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SardonicTyrant posted:If you want Flashman but don't want the grossness that comes with it just try a few Ciaphas Cain books. They're not military fiction, but why the hell would you want to read that anyway? cain is obviously like...a better dude than flashman, no doubt the issue with recommending the cain books as flashman subsitutes is that someone who enjoys the travelogue or historical biography-type elements of flashman wouldn't get those things out of cain, since cain is set in a fictional universe, and even within that fictional universe cain just goes to various imperium suburb planets that are distinguishable only by biome for travelogue & history material, oyu could try something like Scoop, by the british known reactionary and pseudofascist Evelyn Waugh Anyway, if we're gonna bring up ciaphas cain (which will probably happen again in this thread) we should probably talk about whether 40k tie-ins counts as mil-SF/mil-fic or not my take: No, but my definition of mil-SF is idiosyncratic so i dont expect people to agree PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Jul 19, 2019 |
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Jul 19, 2019 14:50
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Gaunt's Ghosts: MilSF. Ian Watson's Space Marine: not MilSF.
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Jul 19, 2019 15:30
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PupsOfWar posted:Anyway, if we're gonna bring up ciaphas cain (which will probably happen again in this thread) we should probably talk about whether 40k tie-ins counts as mil-SF/mil-fic or not 90s Cringe Rock posted:Gaunt's Ghosts: MilSF. Would describe W40k fiction as hard fantasy, Warhammer Fantasy fiction as grim fantasy; with a faint chanting oreverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeverwarforeve.. registering dimly in the back of your head anytime you approach either series. Honestly always thought the W40k Gaunt's Ghost stories sucked rear end because the GG stories wanted to be Combat! the 1960s tv series + Sharpe's Rifles (book and tv-movie versions) at the same time, with a very 2nd tier Sharpe/Honor Harrington knock-off "unique unappreciated snowflake" main character.
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Jul 19, 2019 20:23
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Call that honey-pot thread Literary SexCrimes: no one published is without blame. Lmao
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Jul 19, 2019 22:51
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Ninurta posted:Fair enough, I was phone posting and did not have my copy of the book handy. I will say that this is a book that I've kept through 3 moves, one cross-state and I have re-read it a few times. However, the material can be off-putting to someone who isn't expecting the grotesque nature of the Yukon Confederacy and it's world. The author had mentioned that he would like to write a follow up prequel but that unfortunately doesn't look like it will ever happen. He did however write a Middle-Aged White Men raging against the world in 2016 which is...unfortunately a bit too on the nose these days https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29549598-deadly-waters. Yeah, the Yukon Confederacy is outright horrifying, as the main character realizes far too late. I'm pretty sure there is still a copy somewhere in my parent's house. Neat to see that he actually did continue writing, although from MGD I was starting to get "technology and liberalism are bad, autocracy good," vibes. It was a lot like reading Dan Simmons, actually.
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Jul 19, 2019 23:10
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I read Joe Kasabian's Citizen of Earth, which is really good. I finished it in a night but I read really fast due to 10 years of playing MUDs so I dunno if it's all that short or not. It's like an actually good Starship Troopers I guess. Actually it kind of read like one long action sequence from one of the Expeditionary Force novels which in my opinion is good. Highly recommend as a actually good mil scifi book Anyway it continues the trend of infantry guys always writing the best ones of these kinds of books Also it's like $2 or $3. Support leftist troops Larry Parrish fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Jul 20, 2019 |
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Jul 20, 2019 08:10
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Larry Parrish posted:I read Joe Kasabian's Citizen of Earth, which is really good. I finished it in a night but I read really fast due to 10 years of playing MUDs so I dunno if it's all that short or not. It's like an actually good Starship Troopers I guess. Actually it kind of read like one long action sequence from one of the Expeditionary Force novels which in my opinion is good. Highly recommend as a actually good mil scifi book I'll look this up, thanks! In return you might be interested in Charles Gannon's Caine series. It's not military sci-fi but it's adjacent, it's a sci-fi thriller about exposing corporate abuses and preparing the Earth for potential alien warfare.
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Jul 20, 2019 13:50
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Anytime I find myself thinking of the Expanse books and if I should give the series another go, quickly remember the... -the Larry Niven Known Space knock-off] Spacers and Earther culture split -the main character screeching to the -three dueling main character narratives(the rear end in a top hat earther XO/the detective/the girl hiding from space pirates) in the first book, of which the least-interesting + most annoying character wins out -the --double sets of god-tier (for the setting) space=armor + weapons for each of the party members --the eighteen month supply of power units allowing the notEbon-Hawk to go across the star system twice without paying for refueling ---the additional 6 months supply of power units the crew stumble upon every other "mission" --the automated med-bay with full Raise Dead capabilities --the kitchen mess, the contents of which (coffee supply/coffeemaker) receive the most emotional and animated writing of the entire first book -character constraining details getting dropped towards the end of the first book because the authors wanted to write a spaceship battle segment ...from the first Expanse book which makes me go 'no, read something else'. Alternatively I did like the following things from 1st Expanse book. -the main character feverishly faking up registrations + licenses for the looted fighter-bomber assault ship under the finest RPG/cRPG tradition of "finders keepers, losers weepers'. -the fate of the coffee pot/coffee supply being an over-riding concern during the spaceship battle segment -the party/crew consisting of the space-paladin main-character, the space-elf, the dwarf engineer, wait a sec there was a 4th crew memeber right? uh.....and the space-halfling?
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Jul 20, 2019 17:53
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Anytime I find myself thinking of the Expanse books and if I should give the series another go, quickly remember the... You'd never guess that IIRC, this was just a SitRep of a tabletop game the authors were involved in, huh? Also technically I think the culture split is actually the Earth/Enders/Mars one from Zone of the Enders.
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Jul 20, 2019 18:09
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Kchama posted:You'd never guess that IIRC, this was just a SitRep of a tabletop game the authors were involved in, huh? This method of writing cannot be killed soon enough.
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Jul 20, 2019 18:57
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:This method of writing cannot be killed soon enough. It's weird because some decent stuff has come out of it. But yeah unfortunately most of them are trash. A lot of Japanese SitRep series actually tend to come off a lot better, I feel, for some reason.
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Jul 21, 2019 01:11
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People don't let the dice call the shots in RPGs enough for it to be anything more than a lovely story filtered through a different medium imo
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Jul 21, 2019 01:13
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Anytime I find myself thinking of the Expanse books and if I should give the series another go, quickly remember the... One of my favorite expanse things is how the dipshit author was like yeah we've got no magic sci fi tech here, no laser guns and poo poo! Except the entire setting wouldn't make sense without magically ultra efficient fusion reactors powering drives that might as well not need refueling. Although somehow apparently everyone except the main characters cant afford to run what is the equivalent of a supertanker ship engine that burns a thimble of crude a week. How are there so many poor belters that can barely afford to fly if air and water are almost completely recyclable and your drives can take you across the heliosphere and back without refueling???
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Jul 21, 2019 02:21
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Larry Parrish posted:One of my favorite expanse things is how the dipshit author was like yeah we've got no magic sci fi tech here, no laser guns and poo poo! Except the entire setting wouldn't make sense without magically ultra efficient fusion reactors powering drives that might as well not need refueling. Although somehow apparently everyone except the main characters cant afford to run what is the equivalent of a supertanker ship engine that burns a thimble of crude a week. How are there so many poor belters that can barely afford to fly if air and water are almost completely recyclable and your drives can take you across the heliosphere and back without refueling??? I already said the Expanse series setting was a hardcore ripoff of Niven's Known Space. In Niven's Known Space setting, human spaceships drives are essentially heavily safeguarded hydrogen bombs, and a good portion of Niven's in-universe A.R.M. stories are about suppressing knowledge about how 95% of human spaceflight technology can be easily turned into weapons by disabling the safeties/going full power....the other in-universe A.R.M. stories I remember are about organ-jacking and tracking down perps and the A.R.M. main character having a psi-arm. Niven's Known Space series is still pretty good despite certain aspects of them aging superduper badly(rishathra and eugenics). Niven incorporating known-at-time-of-publishing physics/astrophysics details is why most of Known Space the stories still hold up. Like gravity effects wrecking the hulls of certain superSpaceships, for example. Would highly recommend people read Niven's pre 2000's Known Space stories, just start power-skimming when poo poo gets cringey in those stories (and it will). The Expanse book series being terrible was implicitly obvious to me when the .....then on their first mission, to the raided spaceship where the 3rd in-book narrative took place, the dwarf engineer immediately scavenged another 6 or so months of reactor power-cells. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Jul 21, 2019 |
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Jul 21, 2019 05:43
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I mainly did this out of morbid curiosity and because my time is useless. I hope you're all happy. The Stolen (Nazi) Valor of Sven Hassel If you're on the older side of things and were interested in WW2 militaria before the internet age you might have heard of Sven Hassel. Purporting to be a Dane who had volunteered in the German military and had served in Panzer units on every front except for North Africa before surrendering at Berlin, he started writing his memoirs in a POW camp and published them starting in 1953 and met with great success in the era of pulps and "men's adventure" magazines, his graphic stories of war eventually selling some 53 million copies worldwide, had a Yugoslav movie adaption of one book in the 80s, and was celebrated as "Denmark's Hemingway." Featuring lurid titles and covers that equal their contents ("Legion of the Damned", "Wheels of Terror," "Assignment Gestapo," "Blitzfreeze", "Liquidate Paris", "SS Death Camp Criminal Battalion go to Monte Casino for the Massacre") in the grand tradition of the old men's adventure magazines, his various novels are the entirely true war memoirs of the Author in the 27th Panzer Regiment (Penal) (why do prisoners have tanks? WHY ARE THEY GIVING VALUABLE TANKS TO PRISONERS?!) on every front except North Africa, though often the characters end up fighting as infantry for narrative reasons.    EAGLES RIPPED MY FLESH! The current American editions have more sanitized covers, while the British editions slap giant SS runes on the author's name and feature buck-toothed soldiers trying to devour hand grenades, likely intended to appeal to Sabaton fans and Tory voters.   Of course none of it is true. Hassel was revealed to actually be a guy named Borge Pedersen. A small time criminal and goonlord who lived with his parents (no word on if it was in a basement or not) before the war, he apparently joined the Danish Nazi party and was then ejected from the party for stealing the party head's car, crashing it and then impersonating a police officer while fleeing the scene. He then later showed as some kind of informant to the Gestapo and apparently also was in the HIPO corps, a auxiliary police force set up by the Gestapo after they sent the real Danish police to concentration camps, and was arrested after the war and convicted of treason, being imprisoned until the early 50s and not executed because he was just a failson informant. According to his bio he worked as a manager in a automotive factory post-war and in the late 50s became severely ill with a tropical disease, and apparently used his fabricated military record to obtain treatment in Germany. As you've probably guessed by now the books themselves are entirely fiction (most details don't pass a basic grognard sniff test) and if there was ever any "true story" it's embellishments of stories he'd heard from other Danes who'd volunteered for the various Scandinavian Waffen-SS units or from Germans who'd been rotated back from the front. And allegedly most of his books may have actually been written by his wife after the success of the first couple. Broadly the stories follow a general trend of: Hassel and his stock war movie buddies (the old vet who's literally called "the old un", the playboy, the "slow" guy, etc) go somewhere and get in a battle, something hosed up happens, they go "drat that's hosed up" and then go off to find some prostitutes and booze because nothing matters so might as well live for the day. The Nazi war machine is incompetent and inefficient. War crimes abound. Officers are bungling evil bastards unless they're good, and the good ones end up shot for not throwing away their men for the Reich. It feels like some kind of "Wehrmachtxploitation" thing with things becoming overwrought to the point of absurdity at times. And despite "Danish Nazi writes nihilist war porn" in skimming through "Legion of the Damned" (don't worry, the estate of a nazi didn't get any money from me) I noted a bit of what looks like what I'd almost call "tankie apologia" if it was coming from a modern author. Hassel occasionally drops the narrative for author voice lectures and dismisses claims that Hitler and Stalin were cut from the same cloth ("One look at their portraits will show that that is nonsense"), and repeatedly cautions the reader that one shouldn't take his writings as proof of what it's like in the Soviet Union: quote:If anyone asks me whether it is “like that” in Russia, I can only reply that I really do not know. USSR is a huge country. I have been there for only quite a short time and seen only very little of it, while the circumstances of my stay were such that it was quite impossible for me to have any proper contact or achieve any kind of overall view, let alone anything as complicated as an evaluation of how “things are.” quote:It would be wrong to think that you can conclude from this that everywhere in USSR things were as chaotic and sabotage as rife as at Jenisseisk. The army that was put up against us functioned perfectly. If its equipment was not better than the German—as it not infrequently was—it was at least as good and also less complicated. And the human material was better. More primitive, but also more reliable. That could not have been possible in a land that was corrupt through and through. And the true believers tend to meet inglorious ends. In one book apparently a enthusiastic Nazi soldier falls from a truck and is crushed by the rest of the convoy, the characters react with "lol what a dumbass." A German major attempts to force retreating soldiers back at gunpoint but has his gun taken and is trampled to death. When the SS shows up the other germans go Turbo Clean Wehrmacht and try to kill them whenever they get the chance to make it look like the Russians did it, which makes those British covers ironic. In Legion of the Damned there's a extended sequence where Hassel and Porta (the Berliner playboy) are covering a retreat with a machine gun but spot a German priest trying to desert after previously giving a rousing sermon to "murder the red swamp creatures", so they beat the poo poo out of the priest while going "Now you’ve got into human hands, you swine, and we’re not letting you go!" and then send him off towards the enemy lines, before shooting him in the legs halfway through no man's land and noting with grim satisfaction that the Soviets who retrieved him were Mongols (who are variously described as the most skilled, most feared, and most barbarous of the "Soviet warriors") and would doubtless enjoy tormenting an authentic Nazi priest. Similarly, in between loving prostitutes, blackmarketeering, looting, and flamethrowering Russians, there are anti-war screeds. quote:What a difference there is between the rubicund, spruce, straightbacked young hero gazing steadily into the distance, the womancompelling male warrior whom you see on the recruiting posters of the whole world, and the snuffling, scared devil with a cold, bad breath and pasty face who is the reality of war. If the artists who drew those poster heroes knew how tragic was the task they were undertaking with their ridiculous art they would seek other work. But probably they could get none, for when you look more closely you soon discover that it is only sixth- or seventh-rate artists who take on that kind of commissioned “art.” The military recruiting poster is the field of very minor talents. quote:On the pretext of protecting the Romanian people from being conquered by the Soviets, we had come first and foremost to help prevent the oil wells, the mines, the railway concessions, the big estates, the wine, match, textile, sugar, paper, cosmetics, and an infinity of other monopolies, in fact the whole rich country with its impoverished population, from taking the sad, sad road that leads to nationalization. quote:The Old Un was white in the face: “Let us promise each other that those of us, or the one of us, who escapes alive from this will write a book about this stinking mess in which we are taking part. It must be a book that will be one in the eye for the whole filthy military gang, no matter whether German, Russian, American or what, so that people can understand how imbecile and rotten this saber-rattling idiocy is.” quote:Having tried war, I will willingly submit to even the strictest compulsion if that be necessary in order that we may live our lives in peace, as in fact it is. it is not enough to stand up and say: “We want no more war”—and then think that you have done your bit. There has to be an assertion of will; somebody has to see that all get enough to eat, that all the great humanitarian plans and programs are translated from paper into fact. And it will call for considerable toil, lasting perhaps for several generations; it will call for restraint and strict self-discipline to construct the mighty machinery that will ensure the production and distribution of food enough for all. It will call for the hardest of all compulsions: the need to subordinate oneself to the requirements of the general weal. It will require that one and all renounce comfort and ease and buckle to. It will require that people forget self, that they give up living only for themselves, and the liquidation of that form of individualism that only recognizes the individual’s rights—that to collect for himself—but that becomes so tired and wearied and so annoyed when anyone takes it Upon himself to remind them of the individual duties. We all talk far too much about freedom with the implication that we wish to exterminate others. Or, what is quite infamous, that we want others to exterminate each other while we look on and profit by it. Hassel died in 2012 at the age of 95 in Spain, having moved there in the 60s shortly after former Resistance members in the Danish press figured out who he was, still allegedly the second most successful Danish author after Hans Christen Anderson. Up until his death he maintained that he couldn't be this Pedersen person the various investigators had fingered because how could he have possibly been an informant in Copenhagen if he was fighting on the Eastern Front?!? I suppose a charitable view is that he and his wife needed to pay his medical bills and got in on the first wave of post-WW2 Nazi graft back in the 50s-60s when every rehabilitated ex-general was publishing their memoirs, young people were hungry to read about the war and any outlandish claims he made couldn't be easily refuted, perhaps he even felt guilty about what he'd been party to. Less charitably he was just a fascist pushing the "we were bad but the asiatic hordes were worse" narrative through pulp novels, which became extremely common in post-war German soldier memoirs. Either way he certainly does no favors to the Germans, and presents a far more brutal picture of the eastern front than most non-Russian accounts, which is perhaps the only historically accurate thing in the books. Though my read of Legion of the Damned is that if he was introduced to Baen authors, I suspect Comrade Hassel would introduce a incompetent Nazi officer named Kratman and then have him get tossed into a cesspool where he slowly drowns or the characters hide a white phosphorus grenade under his pillow or something. The actual Danish Nazi Gestapo Informant seems to have had at least a little more humanity than those asshats. (Of course I can't really comment on the later books, even though I read self-published military science fiction and like such "well written" stories as The Lost Fleet series, I don't really find this to be very compelling to read. I imagine they get more pulp as things went on, gotta get that next paycheck!)
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Jul 21, 2019 09:04
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I mean on one hand hes a collaborator but on the other hand it's very hard for me to hate on someone alpha enough to pretend to be a nazi war vet to scam the german healthcare system. That's honestly hilarious. And he apparently escaped the post war trials so either hes a lucky piece of trash who didnt have any evidence of his crimes or he really didn't do anything besides run his grift on fascists
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Jul 21, 2019 10:25
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C.M. Kruger posted:I mainly did this out of morbid curiosity and because my time is useless. I hope you're all happy. Never encountered these Sven Hassel stories in the wild, thankfully. So this guy was the published writer version of the IDR saga for Denmark, with elements of 50ftant/humpermonkey? (That last sentence contained a whole bunch of gip sub-forum references for people who have no idea who IDR + 50ftant/humpermonkey were/no desire to visit gip. IDR was a stolen valor guy/gip poster doxxed after changing his story too much in gip, while 50ftant/humpermonkey were the same person using alt-accounts to write increasingly implausible + overblown "no this really happened" mil-fiction stories). The Mens adventure stories genre is wild, insane, and hackneyed, and yet apparently paid well, similar to bodice-ripper romance stories of the 1920s - 1990s (before internet porn became freely available) with just as much terrible written at a 7th grade reading level writing with overblown WarCrimes, awkward sex scenes and comically evil villains/threats and so on. The thing that separates Mens Adventure stories from mil-fiction/mil-scifi stories is that mens adventure stories usually have a one-man-army main character(usually with a mil or martial arts background though), the villain/villainous threats rarely survived the story, were usually written under pen names by slumming-it-for-the-$$$ writers, and nearly ALWAYS featured firearms/martial arts being described in masturbatory detail with DavidWeberian-tier descriptions of the carnage wreaked by those weapons.
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Jul 21, 2019 14:01
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C.M. Kruger posted:I mainly did this out of morbid curiosity and because my time is useless. I hope you're all happy.  CM Kruger was the true troop all along
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Jul 21, 2019 14:59
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Really wish I’d found this thread prior to reading on Basilisk Station. It wasn’t the worst slog but yeah there are major problems. Pros: at first Honor is alright, and wasn’t perfect at everything. The space cat was interesting and the crew didn’t immediately worship her. -The space combat sequence at the end was decent Cons: -you named the queen Elizabeth? And troopers “Bill” and “Shannon” show up? -the treatment of the native aliens on a Bronze Age planet that is no threat to anyone. The heroes never speak to an alien, and by the end they are bravely machine gunning/napalming/carpet bombing hordes of drug addled “abos” (I’m not Australian and I know that is a slur) pouring out of This might have worked if there was some reflection on humans having made life hell for the natives, or some promise to help repair the damage, but nope, aliens on PCP are beyond helping and must be machine gunned. -The end sequence where Honor is receiving accolades, and it’s thrown in “oh yeah, she’s a millionaire now”
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Jul 21, 2019 16:45
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OK, I did it, I went and made a Flashman thread. It's here, for anyone that is interested.
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Jul 21, 2019 17:08
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Really wish I’d found this thread prior to reading on Basilisk Station. It wasn’t the worst slog but yeah there are major problems. Welcome friend. May the patron saint of this thread, Bolo Shovelware, free you from the poor life choices that involved reading David Weber's fiction. Hopefully this thread will direct you to new2you mil-fiction + mil-scifi authors, some of which are terrible in their own unique ways. Check out the 2nd post for author/series recommendations. [other people reading this thread] Hit me up with new author + book or book series recommendations, same method as before. Keeping my "adversity builds character" recommendation in the 2nd post though.
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Jul 21, 2019 17:14
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Someone tell me about Mark L Van Name before I cave in and buy the omnibus of his first two Jon+Lobo books. They sound like fun space thrillers with an angsty dude and his AI starship pal.
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Jul 21, 2019 17:22
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Welcome friend. Yeah there are some good recommendations there. I was interested in reading the Eisenhorn trilogy, does that have a stamp of approval? My main knowledge of 40k was enjoying the first Dawn of War.
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Jul 21, 2019 17:30
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Anyway thinking about the expanse more makes me want someone to literally write d&d in space, but like the medbay is run by an ai just sentient enough to pray to its manufacturer as a god so its literally casting healing and raise dead instead of just being a magic box doing the same thing as a d&d NPC cleric
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Jul 21, 2019 17:38
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Yeah there are some good recommendations there. The Eisenhorn books are very good, and need no deep immersion in 40k to be enjoyed, but they're investigative thrillers, not mil-scifi
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Jul 21, 2019 17:44
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Hyrax Attack! posted:-The end sequence where Honor is receiving accolades, and it’s thrown in “oh yeah, she’s a millionaire now” Don't worry, she'll be a billionaire soon and one of the wealthiest people in the galaxy eventually FuturePastNow fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Jul 21, 2019 |
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Jul 21, 2019 17:59
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FuturePastNow posted:Don't worry, she'll be a billionaire soon and one of the wealthiest people in the galaxy eventually I mean it wouldn't do for her to fall behind. Given the amount of authorial support she received, the series would probably be better if she just declared herself God-Emperor of the galaxy. Once Weber has written her victory over every other polity in space, he might have to deal deal with what kind of a ruler she would be. Or he might make up a bunch of dumb rebels who launch incdredibly stupid rebellions and are easily beaten, of course.
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Jul 21, 2019 18:29
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Really wish I’d found this thread prior to reading on Basilisk Station. It wasn’t the worst slog but yeah there are major problems. The aliens never ever come up again, and were just there because Weber wanted an analogue to the Central American natives in Horatio Hornblower, who were a threat because Horatio enabled them to become a threat and was forced by his country to betray them. In fact, I think they're the only time sapient aliens are mentioned outside of treecats! So we got spared any more ridiculous racism. Beefeater1980 posted:I mean it wouldn't do for her to fall behind. She is already double nobility and royalty.
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Jul 21, 2019 18:32
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Hyrax Attack! posted:
*thousand-yard stare* hell i miss the days when we could say such things
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Jul 21, 2019 23:32
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Never encountered these Sven Hassel stories in the wild, thankfully. I gather in English his books may have been more of a British thing, when he died there appear to have been a number of obits from British papers including the Guardian, a couple thinkpieces about the 70s-80s British fascination with Nazis (alongside comics like "Hellman of Hammer Force", Bowie doing an immense amount of cocaine and creating a fascist persona, and Lemmy's nazi paraphernalia collection), and I found a fair number of old posts along the lines of "My older brother brought back a bunch of those from a school trip to the UK" on web forums. Also one of the big conceits of Men's Adventure magazines is that the stories were all ENTIRELY REAL. To keep up the illusion IIRC they would also publish dramatizations and interviews of actual events, so you'd have say, a story of a Medal of Honor citation where a bomber crewman carried a burning white phosphorus bomb to a hatch to save the rest of his crew, or some article about sex tourism or drugs, next to "Dear RAW MALE, I never thought it would happen to me, a ex-GI vacationing in Cuba's sin pits, but while visiting a brothel I was captured by BATISTA'S GESTAPO who accused me of being a spy and was brutally tortured before being rescued by beautiful senorita guerilla fighters and embarked on 33 pages of bloody revenge."
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Jul 22, 2019 00:08
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Honestly always thought the W40k Gaunt's Ghost stories sucked rear end because the GG stories wanted to be Combat! the 1960s tv series + Sharpe's Rifles (book and tv-movie versions) at the same time, with a very 2nd tier Sharpe/Honor Harrington knock-off "unique unappreciated snowflake" main character. I know it's bad form to recommend later books in a series because that reeks of "it gets better like three or four episodes in!" but I am curious how far into the series you got. I find the first two story arcs of Gaunt's Ghosts to be merely okay (though Straight Silver is my favourite book in the series) and then there's a major shift in the third arc called The Lost. It doesn't fix Abnett's inability to write an ending, but the books do dial back on the "crazy heroics with no casualties" and start to discuss just how hosed things have gotten, diving into the nitty gritty of chaos as a culture instead of just as an enemy. His depictions of the manipulating perception of Chaos get really inventive. As for Gaunt himself, he is pretty much a "perfect officer who plays by the rules of decency and everyone else is incompetent and treats him as a rogue." It does make him a standout character in a setting like 40K where the rules of the setting supposedly make a man like Gaunt an impossibility, but he's not that different from other heroic rogues like Sharpe or Aubrey Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Jul 22, 2019 |
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Jul 22, 2019 00:43
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C.M. Kruger posted:I gather in English his books may have been more of a British thing, when he died there appear to have been a number of obits from British papers including the Guardian, a couple thinkpieces about the 70s-80s British fascination with Nazis (alongside comics like "Hellman of Hammer Force", Bowie doing an immense amount of cocaine and creating a fascist persona, and Lemmy's nazi paraphernalia collection), and I found a fair number of old posts along the lines of "My older brother brought back a bunch of those from a school trip to the UK" on web forums. Hey to be fair white phosphor flare guy was real, they even named a training squadron at Lackland after him and probably a bunch of other bullshit. My First Term Airman training center on the other hand was named after something people actually gave a poo poo about, the first airman at the base to die in the GWOT
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Jul 22, 2019 02:28
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1994 Toyota Celica posted:The Eisenhorn books are very good, and need no deep immersion in 40k to be enjoyed, but they're investigative thrillers, not mil-scifi They stand alone perfectly fine. I'd be interested in a Lets Read Eisenhorn ! thread from someone who's basically new to 40K and see how it holds up. He interacts with some Guard and Navy units, sometimes in action, but it's not military at all. e. Gaunt's Ghosts starts getting really good with book 3, Necropolis.
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Jul 22, 2019 02:36
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mllaneza posted:They stand alone perfectly fine. I'd be interested in a Lets Read Eisenhorn ! thread from someone who's basically new to 40K and see how it holds up. He interacts with some Guard and Navy units, sometimes in action, but it's not military at all.  power levels but he also goes over the daily life scenes in each book too.
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Jul 22, 2019 02:42
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mllaneza posted:e. Gaunt's Ghosts starts getting really good with book 3, Necropolis. Yeah, the best part of Gaunt's Ghosts is that every book is effectively a scenario from a different war, and Necropolis is the Stalingrad book. it was my favorite when I was a lad, and the early Gaunt's Ghosts books were first coming out
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Jul 22, 2019 02:47
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1994 Toyota Celica posted:Yeah, the best part of Gaunt's Ghosts is that every book is effectively a scenario from a different war, and Necropolis is the Stalingrad book. it was my favorite when I was a lad, and the early Gaunt's Ghosts books were first coming out Some use of weapons poo poo
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Jul 22, 2019 02:49
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Arcsquad12 posted:As for Gaunt himself, he is pretty much a "perfect officer who plays by the rules of decency and everyone else is incompetent and treats him as a rogue." It does make him a standout character in a setting like 40K where the rules of the setting supposedly make a man like Gaunt an impossibility, but he's not that different from other heroic rogues like Sharpe or Aubrey gaunt does get ground down over time - imho he's lost his heroic patina by the (current) end of the series, and you can see him starting to edge into the grizzled indifference of your average 40k commanding officer my favorite 40k book is probably Blood Pact, as i'm a sucker for slice-of-life stuff in that setting, and that's the one that's set entirely in a non-warzone mllaneza posted:They stand alone perfectly fine. I'd be interested in a Lets Read Eisenhorn ! thread from someone who's basically new to 40K and see how it holds up. He interacts with some Guard and Navy units, sometimes in action, but it's not military at all. i think the issue with doing a cold-reading of those books is that the unraveling of eisenhorn as a character is a pretty slow burn your hypothetical reader could be 3/4ths of the way thru book 1 still thinking with perfect validity "alright, this is like an atmospheric space noir book about this kinda obnoxiously perfect self-righteous guy, that's ~cool i guess"
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Jul 22, 2019 02:59
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Arcsquad12 posted:I know it's bad form to recommend later books in a series because that reeks of "it gets better like three or four episodes in!" but I am curious how far into the series you got. Bought and read the vol.1 omnibus collection of Gaunts Ghost stories years ago, because it was highly recommended (at the time) in the book barns black library thread.
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Jul 22, 2019 03:53
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Bought and read the vol.1 omnibus collection of Gaunts Ghost stories years ago, because it was highly recommended (at the time) in the book barns black library thread. So you got to the end of Necropolis. I know a lot of people swear by Necropolis as being "where the series gets good" but the two books that follow necropolis I didn't enjoy that much. I also recall that Abnett had lost his original manuscript for Honor Guard (book 4) and man does it show. If you wanted to give some of the later books a try, I'd say skip over the second omnibus and instead start with Traitor General. It eschews big battles, has a smaller cast, and looks at how a Chaos occupied planet functions. Grab a cheap copy on Amazon rather than shelling out for an omnibus. That way you save some cash if the later stories still don't satisfy. Anyways, I've digressed enough about 40K, and there's a whole thread dedicated to that guff. If you want to talk more that'll be the place. Back to terrible Weber stories and insane jingoism. Now I read the first three Ender's Game books by Card, and I've seen he never really left the series alone, making a book series called Ender's Shadow starring Bean. Are they as bad and superfluous as they sound?
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Jul 22, 2019 04:29
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Arcsquad12 posted:Back to terrible Weber stories and insane jingoism. Now I read the first three Ender's Game books by Card, and I've seen he never really left the series alone, making a book series called Ender's Shadow starring Bean. Are they as bad and superfluous as they sound? Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow are the only even remotely decent books he's ever written. The entire rest of his work can be safely ignored.
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Jul 22, 2019 04:37
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