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I am pretty sure the following "Delta Force's 1980 Iran Hostage rescue attempt was sabotaged by ALIENS" from William Milton Cooper's mega-conspiracy theory book Behold a Pale Horse.... (bolding is mine), Bill is William Milton Cooper, Randy is some totally-not made-up fellow conspiracy theory fan. quote:Bill: Okay, Barbara Honegger wrote October Surprise and they refused to print one chapter. I met her at one of the talks that I give and we got very embroiled in conversation. She ended up coming over to my home, and we talked face to face. There were about four other witnesses there who heard her say this to me. She said, "At DESERT ONE, the first craft that was there was an antigravity disc craft carrying DELTA personnel. Then the aircraft and the helicopters came in." And she said the purpose of the alien crafts, or the craft that we built from alien technology, or the alien craft that we're using was to ensure the sabotage of the operation. .......and watching/feverishly masturbating to dubbed copies of the V (1984) tv-series were the two direct inspirations/stolen source material for John Ringo's Posleen War series.
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Aug 16, 2019 19:42
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:I am pretty sure the following "Delta Force's 1980 Iran Hostage rescue attempt was sabotaged by ALIENS" from William Milton Cooper's mega-conspiracy theory book Behold a Pale Horse.... i am still going to produce a large series of posts about the posleen war series, this project just keeps ballooning in scope as i think more about how crazy a lot of it is. im up to like 4k words and a bunch of diagrams by this point one thing i do appreciate about ringo is that you never really have to question what his sincere beliefs and values are, like you do with some guys we know ringo's highest aspirations and deepest desires he's been very open that Paladin of Shadows is his maximally self-indulgent self-insert fic, so we know that the purest and truest Ringo is the Ringo that wrote Paladin of Shadows which is to say that his deepest desires are a huge fortune, a castle, a harem of teen girls with the servile dispositions of medieval peasants, carte blanche to extrajudicially murder/torture foreigners and liberals, and periodic phone calls from republican officials telling him how cool he is
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Aug 17, 2019 01:46
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PupsOfWar posted:i am still going to produce a large series of posts about the posleen war series, this project just keeps ballooning in scope as i think more about how crazy a lot of it is. im up to like 4k words and a bunch of diagrams by this point tldr prediction for those upcoming PupsOfWar posleen war posts: It all devolves back to V the 1984 tv-series and Red Dawn (1984). Go for it PupsOfWar, only suggestion I have is maybe setup a blog too/cross-post there in case the forums die unexpectedly. Suspecting that you have done more research and proof-reading of John Ringo's Posleen war books than the entire Baen Books editorial staff. If I start to complain about them, throw this post back in my face and laugh hard. FYI the only thing that would truly make me nuke this thread from orbit would be REDACTED REDACTED GIP REDACTED assholes REDACTED REDACTED . So if anyone hates how this thread has been making GBS threads on your favorite genre authors and favorite mil-scifi/mil-fiction series, welp..knowing IS HALF THE BATTLE. https://youtu.be/dzyh_nEuh3M
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Aug 17, 2019 02:47
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Despite being The Ringo Reader I still couldnt get past that first piece of poo poo Paladin of Shadows book. I dont care how long your flight/horrible surgery recovery period is, it's really that bad. I'd rather watch another isekai anime. They're usually better written and I feel less like I need a shower.
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Aug 17, 2019 04:23
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Larry Parrish posted:Despite being The Ringo Reader I still couldnt get past that first piece of poo poo Paladin of Shadows book. I dont care how long your flight/horrible surgery recovery period is, it's really that bad. I'd rather watch another isekai anime. They're usually better written and I feel less like I need a shower. "No American chud poo poo" is pretty much my rule even at sea, the particular fantasy is just so tedious.
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Aug 17, 2019 04:28
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Oh and speaking of actually decent stuff, I got around to reading the first book and a half of Dread Empire's Fall. Its another one of those 'for reasons, we must reinvent the concept of strategy' kinds of books, but it's a good one at least. I wouldn't know if it's any good at PTSD stuff but at least it doesnt have Ringo esque 'hell yeah dude!' stuff when one of our main characters designs a missile attack plan that blows up a hundred million plus population space station/space elevator/antimatter collector that then goes on to smash into the surface and probably cause a nuclear winter on a planet with a few billion people. Our usual authors would have our main characters light a cigarette and mumble that they 'had it coming'
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Aug 17, 2019 05:10
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john ringo BTFO by the anime genre of "sent to another world with my BIG TITTY MOM who has a dual attack skill"
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Aug 17, 2019 05:16
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Omi no Kami posted:Huh, is it worth reading? I lost interested in guy-man after his story kinda sputtered out and turned into 'Solve a mystery in space and then take credit for your ex-girlfriend's tactical innovations', but the book where she took over a whole planet and kept murdering her commanding officers until they gave her a competent one was pretty fun.
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Aug 17, 2019 06:14
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Mars4523 posted:There’s a sequel/fourth book called “The Accidental War” that, as far as I can tell, involves one of the other alien species of the Praxis launching a coup to purge humans from all positions of power and the human protagonists scrambling to escape the jaws of the conspiracy and fight back TBF that was the humans' fault frankly
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Aug 17, 2019 06:43
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PupsOfWar posted:TBF that was the humans' fault frankly Yeah I wasn't expecting to end up rooting for the aliens and I don't think the author expected me to either buuuut
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Aug 17, 2019 14:03
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I dont really know officers or how they think very well but as I continue to read this it sure reminds me of the Air Force and people playing power games in EPR bullets to say 'yeah actually I'm the genius behind that checklist rewrite' so its pretty funny now. I'm not sure it was written to be funny though.
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Aug 17, 2019 16:42
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Larry Parrish posted:a missile attack plan that blows up a hundred million plus population space station/space elevator/antimatter collector that then goes on to smash into the surface and probably cause a nuclear winter on a planet with a few billion people. Our usual authors would have our main characters light a cigarette and mumble that they 'had it coming' Pretty much exactly this happens in a recent milSF series I read (Castle Federation by Glynn Stewart), except it's treated as a straight-up war crime, something so shockingly and monstrously vile that when the protagonist's fleet chases the perpetrators deep into enemy territory before finally overtaking and destroying them, the enemies in question let him depart in peace, despite being in an overwhelmingly superior position, as thanks for saving them the trouble. This is kind of damning with faint praise, but if you want something that scratches the same itch as HH -- big fleet actions, missile salvos, technology written to produce a certain kind of visually impressive fight rather than for plausibility, protagonists getting promoted through the ranks implausibly fast -- while being just generally less bad overall than HH, and also coming to a definite end in 3-5 books, I'd recommend Glynn Stewart, and in particular Castle Federation and Duchy of Terra. (The latter in particular gets bonus points from me for starting with "Earth has been conquered by aliens, and you, the captain of our one surviving warship, must escape into space and return one day to liberate us!", and ending the first book with the captain in question deciding that surrendering to the aliens is the only reasonable course of action, and spending most of book two trying to simultaneously deal with integration into the alien governance and military structures and convince the die-hard factions of the human resistance to come in from the cold.)
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Aug 17, 2019 22:20
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Unleash John Ringo hell part 1, PupsOfWar. Do it. DO IT. https://youtu.be/DrCqEA4r_R4
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Aug 18, 2019 00:41
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ToxicFrog posted:(The latter in particular gets bonus points from me for starting with "Earth has been conquered by aliens, and you, the captain of our one surviving warship, must escape into space and return one day to liberate us!", and ending the first book with the captain in question deciding that surrendering to the aliens is the only reasonable course of action, and spending most of book two trying to simultaneously deal with integration into the alien governance and military structures and convince the die-hard factions of the human resistance to come in from the cold.) This spoiler text actually intrigued me enough to put it on my reading list. Collaborators are sometimes just craven wretches of the worst 'gently caress you got mine' variety but sometimes they're doing what they feel is the very best possible thing to avoid more loss of life. Also for Grover's sake I did finally break down and buy the Bill ebook, I want to see what all this fuss is about.
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Aug 18, 2019 00:49
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Unleash John Ringo hell part 1, PupsOfWar. I will probably need to at least skim some of his zombie books before I can do so. For posting about Ringo I can mostly lean on details I remember from a long time ago, but, if we want to talk about Patterns in his writing at any level more specific than "war man bad", it would be weird to do so without including Ringo in his most evolved form. I aint giving the man money, so this will have to wait til I am near a town large enough to have a library large enough to have those in stock. Before I enter Hell, however, I suppose I should do some Positive Recommendations pmchem posted:Do any of the posters in this thread actually like the genre the thread was made to talk about, and can recommend good books/series? or is the purpose of this thread just to say how bad books in the genre are? 1. Two Mil-SF short stories I enjoy are Morrigan in the Sunglare and Morrigan in Shadow, by TBB's own poster General Battuta. The Baru novels and his video game writing get talked about plenty on SA, but I think people forget he also has a goodly amount of short fiction that can be read for free on the internet. These two specifically are adapted from a Freespace 2 mod he wrote for, meaning that they are, I guess, a type of fanfic. I am pro-fanfic though so this is fine in my book. Battuta's work is apropos to this thread since the Hard Man Making Hard Choices is such a ubiquitous mil-SF trope. His work almost always features the Hard Man Making Hard Choices as its central conceit, but is more about how this type of power transaction breaks your brain and whether it is fundamentally irreconcilable with being a functional human. 2. Dickson's Dorsai series is as foundational to the subgenre as Starship Troopers is, even though Dickson got memory-holed and Heinlein didn't. I wouldn't call these books good as such, but, as with a lot of these old guys, I find the baroque and melodramatic stylings of the original material more enjoyable to read than its prosaic immitators from the 90s. If you read these, try to track down the oldest versions rather than the later revisions. 3. For some reason, Steakley's Armor does not get talked about on SA as often as Haldeman's The Forever War, even though they are equally tentpoles of mil-SF in the aftermath of Vietnam. This is a crime - if you're gonna read one, you should also read the other. 4. Glen Cook's written stuff besides Black Company and Dread Empire - read Starfishers you cowards 5. My final rec is the Argentine alien invasion comic El Eternauta.  I used to have a link to the full thing (I'm not sure whether that would count as  as I don't know if the author's estate was liquidated after he was murdered by the Videla government) but can't find it now. Anyway it definitely counts as mil-SF imho.
PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Aug 18, 2019 |
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Aug 18, 2019 06:56
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PupsOfWar posted:I will probably need to at least skim some of his zombie books before I can do so. For posting about Ringo I can mostly lean on details I remember from a long time ago, but, if we want to talk about Patterns in his writing at any level more specific than "war man bad", it would be weird to do so without including Ringo in his most evolved form. I aint giving the man money, so this will have to wait til I am near a town large enough to have a library large enough to have those in stock. If you live in the U.S.A., at least a few states have state-wide inter-library loan systems. Use this resource as much possible(if possible) in your mad quest for John Ringo UNSUB profiling on the cheap. Personal opinion on the matter follows: In-depth dives where the writer visibly changes their opinions as they do more research into foreign subject matter are best, sounds like you're got a more monolithic approach planned on John Ringo's writing. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA was a great example of what I just mentioned. The author explained in the introduction of the book how she had a pitched a quick--cash grab book on the Challenger space shuttle disaster with a predetermined finding, but the actual interviews and research performed made her change her mind, and overshoot the expected book deadline by about 5-7 years. Maybe have Part 1 of your multi-episode text-podcast focus on Ringo's earliest published work, the most evolved form Ringo discussion could be in your penultimate text-podcast post, with your final post being a recap-summary of all previous text-podcasts + the Overall Writing patterns of Ringo.
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Aug 18, 2019 08:11
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PupsOfWar posted:I will probably need to at least skim some of his zombie books before I can do so. For posting about Ringo I can mostly lean on details I remember from a long time ago, but, if we want to talk about Patterns in his writing at any level more specific than "war man bad", it would be weird to do so without including Ringo in his most evolved form. I aint giving the man money, so this will have to wait til I am near a town large enough to have a library large enough to have those in stock. These are all good recs and I'm gonna look them up. Thank you!
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Aug 18, 2019 13:18
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Hello thread.ToxicFrog posted:Duchy of Terra. I am terribly bored, so I have decided to read this. First chapter opens strong, with INCOMPETENT BUREAUCRATS REFUSE TO FUND MILITARY R&D (technically speaking they're old-guard admirals, but I think the lack of toy-lust demonstrates they have the souls of bureaucrats, at least) SUPER TECH SPRINGS FULLY-FORMED FROM PRIVATE ENTERPRISE (We're not, like, talking about one janky prototype superweapon that's showing promise, we've got a whole menagerie of super-toys ready for the shakedown cruise, all massive leaps-forward on contemporary tech. We've got Perry's Black Ships here, just hanging out and I'm honestly not sure why our friendly neighbourhood CEO doesn't just conquer Earth with them) INERTIALESS DRIVE FAILS TO ATTRACT INVESTORS, SOMEHOW (???) The second chapter introduces us to the woman who I assume is going to be our protagonist. First, though, it has to introduce us to her ship- it is the superest of all the super ships, with all the super-toys (and extra!). Then we're free to learn about Annette Bond: she is a curvy ex-cheerleader. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrNHjSF5Ohc&t=59s
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Aug 18, 2019 13:18
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Hello thread. Hello friend. Glad to see this thread caught your interest enough to post a ongoing readthrough of a mil-scifi genre book that promises amazing Honor Harrington like dividends. However, have you considered reading any of the recommendations in the 2nd post of this thread instead? Most of the book/author recommendations in the 2nd post of this thread hold up....except for mine which is a "Dadjoke-adversity-builds-character" recommendation.
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Aug 18, 2019 14:47
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Hello friend. You know what, in vengeance for you daring to ask this question of someone doing a readthrough, I am going to do a readthrough of On Basilisk Station. You did this. You. Consider that.
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Aug 18, 2019 15:38
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Glenn Stewart is not actually a good writer and unfortunately for the Duchy of Terra series, the idea is a lot cooler than his actual execution
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Aug 18, 2019 15:50
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Larry Parrish posted:Glenn Stewart is not actually a good writer and unfortunately for the Duchy of Terra series, the idea is a lot cooler than his actual execution The same could be said about a lot of MilScifi.
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Aug 18, 2019 15:51
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Stewart's big problem is his terminally dry PoV characters. The main protagonist of Duchy of Terra makes the Lost Fleet guy look like Edmond of Gloucester a good thing about him is that his aliens tend to be a bit weirder and cooler than average in space battle books. Compare something like weber's Starfire novels where the sapient aliens are just cat-humans or bird-humans or what have you. it sorta reminds me of old kaiju movies in that way -you begrudgingly tolerate the humans until an alien shows up to make things interesting. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Aug 18, 2019 |
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Aug 18, 2019 17:00
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PupsOfWar posted:4. Glen Cook's written stuff besides Black Company and Dread Empire - read Starfishers you cowards Passage at Arms and The Dragon Never Sleeps are better than Starfishers, and the former is a strong contender for his best book. Fight me Larry Parrish posted:Glenn Stewart is not actually a good writer and unfortunately for the Duchy of Terra series, the idea is a lot cooler than his actual execution Yeah, there's a reason I recommended his books as "a good choice if you have a craving for HH and don't want to reach quite that far down into the barrel" and not as "these are Good Books and deserve a place in the second post". For me, Stewart is firmly in the "fun, but not good" bucket; he's one of the authors I reach for when I want to turn my brain off for a little while and watch the pretty explosions. There's also usually at least one jaw-droppingly stupid thing per book. Despite that, I've read and enjoyed three of his series now, and I'll probably pick up another one next time I'm in that mood. And it helps that he actually seems to be a decent person and not a turbochud.
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Aug 18, 2019 17:47
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Kchama posted:You know what, in vengeance for you daring to ask this question of someone doing a readthrough, I am going to do a readthrough of On Basilisk Station. This sounds like less of a casus belli retaliation and more of a excuse to do a re-read of On Basilisk Station you were planning on doing anyway. Instead, have you considered reading any of the recommendations in the 2nd post of this thread? Thinking that Sten (1982) or the Wolf Worlds (1984) might show you a book series truly worth tearing apart in a series of readthrough posts. Either way, only you can choose not to self-harm. e: a very on-topic song https://youtu.be/OBdDICZx9gc quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Aug 18, 2019 |
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Aug 18, 2019 19:26
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Hello friend. I'm probably not going to do an actual readthrough, that's a little more time and energy than I have to give. That and I'd probably run out of things to say about it before I ran out of book. I have in fact read a lot of what's in the 2nd post. Not all of it, but I'm sure I'll get to the rest eventually. I still need to get to the rest of the Black Company books at some point (for some reason they only seem to sell the first trilogy in ebook format in the UK). If people are looking for recommendations... I'm actually going to cross-pollinate a little from the webfiction thread and point people at The Last Angel and its (in progress) sequel. Earth gets glassed, and the sole surviving AI battleship spends the next 2000 years out for RRREVEEEENGE!!  Many things explode, in space.It's good, I promise.
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Aug 18, 2019 19:38
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:This sounds like less of a casus belli retaliation and more of a excuse to do a re-read of On Basilisk Station you were planning on doing anyway. I actually only thought of it on the spot. Because it amused me. Notice I chose On Basilisk Station instead of any of the others. Also I thought the 2nd post was for good milscifi. I wouldn't do a tear-apart of something good.
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Aug 18, 2019 20:01
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:
i remember recommending The Last Angel in the dead Space Opera thread long ago pretty solid imo. very probably originated as halo fanfic about a rogue UNSC ship AI jim baen's ghost would almost certainly publish it if the author stuck all of the forum posts together into a pdf and emailed it in Kchama posted:I actually only thought of it on the spot. Because it amused me. i feel you should challenge yourself by doing a lets read of something that isn't weber, kchama also OBS is the best harrington book so it is suboptimal for this surely the thread can help you find something very bad, for purposes of general mockery PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Aug 18, 2019 |
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Aug 18, 2019 20:45
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Kchama posted:I actually only thought of it on the spot. Because it amused me. Kchama posted:i feel you should challenge yourself by doing a lets read of something that isn't weber, kchama Even PupsOfWar agrees, and Kchama........ You deeply (DEEPLY) underestimate how terriblely very bad the Sten Chronicles books are, and how much they deserve a good tear-apart.
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Aug 19, 2019 00:46
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ToxicFrog posted:Passage at Arms and The Dragon Never Sleeps are better than Starfishers, and the former is a strong contender for his best book. Fight me Passage at Arms and The Dragon Never Sleeps are better than Starfishers and yes, PoA probably is his best book, although I'll give October's Baby and She Is The Darkness a shot at the title. The Starfishers trilogy is oddly structured. Shadowline is separated from the other two by a generation and it's a retelling of Norse myth in SF form. It also has an even more complicated multiple-timelines, check-the-date on every chapter heading thing going on than the Dread Empire novels do. He pulls all his threads together better than he did in A Shadow of All Night Falling, showing real growth as a writer in only three years (1979 to 1982). Along with the Norse stuff, he also lays the grounds for the Sangaree plotline that will form a large part of the next two in the series. The second and third books are the actual Starfishers material. Again, multiple timelines. The main "real time" plot covers two Naval Intelligence agents infiltrating the Starfishers' society. They are a space-based, very secretive faction of humanity. Their main resource is the substance that enables FTL communication, without it interstellar society falls apart. They need repair techs due to initially-unexplained combat losses, and they know full well that literally everyone will be trying to plant agents on them. Enter two burn-out and traumatized agents who have to adapt to a warm and caring society that can't trust them. The flashbacks cover their careers as a Intel agents, mostly involving operations trying to shut down the Sangaree drug and slavery operations. These get rough, doing serious damage to personal integrity and identity. There are also sequences back home for recuperation, which do a lot to flesh out the setting and the characters. The real-time B plot follows attempts at a final solution to the Sangaree problem. There's a lot going on in all three books. The plots are dense and require attention to follow. The characters come across as real people with real pain. The setting is well-developed with a lot of scope for exploration. I'd read Passage first. That way when the big-bad is revealed, the fact that Fleet is considering reactivating the Climbers to deal with it, you know just how big a deal it is. On the whole, while Passage is the best and should be read first, you keep getting good stuff if you continue into Shadowline and the two Starfishers books. Publication trivia: the three Starfishers novels (plus Swordbearer) have 1982 publication dates, Passage at Arms came out in 1985 (Along with A Matter of Time, The White Rose, and With Mercy Toward None) Cook was phenomenally prolific in the 80s. The phrase "assembly line writing" gets thrown around a lot, but Cook was working on GM's light truck line with a notepad. He'd alternate doing his station's task with putting down a sentence or two. I think that explains a lot about his style. Fifty one novels, plus dozens of short stories, from 1970 to 2018 is an amazing career. He put out 29 novels from 1979-1990, with a trend of increasing quality as he went along.
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Aug 19, 2019 02:14
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Larry Parrish posted:Glenn Stewart is not actually a good writer and unfortunately for the Duchy of Terra series, the idea is a lot cooler than his actual execution Speaking of Glenn Stewart, I had to take my car in for a recall last week and had to burn through something on my Kindle Unlimited credit and chose Exile, which if, we have LitRPG as a genre, this is Lit4X, because he played a game of Stellaris and wrote a book about it. The Honorable Admiral starts a rebellion, gets exiled out of a one-way wormhole and once they found a colony they literally go through the tech tree identifying what they need to tech up while wary that their industrial base isn't enough to replace their current ships. This isn't a problem until....oh, they settled on a Sacred World and have to fight the Von Neumann warships of the Progenitors(tm pending). This book was literally going through turn by turn of Stellaris and the main characters were more wooden then the resources they harvest.
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Aug 19, 2019 06:09
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Yeah I could kinda of tolerate him but once I read that book I put him into the never read list where he belongs Also I like Last Angel so far. It's good for a web novel which unfortunately isnt saying much but whatever. I needed something to read that wasnt Kindle Unlimited trash anyway
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Aug 19, 2019 09:06
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Ninurta posted:Speaking of Glenn Stewart, I had to take my car in for a recall last week and had to burn through something on my Kindle Unlimited credit and chose Exile, which if, we have LitRPG as a genre, this is Lit4X, because he played a game of Stellaris and wrote a book about it. The Honorable Admiral starts a rebellion, gets exiled out of a one-way wormhole and once they found a colony they literally go through the tech tree identifying what they need to tech up while wary that their industrial base isn't enough to replace their current ships. This isn't a problem until....oh, they settled on a Sacred World and have to fight the Von Neumann warships of the Progenitors(tm pending). Goons seem to love the Bobiverse series which is basically that but instead of the Honorable Admiral archetype, it's some nerd (totally not the author), who became fabulously wealthy after his bespoke IoT blender has it's crypto IPO or whatever the gently caress and he sells his company, signs up for a cryo-freezing service, and ends up with his mind shoved into a Von Neumann probe. It's exactly insufferable as you can imagine.
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Aug 19, 2019 09:36
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tbf there should be more sci-fi novels about Infrastructure
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Aug 19, 2019 16:38
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PupsOfWar posted:tbf there should be more sci-fi novels about Infrastructure Well then, allow me to introduce you to John DeChancie's Skyway series. *HONK HONK* nanoAirBrakes hiss *HONK HONK HONK*
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Aug 19, 2019 18:08
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Ninurta posted:Speaking of Glenn Stewart, I had to take my car in for a recall last week and had to burn through something on my Kindle Unlimited credit and chose Exile, which if, we have LitRPG as a genre, this is Lit4X, because he played a game of Stellaris and wrote a book about it. The Honorable Admiral starts a rebellion, gets exiled out of a one-way wormhole and once they found a colony they literally go through the tech tree identifying what they need to tech up while wary that their industrial base isn't enough to replace their current ships. This isn't a problem until....oh, they settled on a Sacred World and have to fight the Von Neumann warships of the Progenitors(tm pending). Better than a russian litrpg where they were playing totally not eve online, which I mean sounds cool. Even the premise was neat protagonist was hired because he was so good to power grind on some rich persons account because for some reason playing this game is mega important so he has to pretend to be this rich socialite just based off notes and also do well at the game. Too bad it was super boring and creepy.
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Aug 19, 2019 19:19
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C.M. Kruger posted:Goons seem to love the Bobiverse series which is basically that but instead of the Honorable Admiral archetype, it's some nerd (totally not the author), who became fabulously wealthy after his bespoke IoT blender has it's crypto IPO or whatever the gently caress and he sells his company, signs up for a cryo-freezing service, and ends up with his mind shoved into a Von Neumann probe. I somehow found the inner strength to read through that whole series and it was an incredible piece of poo poo
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Aug 19, 2019 20:00
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The Last Angel is a good story, but it was first thing I thought of when I read the plot description of Duchy of Terra, because the story of TLA is so... rooted in the certainty of western civilization, if you'll pardon the pretension. It's like how the Martians in The War of the Worlds wind up dying leaving Britain shaken and stunned but still free and intact. I imagine showing a Incan noble or a Qing Dynasty official and just seeing them laugh and laugh. Of course the confederacy was able to invent a super weapon that would let them inflict a devastating blow on the aliens, which would then overreact, exposing the naked hypocrisy of the aliens, and that superweapon would eventually go on to whatever the endgame the writer has in mind.
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Aug 19, 2019 23:23
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Monocled Falcon posted:It's like how the Martians in The War of the Worlds wind up dying leaving Britain shaken and stunned but still free and intact. In the case of "War of The Worlds", Wells was making a clear allegory to the way "western" cultures were able to easily defeat African natives in combat due to vastly superior technology - but died in droves to malaria and other tropical diseases. The Martians dying was a critical part of the openly-intended "WE are the Martians, assholes!" subtext, rather than some sort of "Our civilization will endure, because I can't imagine it not enduring!" notion.
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Aug 20, 2019 03:55
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I would like to add a recommendation, it's a duology by Steven Westerfeld, his Succession series, The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds. These books reminded me of the Dread Empire series, only the Emperor/Empress are immortal and human and things go downhill from there. It is a Hard SF universe, with a twist. They are very much Space Opera, unfortunately they did not sell well so the author retreated into the realm of YA fiction. Where he has sold very, very well with his Uglies series and subsequent books. Hopefully a Dread Empire sequel makes him write another Succession book.
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Aug 20, 2019 05:37
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