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C.M. Kruger posted:Along with Sgt. Bothari there's also that bit with Lt. Koudelka attempting to force himself on his future wife or something to that effect, going "oh no i've done something terrible" and then IIRC everybody else just kinda laughs it off since he's a cripple and she could have easily fought him off and also turns out to have already been interested in him. No, Koudelka didn't try to force himself on her; it was just poor communication on both sides, complicated by Barrayaran cultural norms. He was apologizing because he thought he'd upset her, and she was upset because she thought his apologies meant he wasn't actually interested in her as a partner. There's a whole scene where Cordelia resolves that particular issue. Bothari...part of what's up there is that Aral considers Bothari to have been just as much of a victim of Prince Serg's vile activities as the women (due to the drugs Prince Serg had him take as part of his involvement in those activities), and the original "therapy" (which was itself a politically expedient drug mind-rape) he'd gotten after the abortive invasion didn't help matters at all either. Bothari himself knew what he did, and he clung to Cordelia because she saw in him a (very poorly used) human being rather than a monster. He got genuine therapy as a result of the events in Barrayar.
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Sep 4, 2019 12:23
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So, I just finished John Birmingham's The Cruel Stars, which is about a mixed cast of characters trying to fight back against the invasion of an exiled faction of humanity that is fanatically opposed to any kind of genemodding or cybernetics in a setting where the wealthy can essentially live indefinitely due to Altered Carbon-esque personality uploading and downloading into different bodies. The enemies, the Human Republic or Sturm, are a bunch of fanatical crusaders who see anyone not 100% pure baseline human as being "mutants" and want to exterminate them, but they also see themselves of liberators of the oppressed and downtrodden (who are unable to afford enhancements or "relifing"), while society itself is pretty objectively horrific and unjust (with many powers being ruled by corporate nobility, slave soldiers being mentioned, one of the protagonists is a soldier from Earth who is a "Source coder" aka a consciousness created digitally and then implanted into a series of combat bodies until he is imprisoned and sentenced to "deletion" at the start of the book). It's an interesting situation because both sides are pretty awful even though one of them are a bunch of fascist jackbooted thugs who are out to exterminate enormous swathes of humanity. I thought it was a pretty good read. Certainly better than Birmingham's last series which was just dumb power fantasy (downtrodden everydude gets superpowers, talks about his bitch ex-wife, fights against demon menace, eventually teams up with smoking hot Russian chick with same superpowers). That said it is a John Birmingham book and so there are still war crimes (the head Marine, a secondary character, has his troops fire into civilian human shields to hit the Sturm troops pushing them along) but it's not as bad as in the Axis of Time books (where in the future, the GWOT gets so bad that the US begins authorizing its personnel to carry out summary executions and worse).
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Sep 4, 2019 17:06
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Deptfordx posted:It's fantasy not MilSf but LBJ's The Curse of Chalion is great. Also wanted to thank whoever recommended Frank Chadwick's Chain of Command - I enjoyed reading it. Good for a break from bashing my head against a bunch of management textbooks
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Sep 4, 2019 22:06
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it's LMB - Lois McMaster Bujold
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Sep 4, 2019 23:49
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So....am I the only one who'd read a fantasy novel written by Lyndon Johnson?
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Sep 5, 2019 02:09
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No, I totally would read a fantasy novel written by LBJ. It could be funny if it's like him talking about his dong, super interesting if he does fantasy court politics, and it'd end up here if it's horrible MilFant about how sometimes hard men need to make hard choices about Edit My mistake - that would Richard Nixon's Fantasy novel. I've thought before that a lot of the of Moorcock-style balance of Law and Chaos or Good and Evil end up as really unsubtle metaphors for the Cold War. Rockopolis fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Sep 5, 2019 |
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Sep 5, 2019 02:18
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Welcome. So I made the mistake of using a free ebook credit on the 2nd book of the Sun Eater Rothfuss-Dune mashup and came across some prose that would make Rothfuss blush.  Howling Dark posted:
So far half the book has been to first find the Oh, well this explains it: Christopher Ruocchio is the author of The Sun Eater space fantasy series from DAW Books. He began writing when he was eight years old and sold his first novel, Empire of Silence, at twenty-two. He is also the assistant editor at Baen Books and a graduate of North Carolina State University, where he received a degree in English Rhetoric and the Classics Ninurta fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Sep 5, 2019 |
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Sep 5, 2019 02:29
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Ninurta posted:Christopher Ruocchio is the author of The Sun Eater space fantasy series from DAW Books. He began writing when he was eight years old and sold his first novel, Empire of Silence, at twenty-two. He is also the assistant editor at Baen Books and a graduate of North Carolina State University, where he received a degree in English Rhetoric and the Classics swipe left
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Sep 5, 2019 04:09
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C.M. Kruger posted:On the other hand I peaced out of the Greatcoats series when it had droit du seigneur in the first few chapters, and the first Riyria book when it had some inanity about how anybody going near the king's palace in the city at night would get shot by archers. Both are apparently well regarded and both also appear to be written by authors who's knowledge of the period they're aping extends to "maybe saw a robin hood movie once." For whatever reason bad scifi annoys me less than bad fantasy. I get that. It's annoying when a book is supposed to be set in a medieval society, but it's basically just modern day in thatched-roof houses, or when it resembles the hollywood version of a historical society. A lot of people dont like the spellmonger series because they thought it was a fantasy military novel and not a slice of life about a wizard, but the author clearly did a lot of thinking about the power dynamics created by a feudal economy
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Sep 5, 2019 04:17
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A sci fi example would be when theres no apparent resource scarcity, but there's inexplicably still social classes based on wealth, AI that nobody thinks are slaves somehow and it never gets mentioned, etc
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Sep 5, 2019 04:22
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Larry Parrish posted:I get that. It's annoying when a book is supposed to be set in a medieval society, but it's basically just modern day in thatched-roof houses, or when it resembles the hollywood version of a historical society. A lot of people dont like the spellmonger series because they thought it was a fantasy military novel and not a slice of life about a wizard, but the author clearly did a lot of thinking about the power dynamics created by a feudal economy The “power dynamics” angle is probably what breaks verisimilitude for me the most, as so much fantasy is fixated on getting the “right” monarchical ruler in place and assuming that’s the end of things. No mention of managing unstable noble allies or dealing with guilds or whatever. Messing up technical details bothers me less, though something as game changing as “magic” having no effect on society (or gender roles, AES Sendai) is also vexing.
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Sep 5, 2019 04:36
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WoT world does have different gender roles than medieval europe though? like, it's a (comparatively) more gender-equal society than its historical analogs, hard to imagine womens' monopoly on magic is not a major factor in that
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Sep 5, 2019 04:56
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Deptfordx posted:It's fantasy not MilSf but LBJ's The Curse of Chalion is great. Her Five Gods stuff is great, and by that I mean "is going to win her another Hugo for Best Series". The first one is a bit, just a little, paint by numbers to get where it's going but it's a solid novel with a pretty original plot influenced by the setting and its theology. Then in the second one she takes a character who was basically the madwoman in the attic from the first book, and makes her the main character. The third novel is in the same setting and time period but in a different country and a different focus on the godridden magic of the world. All highly recommended. Lately she's been self-publishing novellas; 6 or 7 Five Gods, the Penric and Desdemona series, and one in the Vorkosigan series. From following her Goodreads page she's enjoying the freedom to write whatever tickles her fancy and in a moderately-sized format. Having legions of devoted fans who click the $3.99 button on Amazon every time she puts out a new one can't hurt. They aren't milsf, but read the Chalion/Five Gods stories. They just plain good stuff.
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Sep 5, 2019 05:25
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mllaneza posted:Her Five Gods stuff is great, and by that I mean "is going to win her another Hugo for Best Series". The first one is a bit, just a little, paint by numbers to get where it's going but it's a solid novel with a pretty original plot influenced by the setting and its theology. Then in the second one she takes a character who was basically the madwoman in the attic from the first book, and makes her the main character. The third novel is in the same setting and time period but in a different country and a different focus on the godridden magic of the world. All highly recommended. Can second this; I haven’t read the Penric stuff yet as I’m waiting on the omni but the novels are solid. The first one is maybe marginal millSF as so much of it deals with Cazador’s PTSD and injuries.
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Sep 5, 2019 05:31
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I have to say, the five gods series > vorkosigan IMO
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Sep 5, 2019 07:08
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Deptfordx posted:It's fantasy not MilSf but LBJ's I would also like to recommend JFK's Harry Potter books.
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Sep 5, 2019 08:02
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Doctor Jeep posted:I have to say, the five gods series > vorkosigan IMO On the whole, yes. Of course the 5G stuff was mostly written after the Vorkisigan stuff, so she's grown some as a writer. This doesn't explain Cryoburn, but it does explain Captain Vorpatril's Alliance.
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Sep 5, 2019 08:20
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If you do, I'll give loving kill me with a bucket-wheel excavator sized monkey wrench in advance Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan books another chance AND buy the top tier of the Baen ebook humblebundle. Limited Time Faustian Offer, offer may be redeemed for equivalent amounts of Fudgie the Whale cakes. In the meantime, will be reading the paperback copies of Erewhon/Samuel Butler, The Other Side of Time/1965 Keith Laumer, and Black Glasses Like Clark Kent/Terese Svoboda that someone left at a local paperback-book exchange while taking my donated David Brin and Rex Stout books.
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Sep 7, 2019 00:23
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shovelbum posted:Weber's ships are invincible on the top and bottom to make them function exactly like they're in 2d, but in space
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Sep 7, 2019 20:18
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:
Don't forget that you can manually set the "who gets what" sliders so that Baen gets nothing!
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Sep 7, 2019 20:32
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Yvonmukluk posted:So what's to stop a tactical genius rotating his ship 90 degrees so it's immune to enemy fire? Or is this a thing they already do in-universe? They do this and the smart
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Sep 7, 2019 20:41
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Yvonmukluk posted:So what's to stop a tactical genius rotating his ship 90 degrees so it's immune to enemy fire? Or is this a thing they already do in-universe? FuturePastNow posted:They do this and the smart Yeah, in the early books when you still got some energy weapon combat it was a big deal, since if you roll ship and get your wedge towards the enemy you're invincible, but then your own energy weapons are likewise blocked. Which, in turn, put a premium on fleet formations, teamwork, and tactics, such that two ships could bracket an enemy so that one always has a shot, which got increasingly complicated and interesting the more ships you had. Of course nowadays all that fairly interesting stuff is obsolete and ignored in favor of "my missiles have longer range, I shoot more of them and win" which is how all Honorverse battles play out now. 
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Sep 7, 2019 20:49
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Yes, tactics existed in the early books when it was just cruisers and battlecruisers fighting on roughly even terms and short ranges.
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Sep 7, 2019 20:58
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C.M. Kruger posted:Don't forget that you can manually set the "who gets what" sliders so that Baen gets nothing! Yes, I checked that. Disappointed I couldn't stiff individual Baen Book authors, but if PupsOfWar actually pulls through (spoiler: PupsOfWar won't), I look forward to giving Baen Books $0.03, HumbleBundle $0.00, and whatever charity the rest of the money. Or, most excitingly to me, planning out witty puns to write on the alternate Faustian deal option aka Fudgie the whale cakes. "A feast fit for Honor Harrington". "Miles V. broke eight bones lifting this cake". "Eric Flint is Turtledove's bastard son". "Tom Kratman's PIN code is definitely 1488". "Jeffrey Epstein has signed 1st editions of Ringo's Paladin books".
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Sep 7, 2019 22:51
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Yes, I checked that. Disappointed I couldn't stiff individual Baen Book authors, but if PupsOfWar actually pulls through (spoiler: PupsOfWar won't), I look forward to giving Baen Books $0.03, HumbleBundle $0.00, and whatever charity the rest of the money. We'll be merciful and give you a shortlist of Vorkosigan books. Several of them play out like mysteries more than purely military, we could slant the list that way if you like.
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Sep 7, 2019 23:00
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jng2058 posted:Yeah, in the early books when you still got some energy weapon combat it was a big deal, since if you roll ship and get your wedge towards the enemy you're invincible, but then your own energy weapons are likewise blocked. Which, in turn, put a premium on fleet formations, teamwork, and tactics, such that two ships could bracket an enemy so that one always has a shot, which got increasingly complicated and interesting the more ships you had. This stuff didn't even really last all that long. It really wanted to be Legends of the Galactic Heroes but Weber never had any of the skill for it. Also I was doing some perusing of my Honorverse digital collection and I was reminded that pirates are a common thing in this setting when really, they should be even less of a thing than they are today instead of an ever-present scourge in some areas.
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Sep 7, 2019 23:00
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It's never the settings where travel is long and theres no FTL comms that have pirates, for some reason.
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Sep 8, 2019 09:04
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It has been 48 hrs plus a grace period of 4 hours since my Faustian Offer to PupsOfWar to read the entire Miles Vorkosigan series AND buy the highest tier of the Baen ebook humblebundle deal in return for PupsOfWar posting their John Ringo deep-dive manifesto that has been in the works for over 2 months now (originally mentioned by PupsOfWar end of July 2019, with scope creep mentioned mid-August). Literally ANYTHING would have been accepted, even a 1/2-assed or 1/16th -assed 2 sentence post/2 paragraph placeholder post. FAUSTIAN OFFER HAS EXPIRED...... Losers: the Challenger Center Charity, Carvel, and Instagram (an Instagram'ed Miles Vorkorsigan themed Fudgie the Whale cake eat-through will not be happening) Winners: My stomach (no Fudgie), my sanity (no Miles V. read-through and no Baen ebooks), and GRRM style procrastination. .....AS OF NOW.
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Sep 9, 2019 03:49
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In honor of 9.11.2001, I took two days off work this week and got a bunch of weird-interesting-terrible scifi + fantasy paperback books from a used bookstore place I try to visit every year around this time period. Scored 2 very terrible looking John Barnes books (Timeraider + The Duke of Uranium), 2 Mack Reynolds books (one of which looks like a direct ripoff of Judge Dredd prog #1 and checks out date-wise), and a Baen Books collection of Keith Laumer (pre-stroke) humourous scifi stories along with recent paperback reprints of Fritz Leiber's grey mouser/fafhrd + vinge deepness series.
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Sep 12, 2019 15:41
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Has anyone read the Gears of War novelizations? I've been pretty let down by the games not made by Epic, because they lack the weird dichotomy going on in the old games. The first three games are pretty notable for being a strange mix of well portrayed extreme desperation by a clearly corrupt government and military and absolutely ridiculous silly machismo. The COG are blatantly fascist and they get called out for their shady dealings and willingness to sacrifice civilian lives to destroy the Locust, and they are treated as unjustifiable villains who are hated by pretty much everyone, Gears included. At the same time the games focus on a group of inhumanly competent meatheads who singlehandedly save the last remnants of mankind. It's a fun mix of entertainingly stupid game antics and a really grim setting that doesn't glorify "hard people making tough decisions". Then there's the books, written by special forces fangirl Karen Traviss. Now, Traviss made a big splash in franchise fiction with her Star Wars: Republic Commando books, which featured Boba Fett Mandalorians calling the Jedi fascists while they were a race of proud warriors who were the greatest of them all. Traviss didn't make a lot of friends in the fandom and got into a published pissing match with another trashy author, Troy Denning. Changes in Star Wars's canon due to the Clone Wars tv series led Traviss to leave the franchise, and she later went on to write tie in novels for the Halo and Gears of War franchises. I haven't read her Halo books but her Gears of War stories are pretty trashy. I'll point out right now that she didn't come up with the breeding camp idea that people balk at in Gears. For the most part she upholds the games' critical view of the COG as a callous fascist regime, but she does fall into her usual habit of creating a faction of noble warriors who are better than everyone else and everyone idolizes them that she does in every franchise she writes. So rather than glorifying fascism for her MilSF she goes all in on the "hard men making tough choices" spiel, but only if they're soldiers fighting for their own survival and not nationality. I mentioned she wrote the script for Gears of War 3, which I find strange because it's probably the best story of the first three games and it lacks a lot of her less savoury, masturbatory elements that plague her books. I think it has to come down to the fact that the Gears of War game stories tend to be character focused, and the need for constant action keeps her from indulging. And she can write good character interactions. It's her obsession with deifying her pet characters by making GBS threads on others that posses people off. Writing a game script didn't give her that option, so the game story is quite good. But the books are just a slog of hearing about how Marcus Fenix is always right and his tribal warrior friends afe the bestest of them all.
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Sep 21, 2019 00:26
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Congrats on being stupid enough to read licensed fiction I guess
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Sep 21, 2019 04:40
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Licensed fiction can be very hit and miss, especially scifi/mil-scifi licensed fiction. Bolo universe stories + Man-Kzinti war, for example, are bad but managed to sell enough for multiple sequels. Aubrey–Maturin series continues to baffle me, popularity and content wise. Napoleonic naval warfare series with 21 books published. Started the not Judge Dredd knock-off book I mentioned earlier, Mack Reynold's Police Patrol: 2000 A.D. The main character is Tad Boleslaw who looks like Thad Castle, of Blue Mountain State tv series.
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Sep 21, 2019 05:13
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Licensed fiction can be very hit and miss, especially scifi/mil-scifi licensed fiction. Bolo universe stories + Man-Kzinti war, for example, are bad but managed to sell enough for multiple sequels. I've recently come across a couple of books by Joel Rosenberg, whose book "Hero" I had originally read in High School. The book centers on a Jewish post-diaspora colony whose only export is Mercenary soldiers. I vaguely recall the book, but that it went into serious War Crimes by both the main character (Rookie) and those around him. Little did I know that it was part of a series and the 3rd/conclusion at that, so I am planning on reading the prior books to see what, exactly, is going on. To tie things back in to Mack Reynolds, according to the wiki/goodreads posts for Joel Rosenberg he was going to continue Mack's work. Which, given that the first Matsada trilogy book it involves stripping down mercenary commands to a low tech level I can see the influence and cheating the difference It's Glider Paratroops I am...somewhat interested in reading the other books, however it is very 1980's and has Jewish Bushido Warriors who meditate in barren caverns. And marry their brother's wife if he dies in battle.
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Sep 21, 2019 07:42
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Licensed fiction can be very hit and miss, especially scifi/mil-scifi licensed fiction. Bolo universe stories + Man-Kzinti war, for example, are bad but managed to sell enough for multiple sequels. I read so many Aubrey Marturin novels but the formula gets stale after like 6 books; the titular characters dont really grow out of their codependent bromance thing, and the scale of the stories are about one ship and its crew (but mostly just the command staff). And peacetime navies are very boring, so there always has to be a crisis for the guys to get thrown into. They're good books but they wore on me eventually. They're way loving better than the mil scifi knockoffs, though funnily enough theres a few times where the author has a whole book about something he thought was cool, like the prototype missile cruiser Polycrest. Turns out the late 18th/early 19th century just didnt have the technology for naval rocketry
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Sep 21, 2019 08:20
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Arcsquad12 posted:Has anyone read the Gears of War novelizations? I've been pretty let down by the games not made by Epic, because they lack the weird dichotomy going on in the old games. The first three games are pretty notable for being a strange mix of well portrayed extreme desperation by a clearly corrupt government and military and absolutely ridiculous silly machismo. The COG are blatantly fascist and they get called out for their shady dealings and willingness to sacrifice civilian lives to destroy the Locust, and they are treated as unjustifiable villains who are hated by pretty much everyone, Gears included. At the same time the games focus on a group of inhumanly competent meatheads who singlehandedly save the last remnants of mankind. It's a fun mix of entertainingly stupid game antics and a really grim setting that doesn't glorify "hard people making tough decisions". I never read any of those, but I remember idly flipping through a few pages of one once What I recall was an honestly pretty good worldbuilding/character study bit where the gang were combing through old penthouses looking for valuables, with Augustus (always the best character in gears) using his past life experience as a rich athlete to identify where dead rich people have hidden their best loot always thought Traviss was maybe decent whenever prevented from writing about whatever specific pet culture she's latched onto
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Sep 21, 2019 09:16
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Her best books are when she's focused entirely on a mission in the field. She's honestly pretty good at writing tacticool combat scenes rsther than discussing politics and ethical questions.
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Sep 22, 2019 02:39
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Larry Parrish posted:I read so many Aubrey Marturin novels but the formula gets stale after like 6 books; the titular characters dont really grow out of their codependent bromance thing, and the scale of the stories are about one ship and its crew (but mostly just the command staff). And peacetime navies are very boring, so there always has to be a crisis for the guys to get thrown into. They're good books but they wore on me eventually. They're way loving better than the mil scifi knockoffs, though funnily enough theres a few times where the author has a whole book about something he thought was cool, like the prototype missile cruiser Polycrest. Turns out the late 18th/early 19th century just didnt have the technology for naval rocketry Its kind of like Hornblower being a much better series than Honor Harrington. Like Hornblower is a very good navy captain and quite smart, but he still fucks up gets people killed and fails in his missions multiple times like an actual person and doesn't exactly get treated a special snowflake by the admiralty.
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Sep 22, 2019 06:00
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Jack2142 posted:Its kind of like Hornblower being a much better series than Honor Harrington. Like Hornblower is a very good navy captain and quite smart, but he still fucks up gets people killed and fails in his missions multiple times like an actual person and doesn't exactly get treated a special snowflake by the admiralty. Despite what David Weber would tell you, there are often competent and intelligent people on the other side too.
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Sep 22, 2019 07:19
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As I quoted myself in the OP, about 95.5555555555555% of Napoleonic Wars fiction seems to be focused on the English goodguys, with any non-English supporting forces that were ALSO historically fighting the french being an afterthought at best in those novels. Hence my great desire to find French, or Prussian or god forbid Russian viewpoint Napoleonic Wars fiction. Aubrey–Maturin being a 21 book series ways gives me the same throbbing headache as Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt 10 book series whenever I think of them....aka "How the gently caress do you get Finished Police Patrol 2000 A.D. The main character Police Officer T. Boleslaw was annoyingly infallible but the UBI (universal basic income) stuff, UBI credit card fraud, criminals working around UBI limitations and the Deathwish 1 opening/closer chapters of Police Patrol 2000 A.D. made it better than I expected it to be. Kind of prefer Mack Reynolds other mil-scifi UBI themed series aka the "Joe Mauser" books series. The titular series main character was angry/bitter in a very David Drakian sense.
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Sep 22, 2019 07:28
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tbf, the Aubrey Marturin books are about two english nobles, and from their perspective. So of course they basically dismiss everyone unless they're ordered to play nice. anyway the French were the official good guys in the napoleonic wars and we need more books about how ftw killing aristocrats is.
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Sep 22, 2019 08:38
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