|
im still of the opinion that most of this setting was devised by pulling stuff out of a hat and blending it together
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 21:16
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 00:25 |
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:im still of the opinion that most of this setting was devised by pulling stuff out of a hat and blending it together It's largely just his idolization of the Age of Sail British Empire 'correcting' Horatio Hornblower, set in his generic scifi setting using the rules from his tabletop game. It does also include all of his favorite things, like the Society For Creative Anachronisms, which I poo poo you not becomes important in a couple of books as an explanation for why Honor is a master gunslinger with the Colt M1911 which is a very important weapon to know for duels and general Creative Killing Of Bad People in the year 4000.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 22:22
|
|
|
I dunno I think I agree with Larry, the Honorverse is a huge grab bag of things Weber likes from throughout the last 250 or so years of military history like that latter thing might make more sense if you know that Weber probably read in a book that Admiral Nimitz had a shooting range built at Pacific Fleet Headquarters in Hawaii so he could perforate targets when he needed a mental break
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2020 23:52
|
|
|
TheGreatEvilKing posted:This is foreshadowing for later when Charlene, who is totally smokin hot, marries Caleb to join her elite armies to Caleb's bomb-rear end fleet and a later character to battle the Dumb Fake Jesus Sword Guys. I can't remember the details offhand, but we definitely get a peek into Sharleyan's internal monologue where she rolls her eyes at court poets habit of trying to make some feature of hers sound pretty, so I'm pretty sure she's not meant to look super hot, just... fine. More or less ordinary. IIRC, Cayleb's the gorgeous one in their pairing; she just lucked into having (was written to have) really good chemistry with him. TheGreatEvilKing posted:It's kind of amazing how in Weber's writings political marriage between two monarchs always deepens into love, and never ends with them gritting their teeth and loving out a child and then fooling around on the side like many real monarchs in history. I'm pretty sure it's not literally all royal marriages, just the ones he decides to spend time with. TheGreatEvilKing posted:It's also amazing how despite all the linguistic drift causing silly names, the characters speak in remarkably modern English with none of the poetics or grandeur you would expect out of the mythical True Just King. "Slash lizard" and "sand maggot" are just bad and manage to draw and quarter any attempt at solemnity the scene had. The conceit behind the names vs. the rest of their speech is that the "Holy Writ" got used as a reference standard not only for rules of moral behavior and a practical guide to the best possible low-tech medicine and terraforming procedures, but also for their language, with the result that while the underlying grammar and in-character orthography are all practically identical to Standard English, and all the linguistic drift has been in sound changes and pronunciation. Weber is attempting to show us a bit of those sound changes by rendering the names phonetically, while leaving the rest of the dialogue and such in normal orthography for the convenience of his English-speaking readership. As for why the True King and his Goodly Heir don't speak in a higher register, I think you're doing Weber a slight disservice there. Neither he nor the characters think of themselves in those terms; given later revelations, Haarahld definitely knows that any divine right bullshit is just that, and presumably took some pains to develop a similar attitude in Cayleb, even if he couldn't tell his son all of the reasons behind it. However, I'm in complete agreement on your disgust for "slash lizard" and "sand maggot". Imagine naming animals after where they live, or what makes them dangerous. Ridiculous! It would have been much better if he called them something like "giznar" and "sliggle" and interrupted the story for a few paragraphs to explain what they are and why the characters are using them as a metaphor. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Unfortunately, while the books are poorly constructed there is little shock value to be derived from them. You don't have crap like Goodkind's literal rape pits or Ringo's Waffen-SS worship where you can point to the awful poo poo happening and make fun of it. It's all a dull, unexciting mediocrity. Wasn't the SS worshipper Krâtmân, not Ringo? (diacritics added to make it harder for him to google himself) TheGreatEvilKing posted:The puzzle of Weber isn't "why is this so bad", the puzzle is "why does this poo poo sell" and I think that's the question we're all trying to answer in this thread. I can only speak for myself, but I guess it's a bit like comfort food. He has his formulas in how he builds his worlds, constructs his plots, and writes his characters, but he also plays with and varies them enough that so far I find it familiar but not samey or contrived – the vast majority of the time, anyway.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 01:30
|
|
|
FuturePastNow posted:I dunno I think I agree with Larry, the Honorverse is a huge grab bag of things Weber likes from throughout the last 250 or so years of military history I'm not actually disagreeing with Larry, I'm just explaining the details of it. The Colt thing is just that he likes that gun specifically and wants to replicate the duelling from Horatio Hornblower except officially sanctioned and regulated and it's literally legal assassinated.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 02:56
|
|
|
I do wonder if there's a bit of a Heinlein reference going on - the 1942 serial/1948 novel Beyond This Horizon featured a culture where dueling was a culturally expected means of solving problems. The main character (who is suffering from ennui with the utopian future culture and longing for the "good old days") starts carrying a "point four five Colt Automatic" in place of the much more advanced energy guns most people carry. It's a weak connection, so probably unlikely.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 03:04
|
|
|
People wearing power armor when some SCA dork with a powder-based ballistic handgun (with a blackpowder-era cartridge no less) shows up: IIRC in the second Starfishers book the spy protagonist spends a bit of his time rolling his eyes at "Archaicist Fadism" about pot-bellied office workers dressing up as the Pharaoh of New Jersey or wearing wild west clothing. C.M. Kruger fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Jan 5, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 03:34
|
|
|
Anshu posted:I can't remember the details offhand, but we definitely get a peek into Sharleyan's internal monologue where she rolls her eyes at court poets habit of trying to make some feature of hers sound pretty, so I'm pretty sure she's not meant to look super hot, just... fine. More or less ordinary. IIRC, Cayleb's the gorgeous one in their pairing; she just lucked into having (was written to have) really good chemistry with him. Guess I'm doing this, huh? Well, good of you to pop in. I do remember she and Cayleb fall in love at first sight, but it's been a while since I read the latter books. Anshu posted:I'm pretty sure it's not literally all royal marriages, just the ones he decides to spend time with. Most of the ones he decides to spend time with are his stock Good and Wise Monarchs. Manticore and Charis both embrace monarchy, and despite them being the most "advanced" nations in the setting there is never a question of whether or not people deserve to rule by birthright. Even the venal corruption of people like Pavel Young never seems to inspire any demand to get rid of hereditary privileges, and the good characters like Caleb and Honor are distinguished by their royal bloodlines and their royal privilege they take for granted. Anshu posted:The conceit behind the names vs. the rest of their speech is that the "Holy Writ" got used as a reference standard not only for rules of moral behavior and a practical guide to the best possible low-tech medicine and terraforming procedures, but also for their language, with the result that while the underlying grammar and in-character orthography are all practically identical to Standard English, and all the linguistic drift has been in sound changes and pronunciation. Weber is attempting to show us a bit of those sound changes by rendering the names phonetically, while leaving the rest of the dialogue and such in normal orthography for the convenience of his English-speaking readership. First, I don't actually care. If Weber actually wanted to show cultural stasis there are better ways to do it (such as having the characters quoting modern Earth stuff like Shakespeare rather than indigenous authors) and quite frankly the characters all speaking English isn't that important to our series about the clash between church and state (which I think this is supposed to be about?). Forcing the reader to decipher "Dynnys" and "Nahrman" to reveal...they're just English names is irritating and doesn't matter much. The image of the Temple literally just being as the angels left it works a lot better for this anyway, as it implies people aren't making new art or music to glorify the Archangels. That's a much bigger indicator of cultural stasis to me! As feudal kings, Haaralhd and Cayleb would probably be more educated that the rest of the populace. I don't remember Cayleb ever questioning whether or not he should rule Charis based solely on his birthright. He questions whether or not he would be a good king, but never the idea of kingship or the idea that making executive positions based on heredity is bad. The characters (as of...five books in?) don't develop the idea of the social contract, so in the end Cayleb rules not by the will of the people but because the military answers to him. Anshu posted:However, I'm in complete agreement on your disgust for "slash lizard" and "sand maggot". Imagine naming animals after where they live, or what makes them dangerous. Ridiculous! It would have been much better if he called them something like "giznar" and "sliggle" and interrupted the story for a few paragraphs to explain what they are and why the characters are using them as a metaphor. So I'm going to quote Dawn of War 2, because I just played it a while ago and it's also genre schlock. Still, here goes! Azariah Kyras, a Space Demon Man from a videogame posted:...Meridian is as helpless as a babe set upon by wolves. See how even though the game is set in the far future with weird poo poo, the characters are still capable of making analogies that an actual human would make? I do not know what a sand maggot or a slash lizard are. They don't exist. Weber could have added a sentence about the terraforming ships dropping earth life forms and we could have had an actual threatening metaphor. The babe set upon by wolves conjures a horrifying image of a small child being ripped to pieces, and shows the brutality of the character. The sand lizard...doesn't exist and readers are not familiar with it. The ecosystem of Safehold does not actually play a big part in our conflict between empires and isn't particularly interesting. Anshu posted:Wasn't the SS worshipper Krâtmân, not Ringo? (diacritics added to make it harder for him to google himself) Oh boy are you in for a poo poo surprise! Anshu posted:I can only speak for myself, but I guess it's a bit like comfort food. He has his formulas in how he builds his worlds, constructs his plots, and writes his characters, but he also plays with and varies them enough that so far I find it familiar but not samey or contrived – the vast majority of the time, anyway. I would imagine that any concept you find familiar in Safehold has probably been done better by actually competent authors. If you want a better look at the premise of "state with modern technology vs church" I suggest you read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 05:00
|
|
|
TheGreatEvilKing posted:As feudal kings, Haaralhd and Cayleb would probably be more educated that the rest of the populace. I don't remember Cayleb ever questioning whether or not he should rule Charis based solely on his birthright. He questions whether or not he would be a good king, but never the idea of kingship or the idea that making executive positions based on heredity is bad. The characters (as of...five books in?) don't develop the idea of the social contract, so in the end Cayleb rules not by the will of the people but because the military answers to him. I mean, to be fair, it's not like a lot of 15th-16th century kings, even the highly educated ones, questioned whether or not hereditary rule was a bad system, either. None of the characters except Nimue have anything like modern values. While I have a bunch of problems with the book (the very black and white nature of the characters, the fact that Earth's plan was pretty stupid to start with, the fact that a book about an analogue to the Protestant reformation has pretty much no theology in it, that the Protestants are the good guys.  , and a bunch of other things), I don't think it's a flaw of the book that Cayleb never sets up a modern democracy.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 06:00
|
|
|
It's weird because you have a whole bunch of characters questioning everything except Weber's favorite values. Church doctrine? Sure. Science? Sure. I'm not expecting them to set up a modern democracy, but it's interesting that government is the one area they refuse to innovate. I suspect I would have less of a problem with it if Weber wasn't so enamored with kingship.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 06:39
|
|
|
TheGreatEvilKing posted:It's weird because you have a whole bunch of characters questioning everything except Weber's favorite values. Church doctrine? Sure. Science? Sure. Yes, but, and you're putting me in the difficult position of defending Weber, which I don't want to do....So, while this series is set up to be superficially like the Reformation and the Thirty Years War, there's not really much theology involved. The split isn't over the souls of the dead and whether indulgences can get them our of purgatory, or who should be able to interpret scripture, or whether people have a choice in their salvation, or whether images are a form of idolatry, or all of the other things that the people in the Reformation argued about. I mean, eventually the leaders find out, like Nimue knows, the entire Church is built on a lie, and the angels weren't angels, and all that, , but originally the conflict comes because, first, the Church leadership is corrupt, and second. Charis is a trading empire which is making a bunch of technological advances that are coming close to the Church's ban on forbidden technology. So Charis and Cahleb are doing what they're doing out of self interest. The innovations benefit him. That's not the case with some sort of "consent of the governed" principle, and there's no real way that Charis would have come up with it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 07:09
|
|
|
TheGreatEvilKing posted:Guess I'm doing this, huh? Well, good of you to pop in. I do remember she and Cayleb fall in love at first sight, but it's been a while since I read the latter books. I remember that too, now that you mention it, and I also seem to recall that he says he thinks she's beautiful. I would chalk that up to a combination of his relative youth, the euphoria of his diplomatic gambit paying off, and a bit of beauty being in the eye of the beholder – but the fact that Sharleyan's court poets seemed to feel obliged to try to say something nice about... whatever the flaw was suggests to me that it's not entirely in her own head. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Most of the ones he decides to spend time with are his stock Good and Wise Monarchs. Manticore and Charis both embrace monarchy, and despite them being the most "advanced" nations in the setting there is never a question of whether or not people deserve to rule by birthright. Even the venal corruption of people like Pavel Young never seems to inspire any demand to get rid of hereditary privileges, and the good characters like Caleb and Honor are distinguished by their royal bloodlines and their royal privilege they take for granted. A bit of a side tangent, but I feel like Manticore isn't a good example here, in that political marriages don't really appear to be a thing therr? The royals are constitutionally obligated to marry commoners, which is much less restrictive than the opposite – there are a lot more commoners than nobles, so even if a Manticoran royal does fall in love with a noble, it seems pretty likely they could find at least a tolerably congenial marriage partner, rather than being stuck with someone they can't stand for the sake of some treaty or whatever. Anyway,  it just doesn't bother me that much. In fact, I kind of prefer the honesty of the explicit class systems Weber writes to the pretend-egalitarian crypto-aristocracy we have to deal with in America, and I'd much rather Weber pair that with depictions of loving relationships than cold or even outright abusive ones.TheGreatEvilKing posted:First, I don't actually care. If Weber actually wanted to show cultural stasis there are better ways to do it (such as having the characters quoting modern Earth stuff like Shakespeare rather than indigenous authors) and quite frankly the characters all speaking English isn't that important to our series about the clash between church and state (which I think this is supposed to be about?). Forcing the reader to decipher "Dynnys" and "Nahrman" to reveal...they're just English names is irritating and doesn't matter much. The image of the Temple literally just being as the angels left it works a lot better for this anyway, as it implies people aren't making new art or music to glorify the Archangels. That's a much bigger indicator of cultural stasis to me! I feel like you've maybe missed the point somewhere. I don't think the series is about Church vs. State, it's about Tolerance vs. Intolerance, and maybe also Means vs. Ends. The Archangels' own plan limited what Earth cultural stuff they could give the mindwiped colonists. Giving them buttloads of out-of-context cultural material is not a good idea if your plan is to preserve the human species by setting up a largely muscle-powered agricultural society with no memory of where they came from on an alien planet, and keeping them at that tech level by ruling as ostensibly divine superbeings. The "Archangels" can't tolerate anyone else having pre-Safehold knowledge because of the threat it poses to their desired social order, which would in turn risk technological developments that would draw the attention of the xenocidal aliens they're trying to hide from. The colonists probably won't be able to overthrow you, but they're almost certainly going to be able to put things together that you didn't want them to know, and then you have to start killing the ones who know too much, and then somebody will wonder what it was that got that person killed, and now this is turning into one of those plans, where you kill everyone that notices that you're killing people, the dirigible is in flames, and you've lost your hat. No, better to start them with just the carefully written holy book. They'll have to invent their own culture, but there's only so far they can go with just the pieces we've given them, right? Except that's where their plan starts to fail, because while the overall culture hadn't yet grown outside the intended bounds by the time the main action starts, it was starting to creak and totter and collapse into a mess, and who knows where all the pieces will fly off to! As the church becomes more and more corrupt, people grow more and more dissatisfied with it, and challenging its supremacy becomes more and more thinkable, because the culture isn't static, and wouldn't be static even if there weren't secret caches of pre-Safehold knowledge influencing certain areas behind the scenes. Anyway, on the names thing, I don't understand why people feel "forced" to "decipher" the names rather than just take them at face value. Maybe it's because of my exposure to so much schlocky fantasy, but I have no trouble accepting "Dynnys," "Nahrman," and the rest as just What Those Individuals Are Called – and now I'm typing that out, I'm reminded of the line from the ProZD's skit: "Do you have an English name?" TheGreatEvilKing posted:As feudal kings, Haaralhd and Cayleb would probably be more educated that the rest of the populace. I don't remember Cayleb ever questioning whether or not he should rule Charis based solely on his birthright. He questions whether or not he would be a good king, but never the idea of kingship or the idea that making executive positions based on heredity is bad. The characters (as of...five books in?) don't develop the idea of the social contract, so in the end Cayleb rules not by the will of the people but because the military answers to him. I will point out this illuminating bit from Haarahld when asked about why his great-grandfather abolished serfdom in Charis: quote:"The Writ teaches that God created every Adam and every Eve in the same instant, the same exercise of his will through the Archangel Langhorne," Haraahld said. "He didn't create kings first, or nobles, or wealthy merchants. He breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of all men and all women. Surely that means all men and all women are brothers and sisters. We may not be born to the same states, in this later, less perfect world. Some of us are born kings now, and some are born noble, or to wealth, or all three. Yet those born more humbly are still our brothers and sisters. If God sees men that way, then so must we, and if that's true, then men aren't cattle, or sheep, or horses, or dragons. Not something to be owned." TheGreatEvilKing posted:See how even though the game is set in the far future with weird poo poo, the characters are still capable of making analogies that an actual human would make? I do not know what a sand maggot or a slash lizard are. They don't exist. Weber could have added a sentence about the terraforming ships dropping earth life forms and we could have had an actual threatening metaphor. The babe set upon by wolves conjures a horrifying image of a small child being ripped to pieces, and shows the brutality of the character. The sand lizard...doesn't exist and readers are not familiar with it. The ecosystem of Safehold does not actually play a big part in our conflict between empires and isn't particularly interesting. Well, you see, I thought that it stood to reason that people would make analogies based on animals they are familiar with, and that as these are people living on an alien planet with alien wildlife with no memory of Earth, that the animals they were familiar with include alien ones, and I was able to infer that it was meant to be threatening from context. No, I know about that one, it's actually my main exposure to the matter. It was my understanding that Ringo's name is on it mostly because it's set in his Posleen universe, and that the actual content of the book was all on the other author.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 07:37
|
|
|
Anshu posted:I remember that too, now that you mention it, and I also seem to recall that he says he thinks she's beautiful. I would chalk that up to a combination of his relative youth, the euphoria of his diplomatic gambit paying off, and a bit of beauty being in the eye of the beholder – but the fact that Sharleyan's court poets seemed to feel obliged to try to say something nice about... whatever the flaw was suggests to me that it's not entirely in her own head. It's literally the exact same thing as in the Honorverse where Honor is convinced she's super ugly and it's clear she's a super model but everyone has to act like she's ugly but somehow hot. EDIT: Also in one of those books Ringo and Kratman had a shared afterward where they attacked the TRANZIS who were... Trans-Nationals aka the UN, which they wanted to pretend were the REAL NAZIS. Kchama fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Jan 5, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 09:13
|
|
|
Anshu posted:Anyway, I can't really argue with your personal preference. I'd rather take the "pretend-egalitarian" society today because if I run into Bill Gates or Donald Trump I'm not legally required to bow and scrape and call them "sir". Ideally we'd have actual egalitarianism but good luck with that! Then again, it is fiction after all. Anshu posted:I feel like you've maybe missed the point somewhere. I don't think the series is about Church vs. State, it's about Tolerance vs. Intolerance, and maybe also Means vs. Ends. So it should be pointed out that the "Archangels'" goal - though filtered through the eyes of their enemies - was to ensure eternal worship for themselves. I could have sworn Weber intended the series to be about religion, so I looked up some interviews. https://www.torforgeblog.com/2014/02/20/throwback-thursday-an-interview-with-david-weber/ https://bookspotcentral.com/david-weber-safehold/ I'd say we're both right, the intended conflict seems to be religious fanaticism vs innovation. David Weber posted:At this particular time, the United States is the poster child for a technological-industrial society. The basic social blueprint for the US, ideologically speaking, is based on the values of Western humanism, which have been hugely influenced by Judeo-Christian religious teachings. Those humanist values, with their emphasis on the individual and on freedom of conscience, are anathema to those who fear secularization. When you combine that fear of secularization with the wealth, power, and fervent faith in technology and science which are so much a part of the United States’ image today, it’s inevitable that we should become the “Great Satan.” If I were a practitioner of conservative Islam today, I know that I would be horrified by what I saw bearing down on my religion and my society from the United States and Europe. And I would also be aware that the West’s economic and industrial success would be dreadfully seductive to those who do not enjoy an equal level of success, and that the possibility of similar secular success must inevitably fragment the cohesiveness of my own theocratic view of how the world is supposed to be organized to the glory of God. Granted, I tend to argue hard for death of the author, so this probably makes me full of poo poo. I also believe - from reading Weber's works - that the entire Church vs Charis conflict is secondary to Weber's ultimate goal of setting up a trivial curbstomp battle that all his action stories inevitably become. Nevertheless, you can see what Weber intended with the religious fanaticism of the church against the humanism of the state. Anshu posted:Anyway, on the names thing, I don't understand why people feel "forced" to "decipher" the names rather than just take them at face value. Maybe it's because of my exposure to so much schlocky fantasy, but I have no trouble accepting "Dynnys," "Nahrman," and the rest as just What Those Individuals Are Called – and now I'm typing that out, I'm reminded of the line from the ProZD's skit: "Do you have an English name?" I would confess I would be a lot more comfortable if people were named made up poo poo like Valkar and Katniss and whatever than the obvious parallels to English names. Isn't half the command staff Chinese? Did nobody named, say, Okonkwo board the ship? Why do I give a gently caress how they pronounce Dennis? It's deliberately jarring and it doesn't feel like it contributes any meaning. Anshu posted:I will point out this illuminating bit from Haarahld when asked about why his great-grandfather abolished serfdom in Charis: It's the benevolent dictator fantasy. Weber, again posted:I believe that the strongest attraction for the majority of my readers is that my protagonists are decision makers, choice makers, and responsibility takers. They are the sort of people all of us, I think, both want to see in our leaders and would like to be on a personal level. And I think some readers probably see characters like Honor or Nimue and the choices they make as a sort of escape from—or an antidote for, perhaps—the cynicism which envelops so much of our own society at this particular historical juncture. The fantasy is that there's some enlightened and wise person who, by taking sole power will make everything better because they care so hard and we carefully elide the reason that dictators are bad in real life. It's absolute nonsense. Historically speaking, a lot of societal problems come from too much power concentrated in the hands of a few. Power corrupts, power isolates. I get that maybe people don't want it in their escapist fantasy, and yea, it can be fun to pretend that King Arthur is going to come in and send Mitch McConnell to the unemployment line and fix the crappy healthcare system. In real life you are just going to get inbreeding and ineptitude. Go read the Grand Duchess Marie's autobiography - she writes straight up that toward the end of the Romanov dynasty, they were never taught anything of how to govern a country and it's a big reason the Russian autocracy collapsed. Anshu posted:Well, you see, I thought that it stood to reason that people would make analogies based on animals they are familiar with, and that as these are people living on an alien planet with alien wildlife with no memory of Earth, that the animals they were familiar with include alien ones, and I was able to infer that it was meant to be threatening from context. Then make the alien life actually theatening. When I hear "slash lizard," I think this.  Yes, you can infer it's meant to be threatening from context. I don't think that "sand maggot" hits as hard as the mental image of wolves eating a baby. If you're going to translate everything into English anyway save for the wacky spelling of Dennis, you can use non-fictitious, non-mythological animals that people are familiar with. I mean, I get what he's saying, but I don't really feel it, especially because I find the idea of a sand maggot silly. Try it - imagine being attacked by a German shepherd vs being attacked by, I don't know, an "ice frog". Which is scarier? Why? Epicurius posted:Yes, but, and you're putting me in the difficult position of defending Weber, which I don't want to do....So, while this series is set up to be superficially like the Reformation and the Thirty Years War, there's not really much theology involved. The split isn't over the souls of the dead and whether indulgences can get them our of purgatory, or who should be able to interpret scripture, or whether people have a choice in their salvation, or whether images are a form of idolatry, or all of the other things that the people in the Reformation argued about. I mean, eventually the leaders find out, like Nimue knows, the entire Church is built on a lie, and the angels weren't angels, and all that, , but originally the conflict comes because, first, the Church leadership is corrupt, and second. Charis is a trading empire which is making a bunch of technological advances that are coming close to the Church's ban on forbidden technology. I was going to concede this, but then Weber had to go and say that Charis is the US and the Church are Jihadis. Not going to argue with the original conflict, but with Merlin popping up and the heretic church that knows the truth spreading different ideas generally you get a lot of questions, and Charis is supposed to represent the secular human freedoms embodied by the United States (per Weber). It is really weird that there are no legitimate theological debates in this series about religion, but there doesn't seem to be much of a theology to argue about. There are no equivalents of Talmudic scholars or debating mullahs or priests arguing over Biblical passages. It's just a sham religion to enable a power fantasy battle.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 09:31
|
|
|
On the names front: I'm pretty sure I remember one scene where all the baseball players have "Safehold-ized" versions of real life Atlanta Braves players and boy is that awful to read. I guess it might not be so bad for people who don't recognize them but for me it really took me out of the narrative and was the final straw in moving me from "This conceit could maybe be used in an interesting way" to "I hate these names and wish they would stop." On a related note, I wonder which read through will get to his obsession with shoehorning baseball into every series he writes first. I think it happens a lot later in HH, but Kchama is moving pretty quickly.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 11:59
|
|
|
Kchama posted:It's literally the exact same thing as in the Honorverse where Honor is convinced she's super ugly and it's clear she's a super model but everyone has to act like she's ugly but somehow hot. its because they literally think all those disillusioned communists who watched the society they spent their entire lives building collapse in like 2 years into just another capitalist fiefdom that like, gave up and got desk jobs somewhere are actually sleeper agents ready to bring about ww3 and the fifth internationale but also the fourth reich
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 12:31
|
|
|
TheGreatEvilKing posted:I would confess I would be a lot more comfortable if people were named made up poo poo like Valkar and Katniss and whatever than the obvious parallels to English names. Isn't half the command staff Chinese? Did nobody named, say, Okonkwo board the ship? Why do I give a gently caress how they pronounce Dennis? It's deliberately jarring and it doesn't feel like it contributes any meaning. TheGreatEvilKing posted:It's the benevolent dictator fantasy. And furthermore, because of the knowledge they have and the conspiracy they're part of, I feel like we're supposed to infer that the Ahrmahks haven't been ruling purely as military dictators in fancy clothes, but have been pushing (as much as they dare) toward a more humanistic society. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Then make the alien life actually theatening. When I hear "slash lizard," I think this. Seems to me like, yet again, this comes down to our personal prejudices, where I'm fine trying to project myself into and inhabit the secondary world Weber has constructed, and you're refusing to meet the material halfway. It's like reading Tolkien and complaining that he should have used brutish ape-men or something instead of inventing these stupid-sounding "orcs" nobody's ever heard of before.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 23:03
|
|
|
your take on class and aristocracy is highly liberal so basically yes. your dumb for indulging in the History's Only Perfect King thing that Weber constantly writes
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 23:08
|
|
|
Anshu posted:The people with Chinese names live in Harchong; once more Harchongese characters show up you get names like "Tsungshai" and "Zhyou-Zhwo" – but they don't start showing up in quantity until fairly late in the series, so if you've only read the first 5 books then it's understandable you haven't seen them. We can agree to disagree here. Anshu posted:And when I hear "slash lizard," I think something like this. The orcs aren't that threatening because they're orcs, the orcs could really just be evil guys with swords. We spend enough time with the orcs and they're important to the story that they feel like an organic part as the mostly enslaved followers of the dictator. Weber is intentionally trying to create a world with token nods to alien-ness (the slash lizard) but one that is ultimately just based off vaguely familiar earth politics. The characters never really have to confront anything fantastical (Weber is great at making advanced nigh-miraculous technology seem boring and commonplace) so when we are reminded that Safehold isn't Earth, it doesn't actually matter. I legit don't think the Gbaba come up at all in the first...five books.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 23:20
|
|
|
Libluini posted:There seems to be a disagreement of definitions going on here, according to my sources a reactionless drive is not "reaction mass less", but instead it is supposed to mean that the drive doesn't react with forces outside its own system. But it could be that I'm unfair here, as many SF-authors also get this wrong and confuse a reactionless drive with one that is just propellant-less. What sources? Because there really isn't any consensus here, as far as I can tell. Some authors use it to mean "a drive that does not interact with the rest of the universe" (i.e. loving magic), and some authors use it to mean "a drive that does not expel reaction mass". I'm pretty sure I originally encountered the term in Niven, and he consistently uses it as the latter; the Kzinti gravity polarizer, for example, is described as a "reactionless drive". And since in either case, it's a fantastical term used to describe things that do not (and possibly cannot) exist in reality, the only meaning it has is the meaning it derives through use in published SF. Larry Parrish posted:your take on class and aristocracy is highly liberal so basically yes. your dumb for indulging in the History's Only Perfect King thing that Weber constantly writes It's not like it's any less plausible than a hyperdrive and no-one ITT has any trouble taking that in strideu
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 23:30
|
|
|
A writer can't really win with alien animals. Lets say you've got some medium sized predator that hunts in packs. You either give it a really alien name, like "pamzak", and then your characters are running around saying pamzak all the time and the reader is trying to remember what a pamzak is, or you call it a "moon wolf" and that's its own kind of eyerolling. "Slash lizard" works pretty much as well, and I could see that as an actual name sort of.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 23:31
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:your take on class and aristocracy is highly liberal so basically yes. your dumb for indulging in the History's Only Perfect King thing that Weber constantly writes You know, you may have a point there. I first started reading Weber when I was... 12ish, I think, and I only started thinking in terms of leftists opposed to liberals in the last few years. I'll have to do some self-examination on this. TheGreatEvilKing posted:I legit don't think the Gbaba come up at all in the first...five books. I think they come up a handful times, but only very briefly in each instance. They're very much tomorrow's problem so far.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 23:43
|
|
|
Anshu posted:I think we're getting to another of those irreconcilable personal preferences, where you're really bothered by the ahistoricity of a "Good Dynasty" and I'm not, especially when the author has inserted various factors to mitigate the tendency to isolation and corruption, like Manticore's constitutional marriage requirement, or the Ahrmahk line's access to (a small amount of) pre-Safehold knowledge and accompanying participation in the conspiracy to ultimately overthrow the Church and the social order it enforces, or (most interesting to me) the Ternathian emperors including what appears to be a psionically enforced oath of public service in their coronation ceremony. Outside of literal mind control those 'factors to mitigate' aren't going to do poo poo over time. It sounds like a great idea, but the thing is that marrying a commoner turns them into royalty in and of itself, and that is often stronger than how one is raised. Especially if you have the background needed to hang out with royalty enough to marry one. And having access to super-tech and forbidden knowledge is like, super catnip for abuse of power. I'll do a chapter soon. EDIT: Also the Gbaba get mentioned a few times but absolutely never show up. The final book ends on "TIME SKIP to when the sequel series characters are old enough to matter" Kchama fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Jan 6, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 00:14
|
|
|
Epicurius posted:A writer can't really win with alien animals. Lets say you've got some medium sized predator that hunts in packs. You either give it a really alien name, like "pamzak", and then your characters are running around saying pamzak all the time and the reader is trying to remember what a pamzak is, or you call it a "moon wolf" and that's its own kind of eyerolling. "Slash lizard" works pretty much as well, and I could see that as an actual name sort of. This is generally my take on it. You either have wolves and get "Why does this alien planet have wolves?" or you have not-wolves and get "Why didn't they just use wolves?" Weirdly, I feel like Weber does okay with this in the Honor books. Six legged predatory cat-like thing? Call it a hexapuma. It works for me. It's obviously alien, but the name feels like something that people would come up with and it gives me an immediate mental image of it. Similar for a "kodiak max". It immediately makes me assume "It's like a bear but it's loving gigantic" and it seems like something that settlers on a new planet would call an animal that's sorta like a loving gigantic bear.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 00:26
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:What sources? Because there really isn't any consensus here, as far as I can tell. Some authors use it to mean "a drive that does not interact with the rest of the universe" (i.e. loving magic), and some authors use it to mean "a drive that does not expel reaction mass". I'm pretty sure I originally encountered the term in Niven, and he consistently uses it as the latter; the Kzinti gravity polarizer, for example, is described as a "reactionless drive". And since in either case, it's a fantastical term used to describe things that do not (and possibly cannot) exist in reality, the only meaning it has is the meaning it derives through use in published SF. SF authors aren't a source, just a head's up. My sources was Wikipedia and Wikipedia sourced that poo poo with actual science. What SF-authors write is often fascinating and interesting, but if I look something up, I'm not using loving Science Fiction novels
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 00:45
|
|
|
ON BASILISK STATION Chapter Eighteen This chapter is entirely about the aftermath of the whole drug raid explosion. It’s mostly people arguing with each other but it’s decent conflict and isn’t about how amazing Honor or Nimitz is in some form, so it might be an actually decent chapter, all things considered. It still has some goofy writing, though. ”Congested with fury” posted:"Jesus Christ, Westerfeldt! What the hell did you think you were doing?!" His mouth shut with a CLICK? Does he have a cybermouth or something? To be fair, this actual scene is better than our normal fair, and is probably the most we should have gotten so far, but such is life. They talk about how Summervale wasn’t suppose to know and was in fact suppose to have been caught, and how the ‘Stilties’ (both sides have the same terminology for everything. Everyone does.) made the guns themselves. ”Impaled with a glare” posted:Thank God the admiral had departed for the Republic before this fiasco exploded! He swallowed a bitter, half-hysterical giggle at his own choice of verb, and opened his eyes. All their careful work, their cover plan at the lab, the false records—all of it—for nothing. For worse than nothing. The NPA would never rest now that the "criminals" had murdered almost sixty of its field agents! And if they didn't find the false trail they were supposed to find, they might— This doesn’t make any sense, to be honest. They specifically talk about in the previous chapter how it was flat-out impossible for the natives to have made the Ferguson rifles. They’re 1500 years too advanced for the Medusans, and the Medusans would absolutely not be able to just reverse-engineer the rifles just like that, and might not even have the quality of materials needed for them. This implies that the Medusans were able to figure out every single technique made to reproduce the Ferguson rifle despite likely not having many of the concepts needed properly understood. "Summervale The Fuckup” posted:Oh, this is just loving wonderful." Canning groaned. He closed his eyes in pain, then opened them and impaled Westerfeldt with a glare. "Even if you didn't give the order to blow the lab, Colonel, the field op is your responsibility. This is your mess—you clean it up!" That’s not really a one in three chance... That’s just a ‘one in three options are good for him’. Also Haven hates welfare just as much as Weber and everyone does. Naturally. ”Pavel Young is bad.” posted:"All right, Colonel," he said coldly. "Here's what you're going to do. First, get in touch with your NPA contacts. If Harrington doesn't find that tap on Matsuko's power collector on her own, you make damned sure someone points her at it. More than that, I want a watch kept on their deployments. If they start forting up in the enclaves or any of Harrington's Marines get deployed planet-side, I want to know. Then get your rear end out to the main site. I don't care how you do it, but you sit on the Shaman for three more weeks. Three weeks, Colonel! If Young isn't back by then, then we'll kick the operation off without him. Understood?" ”Weber does not know what a ‘chip’ is” posted:"Your ticket, Sir." The Silesian trade factor handed over the small chip with a smile. His freight-line employers offered limited passenger accommodations aboard their bulk carriers, but this was the very first passage the factor had ever booked from Medusa. That was just a short scene. It was basically an unnecessary one as we can guess all of this just from the implications, and uhh, the dramatic tension about him is now dead. There’s a short scene saying it’s hard to track the power relays now and there’s a message for Honor. Skipping it cuz this is gonna be too long as is, and it isn’t very important. It’s just that Hauptman is coming to see them, which... we already knew. So skipping that scene where Honor figures it out. The last bit of the chapter is a scene where the newly promoted Marines Major meets Barney who is A REAL MAJOR. It’s mostly just dickwaving. ”Dickwaving” posted:"Major Papadapolous, Ma'am," McKeon said, and stood aside as Captain Nikos Papadapolous, Royal Manticoran Marines, marched into Honor's briefing room. Apparently Medusans are invisible to sensors, which I suppose is handy to know.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 00:54
|
|
|
Don't worry Kchama I won't accidentally lock this thread for a few days just before you can post your penultimate "On Basilisk Station" recap. Would advise you checking out a few "history of the british empire" books and "decline of the british empire" books...figure they would give you grounding/reference material on the source-material Weber is basing Manticore/manticore's exploits on. Hazily remember the details of the 2nd Honorverse book, and what I do remember gives me extremely heavy beginnings of the British Raj vibes. Reactionless spaceship drive stuff: the mil-scifi thread is probably the worst place to discuss this, because explosions and terrible writing and Hard people making the Hard choices are the defining characteristics of the mil-scifi genre, not accurate science or hypothesizing future-science space-flight methodology. Please move this chat to a dedicated spaceflight or science thread or even a space-themed MMO thread where this topic can get the proper love.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 01:41
|
|
|
Kchama posted:His mouth shut with a CLICK? Does he have a cybermouth or something? To be fair, this actual scene is better than our normal fair, and is probably the most we should have gotten so far, but such is life. Open your mouth. Now close it as fast as you can. Your teeth will make an audible click. That's what Weber's meaning here - Canning is slamming his mouth shut as hard as he can before he goes too far with losing his temper. quote:This doesn’t make any sense, to be honest. They specifically talk about in the previous chapter how it was flat-out impossible for the natives to have made the Ferguson rifles. They’re 1500 years too advanced for the Medusans, and the Medusans would absolutely not be able to just reverse-engineer the rifles just like that, and might not even have the quality of materials needed for them. This implies that the Medusans were able to figure out every single technique made to reproduce the Ferguson rifle despite likely not having many of the concepts needed properly understood. As mentioned earlier, this is Weber screwing up. The rifles were supposed to be something that was impossible for the natives to invent, but within their capability to manufacture. Had he given them simple handgonnes or even muskets, this would have worked - too many intermediate jumps for the natives to plausibly make, but a final product that they could easily duplicate. The error is that what he used is just too advanced for that idea to work. The best historical precedent is firearms themselves - the Chinese spent over a century evolving the crude fire lance into the first guns, and anybody else would probably have had to make similar slow steps to develop the weapons independently. Instead, everyone who ran into the new weapons (either by trade or by fighting somebody that had them) quickly started to make their own based on the more developed form.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 04:15
|
|
|
Libluini posted:SF authors aren't a source, just a head's up. My sources was Wikipedia and Wikipedia sourced that poo poo with actual science. What SF-authors write is often fascinating and interesting, but if I look something up, I'm not using loving Science Fiction novels That would be both interesting and relevant in the spaceflight thread. This, however, is the mil-SF thread; to the extent that this is a discussion of reactionless drives at all, it's a discussion of reactionless drives as they are described and used in military science fiction and Actual Science doesn't even get its foot in the loving door. Between the thread title and the past 37 pages I honestly thought that context was too obvious to be worth explicitly mentioning. Gnoman posted:As mentioned earlier, this is Weber screwing up. The rifles were supposed to be something that was impossible for the natives to invent, but within their capability to manufacture. Had he given them simple handgonnes or even muskets, this would have worked - too many intermediate jumps for the natives to plausibly make, but a final product that they could easily duplicate. The error is that what he used is just too advanced for that idea to work. Not knowing anything about guns or the history of firearms, the events he described here seemed entirely plausible when I read it, so it's interesting to see how a little domain knowledge makes the wheels come off completely.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 04:43
|
|
|
quantumfoam posted:Don't worry Kchama I won't accidentally lock this thread for a few days just before you can post your penultimate "On Basilisk Station" recap. *points two fingers at own eyes, points those fingers at your eyes, shakes first!!* Gnoman posted:Open your mouth. Now close it as fast as you can. Your teeth will make an audible click. That's what Weber's meaning here - Canning is slamming his mouth shut as hard as he can before he goes too far with losing his temper. It doesn't really work for me because I don't close my mouth naturally in a way that does it, I guess. I even tried it a few times while trying to picture the sound when I wrote that. But it might just be me. And yeah it's Weber screwing up, but hey, it's something I can actually talk! So I di! And yeah you're absolutely correct there. He screwed up because he thought the Ferguson rifles were super cool and got stiffed by history, so he wedged them into the book when something much simpler would have been much better. Next chapter is more Tremaine and Harkness... man, I think they actually have more chapters than Honor does so far.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 04:45
|
|
|
Khizan posted:This is generally my take on it. You either have wolves and get "Why does this alien planet have wolves?" or you have not-wolves and get "Why didn't they just use wolves?" There can be some success with original names if the author takes some time to describe the animal to the reader in detail. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 08:31 on Jan 6, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 08:29
|
|
|
Telsa Cola posted:There can be some success with original names if the author takes some time to describe the animal to the reader in detail. Or conversely, halfway through the book it actually comes up that "wolves" are eight legged and feathered, but still pack hunting predators capable of taking down a large herbivore or a lone human armed with only a sharp stick. Then go back to calling them wolves for the rest of the book.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 08:37
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:its because they literally think all those disillusioned communists who watched the society they spent their entire lives building collapse in like 2 years into just another capitalist fiefdom that like, gave up and got desk jobs somewhere are actually sleeper agents ready to bring about ww3 and the fifth internationale but also the fourth reich Ironically you also see a bunch of Russia worship from those types because of Putin's he-man cult of masculinity, and that Russia has gone in heavily on supporting fascist/fascist adjacent groups to destabilize the west and portraying itself as the savior of traditionalist religion/values/the white race/etc. (IME they will generally ignore Putin's mild attitude to Islam) IIRC the PYF Terrible Book thread had some Patriot Civil War 2 novel get posted where when the New Englanders decide to start the second civil war/RAHOWA, prime minister Putinovski sends them T-34s which they use to destroy the US Army because Hillary Clinton put blacks in charge of everything or some bullshit. Telsa Cola posted:There can be some success with original names if the author takes some time to describe the animal to the reader in detail. In the RCN books animal descriptions work because of Leary's interest in the natural world, in the tradition of the Victorian gentlemen being hobbyist scientists. Speaking of I went ahead and started the series again and David Drake can certainly write a page turner compared to Weber, I feel a fair bit of regret for even going "yeah read it until you start disliking it like with Dune" for Honor Harrington to other people. I like that the last couple of RCN books have used different characters for the viewpoints. Like with Bujold's recent Vorkosigan books being about Ivan Vorpatril and Cordelia again I'd say it's probably the best way to revitalize a series that has been running for a while. (Cryoburn would have probably been better if it had been more about Armsman Roic, as it is I think it's one of the weakest books in the series)
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 08:53
|
|
|
ON BASILISK STATION Chapter 19 So the first part of the chapter is just Tremaine And Co finding the backup power collector modifications. It’s nothing important in the least, so I cut it. There’s a long scene then of Estelle being told, and then it ends on a bit that makes it seem like something is actually happening, but nothing does as far as I remember. ”Estelle finds out about the power collector” posted:
The rest of the chapter, which is really short, of McKeon finally becoming a good guy and offering to be there when Hauptman shows up, even though it means torpedoing his career. McKeon’s basically the only really interesting character in this entire book and here’s where he takes a turn for the generic, because he’s going to have much less conflict with Honor. Though to be fair I didn’t like his “is bad because he’s jealous” thing. It’s the lame part about it. quote:
I just kept it all because it’s not that long and it’s basically the entire chapter. For a book about shooting missiles, this book has had exactly zero missile shooting. There’s not a lot of real action, and what’s there is very... There’s not a lot to it. And the non-action side is endless blathering between Honor worship. Book sucks, yo.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2020 07:46
|
|
|
Had been thinking of inflicting a Dean Ing's Quantrill Trilogy Let's Read on this forum for awhile, however decided to reskim the books before making a commitment to do so. Oh Sweet Zoroaster, hell no. Hell no. I had blanked out the sexual assaults and rape and worse going down every other chapter, the runaway child-bride diary, the boar, the undercover murder assassin squads, the embedded in the head microbombs...no. And that's just the first book. Followup books are terrible in different ways (for example, the secondary series villain getting hosed to death by the russian boar). Just to clear the horror away, read a history of the DARPA book. McNamara was even more of a terrible SecDef than I remembered, worse than Rumsfeld somehow. Canceling real life w40k bolter-pistols to do his own version of Trumps border wall, and his own version of the f-35 multi-role combat fighter (google Tactical Fighter Experimental), faking/making his own statistics the Ford Company way, and the whole initial deployment of the AR-15 in Vietnam fiasco....which I am surprised more mil-fiction/mil-scifi authors haven't fixated on.
|
|
#
?
Jan 9, 2020 17:16
|
|
|
Finally ended up reading a Marko Kloos book (Lines of Departure) via a local library rental. Went in expecting a lower-ranks grunt perspective from all the positive reviews and recommendations of the Frontline series. That didn't happen, the book (and Kloos's narrative ticks) really didn't click for me. The 1st Frontlines book probably explains everything better, however it wasn't available. Ah well, at least it got the funk of Robert S McNamara terribleness out of my head.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2020 06:02
|
|
|
quantumfoam posted:Finally ended up reading a Marko Kloos book (Lines of Departure) via a local library rental. If it seems like I'm avoiding more On Basilisk Station it's because I have been. Sorry.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 06:51
|
|
|
How about skipping ahead to the 2nd Honor Harrington book and doing a Let's Reads of the 2nd Honor Harrington book until it gets too bad, and then skipping ahead to the 3rd Honor book, and so on and so on? Eventually, the awfulness factor of the later books will either have you bouncing back to OBS in relief at it being so much less terrible or you will give up entirely on the Let's Read David Weber's Honor Harrington project. Or do a Let's Read of Marko Kloos's Frontline series instead with a non-explanation explanation for the series switch. Example: "The Lanky invasion has always been a part of the Honorverse setting, I don't know what you're talking about friends."
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 11:28
|
|
|
C.M. Kruger posted:I like that the last couple of RCN books have used different characters for the viewpoints. Like with Bujold's recent Vorkosigan books being about Ivan Vorpatril and Cordelia again I'd say it's probably the best way to revitalize a series that has been running for a while. (Cryoburn would have probably been better if it had been more about Armsman Roic, as it is I think it's one of the weakest books in the series) The Ivan and Cordelia books were amazing. She seems to be done with the series (we did get an Ekaterin novella recently) , and that's okay since I like the Penric stuff she's into now. quantumfoam posted:Just to clear the horror away, read a history of the DARPA book. McNamara was even more of a terrible SecDef than I remembered, worse than Rumsfeld somehow. Take a look at Technowar by James Gibson, https://smile.amazon.com/Perfect-War-Technowar-Vietnam-ebook/dp/B005R17Y4M/ It gets heavily into the details of exactly what the Pentagon's policies were and how they were doomed to failure. It's infuriating, you'll love it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 11:43
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 00:25 |
|
|
You know what, here's a good preview of the next chapter and why I can't stand it. So it's about the big confrontation between Honor and Hauptman.Honor is the best posted:"Mr. Hauptman," she said in a voice of frozen helium, "you've seen fit to insult me and my officers and to threaten my parents. In fact, you have descended to the tactics of gutter scum, and that, in my opinion, Sir, is precisely what you have proven yourself to be." Hauptman's nostrils flared in a congested face, but she continued in the same ice-cold voice. Honestly, I could just have this be the entire chapter. Also, "eyes were leveled missile batteries". But yes the entire chapter is Hauptman trying to ineffectually try to intimidate and threaten Honor and Honor tells him off and that's why nobody ever attacks her family, ever. This book loving sucks.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 14:28
|
|