Everyone's a WarCriminal: the Mil-SciFi Thread

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Everyone's a WarCriminal: the Mil-SciFi Thread

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

Oh. I'm very sorry NoNostalgia4Grover for not making this myself. I've been in a slump and was finally feeling okay enough to even look at SomethingAwful and was like "Okay let's see what the Scifi thread has to say before I make this" and it turns out you did it. So thanks.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2019 21:13

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 14:25

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

StrixNebulosa posted:

Did you write up anything? I wanna see it if so.

I didn't really have anything of value. The OP actually got all the good stuff I was gonna quote and a few more besides.

I did have a Manticorean War Crime that Honor wasn't involved with, but I haven't read the Honorverse in forever so my memory isn't great. I just remember this because it made me throw away the book and quit Honorverse forever.

It was in... Storm From the Shadows subseries. Honor's friend is in command of a fleet that gets attacked by a Haven fleet and is defeated and signals surrender and evacuating the ships. When the Haven fleet closed in to pick up the lifeboats, she suddenly changes her mind on surrendering and orders an all-out attack on the Haven ships and catches them off-guard, destroying a bunch of them. The Haven ships return fire and wipe out what's left of the Manticorean fleet. It then cuts to Honor's friend waking up (as the Haven admiral stopped the counterattack immediately and STILL picked up all the survivors) in a prestigious position in Haven and it turning out that they deemed their admiral to be a War Criminal and punished them and absolved Honor's friend of all crimes.

After this I threw my book away and was freed from my curse of needing to finish a series so I can rightfully trash-talk it.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2019 21:49

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Going to add this quoted post to the OP, along with some quotes from 20 or so pages back from from the SF+ Fantasy thread tomorrow or so that cover a broader range of Military Fiction genre posts (napoleonic wars stuff).
Glad to hear you are feeling better/are out of that mental slump. Trash-Talking terrible Mil-SciFi + Military Fiction is the primary point of this thread, at least for me.

Yeah I'm glad to feel a little better. This heat really isn't doing me any favors though. My memory of the series is pretty fuzzy from not giving a drat for so long but that part stuck to me. Also how much I hated Grayson, and everything about them.

quote:

Didn't Honor Harrington + friends do the same hidden military vessel/illegal Q-ship bullshit that the first book(On Basilisk Station) raged about a book or two later? Only it was more Q-ships (filled to the brims with missile pods) when Manticore/Harrington did it?

You know, I think so. ... i'm not sure I want to back to clarify though. At the time though it wasn't missile pods, but Gravlances. Which Weber hated because people liked it so the gravlance went away.

quote:

That is horrifying.....and Hugo nominated too, ugh. Just goes to show how terrible + insular the Mil-SciFi genre can be if THAT story got nominated.

The original Bolo stories by Keith Laumer were ok to decent, then Baen Books got involved with Bolo-universe anthology stories(thinking Jim Baen bought the Bolo IP rights from Keith Laumer post-Laumer heart attack). The Bolo-universe anthology stories that came out after Baen Books owned the Bolo IP rights were 90% bad/100% not worth reading by modern 2018/2019 era readers/150% wastes of paper pulp that could have been better used as napkins or bathroom sanitary products.

It's actually not Hugo-nominated for the reason why you think. It's just that Kratman ran with a group who did their best to rig the nominations in their favor. So they got them and their buddies nominated which would result in the Hugo voters just not picking any winner.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2019 05:33

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

Aerdan posted:

In Honor Among Enemies, she does lead a squadron of Q-ships, but in anti-pirate activity.

(Grav lances only feature twice in the whole franchise, in On Basilisk Station and in a Rafe Cardones short story, since Weber felt they were too much of a god-weapon and they kind of negated his goal of 'Horatio Hornblower in spaaaace', at least in the early books.)

I never really got how piracy could be everywhere in the Honorverse. Or at least, everywhere enough where it seems like anti-piracy was the combat everyone was expected to get. And like, there was wayyyy more piracy than in real life despite how much harder it would have to be than in real life, and none of it was even state sponsored.

Also as far as i can tell, I don't think you're correct that Weber thought they were that at all, as from his very own words it seems like the actual reason for their existence in the first book was of a dual-use of showing Admiral Hemphill to be bad because she invented bad, impractical things, and also to show Honor as super good for being able to use a bad, impractical weapon with super effectiveness.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2019 16:17

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

Larry Parrish posted:

it always struck me as bizarre how most of the jerk evil Manticoran characters are commoners or landed gentry and not honorable aristocrats like Honor lol. My man desperately wants noble priviledge to come back for some reason

Also Liberals! Naturally they're secret slavers conspiring against Manticore. The only good one is the one who says she's a Liberal but agrees with Weber on everything.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2019 20:08

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

i dont know about that

the guy that had honor's boyfriend murdered was the heir of some big dick aristocrat family, and so was the liberal strawman diplomat she was enemies with. Then of course there was the sinister strawman government that took over at the end of the Havenite war whose leaders were aristos

the solarian villains are essentially the same since weber conceives of entrenched bureaucracy as decadent byzantine feudalism (unlike the comparatively virtuous manticoran feudalism (dont ask me how they're different))

come to think of it i can't think of a single weber villain of commoner origins, or even one who was mere minor gentry

i think this is not because he thinks commoners are more virtuous than aristos, but because he can't conceive of a universe where someone from the working class can accumulate enough power to become a threat

It depends on the faction, really. But Manticorean ones do tend to be aristocrats thinking about it because, well, the amount of lower-class civilians from Manticore number in... not a lot. And yeah my memory is returning a little. I get the impression that aristocrats were the only villains for Manticore because pretty much anything below that is basically not worth Honor's time, as you said. Especially since deulling is a thing. Wow, the dueling was dumb. So dumb so dumb soooo-----

Like you can tell it's just in the story so Honor can murder her domestic foes without getting in trouble.

Which reminds me of the she killed that guy who tried to cheat. Which was such a Mary Sue moment because she gets shot in the back and she instantly turns around and shoots him three times in the time it takes the referee to shoot the guy once and he didn't get shot and have to turn around completely.

Also the dueling is just dumb and awful ugh.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2019 01:22

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

anyway that reminds me of another honor harrington war crime - that time her ship's marine complement staged a raid on the hired duelist's hunting cabin and tortured him into giving up his employer

Nah it's cool. Subverting the law and all that is good is the correct thing to do when it comes to Honor. Also hired duelists are only bad and wrong when they're capable to winning against Honor and her boyfriend of the book.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2019 01:45

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

Also in terrible Weber milscifi... Safehold! If you don't know, the premise of Safehold is that a technologically unchanging alien race wiping out all other technologically advanced people in the universe have been doing the same to humanity. Humanity sends out a last-ditch colony to work under the radar literally to improve and advance past the Gbaba and defeat them.

Sounds possibly interesting huh? Here's where it gets SO bad.

The ship gets hijacked by two of the ship's crew, including an evilll psychologist named Adoree who uses a 'mind control matrix' and brainwashes all of the colonists and ship crew into actually abandoning all of the ship's technology and starting from near scratch, and also worshipping the two hijackers as Archangels and vilify the few crew who tried to fight back as demons.

A long time later, a cyborg/android called a PICA that been hidden away wakes up with the memories of a military officer from the fleet that died in the final battles of the Gbaba War, with the mission to help put the colony back on its path to defeating the Gbaba. And the only thing stopping her... now him, as she quickly changes her gender to being am an with PICA Powers, is the evilll but also uselessly corrupt church that controls much of the world.

Okay, maybe this is just the first book so they don't get to Gbaba War II too quickly. Right? You'd be wrong. For the entire massive TEN BOOK SERIES, they never even get to Gbaba War II. They spend it all on just the stupid Plucky Manticore Vs Solarian League retread from Honorverse. And these are not short books either. Even if you cut out the like 300 page glossary every book has, it's still loving massive. And you might need that glossary too as everyone has an awfully spelled name that is just Weber having taken a regular American name and then spelled it as wrongly as possible to represent 'linguistic drift' when it's only people's names that get this treatment and it also ends up nigh incomprehensible.

Oh surely there must be a lot of dramatic tension and stuff to keep you reading? Haha, nope! Weber doesn't seem to like the idea, as the first book goes out of its way to outright tell you that the protagonist Nimue, (or renamed Merlin almost immediately) is more or less invincible and also has a network of invisible perfect spy drones and satellites so he knows literally everything that's going on in the world and so its impossible to scheme against him and that's all the Church really has going for them is schemes.

In short, gently caress Safehold.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2019 15:21

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

Aerdan posted:

... David Weber explicitly said the whole point of the Safehold series was to explore religious strife in the circumstances he set up there. Maybe look to see what the author says about their dumb mil-scifi before reading (and then complaining about) it.

Maybe he says that now but he had a different tune when he the first book and everything about the first book's marketing supports that it isn't what he intended. He straight up says in an interview that it was suppose to basically be a 'last defender of elfland' book with high technology, and specifies that there's no religious commentary with the Church, and it could as well be fascism or communism oppressing people.

None the less, he didn't do a good job no matter what his intentions were, and in fact a good majority of my complaints stand anyways.

StrixNebulosa posted:

Favorite dumb fun detail about the Gundam novel by Tomino: big bad Char has velcro boots so he can walk around in his ship properly. Picturing the sound of that as he walks is great.

The rest of it is surprisingly good "war sucks" stuff.

EDIT:I hosed UP and said he fought in the war when he just lived through it because I'm done. Putting this here so people know I hosed up.

PupsOfWar posted:

The greatest indictment of weber as a writer is his total disinterest in exploring any kind of interesting personal drama even when he himself has set it up.

In Safehold for instance there was immense opportunity to explore various identity issues w/ the unique protagonist nimue/merlin - whether posthuman identity, gender identity or cultural identity.

There's a bit in one of the early books (and i only read 3 books so it had to be one of them) where merlin gets horny watching king caleb and some of his bros frolic on the beach.

My brain fired up like "Whoah, we're actually going to deal with Merlin trying to figure out his sexuality and reckoning with his sex change, that's uncharacteristically interesting from a Weber book...especially since he's arranging a dynastic marriage for caleb currently...what would be the implications be for his work as a vizier if he harbored a secret attraction to his liege?"

and then of course it lasted for 1 sentence and didn't come back up during the 3,000 pages of Safehold i read, and in practice nimue/merlin is not any more complex than your standard weber protagonist despite being, in a literal sense, incredibly layered

That's def in either book one or two, and as far as I remember that's about all that happens for the rest of the series, though it all kinda blurs together. Merlin ends up hooking up with a lady because well, from then on Merlin's basically a generic straight guy. Later on he makes a duplicate of Nimue who is made shorter and more feminine and is treated as Merlin's little sister.

Kchama fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Jun 29, 2019

# ¿ Jun 29, 2019 20:02

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

even if weber intended Safehold as a meditation on religious strife, i didn't see where he did anything w/ that topic that he hadn't already done much more economically in the third Dahak novel
(we could say this about most of safehold, come to think of it - the third Dahak novel expanded ad infinitum)

granted, again, i only read 3,000 pages of safehold

I haven't read any of Dahak, but it does get brought up in the interview with Weber after the first Safehold book, where he lays out what the premise of Safehold was to him:

David Weber posted:

In the Safehold series, unlike Mutineers' Moon, I was deliberately setting out to create a series, and I knew that I wanted to come up with a sort of fusion of high technology with the feel of a "last defender of elfland," but without the urban fantasy matrix. The notion of a hero/heroine living in a cybernetic body, not even certain in his own mind that he's really still alive, grew naturally for me out of that initial basic premise. However, that left me with the question of why? What set of circumstances could create a situation in which my PICA hero came into existence? And given those circumstances, and the personality of Nimue Alban, how was "Merlin" going to react? What sort of strategy could he devise? What sort of flesh-and-blood humans would he end up working with? How much would they know? How much would he�could he�tell them?

And, of course, there are the moral dimensions. What decisions does Merlin make? What choices? And what price is he prepared to pay ... or to demand of the people about him?

He really didn't do a good job with this at all, to be honest.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2019 20:42

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

Darth Walrus posted:

Tomino was born in 1941. Pretty sure he didn't do much fighting.

poo poo, you're right. I got mixed up between him living through it and fighting through it, as he's talked about it a fair amount.

Edit: Also dude just seems even older somehow. I thought he was like a decade older than he really is.

FuturePastNow posted:

I'm sure Weber would approve

This is just regular American love for missiles.

Though he should just get a good look at Shin Getter-3.

Kchama fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Jun 29, 2019

# ¿ Jun 29, 2019 23:43

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

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?

I mean there was recommendations of good ones a few posts up. We just also recognize that most of 'em suck and suck hard. Maybe it got lost in my apologizing for loving up and saying dude fought in WW2 instead of having been alive during it.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2019 19:52

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

The_White_Crane posted:

Has anyone else read the Nicholas Seafort books, Midshipman's Hope et al.?

I loved the first book, and found the later ones got successively less engaging.

The big problem for me was that Seafort oscillated wildly back and forth between "Alas, I have broken my oath and am thus irreparably damned to hell!" and "Alas, my oath which I cannot break binds me to a course of action I find more horrible than you can imagine!"

And I always felt that after the first time he damned himself forever to the eternal torments of Satan's fire, he should probably have just gone with his conscience in future dilemmas, rather than whining about how he can't possibly break his solemn vow, and thus had no choice but to send all those civilians to the gallows (or whatever his latest Hard Choice For Hard Men was).

Hard Choice For Hard Men is one of the things I hate the most. And of course, it's always Correct And Moral to do the Hard Choice, so why is it actually a Hard Choice?

# ¿ Jul 1, 2019 21:06

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

blackmongoose posted:

My only slightly tongue in cheek recommendation post:

90% of mil scifi draws from a reference pool consisting of, in descending order of quality, Xenophon's Anabasis, CS Forester's Aubrey/Maturin series, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, anything by Kipling, Horatio Hornblower, Jane's Fighting Ships, and Wikipedia's entry on World War II. Everything above Hornblower is probably worth reading (depending on your tolerance for old style British racism/imperialism) and they're all better than the derivative works that make up most popular milSF so just read one of them instead.

The only good Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court knockoff was Aura Battler Dunbine.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2019 22:46

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

Oh yeah, wasn't there suppose to be a rant about the whole Belisarus and March Upcompany in the pipeworks? By NoNostalgia4Grover? How's that going?

# ¿ Jul 1, 2019 23:36

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

In proof apparently look at this thread too much... Amazon sent me this ad.

Amazon posted:

FIRST NEW HONOR HARRINGTON NOVEL IN FIVE YEARS! New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and international best-selling phenomenon David Weber delivers book #19 in the multiple New York Times best-selling Honor Harrington series, the first new Honor Harrington novel since 2013's Shadow of Freedom.

HONOR'S FINISHING WHAT SHE STARTED

The Solarian League's navy counts its superdreadnoughts by the thousands. Not even its own government knows how enormous its economy truly is. And for hundreds of years, the League has borne the banner of human civilization, been the ideal to which humanity aspires in its diaspora across the galaxy.

But the bureaucrats known as the "Mandarins," who rule today's League, are not the men and women who founded it so long ago. They are corrupt, venal, accountable to no one . . . and they've decided the upstart Star Kingdom of Manticore must be destroyed.

Honor Harrington has worn the Star Kingdom's uniform for half a century and served her monarch and her people well. In the course of those years, the woman the newsies call the Salamander has grown from a tactically brilliant but politically na�ve junior officer to supreme fleet command and a seat on the highest military and political councils of the Grand Alliance.

Very few people know war the way Honor Harrington does. Very few have lost as many men and women, as many friends, as much family, as she has. Yet despite that, hers has been a voice of caution. She knows the Mandarins and the Solarian League Navy are growing increasingly desperate as the truth of their technological inferiority sinks home, but she also knows the sheer size of the League. And she knows how its citizens will react if the Grand Alliance takes the war to the League, attacks its star systems, destroys its infrastructure . . . kills its civilians. Today's victory, bought on those terms, can only guarantee a future war of revenge against a resurgent Solarian League and its navy.

Honor knows the Grand Alliance must find a victory that doesn't require incursions deep into Solarian space, doesn't leave a legacy of bottomless hatred, and the strategy she supports has been working.

The League is sliding towards inglorious defeat as it steadily loses ground in the Protectorates and the Verge. As its central government teeters towards bankruptcy and even some of its core systems opt to secede in the face of the Mandarins' corruption. As the Solarian Navy finally realizes it cannot face an Alliance battle fleet and win.

But the Mandarins have embraced a desperate new strategy, and in pursuit of that strategy, the SLN has committed atrocities such as the galaxy has not known in a thousand years. The League have violated its own Eridani Edict against mass civilian casualties, violated the Deneb Accords prohibition on war crimes.

And they have finally killed too many of the people Honor Harrington loves.

Hers is the voice of caution and compromise no longer, and the galaxy is about to see something it has never imagined.

The Salamander is coming for the Solarian League, and Hell is coming in her wake.

This book came out after five years and I don't know anything about it besides its description and it's basically just "Here comes Honor to easily crush yet another foe". Oh joy.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2019 18:32

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Guessing it took David Weber 6 months to enter all the ship names/ship loadouts into his copy of Gratuitous Space Battles, 4 years for GSB to process the trillions of missile-spam strikes, 3 months to transcribe the results, 1 week getting the latest version of Honor Harrington potrait properly Photoshopped in without losing the qualities of oversized bolded fonts and glossiness of cover-art that defines Baen Books cover-art, 3 days to write the story framing the battles, 2 days to write the dialogue, and 1 day of editing.

Dorsai! re-read wasn't bad. Not good or terrible, it predates most mil-scifi while also serving as the template Frank Herbert would use half a decade later with his Dune series.

e: oh yeah. Willing to share that amusing-2-me W40k Dawn of War 1 soundclip through Discord or something.

There's a very amusing story about the wargame version of Honorverse where they tried to take David's ship names/stated loadouts and turn them into the wargame's units, but quickly hit some issues and noticed some oddities. One was that the actual description of the ships wouldn't have any actual bearing on what the ship was life, probably because Weber just made them up on the fly and didn't compare them to other ships. So there was stuff like a described specifically lightly-armed-even-for-its-type ship, which was fine on its own except he also had a ship described as VERY heavily armed for its type, and it was the... exact same type as the previous ship, and the previous ship was a lot more heavily armed.

Also the attempt to wargamify Honorverse led to the Great Resizing, because the wargame people noticed an issue with Weber's ships in general. Namely, at their stated size and mass, they would have to be made out of styrofoam to manage, as they were massively big but super light. Which led to all the ship dimensions being decreased.

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

I'm not sure how much of this poo poo is Weber's politics, his inability to create compelling villains, or a realization that if his villains were sympathetic it'd be harder to write their demise in a storm of missile fire.

OP, please link this from the OP. Apparently Weber himself read it and was very sad.

I'd say it's A and B. It's very very clear who is going to die and who is going to defect and be a good guy just by if they're 100% evil or not.

Larry Parrish posted:

Weber is rear end. Say what you will about John 'Sex Weirdo' Ringo but at least I remember what happened in most of his books although there's so many posleen war ones it gets mixed up in my head. Whereas I read every Harrington novel and cant remember anything about it besides the weirdly sympathetic tone towards the Grayson Christian Fascists. Nothing is more horrifically disgusting to me than women not having rights lol.

You should probably avoid most Ringo books too as he's not good on anything.

Also 'weirdly sympathetic tone' nothing. The Graysons are basically the other protagonist nation of the setting and Honor thinks they're the greatest thing ever very quickly, and they're quickly described as benevolent chauvinists and the whole 'no rights for women' thing is an endearing quirk you're suppose to like.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2019 22:00

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

hannibal posted:

Well, fill us in... does she glass Earth?

So I looked it up and she just blows up all space infrastructure and ships in orbit and immediately the Good Guy Solarians coup the villianous leaders and Honor retires to be pregnant and oh yeah her husband and dad that she thought killed midway through the book turned out to be alive because they just happened to be in a survival part of the space station that was nuked or something.

But the queen is sure that the next time evil arises, Honor will unretire to be the supreme commander of Manticore again. THE END.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2019 23:21

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

i think the weirdest thing Baen does is publish teachers' guides to their books

they've been doing this for a while now

like
who is assigning Baen novels in class

is anyone doing this?

i dont think anyone is doing this

, surely,

this is notable in that it is the exact same way the Havenite war ended

w/ the exception of adding an (imho) pretty gross resolution to honor's family drama

I never heard of anyone ever using a Baen Book in a classroom. Thankfully ever.

And yeah it is literally how the Havenite war ended.

Oh man yes I totally forgot while I was typing it up that that the fake death of her father and husband resulted in her husband's other wife dying in grief so that when the husband comes back alive well, she's out of the picture! And Honor is pregnant!

StrixNebulosa posted:

"Quiz/Reading Comprehension Questions�multiple choice/short answer questions to
test reading comprehension:
1. Who are the �Dolists� and what problem do they pose for the Republic of Haven?
(chap. 1)

answer to 1
". The Dolists are the �mob,� the people who have supported Haven�s wars in order
to have a better standard of living. They are �on the dole,� dependent on
government support to live. The are �useless drones� who are sucking up
resources without contributing. Their demands contribute to Haven�s need to
conquer new territory in order to keep their economy viable"

that's not how welfare works, weber!

Weber has some real hosed up views on thing and well, Grayson and Haven kind of just, embody his lovely views.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2019 02:02

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

Aerdan posted:

Not only is that not how welfare works, the whole People's Republic of Haven is not in any way how welfare states happen. There are a handful of real-life examples (like Saudi Arabia), but they formed to ensure that power remained in the hands of the elites, not in furtherance of equality. Moreover, the 'mob' in such states has no real power or ability to acquire any, and their governments do their best to keep it that way. Even with Mesan Alignment influence, it's just not possible to turn a functional democracy into that kind of welfare state.

Well, yeah. But Weber has no idea how this poo poo works. He said in one of his Pearls of Weber that Haven is explicitly America and its welfare system. So even though he's drawing on a specific thing, he literally has no idea how it works.

Kchama fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Jul 6, 2019

# ¿ Jul 6, 2019 03:45

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

StrixNebulosa posted:

aaaggghhh

As a disabled person who cannot work and relies on the government and my parents to keep me afloat this pisses me off extra hard.

Also can you imagine the sheer lack of empathy it takes to decide that it would be okay for poverty to exist

It's okay. You can just live in Space Britain where the hobos are actually billionaires compared to other nations and even homeless children have a better education than any other nation's colleges.

This is something he actually said in one of his Pearls of Weber, showing he knows how poverty works.

Kchama fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jul 6, 2019

# ¿ Jul 6, 2019 04:23

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

Mil-SF clearly isn't just SF about military characters, situations and topics, since those things are abundant throughout all of SF. If that were all MilSF was, it wouldn't need to be its own subgenre. This is in part the reason why I propose that MilSF is not really a genre or subgenre so much as a Movement - a particular set of authors who are ideologically interrelated and mostly personally acquainted, writing books that share a certain canon of tropes, driven by a shared set of preoccupations. It is not unified by device, aesthetic or topic, but by ideology and theme.

Those preoccupations being: the intrinsic virtue of service, military leadership's distrust of civilian oversight, contradictions between the military's sacrifice on behalf of civilians and the military's contempt of civilians, harsh utilitarian decision-making in zero-sum worlds, the fragility of civil society, and the necessity of protecting said fragile society with a robust program of unfettered ultraviolence.

Notably, these preoccupations overlap heavily with the preoccupations of fascism as a political ideology, which is probably why people particularly want to rant about this type of book now that like half the world is fascist irl again.

TL;DR: we can discuss good books here, but i do think this thread was created largely so we could gripe and complain about a few specific best-selling assholes without disturbing the people in the regular SF thread that are trying to talk about and recommend better books.

Yeah, pretty much. If you want to talk about good authors or books, then you're prolly not talking about the topic of this thread.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2019 06:59

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

As thread OP, the re-bolded text in the quote is what I am 100% aiming for regarding this thread, and the only thing as thread creator I will attempt to "gate-keep" towards.
Any kind of chat about quasi military fiction literature or quasi military science fiction literature or even quasi mil-themed manga is fine.
Key words being quasi-Military themed LITERATURE chat aka written/drawn works.

If people don't like that, fine. Feel free to create your own threads or talk the SA mods/admins into getting this thread's title text changed or the thread itself closed.

I mean, I don't mind but the OP is pretty much about how we're talking about the lovely authors who somehow have some popularity despite being medicore hacks, yaknow? That kind of sets the tone that we're not talking about the good examples of the military fiction genre. It's the entire reason why I told that guy that he's in the wrong thread if he expected this to be a thread about good authors.

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Mil-SciFi + Mililtary Fiction genres are defined by lovely to mediocre writing, main characters doing horrific WarCrimes, cartoonishly evil villains/threats, and near immediate plot justification for any WarCrimes the main characters have done or about to do in the books.
Therefore each main character of a Mil-SciFi (and Military-Fiction) book series is usually Schr�dinger's WarCriminal by at least the end of book two. Some authors overachieve though and hit that mark mid-Book 1.
Expect to see lots of David Weber, possibly John Ringo, definitely Tom Kratman, and other 'visionary' Baen Book Mil-SciFi + Military Fiction authors mentioned in this thread.

So maybe add in something about "Yeah also talk about all the good stuff if you want" but this seemed like it was going to focus on the bad authors. Though it kind of feels wrong, since the entire reason why this was split off from the Scifi thread was so our poo poo-talking wouldn't clutter up the Scifi thread which is more about positive recs.

Also just going by the OP rules I could totally work in Bujold as a joke because she's the only good Baen author, anyways.

Kchama fucked around with this message at 15:26 on Jul 6, 2019

# ¿ Jul 6, 2019 15:08

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Added two lines and a "The" to the opening text of OP, as Kchama kindly suggested.
Bolded text shows the changes

Bulk of the OP text remains unchanged, because even the best written and least formulaic Mil-fiction/Mil-SciFi book series have cartoonishly evil villains/threats, WarCrime escalation events going off because otherwise everything would be resolved in 50 pages.

The first re-quote in this thread was me saying "no idea how everyone else is remembering all these random Weber things if they also all read any Ambercrombie/Hamilton/Asher/Erikson/Brust/Scalzi/Bujold/Sanderson/LeGuin/Drake/Vinge, etc."

That works. Also, to be fair, I never read any of those people but Bujold.

I blame getting recommended Honor and my self-requirement to finish all books I start draining all desire to read anything, much less good books.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2019 16:01

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

95% of the text of any weber book is missile logistics and the phrase "of course,", so it's easy to tune all that out and remember whatever threadbare plot twists and characterization beats exist

its not exactly like committing a le guin book to memory

You forgot "As you already know".

# ¿ Jul 6, 2019 16:55

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

ToxicFrog posted:

If you weren't also recommending Moon and Bujold in this post I'd assume you were trolling. The Lost Fleet books were pretty bad. Not politically odious (that I recall), unlike a lot of books discussed here, just supremely dumb. All the ink that would have been spilled on the evils of the welfare state in the pen of another author is instead spent explaining the difference between heavy cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships (sometimes multiple times per book); the rest is spent with the protagonist kicking the poo poo out of everything because he's the only person in the entire setting who comprehends basic tactics (seriously, that's the explicit premise of the series) and on a head-trauma-inducingly stupid love triangle subplot that requires everyone involved to be shockingly childish and petty.

I thought you were talking about Lost Fleet books and not Honorverse.

Alternate joke: Weber spends just as much time explaining those differences and then forgetting them as he does whining about the evils of the Welfare State.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2019 23:46

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

SardonicTyrant posted:

Never a better time to mention that Tom Kratman is a huge piece of poo poo. A few years ago back on the spacebattles forums a mod/former marine tanker named Thanatos did a hate-read of one of his books. Kratman did not take it well, and decided to add a character named Thanatos to a few of his books as a dumber version of him. Then Thanatos came out as trans, and Kratman went full turbo-chud and kept refering to her in the most disgusting and derogatory ways he could think of. I would not be surprised if Big Boys Don't Cry was meant to be a jab at Thanatos.

That sounds about right for Kratman. He and John Ringo did release that insane screed about 'Tranzis'.

Kchama fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Jul 7, 2019

# ¿ Jul 7, 2019 02:24

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

Darth Walrus posted:

Huh, guess we finally found a kind of Nazi that Kratman doesn't like.

They're not Nazis is why he doesn't like them. It's some weird slurring of 'Transnationalists'. Which, of course, means 'globalists', and which well.. means the Jews.

So guess why he doesn't like them!!

# ¿ Jul 7, 2019 04:02

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

it is somehow darkly humorous that, out of all the groups he could have used as the sinister abschaum that betray earth to the aliens, kratman chose the German Green Party of all things

that fierce and powerful bloc of political insiders

I'm 100% sure he just saw 'Green Party' and thought 'pure evil' because they are left of the Nazis, who Tom Kratman is a worshipper of.

Of course, he had to try and hide this worship a little so he he had his SS Troops be The Good Ones who would NEVER commit war crimes (though the exact squad he chose were.. known for having been caught committing war crimes on camera).

# ¿ Jul 7, 2019 05:15

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

You know, I haven't been too impressed by much of the genre. I remember bouncing off Moon. I also remember Weber and Ringo sucking as they jerked me out of the action to masturbate to their depictions of imaginary space weaponry, which is fine, but they never seem to realize that conflict is between characters and nations - not which ship has the plasma launchers that give a +5 bonus to hit - and that conflict is only interesting as much as we care about the result. We care about the Trojan War because it's a tale of a bunch of epic heroes who deserve better clashing over Paris' desire to get his dick wet. We don't care about Honor's Missile Storm #25 because Haven is an uninteresting political entity filled with Evil Rapists OR Men Of Honor Who Are Trapped By Patriotism. I could not tell you anything about the antagonists of the Kylara Vatta series because they are uninteresting.

If we include Forever War, I'd nominate that as one of the better ones because it focuses on the characters rather than jerking it to fictional technologies.

That said, I don't have much respect for most genre fiction and I'm here for people mocking Weber and co.

I think cool toys are good but you're 100% correct about how there also needs to be character to it, which is where Weber and co fail. I mean, among other failures.

It's kind of crazy that we actually have a much better idea of what Grayson, Haven, the Solarian League or Mesa were like as countries more than we do of Manticore itself. We know about how the military of Manticore works, mostly its higher echelons, and we know how the highest echelons of its government works. But I can't tell you a drat thing about anything else about Manticore, except that its so rich that your bum has more pocket change than the GDP of most nations. By contrast, we actually get to see a lot more civilian life of Grayson (cuz Weber really loves Mormon-style polygamy and lots and lots of chauvinism).

# ¿ Jul 7, 2019 18:40

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

tbf im not sure we know much about the domestic interiors of those other countries either

Honor's grayson associates are as rarified, aristocratic and non-representative as her manticoran ones, if not moreso, and w/ the solarian league we mostly see naval officers and the wealthy mesan-aligned conspirators

closest you'd get to a street-level view is i guess the Torch books

one thing you can say about ringo is he does write about protagonists from other walks of life, even if he does so in the fashion of a man who hasn't talked to another human being in person since being dis-invited from all family reunions 30 years ago for excessive racism

We really don't, no. We just actually sometimes see non-aristocrats of Grayson, unlike... every other faction in the entire setting.

And it's true we don't know much about the domestic interior views of them, we know slightly more than nothing at all. And it's quite a shame because treating them like RTS factions (though for gently caress's sake I think a lot of games manage to give a better view of society than Weber does) means that the various factions have very little character. For villians it's largely Their Evil Hat and for the good guys its Why They're So Awesome And Everyone Should Love Them.

As for Ringo, I'm not sure it's quite an accomplishment because of what you say. MAD MIKE is basically just as much a Mary Sue as Honor is.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2019 19:47

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

FuturePastNow posted:

I think every non-mil/gov Grayson citizen we meet is either Honor's employee or is plotting against her somehow

That's basically every non-mil person in Honorverse, too. And nearly every mil person too.

Aerdan posted:

The only real glimpses we see of non-political civilian life in the Honorverse are in the short story anthologies (and the YA trilogy with Jane Lindskold). In one, we get to see what a lovely place Masada is to its women. Most of the rest are significantly prior to the main series, so they don't really count.

Sooo basically everything Weber DIDN'T write, you're saying.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2019 22:10

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Kchama, begging you just for sanity's sake, to read some Asher or Banks or Drake or Vinge or Scalzi's Old mans War or even some Brust to start blocking out the Weber total-recall you have going on at a genetic level.

Personally I just cracked the lid on "behold a pale horse" and it is 350% more insane than I went in expecting. And I expected some pretty insane meandering conspiracy theories.

e: also, C.M. Kruger you kind of scare me now. And also, *cough* can I use you as a search tool for [i]other things[i/]?

Sorry, I am forever lost. Not even good books can save my soul.

Cuz there's also the Kratman and Rothfuss and other terrible ilk who have already claimed it.

I am damned.

EDIT: This thread is where I vent all my damnation.

Kchama fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Jul 7, 2019

# ¿ Jul 7, 2019 22:46

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

Space Butler posted:

Isn't there a bit in one of the Honour books where Manticore straight up annexes several of their neighbours?

Also is this the thread for Gavin Smith's books, or should they go in the other one. I like them, but I don't think they're actually good. I mean, turning a prison ship full of murderers into a mercenary company of slaves as a part of a CIA deep cover mission to do something I honestly can't remember is a bit...much.

It's why they're the Empire of Manticore now. And IIRC all the annexations were all voted for in mass by the annexed.

Of course there's a bit in the book where Manticore more or less rigged the vote so they'd win it (and they forced the vote in the first place with their spies) but this was Actually Good, You Guys and we were suppose to hate the locals for trying to stop this.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2019 23:01

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Some Terry Goodkind right there.

No kidding. Like this was suppose to be good as otherwise they'd be Solarian League members and thus VILLIANOUS SCUM so it was for their own good that Manticore subverted their democratic process to make sure they were actually members of the good guy empire!!

# ¿ Jul 7, 2019 23:36

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

that whole subplot is basically weber going "well, neo-imperialism is bad...should have never moved abandoned regular imperialism"

we're meant to root for the Talbot cluster being seized away from the League because these regions outlying the League are economically and politically exploited by the Office of Frontier Security in a host of different ways...which is fine right up until we're expected to assume Manticore would never do any such thing.

it reflects surprisingly well on Weber at first, since most of his peers at Baen don't recognize those methods of neocolonial control to begin with, but this doesn't last very long once he starts rationalizing that we should want this other expansionist imperial powerhouse to take over instead

like intrinsically we're supposed to think that imperial power is bad when exercised by unelected bureaucrats, but fine when exercised by (also unelected) aristocrats. Why we're supposed to think that is never established, other than Elizabeth as an individual being presented favorably and every dead historical Winton being presented favorably

democracy or indigenous self-rule are never on the table in either scenario

This is just a whole big 'yep'. It's funny that I was expecting someone to come in and explain that I remembered it wrong, it didn't happen like that. Though I didn't have too much hope. But no, I'm not wrong am I. And yeah it's super hosed up because we're suppose to just go "Oh those silly locals don't know what they're thinking, which is why they deserve to die for going against this country literally subverting their democracy and freedom".

# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 04:28

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

tbf the cowboy freedom-fighters on the Rugged Individualist Planet flip and become good royalists in the end

it's only the nasty socialist revolutionary woman on the other planet who remains bad

lol I nearly entirely forgot about literally Space Montana being the home of good royalists. Whereas the French Artists Planet has all the EVIL DEMOCRACY LOVERS.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 04:55

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Starting to suspect that Kchama + PupsOfWar are both former Baen Book interns driven mad by their proofreading duties.

Small Wars Manual 1940 is dated but covers a staggering amount of details from rules of engagement to patrol sizes to recommended cooking ware to setting up actual loving governments + constabulary units. If not a goldmine resource for an mil-fiction/mil-scifi writer doing a guerrilla warfare story, Small Wars Manual 1940 would be a excellent blueprint for designing a unique survival forever-war MMO.

I'm not sure I could be paid enough for that job, and I get paid very little to read very bad fiction.

EDIT: Also I'm tempted to mine that for my terrible fiction I'm writing, as that sounds like very useful information to have some understanding of, even if you need to adapt it.

Kchama fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Jul 8, 2019

# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 05:25

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

it amuses me that they tried making a wargame out of honorverse

like

for wargames people a lot of the appeal is collecting all the different dudes and painting them to look cool (if supplied unpainted) or at least displaying them (if supplied painted)

40k is a bad game and a lot of the sculpts of the models are bad, designed to be slammed out in vast bulk by terrible injection molding equipment from the mid 90s. But the dudes who do it enjoy getting to paint up all the different bits and heraldry. This works very well with a gonzo setting where you can have mecha, exosuits, tanks, artillery, werewolves, dragons, and several different types of flamboyant space knights and space ninja, all in the same battle. This fundamentally is why all of the main wargaming settings are wild and colorful and anachronistic - people want a wide variety of things to paint and display.

you can't do this with honorverse since in honorverse all ships share the same fundamental shape

it is hard to imagine that people who like to paint & display models would enjoy this

what are they gonna do with fleets that are all just incrementally varying sizes of the same thing

i think its just a matter of being at the right age (around 12-13) in a physically and socially isolated space at the time when a lot of this stuff was coming out

there was a point when i was slamming down like 3 of these bad boys per week

it wasn't even that long a phase, but this type of book goes down so fast that a huge amount of content could be consumed during that time

Your picture doesn't work but I assume it's suppose to be the giant double-headed dildos that Weber calls ships.

Also I don't think the game had any real collecting at all. It was more tabletop along the lines of D&D IIRC. It's also where, I mentioned, the devs discovered that the ships were made of Styrofoam and like, a ship's description often had zero to do with reality, so you'd have a described lightly armed ship out-gunning a described heavily armed ship of the same type by a lot.

Aerdan posted:

At least the Andermani navy paints the ships' names on to their hulls; everyone else just puts the ship's catalog number on.

As I recall, that's the Solarian bureaucrats' interpretation of the plebiscites, not what actually happened.

Because obviously it's okay to be imperialist if they asked to join. /s

On the other hand, there's that whole 'split Silesia up between Manticore and the Anderman Empire' bit; the Silesians didn't get a say in that one.

I mean it's possible, though as you pointed out, Manticore really has no issue in forcing issues.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 06:30

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 14:25

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

Khizan posted:

Also, Baen gives out huge amounts of free ebooks for their various authors so I read a whole drat lot of them. Sure, they're loving terrible, but I was broke and they were free. Their "Baen Free Library" has the first book for free from a lot of their authors series, and you can still go download the rips of their old promotional CDs and legally get 20+ free ebooks each by Drake, Fling, Ringo, and Weber, which covers several of their smaller series in their entirety and the first handful of books from their longer series. And they started this back in 2002, well before the advent of the e-reader. I remember reading several lovely Weber books in RTF format on my laptop, because they gave me free books and I was bored and broke.

They sell a lot of lovely books because they go out of their way to make it really easy to read their lovely books.

This is actually how I got a ton of the Honor books. I lucked out as I never spent a dime on them as a result. Which would have been too much money. I saw a recommendation for the books because Honor was suppose to be a good female protagonist and then I read it and discovered that Weber literally only has two voices for his characters: Hero and villian.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 07:04

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Everyone's a WarCriminal: the Mil-SciFi Thread

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