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Arcsquad12 posted:If you can handle 40K madness Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts books are good Mil SF and he takes some welcome jabs at the horrific authoritarian atrocities the Imperium of Man commits. Sometimes Gaunt himself is a little too perfect feeling, but he pays for his actions and the years definitely leave their mark on him. For a quick non-WH40K Abnett book I would recommend Embedded. A reporter get's VR chipped into a soldier to report from the frontlines and things go horribly wrong. I found it a nice, quick read. Plus, there's nary a wet leopard growl to be found. https://www.amazon.com/Embedded-Dan-Abnett-ebook/dp/B004J4WLQY/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Embedded+abnett&qid=1561581391&s=gateway&sr=8-1
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Jun 26, 2019 21:38
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If you want Mi-SciFi war crimes you have alot more of Baen's library to choose from. There's the aforementioned John Ringo, Tom Kratman, and of course Michael Z. Williamson's Freehold where they justifiably kill billions of people on Earth while the protagonist writes off rape as an after thought. This really should be the Baen and things like it thread.
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Jun 27, 2019 18:06
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Oh I wish Resnick's stuff was "deliberately kitsch retropunk pulp throwback". Nope, Resnick is garbage tier, but he's been a professional writer/magazine editor since forever and never really changed up his writing style. Aka the Brian Aldiss/Damon Knight poo poo-tier elder scifi writer venerated because he could have ended your writing career easily pre-Internet. Now Resnick is rightfully forgotten and ignored, just like Silverberg. Pournelle and Niven. I will always like Mike Resnick simply for his Birthright: The Book of Man. I entered into it with low expectations and found it to be a relatively enjoyable read, almost an anti-Foundation. Mankind rises, falls, rises again, shits on the rest of the polity and gets their just desserts. I've only read a few of his other books, including Santiago, some short stories and his Fortress in Orion which is set in the same universe. Oh, and Dean Ing, oof. Militant Mormonism triumphant and Assassin EMT's.
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Jun 29, 2019 06:55
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:A good rule of thumb for Military-Fiction + Mil-SciFi is to track down public library copies of the first book of a series/closest to first book by whatever New2You Mil-Fiction/Mil-SciFi author. One thing I did like about the Quantrill series is that it establishes in the first book that the US not only lost WWIV it lost it hard and ended up retreating from Asia in the "Great Bering Turkey shoot" and ended up losing large swathes of the country to Canadians, Anthrax and Mexico along with the nuclear blasted cities. It's a shame about the American(tm) protagonist Mary Sue. I wish I still had my old copy of Hard Target(for some reason no Used Book store would ever buy it, go figure.) It had a preview of the next book in the series featuring that drat Russian bull and a splash page hyping it. I guess it didn't sell well enough even by Baen standards to see print.
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Jun 30, 2019 22:24
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So, I have a few MilSF recommendations, now that I've cleansed. First, Kam Hurley's The Light Brigade came out earlier this year, and is an okay take on Forever War/Starship Troopers. Set a hundred-couple hundred years from now, Earth goes to hell thanks to climate change and Corporate wars. Just as Earth begins to recover it gets attacked by Mars in an event that kills over 500,000 people in Buenos Aires instantly. As a result, We Go To War and, oh yeah, the soldiers are teleported/beamed from Earth to Mars and yes, there are teleporter errors. I enjoyed it overall, Kam is a pretty good author and her prose tends to be snappy. If you want a longer war/series you can check out her Belle Dam series as well. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40523931-the-light-brigade?from_search=true My second recommendation would be from Frank Chadwick, Chain of Command, which is space navy vs space navy in a relativistic battle over a single space system. It is set in the same universe as his novels How Dark the World Becomes and Come the Revolution where Humanity reaches the stars and finds out that space is full, get in line. Near space is dominated by a very Capitalist, Cartel-like species that are still aligned by nation-state and while they have a proto-Space UN it's about as hosed up as our current global system. Chadwick started as a game designer for GDW so Chain of Command sort of crosses off all of the check marks of overcoming adversity but I found it a good, quick read. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466767-chain-of-command?from_search=true Those are my two most recent MilSF reads that I found worth talking about/recommending. I also finished Yoon Ha Lee's Revenant Gun but it's been a few years since that was published and was discussed in the SF thread. Good book, good conclusion to the trilogy.
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Jul 1, 2019 05:23
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Ninurta posted:So, I have a few MilSF recommendations, now that I've cleansed. Clearly you hate the representation of the battle of SF Solomon Islands.
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Jul 3, 2019 06:44
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Welcome friend. My favorite wasn't written by Weber himself, it was in More than Honor, his first(of many) collaberations where he let other authors play in his universe. It's "Whiff of Grapeshot" by SM Stirling, where the not-France has it's version of 13 Vendémiaire. Only with Super Dreadnoughts. The not-Napoleon is then killed off screen before the next book in the series.
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Jul 11, 2019 22:25
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StrixNebulosa posted:so I peeked in the back of the Seer, an actually cool and good fantasy novel recently published by Baen, and it had a semi-decent "if you liked x, try y" section...followed by a page about Robert Conroy. You missed one, he has a book 1901 where Germany, for reasons, invades the US as the army is deployed to the Philippines. They conquer Long Island, and the new President Roosevelt makes James Longstreet(yes, him) Commander in Chief. Then the Philippine garrison under Arthur MacArthur(the elder) returns to the US and smashes the Germans. I am sure this somehow results in a young Austrian painter entering politics but there's no epilogue. Free Baen ebooks are a curse.
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Jul 13, 2019 06:29
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ToxicFrog posted:The Man-Kzin Wars were mostly a shared universe that a whole shitload of authors wrote short stories in, so, unsurprisingly, the quality is hugely variable. I remember there being a few genuinely good stories in there, but most of it was, at best, forgettable. I think it was The Warriors, but it featured the pacifist human crew making the hard call and turning their drive on the attacking Kzinti ship and destroying it. It turns out that ARM was a good idea after all.
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Jul 15, 2019 06:37
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Arcsquad12 posted:Has anyone ever done an epistolary MilSF novel. It's be like Ken Burns civil war documentary with space marines. Fitzpatrick's War by Theodore Judson does the historical/personal diary of a Great Man/Future Alexander and the Wars he creates to some degree. It has the conceit that the work is banned and an angry historian refutes things in footnotes throughout the book. I thought it was an ok book, and the warcrimes do count into the millions including turning a good portion of a continent into infertile wastes while a group of religious fundamentalists ban any form of electricity from kill satellites in orbit. Sadly, it looks like the author never caught on and there isn't a legal ebook of it available. https://www.amazon.com/Fitzpatricks-War-Theodore-Judson/dp/0756401968/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=fitzpatricks+war&qid=1563477195&s=gateway&sr=8-1
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Jul 18, 2019 20:15
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Fell Fire posted:You might be underselling it a little, the Great Man basically considers himself Alexander reincarnate and deliberately surrounds himself with a group that call themselves his basilei. Fair enough, I was phone posting and did not have my copy of the book handy. I will say that this is a book that I've kept through 3 moves, one cross-state and I have re-read it a few times. However, the material can be off-putting to someone who isn't expecting the grotesque nature of the Yukon Confederacy and it's world. The author had mentioned that he would like to write a follow up prequel but that unfortunately doesn't look like it will ever happen. He did however write a Middle-Aged White Men raging against the world in 2016 which is...unfortunately a bit too on the nose these days https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29549598-deadly-waters.
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Jul 19, 2019 06:55
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Arcsquad12 posted:I found a bunch of old paperbacks called The Lost Regiment today in a used book bin. They looked like MilSF. Anyone know about this series and if there's any red flags? If they're by William R. Forstchen and always wanted to see what a Union regiment of Maine Yankees would look like fighting 3 meter tall Ork-Mongols who eat humans? They were entertaining enough when I was a teenager but Forstchen never met a stereotype he didn't want to beat into the ground and proceed to digging. The books suffer the usual power creep so that by the latest book you have early 20th-century level wars of genocide between both sides. Do not, for any reason, read his One Second After books. You will regret that.
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Aug 2, 2019 03:11
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Kchama posted:You know I've wanted to read someone's Let's read of Guns of the South as I can't remember anything about the turtledove books I've read anymore. Guns of the South was Turtledove's most historical alt-history book, he did a lot of research into the county records of the chief regiment that were the common folk and had historical characters where possible. It's unfortunate that he just got lazier and lazier after that to the point you have "Our unit advanced on Berlin, we fought some Soviets, then the Wehrmacht...Good Germans moved up to reinforce us." I'm not 100% sure the latter happened in his most recent Hot War series about the Korean War going nuclear but it's probably 75% accurate.
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Aug 2, 2019 03:54
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Powerskim the rest of this thread. Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East and subsequent Book of Swords series are decent quality, but the latter er more towards straight up Fantasy while Empire of the East is more post-apocalyptic. I've read a couple of his Berserker novels but, much like Bolos, they seem to be a product of their time and largely forgettable. I guess on the bright side we didn't have a John Ringo Berserker nove...oh goddammit. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1240726.Von_Neumann_s_War
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Aug 6, 2019 06:31
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C.M. Kruger posted:Berserkers play a fair part in the Spiral Wars series by Joel Shepherd and get a more interesting take than the usual scifi "any form of artificial sentient life is genocidal against non-AIs" take. I will have to look up the rest of the Spiral Wars, I read the first book but didn't follow up. I did like the split between the two human factions that were trying to avenge their attempted genocide. Now, I want to address another elephant in the room, one Christopher G. Nuttall. If you do not recognize his name, be glad. He is a Kindle Unlimited author who has pumped out over 100 books in the past five(!) years, and his Mil-SF branch deals with the Federation. The Federation is your usual ancient, decadent empire that is collapsing from within and without, if only there was a good man to save it. He has subsequently written a couple series were this man is a Marine Captain Edward Stalker, and Fleet Admiral Marius Drake that strive to fight back against the coming darkness. I didn't hate his Empire Corps series that featured Marines doing Marine things, it's the latter series I had a problem with. Nuttall has written a couple okay "time of the fall" books in this setting as well as a post-WWIII book that was my first book of his that I had read, but his work has continually gone down in quality since then.
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Aug 7, 2019 07:15
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:The impromptu thread survey question "As to Why people keep reading HH stories if they've read virtually ANYTHING ELSE scifi/mil-scifi, that's the question I've been asking since second 1 of thread creation." answers have been varied but interesting. Small answer base so far, hoping others will chime in. My main reason for keeping up with HH was nostalgia. I had started reading it as a teen and came to accept the Weber-isms, I was also a follower of the Baen Bar(AVOID) where he interacted with his fans and thus came forth...BuShips, BuOrd, and every other awful, fan-based grouping that encouraged David to do his worst with techno-babble. Did you know that On Basilisk Station was only 450 pages long? David Weber clearly doesn't, as he attempts to saw down another forest with his next book. The worst part was I read...A Rising Thunder? I swear, his titles are starting to rival Tom Clancy...at any rate, the book's first couple hundred pages covered the SAME GODDAMN TALBOT CLUSTER REBELS from the previous book, just copy and pasted onto other worlds. That was enough for me. If you cannot get to your next plot point in less words than the first book in the series...shame on me, goddammit.
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Aug 14, 2019 08:25
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Larry Parrish posted:Theres a lot of books in Mechanical Failure's style and I hate them all tbh. Obviously somebody thinks they're funny because they keep getting written, but I cant stand it Your post has failed and must reboot.
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Aug 16, 2019 08:34
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Larry Parrish posted:Glenn Stewart is not actually a good writer and unfortunately for the Duchy of Terra series, the idea is a lot cooler than his actual execution Speaking of Glenn Stewart, I had to take my car in for a recall last week and had to burn through something on my Kindle Unlimited credit and chose Exile, which if, we have LitRPG as a genre, this is Lit4X, because he played a game of Stellaris and wrote a book about it. The Honorable Admiral starts a rebellion, gets exiled out of a one-way wormhole and once they found a colony they literally go through the tech tree identifying what they need to tech up while wary that their industrial base isn't enough to replace their current ships. This isn't a problem until....oh, they settled on a Sacred World and have to fight the Von Neumann warships of the Progenitors(tm pending). This book was literally going through turn by turn of Stellaris and the main characters were more wooden then the resources they harvest.
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Aug 19, 2019 06:09
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I would like to add a recommendation, it's a duology by Steven Westerfeld, his Succession series, The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds. These books reminded me of the Dread Empire series, only the Emperor/Empress are immortal and human and things go downhill from there. It is a Hard SF universe, with a twist. They are very much Space Opera, unfortunately they did not sell well so the author retreated into the realm of YA fiction. Where he has sold very, very well with his Uglies series and subsequent books. Hopefully a Dread Empire sequel makes him write another Succession book.
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Aug 20, 2019 05:37
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PupsOfWar posted:White continued writing more Starfire novels after Weber left, so someone could easily read the White books, figure out what his own style and preoccupations are, then apply that to the Weber/White books to figure out which bits were written by who Ty chto mumu yebyosh? This, ironically, also applies to all Honor Harrington books after say the first 3.
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Aug 21, 2019 06:21
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:As I've hypothesized before, John Ringo's main influence definitely isn't books and instead is the crappy scifi movies and tv-series of the '80s + '90s...Red Dawn, V, Ator, The Beastmaster 2, KRULL, KnightRider, Small Wonder, Short Circuit, AutoMan, etc. John Ringo always struck me as using the Robotech: Invid Invasion Palladium RPG Sourcebook as his inspiration along with reading Alan Dean Foster's The Damned trilogy. Only instead of a multi-ethnic group of elites from around the world he replaced them with Americans, gently caress Yeah! The main reason I think this is because his timeline in the 2nd and onward books seem to mimic the Robotech Defense Force's failed attempts to rescue Earth after the Invid invade and the only effective resistance are survivors that use RDF technology, including mecha-morphing motorbikes that turn into power armor. Ringo of course shits all over his setting of mankind on the brink of extinction in the latter Collaborative books with Kratman where in Watch on the Rhine Europe get's overrun...but it's ok, we've got 100 million
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Aug 28, 2019 05:17
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:
Fair enough. It kind of sucks that the GM decided to convert to the Dresden Files RPG after Changes and it really threw the whole campaign for a loop.
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Aug 29, 2019 04:07
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Welcome. So I made the mistake of using a free ebook credit on the 2nd book of the Sun Eater Rothfuss-Dune mashup and came across some prose that would make Rothfuss blush.  Howling Dark posted:
So far half the book has been to first find the Oh, well this explains it: Christopher Ruocchio is the author of The Sun Eater space fantasy series from DAW Books. He began writing when he was eight years old and sold his first novel, Empire of Silence, at twenty-two. He is also the assistant editor at Baen Books and a graduate of North Carolina State University, where he received a degree in English Rhetoric and the Classics Ninurta fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Sep 5, 2019 |
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Sep 5, 2019 02:29
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Licensed fiction can be very hit and miss, especially scifi/mil-scifi licensed fiction. Bolo universe stories + Man-Kzinti war, for example, are bad but managed to sell enough for multiple sequels. I've recently come across a couple of books by Joel Rosenberg, whose book "Hero" I had originally read in High School. The book centers on a Jewish post-diaspora colony whose only export is Mercenary soldiers. I vaguely recall the book, but that it went into serious War Crimes by both the main character (Rookie) and those around him. Little did I know that it was part of a series and the 3rd/conclusion at that, so I am planning on reading the prior books to see what, exactly, is going on. To tie things back in to Mack Reynolds, according to the wiki/goodreads posts for Joel Rosenberg he was going to continue Mack's work. Which, given that the first Matsada trilogy book it involves stripping down mercenary commands to a low tech level I can see the influence and cheating the difference It's Glider Paratroops I am...somewhat interested in reading the other books, however it is very 1980's and has Jewish Bushido Warriors who meditate in barren caverns. And marry their brother's wife if he dies in battle.
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Sep 21, 2019 07:42
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quantumfoam posted:One thing that kind of amazes me is that Douglas McArthur in the Philippines during/after/before WW2 is a mil-fiction dead zone besides W. E. B. Griffin's turgid books, and Neal Stephenson's super-loving terrible and embarrassing Cryptonomicon. This an entire mil-fiction subgenre waiting to be tapped (or not) by aspiring mil-fiction writers. Technically, this was covered in the Sten series, somewhat. Sand,file off the name plate and replace with Ian Mahoney(3rd time's the charm? It's been 20 years.) Only if McArthur was a black ops/black bag operator who terrorized his own populace. Which, given the Bonus Army, checks out. Ninurta fucked around with this message at 08:05 on Oct 5, 2019 |
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Oct 5, 2019 07:55
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As an FYI, Alan Dean Foster's The Damned Trilogy is currently available for free with Prime Reading. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XRRMTKD/ref=nav_timeline_asin?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
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Oct 7, 2019 06:01
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Reread Red Storm Rising against my better judgment. Red Army by Ralph Peters is...passable, however it has issues. There is also Harold Coyle's Team Yankee from the opposite side. Team Yankee also had a limited comic series re-written by David Drake. If you want to go punk, you can try John Shirley's A Song called Youth trilogy which is WWIII, plus Cyber-punkish.
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Nov 22, 2019 07:14
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