Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
ShinsoBEAM!
Nov 6, 2008

"Even if this body of mine is turned to dust, I will defend my country."

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 actually like them and enjoy them even Weber, but I'm pretty sure this thread is the latter.

In the KU thread, I mentioned A Choice of Treasons, A Poor Man's Fight, To Honor you Call Us all being very good in different ways.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

ShinsoBEAM!
Nov 6, 2008

"Even if this body of mine is turned to dust, I will defend my country."

Kchama posted:

While you bring up good points, I was mostly pointing out that the problem was that the later books establish that the main money-maker that Manticore has is the intra-League trade. And that this is also the main money-maker of the League, which is why Manticore not letting them use the wormholes supposedly cripples them, because it was the big shortcut through the League, but Weber flubbed it there.

It's not the main money maker, it's a large mostly profitable trade, a large part of the issue would just be the shock to the system of having to get new suppliers. Like what would happen to the US economy if we stopped trading with China, now Manticore isn't considered nearly that level from my understanding but it's large enough it could cause a shock. Maybe better to say what if we suddenly had a 50% tariff on everything from China, it would shock the system pretty hard.

Kchama posted:

Though it's insanely loving dumb that Manticore makes up the entire merchant fleet of the Solarian League. There's no way Manticore has enough ships for that if you count every ship in Manticore, no matter what kind, much less just merchants, and then Manticore be able to run merchant ships for also the rest of the universe.

It doesn't though.

ShinsoBEAM!
Nov 6, 2008

"Even if this body of mine is turned to dust, I will defend my country."

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Oops, posted this in the wrong thread, reposting in correct thread.

Also I remember physical Baen Book hardcovers always being thick in comparison to other publisher's hardcovers. Given how I haven't touched an Baen Book hardcover in almost a decade, this might be memory over-exaggeration though.
Earlier in this thread I said the Bolo expanded compilations published by Baen Books weren't worth reading/an active waste of paper pulp better suited for making bathroom sanitary products, the thickness of the Baen hardcover books + the shinyness of the covers makes me wonder what kind of long-term deal Jim Baen signed with his paper supplier. No questions about the printing/printing press contracts though, the sheer volume that Baen Books puts out pretty much assured a good printing contract deal.
Was the paper supplier a family member/was someone at Baen really good friends with a papermill owner/or own stock in a wood processing company? Or something more weird like smuggled paper/remaindered acid-free test reams of paper,......or, very fitting for the genres Baen Books specialize in, did the raw wood pulp come from a area in eastern Europe, say around the region of Belarus + Ukraine? <waves Geiger counter at a stack of Bolo/1632/Honorverse hardcovers> cra...crackle.crackle.CRACKLE..CRACKLE.CRACKLE.CRACKLE.crackle.

I have a feeling Baen hardcovers probably sell at a higher % than most other publishers hardcovers, letting them spend and extra $1 on higher quality paper. Many of their hardcore fans infamously double dip(sometimes triple now with audible) on both the earc and on the hardcover. Also selling your e-arcs are probably one of the most brilliant decisions that has ever been made and I'm still shocked that other publishers haven't started doing it.

ShinsoBEAM!
Nov 6, 2008

"Even if this body of mine is turned to dust, I will defend my country."

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

eARC/e-arc: had too look up that word(wording). Monetizing or pre-ordering digital advance reader copies is definitely trend setting, but after all isn't that what John Scalzi has been doing for the past 3/4 years with his KindleSingles? More serious answer: think being hooked into the Amazon Kindle/AppleBooks infrastructure is a walled garden other major publishers can't easily escape from/are addicted to the effortless cash flow from. Even if they did escape, that would mean spending decent chunks of money self-funding(GASP) a similar program, and suffering through one or three bad financial quarters, which is a big NOPE for 95% of them

3-4 years is nothing, Baen's been doing e-arcs for 20 years I think.

Yeah Baen escaped that trap because they were selling e-books before kindles and what not were even a thing, otherwise I'm sure they would of fallen into it like all the others. Back in the day they would just email you a html/rtf file to read on your computer or maybe a download link, I just remember having to struggling with Mozilla to have it properly display the book.

ShinsoBEAM!
Nov 6, 2008

"Even if this body of mine is turned to dust, I will defend my country."

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

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.
Sunken cost factor? Easy punching bag factor?


I havn't gotten the impression that anyone has been asking this seriously, and I know I have explained this before. But, I'll make an honest attempt at answering this question as I still read Weber, and HH despite a few books in a row being a bit bad(most recent one was finally a step back in the right direction)...I blame him using voice to text to write ever since he hurt his hand and him being too always sellable they arn't editing him as harshly as needed. His original plan getting thrown off and having to spend a few books getting it back on track didn't help either.

But Weber always did one thing really well for me that I enjoyed, even if he does overuse it to death, and that is the setup of explaining a thing and how cool it is like a new strategy/missile system/capital ship whatever, think of it like modern marvels episode and how cool is but with spaceships. Then later after building up the anticipation it has to be used so you have the great reaction shots from all the people on the opposing side who didn't know being in shock and awe of the thing is that is really cool.

I feel no urge to keep reading because sunken cost and even missed the book before the most recent because, well you can just read the reviews, even his fans were dunking on him.

Also as much as you might complain about wow his action and battle scenes suck, it's the reason a lot of his fans that I know like his stuff, they want giant huge galactic size fleet battles because large??? I guess, and a focus on these doesn't exist for a reason, it's really hard to tell a story without running into lots of problems. Seriously go and try to think of a book series that has multiple large scale engagements that are actually described instead of glossed over.

As someone who reads alot of sci-fi and mil-scifi in general eventually I run out of known better stuff and got a bit tired of playing the indie lottery and will grab one of his books instead.

ShinsoBEAM!
Nov 6, 2008

"Even if this body of mine is turned to dust, I will defend my country."

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

I get what you are saying. I was trying to be diplomatic, and funnily enough, yes as thread creator, I have been asking that question you took mild umbrage at over and over. Part of the reason I created this thread was to expose people who " who reads alot of sci-fi and mil-scifi in general eventually I run out of known better stuff" find new material to read. Which is why I've kept recommending different book series or genre authors up for discussion despite the inevitable return to Weber chat mark-whatever.

There is a vast amount of forgotten mil-scifi + scifi stories from the victorian era to the polyester age out there waiting to rediscovered.
Dig deep into the past via curated story collections by the Vandermeers or Dozois to discover new stuff. Or my personal preference: go crazy and read every published copy of Analog/Amazing Stories/etc from start to finish. You are guaranteed to find new authors or interesting stories, only the quality of the stories will vary wildly and the stories themselves be near unreadable at times.

Going through Analog/Amazing Stories is old hat, now a days the new coolness is dig through Royal Road or Kindle Unlimited, mostly KU for military sci-fi as most of the authors are older. The main issue I have is the vast majority of the ones I run across are okay, they arn't bad and I may read more but I'm not going to recommend them.

Like if it somehow got missed I can recommend

Caine Riordan
Expeditionary Force
To Honor you Call Us
Spiral Wars
Poor Man's Fight
A Choice of Treasons


I can also say don't read garbage like
Starship Liberator
Wizard Scout (it's mil sci-fi I know the name yeah yeah)


I started reading Escape: Ark Ship book 1 by David Ryker and it's above average so far, but no recommend level yet and that's just how it goes.

ShinsoBEAM!
Nov 6, 2008

"Even if this body of mine is turned to dust, I will defend my country."

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

fantasy/scifi /mil-fiction economics chat:
Some genre authors grudginly bother mentioning how they have X amount of rations and supplies for the next X days.
And once mentioned, that supply-factoid is rarely brought up again, even if there has been a insane amount of battle or weeks/months of time have passed before the narrative picks up again. David Weber, ugh I loving hate mentioning him, exists in this camp.
One of the reasons why Grant's memoir's of the US Civil War holds up was because supplies + supply support was constant issue in them. The constant fuckups happening.also made Grant's US Civil War memoirs readable/worth power-skimming through. I remember General Burnside always getting poo poo-on by Grant, while General Sedgwick was Grant's "if only he had survived" white-whale, and of course, General Hooker doing the thing that made his surname forever-associated with a class of sex-workers.

That's because in an actual military the interesting person we are following is never in charge of it and in anything large enough even the person in charge of it is only going to know the high level stuff, the nuts and bolts is delegated down to people who are, and nobody wants to read an entire story about supply officers. Though in real war on a huge scale there is constantly supply issues way more often then in fiction though it's normally something like guess we have a sock shortage(which is a very real and serious issue) or something simple that generally didn't get forgotten but a few factors went wrong, like your resupply being diverted to someone in more dire straits and you being kicked back in the list combined with a change in weather conditions. But in most sci-fi stories they break down into base resources they carry around and have magical devices that convert them to what they need, like a video game or something, that hugely simplifies how much the author and reader has to think about supply without becoming boring or unrealistic.

ShinsoBEAM!
Nov 6, 2008

"Even if this body of mine is turned to dust, I will defend my country."
Nahh I have a broken nostalgia gland, nostalgia that would be my friend who actually rereads the old ones, I just don't have any more options and Weber is better on average than random KU mil-scifi. Convenience is probably more accurate.

Deptfordx posted:

I stopped reading Weber with the whole Vampires vs Aliens book Out of the Dark.

No. It's way worse than it sounds. I know the premise sounds cool, trust me. It's real bad.

Except for the most recent HH one, which I read out of morbid curiosity after reading a wiki to catch up the missing volumes.

Dropped Ringo entirely about the time he started writing those terrible zombie books. But I'd already bounced of those Troy Rising books after the first one, and I've never touched the poop that is Paladin of Shadows.

Out of the Dark was hilarious, it was a giant shitpost in book form, filled with stupid in-jokes, I can't believe it actually got published.

ShinsoBEAM!
Nov 6, 2008

"Even if this body of mine is turned to dust, I will defend my country."

Ninurta posted:

Speaking of Glenn Stewart, I had to take my car in for a recall last week and had to burn through something on my Kindle Unlimited credit and chose Exile, which if, we have LitRPG as a genre, this is Lit4X, because he played a game of Stellaris and wrote a book about it. The Honorable Admiral starts a rebellion, gets exiled out of a one-way wormhole and once they found a colony they literally go through the tech tree identifying what they need to tech up while wary that their industrial base isn't enough to replace their current ships. This isn't a problem until....oh, they settled on a Sacred World and have to fight the Von Neumann warships of the Progenitors(tm pending).

This book was literally going through turn by turn of Stellaris and the main characters were more wooden then the resources they harvest.

Better than a russian litrpg where they were playing totally not eve online, which I mean sounds cool. Even the premise was neat protagonist was hired because he was so good to power grind on some rich persons account because for some reason playing this game is mega important so he has to pretend to be this rich socialite just based off notes and also do well at the game. Too bad it was super boring and creepy.

ShinsoBEAM!
Nov 6, 2008

"Even if this body of mine is turned to dust, I will defend my country."

Larry Parrish posted:

Aurora would be my favorite game in the world if it was playable by humans and also maybe had some pretty graphics to show me besides eye searing windows 3.2 flat graphics and drop down lists

You mean eye searing white isn't what you want to be staring at all day, on the plus side it looks nearly indistinguishable from most software programs used at work.

ShinsoBEAM!
Nov 6, 2008

"Even if this body of mine is turned to dust, I will defend my country."

blackmongoose posted:

To be fair, "one fleet sits around in port most of the time until they're sunk by land based artillery" isn't the most compelling narrative and drawing from Tsushima means you have one big ambush battle and that's it - which doesn't lend itself well to 500 sequel books. Most of the interesting parts of the Russo-Japanese War happened on land and space battles seem to be the popular thing in MilSF now (though I think someone could do a really interesting Space Marine/Space Army style book drawing from the Japanese Army campaign).

Popular thing in MilSF has and will always be ground combat, even books about space ships that feature spaceships on cover and promise spaceship on spaceship action will be like 1/2 ground based combat.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

ShinsoBEAM!
Nov 6, 2008

"Even if this body of mine is turned to dust, I will defend my country."

Kchama posted:

It's funny but if you sum it all up that actually does equal to "They were mad too many people were on welfare".

Also man I forgot a lot about how loving dumb the whole Haven revolution everything was.

A government overspending in order to keep the same quality of life/constantly improving lifestyle and running itself into hilarious amounts of debt isn't unheard of at all. Plus their way to make that debt solvent was to invade/expand much like Rome did, which only made their problems worse and kicked the can down the road, which is another thing governments love to do.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply