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Talking about a military scifi series/author I liked, there's John Hemry. Hemry's probably most famous for the series Stark's War, which was good, but I liked his Paul Campbell series better, starting with "A Just Determination". Campbell is this junior officer on a spaceship who's picked as the captain's legal advisor, and it's sort of "JAG in space".
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Jul 2, 2019 02:15
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I like almost all of Scalzi's stuff, both before and after he made it big. I'd also recommend, if you like military scifi, Timothy Zahn's stuff. Zahn sort of gets well known for his Star Wars novels, but he's written a lot of other things as well. Specific military science fiction of his include his "Conquerer's Trilogy", where earth runs into an alien species that attacks it on sight and is stuck in the middle of a war, his "Blackcollar" books, about resistance forces on an earth that's been taken over by alien invaders, and his "Cobra" series, which is about these cybernetically enhanced supersoldiers. In a lot of ways, the first Cobra book is the best, because it asks the question, "Now that you've built a bunch of cybernetic supersoldiers, what do you do with them now that the war's over and you don't need them anymore?"
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Jul 6, 2019 20:05
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I don't know that this applies, exactly, because it's less about war than the lead up to war, but Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota books are about a future society that, after a really terrible war that brought the end of nation states, has been at at peace for three centuries. The society, though, is breaking down, and war is coming, in spite of attempts by a bunch of people to stop it. Three books have come out, with one more coming, and at the end of the third book, the war has just started It might not be strictly military science fiction. The heroes aren't some plucky squad holding the line against alien invaders or whatever, but it is a series about war, and how war happens, and the whole set of choices, and compromises, and refusal to compromise that makes it seem like stuff is just steamrolling to war no matter how much you may try to stop it.
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Jul 8, 2019 05:22
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I hate 1632. Its just so....I dont even know how to describe it. Mike Stearns is always inevitably right, anybody who disagrees with him is an idiot or evil, and every early modern person inevitably sees how much more awesome Grantville values are than theirs. It also just gets a lot of the early modern personalities wrong....it makes the Sazon dukes opponents of the Emperor when they were moderate Lutherans who were Imperial loyalists, it has Oxertina betray Gustafus Adolphus as part of a plot to preserve the traditional nobility when the real guy was fanatically loyal to the king and did a lot to open up the Swedish government to non-nobles, and so on.
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Jul 8, 2019 17:04
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All I know is that David Weber called me an idiot on his forum. It was about the Safehold books. So as you all probably know, the backstory of the Safehold books is that Earth and its colonies were this thriving space empire, until they run into these xenophobic, exterminationist aliens. The war goes badly for earth, and in desperation, they send this colony to Safehold, with the idea that its going to stay low tech for a while (so the aliens won't be able to pick up signals or signs of industrialization from space), and then it's going to modernize , build up its military and beat the aliens. Instead of doing that, though, the Colonial Administrator sets up the Non-Catholic Church, and puts a religious ban on industrialization. So I thought about it, and said, hold on, they were right to do that. The unified forces of Earth and all its colonies combined weren't enough to stop the aliens, and now you're hoping this one little planet can? They're going to build a coal power plant and a radio tower, and the aliens are going to find them and smush them. Their only hope is that they can hide well enough that they get overlooked, and the way they do that is by making high technology taboo. He didn't like that argument.
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Jul 10, 2019 22:27
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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. I read a bunch of his stuff, until I realized he had written one book multiple times. 1. Some alt-history historical event happens that means the bad guys attack the US (imperial Germany attacks, Victorian Britain attacks. Canada goes Nazi and the Germans attack through Canada, the Japanese take over Hawaii, the Nazis and the Soviets team up and attack, etc) 2. It looks bad for the US, because we're outnumbered and caught off guard. How can we survive? 3. American pluck and can-do-itness wins in the end, and the world is saved. Hurrah!
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Jul 12, 2019 14:12
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Space Butler posted:I did like 'the road not taken', but that's just a short story. As a rule, Turtledove's short stories are better than his novels, and his short stories suffer when he tries to lengthen them. So, for instance, "In the Presence 0f Mine Enemies", the short story, is about a family of crypto-Jews living in modern Berlin in a world where the Germans won WWII and the night they reveal to their ten year old daughter the secret that they're Jewish. The novel is about the same thing, but expands it out into an analogue for the collapse of the Soviet Union, and takes what's a personal, family story into something eh. That being said, I do really like Tuetledove, for all of his weaknesses (and the Darkness series is awful...almost as bad as the fantasy story he did about the Civil War). That being said, the man can write decent books when he wants....he just too easily falls into the trap of "Take historical event, fictionalize it, write hook." But try his "21, Counting Up/40 Counting Down" story, where a 21 year old crosses paths with his 40 year old self, "The Barbecue, the Movie, and Other Unfortunately Not So Relevant Material", where a guy in Southern Californa with the unfortunate name of "Genghis Kahn" finds himself having to deal with a disappointed time travelling doctoral candidate from the future, or "Special Report on the Quality of Life", where one of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella's OSHA inspectors vetoes Columbus's journey for health and safety concerns.
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Jul 12, 2019 21:12
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blackmongoose posted:I've heard his alt history byzantium series is also decent since a) he actually has a doctorate in byzantine history and b) it's not a commonly known subject like WWII so his standard "retelling of historical events in different costumes" isn't as objectionable. The Videssos books are pretty good. I'm disappointed he hasnt written any new ones for quite a while (Last one was Bridge of the Seperator, in 2005), because I always made sure to pick them up)
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Jul 12, 2019 21:49
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Jack2142 posted:The important thing is his Alt-Byzantium is not just Belisarius retold and he actually uses entirely different periods of its history! Specifically, if you're curious, depending on the series, Manzikert, Basil I, Heraclitus, and Chosroes II.
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Jul 13, 2019 06:15
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Ninurta posted:. I am sure this somehow results in a young Austrian painter entering politics but there's no epilogue. The Kaiser is forced to abdicate, and the new leaders, who call themselves the Third Reich, decide to persecute the Jews and invade Eastern Europe to give Germany living space.
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Jul 13, 2019 07:00
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I don't think it's fair to Turtledove to compare Turtledove and Weber (and disclaimer here...I like Turtledove). Weber's problems are, first, his Mary-Sueism (Honor Harrington is the galaxy's most perfect soldier and everyone loves her and everyone who she doesn't like is automatically evil and a strawman), and second, the weapons porn...where you're not sure if you're reading an novel or a Jane's guide. (His missiles have more personality than his characters). Turtledove's problems, especially when it comes to multinovel series, are first, he kind of lazily grabs historical events and rubs the names off ("So, this is a fantasy world, much like earth, except they never invented the waffle iron, and they fight a war that's completely not the Peloponesian War"), and second, that his writing tends to be repetitive: Book One: Al Jones looked at the draft notice in his hand, not paying attention to the fact that he was still wearing his uniform for the Toledo Mud Hens. "Well, I guess I'll never play for the Yankees now." Book Five: "The unit had finally been pulled off the line for some R&R, and the men were taking it easy. "Looks like the Yankees won the World Series!", said Bill Smith, reading Stars and Stripes. Al looked glum at that news. "I could have been there, Bill. I played for the Toledo Mud Hens and was going to become a Yankee when I got drafted." Book Ten: "Come on, boys!", said Drill Sgt. Al Jones, "It's easy to throw a grenade! No harder than throwing a baseball." Al made this comparison because he used to play semi-pro ball for the Toledo Mud Hens until he was drafted, ruining his chances of playing for the Yankees." That being said, when he doesn't do that, his stuff tends to be pretty good.
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Aug 3, 2019 06:10
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Mack Reynolds was great, but you're right, a lot of his stories are both so political and so tied to the Cold War that it's hard for people to appreciate him now. Also, as a fun fact, Mack Reynolds wrote the first Star Trek tie in novel, Mission to Horatius, which was pretty universally panned. One of the writers/directors wrote to Roddenberry that the novel was "not technically in bad taste, but is extremely dull, and even considering the juvenile market, badly written". On an unrelated thing...John Ringo. He wrote those Posleen books, which everybody talks about (mostly in horror...that whole Watch on Rhine book where he and Krautman bring back the SS, because they were "real soldiers" unlike the liberal wimps we have today), but nobody ever talks about Alan Dean Foster's "The Damned Trilogy", which is thematically similar to the Posleen books. (Space UN/Federation is under attack by imperialistic aliens, but they're all pacifist, and then they find earth and use humans as soldiers, but there might be more to this than meets the eye), and I sort of wonder why Foster doesn't get more attention.
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Aug 3, 2019 16:07
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Kchama posted:I've never heard of it, so clearly that's why nobody talks about it. Mind controlling theocratic space octopuses, but no Nazis! But the books are worth reading. I'm tempted almost to do a Lets Read of them, but they're neither good enough that people will be impressed or bad enough that people will be horrified. Still, worth reading if you're a military science fiction fan.
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Aug 3, 2019 17:05
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L.E Modesitt said he wrote his first Recluce book after a conversation with somebody about how the economics of fantasy worlds is always unrealistic, in an attempt to do better.
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Aug 13, 2019 18:14
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So....am I the only one who'd read a fantasy novel written by Lyndon Johnson?
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Sep 5, 2019 02:09
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Larry Parrish posted:yeah but he was a FREE IRISH radical, not a jacobin. hes less stuffy than jack but hes still an aristocrat There were Jacobins who came from aristocratic families. Mirabeau, Antonelle, Barère, Barnave, Saint-Just, Fouquier-Tinville.
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Sep 23, 2019 05:10
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Patrat posted:Some of them became aristocratic because of their Jacobin support. I have, lurking in my family tree like some kind of monstrous spider, Antoine Walsh. Noted slave trader and pirate who was made a French count. Walsh was a Jacobite (somebody who thought that somebody from the Scottish House of Stuart should be on the English/British throne) vs a Jacobin (one of the more radical factions of the French Revolution, who, after they came to power, were responsible for "the Terror", a bunch of political executions of people for treason or "insufficient revolutionary zeal", which in practice often meant disagreeing with the Jacobins)
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Sep 23, 2019 11:35
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:The dumb thing is that for every Galileo heresy trial you have things like monks recording history and science during the dark ages, Catholics founding schools, the priests being the only literate guys - and for bonus points, the first universities were explicitly religious institutions. Is this series going to actually address issues of faith? gently caress no, this is an elaborate setup for gun guys to shoot sword guys because the sword guys are stupid idiot morons who believe in Fake Jesus Part of the irony of the Galileo trial and this is that the Galileo trial happened during the Reformation, in large part because of it. The Reformation saw the Church's authority crumble, which made the Church paranoid and led it to crack down on anything it thought was defiant or threatened Church authority. Before the Reformation, Galileo probably would have been ignored. (In real life, also, Galileo didn't help his situation by alienating his allies and supporters in the Church as well as openly mocking the Pope in his book.)
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Dec 21, 2019 22:20
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. We'll get there.
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Larry Parrish posted:isnt a yeoman, as far as most navies go, not really a rank and just an occupational title? like helmsman or damage control man or airman or whatever. Or maybe that's just a US navy thing, I dunno. In the US navy, a yeoman is basically a secretary/administrative assistant. They answer the phone, order office supplies, draft documents for review and signature, and so on. In the British navy, there's a position called Yeoman of Signals, who handles signaling on a ship, originally semaphore, but now radio and electronic signals.
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Dec 29, 2019 08:07
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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.
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Jan 5, 2020 06:00
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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.
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Jan 5, 2020 07:09
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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.
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Jan 5, 2020 23:31
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Does Earth not exist anymore in that universe, or is it no longer inhabitable or whatever? I can see "Old Earth" being used in that context....it's mankind's original homeworld, now lost, but the idea of it still exists to bind us together. "Oh, wanderer, Do you hear the cry of Old Earth? Land of our birth now lost and forgotten. Still my heart calls out for Terra, home of our fathers. though we are nomads without homes of our own"
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Jan 13, 2020 03:37
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Some people might like (and others might hate) this video, by James Tullos, looking at fascist themes in science fiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vph_cDjcgEE It singles out Heinlein's "Starship Troopers", David Weber and Steve White's "Crusade", "In Death Ground", "The Shiva Option" and "Insurrection", S M Sterling's "Islands in the Sea of Time", Jack Campbell's "The Lost Fleet", and Tom Kratman's "Caliphate".
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Apr 10, 2020 21:20
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mllaneza posted:Which isn't fascist by his own definition. Maybe not, but it is militarist and authoritarian.
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Apr 10, 2020 23:19
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Simon Winchester's book Pacific Nightmare isn't good, but it starts with internal unrest in China related to the handover of Hong Kong, which leads to a Japanese invasion.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:58
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C.M. Kruger posted:Dark Rose by Mike Lunnon-Wood. A Libyan/Palestinian alliance invades and conquers Ireland to serve as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Israel, and the resistance to them includes a revived High Queen of Tara. That sort of reminds me of this cartoon: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=364
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Apr 22, 2020 14:11
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I don't like David Weber as an author, but I don't know of a pattern of age inappropriate romances in his books. In the Safehold books, which I know better than the Honor Harrington books, the characters who are in romantic relationships are with people near their own age, and while, sure, in the Honor books, Hamish is a lot older than Honor, this is also a series where a 101 year old and a 62 year old can have a child (and still be functional members of society, which isn't true of a lot of 101 year olds nowadays) , which suggests a certain kind of flattening of the aging process which maybe makes that sort of an age gap less remarkable than otherwise. And they're both consenting adults, and even pass the "half your age plus seven" rule, so other than the possibility of jokes about cradle robbing, I don't see the relationship as icky on age grounds.
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Jun 13, 2020 05:12
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Mycroft Holmes posted:anybody got some recommendations for post-apocalypse stuff that isn't right-wing? I'm tired of wannabe tom kratmans making GBS threads out dreck. The Stand The Handmaid's Tale World War Z New York 2140
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Jan 3, 2021 15:49
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Fivemarks posted:SM Stirling is a piece of poo poo, not just for the Draka, but also for Guns of the South, which runs on Lost Cause myths that personally offend me. Guns of the South was Turteldove, who's not a Lost Causer
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Feb 26, 2022 04:45
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Fivemarks posted:If your book relies on the "kindly General Lee" myth, then you're a lost causer, even if you don't realize it. Over the course of the book, Lee comes to learn that the future views the Confederacy, its values, and its racism, repulsive, and the only people who still consider them heroic are racist cranks like the AWB, and the book ends with a wiser Lee, having realized that, coming around to support and push through abolition in the hope to start to change those values.
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Feb 26, 2022 18:49
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Anshu posted:Yeah, except that the actual historical Lee is much more likely to have viewed our future as degenerate, to be prevented at all costs, rather than enlightened, able to pass accurate judgement on him. Relevant information here. Maybe, but it's fiction. He's not trying to portray Lee accurately. I mean, this is a book where South African terrorists from the future give the Confederacy AK-47s. And part of the message he's trying to get across is that the Confederacy was terrible and unsustainable. One of the themes of the book is that people can come to overcome their prejudices and work to build a better future. That's why you have Lee and even to a lesser extent Forrest eventually realizing slavery is wrong and turning against the AWB, and why Nate is able to challenge his white supremacy (and also marry Mollie even though he knows she's a former prostitute), and why Henry decides he's going to staff a farm with just free labor and make it successful. You don't necessarily have to agree with that message, and you might think Lee was irredeemable, but it's still not a Lost Cause book. It's a redemption narrative.
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Feb 27, 2022 00:08
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Anshu posted:Hm. That argument is similar to things I've said defending Eric Flint's characterization of Gustav II Adolf in the Ring of Fire series – defending it to you in fact, if my memory does not deceive me. I personally will concede the point, at least insofar as, not having read Guns of the South, I don't know enough to dispute your description. It's possible, I guess. I think I've only posted once in the thread about the Ring of Fire series and I don't really remember our conversation.
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Feb 27, 2022 01:34
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Anshu posted:The conversation took place in one of the mil-hist threads, not this one. I don't remember, but I'll take your word for it.
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Feb 28, 2022 03:13
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