- Darth Walrus
- Feb 13, 2012
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I guess the Red Rising series sort of counts, although it's more space opera than mil-SF. Certainly, the out-and-out socialists in it are the most consistently wise and heroic characters.
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Jun 28, 2019 15:49
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Apr 27, 2024 01:02
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- Darth Walrus
- Feb 13, 2012
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Mind you, Japan does have good milSF as well. Legend of the Galactic Heroes blows most Western offerings out of the water, and the Gundam franchise includes some solid contributions to the genre.
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Jun 29, 2019 19:03
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- Darth Walrus
- Feb 13, 2012
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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.
Dudes who fought in a war are usually pretty good at 'war sucks'.
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.
Tomino was born in 1941. Pretty sure he didn't do much fighting.
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Jun 29, 2019 22:57
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- Darth Walrus
- Feb 13, 2012
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I feel we should hash this out further since it is likely to keep coming up.
Part of the issue with having a thread like this is that nobody is real sure what MilSF is. Defining genre is always an ambiguous, subjective thing that people can argue about eternally, but I think most of the regulars here have come to associate the term with a certain small subset of divisive SF authors, mostly if not universally associated with the publisher Baen Books. The thread was, i think, mostly created as an outlet for derails about those authors, as well as a place to discuss other work that may be read in dialog with theirs, or which improves upon the themes and devices they use. Other, better writers will probably be discussed, but the thread will probably never escape its origins of being a spork/rant depository about this clique of awful men (weber, ringo, kratman, williamson etc) we love to hate.
I think the people who've read a lot of Mil-SF basically have a consensus idea of what it is, in sort of a potter-stewart-esque way. This will always create trouble for people coming in looking for recs, since they might not share that consensus. The consensus is not universal (for instance, some people in this thread have already recommended Machineries of Empire, which imo is not Mil-SF), but imho it exists and mostly holds together.
For my part...yeah I could recommend things, but most of what I'd recommend as good Mil-SF, or good SF with military content, already gets discussed in the regular sci-fi thread.
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.
I feel like this sort of gatekeeping is bad for the thread and bad for the quality of discussion. People should be welcome to talk about cool stuff they like, not just the extrusions of a small band of fascists with crappy prose. The thread should be inclusive, not exclusive, and if that means it crosses over in content with other threads, then who gives a poo poo?
On that note, I feel I should bring up T.C. McCarthy's Subterrene War trilogy. They're definitely not without their flaws (the first one uncomfortably fetishises the resident sexy tragic all-female supersoldiers, while the last two are uncomfortably sympathetic to the macho warrior culture the first book spent so much time tearing down) but they've got the raw, authentic feel of semi-autobiographical war novels like Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds despite McCarthy never serving on the front lines. Definitely worth a read if you're into the more surreal, apocalyptic flavour of milSF.
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Jul 6, 2019 10:27
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- Darth Walrus
- Feb 13, 2012
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That sounds about right for Kratman. He and John Ringo did release that insane screen about 'Tranzis'.
Huh, guess we finally found a kind of Nazi that Kratman doesn't like.
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Jul 7, 2019 02:34
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- Darth Walrus
- Feb 13, 2012
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Who wrote the draka series, worst books ever
SM Stirling. Also notorious for being a right rear end in a top hat in Internet comment sections.
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Aug 3, 2019 16:22
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Apr 27, 2024 01:02
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- Darth Walrus
- Feb 13, 2012
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I read a series a while ago, I honestly can't remember what it was called, and it doesn't really matter because the books themselves were super-meh, but it had a really interesting concept. Essentially a species of slug aliens achieved enough of a technological edge to effortlessly conquer the entire galaxy. They freely shared their technology and uplifted the species they conquered, but they were still massively paranoid control freaks who ran everything with an iron fist.
The book series starts with said slug aliens dying off as a species, and their galaxy-spanning empire immediately and predictably shattering into a million-zillion factions. The concept I thought was really interesting was that since the galaxy had been conquered millennia ago, nobody had a good grip on (space) naval doctrine, so you essentially had species with Star Trek levels of technology and a stone age understanding of strategy and tactics, leading to such gems as "Let's put all of our ships in a straight line so they don't hit each other by mistake, then fly them really, really close together so it's easier to communicate."
I don't remember the books actually doing much with the concept, it was mainly an excuse for the protagonists to be awesome by re-inventing basic ship moving techniques, but the idea of incredibly advanced technology being wielded by morons is a pretty neat one.
Dread Empire's Fall.
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Aug 10, 2019 23:23
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Jun 28, 2019 15:49
