|
I'd just like to say that in an interview on a podcast Haldemann put the IN THE FUTURE EVERYONE WILL BE GAY thing in there to piss people off and also help drive home that the main character in Forever War is completely alienated from the rest of humanity, not because he thinks being gay is bad or that everyone being gay is scary
|
# ¿ Jun 27, 2019 20:29 |
|
|
# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 20:30 |
|
And drake gets mentioned a few times in the OP's quotes but to those who might not know, much like Haldemann he's a Vietnam vet and so a little old and out of touch compared to young folks but hes definitely not a protofascist. Like the Hammer's Slammers stories are all about how awful people can be when their only identity is tied in with being a soldier, not that they're good and cool for being utterly detached from their humanity
|
# ¿ Jun 27, 2019 20:37 |
|
thinking about hack Baen writers always makes me mad that theres no leftist war novels, just various levels of anti-war novels set in a war or anti-MIC novels. Meanwhile theres about a billion John Ringo style bullshit ones
|
# ¿ Jun 28, 2019 05:28 |
|
C.M. Kruger posted:Marko Kloos might qualify IMO. The main character is some random guy from the slums who joins the military and ends up in a urban pacification unit and then ends up in the space marines. The US Government in the books is portrayed like your typical corrupt and incompetent milSF badguys more concerned with saving their own skins, and eventually gets overthrown by a popular uprising partway through the series. Eh... Kloos is good but it's kind of just antiwar stuff imo. Theres never any kind of solution presented to these systemic problems
|
# ¿ Jun 28, 2019 08:33 |
|
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
|
# ¿ Jun 28, 2019 18:37 |
|
I kind of like Glynn Stewart but hes not a good author. Like I love the concept of the Duchy of Terra series but its yet another 'humans are the best at everything so once they beg, borrow, and steal some technology from the elder races they become nearly unstoppable except we dont have the population or territory to just dominate the rest of the universe'
|
# ¿ Jun 29, 2019 05:16 |
|
Ringo is completely hilarious politically because he constantly talks about evil liberals and welfare states are but his ideal universe is an FDR style command economy which is the closest the US had ever come to communism so uh. Lol Let us not forget the 100 page essay in the back of the Posleen War spinoff set in Panama featuring sentient anime warship waifus (I'm not kidding) that talks about how the collapse of the USSR was actually a KGB plot to infiltrate the EU and UN
|
# ¿ Jun 29, 2019 17:48 |
|
almost as if Weber is a hack piece of poo poo
|
# ¿ Jun 29, 2019 21:53 |
|
Gate is Japanese Tom Clancy: The Anime
|
# ¿ Jun 30, 2019 10:05 |
|
All of Jack Campbell's books are really good sci fi, although only Lost Fleet really counts as mil sci fi in the traditional sense. I really liked Marko Kloos's Frontlines, Poor Man's War is great, Elizabeth Moon's series is real good, and finally if you count the Barrayar novels Bujold is a good author for it too.
|
# ¿ Jun 30, 2019 23:12 |
|
The thing about mil sci fi is theres a lot of godawful hack bullshit out there and very few actually good ones, and we've all already read the good ones so that just leaves swapping stories about rape/genocide/both filled wish fulfillment novels
|
# ¿ Jun 30, 2019 23:14 |
|
Epicurius posted: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". I dunno why this guy has so many pen names but yeah I havent read a jack Campbell book I havent liked, or whatever the gently caress you want to call him
|
# ¿ Jul 2, 2019 09:31 |
|
I really liked the syndicate spin off idk. Lost Fleet is good enough I'd say it's basically the classic Big rear end Fleets series but it's not really special otherwise. I feel like Jack Campbell is better when hes writing about small groups or individuals, like in the Gensis Fleet, the Syndicate spinoff, the one that I cant remember set in a universe where FTL doesnt exist, etc
|
# ¿ Jul 3, 2019 06:45 |
|
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.
|
# ¿ Jul 5, 2019 21:22 |
|
Eh. Some of them do. But a lot of authors just shrug and go 'this is all powered by a fusion reactor that will go critical if the containment vessel is cracked' so ships mostly just blow up horrifically. The infantry sci fi war books are usually insanely bloody though, like the Warp Marine Corps for example straight up has most cultures using genocide bombs as their preferred doctrine (mostly because the elder races love to keep planets habitable so they just give everyone the plans for super effective space napalm, basically). For some reason it's mostly former infantry guys who are the ones going 'yeah a war on a interplanetary scale would make WW2 or the Taiping Rebellion look like a bar fight'
|
# ¿ Jul 6, 2019 06:42 |
|
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 mostly liked the syndicate spin off tbh.
|
# ¿ Jul 7, 2019 16:55 |
|
David Drake has an Aubery/Marturin In Space series and its honestly 1000x better than Weber's attempt. It's not one of his 'working out PTSD' novels so it's not very bleak, and the space England the main characters are from is presented positively most of the time, but it's mostly seen from the captains perspective, who like Aubery is kind of a loving idiot and blindly patriotic so of course annexing these colonies is fine and good. It otherwise seems to come off as bad
|
# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 16:44 |
|
NoNostalgia4Grover posted:What's that....David Drake not working out his PTSD issues on paper? First thought to 6th and now 7th thought on this take were "Lies or maybe Larry Parrish just has a sweet spot for non-DavidWeber Aubery/Marturin stuff". Even Drake's Lacey stories, nominally about a Future detective-cop doing his job in FuturisticBigCity, were dark with an extremely, let me repeat that EXTREMELY hosed up main character in Futuristic-NotSaigon. It's the least bleak book hes ever written by a country mile man I'm not exaggerating. The universe still has a lot of lovely places, like a planet ruled by a pirate warlord where theres slavery, but it's not like Hammer's Slammers where everyone has nothing in front of them but pain and death Like the short story from Slammer's where the psychopath XO has himself assassinated because he knows hes going to forever taint Hammer's government after he seizes control of his homeworld is probably the happiest ending of one of those I've read and it's probably equally as low as most of the novels from the space sailing series get Larry Parrish fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Jul 8, 2019 |
# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 18:24 |
|
for a guy who sees communist plots everywhere he sure focuses on weird places to fantasize about
|
# ¿ Jul 9, 2019 09:48 |
|
Yeah they're horrible. I cant remember how much is outright said by Weber and how much is just me misrememebring it but I hate that he managed to make Space Samurai Western Movie Texas into Nazis with women as property
|
# ¿ Jul 10, 2019 07:44 |
|
Its kind of funny how much Weber loves monarchies, usually fascists love autocracy, obviously, but in most lovely Baen novels its because there are Hard Choices to make. Weber just seems to love the idea of inherited authority and every portrayal of even aristocratic councils like Manticore's upper house is insanely negative
|
# ¿ Jul 11, 2019 00:03 |
|
Kchama posted:I think it's the idea that monarchies are the opposite of a bureaucracy. Legislatures, judges, and the like are all bureaucratic in his eyes. But a single person in absolute power has no bureaucracy in Weber's mind, so they can make pure, clear, untainted commands. Yeah that's probably part of it. They think all kings are Alexander, even though obviously, assigning his subordinates and comrades conquered kingdoms as satrapys is in of itself a fairly sophisticated bureaucracy, just not the kind invented in early modern Europe or China
|
# ¿ Jul 11, 2019 00:26 |
|
One thing that never made sense to me is Manticore was settled by STL sleeper ships, and once they had arrived, wormholes and Alcubierre drives had been invented. So why didnt anyone just invade Manticore and take this supposedly very valuable system that has a ton of wormholes and three habitable planets? What, did weapons technology not evolve in 500 years so those ancient sleeper ships were competitive?
|
# ¿ Jul 11, 2019 17:06 |
|
im pretty sure UN troops have seen more real combat than American troops in the last 30 years lol. We've been drone striking insurgents one at a time and doing commando raids into houses to secure a handful of rifles at a time and they've been like, doing peacekeeping ops in the middle of civil wars. that was true even when he wrote these lovely novels so basically its astounding how stupid this man is
|
# ¿ Jul 11, 2019 20:01 |
|
As insane as John Ringo is in general, he honestly might be better than Weber when it comes to political analysis lol. His books do a lot of liberal blaming, but its mostly stuff that even his fearless protagonists understand, like the US Government in the Posleen Wars books blowing a lot of money on the underground arcologies instead of dumping it all into the military or conscripting everyone. Whereas with Weber anyone who doesn't line up with his bizarre understanding of the world is a secret Nazi that might actually be a KGB plant to bring back Bolshevism or something.
|
# ¿ Jul 12, 2019 00:41 |
|
Blaze Ward is really good yeah. The Science Officer series is ftw.
|
# ¿ Jul 12, 2019 08:59 |
|
feedmegin posted:UN troops have included American troops, my dude. It's not like there's a separate UN army, whatever the black helicopter militia types might think. im aware but what I meant is that we dont actually contribute soldiers to all of the ops. technically most of our imperialist drone order operations are part of UN operations
|
# ¿ Jul 12, 2019 22:31 |
|
Anyway I recently read Ashes of Empire by Eric Thomsom. This poo poo sucks. There's zero conflict in this poo poo novel, the main character either just talks everyone around to his view or shrugs and leaves him alone to do whatever. He picks up some space-monks and almost immediately he consults with a space-monk about tactics and poo poo constantly. Which would be fine if anything happened in this turd of a novel. This guy wrote the Siobhan Dunmoore books too which are also pretty godawful but for some reason features Planet Rape, Christian fundamentalist edition where the inhabitants are space pirates that literally take women home as chattel slaves for reasons. They arent written as sympathetic or anything but like, why is this even here?
|
# ¿ Jul 12, 2019 22:41 |
|
I read Joe Kasabian's Citizen of Earth, which is really good. I finished it in a night but I read really fast due to 10 years of playing MUDs so I dunno if it's all that short or not. It's like an actually good Starship Troopers I guess. Actually it kind of read like one long action sequence from one of the Expeditionary Force novels which in my opinion is good. Highly recommend as a actually good mil scifi book Anyway it continues the trend of infantry guys always writing the best ones of these kinds of books Also it's like $2 or $3. Support leftist troops Larry Parrish fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Jul 20, 2019 |
# ¿ Jul 20, 2019 08:10 |
|
NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Anytime I find myself thinking of the Expanse books and if I should give the series another go, quickly remember the... One of my favorite expanse things is how the dipshit author was like yeah we've got no magic sci fi tech here, no laser guns and poo poo! Except the entire setting wouldn't make sense without magically ultra efficient fusion reactors powering drives that might as well not need refueling. Although somehow apparently everyone except the main characters cant afford to run what is the equivalent of a supertanker ship engine that burns a thimble of crude a week. How are there so many poor belters that can barely afford to fly if air and water are almost completely recyclable and your drives can take you across the heliosphere and back without refueling???
|
# ¿ Jul 21, 2019 02:21 |
|
I mean on one hand hes a collaborator but on the other hand it's very hard for me to hate on someone alpha enough to pretend to be a nazi war vet to scam the german healthcare system. That's honestly hilarious. And he apparently escaped the post war trials so either hes a lucky piece of trash who didnt have any evidence of his crimes or he really didn't do anything besides run his grift on fascists
|
# ¿ Jul 21, 2019 10:25 |
|
Anyway thinking about the expanse more makes me want someone to literally write d&d in space, but like the medbay is run by an ai just sentient enough to pray to its manufacturer as a god so its literally casting healing and raise dead instead of just being a magic box doing the same thing as a d&d NPC cleric
|
# ¿ Jul 21, 2019 17:38 |
|
C.M. Kruger posted:I gather in English his books may have been more of a British thing, when he died there appear to have been a number of obits from British papers including the Guardian, a couple thinkpieces about the 70s-80s British fascination with Nazis (alongside comics like "Hellman of Hammer Force", Bowie doing an immense amount of cocaine and creating a fascist persona, and Lemmy's nazi paraphernalia collection), and I found a fair number of old posts along the lines of "My older brother brought back a bunch of those from a school trip to the UK" on web forums. Hey to be fair white phosphor flare guy was real, they even named a training squadron at Lackland after him and probably a bunch of other bullshit. My First Term Airman training center on the other hand was named after something people actually gave a poo poo about, the first airman at the base to die in the GWOT
|
# ¿ Jul 22, 2019 02:28 |
|
i read the ender's game sequels as a teenager and shockingly I remember like, details from Heinlein's godawful books like Stranger in a Strange Land, but not a single loving thing about card's books besides it being notable for being one of like two sci fi series that is magic high technology sci fi but without FTL. usually if a setting has no FTL its because it's an Alistair Reynolds esque depression fest and everyone except for rich people is basically a normal person from today
|
# ¿ Jul 22, 2019 08:09 |
|
What I'm saying is that they're so bad that I burned it out of my memory which is especially hard since I'm one of those weirdos who can easily memorize stuff as long as it's written down
|
# ¿ Jul 22, 2019 08:11 |
|
Vatta's War series has a random moment where the plotters that are trying to take over the galaxy upgrade to completely insane evil and uh, it doesn't even make sense for them to do it.
|
# ¿ Jul 22, 2019 15:00 |
|
Here's another post on Actually Good Mil Scifi: Zone War by John Conroe. It's the near future, and autonomous warfare is ubiquitous because strong AI exists. Not the typical sci fi version, where they're all basically sentient and hyper intelligent, but the BRIC nations and the USA have been developing increasingly sophisticated autonomous drones to the point where they have limited self learning capabilities. So, some terrorists get their hands on a giant pile of midrange drones and a few insanely powerful command and control platforms designed to run an entire battle's drone component. They load 'em up on a container ship, sail it to Manhattan, and four hundred thousand people die in a night. The government seals it up, and now its basically escape from New York. Large incursions of troops get slapped down by the drone network too easily, but small teams can slip in, so we join our main character jacking poo poo out of Manhattan to sell, which is legal for some reason. Maybe I wrote too much about the set up for the book but it's pretty good. I ain't infantry and I definitely ain't a sniper (which is what the main character is supposed to be) so I dunno how much is pure fantasy and how much is speculation on what 2060's urban combat looks like. It's good as hell though, and cheap
|
# ¿ Jul 24, 2019 10:16 |
|
So, John Ringo and actually competent author Mike Massa out out a joint book earlier this month. It's a sequel to Ringo's zombie apocalypse series, which is basically a love letter to the Marines and the kind of hard core metal only a former army NCO could possibly think is cool in today's day (its nightwish and drowning pool ofc). But, like I said, unlike other Ringo collaboration novels, Mike Massa is actually good. Hes an actually competent author who isnt nearly as bad as Ringo about putting the brain damaged army vet version of Reddit memes directly into his novel. Anyway I re read all the novels prior to this but got tired of the anthology halfway through so I skipped that one. The only truly good story in it anyway was, ironically, one that was by Massa that inspires Massa's follow on novels. The original 4 suck. Ringo's idea for how a zombie apocalypse happens is shockingly not horrible but it's just DRIPPING with 'look at me, I actually googled some poo poo around before I turned in my manuscript!'. In typical Ringo fashion our heros rapidly establish command economy socialism (or in this specific case, call it naval syndicalism), remark about how amazingly well it works, and then say they miss capitalism for some reason. One of the main characters is a buff rear end 13 year old girl which would be cool and/or funny if it wasnt for how many times people point out that shes hot jailbait. Like I get making that kind of joke to gently caress with someone but not like, to the actual teenagers face. Anyway if you've read one Ringo novel you've all four of these. Where it gets good is Mike Massa fleshing out what, exactly, is happening in New York City while the apocalypse slowly unfolds. He even finds a way to plausibly explain Ringo's hilarious setup where all the power and cell infrastructure in NYC goes down at the same time at a tense moment for the original book's heros. Basically these two novels take all the cool side characters from the first act of the first book and transform them into the only actually good writing to fall out of this turd of a series. Everyone is distinct and memorable and I liked them all, even the Specialist that is every Airman/Private Snuffy story come to life like a tasmanian devil of stupid ideas and grift. The book set in New York honestly had me on the edge of my seat, it's basically a mob novel set in the end of the world and its loving great holy poo poo. The second one isnt as tense but is a good follow up and serves up Massa's alternate plot in a pretty good way. Franky this two book departure has a better ending than anything Ringo ever wrote (he hasn't ended any of his series besides march upcountry) Tl;dr read the two new john ringo novels because I dont think he actually wrote a single thing besides the dedication to Capt. Long lol. Do skip the first four books because they have all the subtlety of a tap out tshirt hanging off the skinny frame of an e-3 in the BX. Do not skip Massa's second book where he subtly makes fun of how Ringo makes communism the enemy without actually knowing that he describes communism as the true ideal system of organization Larry Parrish fucked around with this message at 12:22 on Jul 30, 2019 |
# ¿ Jul 30, 2019 12:19 |
|
He listens to the same bands my 50 year old ESL teacher tia does, who definitely does not think of herself as a 'metalhead'
|
# ¿ Jul 30, 2019 19:28 |
|
|
# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 20:30 |
|
Also he keeps referencing that stupid rear end comic with the bit about there being no such thing as overkill in the zombie series (theres a reference to it in the mike massa ones but someone immediately slaps them down and calls them an idiot lmfao) but theres no invader zim esque murder rabbit thank god. In the council war series he straight up has it as a character
|
# ¿ Jul 30, 2019 19:29 |