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Gotta mention Peter Watts' Rifters trilogy. Cybernetically modified workers on deep sea-floor stations. Shiny happy stories they are not. Also, Demon-6 by David Mace. There has been a third world war, without any real winners, not quite a civilization-ending apocalypse but poo poo is bad all around and the surviving nations are having to cooperate in order to get the resources needed to pull through. Unfortunately, there are these automated deep sea-floor fortresses with drones and nukes and advanced AIs and poo poo that have decided that everyone is an enemy and nobody is allowed to go anywhere in the huge areas they control, and this is a serious problem. Also, surviving naval assets that could be used against these now amount to some random poo poo boats with no chance. Except there are these experimental hunter-killer submarine drones run by semi-AI systems based around reassembled brains of dead soldiers. Supposedly with no real consciousness, nor memory of their past lives...
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Jun 1, 2020 22:15
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Pennywise the Frown posted:Total Annihilation was one of the best games ever made.
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Jun 14, 2020 11:10
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Scut posted:Minor correction, the title is Demon-4, and thanks for the tip I'm currently reading a copy I borrow via archive.org and it's the sort of techno-thriller pulp I love. Yes, sorry. Also, same author's Fire Lance which also belongs in that specific and very 80s subgenre somewhere between SF and technothriller, the near-future nuclear war story. I was old enough to read a crapload of this type of book back then, just recently read this one and it's certainly one of the very finest of its type. Written in the mid-80s and set sometime around the year 1999 or 2000 or something like that; it's been a few weeks since the big war happened, most of the population of the northern hemisphere is already dead, all the worst projections of nuclear winter have come true and the very biological survival of the human race seems doubtful. It is June but the entire northern hemisphere is cloaked in the stratospheric ashes of burnt cities, farmlands and forests, to the point where it is dark and freezing everywhere. But enough of the strategic deterrent assets on both sides still exist, and remains of the command structures survive, to maintain an informal sort of ceasefire, under the threat of making things even worse. So the story follows one of the last remaining mobile strategic assets on the US side, a huge futuristic warship built to maximize survival chances and durability, and loaded with an enormous arsenal of strategic nuclear-capable cruise missiles. From a relatively safe position in the South Atlantic, far from land and far from any surviving hostiles, new orders come in that send them into the North, into the darkness and more immediate danger, towards a position from where they could attack again.
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Sep 24, 2021 09:46
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Prolonged Panorama posted:^ hell yeah Feel pretty sure we've mentioned them already, but once more can't hurt. Good poo poo.
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Feb 23, 2022 20:37
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:i feel like that working mat is the perfect background for those books (i've never read them, i'm just going by the covers) Very 80s future, evoking a feeling of wireframe graphics and such, yes.
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Mar 1, 2022 11:43
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Fivemarks posted:Do the Destroyermen novels count as Nautical Sci-Fi? I say yes. Pretty good too. The weird alien setting is an alternate Earth, the ships go on water and not in space, the advanced technology is WW2 level.... apart from that it's a better milSF space opera than most. Exploration, diplomacy, base building, upteching, pitched battles... Also the series is actually concluded now. And I don't think the author is any kind of fash either. He pointedly rejects the whole "hard men making hard choices" thing.
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Mar 9, 2022 20:39
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Once you spot that 'hard men making hard choices' fash theming you really do see it way too often. Absolutely. In these books, though, there is for example the subplot with the deathkudzu thing that could wipe out enemy populations completely, and this one guy who wants to use it is denied; and in the end it turns out that even the most implacable enemy can stop being an enemy and learn other ways to interact than "kill everything".
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Mar 10, 2022 09:40
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