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Arson Daily posted:thats gotta be AI If it isn't somebody needs to touch some grass, stat.
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Aug 27, 2024 06:05
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Uhhh... a nuke goes off in I think Angola, obliterating Cuban (lol) forces advancing on South Africa... there's a lot about Boers and extreme right wing Afrikaners... one of the pivotal plot points is a South African guy sodomising young black men That's all I got Edit: it's called Vortex by Larry Bond A CRAB IRL fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Oct 14, 2024 |
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Oct 14, 2024 02:52
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A CRAB IRL posted:Uhhh... a nuke goes off in I think Angola, obliterating Cuban (lol) forces advancing on South Africa... there's a lot about Boers and extreme right wing Afrikaners... one of the pivotal plot points is a South African guy sodomising young black men Book’s got an artillery duel between a loving Iowa-class battleship and G5 emplacements on Table Mounting. It’s so much fun. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Oct 14, 2024 |
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Oct 14, 2024 03:13
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Vortex is weird because it goes "The Neo Nazi White Supremacist Afrikaneers are the bad guys" which is good and right. Then it goes "The ANC and their African and Cuban allies are ALSO bad guys because they're commies, and they're incompetent because they're brown" which is loving weird. But I guess that's what you can expect from the Technothriller Genre.
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Oct 14, 2024 04:30
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Fivemarks posted:Vortex is weird because it goes "The Neo Nazi White Supremacist Afrikaneers are the bad guys" which is good and right. Then it goes "The ANC and their African and Cuban allies are ALSO bad guys because they're commies, and they're incompetent because they're brown" which is loving weird. They were competent enough that they were beating the Nazis bad enough that the Nazis had to nuke them.
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Oct 14, 2024 15:07
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I can't remember but then I think America comes to save the day though right
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Oct 15, 2024 02:50
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A CRAB IRL posted:I can't remember but then I think America comes to save the day though right I mean you could guess that about most of the books in this thread without ever having to read them.
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Oct 15, 2024 14:59
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It's deep in the Cold War, and the Soviets have yet again magicked up some technology that's going to render the U.S. ICBM shield ineffective. Maybe it's lasers, or super-effective ABMs? Anyway, turns out a decade ago the U.S. secretly constructed hidden SRBM silos in Central Europe so they could do a reverse Cuban Missile Crises in the event something like this came up. Trouble is that everyone who knows the location and launch codes for these hidden missiles had them erased from their memories with hypnosis. Are Hero has to find and make contact with these people and speak a code phrase ("skull a of place the", don't ask me why I can remember this over twenty years later) which will then lead him to the next person, and the next. Of course the KGB has sent their best man to stop him from doing this. The rest of the book is just their game of cat and also cat, and in the end freedom wins and MAD is preserved. I think an empty part of Eastern Europe is nuked to say "we've got these missiles that can hit anywhere in ten minutes." Book was The Last Trump or The Final Trump, something like that, which is kind of amusing in modern context.
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Oct 17, 2024 22:08
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Moon Slayer posted:It's deep in the Cold War, and the Soviets have yet again magicked up some technology that's going to render the U.S. ICBM shield ineffective. Maybe it's lasers, or super-effective ABMs? Anyway, turns out a decade ago the U.S. secretly constructed hidden SRBM silos in Central Europe so they could do a reverse Cuban Missile Crises in the event something like this came up. Trouble is that everyone who knows the location and launch codes for these hidden missiles had them erased from their memories with hypnosis. Are Hero has to find and make contact with these people and speak a code phrase ("skull a of place the", don't ask me why I can remember this over twenty years later) which will then lead him to the next person, and the next. This sounds very British, for some reason. like the sort of thing that would be a BBC limited series with a bunch of sweaty closeups of people running through Prague or something,
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Oct 17, 2024 22:50
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Madurai posted:This sounds very British, for some reason. like the sort of thing that would be a BBC limited series with a bunch of sweaty closeups of people running through Prague or something, He was British, he also wrote a bunch of James Bond novels, at least one of which I have read but can remember literally nothing about except the name of a character. Going from a review it seems likely the book The Last Trump was also known as Golgotha as listed on Wikipedia
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Oct 18, 2024 05:48
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Dang, I don't remember the "Soviets totally dominate Europe and the UK under Labour collaborates with them" part of the story at all.
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Oct 18, 2024 06:24
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Moon Slayer posted:Dang, I don't remember the "Soviets totally dominate Europe and the UK under Labour collaborates with them" part of the story at all. oh you dropped your subscription to The Telegraph?
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Oct 21, 2024 01:13
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Ok so I actually met this author, he was part of my parents sci-fi club pack in the 90's early aughts and ummm..... This book. Woof. Do you want a book about some junior enlisted schmuck that was in the 101st and then joined the navy to plan a hostage rescue mission based off of his limited infantry training and table top gaming experience? Oh and a US destroyer gets in a close up gun fight with BMPs and those wheeled soviet APCs quote:The crew of a Navy destroyer must rescue hostages trapped in Libya.The Navy destroyer USS Kimmel is in its seventh month of a six-month deployment when they receive orders for one final mission -- retrieve a hijacked Libyan helicopter containing a CIA agent and a defecting Libyan Major who knows where a group of Americans is being held hostage. Simple enough. Then the tired crew can return home.But when the Kimmel arrives in the Mediterranean, they find the helicopter shot down, the Major dead, and the agent floating alone in the sea. The agent knows where the hostages are being held, but he also knows that if the situation is not resolved within seventy-two hours, the hostages will be killed. Suddenly the mission is not so simple. Now everything hinges on the Kimmel and its exhausted crew. Can they put together a landing party, armed only with equipment in the ship's armory, locate, rescue, and retrieve the hostages -- all before the clock ticks down? They have no choice. And the hostages have no other hope.
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Dec 12, 2024 03:08
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Flikken posted:Do you want a book about some junior enlisted schmuck that was in the 101st and then joined the navy to plan a hostage rescue mission based off of his limited infantry training and table top gaming experience? <reads the back of the book> No. You'd be better off pulling a squad from the nearest embassy guard detachment, and there's probably a carrier closer than the nearest embassy that can spare the manpower.
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Dec 12, 2024 03:31
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mllaneza posted:<reads the back of the book> A seal team tries to take off from a carrier and oops........Forrestal Flikken fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Dec 12, 2024 |
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Dec 12, 2024 05:20
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Flikken posted:
This has the "science fiction writer asked to join the government task force on aliens" vibe from Niven's Footfall pretty hard.
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Dec 12, 2024 21:16
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Maybe, but Footfall kicks rear end. This other book sounds like plain rear end
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Dec 12, 2024 21:31
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Madurai posted:This has the "science fiction writer asked to join the government task force on aliens" vibe from Niven's Footfall pretty hard. The author was in the Army National Guard and the Navy so he is Mary Sueing pretty hard.
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Dec 13, 2024 14:02
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Arrath posted:Maybe, but Footfall kicks rear end. This other book sounds like plain rear end Footfall is a lot of fun but goddamn those aliens are loving dumb. It’s like if we mastered interstellar travel and then when we got to some other planet light years away we expected whatever was living there to understand what a handshake is. They’re dumber than those aliens in that one awful Next Generation episode that kidnap Geordie so he can teach them how to be smart.
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Dec 13, 2024 23:08
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Phanatic posted:They’re dumber than those aliens in that one awful Next Generation episode that kidnap Geordie so he can teach them how to be smart. Those aliens were running a con to get their hands on a competent engineer at least temporarily. They show up in Lower Decks as semi-competent antagonists.
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Dec 13, 2024 23:22
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The Fithp in Footfall were also clearly not as advanced, culturally, as their technology made them. This is explained in the book where its explained that they got their technology from leftovers by a civilization that existed on their planet before them, boosting them from the stone age to, when their home planet suffered environmental catastrophe as a result of a war, the losing side could just build a starship and leave to a new world.
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Dec 20, 2024 14:58
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I'm considering doing a quick summary of a like 20+ book franchise of Kindle slop Mil Sci-fi called The Ember War, and oh boy is it bad but also simultaneously "no gently caress it he's trying to cook" sometimes. For instance, the "good guy" humans who get forcibly time traveled 20 years into the future have mini mecha called Armor- and the pilot we meet in the first book who isn't the not Cmdr Shepherd main character name drops Evangelion the first time he shows up. On the other hand, he also brings up how the Western Union was formed when the west teamed up to liberate Sweden from Sharia Law. The basic plot is that a swarm of unmanned drones called the Xaros have been swarming through the galaxy wiping out any sentient race they find, and humans are next on the list. An ancient race of aliens called the Kharesh send a probe to earth where instead of helping bootstrap humanity to fight them off, the plan is to timeshunt a fleet from just before the Xaros invasion to after the main swarm has moved on and then start working against them along with an alliance of other alien races. It's very Mass Effect at Home. But then it turns out one of the alien races from the Alliance are Ferengi but instead of being funny capitalists they're a race of clones led by Brains in jars with tentacles that suck the life force out of living creatures, and then the humans developed Procedurally generated clones to help get their numbers up and the NotFerengi, the Toth, want that tech to have an infinite buffet. Also the Xaros are from another galaxy that hosed itself up with FTL tech and they want to ensure it never happens again, and the Kharesh are assholes who kind of wiped out all life in the galaxy in order to ascend to godhood. Oneo f them hosed up and wanted to do it again to get Super duper godhood and got sealed and became Malal. The sequel series get progressively better(?), including a civil war between the earth government trying to play good with the Not!citadel while an alien race there tries to conquer human colony worlds and the Ibarra Nations, a nation of Procies who worship the granddaughter of the scientist the alien probe worked with and they're all vaguely basque themed. Then Celtic themed aliens show up and in the midst of stealing an artifact to help fight them, the main character of that series wakes up the Geist, a race of space alien space ghosts who want to harvest souls and wake up Malal. Also in the meantime, NOT CMDR SHEPHERD is running a human colony in another galaxy fighting the Taiidan from Homeworld. It's intensely stupid.
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May 21, 2025 20:43
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Fivemarks posted:I'm considering doing a quick summary of a like 20+ book franchise of Kindle slop Mil Sci-fi called The Ember War, and oh boy is it bad but also simultaneously "no gently caress it he's trying to cook" sometimes. Oh God, that just reminded me of some series I read one of in the early- to mid-80s, I cannot remember the name of it, but it was utter garbage. The heroic American special unit that was fighting the Russians literally had mech suits of pure movie magic-tech, the kind that never runs out of bullets for its machineguns and they fired these things called e-balls that were literally glowing balls of electrical energy that in one case blasted a hole in a (surfaced) Soviet submarine. I cannot remember the name of it for he life of me but that's probably a good thing. Edit: Oh poo poo, ChatGPT helped me find it. Neither of us are hallucinating these: https://glorioustrash.blogspot.com/2012/05/cads-1.html Phanatic fucked around with this message at 21:39 on May 21, 2025 |
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May 21, 2025 21:33
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Fivemarks posted:It's intensely stupid. And busy! Phanatic posted:Edit: Oh poo poo, ChatGPT helped me find it. Neither of us are hallucinating these: Oh, I remember it well. Though I never realized there was a series that came after the first book. I remember their high-tech napalm substitute was "LPF," short for Liquid Plastic Fire, which the author was so proud of he wouldn't shut up about it, and the climactic battle at the end that was apparently written after too many adjectives were used up and just described as "And then the unbelievable battle happened."
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May 22, 2025 04:10
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Enough time has passed since I read Sauve qui Peut à Kabul which I believe has been translated into English as Chaos in Kabul. The plot concerns Karzai and his role in the US-taliban negotiations. Both sides want a deal so the Americans can pull out, and the Taliban is willing to accept some democracy if the US-named leader is acceptable to them. Unfortunately, Karzai relies on staying in office to the extent that he'll kill whoever the Americans propose as his replacement. Their solution: kill Karzai. Our intrepid Austrian ubermench protagonist lands in Kabul and promptly makes contact with two South Africans. One is a merc who has been n Afghanistan so long he's basically pashtun (this description is used repeatedly) amd the other is a mechanic women with big tits who likes champagne. The merc meets with his contacts in Karzai's palace to determine his route and gets an explicit bacha bazi scene. He then sets up in an overwatch position with a recoilless rifle, gets a call from his contact that Karzai is in the second car, kills a bodyguard on overwatch, and then blows up the car... only to learn that his contact lied, and Karzai lives and is out for revenge. But neither he nor the protagonist can flee Kabul yet. In one of the more subtle scenes in the series the merc and our protagonist get visits from Afghan intelligence where they're induced to try and kill each other. The merc murders his mole's whole family for giving him bad intel and then meets with the protagonist, who kills him, but then has to pass on their choice of candidate to the Taliban. The candidate is Muhammad Muhammad. The Taliban apparently accepts this but there's a market chase and the Taliban guy gets boiled by Uzbeks. Also the South African woman gets arrested by the Afghans and our protagonist is so guilty about her ongoing rape that he can't bring himself to deflower a Pakistani businesswoman. In the end the protagonist warns Mohammed Mohammed about their fuckup who is exasperated but thanks him for the warning. Also he might get held hostage by a drug lord for a few days so the DEA can dismiss an indictment so the drug lord can again vacation in Dubai. I forget how he gets the South African woman released but he leaves on the plane thinking that he never ever wants to return to Afghanistan. Not one of the best books but it's an interesting portrayal of Karzai's "Mayor of Kabul" phase. There is also a scene where the south African lady blows the protagonist with a mouthful of champagne.
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May 28, 2025 18:47
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He must have a tiny dick for that to work.
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May 29, 2025 16:14
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A spectacular E: found it, Force of Eagles by Richard Herman. The Kindle version has the Warner Bros style intro 'Please note this book is from the 1990s when social attitudes were very different, and smartphones were not ubiquitous.' A US base near Iran is overrun at the end of some Tanker War gone wrong conflict. 300 staff of this airbase were captured during an Iranian air raid, and 5 years later remain captives on this airbase which is now Iranian territory. Their interrogations and torture are described throughout, with repeated reference to the rape of the one female soldier captured. Now, the US is going to rescue them - Credible Sport/Entebbe is put together, with many C-130s, F-15Cs and Es, and an AC-130. In the planning stage, an author insert USAF intelligence officer is driving a bar floozie home. Suddenly, Iranian intelligence agents in flyover country ambush his jeep. Luckily their European sedan can't go off road. The raid and escape is prolonged. Highlights include: - Rangers using SAWs as tail guns to harass MiGs or F14s who have closed to gun range on the C-130s tail. - The airbase's aptured doctor is raped in the control tower with this broadcast over the camp's PA, by a Iranian who is solely employed as a rapist and whose belly is described more than some of the main characters are. - The control tower above being bombed by the US deliberately to put the doc out of his misery, as he is unrescuable. (Possibly a punctured appendix?) - One of the F-15C pilots has to land in either the airbase, or the middle of the desert, to repair his aircraft, then takes off again. The F-15E is the best 15. Its WSO work is described in great detail throughout the battle. The name was something like Strike of the Eagle. Nutapii fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Jun 7, 2025 |
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Jun 5, 2025 18:59
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Another Texas secession book, because you've all forced my hand. It's the near future of 30 years ago. The ever-expanding Soviet sphere of influence has basically embitchified all of Western Europe and caused the cowards in Washington DC to agree to restrictive arms-control treaties as to not antagonize the Russians.* Texan politicians see this as their moment to declare independence in protest. Somehow, this does not cause a civil war, because I guess the US government is just tired. The nascent Republic of Texas declines to host a huge Soviet fleet on its round-the-world Texas guts the Soviet fleet but is lost in the process, and they could have just left the Alamo analogies make themselves, but no, they have to do it for you. That's The Ayes of Texas by Daniel D Cruz. There are two more books in this series, focusing on the son of the deceased dude from the first one, but I can't bring myself to read them. *Side note: it is amazing the consistency of this genre to have members of civil government be milquetoast Quislings who hate the US military for no given reason.
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Jun 7, 2025 23:54
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Space Battleship
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Jun 8, 2025 00:18
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Madurai posted:, who has been secretly refitting the museum battleship Texas into a nuclear-powered, particle-beam armed monster, decides to single-handedly defend Padre Island from the Reds. (Yes, by himself. Texas is controlled from a cockpit deep in the hull by one operator. There was a scene like this in Use of Weapons by Ian M. Banks but I'm just gonna predict that that one's a much better book.
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Jun 8, 2025 05:22
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