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fookolt posted:Is that spoilered bit hyperbole or are you being serious? I don't know which answer would make me want to read the book more or less. He's being totally serious. Make of that what you will. As for my take, On Basilisk Station is a pretty good book. Honor's a little smug, but otherwise it's a decent read with well thought out action. Around about Fields of Dishonor (book four) things start to go off the rails with Honor being better at everything than anyone else. By the time Weber got to At All Costs I was hanging on for just one reason, that Honor was being set up as an Admiral Nelson analogue and with Space Trafalgar on the horizon, by all rights Honor should die and make the universe a less Mary Suish place. But no, Weber didn't have the guts to kill his cash cow, so someone else died in Honor's place and I was out. If you've got fuckin' Rob S. Pierre as a character, another character as the clear Napoleon counterpart, and your main character is clearly Lord Nelson then by God you kill Nelson at Trafalgar! With that last betrayal I simply couldn't carry on. gently caress Honor Harrington and gently caress all Mary Sues, of whom Honor is the worst I've ever seen. 
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Dec 9, 2013 19:03
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fookolt posted:Is that spoilered bit hyperbole or are you being serious? I don't know which answer would make me want to read the book more or less. It's all true. I love the hell out of the Honor Harrington books, but she's a total Mary Sue. They're great fun, and I'll put "egregious Mary Sue" over "space zombie Al Capone" for my stupid thing to put up with in a story, but if it turns you off then don't go for it. There's other books out there.
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Dec 9, 2013 19:06
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jng2058 posted:gently caress Honor Harrington and gently caress all Mary Sues, of whom Honor is the worst I've ever seen. Jenetta Carver tops Honor Harrington easily, with the added 'bonus' of being turned on by pain and possibly immortal. snooman fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Dec 9, 2013 |
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Dec 9, 2013 19:07
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fookolt posted:Is that spoilered bit hyperbole or are you being serious? I don't know which answer would make me want to read the book more or less. It's not hyperbole. The first book or two are serviceable, then it... just disappears into the Mary Sue Singularity.
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Dec 9, 2013 19:58
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fookolt posted:Is that spoilered bit hyperbole or are you being serious? I don't know which answer would make me want to read the book more or less. I'd say he's significantly downplaying and understating things, actually.
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Dec 9, 2013 20:10
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snooman posted:Jenetta Carver tops Honor Harrington easily, with the added 'bonus' of being turned on by pain and possibly immortal. Amend to "that I've actually read" then. Where's Carver from so I can avoid her like the plague?
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Dec 9, 2013 20:19
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mllaneza posted:Glen Cook has war in space stuff. The Dragon Never Sleeps has some beautiful battles in it, you just can't go wrong with 250-tonne antimatter shells. It qualifies as Roman-legions-in-space too. Passage at Arms is a love letter to Das Boot and Run Silent, Run Deep. There's a lower proportion of spaceships blowing up in the Shadowline/Starfishers trilogy, but read those too. Shadowline is mostly mercenary wars in the far future. The next two are more military intelligence missions gone wrong. He put a couple of stories from that setting in his new collection Winter's Dreams, which also has some very good dying earth swords and sorcery. For another opinion, I can STRONGLY recommend Passage At Arms, it is truly an excellent book which takes everything fascinating, claustrophobic, and tense from submarine warfare and adds in the awesomeness of space warfare. Pretty good characterization and excellent scibabble. Somewhat less so but still highly recommended would be The Dragon Never Sleeps. Its actually one large book that was made with almost a trilogy worth of material, so it is refreshingly stripped-down and fast-moving. I actually didn't know Glen Cook could write novels at this level of interest and complexity. They are far from perfect, but I find them to be excellent. That being said, I found Starfishers to be laughably bad.
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Dec 9, 2013 21:11
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jng2058 posted:Amend to "that I've actually read" then. Where's Carver from so I can avoid her like the plague? Thomas DePrima's A Galaxy Unknown series. Apparently he's considering leaving Amazon now, stemming from Amazon's response to a review that indirectly accused him of plagiarizing David Weber. I kind of feel sorry for the guy but the books are pretty bad.
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Dec 9, 2013 21:49
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snooman posted:Apparently he's considering leaving Amazon now, stemming from Amazon's response to a review that indirectly accused him of plagiarizing David Weber. Tell me more... quote:The purple prose, needless use of 5 dollar words,and sentences like this one "Numerous items of limited pecuniary value stirred a vast reservoir of happy memories and stimulated her lachrymal glands beyond her control." fritz fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Dec 11, 2013 |
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Dec 11, 2013 01:23
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That sentence is hosed.
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Dec 11, 2013 01:29
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Fallom posted:That sentence is hosed. But his characters aren't! quote:
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Dec 11, 2013 01:31
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quote:Numerous items of limited pecuniary value stirred a vast reservoir of happy memories and stimulated her lachrymal glands beyond her control. For some reason he also specifies the height of nearly every character that is mentioned.
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Dec 11, 2013 18:01
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A Galaxy Unknown posted:A young ensign, recently graduated from the Northern Hemisphere Space Academy, is wakened abruptly in the middle of the night by alarms, flashing lights, and dire messages to abandon ship. The petite blonde pulls on some clothes and races through the spaceship in a desperate search for an available life pod-- but it appears all have already departed. This is the best thing.
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Dec 11, 2013 18:41
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noice
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Dec 13, 2013 14:19
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So after talking a long break from reading, I'm looking for some of the best books in the genre to start in on. Any suggestions?
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Dec 13, 2013 17:08
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Sneaky Fast posted:So after talking a long break from reading, I'm looking for some of the best books in the genre to start in on. Any suggestions? If you're looking for Real Literary Quality try Iain Banks (Player of Games is a great place to start with the Culture). Alternatively, though I still haven't read it, everyone in the SF/F community is agog over Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice.
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Dec 13, 2013 17:11
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Sneaky Fast posted:So after talking a long break from reading, I'm looking for some of the best books in the genre to start in on. Any suggestions? The Deathstalker series by Simon R. Green http://www.amazon.com/Deathstalker-1-Simon-R-Green-ebook/dp/B005HG583G/  A little campy maybe but I thought it was awesome vOv
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Dec 13, 2013 17:57
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Danith posted:The Deathstalker series by Simon R. Green http://www.amazon.com/Deathstalker-1-Simon-R-Green-ebook/dp/B005HG583G/ Just make sure to stop after the first book. What happens is you keep reading, and then at some point you realize Green's writing the same book again and again and again and just turning the volume knob up slightly each time...
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Dec 13, 2013 23:50
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Simon Green is a case of good ideas combined with lovely execution in a way that makes him drat near unreadable, imo.
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Dec 14, 2013 00:19
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I loved all the books 
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Dec 14, 2013 02:28
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Simon Green has only ever written one book, he just used different names/nouns in his Mad Libs draft. If you liked one book, you'll like every book, as long as you can deal with reading literally the exact same character description paragraph whenever a recurring character shows up.
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Dec 14, 2013 02:45
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Piell posted:Simon Green has only ever written one book, he just used different names/nouns in his Mad Libs draft. If you liked one book, you'll like every book, as long as you can deal with reading literally the exact same character description paragraph whenever a recurring character shows up. Hey, I can never get enough from evil guys monologuing until they inevitably get killed off. Sometimes by monologuing too long. Also Blue Moon Rising is the best book ever (go read it), I liked it even more than his Deathstalker books, which come a close second by my book. His Nightside-books are good, too. But like Blue Moon Rising it's not exactly space opera. Back to Deathstalker, as someone who read all the books in this series, it is astonishingly good and full of creative and often disturbing ideas. It's often quite a bit tongue-in-cheek, though. Like all his works you need a sometimes robust sense of humor to enjoy his stories.
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Dec 15, 2013 13:51
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General Battuta posted:Alternatively, though I still haven't read it, everyone in the SF/F community is agog over Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. Sadly the ending was pretty average, didn't fill me with confidence that the author can keep up with herself for the sequel.
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Dec 15, 2013 14:41
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What are some of the space operas along the lines of the Amory Wars? Except in book form.
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Dec 16, 2013 02:44
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tonberrytoby posted:I just read this. It was very good. Defiantly inspired by Banks. I really liked it but would rather that was it. Ambiguity is a better outcome than a dead-horse flogged for another three to eight books.
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Dec 16, 2013 10:38
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The Kindle Sci-Fi Daily Deal today is Pirates of the Outrigger Rift. The description sounds like it could be a fun read - has anyone here read it, and if so, would you recommend it?
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Dec 16, 2013 19:17
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Just read a book by R.M. Meluch that I picked up at a Salvation Army, what is the general opinion on him as a writer? Fake Edit: Thanks for the earlier suggestions they look good.
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Dec 17, 2013 02:58
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I read the first couple of her (that's Rebecca M. Meluch, btw) Tour of the Merrimac books. I'm not a fan. I find the whole "Roman Empire in Space" conceit to be incredibly lazy writing. I mean, yes, a lot of Space Empires in fiction are the Roman Empire with the serial numbers filed off. Asimov's Foundation books were based on Gibbons' "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", at least to start. But Meluch's idea that the Roman Empire hid throughout American history and then emerged once humanity made it into the stars to oppose Space America? That's pretty dumb. The idea that they'd literally pick up where they left off with everyone speaking Latin, wearing Roman armor and wielding swords? That's mind-numbingly dumb. I hate Weber doing a point-for-point remake of the Napoleonic Wars but at least he had the brains to rename some poo poo. Meleuch can't even be bothered to do that. It's Space America vs Space Rome and as far as I can tell, no one else matters. 
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Dec 17, 2013 04:17
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jng2058 posted:But Meluch's idea that the Roman Empire hid throughout American history and then emerged once humanity made it into the stars to oppose Space America? Haha, what? That's pretty amazing in the realm of weird ideas.
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Dec 17, 2013 04:33
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Chairman Capone posted:Haha, what? That's pretty amazing in the realm of weird ideas. Ah, and THEN all of humanity is under attack by telepathic space bugs. Can Space Rome and Space America unite to fight off the alien menace? No one cares.
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Dec 17, 2013 04:41
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coyo7e posted:Bonus points for difficulty: it's a zombie versus jarheads book where the only survivors hole up on the British Isles. They go to Africa to fight zombies, who they constantly refer to as "Zulus". I know this post is like a week old but Zulu is Z in the NATO phonetic alphabet. It's definitely a bit insensitive, but that also fits the characters.
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Dec 18, 2013 16:13
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Yeah everybody knows that however, there's a reason they don't call them that basically in any other zombie movies/books/comics.
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Dec 18, 2013 18:50
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coyo7e posted:Yeah everybody knows that however, there's a reason they don't call them that basically in any other zombie movies/books/comics. Particularly the ones set in Africa and titled 'Mogadishu of the Dead'.
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Dec 18, 2013 19:56
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Darth Walrus posted:Particularly the ones set in Africa and titled 'Mogadishu of the Dead'.
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Dec 19, 2013 00:11
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jng2058 posted:I hate Weber doing a point-for-point remake of the Napoleonic Wars but at least he had the brains to rename some poo poo. Truly, Rob S. Pierre, Chairman of the Committee of Public Safety, is the most clever of renames. You know he loving high-fived like everyone the day he wrote that one, like YEAH! gently caress! THIS OWNS! LOOK AT HOW CLEVER THIS IS! I'll say this, at least. Your description of Meluch at least has taught me that as ridiculous as Weber got, it can get worse! And I generally like the "[historical thing] in space" concept, but uh, do it right, geez. Tangentially, I had a hunch that Weber's "PD" dating scheme would oh-so-coincidentally line up with the CPS taking power in 1793PD but in fairness to him, he didn't go quite that far. I wonder if he just didn't think about it. 
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Dec 19, 2013 18:03
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Psion posted:Truly, Rob S. Pierre, Chairman of the Committee of Public Safety, is the most clever of renames. You know he loving high-fived like everyone the day he wrote that one, like YEAH! gently caress! THIS OWNS! LOOK AT HOW CLEVER THIS IS! I said "some". I've called out Rob S. Pierre as bullshit myself. But at least "The Star Kingdom of Manticore" and "The People's Republic of Haven" beats "Space Romans" and "Space Americans".
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Dec 19, 2013 18:33
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I mostly liked Weber's world building. Well, compared to his character writing it's easy to look good I guess  Maybe I'd be less down on Honor if her support cast didn't feel so loving superfluous. I'm struggling to remember any of them that weren't always back home/on some other ship. Compare to David Drake's RCN novels - the protagonist is also really good at what he does, but he is surrounded with fairly interesting characters with different important skillsets, and occasionally they throw in a point about it actually being kind of lovely that he as Captain is always tempted to take over the missileer's job to micromanage/do it better. Sure these other guys weren't all particularly three-dimensional but at least it was something! And I did kinda enjoy the Hoggs/Tovera interactions 
Psykmoe fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Dec 19, 2013 |
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Dec 19, 2013 21:35
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The only supporting character Weber did anything interesting with died as the Honor-surrogate when he chickened out of killing her, so, yeah pretty much. Drake's RCN series goes to some length to let you know Daniel is not, in fact, perfect - sure, he is really good as a fighting captain (not the only skill you need in the RCN - or the RN it takes a lot of cues from) but I can name half a dozen characters Drake made sure to let you know are relevant to that success. I mean tell me the name of the chief engineer on any of Honor's ships, and why they're relevant. How many even got names? One? Of course when one of the running themes of the series is the strength of having a family, it's no surprise that an ensemble group is effective. And yeah, Hogg and Tovera are pretty great.
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Dec 20, 2013 04:43
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And then there's the part where Tovera fucks a dinosaur 
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Dec 20, 2013 05:56
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Velius posted:Quoting myself from three years ago, because it's still true. Mil Sci-fi is a tough genre to find decent stuff. I know this is from a page ago but I recently found a couple books that were OK. Some of the political stuff was a little over the top (though I think it was on purpose), but if you just want a fun book with explosions they aren't too bad. Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos This one starts off strong(ish) and gets worse the further it goes along, though it never gets out and out bad.Kid enlists to get out of the slums, ends up putting down riots in the same kind of slums he came from. Second half goes weird with aliens though. Poor Man's Fight by Elliot Kay Starts off weaker than the end of the book(but isn't bad), gets better as it goes along. Kid enlists because he botches some exit exams that determine how much money he owes the state after graduation and he can't earn a living any other way. Stereotypical boot camp scenes ensue. poo poo happens and it turns into Die Hard in space in the second half of the book. Has a really well done pirate story arc that it switches to occasionally to cover your ships with lasers quotient. Both books are fun, but definitely not literature by any stretch of the imagination. Poor Man's Fight is (in my opinion) the better of the two just because the action ramps up as the book goes along instead of starting off strong and just kinda turning meh like Terms of Enlistment does.
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Dec 20, 2013 07:24
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