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M'lady.
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Aug 21, 2014 17:13
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The Lone Badger posted:The second book is the most Randian of the trilogy, but it's not like the third one is a lot better than the first. The finale of the third book delves into literal objectivism.
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Aug 24, 2014 15:04
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I managed to finish Blindsight on the eve of Echopraxia's release. Now I find myself wishing I had waited to finish it cause I'm aching to dive into Echopraxia! How's Watts' Rifters series?
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Aug 26, 2014 06:09
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apophenium posted:I managed to finish Blindsight on the eve of Echopraxia's release. Now I find myself wishing I had waited to finish it cause I'm aching to dive into Echopraxia! How's Watts' Rifters series? Really great first book, weaker follow-up, pretty dire third entry.
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Aug 26, 2014 06:45
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Am I the only one on these forums that didn't like Blindsight? Maybe I'm not into "hard" sci-fi, but I felt it was a little too introspective/obtuse, and the advances in humanity somehow made it so I couldn't relate to the characters at all. I finished the book, but didn't really enjoy it at all.
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Aug 26, 2014 19:13
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syphon posted:Am I the only one on these forums that didn't like Blindsight? Maybe I'm not into "hard" sci-fi, but I felt it was a little too introspective/obtuse, and the advances in humanity somehow made it so I couldn't relate to the characters at all. I finished the book, but didn't really enjoy it at all. I have little interest in reading it. I'm sure it's good but I'm also sure it's really depressing.
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Aug 26, 2014 19:16
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There's nothing wrong with that opinion. It's a cold book with slippery, detached, inhuman characters.
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Aug 26, 2014 19:24
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I have little interest in reading it. I'm sure it's good but I'm also sure it's really depressing. It's not really depressing, not at all in the same league as Starfish/Rifters trilogy.
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Aug 26, 2014 19:26
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I would say it really is! Less repulsive than Behemoth but not less bleak.
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Aug 26, 2014 19:36
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syphon posted:Am I the only one on these forums that didn't like Blindsight? Maybe I'm not into "hard" sci-fi, but I felt it was a little too introspective/obtuse, and the advances in humanity somehow made it so I couldn't relate to the characters at all. I finished the book, but didn't really enjoy it at all. I got about a third of the way through, but gradually drifted away because of the sheer degree to which I did not care about what happened to any of the characters. I loved Starfish, though.
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Aug 26, 2014 22:13
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PupsOfWar posted:I got about a third of the way through, but gradually drifted away because of the sheer degree to which I did not care about what happened to any of the characters. Definitely, the characters are only there to give Watts a reason to explore cool ideas (topology, space, aliens, vampires in space), not to be real characters. I guess that's why I didn't think Blindsight was very depressing. It's kind of dark, foreboding sci fi, but I didn't feel much emotion besides "hmm, cool idea"
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Aug 26, 2014 22:35
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RVProfootballer posted:Definitely, the characters are only there to give Watts a reason to explore cool ideas (topology, space, aliens, vampires in space), not to be real characters. I guess that's why I didn't think Blindsight was very depressing. It's kind of dark, foreboding sci fi, but I didn't feel much emotion besides "hmm, cool idea" yeah, you could almost say he was taking a Stephen Baxter type approach, but with transhumanism and biology rather than theoretical astrophysics and cosmology. I do think Watts is a much better prose stylist and character writer than Baxter and most of his traditional Hard Sci-fi ilk, it's just that the moody, atmospheric horror stuff he does is better for showing this off than wham-bam high-concept transhuman space opera.
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Aug 26, 2014 23:01
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I just finished "The Forever War" and thoroughly enjoyed it. I am visiting this thread for the first time in an effort to find some more good stuff like it. Going to start from page 1 now, but I just wanted to post my reaction to the book first because 
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Aug 29, 2014 04:52
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I read the first 3 books in the Old Man's War series after I finished The Forever War and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Different tone but basically space marines killing aliens.
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Aug 29, 2014 05:06
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Nice, that looks very interesting. It's down to either that or Asimov's Foundation.
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Aug 29, 2014 05:14
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I love Foundation, it's one of my favorite book series of all times and one of the few books I reread every so often, but I feel I should say it's not a whole lot like Forever War.
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Aug 29, 2014 05:16
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Yeah I gathered that from the synopsis I read, but it kept popping up in my queries into the genre as a classic so I figured I can't go wrong with it.
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Aug 29, 2014 05:19
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PyPy posted:Yeah I gathered that from the synopsis I read, but it kept popping up in my queries into the genre as a classic so I figured I can't go wrong with it. It's very 1940s. May seem wierd if you haven't read a lot of old SF.
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Aug 29, 2014 06:42
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PupsOfWar posted:Weber-wise, I just miss the olden days of swashbuckling fun with books like Honor Among Enemies. I know I'm doing minor post-necromancy here, but the way I've dealt with it is to consider anything after Cerberus/Hell to be an entirely new series, just with the same characters. Yes, the shift in scale and plot to political plotting/vast fleets hammering each other into scrap sucked, given that the swashbuckling aspect of it was what brought me into the series, but once it was clear Weber wasn't going to follow his original idea to kill Honor off, I can't work up too much annoyance... And, admittedly, partly that has to do with the fact that Honor is reaping her just reward for all the unmitigated poo poo she was forced through from Basilisk onwards. Yeah, she's Mary Sue-ish, but not annoyingly so, at least to me. Weber is walking a very, very fine line there, though, and I can definitely see why someone would give up on the series entirely following In Enemy Hands/Echoes of Honor, once the shift kicks off and goes over the deep end completely. At this point, breaking her again would just seem implausible, without loving with far too many established characters into the bargain... So I can't actually blame Weber for not even trying. Besides, these are adventure books more than anything else, and part of that is... well, the designated Good Guys winning. Not to mention that the Crown of Slaves and Saganami Island spinoffs more than fill the vacancies that've been left in the main line books, with the added bonus of having other authors to help Weber not wander too far afield.  Or maybe I just have an abnormally high tolerance for bullshit in my guilty pleasures. TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Sep 2, 2014 |
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Sep 2, 2014 08:07
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TLM3101 posted:And, admittedly, partly that has to do with the fact that Honor is reaping her just reward for all the unmitigated poo poo she was forced through from Basilisk onwards. Yeah, she's Mary Sue-ish, but not annoyingly so, at least to me. Weber is walking a very, very fine line there, though, and I can definitely see why someone would give up on the series entirely following In Enemy Hands/Echoes of Honor, once the shift kicks off and goes over the deep end completely. At this point, breaking her again would just seem implausible, without loving with far too many established characters into the bargain... So I can't actually blame Weber for not even trying. Honor Harrington is the best gun duelist and the best sword duelist and has a magic talking cat and gets to eat whatever she wants without getting fat and a duchess and the only female noble on Grayson and has a mechanical arm with a gun in it and in a polygamist relationship and she thought she was ugly but really she was the prettiest and wins all the battles. She is the Mariest Sue.
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Sep 2, 2014 08:29
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Piell posted:Honor Harrington is the best gun duelist and the best sword duelist and has a magic talking cat and gets to eat whatever she wants without getting fat and a duchess and the only female noble on Grayson and has a mechanical arm with a gun in it and in a polygamist relationship and she thought she was ugly but really she was the prettiest and wins all the battles. Then we're operating from different definitions of Mary Sue-ism. Throughout the series - or at least up until In Enemy Hands/Echoes - she's consistently shown as having to work, and work drat hard, for her accomplishments. Nothing she does comes easy to her, and she isn't blase about the price she ( and others ) have to pay for their victories. Granted, that isn't emphasized nearly enough, and like I already said, yes, sure, she definitely is Mary Sue-ish. But not nearly the most obnoxious and/or irritating representative of the type. Part of it is also that, due to the nature of the series, she kind of has to be a self-insert/wishfulfillment character. The series is " e: Just to be clear, I am by no means making the argument that the series is ( somehow ) great literature, or that Honor Harrington is a realistic character, because she's clearly not, and it's clearly not. I am, however, making the point that I've seen it done far worse and less engaging (see: Joshua Calvert ), and that the series is better than one might suppose. TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 11:35 on Sep 2, 2014 |
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Sep 2, 2014 10:59
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woop doop comin' on back Anyway, another thing that has really driven this Honorverse thing downhill has gotta be the antagonist situation. Weber replaced one group of Evil Cartoon Liberals with a second group of Evil Cartoon Liberals, then replaced this group with a more sympathetic and capable little cabal of pals, closely analogous to the protagonist ensemble. The latter of these moves sounds like a good idea on paper, but in retrospect it seems like he didn't really do enough with the whole Worthy Opponent/Tragic Conflict thing before hastening to team everybody up against yet a third group of Evil Cartoon Liberals. Missed opportunities everywhere during that period. I had to roll my eyes when one of the two hyper-competent Havenite admirals who'd been set up as a real equal to Honor (Giscard) was casually used as target practice for yet another game-breaking Manticoran superweapon. Waste of a good chance for a kickin' rad set-piece battle. Then her climactic showdown with Tourville was ruined by the aforementioned shift in scale, as it was settled almost purely by material and happenstance. Obviously that's something that would probably be different if Weber had gone through with his original plan and had Honor die during that showdown. Tourville might've then ended up as the grand alliance's senior fleet commander during the next series, meaning that Honor's kids might have had to serve with/under him, which might have been interesting. In any case, I guess "there will always be another group of Evil Cartoon Liberals" is just the rules of the road when you read Baen, so whatever. Personally I found the Legislaturists' "poo poo guys what do we do about this tiger we are riding?" schtick the most interesting of the antagonist batches we've had so far and kinda wish they had stuck around a bit longer. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 12:08 on Sep 2, 2014 |
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Sep 2, 2014 11:58
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TLM3101 posted:Part of it is also that, due to the nature of the series, she kind of has to be a self-insert/wishfulfillment character. The series is " Sounds like she's a pretty bad Mary Sue then, doesn't it?
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Sep 2, 2014 11:59
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PupsOfWar posted:woop doop comin' on back Yeah, this is something I'll agree with without reservation. It seems like Weber screwed the pooch quite thoroughly when he decided to not follow through on his original idea to get Honor out of the way and let her kids take over, and now he's floundering around. Pretty much everything since Echoes has suffered from a severe case of shoehorning everything into 'just so' scenarios to get the plot to where it needs to go... Which isn't necessarily a problem, if it's done well. Which it manifestly isn't in this case, hence all the griping. And the less said about the Manticoran superweapons the better. It was fun to see - and even logical to see - during Ashes of Victory, where it had been set up pretty nicely, but once is enough. It's gotten quite ridiculous since. PupsOfWar posted:In any case, I guess "there will always be another group of Evil Cartoon Liberals" is just the rules of the road when you read Baen, so whatever. Well, we have the Solarian Apparatchiks now to fill the same role... Though the Comittee of Public Safety had the same issues. And to give Weber his due, he has made an effort to make their position logically consistent, even if it's dumb as hell. I'm not sure I can agree with the "Evil Cartoon Liberals" part, though, simply due to the fact that Weber has gone out of his way to paint both extreme conservatives and liberals as misguided and dumb ( see: Baron High Ridge and the Conservative Association staying in power through outright bribery, blackmail and vote-buying for pet causes, Kolokoltsov and his clique being conservative* as hell, etc. ). If anything, Weber seems to be rather aggressively centrist in his views politically... And having a pronounced liberal bent in others. Whatever else you can say about the man, he's gone out of his way to be aggressively for gender equality throughout the series, for instance, even if I'll be the first to admit that he falls into a lot of the predictable traps along the way. * Of course, Kolokoltsov & Co. are conservative in the 'proper' useage of the word: They want to keep things just the way they are and change is something to be resisted at all costs. TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 12:40 on Sep 2, 2014 |
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Sep 2, 2014 12:38
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Piell posted:Honor Harrington is the best gun duelist and the best sword duelist and has a magic talking cat and gets to eat whatever she wants without getting fat and a duchess and the only female noble on Grayson and has a mechanical arm with a gun in it and in a polygamist relationship and she thought she was ugly but really she was the prettiest and wins all the battles. You haven't met Jenetta Carver, who once had test anxiety and is now effectively immortal, turned on by pain and cloned a few times. She also designed a video game. No idea if pages of sign language has made it into the series.
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Sep 2, 2014 19:25
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Piell posted:Honor Harrington is the best gun duelist and the best sword duelist and has a magic talking cat and gets to eat whatever she wants without getting fat and a duchess and the only female noble on Grayson and has a mechanical arm with a gun in it and in a polygamist relationship and she thought she was ugly but really she was the prettiest and wins all the battles. This guy gets it. Reading that series was like injecting industrial caulk into my frontal lobe. Run Honor Harrington through this test and she drat near breaks it: http://www.springhole.net/writing/marysue.htm TLM3101 posted:
Plenty of space operas have done Boy's/Girl's Own Adventures and still avoided the Mary Sue trap. I mean, hell, there are acres of wooden-ships-and-iron-men novels that form the base model for the Honor Harrington books, and those books are absolutely full of flawed protagonists and enemies that don't always wilt away at the slightest brush with the protagonists' superior moral force. Compare with, say, Horatio Hornblower, or Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Or, hell, if you want to compare with pure space-wish-fulfillment novels, try something like Scalzi's Old Man's War (where the protagonist has a mental breakdown because he realizes he's fighting in pointless wars for the wrong causes), or hell, even something like Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy or Colin Greenland's Harm's Way -- novels that might be wish-fulfillment but that have some small degree of depth and protagonists who sometimes make mistakes. David Weber is a Bad. A bad bad bad. Do not read. Ever. If you are confronted by a David Weber, run away. If you cannot run away, consider blinding yourself, if possibly only temporarily.
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Sep 2, 2014 19:57
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TLM3101 posted:
Well, I'll agree that Weber is a good distance leftward of the average lovely Baen Writer, if still probably rightish overall. Certainly he has to be kinda centrist-ish in order to work with both Flint and Ringo, who probably could not work together without exploding. I'd probably peg him as a libertarian with a weird monarchist fetish, particularly if you buy that Zilwicki is is author-insert. But when you look at the factions that have held main, tangible antagonist status: The Legislaturists were a bloated welfare state where employment dynamics had resolved into a dystopian caste-system. The Committee For Public Safety were rabid leftist militants hiding behind populist rhetoric in order to indulge their individual brands of sociopathy. The Solarians are a naive, hegemonistic federation - which Weber has compared to the U.N. - whose naivete and bleeding heart make it vulnerable to manipulation by ancient cabals and conspiracies like It's like a role-call of all the right wing's most neurotic New World Order fears. Whereas the Evil Cartoon Conservatives like High Ridge's government and the Masadans (who, as Evil Cartoon Muslims, could be used in a similarly heavy-handed way for either liberal or conservative author tracts) tend to be secondary or incidental antagonists. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Sep 3, 2014 |
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Sep 3, 2014 00:19
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PupsOfWar posted:I'd probably peg him as a libertarian with a weird monarchist fetish, particularly if you buy that Zilwicki is is author-insert. See also Jerry Pournelle, whose ideal space opera government (the First Empire from the Mote/CoDominium books) was a libertarian monarchist military dictatorship theocracy.
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Sep 3, 2014 01:25
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PupsOfWar posted:Well, I'll agree that Weber is a good distance leftward of the average lovely Baen Writer, if still probably rightish overall. I'm not buying that he's a libertarian either... for this reason: Cauldron of Ghosts posted:When it came to this issue, at least, the seccy quarters of Mesa were as close as humanity had ever gotten to untrammeled libertarianism. And if that state of affairs was impossible to distinguish from one in which crime lords ran the show, so much the worse for libertarianism. Even if he's working with Eric Flint on the Crown of Slaves spin-offs, I don't quite see a committed libertarian letting a line that draws an unfavourable comparison between libertarianism and outright mafia-rule. I'm not going to argue with you on the depiction of the Legislaturalists, but I'm going to have to disagree when it comes to both the Committee of Public Safety and the Solarians. The Committee - for all they were shown as bloodthirsty bastards - are explicitly shown to be doing what is ( eventually ) held as a necessary thing. Which, considering that it's the French Revolution in space has some rather interesting implications. Pierre and even St.Just are shown to be far more nuanced when it comes to motives than the Legislaturalists were portrayed as ( Not that this takes much effort, to be sure ). As for the Solarians, the absolutely last thing I would describe them as is being run by people with a tendency towards "naivete and bleeding heart" policies. If anything, the Mandarins are cynical as gently caress and completely ruthless when it comes to Realpolitik. Their problem is that they're conservatives operating from a deeply flawed set of assumptions and are corrupt as gently caress, not that they're being "too nice" or "weak liberals". And finally, the Masadans. Granted, it's hard to really tell what they're supposed to be, given how sketchily their theology is described, but for what it's worth, I personally always got a vibe of them being Evil Cartoon Mormons, not Muslims. Especially since they're a fundamentalist splinter of the Grayson Church, which is quite down with the Jesus. Kind of like the split between the LDS and, well, these guys. I don't know why, maybe it's the fact that the Graysons hold Country and Western as classical music... And that Weber is really really bad at doing subtle. If he wanted Evil Cartoon Muslims, it'd be the mentioning the Prophet or Allah every fifth word instead of God.e: Cleaned up a bit due to posting on too little sleep. TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Sep 3, 2014 |
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Sep 3, 2014 02:47
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The very best Honor Harrington moment is when she shoots the space pirates in the face with the M1911a1 pistol that the space mormons gave her. Its so ridiculous and archaic.
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Sep 3, 2014 03:16
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TLM3101 posted:
Well, yeah, naturally, that is how you would describe Kolokoltsov and his ilk, but I'm talking about the Solarian population, their figurehead governments and soforth, who are presented as generic Good Western Liberals who, thanks to the magical powers of Political Correctness, Liberal Media Elites and Blind Idealism, can be made to support sinister ideologies and groups. Which is how many real conservatives view the Left: people who, thanks to the magical powers of Political Correctness, Liberal Media Elites and Blind Idealism, refuse to deal with Crime/The Reds/The Muslims sternly enough. The Mandarins are an Illuminati analog, while the League itself (the straightforward, physical threat) is generic Western liberalism gone horribly awry. And I think the Masadans are pretty obviously Space Muslims, with the Graysons as Space Mormons. He just doesn't have them use any Muslim terminology or have any Arabic cultural roots because that would be a bit on the nose for anyone who is less insane than Ringo/Kratmann. And because he probably wanted the Graysons to be Christian, so the Masadans had to be Christian for the religious schism to work. Masadan misogyny and zealotry is just too similar to the way Weber's peers use more explicit Space Muslims elsewhere, regardless of their nominal roots. If you want to get technical with it, the Masadans are probably more like weird retroactive pseudo-Jews than anything, considering that they reject Jesus and the rest of the New Testament. Anyway, Weber should be disqualified from authorship for unironic use of the term "sheeple" PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Sep 3, 2014 |
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Sep 3, 2014 05:40
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Azipod posted:The very best Honor Harrington moment is when she shoots the space pirates in the face with the M1911a1 pistol that the space mormons gave her. Its so ridiculous and archaic. I actually didn't mind this because the entire point of it was that it was so ridiculous and archaic that nobody even considered the possibility of a chemical-burning weapon. The ridiculous one is where she goes and wins her first Space Samurai Duel with practically no training.
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Sep 3, 2014 07:12
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PupsOfWar posted:Well, yeah, naturally, that is how you would describe Kolokoltsov and his ilk, but I'm talking about the Solarian population, their figurehead governments and soforth, who are presented as generic Good Western Liberals who, thanks to the magical powers of Political Correctness, Liberal Media Elites and Blind Idealism, can be made to support sinister ideologies and groups. Which is how many real conservatives view the Left: people who, thanks to the magical powers of Political Correctness, Liberal Media Elites and Blind Idealism, refuse to deal with Crime/The Reds/The Muslims sternly enough. I can definitely see how you could read it like that, but somehow, it doesn't seem convincing to me. While Weber does seem to have some fairly strong views on the how easily the general populace is, he isn't exactly singling out Solarians for special treatment in the "the general population is dumb and easily led". Both the Star Kingdom's population, not to mention the Havenites, have gotten hit with that particular brush. On the other hand, it does lead into the next point PupsOfWar posted:And I think the Masadans are pretty obviously Space Muslims, with the Graysons as Space Mormons. He just doesn't have them use any Muslim terminology or have any Arabic cultural roots because that would be a bit on the nose for anyone who is less insane than Ringo/Kratmann. And because he probably wanted the Graysons to be Christian, so the Masadans had to be Christian for the religious schism to work. Masadan misogyny and zealotry is just too similar to the way Weber's peers use more explicit Space Muslims elsewhere, regardless of their nominal roots. ... which is where I'm going to admit that I'm probably having difficulty with seeing this interpretation simply because I'm not an american and so I'm probably missing some cultural and contextual cues in the text. Again, I can certainly see reading the text the way you are, but it's just not the impression I'm getting from the books. If anything, I'm seeing the Masadans as a direct jab at fundamentalist religion in general, and the loonier far-right versions of christianity in particular. And to be perfectly honest the US has plenty of examples of loony, far-right christian nutbars ( which, to be fair, my country does as well, although they're not so open about it ), some of which have drifted fairly close to Masadan levels of misogyny ( e.g. the Quiverfull movement and the aforementioned FLDS* ). PupsOfWar posted:Anyway, Weber should be disqualified from authorship for unironic use of the term "sheeple" This, however, is true.  *Digression time! Actually, speaking of the FLDS, the library I work at received a free copy of the pronouncements of Warren Jeffs - sorry - The Lord Jesus Christ as related to and by Warren Jeffs in his new book, Jesus Christ Message to All Nations. It's the second, updated edition. And yes, Jesus is listed as the author. I'm keeping it on my desk simply because it's hilariously nutty, and makes for brilliant lunch-break reading. Apparently, for the low, low price of... I think fifteen dollars or something, you can recieve updates by snail-mail as they are revealed by Jesus himself to mr. Jeffs. It is exactly as  as it sounds.It's actually weirder than the loving Scientology claptrap that ends up crossing my desk, and that's saying something! TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 11:51 on Sep 3, 2014 |
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Sep 3, 2014 11:47
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Even without the Mary Sueishness and the politics, from this thread it sounds like Honor just combines the worst of the Star Wars EU (E: aka all of it ). Superweapons around every corner, each more and more unbelievably powerful. Stories going from an officer to a captain to an admiral... to an admiral of multiple fleets and specops commando and noble and war hero. Each conflict bigger and more impressive and each fleet more powerful than the last with like ten thousand Super Big Extra Star Destroyers. I don't know, it just seems like sci fi writers really let things get out of hand if they can't just let a story go once it's told.
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Sep 3, 2014 12:40
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Strategic Tea posted:Even without the Mary Sueishness and the politics, from this thread it sounds like Honor just combines the worst of the Star Wars EU (E: aka all of it Whoa now! I say! That's quite a charge to bring to the table!  Strategic Tea posted:Superweapons around every corner, each more and more unbelievably powerful. Stories going from an officer to a captain to an admiral... to an admiral of multiple fleets and specops commando and noble and war hero. Each conflict bigger and more impressive and each fleet more powerful than the last with like ten thousand Super Big Extra Star Destroyers. This, however, is pretty much the crux of the matter. It actually all works pretty reasonably... Up to a point. And then the wheels kind of come off the wagon. By his own admittance, Weber chickened out of ending the story where he originally had planned it, so everything after that has been, like you said, "gotta up the stakes, gotta up the stakes, more and cooler weapons, bigger fleets, bigger EVERYTHING!" Which is kind of sad, because there was a natural, perfect ending there, but whether due to sentimentality or avarice or both... He screwed the pooch. Royally. In full view of the public. With tv-crews and children present.
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Sep 3, 2014 12:59
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Strategic Tea posted:Stories going from an officer to a captain to an admiral... to an admiral of multiple fleets and specops commando and noble and war hero. Each conflict bigger and more impressive and each fleet more powerful than the last with like ten thousand Super Big Extra Star Destroyers. That's what happens if you have a long-running series with perfect protagonists that always win. Since the protagonists have no real flaws that would stand in their way, are liked by everyone not evil, and of course are always climbing up every ladder you have only a very narrow ledge to introduce strife - without adversity your only choice to create conflict again is by making the outside threat bigger than the one just solved last book. Compare it with series that actually feature complete characters like the Vorkosigan Saga or the already mentioned Aubrey/Maturin - you don't need to always make the threat bigger and badder, because you have a big and rich tapestry of directions and ways to introduce barriers and conflict for the heroes. Decius fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Sep 3, 2014 |
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Sep 3, 2014 13:40
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TLM3101 posted:Whoa now! I say! That's quite a charge to bring to the table! Yeah, really. The Star Wars EU is actually better than the Honor books. Well, at least some of it.
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Sep 3, 2014 14:56
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Strategic Tea posted:Even without the Mary Sueishness and the politics, from this thread it sounds like Honor just combines the worst of the Star Wars EU (E: aka all of it So I haven't read much EU stuff, but the superweapons are like ancient stuff that people stumble across, don't really understand, and then fight for, right? In the Honor books, I don't believe there's any of that, actually. The superweapons basically come from the good guy side in the biggest war in a really long time coming up with a ton of technological breakthroughs and then getting mass-produced. The problem is that the factions with the newly developed ships basically can't lose in a straight-up fight to the factions without them. The rest of what you said holds true, though.
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Sep 3, 2014 15:03
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Elyv posted:So I haven't read much EU stuff, but the superweapons are like ancient stuff that people stumble across, don't really understand, and then fight for, right? In the Honor books, I don't believe there's any of that, actually. The superweapons basically come from the good guy side in the biggest war in a really long time coming up with a ton of technological breakthroughs and then getting mass-produced. The problem is that the factions with the newly developed ships basically can't lose in a straight-up fight to the factions without them. Actually, Star Wars EU superweapons are cranked out by Imperial Scientists*. The other distinction - that Star Wars EU superweapons are one-off macguffins that change strategic situations but don't really change tactics, while Honorverse superweapons are mass-produced gamebreakers that make battles boring to read - definitely holds up, however. *nobody knows where such people come from, given the general scientific stagnation of the setting. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Sep 3, 2014 |
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Sep 3, 2014 15:52
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Chairman Capone posted:Yeah, really. On the other hand, Killiks.
TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Sep 3, 2014 |
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Sep 3, 2014 17:41
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