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WarLocke posted:Not sure if it qualifies as 'ancient astronauts' but Weber's Excalibur Alternative is about a 14th century English troops forced to fight for aliens. I feel like there's another story of a similar type that was about a Roman legion that gets abducted by aliens and made to fight for aliens. Possibly it's set in the same series because I think there was another story in that collection involving the Spanish Armada and aliens?
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Apr 26, 2015 19:30
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Chairman Capone posted:I feel like there's another story of a similar type that was about a Roman legion that gets abducted by aliens and made to fight for aliens. Possibly it's set in the same series because I think there was another story in that collection involving the Spanish Armada and aliens? I think there's a whole sub-genre about this kind of stuff. That wikipedia page mentions a David Drake book with a similar idea. Weber's was just the one that popped into my head because it was the first one I read. Or, well, second now that I think about it. I read W. Michael Gear's Starstrike first, but it's a bit far from an 'ancient astronaut' book.
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Apr 26, 2015 19:33
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WarLocke posted:I think there's a whole sub-genre about this kind of stuff. That wikipedia page mentions a David Drake book with a similar idea. Weber's was just the one that popped into my head because it was the first one I read. Has anyone ever written a funnier twist on this than Poul Anderson's The High Crusade? It's only been, what, 55 years...
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Apr 26, 2015 19:39
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WarLocke posted:Not sure if it qualifies as 'ancient astronauts' but Weber's Excalibur Alternative is about a 14th century English troops forced to fight for aliens. Oh that looks interesting, it's the third in the series *buys all three for a kindle spree*. 
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Apr 26, 2015 19:40
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Just Another Lurker posted:Oh that looks interesting, it's the third in the series *buys all three for a kindle spree*. Unless I am seriously misremembering, Excalibur Alternative was a one-off? VVV: Those are both good suggestions, but stop reading the Inheritance stuff after the third book (Entoverse is... not as good). WarLocke fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Apr 26, 2015 |
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Apr 26, 2015 19:52
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Internet Wizard posted:I'm on the lookout for some scifi, preferably milsf, that has ancient astronaut themes. Quality isn't necessarily a priority, so long as it isn't like, weird Ringo style stuff like child rape or reenacting Mogadishu with super soldiers or whatever. For MilSF, I guess Weber's Dahak/"Empire from the Ashes" series, starting with Mutineers' Moon. (You can get them here for free, under "Dahak series".) It's by no means MilSF, but my favourite ancient astronauts story is James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars. (The sequels get progressively loopier, though, so don't bother with those.)
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Apr 26, 2015 20:04
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WarLocke posted:Unless I am seriously misremembering, Excalibur Alternative was a one-off? Looks like they have repackaged three books under the "Ranks of Bronze Series" banner, 1 & 3 by Webber an #2 by Eric Flint.  Hobnob posted:It's by no means MilSF, but my favourite ancient astronauts story is James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars. (The sequels get progressively loopier, though, so don't bother with those.) Read Inherit The Stars years ago, a great little book... agree with you on the sequels as well.
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Apr 27, 2015 02:27
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Just Another Lurker posted:Looks like they have repackaged three books under the "Ranks of Bronze Series" banner, 1 & 3 by Webber an #2 by Eric Flint. Cool, something else to look up then. Excalibur Alternative isn't exactly Asimov but it was a fun read. And yeah, Inherit the Stars is pretty grounded (for what the plot/backstory is), I don't think the second and third books are exactly bad but the overall quality does droop as bit as it goes on. The fourth book is not that good and the fifth is a ham-handed attempt to tie up all the hanging plot points that really doesn't work IMO.
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Apr 27, 2015 02:41
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Chairman Capone posted:I feel like there's another story of a similar type that was about a Roman legion that gets abducted by aliens and made to fight for aliens. Possibly it's set in the same series because I think there was another story in that collection involving the Spanish Armada and aliens? It's the same universe the end part in the future talks about the Romans giving the terrans the hyperdrive and being willing to be sacrificed to the galactics if it'd save earth
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Apr 27, 2015 04:47
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Chairman Capone posted:I feel like there's another story of a similar type that was about a Roman legion that gets abducted by aliens and made to fight for aliens. Possibly it's set in the same series because I think there was another story in that collection involving the Spanish Armada and aliens? These are in the same universe. The Roman legion was in Ranks of Bronze by David Drake. Several years later Baen published an anthology of stories set in the Ranks of Bronze universe. One of the stories in the anthology was David Weber's Sir George and the Dragon. The Excalibur Alternative was then Weber's sequel to both those books. Another series in a similar vein is Jerry Pournelle's Janissaries. Drakhoran fucked around with this message at 11:21 on Apr 27, 2015 |
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Apr 27, 2015 11:11
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I work at a university and the library was giving away a ton of fiction books today, and browsing through it I found a copy of Bowl of Heaven. I'm really looking forward to reading it, I'm really hoping that Benford manages to smooth over any late-era Niven Republican craziness and it's a return to 1970s big dumb object story form.
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Apr 29, 2015 16:50
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Internet Wizard posted:I'm on the lookout for some scifi, preferably milsf, that has ancient astronaut themes. Quality isn't necessarily a priority, so long as it isn't like, weird Ringo style stuff like child rape or reenacting Mogadishu with super soldiers or whatever. at the end of the series we learn the answer and it is INCREDIBLY STUPID
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Apr 30, 2015 02:54
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I just finished reading Walter H. Hunt's Dark Wing. I dunno. It was okay, and I finished it, but it felt too easy. After getting Pearl Harbored, the humans win every other battle and push the enemy to the brink of extinction. There never feels like much threat, especially since Hunt skips the actual battles and just presents each win as inevitable. Plus there are all kinds of wasted passages. Like there's a section where Hunt spends a paragraph on the captains of each of ten ships that are being assigned to a new squadron...only two of which ever even show up and say anything ever again after that chapter! Has anyone else ever read Hunt's books? Are the remaining three Dark books worth reading? Because the first one was pretty lackluster.
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Apr 30, 2015 07:37
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Chairman Capone posted:I work at a university and the library was giving away a ton of fiction books today, and browsing through it I found a copy of Bowl of Heaven. I'm really looking forward to reading it, I'm really hoping that Benford manages to smooth over any late-era Niven Republican craziness and it's a return to 1970s big dumb object story form. Bowl of Heaven is actually a pretty good take on the Ringworld/Rama/etc. genre. The tech stuff and worldbuilding (natch) are decent and the characters aren't quite as flat as the bad old good old days of hard SF. OTOH it's not anything particularly new or wondrous at this point. I'd call it a competent return to form mostly, especially if you're already on board for Niven's general genre stylings. On the gripping hand for the love of all that is decent do not read The Goliath Stone that Niven co-authored with some random Man-Kzin Wars douchbag named Matthew Joseph Harrington. I bought it at the same time thinking I was going to get another Lucifer's Hammer or Footfall kind of thing and instead got some sort of weird lolbertarian future where eco-wackos ruin everything and were wrong about climate change. Also there are occasional cool sciencey bits about a comet that are almost completely divorced from the rest of the plot. Ugh. I hope Niven just soloed and then mailed in the comet parts to the Baen-Randian editor and no one ever talked to Harrington again. edit: Had a random synapse fire and realized that I posted almost exactly the same thing in this thread a year ago. Still hurts, man. ThaGhettoJew fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 12:46
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ThaGhettoJew posted:Bowl of Heaven is actually a pretty good take on the Ringworld/Rama/etc. genre. The tech stuff and worldbuilding (natch) are decent and the characters aren't quite as flat as the bad old good old days of hard SF. OTOH it's not anything particularly new or wondrous at this point. I'd call it a competent return to form mostly, especially if you're already on board for Niven's general genre stylings. That's great to hear. I can deal with it not being anything earth-shattering or the like. A competent book with a great developed world and some stock Niven characters exploring a giant habitat is exactly the sort of thing I'm in the mood for. ThaGhettoJew posted:On the gripping hand for the love of all that is decent do not read The Goliath Stone that Niven co-authored with some random Man-Kzin Wars douchbag named Matthew Joseph Harrington. I bought it at the same time thinking I was going to get another Lucifer's Hammer or Footfall kind of thing and instead got some sort of weird lolbertarian future where eco-wackos ruin everything and were wrong about climate change. Also there are occasional cool sciencey bits about a comet that are almost completely divorced from the rest of the plot. Ugh. I hope Niven just soloed and then mailed in the comet parts to the Baen-Randian editor and no one ever talked to Harrington again. I remember reading stuff about this book before, maybe on Amazon or your earlier post. I guess it's kind of telling that for the last ten years or so, the MKW books are pretty heavily dominated by Matthew Joseph Harrington and Hal Colebatch, the latter of whom is part of an Australian right-wing political family. (Actually, I'm kind of surprised that Niven would collaborate with Benford, since he not only seems to be more of a left-wing libertarian, but Benford also wrote the one MKW story that Niven seems to have completely rejected.) I have to wonder what happened to Niven. He's clearly always had right-wing views but it seems like it generally was contained (except in books he co-wrote with Pournelle, which I took to be that those aspects were Pournelle's doing). I did some internet sleuthing a while ago out of curiosity and it seems like Niven's turn to the hard right first manfisted publicly back in 2008 when he suggested that hospital overcrowding could be solved by the DHS spreading rumors in Hispanic communities that hospitals would harvest Latino organs if they went for treatment. That's also when he started writing a lot again after not putting out much from around 2000 or so. It makes me wonder if he's one of the people who just completely freaked out due to Obama's run for office. Internet Wizard posted:I'm on the lookout for some scifi, preferably milsf, that has ancient astronaut themes. Quality isn't necessarily a priority, so long as it isn't like, weird Ringo style stuff like child rape or reenacting Mogadishu with super soldiers or whatever. Okay, finally remembered what book was on the edge of my memory when this got brought up. The Star Conquerors, by Ben Bova. The idea is that a million years ago, humans had spread out to nearby star systems and had an interstellar empire, when they were attacked by a more advanced race. The humans eventually lost, and the aliens conquered the human colonies and started the Ice Age on Earth after destroying the Earth's infrastructure, which is what caused humans to revert to Stone Age cave men and slowly advance again to where we are today. The book is set a few hundred years in our future when humans on Earth have created starships again, discovered their past, and are once more going to war against the aliens to liberate all the old human planets, which by now have all had long-term parallel evolution into very different cultures (and I think forms). This was one of Bova's earliest books, maybe his first, and was out of print for decades, but a few years back it was released in both paperback and ebook, along with the sequels and prequel (As on a Darkling Plain, which was actually where I first encountered the series).
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Apr 30, 2015 15:15
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Chairman Capone posted:
I thought Niven's always been right wing, didn't he help the Reagan administration with the Star Wars Program back in the 80s, as well as being part of other military think tanks?
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Apr 30, 2015 15:41
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savinhill posted:I thought Niven's always been right wing, didn't he help the Reagan administration with the Star Wars Program back in the 80s, as well as being part of other military think tanks? I thought that was Pournelle who claimed to have invented SDI? I can't imagine what Niven would have actually helped with SDI on, since as I recall he dropped out of both CalTech and UCLA. In any case, what I meant to say was that while I don't doubt Niven's always been right wing, it never really seemed to come out in his solo works until he started writing again around ~2008.
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Apr 30, 2015 15:56
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Chairman Capone posted:I have to wonder what happened to Niven. He's clearly always had right-wing views but it seems like it generally was contained (except in books he co-wrote with Pournelle, which I took to be that those aspects were Pournelle's doing). I did some internet sleuthing a while ago out of curiosity and it seems like Niven's turn to the hard right first manfisted publicly back in 2008 when he suggested that hospital overcrowding could be solved by the DHS spreading rumors in Hispanic communities that hospitals would harvest Latino organs if they went for treatment. That's also when he started writing a lot again after not putting out much from around 2000 or so. It makes me wonder if he's one of the people who just completely freaked out due to Obama's run for office. Chairman Capone posted:In any case, what I meant to say was that while I don't doubt Niven's always been right wing, it never really seemed to come out in his solo works until he started writing again around ~2008. I still enjoy the overtly libertarian Oath of Fealty since it actually acknowledges that their Galt's Arcologulch makes people kind of weirdly insular and has some detrimental impacts on its surrounding communities. Maybe less so since the "rise" of Ron Paul. And most the authoritarian mil-infused stuff he does with Pournelle is fun for a while. I guess I can overlook some writers' awkward political tendencies as long as the story supports it without blowing my suspension of disbelief too hard or preaching too obviously. A lot of 'the supremacy of the individual' and 'the Gov't is incompetent/evil' goes well with heroic adventure tales anyway. Buuuuuut then there's Terry "Rape 'em for Freedom" Goodkind.
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Apr 30, 2015 20:31
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Finished the three David Weber books mentioned earlier, the third one: The Excalibur Alternative is included in the second book (which is composed of several shorter stories) and looks like Weber took one, padded it out and extrapolated a new ending to complete it and flog it as the third book. Bit of a sucky move on his part and some of the additional writing was a bit meh.
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May 5, 2015 00:55
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Just Another Lurker posted:Finished the three David Weber books mentioned earlier, the third one: The Excalibur Alternative is included in the second book (which is composed of several shorter stories) and looks like Weber took one, padded it out and extrapolated a new ending to complete it and flog it as the third book. Every so often I'll break it out to read the future part of the book as a standalone short story.
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May 6, 2015 03:02
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Just Another Lurker posted:Finished the three David Weber books mentioned earlier, the third one: The Excalibur Alternative is included in the second book (which is composed of several shorter stories) and looks like Weber took one, padded it out and extrapolated a new ending to complete it and flog it as the third book. Yeah, it's pretty clear Weber just plain stopped caring around 2005 or so.
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May 6, 2015 05:19
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I'm now on my second attempt to try to read anything from Weber's Honorverse because I've had a real desire to try to get into pulp sci-fi. I tried once a few years ago and I couldn't make it past the first chapter of On Basilisk Station. The prologue is bad enough (absolutely awful dialogue and an infantile view of how political decisions are made, but what can you expect from mil-SF?), but then chapter one swings in and Weber starts describing Honor Harrington herself. I get that he's trying really hard to make her Horatio Hornblower, but instead of making me genuinely believe that she worked her way up from nothing in a heavily nepotistic world like Hornblower did, he just keeps reminding me about how she broke all sorts of academy records (which still stand!) while all the while remaining a unique snowflake (who nobody would call pretty! but here, let me describe just how attractive she is anyway!) who carries around some kind of magical cat on her shoulder that adds nothing to her character or to the story. Weber also has a bad habit of jumping around wildly on perspective within the same chapter -- one paragraph we can be experiencing the story from the point of view of Honor, and then literally a sentence later we're on an entirely different ship, reading about the inner monologue of an opposing captain's mind. Then we spring right back to Honor without so much as a real scene change. I forced myself to lay on the couch last night and breeze through a few chapters. I don't actively hate it, but drat are its flaws really apparent. Is it a general rule of thumb that pulpy space opera series like these tend to get better over time or something? Apparently the Honorverse is popular enough to actually... you know, have a name like "the Honorverse" associated with it. I really want to get to know pulp better, since the only thing I've ever read that qualifies were all licensed works from Star Trek/Star Wars/40k. It's just not really easy when I can't stop myself from reading it critically 
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May 8, 2015 06:48
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Drone posted:I forced myself to lay on the couch last night and breeze through a few chapters. I don't actively hate it, but drat are its flaws really apparent. Is it a general rule of thumb that pulpy space opera series like these tend to get better over time or something? Apparently the Honorverse is popular enough to actually... you know, have a name like "the Honorverse" associated with it. Parts of his writing get better as the series goes on, but some of it never changes. On the technical/'actual writing' side he improves, but he's always in love with big monologues, excessively detailed battle scenes (until the battles got so huge he had to stop writing them into the books), cartoonish political characters (this does get a little better with the introduction of some characters, but other long-running ones stay foppish), and the Mary-Sue-but-not-really-honest! Honor herself. The first book is the closest one to being 'literally Hornblower in space'. In the next few books Weber lifts some Hornblower stuff (my memory is vague but the 'left on station with a crappy boat while the commander leaves to make him(/her) look bad and wash out, but instead the day gets saved' thing is also pure Hornblower) but he starts fleshing out his own universe fairly quickly. Book 2 introduces the Graysons and Masadans, which become rather pivotal features of the universe. After that it goes back to the war with Haven and into cliche territory, though the Haven stuff pays off about a dozen books later (if you get that far). If there wasn't so much sheer mass of pages reliant on it I would almost suggest starting with one of the offshoot series. The Torch of Freedom stuff (starting with Crown of Slaves) is very light (almost nonexistent) on space navy stuff, it's all ground-level spy crap. Still with Mary Sues, but Honor only shows up for the occasional couple page cameo.
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May 8, 2015 07:21
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What about reading stuff like Vatta's War, or the Serrano Legacy? Maybe Huff's Confederation or Johnson's Theirs Not To Reason Why series?
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May 8, 2015 07:54
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Drone posted:I really want to get to know pulp better, since the only thing I've ever read that qualifies were all licensed works from Star Trek/Star Wars/40k. It's just not really easy when I can't stop myself from reading it critically His stuff is dreck even where pulp is concerned, in like the 3rd book she get kidnapped, has stockholm syndrome with her rapist and then switches sides. I think I threw the books away when that happened. There is a ton of pulp out there that is well written. I can normally hoover up pulp scifi at a rate of a book a day and read the entire series without stopping, but the honorverse just repelled me with the over the top mary sue and backwards morality. Washout fucked around with this message at 09:35 on May 8, 2015 |
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May 8, 2015 09:30
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Currently rereading Thomas DePrimas' Janetta Carver books; makes Honor Harrington looks like the epitome of edgy hardcore scifi warfare (in my defence they were already on my phone i need something to keep me awake on nightshift). God they are awful. 
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May 8, 2015 10:27
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Washout posted:His stuff is dreck even where pulp is concerned, in like the 3rd book she get kidnapped, has stockholm syndrome with her rapist and then switches sides. I think I threw the books away when that happened. There is a ton of pulp out there that is well written. Really the only reason I'm reading this is because 1.) it's free and 2.) a lot of people seem to have read it. I'd probably have the same reaction as you, if I even make it through the first book.
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May 8, 2015 10:53
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Drone posted:Really the only reason I'm reading this is because 1.) it's free and 2.) a lot of people seem to have read it. I'd probably have the same reaction as you, if I even make it through the first book. It may be stockholm but I grew to like it but the only way I even got that far was stuck in a blizzard in West Virginia and it was the only thing to read.
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May 8, 2015 14:30
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Oh god, the Honor Harrington books are sooooo baaaad. Seriously, go read Scalzi's Old Man's War instead.
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May 8, 2015 15:39
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Which was the one where a battle was interrupted by a lengthy digression on some advanced new technology which would have saved the day except it was so new none of the ships had it and it was completely irrelevant? That was possibly peak Weber, unless peak Weber was one of the ones where they fired hundreds of missiles in a single broadside, or upgraded their ships to be able to launch more missiles in a broadside, or had a new type of missile. Don't read Weber.
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May 8, 2015 16:30
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This is wonderful. But if the price of being able to laugh at stuff like this is having to read Weber, then...
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May 8, 2015 16:37
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If you want crazy pulpy sci-fi military action, I'd look at the Autumn Rain trilogy, by David J. Williams. They're basically insane action movies in book form - set in ~2100, featuring a cast of badass space marines and soldier/hackers, blasting up everything from space elevators to big warships to O'Neil cylinders to transatlantic vacuum trains to moon bases. If you don't like the first book, don't bother with the others. The first half or so of the second novel is the most insane action set piece I've ever read - just when you think it's done, it gets turned up to 12, again. And again. There's no deep characters or anything, but there's enough variety in the action, betrayals, and revelations that I was hooked all the way through.
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May 8, 2015 16:38
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Read very little Weber. Unless you like him, I guess, then go wild. Wild for missiles, thousands of missiles, spewing from the broadside of a giant dildo-shaped dreadnought accelerating at hundreds of Gs, the impenetrable sidewalls of its impeller wedge leaving only the tips exposed to the bomb-pumped laser missiles of the enemy's broadside as they scream past. Missiles. Podnaughts full of missile launcher pods to increase the size of their broadside. Super long-ranged missiles. Missiles that fire missiles. Oversized fighters firing more missiles. Psychic cats. Or the bits focusing on the competent characters on the other side, when they show up, they can be entertaining. Still not worth it though.
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May 8, 2015 16:42
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Prolonged Priapism posted:If you want crazy pulpy sci-fi military action, I'd look at the Autumn Rain trilogy, by David J. Williams. They're basically insane action movies in book form - set in ~2100, featuring a cast of badass space marines and soldier/hackers, blasting up everything from space elevators to big warships to O'Neil cylinders to transatlantic vacuum trains to moon bases. If you don't like the first book, don't bother with the others. The first half or so of the second novel is the most insane action set piece I've ever read - just when you think it's done, it gets turned up to 12, again. And again. Well, I'm sold. Gotta keep feeding the Bad Taste Engine.
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May 8, 2015 16:53
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What are you all talking about? The last time I read Weber, his books were about 19th century politics and sailing, not science fiction. Or did he start writing books about space ships again? Guess I missed that, huh.
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May 8, 2015 19:18
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Libluini posted:What are you all talking about? The last time I read Weber, his books were about 19th century politics and sailing, not science fiction. I was about to reply to this and mention the Safehold books but I see what you did there.
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May 8, 2015 19:39
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WarLocke posted:I was about to reply to this and mention the Safehold books but I see what you did there. I can't stand Weber's sci-fi, but I don't mind the Safehold books when things are actually happening in them. Which excludes the entirety of his latest book. The big naval battle near the end of Off Armageddon Reef was great stuff for showing just how horrifyingly outmatched galleys are against cannon-armed galleons.
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May 8, 2015 19:49
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The wheel spins and again we speak of Weber. I've found that Weber is more tolerable when he's got a co-writer or ghost writer. For instance, the first Manticore Ascendant novel A Call to Duty was pretty good and included few of Weber's writing quirks. Granted, they were replaced by a lot of Zahn's quirks, but I personally find the latter less annoying. Likewise the Starfire novels (based on an old and now mostly defunct tabletop wargame) co-written by Steve White have some very good books among them. I'd recommend Crusade, In Death Ground, and The Shiva Option as a more or less complete trilogy that has a reasonably satisfying conclusion. The first book written, but fourth chronologically, Insurrection doesn't work as well for me, and the books after Weber left the series are pretty much pure trash. But somehow the alchemy worked for Crusade, Death Ground, and Shiva. Especially for In Death Ground which is far and away my favorite book of Weber's that I've ever read. Which isn't to say that there isn't a lot of Weber quirkiness in them. There is. Politicians suck, the noble admiral is always right, engagements eventually grow to the point of ridiculousness, and so on and so forth. But whether it's because of Steve White's influence, the fact that Weber's holding himself to within the structure of a game's rules, or because it was early enough in his career that he still cared, the quirks aren't nearly as bad in these books as they are in the mainline Honorverse stuff. jng2058 fucked around with this message at 20:48 on May 8, 2015 |
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May 8, 2015 20:13
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In Death Ground is pretty drat good, if only because it has an actually threatening enemy who actually wins more than just a few token engagements. Shiva Option I felt fell back into the same old of unstoppable death fleets that brush away all opposition. I mean, the parallels to the Pacific Theater of WWII are pretty obvious (In Death ground is 1941-1943, Shiva Option is 1944-45), so I'm not complaining too hard, but it did feel a little like the last half of the book was just spelling out a foregone conclusion over 300 pages.
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May 8, 2015 20:42
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ArchangeI posted:In Death Ground is pretty drat good, if only because it has an actually threatening enemy who actually wins more than just a few token engagements. Shiva Option I felt fell back into the same old of unstoppable death fleets that brush away all opposition. I mean, the parallels to the Pacific Theater of WWII are pretty obvious (In Death ground is 1941-1943, Shiva Option is 1944-45), so I'm not complaining too hard, but it did feel a little like the last half of the book was just spelling out a foregone conclusion over 300 pages. Yeah, but that's where the bits with Irma the fighter pilot come to the fore. The war's won, but it still impacts the winners on a personal level. Not perfect, I agree, but it does come to a conclusion, which is more than one can say for anything with Honor in the title.
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May 8, 2015 20:50
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