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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:The Traveller RPG is insanely detailed, has always been insanely detailed throughout it's 7 published editions and has the best out-of-context stories. The Laumer Bolo stories, and a good chunk of the stories in the anthologies, are good milsf. Weber usually tries to get grimdark and fluffy into the same story. The W.H. Keith Bolo novel is violence porn about sentient velociraptors slaughtering people in way too much detail; tonally off of literally everything else he's done. I blame Baen.
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Aug 14, 2018 05:59
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Holy poo poo that escalated quickly. Start of chapter: an arrest is attempted. End of chapter: Tabaea kicks the poo poo out of the Guard and a warlock, declares herself Empress, raises an army and marches on the palace.
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Aug 14, 2018 13:44
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mllaneza posted:The Laumer Bolo stories, and a good chunk of the stories in the anthologies, are good milsf. Weber usually tries to get grimdark and fluffy into the same story. The W.H. Keith Bolo novel is violence porn about sentient velociraptors slaughtering people in way too much detail; tonally off of literally everything else he's done. I blame Baen. Laumer stroked out in the early 1970s and never really recovered from that heart attack, physically or mentally. No disagreement about Baen, Baen Books exploited the hell out of Laumers death with many many many Bolo-universe stories. According to wikipedia David Weber featured heavily in them, John Ringo appeared, and Krautman probably submitted dozens of stories featuring goodguy Nazi SS tank commanders.
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Aug 14, 2018 14:23
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The orgasming ss tank story was a bolo knock-off, not set in the actual bolo universe.
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Aug 14, 2018 14:28
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Laumer stroked out in the early 1970s and never really recovered from that heart attack, physically or mentally. No disagreement about Baen, Baen Books exploited the hell out of Laumers death with many many many Bolo-universe stories. According to wikipedia David Weber featured heavily in them, John Ringo appeared, and Krautman probably submitted dozens of stories featuring goodguy Nazi SS tank commanders. I've got a Ringo-written bolo called Road to Damascus that I will never read because every review if it says that it's a political screed ripped from Fox News and I don't need that.
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Aug 14, 2018 15:19
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I mentioned this hundreds of pages ago in this thread, just going to repeat it. A good gauge for determining if a author is crap is how many times they have rewritten the same book or book series. Anne of Green Gables has been adapted for tv-series or movies an insane amount of times for example. David Eddings re-wrote the same story/book series 3 goddamn times. Christopher Stasheff's Warlock series kinda fits this, so does Harry Harrison's Deathworld series and/or his popcorn fiction Stainless Steel Rat books. Xenophon's Long March Saga is the book most milfiction authors have rewritten once in their literary career. Something about the elite mercenary group enduring constant betrayals by former allies, almost constant battles and and how against all odds a chosen few made it back home after a 1000+ mile endurance deathmarch is catnip/crack-cocaine/100% black tar heroin for milfiction writers. David Weber has rewritten Xenophon's Long March Saga at least 1.5 times. John Ringo has rewritten Xenophon's Long March Saga at least 3 times. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Aug 14, 2018 |
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Aug 14, 2018 19:22
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Xenophon must be one of the most ripped-off writers ever. The original is surprisingly readable for something 2400 years old.
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Aug 14, 2018 19:31
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StrixNebulosa posted:I've got a Ringo-written bolo called Road to Damascus that I will never read because every review if it says that it's a political screed ripped from Fox News and I don't need that. Road to Damascus is weird for a ringo book, in that the amazingly hosed-up politics don't start until the second act
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Aug 14, 2018 21:44
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PupsOfWar posted:Road to Damascus is weird for a ringo book, in that the amazingly hosed-up politics don't start until the second act How long until the child rape
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Aug 14, 2018 22:41
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The only Bolo story I've come across is "A Relic of War" and I thought it was kinda cute.
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Aug 15, 2018 00:50
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Internet Wizard posted:How long until the child rape Boy time to crate has taken a dark turn
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Aug 15, 2018 01:05
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:I mentioned this hundreds of pages ago in this thread, just going to repeat it. Centurion is one of them for Ringo what are the other two? Also I read the Powder Mage books and my feelings are pretty :meh: like they weren't bad, but just kind of underwhelming after a pretty solid opening. It feels a lot like the Malazan books just everything in it wasn't as good.
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Aug 15, 2018 02:23
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I thought that Powder Mage failed to establish a tone.
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Aug 15, 2018 03:55
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General Battuta posted:Boy time to crate has taken a dark turn lol
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Aug 15, 2018 03:55
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Jack2142 posted:Centurion is one of them for Ringo what are the other two? Nobody should read more John Ringo or David Weber than they already have, but https://imgur.com/gallery/DFBTj0a appears to be your motto. How about the 4 book series March [insert adjective] by David Weber and John Ringo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Man Apparently Weber did the plot outlines for each book, while Ringo did the writing for that series. Weber's earlier Long March adaption was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heirs_of_Empire
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Aug 15, 2018 03:58
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Jack2142 posted:Centurion is one of them for Ringo what are the other two? Well, the whole series of books that include "March Up Country" et al., but I suppose that could be lumped as 1. I'm not sure, but maybe his Bolo story mentioned earlier is the other.
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Aug 15, 2018 03:58
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General Battuta posted:Boy time to crate has taken a dark turn 
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Aug 15, 2018 04:07
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General Battuta posted:Boy time to crate has taken a dark turn Sadly not the first time I've heard a variant of this joke.
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Aug 15, 2018 04:49
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Jack2142 posted:Centurion is one of them for Ringo what are the other two? Powder Mage had several problems, but the biggest one is that, "Divine Right of Kings is real, and the revolution has brought down the Wrath of God." is a really cool problem and, "shoot a wizard in the face" is a really dumb solution to that problem.
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Aug 15, 2018 05:49
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I mean shooting a wizard in the face sounds like an excellent solution to many problems.
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Aug 15, 2018 05:53
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Nobody should read more John Ringo or David Weber than they already have, but https://imgur.com/gallery/DFBTj0a appears to be your motto. Thanks, I will now proceed to never read these books I read Centurion twice because I couldn't believe how batshit it was, it was like a terrible zombie story except no zombies, just pages and pages of insane right wing strawman's and conspiracy theories, with a healthy dosage of racism and rape! On the plus side it made me realize a decade ago that hard core republicans had already lost their grasp on reality. Patrick Spens posted:Powder Mage had several problems, but the biggest one is that, "Divine Right of Kings is real, and the revolution has brought down the Wrath of God." is a really cool problem and, "shoot a wizard in the face" is a really dumb solution to that problem. That is kinda the problem, everything lurches from one interesting crisis to another, but everything seems to be dispatched too... simply? for there to be serious tension, like the most tension in the series I felt was Tamas in Book 2 "trapped" in Kez, but again the Malazan comparison... the Chain of Dogs was much better. Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Aug 15, 2018 |
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Aug 15, 2018 06:12
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Internet Wizard posted:How long until the child rape i mean the protagonist somewhat creepily hooks up with a much younger woman early on, but iirc she was not a child this was very early-career ringo, so I don't think he had grown confident enough to make a kidfucker the hero of a novel yet
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Aug 15, 2018 06:29
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mllaneza posted:The bureaucracy bit was a joke about Stross' last piece of superhero writing. It featured an over detailed examination of setting up a new department in the MoD to handle superheroes. Home Office, actually  It is specifically a plot point that the superheroes are being recruited into the police, not being used as paramilitaries or whatever.
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Aug 15, 2018 13:28
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Finished Spell of the Black Dagger last night. Good times, but seriously, if the best idea you can come up with is "let's recreate Adron's Disaster except slower" you should be immediately locked out of the workshop. Now about halfway through Night of Madness 
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Aug 15, 2018 14:11
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Jack2142 posted:Thanks, I will now proceed to never read these books Any person I can save from reading (or reading more of) John Ringo and David Weber, the better the world becomes. Harry Harrison was one of my favorite authors, even I acknowledge that Harry Harrison wrote a lot of clunkers. His "what if dinosaur global extinction event never happened" book series was creepy and weird and full of the things I have mocked other authors doing. Pronunciation guides, bestiary/encyclopedia appendixes, so many contrivances in-story it can only be described as "flocks of deus ex machinas", a impossible leonardo da vinci main character, and super awkward sex scenes , the worst of which involves a evolved dinosaur-humanoid lady + the leonardo da vinci main character. tldr: Never read Harry Harrison's Eden series* * That is unless you have sailed the seas of truly terrible fantasy/scifi fiction and no longer fear braindeath. Indeed braindeath and you are now boon companions on a journey even the gods themselves fear to witness. If that's the case, well go for it.
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Aug 15, 2018 15:12
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Apropos of nothing: I picked up The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu the other day while just randomly shuffling through the shelves at my local bookstore. I'm a little over a hundred pages in and... I'm thoroughly weirded out so far, but I can't seem to put this thing down. But I might have to force myself to, because reading anything that even borders on existential or metaphysical stuff while I'm going through a period of depression irl is probably not the best idea 
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Aug 15, 2018 20:03
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In completely unsurprising news and probable confirmation of the dude being an ai instead of a human, there's a new Craig Schaefer book out! Detonation Boulevard is the name.
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Aug 15, 2018 23:13
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C.M. Kruger posted:
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Aug 16, 2018 12:56
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:
in the 90s i had pulp editions of everything he'd written up to that point. i loved the eden series, mostly for the dino-bio hacking like the icthyosaur submarines. i still have cubic meters of sci fi and fantasy soft covers in a storage unit i haven't looked at in years. *edit* I'd like to think critical judgement happened eventually but looking at the volume of self published scifi on my kindle, i doubt it.
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Aug 16, 2018 13:19
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branedotorg posted:avoid the sequels. i enjoyed admiral, just leave it as a stand alone. What's bad about the sequels?
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Aug 16, 2018 14:17
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Amazon has the whole Divine Cities trilogy (City of Stairs et alles) for 2.99 if one liked those, or hd been putting off reading them.
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Aug 16, 2018 15:24
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I second the recommendation for Divine Cities. They're really great books and $2.99 is a steal for all three.
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Aug 16, 2018 15:49
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pospysyl posted:That's a pretty limited way of looking at children's literature. Like if you think about it, pretty much all children's books have adult characters in them (parents, caretakers, teachers, you know). Even if you mean that the viewpoint characters are children, there are plenty of easily accessible counterexamples. Hitchhiker's Guide is a YA book where every character's an adult. The Earthsea sequels all have adult characters, and most of a Wizard of Earthsea is about an adult as well. The Hobbit is another example of a children's book about adults. If you want to stray away from literature, nearly all superheroes are adults. Most of the protagonists of Steven Universe are thousands of years old. Ok, that makes more sense now that I know how you're defining it. Yeah, I was narrowing it to the contemporary children's genre (as pigeon-holed by marketers) and not including classics or YA. The Wayfarer's trilogy is quite YA.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:17
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occamsnailfile posted:Amazon has the whole Divine Cities trilogy (City of Stairs et alles) for 2.99 if one liked those, or hd been putting off reading them. Thanks for posting. I've been meaning to get the third book and 2.99 is a lot less expensive than buying it standalone.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:55
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Stuporstar posted:Ok, that makes more sense now that I know how you're defining it. Yeah, I was narrowing it to the contemporary children's genre (as pigeon-holed by marketers) and not including classics or YA. The Wayfarer's trilogy is quite YA. They're actually being quite condescending, and their inclusion of Hitchhiker's Guide as YA is particularly exasperating.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:57
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Recently went through Orconomics and its sequel Son of a Liche, didn't know how much I wanted some self-aware fantasy parodying modern capitalism until now. Fantastic series so far.
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Aug 16, 2018 18:07
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Cicero posted:Recently went through Orconomics and its sequel Son of a Liche, didn't know how much I wanted some self-aware fantasy parodying modern capitalism until now. Fantastic series so far. The marketing division of the undead host was probably the best part of Son of a Liche.
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Aug 16, 2018 20:51
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occamsnailfile posted:Amazon has the whole Divine Cities trilogy (City of Stairs et alles) for 2.99 if one liked those, or hd been putting off reading them. This is a criminally low price, I've read the first two and I paid 2.99 just to have the third one and to have them all on kindle.
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Aug 16, 2018 20:58
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For those that don't know, Bennett has a new book out this month, Foundryside. It sounds pretty interesting.
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Aug 16, 2018 21:16
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Today I peeked in the R Scott Bakker thread and what started as an interesting grimdark fantasy apparently ended in a wet fart where nothing mattered, so. I guess I'm never gonna finish it, oh well.
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Aug 16, 2018 21:19
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