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1994 Toyota Celica posted:Sorry to double-post, but a recommendation I just made in the Malazan thread got me thinking. It's fantasy, not sci-fi, but it's definitely military fiction and quite formative for me: is anyone else here familiar with David Gemmell? Scifi also covers fantasy in my eyes, so it's fine to bring it up here! But alas, I am not.
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Aug 8, 2019 03:59
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Narsham posted:Murgen also gets some grief as a narrator but that's because of what Cook is doing with time and perspective. I do like that he makes a stylistic decision into a major plot point, personally, and Glittering Stone holds up astonishingly well on reread. I still catch little buried clues I'd missed, mainly because Cook doesn't write puzzles you're always supposed to work out, he just writes things that only make sense if you understand what's going on and leaves you to work things out. Oh jesus this must be how I sounded to other people whenever I wouldn't stop talking about/positively ranted about/hyped the deepness of the storytelling/praised to the high heavens Stanislaw Lem and M. John Harrison for multiple posts in both this thread and the main Fantasy + Scifi thread. I deeply apologize for my past transgressions, and promise I won't do it again. Reading the 10 book Malazan series got me over how amazing the Black Company books were, and ironically, re-reading the Malazan series got me over how amazing the Malazan series was. Monologue power creep set in hard for the last four books of the Malazan series. Way too many long-winded internal monologues went down in those books, while the extended-multipart ending chapters highly annoyed me on the re-read/reminded me of victorian era fiction with similar styles of story-telling bloat. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Aug 8, 2019 |
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Aug 8, 2019 04:10
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ToxicFrog posted:Someone who is spectacularly wrong. A Shadow of All Night Falling is the only one of those three that really has the jumping around in time problem. All Darkness Met is about half history outline; at one point he does two full years of war in about three pages complete with major battles and named-character deaths. Still good, but not always a proper novel. October's Baby is the best of the three, and if you love medieval small-unit combat (hundreds of troops, not thousands) you'll loving love this one. it's Bragi and Mocker making a real play to take control of a small, but wealthy and strategically vital kingdom. It does have a little of the time-jump and paragraphs of history, but not enough to be a problem. And I really love the two books on the El Murid wars. They're kind of dated in that anyone who tried to publish a novel about how not-Islam was founded by an ten thousand year old wizard arranging an amusing conflict for the gods would be laughed out of serious society (they'd probably sell to the alt-right crowd though). In it you get the back stories of the three main characters, Bragi, Haroun, and Mocker and the formative events in their lives that set them to where their paths crossed. As much as I like the pseudo history in All Darkness Met, Cook has improved as a writer and events flow much better in prose. It might not be popular with the alt-right though. El Murid and his family and followers are deeply human characters portrayed with just as much sympathy as the main trio and their hangers-on. Their successes and failures flow from their virtues and flaws. You can't help but feel for them because you know them so well. I'll ponder the three novels set after the main trilogy and the short stories and chime back in about those later. NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Anyone who has touched/been contaminated by Christopher G. Nuttall's writing should read Poul Anderson's Baen publishes a lot of crap, but people buy it and they like money. What they sometimes also do is publish collections of classics. They've done Poul Anderson's van Rijn/Falkenhayn/Flandy stories and novels in big beautiful softcovers, and shoe horned in a bunch of the unrelated short stories from that setting. Collections like that balance out how much of a stain on the industry they'd be if they were just Kraitman, Ringo and cohorts all the time. Poul Anderson is a grand master of science fiction for a reason, and that reason will be found in the Baen omnibuses. Read. Those. Stories. They're better than 90% of your backlog anyway.
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Aug 8, 2019 04:55
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Jack2142 posted:I like the ending of the Black Company books and it wraps up with a satisfying conclusion. I still don't understand why there is supposedly a sequel to Soldiers Live called Pitiless Rain in the works (Other than $$$$$). The newest Black Company book Port of Shadows... is uh not very good. There's some interesting ideas in Port of Shadows but unfortunately they belong in three or four separate stories and not in a single novel. Cook evidently got some massive exposure to anime in the last decade or so and I suppose if I got all the likely references he's making I might appreciate what he's doing a little more, but pasting semi-comic anime concepts into a dark European fantasy setting is pretty whiplash-inducing. Some good character building for Lady, I suppose, save that you have to reread the drat novel to pick up on it. NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Oh jesus this must be how I sounded to other people whenever I wouldn't stop talking about/positively ranted about/hyped the deepness of the storytelling/praised to the high heavens Stanislaw Lem and M. John Harrison for multiple posts in both this thread and the main Fantasy + Scifi thread. I am a professional; do not try this without training. That said, you are allowed to genuinely enjoy things without feeling shame, even in this thread you started. Let the cynical perfectionists who hate-read everything keep buying Weber's stuff. Malazan series is heavily indebted to Black Company, but Erikson has an entirely different approach to things. Cook has an interest in world-building, but he's not interested in schematics or deeply-interwoven narrative elements. He likes messy world-building where at the end you not only can't work out precisely what happened in the world's past, it doesn't actually matter that much either. Whereas Erikson requires you to work out how his world functions to understand what's going on and there are usually answers to questions about everything. Ask Erikson about a small detail and he'd either be able to explain or he'd say that he can't because it's more important than it seems; Cook would just tell you you're wasting your time.
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Aug 8, 2019 19:09
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In Black Company you can hardly work out what's going on in the world's present, how much of it you've seen, how significant any of it is on a global stage, if there is a global stage, the works. You're just dragged through a few countries you wouldn't really ever want to visit voluntarily on a strange set of contracts until pretty far into the series.
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Aug 8, 2019 19:30
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1994 Toyota Celica posted:Sorry to double-post, but a recommendation I just made in the Malazan thread got me thinking. It's fantasy, not sci-fi, but it's definitely military fiction and quite formative for me: is anyone else here familiar with David Gemmell? im aware of the man (rip) that said I'm curious which of gemmell's work you consider military fiction rather than heroic fantasy all of the gemmell ive ever read id call heroic fantasy i think PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Aug 8, 2019 |
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Aug 8, 2019 20:02
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quote:Coming from a staunch socialist family, Gemmell carried banners and campaigned for eventual Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the 1960s, although he nevertheless admitted a grudging alignment with Thatcherite policies on issues of foreign policy, especially the Falklands Conflict,and with Reaganite views on East-West relations. drat thats grim
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Aug 8, 2019 20:04
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Narsham posted:I am a professional; do not try this without training. That said, you are allowed to genuinely enjoy things without feeling shame, even in this thread you started. Let the cynical perfectionists who hate-read everything keep buying Weber's stuff. You're....you're not BotL's sane persona alt, are you? Come on now, be honest. Cook and Erikson wrote in different (publishing) eras, literally. Biggest difference between the two (besides age) is that Cook has spent decades plotting out details and answering questions about his Black Company books, while Erikson is visibly still winging it. Also Erikson seems addicted to inserting comedic side characters (Kruppe, Pust, Tehol, Ubla, Crump, Helian, etc) into each of his books, while Cook kept things more serious. Both are good authors. The Noon Universe series is pretty interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Universe Always think of it as a quasi-scifi/post-scarcity mil-fiction/adventure series. Not really available as ebooks though, so tracking down physical book copies is needed. Always liked the Progressor/Independent Reconnaissance Unit/Conservator tripod exploration/action setup in the Noon Universe series, which is a universe where communism/socialism won, and Earth is a post-scarcity society reaching out to the galaxy and discovering other lifeforms while learning/breaking/fixing/unintentionally loving up things. Progressors: intervene, uplift, and overthrow in the name of progress/what-ever long term (wink) goals the faction had. Highly skilled, long term goals are goddamn boring, ethics slow you down in the field. Independent Reconnaissance Unit: explores the galaxy with (mostly) unskilled volunteers. Exceptionally high first mission loss rate. The IRU answers to no-one, because 'gently caress you man - you ain't paying me and I volunteered'. Conservators: pretty much the Star Trek Prime Directive given physical form. Spends their time monitoring off-world planets+ artifacts and/or and fixing whatever gently caress-ups the Progressors accidentally-on-purpose inflicted on alien worlds/lifeforms. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Aug 8, 2019 |
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Aug 8, 2019 20:55
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shovelbum posted:In Black Company you can hardly work out what's going on in the world's present, how much of it you've seen, how significant any of it is on a global stage, if there is a global stage, the works. You're just dragged through a few countries you wouldn't really ever want to visit voluntarily on a strange set of contracts until pretty far into the series. Sure makes you feel like you're part of a mercenary company with a confused and vague past that keeps getting stuck in things they want no part of
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Aug 9, 2019 08:32
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Been over a day, if my BotL alt account joke scored a "....you sank my Battleship" hit, that is hilarious. Anyway, the Noon Universe is a interesting setting, and the stories in the series run the gauntlet of low to high scale stakes. Low stakes being lifelong friends meeting up for dinner, a group of kids planning to run away from school and become spacers, the first human child born on Mars, a possible career change, a seemingly lingering death situation on a spaceship in deep outer space getting resolved by mysterious help, etc. Middle stakes being IRU volunteers in any first contact situation, the first manned (and long since forgotten) interstellar expedition returning to Earth many decades later, a Progressor agent embedded in a AlexandreDumas-culture planet getting more and more out of their comfort zone(Hard To be God, which inspired a computer sim-strategy series) , the mystery of what the gently caress is going with kilometer tall silicoid intelligences, etc. High stakes being: experiments into improved FTL sets off a death-wave that will kill everything on the planet in 14 hrs, next stage of humanity may have evolved in secret...so what do WE do/what do THEY do, and the slow burn mystery of "A Beetle in the Anthill".
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Aug 9, 2019 23:00
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:You're....you're not BotL's sane persona alt, are you? Come on now, be honest. I don't know who that is and don't particularly want to go hunting through the forum looking for a poster whose name fits that abbreviation. Cook doesn't actually care: that's why he doesn't provide maps, even when they'd be drat helpful. With Erikson you feel like everything in the world has been mapped out to the same level of detail; Cook makes you feel like if you walked away from where the plot's taking place things would get vague very very quickly. If you pointed out an inconsistency to Erikson he might fret about it; Cook would suggest you should relax and maybe have a beer. Did you know that Kruppe is pretty much a direct copy of Cook's character Mocker from Dread Empire? Or as direct a copy as The Dead Man is of Nero Wolfe.
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Aug 10, 2019 00:36
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one thing im discovering is RIngo is apparently super pro-Rhodesia that's...that's a bit of a racism deep-cut even for a right-wing military fiction author i dont think you'd catch Weber or SM Stirling or whoever going "actually the selous scouts were cool" if i wanted to characterize a protagonist as a hardened Cold Warrior who kept fighting in other awful colonial wars after Vietnam, i'd go with something mainstream like the american proxy war against the Sandanistas , something many american audiences would still accept uncritically i would not go with the guys who were so racist and tyrannical that apartheid south africa considered backing them to be a bad look PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Aug 10, 2019 |
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Aug 10, 2019 04:23
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If you like Cook as much as you profess Narsham, you need to read Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night, which was a thin layer of fiction over Céline's actual life as a World War 1 veteran up to 1931. ....... Warning: Just don't read anything else by Celine, Celine drank the Nazi/fascism/antisemitism Kool-Aid hard a year or so after Journey to the End of the Night got published. Same recommendation + warning goes to everyone else in this thread too. As I said earlier, Cook has had decades to not give a gently caress, while Erikson hasn't aged into that viewpoint yet (he will though). Agree with the character archetype re-usages in both examples you gave though. Another good example of character archetype re-usages is the "dirtiest soldier in the world/universe" archetype which I've noticed in 3 different british book series/one mildly famous british tv series now...am sure that I've missed more examples in British fiction/tv media. It goes, -George McDonald Fraser's McAuslan, "the filthiest soldier in the British army" character in Fraser's thinly fictionalized short stories about being a recently commissioned officer in a post WW2 Highland regiment -the 4th season version of the Baldrick character in the BBC tv-series Blackadder -Terry Pratchett's Nobby Nobbs character in the Discworld Guards books -Sandy Mitchell's Jurgen character in the W40K Ciaphas Cain stories,
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Aug 10, 2019 04:36
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PupsOfWar posted:one thing im discovering is RIngo is apparently super pro-Rhodesia Ringo is super racist is the deal. Like, racist enough that he likes Tom Kratman, who is insane and super racist.
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Aug 10, 2019 04:44
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PupsOfWar posted:one thing im discovering is RIngo is apparently super pro-Rhodesia Thanks for this post, I had no idea what Rhodesia was and after perusing their wikipedia article - 
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Aug 10, 2019 11:50
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StrixNebulosa posted:Thanks for this post, I had no idea what Rhodesia was and after perusing their wikipedia article - I only know stuff about Rhodesia becuase we've got a well-off clan of Rhodesian expats that live in my county, they're big in the punched metal fabrication business and also organized crime
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Aug 10, 2019 19:23
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Kchama posted:Ringo is super racist is the deal. Like, racist enough that he likes Tom Kratman, who is insane and super racist. Saying Ringo and Kratman are super-racist is like saying that Jim Baen liked military-fiction, or that bees have a preference for collecting pollen. Back to broadening the circle of interest for thread readers looking for something new in the Mil-Fiction or Mil-Scifi genres to read. The last 20% of Vernor Vinge's The Peace War turns into a drat fine mil-scfi last-stand battle scenario with both sides holding nothing back. Both factions (eventually) have acess to the same super-weapon/peace-keeping technology, how each faction uses the technology is the real "I WIN" factor. Preemptively stasis-bubble major areas of resistance? Use stasis-bubble as a prison sentence for political enemies? Wait out the entire conflict via stasis-bubble? Or my personal favorite....in the heat of the final battle swarms of tiny stasis bubbles cure jet-turbine engines. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Aug 10, 2019 |
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Aug 10, 2019 22:16
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I read a series a while ago, I honestly can't remember what it was called, and it doesn't really matter because the books themselves were super-meh, but it had a really interesting concept. Essentially a species of slug aliens achieved enough of a technological edge to effortlessly conquer the entire galaxy. They freely shared their technology and uplifted the species they conquered, but they were still massively paranoid control freaks who ran everything with an iron fist. The book series starts with said slug aliens dying off as a species, and their galaxy-spanning empire immediately and predictably shattering into a million-zillion factions. The concept I thought was really interesting was that since the galaxy had been conquered millennia ago, nobody had a good grip on (space) naval doctrine, so you essentially had species with Star Trek levels of technology and a stone age understanding of strategy and tactics, leading to such gems as "Let's put all of our ships in a straight line so they don't hit each other by mistake, then fly them really, really close together so it's easier to communicate." I don't remember the books actually doing much with the concept, it was mainly an excuse for the protagonists to be awesome by re-inventing basic ship moving techniques, but the idea of incredibly advanced technology being wielded by morons is a pretty neat one.
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Aug 10, 2019 23:16
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Omi no Kami posted:I read a series a while ago, I honestly can't remember what it was called, and it doesn't really matter because the books themselves were super-meh, but it had a really interesting concept. Essentially a species of slug aliens achieved enough of a technological edge to effortlessly conquer the entire galaxy. They freely shared their technology and uplifted the species they conquered, but they were still massively paranoid control freaks who ran everything with an iron fist. Dread Empire's Fall.
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Aug 10, 2019 23:23
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Pandora's Legions by Christopher Anvil? Though that one always seemed more like a bunch of puzzles wearing a military costume.
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Aug 10, 2019 23:33
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Darth Walrus posted:Dread Empire's Fall. I'm reading this now it's pretty good for mindless fiction
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Aug 11, 2019 01:01
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dread empire's fall is great if you read it as a comedy of manners rather than as military fiction
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Aug 11, 2019 01:43
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Darth Walrus posted:Dread Empire's Fall. Yeah! That's the one! I can't believe you got it from my terrible half-remembered description. ^^ And yeah, it's great as mindless fiction- the second book, in particular, is very satisfying in a competence porn, "Everything is screwed up, how will the protagonist win at everything" way. My main gripe with the series as a whole was that for all the time the author put into coming up with genuinely interesting ideas, they didn't seem too interested in actually exploring them. (Pretty big ol' spoilers for the second and third book): Like, the second point of view character, the really attractive noblewoman who ended up being a complete loving sociopath? I actually liked that they introduced her through the eyes of the vaguely sleazy girl-obsessed entitled guy, got us to like the character, then switched to her and unfolded a reasonably screwed-up backstory and showed that in spite of returning his affection, she was willing to be way more brutal and cutthroat than he realized or would've been comfortable with. And then as far as I can remember, they just kinda dropped the thread? He got tricked into marrying the other lady, and sociopath girl took over and then lost a planet, and kinda went 'Screw you idiots, I'ma go re-invent fighter jets and carrier tactics.' Then the books ended.
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Aug 11, 2019 02:22
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PupsOfWar posted:dread empire's fall is great if you read it as a comedy of manners rather than as military fiction Wait it's not? gently caress I'm gonna go back to reading good books
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Aug 11, 2019 02:26
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Omi no Kami posted:Yeah! That's the one! I can't believe you got it from my terrible half-remembered description. ^^
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Aug 11, 2019 04:09
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ianmacdo posted:He wrote another sequel with her, she goes to earth and does some stuff. Huh, is it worth reading? I lost interested in guy-man after his story kinda sputtered out and turned into 'Solve a mystery in space and then take credit for your ex-girlfriend's tactical innovations', but the book where she took over a whole planet and kept murdering her commanding officers until they gave her a competent one was pretty fun.
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Aug 11, 2019 04:38
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:If you like Cook as much as you profess Narsham, you need to read Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night, which was a thin layer of fiction over Céline's actual life as a World War 1 veteran up to 1931. Wait, I should give away the books written by two child abusers but buy a book written by an antisemitic Nazi supporter and Holocaust denier? I feel like I'm getting mixed messages here.  (Yes, my local library does have a copy.)
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Aug 11, 2019 19:30
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Narsham posted:Wait, I should give away the books written by two child abusers but buy a book written by an antisemitic Nazi supporter and Holocaust denier? I feel like I'm getting mixed messages here. Getting rid of books written by child abusers is always a good call. Like you said, library. Library is always the best first option for questionable authors. My local library system had a copy of it too. Only reason I knew that book existed at all was because "Wasteland: the great war + origins of modern Horror" by W. Scott Poole, mentioned it briefly. e: Wasteland: the great war + origins of modern Horror is a pretty interesting read, and serves a primarily as an amazing reference guide to "classic horror movies of the "1920s -1950s", as well as a decently researched secondary source for finding old horror-infused fiction stories of just about any genre, including mil-fiction. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Aug 11, 2019 |
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Aug 11, 2019 22:35
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:
something awful dot com should ammend its rules in declaration that it is moral to  fascists
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Aug 11, 2019 22:45
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Incidentally, have the latest honor harrington books gone anywhere interesting? I was down to aggressively skimming after the first few, and think I finally gave up in the one where the good republican planet and the evil welfare planet teamed up to fight the... I think it was supposed to be a communist planet? I forget, all I remember is that their strategy was explicitly the zapp brannigan thing of building more ships than honor had missiles, and just mass-suiciding hundreds of thousands of hulls until she ran out of things to shoot at them. (Also they apparently had a manchurian candidate-esque thing they were using to brainwash republicans into shooting at them? I was honestly pretty checked out by that point.)
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Aug 11, 2019 23:51
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Omi no Kami posted:Incidentally, have the latest honor harrington books gone anywhere interesting? noop
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Aug 12, 2019 00:24
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Omi no Kami posted:Incidentally, have the latest honor harrington books gone anywhere interesting? I was down to aggressively skimming after the first few, and think I finally gave up in the one where the good republican planet and the evil welfare planet teamed up to fight the... I think it was supposed to be a communist planet? Welfare Planet is good now - they had a revolution to restore capitalism the new antagonists are like...I guess WorldBank/IMF planet
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Aug 12, 2019 00:30
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Omi no Kami posted:Incidentally, have the latest honor harrington books gone anywhere interesting? I was down to aggressively skimming after the first few, and think I finally gave up in the one where the good republican planet and the evil welfare planet teamed up to fight the... I think it was supposed to be a communist planet? I forget, all I remember is that their strategy was explicitly the zapp brannigan thing of building more ships than honor had missiles, and just mass-suiciding hundreds of thousands of hulls until she ran out of things to shoot at them. (Also they apparently had a manchurian candidate-esque thing they were using to brainwash republicans into shooting at them? I was honestly pretty checked out by that point.) This has more or less been the tactics of the people who fight Honor ever since Missile Pods happened. And no nothing interesting has happened. The series is technically over now, in fact, with everyone being defeating and Honor retiring due to pregnancy and the Queen declaring that she'll return To Save Them All. PupsOfWar posted:Welfare Planet is good now - they had a revolution to restore capitalism The UN. And they're defeated. Unless you mean Mesa, who are just stupid. Also defeated. Kchama fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Aug 12, 2019 |
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Aug 12, 2019 00:41
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Omi no Kami posted:Incidentally, have the latest honor harrington books gone anywhere interesting? I was down to aggressively skimming after the first few, and think I finally gave up in the one where the good republican planet and the evil welfare planet teamed up to fight the... I think it was supposed to be a communist planet? I forget, all I remember is that their strategy was explicitly the zapp brannigan thing of building more ships than honor had missiles, and just mass-suiciding hundreds of thousands of hulls until she ran out of things to shoot at them. (Also they apparently had a manchurian candidate-esque thing they were using to brainwash republicans into shooting at them? I was honestly pretty checked out by that point.) In the latest ones they are fighting the Solarians, which gives Manticore a new group of badly trained enemies that are over-confident due to their numerical superiority, so that they can wipe them out with their magic missile technology advantage. Though the Manticore home system got a bit hosed up due to a sneak attack, if I recall. Not that it really seems to matter much. There's a Timothy Zahn co-authored side series of prequels (Call to ...) which is set well before the first HH novel. Though suffering from most of the same problems as the main series, at least the space battles are smaller scale and it's not all "There were 5,271,009 Mark XXIV mod-E 'Spacefucker' missiles in the initial Manticorian broadside".
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Aug 12, 2019 00:42
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PupsOfWar posted:something awful dot com should ammend its rules in declaration that it is moral to I actually kind of agree with you here though for the site owners that involves liability issues. I can still let myself use the library if I feel they're something I must read, usually for historical reasons. But my TBR pile in my house may be attaining sentience and perhaps I should placate it first.
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Aug 12, 2019 00:43
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Hobnob posted:In the latest ones they are fighting the Solarians, which gives Manticore a new group of badly trained enemies that are over-confident due to their numerical superiority, so that they can wipe them out with their magic missile technology advantage. Though the Manticore home system got a bit hosed up due to a sneak attack, if I recall. Not that it really seems to matter much. The kicker is that the Solarians didn't even have numerical superiority. The Manticorean Alliance had parity or outnumbered them, though they only needed like 100 ships to wipe out a force 10 times as big.
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Aug 12, 2019 00:47
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Omi no Kami posted:Incidentally, have the latest honor harrington books gone anywhere interesting? I was down to aggressively skimming after the first few, and think I finally gave up in the one where the good republican planet and the evil welfare planet teamed up to fight the... I think it was supposed to be a communist planet? I forget, all I remember is that their strategy was explicitly the zapp brannigan thing of building more ships than honor had missiles, and just mass-suiciding hundreds of thousands of hulls until she ran out of things to shoot at them. (Also they apparently had a manchurian candidate-esque thing they were using to brainwash republicans into shooting at them? I was honestly pretty checked out by that point.) Quite the contrary, they're pretty much boring as poo poo. The newest books have played up the tech advantage that Manticore and her allies have to such a degree that the "battles" are almost always one sided massacres with dozens or hundreds or thousands of enemy ships all destroyed with little or no RMN losses. Since all the battles are a tedious foregone conclusion, the only possible angle for anything remotely interesting is in some of the character drama stuff, but then the fact that Weber can't write that kind of stuff convincingly pretty much kills that too. I'm only still reading them out of sheer inertia. Thank god for the public library, because if I had to pay money for these things I'd be pretty damned aggravated.
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Aug 12, 2019 00:56
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I was gonna do a let's read of echoes of honor but it's just a Weber book. They are all the same. Heroic monarchy with overpowered weapons/magic battles evil Nazi Communist Welfare bad guys who have two character archetypes: bad people who enjoy raping and honorable generals serving because of their love of country who realize they serve the Bad Mans and are no match for the protagonist. There's just not enough there to make fun of. It's bad, but it's usually not an overly offensive outrageous bad or a funny, campy bad. It's just uninteresting and repetitive l.
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Aug 12, 2019 02:25
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I was gonna do a let's read of echoes of honor but it's just a Weber book. They are all the same. That's why I suggested Honor of the Queen because it's entire thing is the chauvinism thing, which... well, let's just say Weber is not good there. I kinda wanna dig through his Pearls of Weber for choice bits, myself.
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Aug 12, 2019 02:44
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Huh, thanks for the summaries guys- I definitely made a good call bailing out when I did. Incidentally, while we're discussing Weber's writing I read Wages of Sin once, which I think he co-wrote with Eric Flint? I can't recommend it since it had tremendous amounts of sexual violence, weird male gaze-y stuff, and just a whole lot of creepy nonsense in general, but I got the impression that every time Weber wrote a tedious detailed ship battle, Flint yanked that section out, flipped a coin, and replaced it with either sex or violence. It didn't make for a good book, but it was remarkable how much better the pacing and general structure was with a second voice trying to moderate some of Weber's more problematic habits.
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Aug 12, 2019 02:53
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