Charge your lasers, and prepare for lightspeed: The SPACE OPERA thread.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Charge your lasers, and prepare for lightspeed: The SPACE OPERA thread.

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Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

branedotorg posted:

I liked the empire of man series too, it was just fairly obvious the each segment was a set up to the next pitched battle using a different tactic based on utilising whatever the local economic speciality was.

Try the "Lost Fleet" series, it's even worse. Each segment is a setup to the next pitched battle which is almost exactly like the last pitched battle.

Has anyone read David Drake's "Leary" series? I kind of like how the technology completely changes from one book to the next.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2009 03:26

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 00:27

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Mr.48 posted:

This seems like a good place to ask as any, are Drakes Hammer's Slammers books good? I only read the Venus novellas by him and liked them.

I like them, although it gets a bit repetitive sometimes to read about the awesomest soldiers in the universe being awesomely more awesome than everyone else. It's non-political, in the sense that it's taken as given that any politician is a total sniveling weasely bastard and the Slammers are the only people who can do anything at all.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2009 04:56

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

It's not much like the Black Company books; if anything, it's most like Haldeman's "The Forever War". (I haven't read any of the "Dorsai!" books so I can't speak to those.)

You can get a lot of it on the Baen Free Library if you want. Go for "The Tank Lords" and "Paying The Piper".

# ¿ Nov 13, 2009 19:23

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Tanith posted:

I think the space Catholicism of the last two books in the series is interesting, but like the church, Aenea is also the biggest threat to the book's being good.

Yes, it was interesting to think about how religion would work in a sci-fi universe where true resurrection was a reality. Unfortunately it became about thirty chapters of "Hey look at this cool SF world I just thought up" and "dude, Frank Lloyd Wright was TOTALLY loving AWESOME okay?"

Tanith posted:

What surprises me is that no one has mentioned Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empire's Fall trilogy, which has all sorts of neat things like physics playing a huge role in his conceptualization of space combat.

I think it's been discussed (either here or in a mil-sf thread) and the consensus was that the third book pretty much abandons the plotline to gently caress around with a murder mystery IN SPACE and a thinly-veiled "Iraq from the OTHER SIDE" allegory.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2009 19:03

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

USMC_Karl posted:

Yeah, after you read the first two or three books you'll notice there is a really set formula that Campbell follows each book.

Oh GOD yes. I think that there's at least twice in each book where he tells us about how battlecruisers are fast and heavily-armed but don't have the armor of a battleship.

Velius posted:

Weber's Honorverse is horrible tripe, but the battles in the novels are actually pretty entertaining. If his characters weren't so ridiculous it'd be a lot more tolerable. He also has a duology of "In Death Ground" and "The Shiva Option' which are also horribly written and characterized, but the books are 95% straight up battles that end up being pretty entertaining.

The amusing part is that the duology in question is sort of a sci-fi wargame equivalent of the original Dragonlance trilogy (along with Red Storm Rising) in that it's a novelisation of a long-running game campaign involving the author and one of his friends.

# ¿ May 16, 2010 01:10

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

I do kind of get the idea that he's using a Star Fleet Battles design aesthetic; i.e. "the small ship is a smaller exact copy of the basic design, and the big ship is a larger exact copy of the basic design".

Although it's better than the Honor Harrington series where everyone rides around in flying death kazoos.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2010 21:45

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Tanith posted:

Since I love everything Horatio Hornblower ever UP UNTIL FORESTER KILLS BUSH

(Hornblower spoiler discussion) And a total gently caress-you ending, too; it's just "oh he got blown up offscreen, poor Bush I guess I'll cheat on the love of my life now"

mllaneza posted:

[The Honor Harrington tabletop game is] a good one too, plenty of detail, 3D fully Newtonian movement, an operational scale for trying to maneuver the other guy away from the convoy. And done by an SFB refugee with a knack for using play aids to simplify math and procedures.

What I liked was how the guys who made SFB were always "oh, we can't possibly do 3D momentum-based movement, that's way too complicated and has no gameplay benefit", and the HH game rules are not only entirely workable but less complicated than SFB!

Incidentally, if you want space-opera ripoffs of Horatio Hornblower, one of the "Sten" novels is basically a Cliff's Notes version of the Hornblower series up to "Ship Of The Line". (After that it turns into "The Great Escape".)

WarLocke posted:

...there's the Dahak books which are kind of the antithesis of the Harrington stuff - the tech is mindblowingly advanced and over the top, he doesn't even try to depict 'realistic' space warfare what with battle planetoids the size of moons slashing into fleets composed of hundreds of thousands of ships.

Sounds like "Legend of the Galactic Heroes". (Which is a novel series that I'd think someone could release domestically, seeing as how there's apparently markets for big-fleet MilSF and translated Japanese sci-fi novels.)

Miss-Bomarc fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Jun 9, 2010

# ¿ Jun 9, 2010 03:59

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Tanith posted:

Wait did he manage to screw up Lord Hornblower more than I remember, or are you referring to that nonsense in Flying Colours? And did he do it again in Commodore Hornblower? It wasn't specified in the text, but I thought it might have been implied that he hosed up like that then too.

No, Flying Colours was okay, but Lord Hornblower was absolutely awful. He cheats on his wife while his best friend dies offscreen, then the girl he cheated with gets shot, then he pretty much beats up Napoleon singlehandedly.

I know we're derailing this into a Hornblower Bitchfest, but it's also important to remember that the British Royal Navy and the Horatio Hornblower series have been the inspiration for any amount of space opera.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2010 06:23

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

papa horny michael posted:

I have the same problem with John Scalzi. Everyone seems to like his stuff, but jeeze, if I wanna read a rewrite of heinlein/haldeman junk, or the abominable Agent to the Stars.

For some reason John Scalzi is the favorite author of conservative bloggers everywhere. I have no idea why, since he shits all over their darling Firefly, but everyone was all crazy about "Old Man's War".

actually, wait, I do know why. OMW has a really interesting dust-jacket summary--aliens come to Earth to recruit humans into the galactic army, but there's a catch. They don't want dumb cannon fodder, they want elite supertroopers, so they only take people who've got plenty of life experience--i.e. they only want old people who've been around the block a few times and know what's what.

I think "hey, this sounds cool, I bet they use all sorts of remote-operating vehicles, or maybe the whole army is just robots and the geezers basically just play Starcraft only for real--"

Turns out it's possibly the biggest Mary Sue story ever. In fact, the entire premise of the book is that Mary Sue is a real thing. The best and most awesomest (although physically inferior) people on Earth get to go into space and have their minds transferred into incredibly sexy super-soldier bodies and you get to wear cool power armor and shoot neat guns and it basically turns into a generic Tom Clancy Rainbow Six power fantasy in space.

To sum up, there's nothing that Scalzi writes that Ringo didn't write better earlier--and, for that matter, that David Drake didn't write better and earlier than Ringo did.

*********

Speaking of which, what about David Drake's Leary/Mundy series? I think that's my guilty pleasure, my equivalent of the "Black Jack Geary" series. I know it's just trashy generic sci-fi, but dammit I can't help but buy 'em right as they come off the press...

There was also Drake's "Venus" trilogy, but that was back before he'd started taking lithium or whatever he did, and so it's unrelentingly grim (and also bloody violent.)

Miss-Bomarc fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Jun 14, 2010

# ¿ Jun 14, 2010 04:22

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

What makes [the Old Man's War series] worthwhile is that [Scalzi] puts in a lot of subtle digs at Heinlein's worldview, rampant militarism, etc., throughout the series -- he's subverting the tropes, not just repeating them.

Meh, not really in the first one; there's one bit where someone attempts to peacefully contact an alien race and is instantly killed, and another bit where it turns out that an evil sentient fungus was slowly infiltrating the colony and then suddenly destroyed it from within--and the colonists could have kicked it out, but they were too lazy to bother, doesn't this maybe make you think of COMMIE SUBVERSION!?!?!?? !! @! Or something like that.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2010 04:40

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

[Scalzi's] too good a writer to do it too obviously, because he's trying to sell books first, but the subversion of the tropes are there. If you read Scalzi's blog it's pretty clear that he's pretty drat left-wing.

Heh heh heh, I was wondering why the sequels to OMW didn't get nearly the level of blog-cocksucking that OMW got...

PS that blog post is a big long list of White People Problems. Oh no, the special clothes I wear to keep my dick-sweat from staining my shorts were bought secondhand, I had to wash them before I wore them.

Miss-Bomarc fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Jun 14, 2010

# ¿ Jun 14, 2010 05:30

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Psion posted:

Gonna make you all hate yourselves for reading this.

Gah. It's like someone did a transcript of grognard table-talk.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2010 02:15

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Raere posted:

Can anyone recommend any decent novels that center on ships? I guess I'm looking for spaceship battles with as minimal cheese as possible.

Drake's "Lieutenant Leary Commanding" is pretty ship-centric.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2010 05:56

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

HerrMorden posted:

I've been listening to The Lost Fleet on audiobook...Does it get better in the last half of the series?

I lost count of the number of times we were told that battlecruisers were faster than battleships and had equivalent firepower but couldn't take as much damage. (And somehow this never seems to matter much. There's no repetition of the Run to the South, where Beatty went in with six battlecruisers and came out with two.)

Tanith posted:

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that we need Hemry to create the structure of a series, and then force Peter F. Hamilton to fill in the blanks while threatening to break a bone for every superfluous and gratuitous sex scene he tries to sneak in.

Actually, David Drake could do a better job with the ship combat. Actually, I'd rather just go read "Seas of Venus" again (and wonder why Drake put a weird travelogue as the third bit instead of Kuttner's "Clash By Night".)

Miss-Bomarc fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Nov 19, 2010

# ¿ Nov 19, 2010 04:56

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

It also helps if you describe what you're looking for. Are you interested in "the whole universe explodes" space opera? I think you're stuck with the Scotsmen there. Is it "another tale of The 37735621th Space Battlefleet"? That's pretty much all Weber does. Or are you looking for "Captain Tyson McCracken kills an alien and fucks a broad?" That one I'd point you to Drake's "Leary" series.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2010 23:25

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Chairman Capone posted:

I used to give Baen a lot of credit for their willingness to put both old and new titles online for free. But on the other hand, most of their free stuff is poo poo like this. Also the covers to their books are, without a single exception, absolutely terrible.

Oh come on, how can you NOT love poo poo like this?

# ¿ Dec 2, 2010 07:57

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Midget Fist posted:

Wasn't the whole point of joining up to become a citizen? So that you could vote and everything, otherwise you were 'just a civilian' athough most civilians didn't seem too bothered about it.

Right, but "join up" in the context of the Starship Troopers novella could mean "spacesuit field-tester" or "mining at the bottom of the Marianas Trench" or "nuclear reactor refueling technician". The idea is that it's difficult, dirty, dangerous work which shows that the person will instinctively make choices that benefit the group.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2010 23:58

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

A: You know, I never really looked at it like that before, but drat if you aren't exactly right!

B: You stole that from this thread, didn't you

# ¿ Dec 22, 2010 04:11

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Part of the thing is personal pique--Niven and Pournelle and a bunch of other mil-sf authors were invited to comment on SDI, and came up with some pretty crazy poo poo (basically, all the stuff in "Footfall" was their SDI proposals). They got told "thanks, but that's about twenty years beyond modern technology; don't call us, we'll call you" and never really got over that sense of rejection.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2011 20:11

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

pseudorandom name posted:

My favorite example of this is Vinge's comment that mankind counts time as the number of seconds since the first time they landed on their homeworld's primary satellite, but off by a bit.

This actually isn't far from the truth.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2011 05:09

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

I read Risen Empire (and its sequel, Killing Of Worlds) and they were interesting. I'd say they're very much Space Opera as this thread would define it.

It's unfortunate that Westerfield doesn't seem interested in continuing the series, though, because the ending of the second book couldn't get any more "to be continued" if he'd actually written "TO BE CONTINUED".

# ¿ Jan 7, 2012 08:09

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

"The City Who Fought" is about a sentient space station.

Although it's Anne McCaffery, who...had her moments.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2012 04:36

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Antti posted:

Honestly I wonder if the author's paralyzed thinking "gently caress, how can I write a sequel that does justice to that setup?"

From what he's said, I get the idea that it didn't sell well enough to make him excited about continuing it, and then he got another idea that was more exciting and sold better.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2012 14:41

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

What I learned from the Mordant's Need series is that licking a woman's nipples causes her to enter a hypnotic trance, at which time you can implant unconscious suggestions.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2012 06:22

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

notaspy posted:

I've read through this threat to find a book or series I'm pretty sure doesn't exist. I'm wanting something with the following plot devices:

- A Human empire or at least Humans as a major force in the universe
- Epic space battles
- Epic ground battles
- An epic scale either in time or space
- Political intrigue
- Aliens
- NO loving KIDS, well not as major characters!

Walter Jon Williams's "Praxis" series sounds like pretty much exactly what you're looking for.

# ¿ May 1, 2012 06:03

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Chairman Capone posted:

But seriously, what the hell is it with Baen attracting the absolute most regressive far-right people possible to write for them?

It's right there in the name. Jim Baen did his business based on personality, and the personalities that created working relationships with him generally had what you'd call "terrible right-wing views". With some notable exceptions, such as David Drake (who, to the extent that he has a definable political philosophy beyond sarcastic cynicism, seems to favor anarcho-syndicalism.) Drake at least has the good sense to keep his political philosophy mostly out of his books.

Hedrigall posted:

But now the fact that [Sheffield is] published by Baen is making me worry that I've really bought some right-wing milsf garbage.

You know, you could try just reading the book and deciding for yourself whether or not you liked it without worrying about the Political Acceptability of your chosen entertainment.

Miss-Bomarc fucked around with this message at 06:51 on May 4, 2012

# ¿ May 4, 2012 06:49

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

mllaneza posted:

Eric Flint also put his money where his mouth is and started giving away his ebooks. He made money from it in increased sales of his back catalog and that's why Baen has the first couple of books from every series it publishes available for free. And it took a socialist to lead them.

Baen had been giving away free books for a while, it wasn't just Eric Flint.

# ¿ May 10, 2012 04:41

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Lprsti99 posted:

Grey Goo

"Aristoi", by Walter Jon Williams.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2012 02:55

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Velius posted:

For being military sci-fi, Moon's stuff never struck me as being filled with Mary-sues.

To be honest, it was much more filled with boring. I read about half of "Vatta's War" and realized that I was basically reading a novelised Let's Play of EV:Nova, and that made me wonder why I wasn't just playing EV:Nova.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2012 05:27

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Chairman Capone posted:

As a Star Wars EU nerd I could go on for pages about Karen Traviss, but in the interest of not spamming the thread I'll try and keep it short.

What I thought was most amusing was how her "Republic Commando" series turned into a lengthy apologia for Jedi going over to the Dark Side of the Force, and yet somehow she never seemed to recognize this.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2012 05:55

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Chairman Capone posted:

I've always heard of it being a modern version of Starship Troopers, but so far at least it reminds me more of The Forever War. Which is a good thing, in my view.

Advertising copywriters describe things as "like Starship Troopers" because they don't read anything that wasn't on Oprah's website but they've heard of "Starship Troopers" because it got made into a space war movie and they've also heard that it was a book first so anything that's "space war"-ish gets described as "like Starship Troopers".

# ¿ Dec 30, 2012 02:24

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Like has always happened ever? Half of the original set of Star Trek novels were at least plotted by Diane Duane, if not written outright.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2013 08:25

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

The problem is that they aren't so much Indian as they are white people wearing Indian costumes.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2013 16:28

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

The thing to remember about GotM is that Erikson wasn't really sure where he wanted to go with the series yet, and he was kind of just trying out a bunch of different things. And in this day and age of Big Fat Fantasy, they just had him publish EVERYTHING instead of editing out the stuff that didn't matter.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2013 16:46

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Bhodi posted:

[*]David Drake's RCN series - the best and most blatant re-skin of Aubrey�Maturin ever. Also the most "realistic" physics-wise, just don't do the math on the accell/time/percentage of c figures.

Drake also had an earlier series, the "Reaches" trilogy, that was a similar "let's invent technology that makes sailing-ships-in-space work" idea. It was a lot more graphic than Drake's recent work, though (this was around the same time he was doing Northworld.)

# ¿ Sep 10, 2013 05:53

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

There's nothing wrong, I think, with enjoying media that is "trash". Lots of people play terrible video games, watch awful movies, etcetera.

The difference comes when someone says "Weber's Honor Harrington series is a TOTALLY LEGITAMITE look at politicial evolution and EVERYONE SHOULD READ IT and UNDERSTAND where society is going! And it has COMPLETELY REALISTIC depictions of space combat and is an OBVIOUS result of technological development!" Like, when they stop saying "this is entertaining trash" and start saying "you know, the author is actually right about this stuff".

# ¿ Sep 21, 2013 16:03

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

Well, yeah. Basically this is Drake's answer to Weber's "Space Horatio Hornblower" (and, in fact, Drake originally got the idea when doing an Aubrey/Maturin pastiche set in Weber's universe.)

You're right that the end battle always seems to turn out as "We win because we're Daniel Leary and Adele Mundy".

# ¿ Oct 1, 2013 04:32

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

BadOptics posted:

What is the consensus on Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empire's Fall?

It's resoundingly okay. Go ahead and finish it, but it does not really deliver on the promise of its beginning.

the solution to all the battles is "invent new tactics instead of just re-using the ones you've used for the last four thousand years". The third book forgets that it's supposed to be a space opera, and divides its time between a murder mystery and a freedom-fighter-guerilla story.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2013 23:39

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

That's actually a good way to describe it. For Dread Empire, it's like if you put the first two books together (cutting a big chunk of the second) you'd have a good Book One, and the third book would be a good Book Two.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2013 23:51

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 00:27

Miss-Bomarc: Aug 1, 2009

It's also kind of weird to read the author's blog posts, where he talks about how incredibly scary his female character is and how she's this unbelievably awful person, just a totally vicious bitch, and how she's like the worst character he's ever written. (Bear in mind that this author wrote another book where the heroes come up with a plan to suicide-bomb the cure for AIDS so that a child molester can take over the world.)

# ¿ Oct 21, 2013 02:48

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Charge your lasers, and prepare for lightspeed: The SPACE OPERA thread.

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