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The X-Wing stories are pretty good, too. No real galaxy threatening superweapons, just solid stories that show that even though the Empire is losing, they can still kill people easily and fighting them is still relevant, even though the emperor is dead. Also has a MC who is actually a Jedi but doesn't know it, but, you know, let's not look at that too much.
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Sep 3, 2014 22:52
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It's also kinda generic and honestly pretty mediocre. It has a couple nice concepts, like the way the aliens reproduction influences their society, but in the end it does feel rather uninspired to me. Like the author wanted to do a roughly WWII-period story but found the setting too constrained and just decided "screw it, we'll do this in space".
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Oct 15, 2014 02:53
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Arglebargle III posted:It's not just smartphones; ubiquitous microcomputers have been important since the late 70s. The first 100% fly-by-wire fighter jet entered service in 1978. Every American fighter since 1978 has been flown by a computer, and incorporate design innovations that require computer control and would make direct human control difficult. For a direct analogy to the Forever War, the F-16's flight computer (and all subsequent fighters) do not carry out control inputs that exceed the aircraft's flight envelope, in contrast to Forever War's dumb mechanical waldo suit that allows lethal control inputs. The F-16's first flight was in 1974. All sci-fi looks incredibly dated after about a decade. Something I learned writing my sci-fi novel is that you can't predict the future and hope that it will be even remotely accurate a year or two later (just had a discussion with an early reader about it because I decided not to touch on AR and direct neural implants in a story set in 2114). At some point you have to consider what kind of story you want to write and decide how technology is going to play into that rather than trying to make an accurate prediction of what the future will actually look like. Add to that the desire to make the future somewhat relateable for the people reading the novel when it is written and you necessarily end up with a very conservative estimate regarding technological progress. No one wants to read 150+ pages of characters discussing the advancements in network routing software architecture that happened between the time the book was written and its setting (especially when network routing technology is in its infancy at the time of writing). It gets even worse for things that we haven't even gotten the first clue about. Imagine having to explain to the reader the changes that had to be made in biological classification systems to account for alien species. Plus even the boldest predictions are often wrong. I always imagine a guy in 1914 imagining what 2014 would look like and deciding that, of course, no one uses telephones anymore and the letter has vanished as a form of communication.
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Mar 24, 2015 12:14
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Mars4523 posted:Star Fist is bad. Very very bad. In the future there are no girls in the Marines(*), no power armor in the Marines, no combined arms in the Marines, and so on, plus Murica. In this universe, light infantry uber alles, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise (I'm guessing that's what the authors were). And later LSD starts getting involved. Well, Truman once said the USMC had a propaganda apparatus that put the Soviet Union to shame. I can totally see Congress forcing the Air Force (or whoever ends up running the US space fleet) to take Marines on board for "self-protection" because the Marines whined to Congress about it. We are talking about a service who wanted a supersonic stealth fighter that can take off and land vertically so they can operate it from hastily-secured beachheads (in tyool 2015) and got it. At least, that is how I did it in my novel  Speaking of which, I am currently looking for advance readers to give me some feedback on it and maybe a review after it is published. If you don't mind reading one of these dreaded ~self-published~ books, give me a shout at robertdreyerhro[at]gmail.com If I had to describe it in a single sentence, it is one of Tom Clancy's saner novels set in the early 22nd century. You have multiple blocks all striving for dominance in the inner solar system, mankind is just starting to think about maybe colonizing Mars while already actively mining asteroids, with a kind of cold war brinkmanship thrown in the mix. Predictably, it all goes wrong at some point and the world has itself a good old fashioned throwdown. Includes, among other things: The Russian and British armies reenacting the Charge of the Light Brigade on the Moon, Germans in tanks named after big cats, a Daring Commando Raid, a man on the run from his past, a woman seeking to right past wrongs, a young man finding his place in the world, a spy of questionable loyalties, orbital bombardment shown from the receiving end, a number of space battles, and a maneuver I like to call The Newtonian Handbrake. Not included are awkward sex scenes, crazy political ramblings, battlecruisers or the discussions of the qualities of their officers. I like to think it is quite good, but then again I'm probably biased.
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Mar 26, 2015 18:06
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Piell posted:I'd be interested in reading it. ed balls balls man posted:I'd give it a read as well. Ayn Marx posted:I also want to read that Captain Monkey posted:Link it or distribute this, I want to read it. If you guys could drop me a message at robertdreyerhro@gmail.com I can get it to you. Many thanks to those who have already contacted me, I hope you'll enjoy it.
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Mar 27, 2015 18:26
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WarLocke posted:If I have absolutely abysmal taste in books and have read (and enjoyed) the majority of the Baen catalog, where would I go from there? Completely shameless, albeit topical, plug (let me know if it gets on people's nerves): ArchangeI posted:If I had to describe it in a single sentence, it is one of Tom Clancy's saner novels set in the early 22nd century. You have multiple blocks all striving for dominance in the inner solar system, mankind is just starting to think about maybe colonizing Mars while already actively mining asteroids, with a kind of cold war brinkmanship thrown in the mix. Predictably, it all goes wrong at some point and the world has itself a good old fashioned throwdown.
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Apr 6, 2015 23:39
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Am I the only one who loves the idea of a story exploring gay and transgender issues through the medium of blowing poo poo the gently caress up?
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Apr 9, 2015 21:08
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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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Fried Chicken posted:As I recall, his first book involved power armor guys doing some kind of viltron thing and rising out of the sea to Led Zeppelin's The Immigrant Song and slaughtering irrelevant cardboard stormtroopers as a power ballad for how Totally Awesome his Mary Sue was. He loves that music poo poo so much. I think at one point a character comments how great Evanenesence is.
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May 13, 2015 23:27
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Kesper North posted:He writes like a sex-crazed ten year old with a rape fetish. I like to think he marks the lower border of what is acceptably trashy pulp sci-fi. Below him are the likes of Kratman. I also second Legend of the Galactic Heroes, it is really good. The animation quality is pretty dated, but other than that it could be described as Game of Space Thrones in terms of plot. Lots of intrigue, coups, revolutions, revolutionary coups, revolutionary counter-coups. The occasional space battle that is mostly "okay now send ten thousand battleships to the left flank and break through the enemy's fleet!" rather than endless sperging over the difficulties of point defence lasers have trying to destroy the new HVTAM (Hyper-Velocity Terminal Assault Missile) of the enemy. It also helps that it avoids all the things modern anime is infamous for.
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May 14, 2015 00:43
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Libluini posted:The book literally ends with the protagonist commiting genocide on aliens and practically everything about German politics in that book is wrong up to the point where 2 minutes on Google could have told Kratmann the truth. Yeah, I like to think if the choice was literally between Germany being completely wiped out as an entity, population included, and reinstating the SS as a force in Germany, the German parliament would still very seriously consider the first option. And even if you grant him that the circumstances require an elite unit for morale purposes, it would be a million times more likely that the Bundeswehr would form something like a Republican Guard Division that traces its roots back to the Guard Divisions of the old German Empire, because that would be less politically insane.
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May 14, 2015 22:41
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If nothing else I think most people would agree that the Neo-SS having a Jewish Brigade (and some parts of the book implying that something similar was planned during WWII) was amazingly tone-deaf at minimum, if not outright insulting.
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May 15, 2015 15:18
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Libluini posted:Because of this, I took a note to include at least three wildly different teary rants if I ever need a character to go on one. lovely SciFi-authors should learn to use smokescreens like this instead of just kinda hoping others are OK with their dumb poo poo. It's actually a good exercise to try and write a character argue a point you personally disagree with and have them win the argument with a character who argues your point. Just maybe not "abolish the age of consent entirely".
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May 29, 2015 09:36
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Drifter posted:Is Baen a cookie-cutter publisher or something? What is a Baen book? I thought Asaro was supposed to be a good author? Baen publishes mostly mil sci-fi and is pretty well known to skew hard to the right even for that genre. The infamous Thomas Kratman and John Ringo ("Let's rejuvenate literally SS soldiers to fight against an alien invasion because modern day Germany is overrun by liberals who just don't cut it" is the plot of one of their books) publish at Baen.
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Jun 17, 2015 19:12
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WarLocke posted:It's a contentious book but that's not the plot. It's more like "literally everyone else is either dead or already fighting, we're desperate enough to rejuvenate literal nazis so aliens don't eat everyone". No, it was literally to create an elite unit for morale purposes. They could have rejuvenated Nazis and put them into regular units but nope, we gotta recreate the SS. Plus it was done well before the invasion started, so it wasn't even scrapping the barrel.
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Jun 17, 2015 20:13
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Kesper North posted:Yup. It's even implied that they're just as smart as humans and that they just exploit their status as cute furry animals so they can screw around. That sounds like a cat alright
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Jul 7, 2015 17:35
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Psion posted:
Wasn't it Honor Harrington where the author wrote like a three page derail about advances made in missile technology and missile launch technology, ending literally with "none of this mattered to the characters in this particular moment"? Because that still sticks to my mind as the most blatant and terrible infodumping I've ever read. Should be enshrined and given to each prospective mil sci-fi writer the moment they first boot up a text editor.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:00
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Obligatory mention of Passage at Arms as the best "Spaceships are really just submarines in space" novel ever written. There isn't a whole lot of character development in the book and the characters themselves are kinda predictable (the Christian guy, the old man, the clueless newbie etc.), but that doesn't really matter because the rest is so loving good.Velius posted:Just be aware that On Death Ground and Shiva Option are 100% relentless space battles with thinner than cardboard characters. Also a lot of "the new tier XII shields held the tier 7 warheads, but only for a moment before they were overwhelmed, the ship engulfed in explosions as it fell off the line." It's based on a boardgame (Starfire), and it shows really badly at times. In some sections you can practically see the dice rolls. But I still love it, because the plot is fairly well done and even allows for the heroes to make a few mistakes early on (practically unheard of in most mil-sci-fi) before turning into an unstoppable juggernaut of a military machine. I'll also shamelessly plug my very own Weltenbrand, which is very much a Tom Clancy novel reimagined in space (minus the crazy right-wing political rants). Including tank battles on Mars involving Germans in tanks named after big cats, Daring Commando Raids(TM) and lots of space battles.
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Sep 12, 2015 04:40
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Libluini posted:The only bad I can say about both books is this weird thing military SF-authors seem to have where they just describe space battle after space battle, but somehow forget to actually mention how the ships involved look. I guess I'm in the minority that couldn't care less how ships look like, unless that is somehow relevant to the plot or significantly different to what people would assume a star ship to look like (Battlefleet Gothic comes to mind). At the distances most hard-sci-fi space battles are fought you're firing on a radar blip anyway, and when you're flinging antimatter-tipped missiles around it matters little where the missile hits. So the ships are probably mostly box shaped with engines on one end.
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Sep 12, 2015 10:25
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Libluini posted:It's nice you want to support bad authors, but just forgetting descriptions most people consider important is still dumb. Also "box shaped with engines on one end" is the most unimaginative thing said ever in the history of the universe. Calling someone unimaginative after criticizing a book for forcing you to use your imagination is pretty hilarious.
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Sep 12, 2015 14:20
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FuzzySlippers posted:You can be interested in the plot or the world in the large strokes but less interested in lengthy physical descriptions. I have to admit I kinda skim through long descriptive passages when doing light reading especially if the author isn't particularly good at it or it just isn't very interesting. That's pretty much my point. If it is relevant to the plot or tells us something about a character, it is absolutely required to be described. If its not relevant then its just infodumping for the sake of infodumping, in a genre that is already rife with infodumping. It's the epitome of "none of this mattered to the crew at this particular moment"-syndrome. Telling authors, particularly new authors, that they need to describe everything a character sees is what causes authors to either give descriptions that read like police warnings or go into incredibly creepy detail about the creamy skin and the big tits of the new XO, whose mop of unruly red hair reflected her personality etc. etc.. None of which matters. For a book with the scope of In Death Ground what a ship does is far more important than how it looks from an angle no character ever gets to see. You can literally imagine them as boxes with engines and not miss anything. But the real reason why no one should give any details about a ship that aren't absolutely vital to the plot are the smartasses that come up and go "Uh hey on page 237 of your 800 page novel you say that the high-gains antenna is on the left side of the ship between the aft missile tube and the secondary airlock, but on page 659 you say the ship sends a transmission to another ship behind it while the engines are running. Since you wrote on page 496 that the ship uses ionized plasma as a propulsion method, shouldn't that have garbled the transmission into uselessness?"
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Sep 13, 2015 02:54
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Wait until you read the book he wrote with Tom Kratmann
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Oct 2, 2015 07:53
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:It's largely a false distinction but the technical definition is that hard SF is based on a scientific concept, whereas other SF doesn't and is just taking place in a futuristic setting. I would disagree with that definition. Hard Sci-fi tries hard not to violate the known laws of the universe. That means no previously unknown elements with incredible abilities (this includes particles and sub-particles), time delay for long range communications as a thing which exists, orbit as a state of motion rather than a place to be and everything that flows from there. Both Star Trek and Star Wars fail this on multiple accounts. That doesn't mean you have to have a degree in spaceship engineering to write a hard-sci-fi novel, or that you have to show exactly how you did the math. In fact, I'd argue that you don't even have to do the math so long as you stay within the framework of the universe as we understand it today. But as others have said, it's not nearly as neat a divide as some people might say. What is also important is to note that this doesn't say anything about the quality of a story. Anyone who uses realism as a mark of quality in a fiction story hasn't understood the concept of fiction. To wit: The Martian is hard sci-fi (in fact about as hard sci-fi as you can probably be without writing research proposals for NASA). A story about Mark Watney having to travel across Mars to activate the 12 pylons left by the progenitor race with his special DNA in order to power his specially constructed teleportation gate, the plans of which were granted to him by a disembodied voice in his mind), to get back home and lead humanity to the stars would be soft sci-fi.
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Oct 26, 2015 20:57
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Atrocity Archives is pretty decent. It's more James Bond meets Chutulu, though, if James Bond was a slightly more fit typical goon. The nerd pop culture references come hard and fast, and the overall setting loves it some snide comments about the British civil service.
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Oct 26, 2015 21:36
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Well if you hype up a character as the most brilliant, most brave, most badass space admiral ever, any death you can give her is going to leave people feeling like it was dumb. This is why you regularly kill off characters before they can become too strong and overbearing. The universe is a cold and cruel place, but not nearly as cold and cruel as the author's mind.
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Feb 2, 2016 00:09
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General Battuta posted:But the Solarians didn't know that she had more than 25,000 triple-stage CLAC guided Apollo missiles with Ghostfucker jamming and the new Treecat Empathy Guidance systems, or that the new Prince Harry-class ultradreadnoughts could poo poo them out as fast as they could build them — and Rear Admiral Someone smiled fiercely as None of this, of course, mattered to the crew of HMS Gay Viking in that particular moment...
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Feb 2, 2016 21:16
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Psion posted:A fair criticism I think is totally legitimate to level at Weber is his mindset seems to be problem occurs -> heroes solve problem -> problem is resolved perfectly and forever. In HH, I feel like he also wanted to cleave too closely to the idea of decadent French royalty lording it over French peasantry, just by prefixing "space" in front of everything. Space France, Space Proletariat, Space CPS headed by Space Robspierre. That didn't help, but the trend is extant in most of his work: he does this in Safehold and he did it with HH, arguably he did this with Dahak, anything long-form. It may be simple, but on the other hand, we are talking about fiction and storytelling, here. I'm always very wary when people demand realism in their fiction, and I say that as someone who deliberately set out to write hard-ish space opera/mil-sf. At the end of the day, a fictional story is a fictional story, it is subject to the laws of the medium, not of nature. And one of those laws - at least in the genre of space opera - is that there should be development and progress throughout the story. Part of that is not going back to fix a problem the hero has already fixed. Once the hero has forged the Sword of Destiny, it makes little sense for the sword to break before confronting the Villain near the end of the book (or at all, really). All that would lead to would be another ten chapters about re-forging the Sword of Destiny. The sword shattering might be more realistic, but would it make for a better story when you have to go back and do the whole thing over again in the next book? Wouldn't that read more like padding? Wouldn't it be better to show new problems to be solved, which by necessity requires old problems to remain solved? I for one find it difficult to blame someone who wants to show of every part of the universe they created rather than writing yet another book dealing with the Sixth Corisande Insurgency War.
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Feb 17, 2016 07:17
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Rocksicles posted:Anyone read the Frontlines series by Marko Kloos? Do the later books go anywhere? The first two read more like collections of short stories with very tenuous connection between them. Especially since you never get the impression that anything is ever resolved, things just get worse and worse and worse and new ways in which things are bad are created one after the other. I honestly got the impression that Kloos just wants to write action scenes (which he writes pretty drat well) but has no idea where to go with the plot and just makes the overall plot up as he goes along.
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Jul 24, 2016 20:17
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Hughlander posted:Biggest problem with the series is every book ends because someone did the same two things: built a hull type larger than before. Introduced a new weapon type. Also built more ships. I mean, I really like it because it manages a great sense of scale while still keeping an eye on individual characters, but Shiva Option in particular devolves into a lot of quote:97 missile pods made the transit through the wormhole. Of these, 12 intersected and were destroyed in an instant. The remaining 85 launched a total of 255 missiles at the enemy fleet guarding the exit of the wormhole. At once, Alien point defense networks sprang to life. Missiles started dying by the dozens. Alien defenses managed to swat 86 missiles out of the void before they struck their target. Still, more than 150 missiles hit. Force fields buckled under the nuclear onslaught. Six battleships, five cruisers and a carrier were destroyed in an instant, a further 4 battleships and 2 cruisers reduced to glowing hulks that drifted aimlessly, spewing atmosphere in the vacuum like the blood of an animal with a cut jugular. It was in this moment that the first of the 129 battleships waiting on the human side of the wormhole made its transit." x20
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Oct 2, 2016 00:00
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Hammerstein posted:I read so many mediocre to bad SF space operas over last summer - it's such a welcome change from my academic reading lists during the semester. I'm just gonna shamelessly plug my own novel series here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VVU7164 It's basically Tom Clancy does Space Opera before he went crazy. So you have spaceships that are essentially submarines IN SPACE, spies doing spy stuff, cold wars GOING HOT, tank battles ON MARS, spec ops operators operating ON THE MOON (high speed, zero drag environment) etc. It does do the whole "Unlikely hero in an old ship with a crew of misfits", but that is just one character among many (too many, really, the first book suffers from severe "Meanwhile..." syndrome in certain parts). And I never described the shape of a female character's breast.
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Nov 7, 2016 19:13
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Reminder that Tom Kratman believes that the right answer to an alien invasion of people-eating monsters is to revive literal SS-war criminals because they are "motivated to fight" unlike those pinko liberals these days who would just roll over.That Works posted:Worlds Aflame by Weltenbrand, a goon author was recommended in here recently and has been decent mil sci-fi. I liked it, reminded me a lot of Red Storm Rising (in good ways ) not to be too nitpicky, but Weltenbrand is not the author, its the title (worlds aflame is the subtitle and is the literal translation of the Cool German Name). And yes, Red Storm Rising was what I was going for. Glad you liked it.
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Jan 17, 2017 18:29
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