Magnificent Quiver posted:

Can anyone recommend a book with a humanity uber alles theme? I have a weakness for books where humanity gets beaten or starts out as the underdog, then proceeds to kick rear end. Sort of like the first three books of the Uplift series, or that weird Niven book where the elephant aliens invade the solar system.

Chairman Capone posted:

That series sounds pretty interesting, but on the other hand it is written by the absolutely terrible John Ringo, so is it worth it? Does the story manage to overcome his atrocious high-school level characterization, plots, and writing?

John Ringo posted:

To take his mind off of the stupid bastard as he waited for last formation to be called, Duncan studied the latest black box they had been issued. It was about the size of the pack of Marlboros in his left breast pocket and flat, absorbent black, very similar in appearance to their AIDs. Black as an ace of spades. And, somehow, it projected a field you could not put a .308 round through. He'd already tried. Several times, just to be sure. And it didn't even move the box when the shells ricocheted off; that was freaky. Mind you, the guys around him moved prrrretty damned fast when those .308 rounds came back up range at the Fort Bragg Rod and Gun club. Fortunately there weren't any jerks around. The other shooters just laughed and went back to jacking rounds downrange from an amazing variety of weapons.

Okay, so it stopped bullets. But the field only extended out about seven feet in either direction and it stopped when it touched an obstacle. Stopped. It didn't wrap around the obstacle. Just stopped, which sucked if you thought about it. And you should be able to brace it into something, not just depend on whatever it was that kept it in place. He'd had a little talk with his AID and it turned out the drat thing had some sort of safety lock. So he'd talked with his AID a little more and convinced it that since they were an experimental battalion, with experimental equipment, they had the responsibility to experiment. The AID checked its protocols and apparently agreed because it had just released the safety interlocks on the device. Ensuring that it was at arm's length, Duncan activated the unit.

The Personal Force Field unit functioned by generating a focused reversal plane of weak force energy as analogous to a laser beam as a line is to a plane, meaning not. The unit was designed to produce a circle 12 meters in area for 45 minutes. Given the option of maximum generation, it generated a circle 1250 meters square for 3 milliseconds before failing. The plane was effectively two-dimensional. It extended outwards 20 meters in every direction, sliding through the interstices between atoms and occasionally disrupting the odd proton or electron.

The plane sliced as effectively as a katana in air through all the surrounding material, severing I-beams, bed structures, wall lockers and, in the unfortunate case of Sergeant Duncan's roommate, limbs. The slice, thinner than a hair, reached from the basement supply room, where it, among other things, sliced through an entire box of Bic pens causing a tremendous mess, to the roof, where it created a leak that was never completely fixed. However, once the entire base was overrun by the Posleen the leak became moot. In addition, the throughput on the unit exceeded the parameters of the superconductive circuitry, and waste heat raised the case temperature to over two hundred degrees Celsius.

"Jesus!" screamed Sergeant Duncan and dropped the suddenly red-hot case as his bunk dropped to the floor. As the floor began to settle, he slid forward as did his roommate on the other bunk. His roommate let out a bloodcurdling scream as his legs, from just below the knees, suddenly slid sideways away from his descending body and arterial blood spurted bright red to blacken the army blanket.

In his time Sergeant Duncan had seen more than any man's share of ugly accidents and he reacted without thought. He rapidly wound parachute cord around the stumps. The knife made an effective tightener for the first tourniquet; placed right it did not even cut the cord. The second tourniquet slowed the blood loss through the simple expedient of using a self-tightening hitch, very common when preparing vehicles for heavy drop or certain kinds of girls for bed. The unfortunate roommate screamed imprecations and began to cry; to such a man the loss of his legs might as well be death.

"Forget it," Sergeant Duncan snarled as he slid a screwdriver under the second tourniquet and tightened it until the blood flow stopped. "They can regrow them now." The soon-to-be ex-roommate was going glassy eyed as the blood loss began to affect him, but he caught the central idea and nodded as he passed out. "I'm the one who's hosed," Duncan whispered at last and cradled his burned hand to his chest as he crawled up the incline to the door. "Medic!" He yelled into the hallway and slumped back against the doorframe staring blank-eyed at the floor sloping towards the mirror-bright cut.

fritz posted:

isn't that the one where the only dudes bad enough to lead Earth's armies are a bunch of hundred and twenty year old nazis (<-- literal nazis of the 1940s German kind not modern nazis, skinny and monocled not fat and tattooed )

Chairman Capone posted:

Holy poo poo. I just stopped reading that when I got to the "mother-daughter action" and fifteen year old hooker part. Jesus Christ. I take it back, I think I have no need to read this to see how bad it is.

CaptainCrunch posted:

The Legacy books up to "Hell's Faire" are straight up Ringo, pre-rape fantasy weirdness and are pretty decent if you're just looking for quasi mindless "High tech shoot out" fun. He was still getting started as an author at that point and I find them worth the occasional read. Plus introducing the idea why it's bad to let rednecks play with antimatter.

I.E. if you like the scene in "Predator" where the squad panics and hoses the jungle with machinegun fire while yelling... you can probably be entertained by these books.

branedotorg posted:

not bad if you like excuses for pitched battles, evolving tactics always based around one (new) trick & obvious character progressions. the evil empire is a green oriented socialist empire btw.

Rhymenoserous posted:

They start off well, but about 6 or 7 books in the Author wants to gently caress his subject material a little too much (Honor) and his misogynistic streak starts showing. The way he had written the character up to that point didn't really allow for the "Falls to pieces because the one man she loves can never be hers!" nonsense that occurred.

Turned me off the series entirely.

mllaneza posted:

Tanith posted:

Since I love everything Horatio Hornblower ever UP UNTIL FORESTER KILLS BUSH could you elaborate on the parallels?

Tanith posted:

Does this six-legged psychic cat-thing get more important, or is it just a bit of fun?

Chairman Capone posted:

I take exception to the idea that John Ringo ever wrote anything good, ever.

Noricae posted:

The more science, the better, in my sci-fi, if that helps, and is probably what determines what I pick up more often than not

Noricae posted:

Stephen Baxter is added to my list though (similar to Poul Anderson apparently? sold!); thanks multiple people!

Psion posted:

I've said this before but I'm absolutely convinced now -- Weber is writing so much poo poo lately that when he gets stressed for deadlines he falls back on his wargaming. So his books read like dice rolls; you can hear the loving things as he and his friends sit around a table making excel charts on their laptops while the Space Dungeon Master discusses how many superdreadnoughts the shipyards built that week with ECM3 AMBAM DSMBL MDM bhurfhgh blurghl.

Psion posted:

My concern is that #4 seems to be Weber's magic number; the horribly blatant telegraphing of a character death late in the book is a bad sign.

Psion posted:

Really the problem with the HH books is he intended to kill Honor at the end of the last one and it's been incredibly obvious that his attempt to massage that change into these new books failed. The inconsistencies are legion in the 'transition' from old war (i.e. Peeps) to new war (i.e. Machiavellian Mesa Alignment) and it's just painful. Doubly so since, as I claimed above, he's not sure how to do it so his solution is to bury the inconsistencies in technobabble and dice rolls.

Psion posted:

Man In Fury Born annoys me since he took a perfectly good, tightly written book (Path of the Fury) and just plastered on a bunch of ham-handed foreshadowing in the 'prequel' bit as well as meaningless, meaningless technical detail.

Psion posted:

But all of that was in Path of the Fury. It was implied instead of spelled out in painstaking detail, but it was still there.

Astroman posted:

Really fun reads. I'd never read any of his stuff before and was pleasantly surprised. I'll definitely be looking for the third in the trilogy.

fritz posted:

The only good time travel story is All of an Instant but that's not space opera

Midget Fist posted:

I've had Dragon's Egg on my reading list for a while but have yet to stumble across it in a second-hand bookshop:(

Flipswitch posted:

Are these books direct sequels? You mentioned avoiding Absolution Gap, so am I not missing the ending plot-wise? or are they similar to the Culture novels, where they're based in the same universe and only loosely tie into each other?

Trig Discipline posted:

I'm getting either a dragonfly or a dick. Or maybe a dragonfly dick.

Midget Fist posted:

I was hesitant at first after seeing that it was Eric Flint who is responsible for the time-travelling-alternate-history-rednecks take guns back in time-stuff which admittedly I haven't read, but don't see how it could be good.

Ferrosol posted:

I have to admit John Ringo is a big guilty pleasure of mine. Something about his over the top right wing views and blatant rape fantasies is very amusing to me

Ceebees posted:

He already said that he read Drake's RCN

Patrick Spens posted:

"what if the French Foreign Legion was made up of the disembodied brains stuffed into giant bipedal war machines?"

Internet Wizard posted:

I'm on the lookout for some scifi, preferably milsf, that has ancient astronaut themes. Quality isn't necessarily a priority, so long as it isn't like, weird Ringo style stuff like child rape or reenacting Mogadishu with super soldiers or whatever.

Chairman Capone posted:

I feel like there's another story of a similar type that was about a Roman legion that gets abducted by aliens and made to fight for aliens. Possibly it's set in the same series because I think there was another story in that collection involving the Spanish Armada and aliens?

Just Another Lurker posted:

Oh that looks interesting, it's the third in the series *buys all three for a kindle spree*.

Just Another Lurker posted:

Looks like they have repackaged three books under the "Ranks of Bronze Series" banner, 1 & 3 by Webber an #2 by Eric Flint.


Read Inherit The Stars years ago, a great little book... agree with you on the sequels as well.

Drone posted:

I forced myself to lay on the couch last night and breeze through a few chapters. I don't actively hate it, but drat are its flaws really apparent. Is it a general rule of thumb that pulpy space opera series like these tend to get better over time or something? Apparently the Honorverse is popular enough to actually... you know, have a name like "the Honorverse" associated with it.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

If you want crazy pulpy sci-fi military action, I'd look at the Autumn Rain trilogy, by David J. Williams. They're basically insane action movies in book form - set in ~2100, featuring a cast of badass space marines and soldier/hackers, blasting up everything from space elevators to big warships to O'Neil cylinders to transatlantic vacuum trains to moon bases. If you don't like the first book, don't bother with the others. The first half or so of the second novel is the most insane action set piece I've ever read - just when you think it's done, it gets turned up to 12, again. And again.

There's no deep characters or anything, but there's enough variety in the action, betrayals, and revelations that I was hooked all the way through.

Libluini posted:

What are you all talking about? The last time I read Weber, his books were about 19th century politics and sailing, not science fiction.

Or did he start writing books about space ships again? Guess I missed that, huh.

Cythereal posted:

I can't stand Weber's sci-fi, but I don't mind the Safehold books when things are actually happening in them. Which excludes the entirety of his latest book. The big naval battle near the end of Off Armageddon Reef was great stuff for showing just how horrifyingly outmatched galleys are against cannon-armed galleons.

Drakhoran posted:

I'm not familiar with Odyssey. Could it have been the Troy Rising series by John Ringo? That's at least a Homeric name.

Deptfordx posted:

Eh I couldn't get past the first hundred or so pages.

DolphinCop posted:

this is the most john ringo thing i have ever seen