Posleen and things similar...

[Ahriman238]

I actually like a fair bit of the Baen books stuff, granted it can get pretty silly at times. Sometimes that can work for them though, like the Posleen books. But what really got me into them was David Weber's Mutineer's Moon and sequels (there's an omnibus now called Empire from the Ashes) which remain one of my favorites. An astronaut discovers that the moon in actually an ancient, supermassive spaceship under an 8 meter coat of rock, that humanity as we know it is descend from the ship's crew which had to abandon 50,000 years ago thanks to a sabotage/mutiny, and that the mutineers are still around. So Dahak (the moon-ship) kidnaps him and names him captain.

[gigabytelord]

I actually like a fair bit of the Baen books stuff, granted it can get pretty silly at times. Sometimes that can work for them though, like the Posleen books. But what really got me into them was David Weber's Mutineer's Moon and sequels (there's an omnibus now called Empire from the Ashes) which remain one of my favorites. An astronaut discovers that the moon in actually an ancient, supermassive spaceship under an 8 meter coat of rock, that humanity as we know it is descend from the ship's crew which had to abandon 50,000 years ago thanks to a sabotage/mutiny, and that the mutineers are still around. So Dahak (the moon-ship) kidnaps him and names him captain.

That sounds like an interesting read.

"Thou shalt not make a computer in the likeness of a human mind." Over and done with. Humans remain the center of the story and the how's and why's of the tech remains off-stage so you don't have jarring "wait a sec!" moments.

Yeah this is hard to get around without making it sound generic.

[jollyreaper]

*curses*

someone stole my ideas!

I feel that all the time. The way I see it, there are only so many was of doing things out there. You get enough ideas bouncing around in discussions, eventually two people will put some things together. Charlie Stross had written two Laundry novels before he'd ever heard of Delta Green. What's Delta Green? X-Files meets Cthulhu Mythos, government investigators going after cultists. It's not surprising in the least that people would put these ideas together.

Seriously, I like this universe just from your description. Like my comment from above, I've been thinking on and off about a universe like this for the last couple of years.

Read up. The book is $2.99 via Kindle, he has a website describing the background.

What I like about the book is that he's put a lot of thought into things. You read and you're like "Well, if you set it up like this, you realize that this other thing would be the natural consequence." And he's like "Yeah, that's laying groundwork for the next story."

It's a really good read and he's working on the second novel in the series. I'm looking forward to seeing where he goes with it.

I'd read this one right after the Lost Fleet and so the contrast is very strong for me.

I appreciated the concept of Lost Fleet but it was poorly written with a host of terrible characters, bizarre interpersonal dynamics and a repetitive formula. And being that so much of it centered around how space tactics work in that setting, the tactics weren't really explained at all. Like why do you even have destroyers in the first palce when the battleships are the ones best suited to serious fighting? i can think of some reasons to have destroyers but you would think you would keep them possible at the center of your formation so they won't be taking hits the battleships have the shields to handle. Archers are useful but you don't put them in front of your pikemen to accept the cavalry charge. It's stuff like that.

i think I would have enjoyed seeing the scenario handled by a better writer.

[jollyreaper]

It depends on what you mean by terrible characterisation.By the standards of mil science fiction, its relatively great. Geary evolution from shell-shocked to Admiral of the Fleet and acceptance of his duty is done quite subtly. Ditto to his opposition.

I suppose that we can give him props for not making the enemy dirty space hippies and his domestic enemies aren't dirty space hippie sympathizers.

The co-president/love interest is written from the perspective of a man who must have gone through a nasty divorce. Her role could have been very interesting if handled with a bit more subtlety.

Given the prominence the religion was given in the storyilne, it really could have done with a little more fleshing out.

The idea of a mindless war with people thrown at each other senselessly to die for stupid reasons one would hope seems realistic but it's really just WWI all over again. That's not unrealistic. But to stretch this war out over 80 years, there needs to be more discussion about what it's like living under this kind of system. How have they been stalemated so perfectly? I know that this was supposed to be foreshadowing for the final book but it didn't work right for me.

It's like ok, if the book is just a format for working through interesting tactical exercises we can excuse characters being a bit stock. But if we have someone moping about his family for long periods between battles, we could at least learn a little more about them.

By contrast, Weber and White's novels Death Ground/Shiva Option are pretty much a pure example of what Lost Fleet was trying to be. It's wall to wall battles, characters are angstrom-thin, and it's splody-time all the time, bang bang bang! But that's exactly what the reader is looking for in a giant space battle book, right?

Its way superior to the like of Tom Kratman, Ringo or any of the current crop of authors out there.

lol. That's more of a condemnation of current mililtary science fiction but its how it is right now.

I think the problem was in the padding. He took too many books to tell a story that could have been told in possibly two.

[jollyreaper]

Cause Chicago is best coast.

If you're looking for some good modern sci-fi, check out Peter F. Hamilton. He has a two part series that I highly recommend: Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. It poses some interesting questions on a future with pseudo-immortality, genocide and responsibility.

Night's Dawn Trilogy is really good right up until the ending which is the worst deus ex mechanica since the Stand. But up until that point it's really good stuff.

[jollyreaper]

He's very small-time, an ascended geek, frequenter of blogs and message boards. To describe the setting in a nutshell, think modern world projected out a few hundred years. The politics and calculations feel straight out of early Tom Clancy before his America=superman phase. Human nations go to the stars, resurgent nationalism sees nation-states founding extra-solar colonies. China is top dog, the USA is a mid-tier power, nationalism is the new big thing. Due to political machinations beyond the immediate understanding of our protagonists, the first interstellar war brews up.

Seriously, I like this universe just from your description. Like my comment from above, I've been thinking on and off about a universe like this for the last couple of years.

The worldbuilding is somewhat interesting but the book is merely okay. Sure, it's mostly hard sci-fi with an okay projection of the future, but the characters are pretty flat and generic (protagonist and antagonist).

I think this is a real YMMV case. You can find people who luuuurved old Clancy and other people who said it was just tech porn with flat characters and completely uninteresting. Likewise you'll find people who luuuuuuurve Jane Austin and others who will say it's just a bunch of women nattering on about bullshit and when will we see any action? How about some zombies? Oh, wait, someone not only said that but wrote it. lol

I still highly recommend it for anyone who likes military SF. It's worth reading if only to see whether or not you'll like it. There are plenty of other books I would advise "do not set aside lightly; fling with great force."

[TronPaul]

Cause Chicago is best coast.

If you're looking for some good modern sci-fi, check out Peter F. Hamilton. He has a two part series that I highly recommend: Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. It poses some interesting questions on a future with pseudo-immortality, genocide and responsibility.

Night's Dawn Trilogy is really good right up until the ending which is the worst deus ex mechanica since the Stand. But up until that point it's really good stuff.

Yea one of the reasons I didn't recommend it. It was so enjoyable up until the final book(s) (The Naked God can be found in a single giant book or three separate books). Another good one by him is Fallen Dragon which is a stand alone novel.

[jollyreaper]

People are divided when it comes to situations like that. Some people say if you enjoyed the rest of the work, a bad ending shouldn't ruin the rest of it. Others say a bad ending makes everything else feel like a waste of time.

While I really enjoyed my first read through it, I don't think I'll ever revisit it because the bad ending will be sticking out in my mind the whole time. But the early stuff was really, really good.

Sometimes you can just avoid the parts that aren't bad. When rewatching Babylon 5, I can do seasons 1 to 4 and then watch Sleeping in the Light. season 5? What's that?

[MKSheppard]

I appreciated the concept of Lost Fleet but it was poorly written with a host of terrible characters, bizarre interpersonal dynamics and a repetitive formula.

The repetitiveness of it is what hurts it the most. You have at most one major space battle for control of a system per book, and so it takes forever to get anywhere in TLF.

After a while, the battles kind of blend together.

(snip talk of tactics, Space Battleships and Space DDs)

Good points.

You'd have a lot of reasons to have Space DDs, because you have all sorts of ancillary missions that you don't send a Space Battleship to handle; or can't spare a battleship for, like going to deploy anti-mine robots, staying behind at a jump point, etc.

It was however interesting to see someone try to take a stab at 'realistic' space battles, with engagements at closing speeds of 60,000~ kilometers a second.

(Two opposing fleets moving towards each other at point one light)

And how you would handle fleet battles in an environment where you literally can see forever, and where stealth is virtually non-existent.

I also liked how he handled speed of light lags -- a fleet jumping in at a jump point would be able to see everything in a solar system immediately, albeit at several hours old, while the enemy would not know the fleet had arrived for several more hours.

i think I would have enjoyed seeing the scenario handled by a better writer.

Like?

David Weber: The Fleet jumped into the jump point and fired 400,000 billion missiles; of which 98% were intercepted; and the rest got through. Five point two billion enemy personnel were killed.

*cue long scene of Geary all super agonized about horrible losses, and then ordering another mass missile barriage which kills even more people*

In the middle of it all, the evil liberalsliberalsliberalsliberals, are revealed to have been behind the sad state the fleet is in, because they've diverted funding from Fleet Construction to social programmes during the war; squeezing Bureau of Ship's engineers ever harder.

John Ringo/Kratman: It's revealed that the war is one giant social engineering experiment by the Libruls, after Geary boards an enemy ship wearing power armor and engages the enemy crew in hand to hand combat and singlehandedly seizes the memory core, which has all sorts of secret information.

etc.

We're kind of starved here, people.

[Shroom Man 777]

Maybe its cause of the kind of mindset that delves into the great hueg war in space kinda thang which explains why, you know, after a while all the spess wars and the spess mareens and power armor shtick kind of ends up blending into the same... thing. It's sad that like, one of the popular space war franchises that doesn't have US MAREENS in spess as its superspecial badass power armor ubersoldatens instead has its superspecial badass power armor ubersoldatens... stab people in the face with crucifix-shaped chainsaws on banners with skulls on spikes in bannerskullspikes on spiked bannerskulls on skulls with bannerspikes for teeth emblazoned on a fluttering spikeskulled banner.

[Shroom Man 777]

It almost makes you want to wonder what's in other works of fiction that don't have spess wars or spessmareen warriors and if they are similar and/or different from, well, everything you've mentioned re: luberals luberals luberals, etc.

How writers' minds function and what they can elaborate and conceive when they're not, you know, describing streams of explosions that in the big picture are all the damn alike.

[jollyreaper]

Maybe its cause of the kind of mindset that delves into the great hueg war in space kinda thang which explains why, you know, after a while all the spess wars and the spess mareens and power armor shtick kind of ends up blending into the same... thing. It's sad that like, one of the popular space war franchises that doesn't have US MAREENS in spess as its superspecial badass power armor ubersoldatens instead has its superspecial badass power armor ubersoldatens... stab people in the face with crucifix-shaped chainsaws on banners with skulls on spikes in bannerskullspikes on spiked bannerskulls on skulls with bannerspikes for teeth emblazoned on a fluttering spikeskulled banner.

Dude. You know what these skulls need? More skulls.

[jollyreaper]

Good points.

You'd have a lot of reasons to have Space DDs, because you have all sorts of ancillary missions that you don't send a Space Battleship to handle; or can't spare a battleship for, like going to deploy anti-mine robots, staying behind at a jump point, etc.

Oh, absolutely. Especially if you don't have FTL coms, your lines of communication are back in the pre-radio era. You have to move your messages with a ship.

The particulars of any fleet vary with the technology of the setting. The big question is whether size confers an advantage. We don't have battleships today because cruise missiles are very powerful. Even a patrol boat packs the kind of hit to take out a battleship. So the only large ships we have left are carriers. Everything else is essentially a glorified frigate (or destroyer, depending on your naming convention). You optimize for firepower or seakeeping abilities. American ships are always deploying long distances and so have to be comfortable to live on for long stretches. Primary offensive weapons are anti-ship missiles. You can mount those missiles on a frigate or on a patrol boat. But that patrol boat isn't going to be deploying to the Gulf from the US, nor is it going to be good at engaging aircraft or subs.

Now if size confers an advantage then you can build a battleship that can't be taken down easily by even a squadron of destroyers. This assumes there's no knock-out weapon like an anti-ship missile and it's a protracted slugfest to get through armor with guns.

Once you establish what the ideal warship is, then you have to figure out if you can afford it. And that's when the political realities of the setting as well as the technology will allow you to build. It becomes very easy to imagine the idea of the line of battle for decisive engagements and then all of the frigates that operate outside of the line doing interesting things.

There's also the question of strategic mobility. If you have to cover four areas and only have the resources to build two perfect fleets, you might be forced to compromise in what you build to cover those areas. Or your doctrine might call for placing tripwire forces in those key areas whose purpose is delaying the enemy's advance long enough for your reserve to deploy.

It's really hard to speak in generalities because so much is dependent on the setting. One huge question is whether planets are off-limits or if they are open to attack. Because if you can attack planets, that pretty much turns into a WWIII scorched Earth scenario, total war. But a planet also represents a fixed and known target. Super-dreadnaughts might not be fast enough to chase down the enemy's fleet but are more than capable of catching up with a planet and hammering the defensive forces, even planetary defense lasers that can use entire oceans for heat sinks. By threatening a valuable target, an attacker can force the enemy's fleet to fight or else surrender the target.

None of this was really approached in the Lost Fleet novels and the tech was really wonky to begin with. They're performing rapid turns while at relativistic velocities? Looping back around to engage the enemy? I don't think so.

Since everybody is operating in realspace, there's not much use for small units as scouts. Destroyers might be decent escorts against enemy commerce raiders if those raiders are other small craft. Fast packets could be used to ferry personnel and data between systems at a faster speed than the main fleets. Battle-cruisers might serve the purpose of a cavalry force capable of chasing down targets of opportunity while avoiding "wall on wall" fights that they don't have the armor to survive. It seems like the heavy battleships in a football metaphor would be the linebackers, on the periphery of the formation protecting the more specialized ships on the inside.

But he never really explained the tech in the first place. The ships run on fuel cells. Ok, how? Do they need reaction mass? Are they using reactionless drives? How does any of this stuff work? It's not really gone over. In a novel like Starship Troopers, the mobile infantry suits might be cool but they're not the point of the story. For something like Lost Fleet, the fleet operations are more front and center so really need to be given more attention.

It was however interesting to see someone try to take a stab at 'realistic' space battles, with engagements at closing speeds of 60,000~ kilometers a second.

(Two opposing fleets moving towards each other at point one light)

Interestingly enough, it was also done with Dread Empire's Fall. It's a better read than Lost Fleet but there were a lot of areas in the setting that would have been more interesting to explore that the author left untouched.

And how you would handle fleet battles in an environment where you literally can see forever, and where stealth is virtually non-existent.

That's pretty much how space is. You don't have stealth and any kind of meaningful ship drive would be a beacon across the system. You're pretty much looking at a chessboard.

I also liked how he handled speed of light lags -- a fleet jumping in at a jump point would be able to see everything in a solar system immediately, albeit at several hours old, while the enemy would not know the fleet had arrived for several more hours.

Given Lost Fleet, the even bigger struggle is trying to coordinate fleet actions across multiple systems. If you're at fleet HQ, your information is weeks or months old from each system. You have sufficient forces to destroy the fleeting fleet if you can only muster them all in one place. Where is he going? If you divide your forces you invite defeat in detail whereas your enemy will be keeping his forces intact the entire time. The lack of realtime communications means that fleet commanders would have to be given considerable autonomy which might fly directly in the face of the paranoia the Syndicate is supposed to operate under.

i think I would have enjoyed seeing the scenario handled by a better writer.

Like?

David Weber: The Fleet jumped into the jump point and fired 400,000 billion missiles; of which 98% were intercepted; and the rest got through. Five point two billion enemy personnel were killed.

*cue long scene of Geary all super agonized about horrible losses, and then ordering another mass missile barriage which kills even more people*

In the middle of it all, the evil liberalsliberalsliberalsliberals, are revealed to have been behind the sad state the fleet is in, because they've diverted funding from Fleet Construction to social programmes during the war; squeezing Bureau of Ship's engineers ever harder.

He also needs to progress from book to book going from a homely yet capable officer to becoming an enormously attractive Marty Stu whose personal injuries approximates that of a famous real world admiral.

John Ringo/Kratman: It's revealed that the war is one giant social engineering experiment by the Libruls, after Geary boards an enemy ship wearing power armor and engages the enemy crew in hand to hand combat and singlehandedly seizes the memory core, which has all sorts of secret information.

And the only way to defeat the enemy is to revive the SS complete with deaths head caps.

Yeah, there's too little decent military fiction out there.

[jollyreaper]

It almost makes you want to wonder what's in other works of fiction that don't have spess wars or spessmareen warriors and if they are similar and/or different from, well, everything you've mentioned re: luberals luberals luberals, etc.

How writers' minds function and what they can elaborate and conceive when they're not, you know, describing streams of explosions that in the big picture are all the damn alike.

I like to imagine Warhammer 40K authors trying to adapt to other genres like ghostwriting a cooking book for Paula Deen. BUTTER FOR THE BUTTER LORD!!! LARD FOR THE LARD THRONE!!!! Ghostwriting Bill O'Reilly's next book? Damn liberals are at fault for everything.... wait a sec!

[evilsoup]

Shroom are you saying that people should read stuff other than milscifi? Why would they want to do that?

Hrrm. Was it you who wrote that thing about American godzilla vs Japanese godzilla; where the American one gets blown up by tanks and bombs and etc, and is fundamentally just a challenge to be overcome, whereas the Japanese one is an unstoppable force of nature/atomic lizard bomb, that it is futile to go against? Maybe it's the same thing here.

I mean, the american military experience for the better part of the last century has been of their soldiers stomping others into the ground. Complete military superiority, plus the EVIL EMPIRE USSR in the background to provide an excuse to do anything for the greater good/in defence of FREEDOM. The only time the Americans lose is in things like vietnam, where of course it's the fault of those UNWASHED HIPPIES. But of course you know this.

Likewise with WH40K, it's all informed by the decay and loss of the British empire, and our use as... well not quite a pawn, but definitely a piece in the cold war, rather than a player. All that 1980s anti-establishment 2000AD I AM THE LAW parody stuff plays into it too.

Is there any, say, Vietnamese military scifi? Or Argentinian MilSciFi? That could be an interesting comparison...

[jollyreaper]

Could you imagine North Korean military scifi? God-Emperor of Mankind, Jong!

[MKSheppard]

Interestingly enough, it was also done with Dread Empire's Fall. It's a better read than Lost Fleet but there were a lot of areas in the setting that would have been more interesting to explore that the author left untouched.

Cutting this one out of my quote, so that DEF gets the love and attention it deserves.

The trilogy of books that makes up Dread Empire Falls by Walter Jon Williams is simply high grade book crack. Yes, there are some areas that could have been improved; but it moves at a fast coherent clip, and covers wide areas. I've read it twice; and Lady Sula is a pretty good antagonist.

[MKSheppard]

Here's a generalized breakdown of wordcounts for DEF vs Lost Fleet:

Dread Empire's Fall

DEF 1: 123,700~ words
DEF 2: 133,600~ words
DEF 3: 205,500~ words

462,800~ words in total

Lost Fleet:

LF 1: 99,500~ words
LF 2: 90,800~ words
LF 3: 93,400~ words
LF 4: 91,500~ words
LF 5: 91,500~ words
LF 6: 91,900~ words

558,600~ words in total

So it appears that Dread Empires feels snappier because the author spread it out over three books over 2002-2005 (three years), versus six books over 2006-2010 (four years) for the first arc of Lost Fleet.

[PainRack]

I disagree that the Lost Fleet series was about space battles. The author as well as the series is essentially about a god-king like Arthur returning.

Everything else is just dressing to highlight the God King qualities.
Space battles? In a universe without magic powers and equivalent tech, his superior grasp of lost tactics become his superpower.

Human qualities. The God King morals, ethos and linking him to religious mythology.

The story? The God king interacting with the universe and other people.

That was the arc the author hung the Lost Fleet on, everything else is the author background feeding in. He's a naval officer and obviously a lawful liberal on the alignment chart, and he arranges his characters and stories that way.

[MKSheppard]

I mean, the american military experience for the better part of the last century has been of their soldiers stomping others into the ground.

Not...really. Generally, US Military experience since 1861 has been:

*declare war*

What the hell? We don't have any good units? We keep getting our asses kicked?

OMFGWTTBQ?

*a year or two passes*

"Hell yeah, we're kicking ass now!"

You can see this on a small scale with the US SIGINT units in Iraq.

After we declared MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, we disbanded most of our SIGINT efforts, and sent most of the linguists home.

Then when the insurgency broke out, it turned out we were dangerously understrength in SIGINT, and with faulty equipment which was designed for COLD WAR COMBAT IN EUROPE against an enemy which used military frequencies...not cell phones or walkie talkies like the insurgents did.

But by 2007, we'd made a major turnaround in our SIGINT efforts, with newer generations of equipment which could also deal with civilian comms, and more trained linguists, and plus machine translation.

All this...was not cheap, however.

But basically, the US had it's World War I national trauma in 1861-65, which has kind of kept us pretty optimistic compared to Europe.

[Ahriman238]

I actually like a fair bit of the Baen books stuff, granted it can get pretty silly at times. Sometimes that can work for them though, like the Posleen books. But what really got me into them was David Weber's Mutineer's Moon and sequels (there's an omnibus now called Empire from the Ashes) which remain one of my favorites. An astronaut discovers that the moon in actually an ancient, supermassive spaceship under an 8 meter coat of rock, that humanity as we know it is descend from the ship's crew which had to abandon 50,000 years ago thanks to a sabotage/mutiny, and that the mutineers are still around. So Dahak (the moon-ship) kidnaps him and names him captain.

That sounds like an interesting read.

It really is, and I'd highly recommend it. There's also the catch that Dahak was scouting for a massive alien invasion, and is accelerating his timetable for dealing with the mutineers because the invasion is imminent.

The second book deals with the invasion itself, Dahak and crew go looking for the Fourth Imperium to whistle up some reinforcements, while we also flash to people on earth trying to form a world government in time, and fortify the solar system, build a space navy etc.

The third and final book, you may want to skip. It's randomly at least 20 years later, and follows the kids of the former protagonists as they get caught up in an assasination attempt and marooned on a primitive planet dominated by a technophobic Church (it all makes sense in context, but it's hard not to take that as a jab to all organized religion) which they must overcome. It's a moderatly interesting idea, and one done much better when Weber revisits the idea in his Armageddon Reef story. In-universe it just feels kind of odd, and lacks a lot of the mystery and majesty felt in the first two.

[MKSheppard]

It really is, and I'd highly recommend it. There's also the catch that Dahak was scouting for a massive alien invasion, and is accelerating his timetable for dealing with the mutineers because the invasion is imminent.

You forgot the part where NASA has laser rayguns pew pew on it's exploration ship; just because.

[Shroom Man 777]

I like to imagine Warhammer 40K authors trying to adapt to other genres like ghostwriting a cooking book for Paula Deen. BUTTER FOR THE BUTTER LORD!!! LARD FOR THE LARD THRONE!!!! Ghostwriting Bill O'Reilly's next book? Damn liberals are at fault for everything.... wait a sec!

I think the standard issue sci-fi technothriller writers are actually worse than the 40k authors. Since "giant cathedral doombot shoots out screaming satans from its gatling plasma swordgun" is funner and aware of its self-ridiculity than "orbital warship at 900 gees excretes a depleted uranium mass from its reinforced carbon nanotube buckyball sphincter bomb bay and the kinetic killfuck vehicular accident-inducer warhead reentered the martian atmosphere at ten times the speed of fear and released its payload of combat oriented lethal devices at the enemy bunker formation built into the olympus mons in a hull down position using guidance systems interlinked to tachyonic designators wielded by thermoptic cloaked navy seals on long range desert patrol riding pathfinder mars rovers with 6x6 off-road steering complete with five differential locks and portal axles and neutrino heatsink radiators originally these doomvees would've had hyperalloy armored carburetors to protect the crews from alien-piercing ammunition but the liberals liberals liberals canceled replaced the releaded diesel engines with environmentally friendly engines outsourced from burkina faso etc."

Hrrm. Was it you who wrote that thing about American godzilla vs Japanese godzilla; where the American one gets blown up by tanks and bombs and etc, and is fundamentally just a challenge to be overcome, whereas the Japanese one is an unstoppable force of nature/atomic lizard bomb, that it is futile to go against? Maybe it's the same thing here.

Yeah I wrote that.

If American culture is prone to declaring wars on even abstract concepts (war on poverty, war on drugs, war on terror, war on christmas, war on islam, etc.) and/or framing all sorts of things in the context of wars, then you can imagine what the hell their escapist science fiction fantasies would look like. War on outer space. War on the future. War on stars. War on moons. War on extraterrestrial species. War on stellar constellations. War on quantum anomalies. War on polarity reversals. Man. You don't need to go to the grim darkness of the future, just go to your local library's sci-fi section!

40k was an affectionate parody just like Judge Dredd, originally made in the Thatcher era or something and so you've got a ridiculization of militarization and the absurdities of it. But when old guys who had senses of humor got replaced with guys who take that shit seriously and fanboys who, well, take that shit seriously and don't have the sense of humor or the concept that it's still a joke, well... yeah. This is why we can't have nice things.


I'd actually love to see more science fiction from different contexts, particularly from less-militant societies or from societies whose histories and contexts are not of jingoistic triumph over others, but perhaps the exact opposite. What would these guys produce? What would the imagination create, if that imagination was one from a different environ? Well, I am sure some people from certain subsets would not really like these differing strange depictions of things, because they might not be interested or they might be discomfited by things outside some comfort zone or preference created by their own upbringings and environments and surrounding influences, but hey, I'm personally all for encountering different things because I think this diversity of thought and feeling and imagination and depiction is what makes life beautiful. My cultural context is where steamed duck embryos and fetuses are popular snack foods. Sometimes, actually the best part of this is in realizing that despite the vast gaps of differences between peoples and their environments and contexts, the diversities of their works still end up touching on fundamental things that we all share, just from wildly varying perspectives.

[MKSheppard]

"orbital warship at 900 gees excretes a depleted uranium mass from its reinforced carbon nanotube buckyball sphincter bomb bay and the kinetic killfuck vehicular.......{snipped}

Shroom....never go into Pentagon contracting, please. You'd destroy it in minutes with buzzwords.

If American culture is prone to declaring wars on even abstract concepts (war on poverty, war on drugs, war on terror, war on christmas, war on islam, etc.)

MURCA is very good at absurd engineering projects, from the Erie Canal in 1817 to present day; that continues to create the national myth:

"The difficult is done at once; the impossible takes a little longer."

Or in the words of Howard Hueg in that biopic:

"When I grow up, I'm gonna make the biggest movies, fly the fastest planes ever, and be the richest man in the world."

"The way of the future. The way of the future. The way of the future. The way of the future. The way of the future."

[Simon_Jester]

"orbital warship at 900 gees excretes a depleted uranium mass from its reinforced carbon nanotube buckyball sphincter bomb bay and the kinetic killfuck vehicular.......{snipped}

Shroom....never go into Pentagon contracting, please. You'd destroy it in minutes with buzzwords.

I'm not sure that would be a bad thing. If the buzzwords reach critical mass and we have to start over from World War era vocabulary, it might herald a new (temporary) age of clear thinking.

If American culture is prone to declaring wars on even abstract concepts (war on poverty, war on drugs, war on terror, war on christmas, war on islam, etc.)

MURCA is very good at absurd engineering projects, from the Erie Canal in 1817 to present day; that continues to create the national myth:

"The difficult is done at once; the impossible takes a little longer."

Or in the words of Howard Hueg in that biopic:

"When I grow up, I'm gonna make the biggest movies, fly the fastest planes ever, and be the richest man in the world."

"The way of the future. The way of the future. The way of the future. The way of the future. The way of the future."

MURCA is very eager at absurd engineering projects. Sometimes the projects are good, sometimes they're bad.

When America's big project goals had to do with peaceful development, then we got some really big impressive peaceful developments. Giant canals, railways, and roads, huge scientific leaps, big buildings, and so on.

When America's big project goals have to do with reshaping the face of human societies (war on terrordrugpovertychristmas), then what you get is a big roll of blueprints smacking into a human face, for... well, maybe not forever, but for a long time.

Up until about the 1970s, there was a broad vein of American thought that war was, in some sense, a bad thing. It was dangerous, you were fighting peer competitors that could ruin you, and it would be better if the need for war had never happened- the Civil War, the World Wars, up through Vietnam, almost anyone would agree that it would have been better if the fights had not occured and not been necessary. The costs were always high and we were conscious of them.

And the Big Projects that got Americans all enthusiastic were mostly peaceful- space this, cyber-that, road from A to B and B to A, power plants and irrigation and whatnot. Because while you could make a war a big project, it was a dangerous one that might blow up in your face.

But with the end of the Cold War, the US finds that it has plenty of muscle to flex whenever it wants, and that wars can be fought seemingly without consequence- to us. War becomes more interesting, more appealing. It stops looking like a way to die, and starts looking more like a big exciting camping trip, only with high explosives. So while there was a temporary slump in military fiction around 1990 (due to the collapse of the market of actual members of the military), in the long run, military SF gained a lot of cultural power, because Americans were seeing wars as something that you could win almost by default, without getting hurt too badly.

War became fun. And so you got what Shroom is talking about, with so many novels in the past 20 years involving seemingly identical space explosions and power armored MARINES and whatnot.