Future Equipment of WWIII

[Havok]

SPACE IS NEAT BRO sounds like the title of an awesome sci-fi story.

[Stark]

Scifi is so derivative that if I told you about a story where a man lost his space bond and was evicted from space and became trapped... on earth ... forever because space is all around earth...

You'd already know everything that happens and could probably accurately date it to 1962.

[Simon_Jester]

I will gladly concede the possibility that I may have Ringo wrong. I read one of his books from the Polseen arc when I was much younger, tried to read a second one and was deeply put off by how it seemed to revolve solely around special weapons and units and gave up on it and judged the rest of his works based on that and received experiences from others.

Oh, it does revolve around special weapons and units. The difference is that he spends at least as much time with his characters doing human things (having opinions, having emotions, having family even) as he does talking about weapons in the explicit "this is what it does" sense.

Much much more time is spent dwelling on the "and the artillery blew the shit out of them" stuff. That falls somewhere between what might be called good story and the pure 'tech bible' territory; that's one of the reasons Ringo is at best mediocre. On a good day. When he's not getting political.

There are plenty of reasons to criticize Ringo as an author. "His books are glorified technical manuals" is not, in my opinion, one of the best reasons.

Weber seems to be a good example when it comes to the 'too much math/technical' stuff than Ringo (I never quite figured out what Ringo's attraction is, unless its some political/cultural appeal amongst the baen crowd). I actually suspect alot of Weber's following stems from all the technical/detail oriented stuff.

Weber yes- he actively markets to that crowd, although he's successful in no small part because he does have human beings in his stories you can at least vaguely relate to or admire as human, a thing many of the hardware-geek writers out there haven't yet learned. As for Ringo and politics- we have a winner. That's it exactly, and it's probably a big reason Ringo (unlike a number of Baen's other star writers) hasn't enjoyed any success with any other publisher.

I also suspect Weber reflects a 'wargame' hobbyist's approach to writing - I think he even had done that awhile with his old Starfire stuff, and you can draw alot of parallels between the starfire works and his latter HH stuff. By now he seems to have a compulsive need to cram as much detail into ALL aspects (politics, economics, military, etc.) into his books - so much so the last novel he wrote acutally got split up into two, IIRC.

I don't know if that's true but I totally believe it. I can't really read Weber anymore; I just skim it and entire paragraphs blur past. I'm curious enough to spend a few hours going over his books in a bookstore, but I don't really buy them anymore.