Neocons in Military Sci-Fi A Rant and a Challenge

[DrMckay]

I like Science Fiction. I like Military Sci-Fi if it is well written and the book has good characters and doesn't read like a tech manual in terms of weapons descriptions.

Then I read the first half of Troy Rising in a bookstore. It was the first time in years that i hadn't finished a book, and the first time in my life that I seriously considered burning a book.

My eyes burned, my stomach churned, and I put it down and walked away

This brings me to a topic I have been having more and more difficulty stomaching: many American authors of Military Science Fiction are neoconservative douchebags to whom the Alien Menace is a secondary threat to “Teh Eeevul Librulz” who are already “Destroying the World for Decent People” and refuse to build new weapons because they might harm the environment.”

I am ashamed to be thought of as a fan of work written by people such as these, by authors who use invasion stories as a justification to do reprehensible pointless things like rejuvinate geriatric SS veterans who somehow dodged the Nuremburg and promote facism as the only reasonable response to a crisis, and fantasize bloodily about the Moment when it all comes crashing down for the corrupt permissive Liberal society (I'm looking at you Ringo and Krantman) but not for the rarest of creatures: the family-values entrepreneur good ol' boy with a nice subservient wife of course.

The worst part is, just like Karen Traviss, some of them are, technically, readable, which makes me lose even more faith in humanity. Gaaaaaaaaaah.

Okay, rant over. Now, on to the challenge:

As a response to the Ringos and Krantmans of the World I hereby challenge my plucky and imaginative fellow writers of SD.Net to write mil-sci-fi or sci-fi stories (preferably oneshots) dealing with governments run by the other end of the spectrum: The competent Liberal (like New Deal/Manhattan Project FDR who can be ruthless) the incompetent conservative (like the Bush administration,) equally incompetent politicians, why bureaucracy and government organizations like the CDC and FEMA can actually help (or really hinder) in an alien invasion.

I challenge you to write whatever you want in the scenario of an alien invasion and war as long as it is

1) politically/societal motivated in some way,

2) snarky

3) funny is a plus, but serious is ok too

4) both sides can be equally incompetent for laughs.

5.maybe...) shows the cost of war and fascism internally.


Oh, and Shroomy, you don't have to because MURCA: Land of the Free fulfils these requirements already and is awesome

So, will you lovely people help me make the genre of Military Science Fiction truly "Fair and Balanced?"

[Shroom Man 777]

Oh, and Shroomy, you don't have to because MURCA: Land of the Free fulfils these requirements already and is awesome

PeZook deserves the bulk of the credit, man. It's his wretched will to smear America that gives MURCA life!

I also made a spin-off of those Salvation War/Armageddon stories, transpositioning smarmy asshole Testingstani posters into the USMC in Hell. I should continue that some day. I had great plans.

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

Too bad that MURCA, like many other SDNW4 storylines, seems to have fallen by the wayside for the time being. I still need to go into more detail on my own part of that story, because the world can always use more Red Dawn parodies.

DOOM PATROL was also promising, even though I never really read the main Salvation War stuff that much. I for one would certainly love to see what those great plans were.

[Shroom Man 777]

WAIT.

An example where liberalism and homobortionists and slack-jawed limp-wristed flaggoffs triumph over neoconservative chest-beating Space American sexual thanasaurus militarists?

Why, the biggest grossing movie in all of history has exactly this! AVATAR! And those same milwankers can't ever stop bitching about it!

RDA WARNING

PAPA DRAGON FLIGHT OVER SOUTH PANDORA

I Eywah Spirit of Pandora respect the environment humans!

BALLS! said Sergeant Jake Sully in his RDA-manufactured Avatar body designed with half-human and half-Navi DNA, connected via thought-transfer mindlink uplink to an AN/SPQRSDN modified mil-spec MRI machine in a containerized aluminum air-dropable trailer with positive-pressure inverse osmosis climate control internal atmospheric oxygen supply and NBC protection, as he flew in an Aerospatiale Scorpion Gunship with VTOL fan jets and a clear glass canopy armed with a double-barreled .30 caliber cannon for close-encounters with the third kind and radar/FLIR-guided missiles mounted on underwing hardpoints piloted by Michelle Vasquez Rodriguez callsign HOOTERS.

*MULTIPLE PARAGRAPH INFODUMP by Sigouney Grace Ripley*

"limp dicked science majors, if I wanted an infodump I'd take a shit and use an issue of the Washington Post for toilet paper" replied Colonel Piles Sarevokerritch.

"Why is it so boring? Real people don't talk that way!"

"we must kill eywah" said vladimir putin

IT IS IN A DOCUMENTARY FORMAT

[Scorpion]

I don't know what that was, but it was awesome.

[Whiskey144]

SHEER AWESOME SHROOMY MADNESS

I didn't post the original, because I felt it would be a disservice to both the author and the material in question.

You, sir, win the Internet. Your madness is sheer awesome.

[LadyTevar]

Not really FanFiction. Off to SciFi

[Darth Tedious]

I don't know what that was, but it was awesome.

That sir, was Shroom Man being Shroom Man, as only Shroomy can.

[Connor MacLeod]

You think Ringo is disgusting? Oh man. Avoid Kratman at all costs. Kratman makes Ringo look like JRR Tolkien.

Mind you if you pick up a Baen novel nowadays you should expect right wing/neocon type stuff as a rule, especially from John Ringo. I've still maintained some enjoyment in the Honor Harrrington novels despite the absurd twists it's taken since the early novels, but even that is full of that kind of stuff (in a milder form.)

I've heard there are worse people. (That Williamson guy can do some weird shit too in some of his novels I hear, although I've never read any of his stuff and IIRC he's more libertarian than anything.)

if you're curious, there's a thread over on SB in the main forum where Thanatos is reviewing one of Kratman's novels in an MST3K fashion (EG taking something that would be intolerable on its own and making it enjoyable, albeit at a great cost in personal suffering and madness to himself. I expect the poor guy will be eating his toes before he's done.)

[DrMckay]

Oh, I've read Krantman, hence the crack against the rejuvinated SS Officers...

It's just terrible, Which is why I am trying to promote mass parody, along Shroomtastic lines.

[Simon_Jester]

You think Ringo is disgusting? Oh man. Avoid Kratman at all costs. Kratman makes Ringo look like JRR Tolkien.

Mind you if you pick up a Baen novel nowadays you should expect right wing/neocon type stuff as a rule, especially from John Ringo. I've still maintained some enjoyment in the Honor Harrrington novels despite the absurd twists it's taken since the early novels, but even that is full of that kind of stuff (in a milder form.)

David Drake is all right. I'd call him the exception to any rule involving Baen. Whatever his political views, he's able to move beyond them as a writer and as a man, in a way that someone like Ringo doesn't.

Eric Flint isn't the best of writers, but he's not a right-winger.

Travis Taylor, well, I don't know. I think he's a good influence on Ringo- has a damn sense of humor and cares more for the craft of the writing and the quality of the science than he does for politics. I don't mind a right-wing political perspective in a novel, as long as it doesn't get so big it chokes the narrative.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

Oh, I've read Krantman, hence the crack against the rejuvinated SS Officers...

I could have forgiven Kratman for 'Caliphate' if he hadn't added that screed at the end explaining how and why his Eurabia scenario was definately going to happen. He even took the time to sling mud at Ralph Peters, whose argument against Eurabia is the most anti-European I could find.

If I were to write something like this, it would involve the EU saving the world.

[Kingmaker]

95% of what Baen publishes is shit. Film at 11.

The problem isn't right-wing MilSF per se - that describes the vast majority of it, good and bad - but bad MilSF. No one wants to be preached at, especially when the book is already a shambolic mess.

Also, Space War is outside the thematic interest of most left wing SciFi novelists, I suspect, and especially the ones with a political axe to grind. In contrast, the first place a closeted authoritarian is going to go for his novelized political screed is good old fashioned Space War against the Space Communists. War, after all, provides an excellent venue for the validation and celebration of right-wing authoritarian values.

[Connor MacLeod]

Drake is almost an anomaly in BAen's lineup. I can't say I've ever read anything of his I haven't enjoyed, and he generally seems like a pretty cool guy all around. Weber is not terribly bad when it comes to that either. There are flaws to his writing of course, but he's not quite as batty as some of the other writers.

i dont know much about Flint except from the Starfire novels, or many other BAen authors TBH. There's also Lois McMaster Bujold, who is most certainly not (or at least wasn't) a right winger and I rather enjoyed the Miles Vorkosigan novels.

Ringo is a hit or miss writer. There is stuff of his I rather like (some of the posleen books aren't too bad.. I still rather like Hymn Before battle, and the Hell's Faire had its moments even though most of the battles were shit - but the second and third book were tedious boring crap.) and a fair bit I rather hate (Paladin of Shadows.. but in Ringo's defense I hear he actually never wanted to publish those, so I'm willing to give that a pass even though he keeps writing em)

Kratman.. is Kratman. For all that has been said about how bad a writer Traviss is, she's nothing on Kratman. Traviss can at least write a decent story if she has some sort of editor with a backbone. The same cannot be said of Kratman, and if anything his work has proceeded to get worse over time. I've been following Thanatos' revelations about "A desert called Peace" on SB and it makes me visibly wince every time. If it wasn't for Thanatos's ongoing commentary (up until he gets raped by a Space Camel in some future novel in retribution at least) I don't think I would have even bothered. Compared to Desert, Watch on the Rhine was a masterpiece. And I've heard his other Posleen collaboration novels were worse, too.

[Ahriman238]

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but in most of the David Weber books I really remember (Mutineer's Moon and sequels, Path of the Fury, Apocalypse Troll) politics is completly absent. In the Honor Harrington novels both Liberal and Conservative parties are painted as incompetents with only the single-issue Moderates being presented as the source of all goodness and reason. And in the Safehold series where severly conservative/reactionary fundies are the villains.

The Miles Vorkosigan series is definitly not conservative. The conservatives are the dumb hillbillies who murder their children for having a cleft lip and the officers who get hundreds of people killed because they can't understand modern tactics or weaponry. That said, in Shards of Honor Beta Colony previously portrayed as a liberal paradise takes a very disturbing and sinister turn with the Mental Health Police.

Eric Flint can get annoying with his AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!! attitude, but the man has a point about how alien our world would be to men of the 17th century, and vice versa. Again though, something profound changes in the world and it's the most conservative noblemen who are left in the dust while others adapt. I also loved his 'Philosophical Strangler' book, though most of it is a series of terrible puns.

I just read John Ringo for the ACS power armor and the Posleen themselves. The armor is sweet in all of it's faintly ridiculous capabilities, while the Posleen are what Starship Troopers would be like if all the bugs had guns. A lot of the battles are crap, though the first book and parts of the second are great. Also, the wheels come off the universal draft almost immediatly. In real life, I doubt anything would go even that well.

I'll agree I can't think of any prominent MilSci-fi pushing a liberal agenda, but I don't see the problem as being all that bad. I'm quite happy having no politics shoved in my face during reading, which I feel is the general trend.

[Imperial Overlord]

Drake's been with Baen since the 80s and he's a guy who likes to stay with people he's used to working with. As far as politics, Drake likes to use actual historical societies and events to form the base of his books, which means there's lots of greedy and power hungry defacto aristocrats and would be dictators making power plays that will absolutely fuck ordinary people, which isn't exactly pandering to the right wing. He also doesn't down play the human cost of such actions. The only time left wing traitors get killed in a Drake series that I can remember is in the Lieutenant Leary series where its treated as a tragic event that kills wipes out one of the protagonist's entire family including her eight year old sister.

Flint seems pretty left wing (by American standards), although too prone to "the protagonists are awesome and everyone thinks so" and "America Fuck Yeah" for my taste.

[Slacker]

Ringo doesn't take himself seriously in the same way Kratman does. Right after 9/11, he did, but he's mellowed out considerably in the years since then. And the "Paladin in the Shadows" warporn series he wrote is completely tongue in cheek-someone absolutely savaged it online, and Ringo not only agreed with the guy, but posted the review on his website for awhile. This new series he's writing, the Troy series, isn't too bad, it's got that Libertarian Right Wing woohoo meme, but it's nowhere near as offensive as Kratman. And they turn asteroids into giant Orion-drive propelled mobile battlestations, so there's a lot to say for that.

Travis S. Taylor is actually normally a good read-he's generally pretty low key with his politics, which are southern Republican, I think, but not crazy right-wing. And he can actually write, which helps. I genuinely enjoy the space pulp adventure of the Looking Glass series.

[Simon_Jester]

Drake is almost an anomaly in BAen's lineup. I can't say I've ever read anything of his I haven't enjoyed, and he generally seems like a pretty cool guy all around.

Drake was normal in Baen's lineup, once upon a time. I think half the problem is that the publisher drifted over time, drawing in some of the nuttier fans of the earlier generation's work. Drake being an example of said earlier generation, ditto people like Pournelle.

Weber is not terribly bad when it comes to that either. There are flaws to his writing of course, but he's not quite as batty as some of the other writers.

Yeah, he's flawed but he's not crazy. I've got nothing against him even though I've stopped buying his books. And, come to think of it, most books.

Eric Flint can get annoying with his AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!! attitude, but the man has a point about how alien our world would be to men of the 17th century, and vice versa. Again though, something profound changes in the world and it's the most conservative noblemen who are left in the dust while others adapt. I also loved his 'Philosophical Strangler' book, though most of it is a series of terrible puns.

Flint also did most of the writing on the Belisarius series, though Drake wrote the plot and it shows, I think.

I just read John Ringo for the ACS power armor and the Posleen themselves. The armor is sweet in all of it's faintly ridiculous capabilities, while the Posleen are what Starship Troopers would be like if all the bugs had guns.

...The movie, or the novel?

[Xon]

Drake is almost an anomaly in BAen's lineup. I can't say I've ever read anything of his I haven't enjoyed, and he generally seems like a pretty cool guy all around.

Drake was normal in Baen's lineup, once upon a time. I think half the problem is that the publisher drifted over time, drawing in some of the nuttier fans of the earlier generation's work. Drake being an example of said earlier generation, ditto people like Pournelle.

It's a classical case of a group drifting once the initial founder dies/leaves. The writing was on the wall about a year before Baen died, and made editing quality went down hill after that.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

When did Jim Baen die? I think it is actually Drake, in the foreword to one of his books, who mentions that the mix of authors taken on by the label changed a lot after the original owner of the firm passed on- from everything I've read, Jim Baen himself seems to have been a decent man and a great encourager of young writers, and the decline in quality- shift away from variety to the established market, anyway- only came after he was gone. Do not forget that there are people to whom this sort of thing sells.

(Ed; Xon beat me to that. Oh well.)

Oh, and just to pick up on Simon's point- in the book version of Starship Troopers, the bugs do have guns, and the reasoning that comes out of Rico's mouth is that it is basically them or us- if we don't get the bugs, they'll wipe us out, they're genocidal psychopaths at least on the same level as humanity. The book and the movie are as different as WWII and Vietnam.

The Mental Health Police are interesting; as an old gamer, I remember the Traveller universe's "Guardians of Morality"- the Zhodani Consulate's internal security force, telepathic thought police who were just as brainwashed as the common people and absolutely convined that maintaining everyone else's mental health by active, intrusive means was indisputably the right thing to do. I started a fanfic in that universe, actually, I might revive it and try and tie it into this if I have spare muse-juice.

[Darth Hoth]

I've heard there are worse people. (That Williamson guy can do some weird shit too in some of his novels I hear, although I've never read any of his stuff and IIRC he's more libertarian than anything.)

Oh, God, Michael Z. Williamson. Where do I begin . . .

His Freehold series is rather insaner than Kratman had gotten about halfway through the A Desert Called Peace cycle. (I have read nothing of him published after that, so maybe he has grown worse since, but probably not to that level.)

The first book is generic Baen fare with a reluctant heroine eventually shouldering up to the responsibilities facing here - only with whole chapters of preaching about how awesome the Freehold's libertarian politics are. Everyone carrying concealed all the time is so much better than a police force for crime prevention, everyone is so much healthier without any kind of state-funded healthcare, even the street-gang hoods are always nice to people because - The magic of the free market! And of course, their volunteer militia easily trounces the professional UN forces because of evil progressives.

Irritating and oblivious to reality, perhaps, but not disturbing.

In the second book, however, The Weapon, it really gets going. The story chronicles, in the first person, the life of a super-special-elite Freehold SpecOps trooper. Since we already knew the Freehold troops were all awesome, this guy is that much more awesome, because he is so elite. Freehold troopers are so hard they get tortured and raped during their training so they learn to cope with that kind of thing in the field! (Insert any one, two or three of , , or , as appropriate.)

Most of the book is then the uber SpecOps guy stomping on religious terrorists and trouncing the various other planets' militaries in more or less serious drills (because without the Freehold's uber training they are all weak, effeminate girlymen, obviously), and then being insufferably smug about it. The truly vile part, however, is when the Freehold goes to war with the UN and he and his terrorists undercover patriotic freedom fighters infiltrate Earth. After about a hundred pages of disgust with the incompetent and corrupt UN bureaucracy and venomous contempt for the "sheeple" (=common people) who go along with everyday life in their little routines and illusory security, they launch a major terrorist offensive, cause a nigh-total societal collapse, and kill enough billions of people for Earth to surrender and leave the Freehold alone. And this guy has said earlier in the same book in so many words that he considers terrorists who attack civilians vile scum who deserve death by slow torture.

And that was the last I read of anything Williamson has written.

The hypocrisy and sheer bloody-minded fanaticism and superiority complex of the main character is just awful, really. Kratman has insane shit like the Marchioness of Amnesty International Interplanetary torturing captured and enslaved rightwingers to death in the UN's dungeons, but as far as I can tell, he thus far never advocates urban terrorism with a straight face. And, while being perfectly serious about his crypto-fascist worldview, he is still not so deadly earnest in his descriptions of torture and mass death of his enemies, nor as insufferable in his smugness over how awesome his Mary Sue inserts are at everything.

A lot of idiots on the Internet like to compare various books to The Turner Diaries, often without reading them, but when compared to The Weapon, it actually does look eerily similar in places. The basic plot is quite similar, and while it lacks the racism, the visceral contempt for ordinary rules-abiding people and the weak in general is right on spot.

[Darth Hoth]

Travis Taylor, well, I don't know. I think he's a good influence on Ringo- has a damn sense of humor and cares more for the craft of the writing and the quality of the science than he does for politics. I don't mind a right-wing political perspective in a novel, as long as it doesn't get so big it chokes the narrative.

Since when? I only read his Warp Speed book and the immediate successor, and while the second one was quite tolerable writing (the first was really bad), I found the science quite underwhelming. Some guy gets nanorobots in his blood, and suddenly he can run at supersonic speeds? What?

[Simon_Jester]

Travis Taylor, well, I don't know. I think he's a good influence on Ringo- has a damn sense of humor and cares more for the craft of the writing and the quality of the science than he does for politics. I don't mind a right-wing political perspective in a novel, as long as it doesn't get so big it chokes the narrative.

Since when? I only read his Warp Speed book and the immediate successor, and while the second one was quite tolerable writing (the first was really bad), I found the science quite underwhelming. Some guy gets nanorobots in his blood, and suddenly he can run at supersonic speeds? What?

"The quality of the science" is scientific literacy, not scientific perfect-accuracy. I don't demand flawlessness before I consider a book to be legible.

Taylor, when he breaks the rules, at least shows a basic grasp of what they are. This is more than can be said for a lot of SF, or for that matter fiction in general. He also understands what science is, in terms of basic attitudes and ideas: shows understanding of how scientists might approach problems, even if he grossly exaggerates things like how fast they can work for dramatic effect.

And of course, I also haven't read everything he ever wrote, which compounds all this- what I read Taylor for is not necessarily found uniformly in all books.

[PeZook]

After about a hundred pages of disgust with the incompetent and corrupt UN bureaucracy and venomous contempt for the "sheeple" (=common people) who go along with everyday life in their little routines and illusory security, they launch a major terrorist offensive, cause a nigh-total societal collapse, and kill enough billions of people for Earth to surrender and leave the Freehold alone. And this guy has said earlier in the same book in so many words that he considers terrorists who attack civilians vile scum who deserve death by slow torture.

The most idiotic thing about this entire chain of events is that Freehold special forces massacred billions, but didn't actually touch any important military infrastructure.

The UN navies were left almost completely intact. In a realistic world, what happened next would be Earth stalling for time before launching a massive vengeance strike against Freehold, wiping the planet clean of life and then hunting down every last freeholder still left alive.

Of course, knowing Williamson, they'd do something stupidly insane like use non-lethal weapons or send an angry letter or use paraplegic troops because the UN is both stupidly liberal and totally opressive (Williamson UN somehow has total surveillance and secret police, yet also absurdly high crime. It is also starving yet full of bloated fatsos)

[Zaune]

Most of the book is then the uber SpecOps guy stomping on religious terrorists and trouncing the various other planets' militaries in more or less serious drills (because without the Freehold's uber training they are all weak, effeminate girlymen, obviously), and then being insufferably smug about it.

You missed the part where, during a "peacekeeping" operation, they massacre an entire village pour encourager les autres. It's basically My Lai, only presented as distasteful but necessary for the greater good instead of a war-crime.

And wasn't Williamson in the US Army at some point?