What Is Being Read

[Simon_Jester]

He's done a number of novellas and short stories in the same setting, plus who knows what-all else.

I do think that it's poor form as a creative artist for an author to start a magnum opus and then neglect it as he drifts into his sixties and seventies, because it leads to works being left unfinished by the author's unexpected medical decline and death...

The artist is within their rights not to care about that, but it's bad form.

I did that with Flint's other work. It lead to me developing a drinking problem.

I can't see why people would read that dreck.

Eh, the 1632 series is legitimately bad as alternate history, though it gets at least incrementally less bad over time (though retaining as canon the events that made it bad in the first place). By the time you get to the books that happen recently, the majority of relevant good decisions are being made by 'downtimer' natives of the 1630s, and the 'uptimer' protagonists are starting to fade into the background somewhat although there are still moments of grating.

The Belisarius series is both... better and worse, I'd say. I essentially treat it as a series of fantasy novels that just happen to be set in a world that looks a lot like our Earth circa 530 AD, not as a serious attempt to depict realistic events if a magical jewel from outer space fell into the hands of Belisarius and told him he had to invent gunpowder weapons to resist the onslaught of a magical cyborg from outer space that was busy building Mordor an empire in northern India.

Off the top of my head- hell, looking around my shelves- I can name at least half a dozen writers (well, somewhere between several and many anyway) who do a clumsier and less elegant job of adapting historical events to science- fiction plot than Drake. I suspect your disapproval is ideological rather than artistic.

Thanas is criticizing Flint, not Drake.

Flint, on the other hand, his bibliography does contain quite a few things I wouldn't touch with a bargepole, and considering how much of that work is collaboration, with a fairly widely divergent spectrum of people, and how many other things are 'edited by', he may be a better editor than he is a writer.

He is almost certainly a good editor. I like him as a writer but my taste is... poor.

I even find John Ringo marginally readable as long as he isn't co-authoring with anyone to the right of his own already right-wing views. Indeed, John Ringo is the exact outer limit of my standard of readability, because making him incrementally worse makes him intolerable to me, while making him incrementally less bad makes him tolerable.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Of course it's ideological; Calgacus was right.
Spoiler

He was also in all probability fictional...but how else was Tacitus supposed to denounce his society and get away with it? In fact, to the crimes enumerated, we can thereby add that of Rome's intolerance of free speech and dissent. Spoiler

Semi- seriously, I'm trying to be a little less laconic when it comes to mentioning titles and authors; say a little about why I find something good, or notable, or with any luck both. Possibly even go into detail. Information is a good thing, right? Not everyone knows everything, and we certainly don't share each others' private obsessions. (and before you say it, I will- thank god for that.)


Inspiration, perspiration. To (slightly mis) quote, again, Timothy Gawne, from one of his chapter headings that is a gag in itself and practically a riff on the entire genre of Communist humour, "That he only produced one great work in his life leaves all the more for the rest of us to write; and by it's nature Genius is that which is almost out of reach, a rare and valuable thing- otherwise we would all be doing it."

Getting an idea out and shaped and in complete, metaphorically concrete form is work, and doing it to a professional standard is or should be hard work; age, exhaustion, failure of inspiration, all legitimate excuses.

John Ringo's an interesting case; it is certainly possible to read things that you, that's the generic you including me, don't actually like and wouldn't read for pleasure or choice, and still make human sense of the words and the plot and syntax and stuff. Taste being the keyword here, and hey, book club selections again. Can- but won't. (To stretch the analogy, a sufficiently bad taste may be a warning that the material is in fact indigestible.)

I did pay money for precisely three of his books, because I am a fan of Schlock Mercenary; and the central character in the Troy Rising series is very much an insert of Howard Tayler, and the central conceit of the books ties strongly into the Schlockiverse.

I think he's quite bad enough on his own, because the wish fulfilment he has happen not quite centre stage is, well, I've got a strong literary stomach, I can parse that, we've seen bloodier things happen to planets, but the bits with the latin americans are just excruciating, and they are in close focus. The books do get progressively worse as he moves away from the source material; the last one is only saved by the aliens- and this time the joke being played is that of convergent evolution, how like us they turn out to be.

[Simon_Jester]

Again, my experience is that the weighted average work of Ringo is exactly bad enough on its own, for me. That even one bit incrementally worse than said average is the straw that breaks the camel's back, for me. Ringo himself, on a bad day, can enter that territory.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

An odd question- how often do you find yourself, everybody, re-reading something? Most of the things on my shelves, I only have to look at to remember what they were about- but if I didn't have it there as a key to memory, I would forget and have to buy it again. (There are at least three copies of Tales from the White Hart around here somewhere; I kept losing them.)

And occasionally, there's something that I have forgotten entirely and have to re- read to remember how it went. Cue Bob Shaw's The Palace of Eternity. Start reading and it seems to be working well so far; human race is at war, protagonist is an ex- army weapons designer whose best work was a service rifle that can be fired accurately one- handed while dragging a confused eight year old to an evacuation transport with the other. He had been that eight year old.

He was never a natural warrior, gave up on the military mindset, and moved to spend his retirement in an artists' colony in the hind end of nowhere. Then the army turn up and decide to place a major headquarters there precisely because it is a backwater in the end of nowhere, and who needs this art crap anyway?

OK, so far, so good, half way in and this is looking like it could be an interesting tale about idea as weapon, what is worth fighting for, the power of culture against the culture of power, why can't I remember reading this?

Because it goes completely batshit insane in the second act, that's why. Suddenly the protagonist is dead for romantic reasons and I am reading about a particle theory of consciousness, that there is an elementary unit of mind called in what must outdo even Star Trek for bad technobabble, the physical unit of the human mind is the "Egon."

Good grief. No wonder I had banished this from my memory.


More recently, a Kindle anthology- Stars and Empire 2- collection of ten novels of lightweight, mostly military SF, very cheap for the pack. About, hm, converts, three dollars. And not actually worth it; they were the sort of vaporous, coreless, no-concept trash full of cardboard characters and uninspiring volence that you might expect to find retailing at that price. Oh well.

Better mad than trivial, i suppose.

[Simon_Jester]

An odd question- how often do you find yourself, everybody, re-reading something? Most of the things on my shelves, I only have to look at to remember what they were about- but if I didn't have it there as a key to memory, I would forget and have to buy it again. (There are at least three copies of Tales from the White Hart around here somewhere; I kept losing them.)

I reread a LOT. This is partly because lack of living space stops me from having an actual 'library,' and often results in my book collection being divided into the books in storage and the books I live around. When you 'only' have fifty or so books in the house, you read quickly, and you start semi-randomly sampling them over a two year period, you're going to end up rereading the same books a lot.

It's also, frankly, because I do most of my reading as comfort food. At least at this moment in my life.

[Soontir C'boath]

I used to buy books first new and then used on eBay. Nowadays I borrow books from the library to save money and space. If I somehow cannot get it from the library, I use PaperBackSwap.com which is a US based website that as its name states swap books for the price of postage, and I see the UK has something similar as well.

In all likelihood, there is a good chance I will forget what a book is about nevertheless the details pertaining to it. I think it was a couple years ago on this forum someone actually named me as if I was some expert on the Foundation books, but I have not read them in years and scant remember most of what happened nowadays. I do have the books somewhere...

As for rereading books. Whatever is in the privy at hand.

[Imperial Overlord]

Path of the Incubus by Gav Thorpe. Dark Eldar shenanigans. The 40K kick is winding down.

[Elheru Aran]

Ooh. I almost forgot. A few weeks ago I finished the Videssos Cycle by Harry Turtledove. It's early work for him so it's pretty decent, past the whole Civil War-World War-aliens-whatever alternate-history bollocks he's devolved into since the late 90s. Pretty decent representation of the Byzantine Empire (or rather, Videssos) clashing with Republican era Roman soldiers, and how their cultures influence each other and all that. It's certainly interesting figuring out the real-world parallels. An enjoyable read, even if the last couple of books were mostly just a lot of marching back and forth and petty dramas.

[Vendetta]

An odd question- how often do you find yourself, everybody, re-reading something? Most of the things on my shelves, I only have to look at to remember what they were about- but if I didn't have it there as a key to memory, I would forget and have to buy it again. (There are at least three copies of Tales from the White Hart around here somewhere; I kept losing them.)

Most of my books I've read at least twice. Some of them many more times than that.

I don't find my enjoyment of books particularly diminished by rereading.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

One that's not actually science fiction; highly recommendable but quite strange, for me- The Man in the Yellow Doublet, the only one of Arturo Perez- Reverte's Captain Alatriste series that has so far been ebooked.

Perez- Reverte is very Spanish, to the extent that he initially refused to have his books translated because he felt that they were too Spanish; anyone who wanted to read them could only understand them properly in the original.

I happen to be from north of the Antonine line, but I am still quite British, and I approached this foreign cultural artifact expecting it to be, in fact, foreign- looking over the shoulder of another mindset entirely. Trying to put all previous prejudice out of my mind, and simply imbibe.

It was actually very funny to have the native ultramontane Spaniard essentially confirm all the rude and mocking things that contempt- filled Englishmen such as Kincaid and Wheeler and Harris- and for that matter Wellington- said about his people;

Spaniards did not consider a favour to be a privilege but an inalienable right, so much that the fact of not possessing something our neighbour had blackened both our bile and our soul. As for that proverbial much vaunted Spanish virtue hidalguia- nobility- a lie that even Corneille and others like him had swallowed whole, I will say only that it may have existed once, when our compatriots had to fight to survive and valour was one of many virtues that one could not buy with money, but no more.
...
It has always made me laugh to hear men declare, with a twirl of their moustaches, that Spain is a gentlemanly nation. Well, I was and am a Basque and a Spaniard; I've lived my century from beginning to end, and along the way I've met far more Sancho Panzas than Don Quixotes: more base, despicable, wicked and ambitious people than valiant, honest folk. Our one virtue has been that when there was no alternative, some, even the very worst of us, died like men, standing up and with sword in hand. The truth is though that it would have been far better to live and work for the progress we so rarely enjoyed; alas, kings and royal favourites and priests obstinately denied us this possibility.

Why can so desperately few people write like this about the future? Yes, it would require an enormous amount of worldbuilding and no little actual thought, and the ready presence of cultural clues and meanings that would otherwise have to be counterfeited is another good reason to borrow from history.

[Imperial Overlord]

Just finished Max Blumenthal's Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. It's about the internal workings of Israel and its rightward political shift as well as the day to day realities of the occupation. It's heartbreaking in some places and darkly comic in others, but generally informative if not uplifting reading. It has excellent and extensive end notes that provide sources supporting its case, which are useful for confirming the facts and beating data into the thick skulls of spin consumers. I highly recommend it.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Fee, fo, fi, fum,
I scent a line of moratorium...

That said, without thinking about it I know of two science fictional takes on the IvP problem, the quite well known M. John Harrison's The Centauri Device, whose fundamental message is "a pox on both your houses";
two opposing factions control Earth and dominate a great many of the colonies (described as waiting, powerless and terrified, for their brief parts in Earth's dance of death), each of the faction- blocks would cheerfully atom bomb the other to powder, if there was only some way of keeping their half of the planet at least marginally livable afterwards.
To these factions he gives, with bitter and satirical intent, the handles of "arabs" and "israelis". They are searching for a superweapon to tip the balance- the aforesaid Centauri Device, which unfortunately is genetically keyed, a Terran cannot employ it, and the viewpoint character may be the last sufficiently direct descendant of the bombarded-almost-to-extinction Centauri people who can.
If either side can manage to make him an offer that doesn't include "or else your pet cat gets it"- mother, girlfriend, buddies- anybody; he spends most of the book running away from these people and their deranged, brutal offers.
Spoiler

When they finally do get him in a corner, the result can be summarised in the first line of the afterword; "The Sol-Centaurus Hypernova". A pox on both your houses, indeed.

The other is the undeservedly but probably quite thankfully forgotten New Alabama Space War Blues, by Richard A. Lupoff- a writer of conspicuous bonkersness, whose books you really want to read with a notepad to hand to jot down what seems to be the plot, so you can keep track of how it contradicts, involutes on and eats itself later. Picture Philip K. Dick on even more Acid- and absent all sense of decency and humanity.

It is quite possibly capable of getting anyone who tried to reprint it lynched, considering that the excuse for the action is racial war between interstellar colonies, New Alabama versus New Haiti, with numerous semi- involved bystanders; rednecks versus voodoo, both caricatured to somewhere well the far side of libel, to the point where I strongly suspect I could get into trouble by giving an accurate rendition.

I could never quite decide if it was the writing of an angry man or not; on one hand it has a craftsmanship that surely could not have been achieved in the state of rage that seems to come through the words, on the other hand someone who was not a driven man could not have produced this depth of satire.

The connection is that after the launch of the colony ships, the arab and israeli leadership calmly reveal that it was all a sham, their conflict a deep seated and carefully managed plot to clear everyone else off the face of the planet so the combined semitic jewrab federation could have it all for themselves. (Yes, that is a quote.)

If anyone manages to get hold of a copy, please do write in and say what you think of it.

[Adam Reynolds]

Has anyone read the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer? I was thinking of checking it out.

That said, without thinking about it I know of two science fictional takes on the IvP problem, the quite well known M. John Harrison's The Centauri Device, whose fundamental message is "a pox on both your houses";

It's not a book, but the geth and quarians in Mass Effect also had the same vibe. The dilemma the quarians discussed in Mass Effect 2 was almost exactly the same as that faced by the Jews that settled Israel in the late1940s. Though of course being a video game it likely gets a happy resolution courtesy of Commander Shepard and Legion as Space Jesus.

As a side note this quote always seemed the best summary of the real life situation to me:

A man once jumped from the top floor of a burning house in which many members of his family had already perished. He managed to save his life; but as he was falling he hit a person standing down below and broke that person’s legs and arms. The jumping man had no choice; yet to the man with the broken limbs he was the cause of his misfortune. If both behaved rationally, they would not become enemies. The man who escaped from the blazing house, having recovered, would have tried to help and console the other sufferer; and the latter might have realized that he was the victim of circumstances over which neither of them had control. But look what happens when these people behave irrationally. The injured man blames the other for his misery and swears to make him pay for it. The other, afraid of the crippled man’s revenge, insults him, kicks him, and beats him up whenever they meet. The kicked man again swears revenge and is again punched and punished. The bitter enmity, so fortuitous at first, hardens and comes to overshadow the whole existence of both men and to poison their minds.

[Imperial Overlord]

The book isn't about IvP, it's about I. Far more room is devoted to the lives of Sudanese refugees in Israel and how women are treated in the army than to Hamas and the PLO.

[Baffalo]

I'm currently reading two books, depending.

When I'm at work (substitute teaching) I'm reading Day of the Jackal by Fredrick Forsythe, a fictional account of the attempt to assassinate French president and former general Charles de Gaulle.

At home during my downtime, I'm reading the Destroyermen series by Taylor Anderson. Currently on book 6, Firestorm.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

In comedian Mark Steel's comedic history on the French Revolution, he takes a sideways dig at Forsyth, talking about people who went into politics for all the wrong reasons; he's actually on about the Girondins at the time, and says something like, misquoting, "look at Frederick Forsyth, imagine if he went into politics, it'd be like Hitler not being allowed to be an architect, I mean we'd all be sitting around now trying to scratch a living in the radioactive rubble, saying 'he wanted to be a writer apparently'."

This may be just a shade harsh- and is it just my perception, or are political thrillers like that almost an extinct species? Would it even be possible to do something like that now, or would it be too contentious, too obviously written for one side of the political divide or the other?

[Baffalo]

The main reason I have it is my dad had a huge collection of these, and I needed something to read during class when the little hellions students were supposed to be reading or something. Most of my content is on Kindle these days, and I'm not about to take my Kindle into a school where the kids will try and steal it. So, in desperate need of a book (the little bastards won't dare steal something like that!) I grabbed one off the shelf and went. I'd get one of my other books, but they're all in storage.

[Elheru Aran]

From my perspective Day of the Jackal isn't so much political as it's simply a 'thriller', a film version of an action film. When I think 'political thriller' I think something like the later Jack Ryan books from Clancy... 'Debt of Honor' and the like. Nobody actually does a whole lot of anything, the main characters mostly stand around and pontificate at each other, occasionally there's a brief action sequence involving side characters that disappear quickly but lead to Consequences (TM) and so forth.

[Adam Reynolds]

In comedian Mark Steel's comedic history on the French Revolution, he takes a sideways dig at Forsyth, talking about people who went into politics for all the wrong reasons; he's actually on about the Girondins at the time, and says something like, misquoting, "look at Frederick Forsyth, imagine if he went into politics, it'd be like Hitler not being allowed to be an architect, I mean we'd all be sitting around now trying to scratch a living in the radioactive rubble, saying 'he wanted to be a writer apparently'."

This may be just a shade harsh- and is it just my perception, or are political thrillers like that almost an extinct species? Would it even be possible to do something like that now, or would it be too contentious, too obviously written for one side of the political divide or the other?

Haven't you heard of Homeland? It is much the same material, updated for the War on Terror rather than the Cold War. This is not to mention the right wing masturbatory fantasy from authors like Vince Flynn

From my perspective Day of the Jackal isn't so much political as it's simply a 'thriller', a film version of an action film. When I think 'political thriller' I think something like the later Jack Ryan books from Clancy... 'Debt of Honor' and the like. Nobody actually does a whole lot of anything, the main characters mostly stand around and pontificate at each other, occasionally there's a brief action sequence involving side characters that disappear quickly but lead to Consequences (TM) and so forth.

Debt of Honor was nothing compared to The Bear and the Dragon in which he was able to convert a 400 page story into an 1100 page book.

Personally I preferred Ralph Peters' Red Army told entirely from the Soviet perspective.

[Lord Pounder]

Was at a paper back trading session yesterday. I'm gonna read Caiphas Cain aka Blackadder goes grimdark.

[Imperial Overlord]

Path of the Archon down, more dark eldar shenanigans.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

I have to admit I think Sandy Mitchell's lost it a bit with the more recent books; one through three were the funniest and freshest, four through six were certainly good but you could tell he was reaching a bit, number seven just didn't click in a lot of ways for me, and I haven't really bothered stretching the budget to the more recent than that.

Caiaphas isn't Blackadder though, you need to go back a generation and down a gross distortion of the facts to the original source material- George MacDonald Frazer's Flashman series. There are quite a few of them, but his estate seems to have been very generous with allowing others to use the character (or at least relatives thereof) and the concept, and most of them are crap, so make sure you get the originals.


Didn't get into Homeland; I saw it less as a drama than an act of political spin in itself- il n'ya pas de hors-texte, after all. Wiki'ing Vince Flynn, never heard of him, I am tempted to repeat myself- obviously written for the other side of the political divide. I do not think the middle ground, such as it is, is fertile territory- everything is trending to be for one agenda or the other. A Jovian invasion fleet turning up now would probably do us a favour, really; provide a common enemy.


For fun and relaxation, been diving into D.K. Brown a lot- the naval architect, that is. The Making of the Grand Fleet at the moment, an education on how the real world can sometimes get it spectacularly wrong, how difficult it is to know what a good decision looks like at the time, how institutional culture shapes decisions made. Yes, naval architecture is fun.

[Guardsman Bass]

I just finished reading Railroaded by Richard White (a historian of the American West at Stanford), about the development of the railroads and broader US economic complex linked to them in the second half of the 19th century. Easily one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read - White presents a pretty devastating case as to why the massive federal effort to promote transcontinental railroad systems (and the orgy of financial fraud and speculation that came with it) was a terrible set of decisions that should never have been done. Also pretty funny.

I'm reading An Indigenous People's History of the United States. It's polemical - like the Patriots History of the United States - but still quite interesting and extremely well-detailed when it comes to the 19th century Indian conflicts. I'd recommend reading it alongside Charles Mann's 1493.

While I've been on a non-fiction kick for a while, I'm going to try and read more fiction. I've got The Martian by Andy Weir, Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, and the Cruel Sea by Nicholas Montserrat up. But I'm also tempted to read Why Not Capitalism? and These Are The Voyages.

[Simon_Jester]

I just finished reading Railroaded by Richard White (a historian of the American West at Stanford), about the development of the railroads and broader US economic complex linked to them in the second half of the 19th century. Easily one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read - White presents a pretty devastating case as to why the massive federal effort to promote transcontinental railroad systems (and the orgy of financial fraud and speculation that came with it) was a terrible set of decisions that should never have been done. Also pretty funny.

Could you expand on that?

I mean, the immense fraud associated with the long-distance railroad boom of the 1860s and '70s was definitely a big stain and a waste of resources. That I agree with- although this was the beginning of the Gilded Age; it was hard to find anyone capable of bankrolling large industrial concerns who didn't have some degree of corruption or disarray in their finances. Still, the transcontinental railroad attracted worse investors than most.

But what's the argument for the decision to have transcontinental railroads being a bad one in the first place? The rapid expansion of the rail network played a major role in turning the American West from a wild and largely empty territory into a substantially contributing economic asset. Is the argument that this rail expansion should have occurred more 'organically?' Or what?

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Looking at The World The Railways Made and similar things on the subject, I don't think the growth of the American rail network could have been much more organic, in the sense of 'nature red in tooth and claw' anyway.

The federal effort largely, as I recall it, consisted of incentives, legal mandates and underwriting of risk- not really European planning at all. The closest America got to that was in the U.S.Military Rail Roads, and the clue is in the name there. Military planning- from the second wave onwards anyway- drove European subsidies and incentives, America fed the economic beast and let it run. And occasionally eat people and bury others in shit.