what are you reading?

[HGFB]

Don't get me wrong. I haven't given up on it yet. I'm waiting until we get some action and things going PEW PEW BOOM to decide.

It's just not a great start. In fact it's a really shit start

[VNVObit]

YUOR THETANS
missing image see previous page
GIVE ME THEM

Is your toilet reading having any effect on you

[benedictw]

Big mistake. The author seems to be a coder, a sci-fi fanboy and a horrible nerd. He keeps dropping nerd bombs into the narrative that are so awful they make *me* cringe.

I'm sorry but the day the Earth finds out that aliens are real and coming to invade is *not* the day the US military calls in David Weber for advice.

Yeah, once you're through the first half it does get a lot better. I enjoyed it enough to queue up the second one. I expect it will be trash but hopefully the author got all the baggage out of the way on the first one.

[Orava]

Well, I WAS reading Caesar's Gallic War until about 10 days ago when it went missing.

The oldest daughter (7) and her brother (4) have been rather keen on playing Romans lately - I even had to make a laurel for them yesterday as they wanted to play 'caesar'. They also got all the Asterix comics they could find out of the library this week.

So I had my suspicions, and yes The Gallic War was indeed under my daughter's pillow.

[F-ZeroOne]

Don't get me wrong. I haven't given up on it yet. I'm waiting until we get some action and things going PEW PEW BOOM to decide.

It's just not a great start. In fact it's a really shit start

Ah, okay. The one I'm reading basically starts with a firefight, continues with a firefight, stops a bit to insert the flimsiest excuse for a nude scene in a combat zone I've ever read, and ends with a... guess.

[Saint Sandy]

[HGFB]

Don't get me wrong. I haven't given up on it yet. I'm waiting until we get some action and things going PEW PEW BOOM to decide.

It's just not a great start. In fact it's a really shit start

Ah, okay. The one I'm reading basically starts with a firefight, continues with a firefight, stops a bit to insert the flimsiest excuse for a nude scene in a combat zone I've ever read, and ends with a... guess.

I see. The first one starts with a large cluster of nerd bombs (Hero writes java and perl. Has a Tick poster in his office. Happens to be a short, wide and ugly hard fighting ex-marine who writes sci-fi) then moves on to describe how he taught his commanding officer to love sci-fi and then has the most fucking ridiculous setup for a space war and invasion that I have ever read in my fucking life. At the moment the only reason I'm still reading is because every time I think it can't get any worse it goes and gets worse. Much worse.

It's wooden, 1d drivel so far. Mind you there hasn't been a single bit of violence yet. Even a prospective punchup between NCOs turned into one of them bawling his heart out like a fucking pussy.

And I'm sorry. If over 2 million heavily armed and armoured killing machine aliens were coming in 5 years they *still* wouldn't ask David Webber for advice.

[F-ZeroOne]

Perhaps you should skip to the end? Of the series? Thats where I started.

[F-ZeroOne]

One thing - I did check out "Sluggy Freelance", to find out more about this "Bun-Bun".

Imagine if Pikachu had an equally cute brother who was a serial killer.

Start there...

[HGFB]

I've been reading Sluggy for years

[F-ZeroOne]

Working my way through the archive. Whens dawn happen again?

[juice]

After reading the very odd but strangely enjoyable Orcs-in-Space "East of the Sun, West of the Moon", by John Ringo (I forgot to mention the authors name previously. Sorry. I think it was because I couldn't believe anyone actually has "Ringo" as a surname), I picked up up "Hells Faire" from the library. This is part of a different series, and being a library book, not the first volume, so excuse some shakiness in the details.

I've never been that keen on John Ringo's stuff - he's very focused on the "military hampered by civilian beauracracy" theme. Oh, and he's long since worked out that his audience loves sex - his non-scifi series Ghost kicks off as follows:

When [Ghost] sees a kidnapping a series of, at the time logical, decisions leave him shot to ribbons and battling a battalion of Syrian commandos with only the help of three naked co-eds who answer to the names "Bambi," "Thumper" and "Cotton Tail."

Unsurprisingly, the co-eds appear to be in all the sequels (I've not tried reading any of them!).

However, to be fair: JR is a decorated US marine - there's an appendix in one of his books from his wife, detailing how he won a major award by driving off and killing lots of attackers during an ambush on his convoy. So his focus is understandable

It also features a tank called the SheVa. The SheVa is the most tanky tank there has ever been. The Polseen have these heavily armoured gunships that are a bitch to kill. Until one got into a gunfight with the U.S.S. North Carolina, a battleship equipped with nine sixteen inch guns, which apparently make quite a mess of heavily armoured gunships (this action seems to have occurred in a previous book and I would love to read it).

Did I mention that one SheVa weighs 7,000 tons? (a fully loaded M-1 tank, todays most kick-ass real world tank, weighs about 70).

And then its crew called it Bun-Bun, after a homicidal rabbit from the web comic "Sluggy Freelance".

Pah. That ain't a tank. This is a tank
</dundee>

A fully AI-driven, self aware tank which weighs up to 32'000 tons in later marks and equipped with up to 3 200-cm plasma cannons. Bun Bun is just a smeared bit of road-kill for anything past a Mark XV

More seriously: if you like Ringo, check out the Bolo series (Keith Laumer) and stuff from David Drake and/or David Weber - a lot of each is in the
free Baen library and/or on the freely distributable CD ROMs Baen has given out (some of which include audio books):
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/

(most of the posleen stuff is scattered on the CDs and websites, too)

The original Bolo stuff is significantly less cheesy than you'd expect - it's simply war writ large: think Warhammer 40k Titans slugging it out while humans run for cover. Also, it's been picked up by people like David Weber since Keith died - Dave's excellent effort is on the 9th CD, with the usual array of reading options:
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/09-A ... /index.htm

[juice]

I see. The first one starts with a large cluster of nerd bombs (Hero writes java and perl. Has a Tick poster in his office. Happens to be a short, wide and ugly hard fighting ex-marine who writes sci-fi) then moves on to describe how he taught his commanding officer to love sci-fi and then has the most fucking ridiculous setup for a space war and invasion that I have ever read in my fucking life. At the moment the only reason I'm still reading is because every time I think it can't get any worse it goes and gets worse. Much worse.

As far as I can see, that's basically an autobiographical description of John Ringo...

And I'm sorry. If over 2 million heavily armed and armoured killing machine aliens were coming in 5 years they *still* wouldn't ask David Webber for advice.

Dunno... Given the choice between Weber and Pournelle (who made a similar suggestion in Footfall), I'd take Weber! At least Weber's done a lot of thinking around the gigadeath scenarios...

I chose Tanks over bras.

Big mistake. The author seems to be a coder, a sci-fi fanboy and a horrible nerd. He keeps dropping nerd bombs into the narrative that are so awful they make *me* cringe.

Trust me. Ditch the posleen crap and pick up the Bolo stuff. I know you're not keen on Weber, but his Bolo stuff is on CD 12, and it's all pretty faithful to the original:
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/12-H ... hNoFuryCD/

There's also a fair chunk of all the bolo books (including the original Laumer stuff) on the webscriptions website - including Bolo Rising by William Keith, which sees a lobotomised Bolo taking on a AI empire which has turned a human planet into a deathcamp...

[HGFB]

I've never actually read any Weber

[juice]

I've never actually read any Weber

Ga'un, you know you want to. If the idea of a 7'000 ton tank got your juices going, how can you not be attracted to a 32'000 ton AI tank?

Another interesting self-contained story Weber wrote was The Apocalpyse Troll. TBH, I'm not as keen on the second half, which gets a bit too close to Ringo-style wish fulfillment, but the first half features a nice race of attrition between two battlefleets - a lot of the tension comes from the translations between subspace layers, which gets riskier with each jump, as engines fail and ships die...

There's also the Starfire work, which is EE Doc Smith style space opera. I'd skip Insurrection (which is a thinly veiled take on the American Independance) and possibly Crusade (which introduces some Kzinti wannabes), but In Death Ground and The Shiva Option are great: humanity accidentally disturbs an insane and carnivorous species with several million spare warships waiting for new targets - and new food.

Oh, and Honor Harrington's series - a nice mix of politics and sea-faring style space battles. Or the Hradani series (Oath of Swords): Conan style swords-and-sorcery with a logical set of magical rules behind it. It's worth digging out the short tale Sword Brother, which basically yanks an armoured car from "our" world and pits its 25mm chain gun against a 50ft demon

There's also Path of the Fury, which details the tech and training which goes into a set of far-future imperial guards[*], and ends in a "300" style massacre, which the guards barely win. The sequel gets a bit stranger: the main character from POTF links up with an ancient non-human construct and a new AI ship to track down the murderers of her family.

Or Dahak, which starts off with the moon actually being an ancient death-star style battleship ran by an AI which is guarding against the near-immortal crew members who rebelled thousands of years ago and are hiding on Earth. Later books expound on the reason for a death-star: the galaxy is subject to sweeps every few thousand years by an unknown and homocidal alien race: the death-star was actually built by the fourth imperium, after the first three got vaped...

Any of that sound tempting?


[*]which also links into the "March" series he co-wrote, where a later set of imperial marines need to drag a spoilt prince across a primitive planet, with their advanced equipment failing or running dry along the way.