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Subject: Favorite Military Science Fiction Book
D Masterson    8/31/2002 9:58:17 AM
Let us know what your favorite Military Science Fiction book is. Personally, Ender's Game is probably my favorite with Starship Troopers a close second. There certainly is a lot of good stuff out there.
 
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Lu_86    It's not original but...   2/26/2008 2:07:05 AM
I'm not gonna pretend to seem interesting, Ender's Game for the philosophical and psychological aspect and Red Storm Rising just for the fun of it. I still doubt that the politics of the war were any credible, but many of the assumptions about the course of the war sounded reasonable to me, in particular the shortage of ammunition and the role of stealth fighterbombers. In hindsight though, it's pretty dubious that the Soviets would have achieved that kind of progress, the capacities of soviet equipment were probably overestimated.
 
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BasinBictory       10/16/2008 5:56:32 AM
Just started reading the Honor Harrington series by David Weber, and it reminds me a lot of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan books. Honor = Jack Ryan, in which the main character always seems to find themselves the primary focus of events, but there are numerous subplots and a wealth of characters. Weber's character development is quite good, and I would venture that politcally, he's in the same boat with Clancy as well.
 
Another series which I have read through is Jack Campbell's "Dauntless" series. That's the series where Captain "Black Jack" Geary is a space naval officer who gets reawakened over 100 years after he thought he had died but was in cryo-stasis, and discovers that the war he fought in the first of is still raging, and that he has been elevated to near mythical status by his people - a status that he really dislikes. I liked this series, although I thought the character development was very poor in the first few books. The space battles are very interesting, because there are considerations of radio wave communications and light itself being able to only travel at the speed of light, so manuevers must be coordinated with the knowledge that ships that might be many light-seconds away from the flagship will take longer to receive and execute orders. Also, the fleet on the offensive is always at an advantage because when they first "jump" into a system, they can immediately track all the in-system assets of the enemy, while it will take several hours for the light of their arrival to reach the defenders.
 
Also finished Ender's Game, I Robot, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I find that Philip K. Dick's writings are extremely sparse, not very illustrative, and it's difficult to really imagine the world of his books.
 
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Heorot    Basin,   10/16/2008 7:28:19 AM
 
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Heorot    Basin,   10/16/2008 7:32:44 AM
Actually,
the inspiration for the Honor Harrington books were the Hornblower books by C S Forester, set in the Napoleonic Wars British Navy.  The name of the Havenite leaders were taken from the French Revoultionary leaders, the most blatant being Rob S Pierre for Robespierre. If you read the Forester books, the resonancees are obvious.

 
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BasinBictory       10/17/2008 4:54:35 AM
heorot,
 
Yes, I remember reading the wikipedia articles on the Honor Harrington books and how they were basically space-age versions of Horatio Hornblower, but since I hadn't read those books, I was only comparing them to what I have read, and Weber's style of writing reminded me a lot of Clancy, with just enough techno-babble to explain it to a layman, and why that information was relevant to the tactical manuevers of the characters involved. The character arcs and development are similar to Clancy's style as well. I'll probably eventually get around to reading the Hornblower books, but after reading through this thread again, I picked up one of Harry Turtledove's books, "Guns of the South." Looks pretty interesting to me. Kalashnikovs in the hands of the Confederates!
 
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