StarDestroyer.Net BBS

You're forgetting the first rule of Bart Blade: technical accuracy is a substitute for storytelling. It's not just that, it's that he assumed that I was attacking his technical accuracy and his credentials, even when a glimpse at the review shows that I'm not. I'm still a little stumped why he chos...

First off, I'm not Norseman, in case anyone needed any more proof of that. Second, from the thread, Stuart obviously didn't get the point of my RoTV review. I don't think the "reviews" are worth the electrons they are written with. Coiler doesn't seem, for example, to be aware that using i...

Look at what happened with the United Arab Republic, though. It lasted three years, only drawing in Egypt and Syria (both under secular dictatorships), then failed. That was between two Arab states with a lot more culture and religious commonalities than the Caliphate would have, yet the Caliphate ...

It takes an act of stupid plot to have a society that knows how to make bioweapons, but isn't aware of mutations. It also takes an act of stupid plot to have the nation that Stuart repeatedly insists is weak and barely held together last as long as it does, and to have not turned its most powerful w...

The action scenes suffer from these problems: 1: Too often the attributes of the combatants are told and not shown, or shown and told anyway, leaving the reader annoyed as to their redundancy. 2: The reader sees too much information. Listing the full OOBs of every combatant before, and showing both ...

The Caliphate only makes sense as a "be careful what you wish for" sort of thing, showing what life would be like under certain implementations of Salafi or Deobandi Islam. The problem of course is that he knows absolutely nothing about Islam or Islamic movements. For instance there is a ...

The killer for him is the political stuff, I think- because he needs to explain who the hell the Caliphate are, and to constantly justify everything they do because it doesn't make any damn sense unless you approach the Caliphate from the exact same frame of reference Stuart himself has. They're he...

I'd be interested in seeing that list. Is it too big to be done in a post here, like Raynor's 80+ page reaction to the RedLetterMedia review in "Pure Star Wars"? As thread creator, I give permission for the list to be posted here. Politics is going to be almost unrecognizable, but people ...

From a literary standpoint, I would rather talk about what rules of good fiction Stuart broke, and explore them, than just chew over what Stuart wrote badly. Exactly. This is in part why I'm deciding to put the next chapter update (spoilers: More plots) on hold. Rather than continue to beat what we...

Coiler, which book will you review after ROTV? Not sure. It definitely will not be Lion Resurgent, though. I actually do like some elements of the "post-war" TBOverse novels like ROTV/Crusade/etc, because there is an element of uncertainity in those novels which is absent from the "p...

The Algeria stuff is making me mad IRL. You've got the paras and the FLN working together to defeat the evil Islamists. This is a serious series that is making this happen. Oh, and grotesque manlove for the torturing paras. This would really not have happened at any point because if we're sticking ...

Taking place in 1972, Ride of the Valkyries is the next TBO “novel” after Crusade. The cover and title feature the bomber that Robert S. Mcnamara, the horrific traitor, cancelled in real life, and which, in this book, finally gets to spread its metallic wings and soar. I’ll be taking care to go slow...

So it started as a forum post. How utterly unsurprising. I can actually see the progression as more and more fanboyism creeps in. First it starts as talk on a forum, then it becomes a "story" with a thinly veiled plot just to set up that scenario. Oh sure, the history is contrived to set u...

I'd be more willing to let the implausible parts of the setting slide if Stuart didn't insist that they were realistic. What I'm not willing to let slide, no matter the setting, are the poor, scattered plots, the lack of characterization, and the fact that the storylines are set up to minimize drama...

No idea. What's weird is that Stuart also said elsewhere that this wasn't some type of lolbertopian society. Let's see: Besides everything mentioned in that post, you have essentially all the federal government being run by private entities*, and it turns out to work for the better. Stuart and his ...

Skgoa wrote:Wait, you turn even that into an ad hominem attack?

Are you referring to me or Stuart?

And the wish fulfillment goes to 11. The intense technology base of the TBOverse and its reliance on manned equipment rather than unmanned would reflect in science fiction being more popular. The woo-woo world would be less prominent (the attitude to a psychic would be "We're from Missouri. Sho...

Edward Yee wrote:I was referring to TSW, not TBO; admittedly I haven't read TBO which is why I'm treading very lightly on that end.

You can apply that to both equally, though. Stuart's writing is still the same, and so is the method by which the stories are made.

Didn't Stuart say that he would have excised some of the more obvious bits, i.e. "McNamara in the ninth circle of Hell," in the event of actual publishing? In fairness, a lot of the obvious examples were seemingly inconsequential bits, i.e. names like *ahem* Aperture Science, whose editin...

* Does Chipan make sense as a political entity? No. If casualties got too high in China, Japan would set up puppet governments and rule indirectly through them, not become "Sinified"-as if a society as nationalistic as Imperial Japan would let that happen. I do think that they were an exa...

Chapters 5-epilogue: Even though there are over a hundred pages left in the book, I’m covering it all in one fell swoop because I want to highlight just how little substance there actually is. The first few pages of Chapter 5 are taken up by, (sigh) the Asian plot. Pirates, Gnat fighters, you’re not...

In the near term post-TBO, it's probably reasonable to see such designs. The weapons butterflies are far from the biggest problem in the timeline. The lack of weapons butterflies isn't really as bad as the lack of political butterflies, with LBJ's inclusion as president seeming to me to be a combin...

On another note, if this dreck can get published I certainly think my own stuff can be, so it's kinda hopeful in that respect. It's self-published, so it doesn't matter how terrible it is. I could self-publish a book that was nothing but the words "In 1908, W. H. Taft was elected President&quo...

Chapter 4: The chapter begins in Egypt, where Caliphate-backed mobs have beaten back the security forces and forced the government to flee. We see Caliphate fighters backing the mob using shoulder-launched missiles competently-except that a missile crew’s cry of “Sehr Gut” after shooting down a heli...

Chapter 3: We start with more of the Pacific segment, which, to be blunt, I’m just going to skip. Regardless of its literary worth, or lack thereof (and believe me, you’re not missing much), it just doesn’t fit within the main plot concerning the Caliphate. The whole Chipan, and Australia, and the M...