Posleen and things similar...

[MKSheppard]

When America's big project goals have to do with reshaping the face of human societies (war on terrordrugpovertychristmas), then what you get is a big roll of blueprints smacking into a human face, for... well, maybe not forever, but for a long time.

You mean like subsidized housing projects that are skyscrapers full of filth?

This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.

But with the end of the Cold War, the US finds that it has plenty of muscle to flex whenever it wants, and that wars can be fought seemingly without consequence

We were already doing that in the Cold War.

From 1981-1983, we had RC-135s from Offut AFB, nominally assigned to Strategic Air Command, trolling off the coast of El Salvador, listening for radio intercepts from FMLN guerillas inside El Salvador.

When we found something of interest via triangulation, we had AC-130H Gunships take off from airfields in Panama and fly into El Salvador in complete utter secrecy to vaporize the FMLN camps.

You're reading a little too much into your own biases -- here's my own take:

Murca has long had an instinctive love of technology for technology's sake, particularly in wartime.

War always brings out the crackpots and crazy ideas; for America wants to win it's wars cheaply and without much bloodshed.

Like the crazy coot who invented a KILLING MACHINE during the Civil War which he claimed would WIN THE WAR against the Rebels in no time: It consisted of a railroad locomotive with scythes attached to the driving wheels. Naturally, the Rebels would all stand in nice rows next to the track to be cut down like wheat.

Other coots are more successful. To Quoth Vendetta:

Richard Gatling was a pioneer in US national healthcare. On discovering that most soldiers during the American Civil War were dying of disease rather than gunshots, he turned his mind to, rather than providing better sanitary conditions and medical care for troops, creating a machine to make sure they got shot faster.

Then we have the more recent technological love of AIRPOWER, first through the apostles Mitchell and then de Seversky.

During the Vietnam War; we had the McNamara Line. Instead of deploying hundreds of thousands of troops in a static defensive line on the South/North Vietnamese Border, we'd solve the problem via SCIENCE!

The plan was for a mere 20,000 airdropped remote listening devices, combined with 240 million gravel mines, 300 million button mines, and 19,200 Sadeye cluster bombs to be deployed, allowing us to control the border with North Vietnam against infiltrators for a mere $1 billion dollars a year, at the cost of $1.6 billion in R&D and a $600m command center in Thailand to run it all.

Some elements of it was incorporated into IGLOO WHITE

The Drone War is just a recent manifestation of this practice. Only now we're controlling them with XBRICK360 controllers, kind of blurring the line between entertainment and actual war.

[Simon_Jester]

When America's big project goals have to do with reshaping the face of human societies (war on terrordrugpovertychristmas), then what you get is a big roll of blueprints smacking into a human face, for... well, maybe not forever, but for a long time.

You mean like subsidized housing projects that are skyscrapers full of filth?

This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.

Well, the war on poverty achieved mixed results. There are a lot of people whose lives would be poorer and shittier if things like Medicaid had never happened. On the other hand, there are a lot of people whose lives are poorer and shittier because poorly thought out public housing projects did happen.

Mixed bag.

But the war on drugs- pretty much everything that's come out of that has been uniformly shitty. Likewise the war on terror. A nation less ambitious, less prone to just pulling out a giant-ass hammer and smacking everything vaguely related to the problem, might have done better handling those crises.

But with the end of the Cold War, the US finds that it has plenty of muscle to flex whenever it wants, and that wars can be fought seemingly without consequence

We were already doing that in the Cold War.

From 1981-1983, we had RC-135s from Offut AFB, nominally assigned to Strategic Air Command, trolling off the coast of El Salvador, listening for radio intercepts from FMLN guerillas inside El Salvador.

When we found something of interest via triangulation, we had AC-130H Gunships take off from airfields in Panama and fly into El Salvador in complete utter secrecy to vaporize the FMLN camps.

I mean yes, that's true- but we weren't looking at full scale wars with ground deployments and whatnot. We were too busy keeping troops in Germany to deploy them in Iraqistan, and what wars we did fight on the ground like Koreanam were relatively bloody affairs. They had a real social cost, which kept people from being too rah-rah about war in general.

That said, yes, there's an element of my own biases in there.

You're reading a little too much into your own biases -- here's my own take:

Murca has long had an instinctive love of technology for technology's sake, particularly in wartime.

War always brings out the crackpots and crazy ideas; for America wants to win it's wars cheaply and without much bloodshed.

Like the crazy coot who invented a KILLING MACHINE during the Civil War which he claimed would WIN THE WAR against the Rebels in no time: It consisted of a railroad locomotive with scythes attached to the driving wheels. Naturally, the Rebels would all stand in nice rows next to the track to be cut down like wheat.

Other coots are more successful. To Quoth Vendetta:

Richard Gatling was a pioneer in US national healthcare. On discovering that most soldiers during the American Civil War were dying of disease rather than gunshots, he turned his mind to, rather than providing better sanitary conditions and medical care for troops, creating a machine to make sure they got shot faster.

Then we have the more recent technological love of AIRPOWER, first through the apostles Mitchell and then de Seversky.

During the Vietnam War; we had the McNamara Line. Instead of deploying hundreds of thousands of troops in a static defensive line on the South/North Vietnamese Border, we'd solve the problem via SCIENCE!

The plan was for a mere 20,000 airdropped remote listening devices, combined with 240 million gravel mines, 300 million button mines, and 19,200 Sadeye cluster bombs to be deployed, allowing us to control the border with North Vietnam against infiltrators for a mere $1 billion dollars a year, at the cost of $1.6 billion in R&D and a $600m command center in Thailand to run it all.

Some elements of it was incorporated into IGLOO WHITE

The Drone War is just a recent manifestation of this practice. Only now we're controlling them with XBRICK360 controllers, kind of blurring the line between entertainment and actual war.

Yes- what I mean is that in general, the American perception of war seems to have evolved. For earlier generations, war involved national sacrifice, and the ambiguity about the role of a strong army in a democracy kept the peacetime standing army small before WWII.

Since the '80s, wars for the US involved much less collective sacrifice- what I'm getting at is that I think this is affecting the attitude of the American SF community towards military SF, the glorification of fictional militaries over civilian government, and so on. Though part of that is simply the rise and fall of Baen, who make up a large chunk of SF sales and sell almost nothing but this kind of fiction.

[jollyreaper]

Interestingly enough, it was also done with Dread Empire's Fall. It's a better read than Lost Fleet but there were a lot of areas in the setting that would have been more interesting to explore that the author left untouched.

Cutting this one out of my quote, so that DEF gets the love and attention it deserves.

The trilogy of books that makes up Dread Empire Falls by Walter Jon Williams is simply high grade book crack. Yes, there are some areas that could have been improved; but it moves at a fast coherent clip, and covers wide areas. I've read it twice; and Lady Sula is a pretty good antagonist.

I wanted to learn more about the Praxis, the working of the minds of the aliens that put it together, the death cult that was orchestrated that could lead to people finding it virtuous to contribute members of their families to die with the last of those aliens,

I did fight a constant feeling that the tech was out of scale. If you've got freaking beanstalks going up to an orbital ring of solid structural unobtanium that encircles your entire planet at geosync altitude, holy shit!!! it's so out of scale with everything else.

I wanted to know more about the Shaa, what made them tick, why they did what they did. But i get the sense that they were just the means to an end, creating the premise of the novels. They weren't the focus themselves.

[jollyreaper]

War became fun. And so you got what Shroom is talking about, with so many novels in the past 20 years involving seemingly identical space explosions and power armored MARINES and whatnot.

The thing that the Murcan culture doesn't seem to comprehend is that it' so easy to move from the white hat to the black hat without even realizing it.

Our cultural stereotype is, in a John Wayne drawl, "We don't start fights but, by Gawd, pilgrim, we finish 'em." And if it looks like we're starting the fight, it's only because we've been forced to act preemptively by really bad people.

My personal bias is towards the idea that we have to be willing to defend ourselves with great violence because there are going to be other people who are assholes who won't take "leave us alone, please" for an answer. But i also believe that we're very susceptible to deluding ourselves so we don't realize we're being the assholes who aren't taking "leave us alone" for an answer.

I think that the difference between rational and "RAR SPASS MAREENS!!!" thinking could be compared to farming for meat. If you raise animals for meat, you have to kill them to butcher them. It's a fact of life. The necessity can become numbing, can make you dissociate. But the really dangerous thing is when people get off on it. It's not just a necessary thing, it's something they look forward to. Yay, I get to kill an animal. It's something for me to take pleasure in. I get to assert my dominance and will.

It's the difference between thinking the unthinkable with candor and thinking the unthinkable with your hand down your pants.

[Shroom Man 777]

So ye-ah. Mayhaps we should broaden horizons and try to tread new ground, or if not new ground then at least the road less traveled, rather than descend into a rehash of MAREENS SPESS FLEET PEW-PEW stuffs.

Has Brave New World been recommended? If not, then I recommend it.

[MKSheppard]

So ye-ah. Mayhaps we should broaden horizons and try to tread new ground, or if not new ground then at least the road less traveled, rather than descend into a rehash of MAREENS SPESS FLEET PEW-PEW stuffs.

The problem I have is stuff that I'd like -- relative near future SF that could be possibly achieved in the next 100 years or so -- there's just too much organ grinding by the authors.

Consider Jupiter by Ben Bova:

The Booklist description goes like:

Astrophysicist Grant Archer takes an assignment at the observatory orbiting the giant planet with the expectation that he will spy for the New Morality theocracy that rules Earth and is gravely suspicious of uncontrolled science.

and

What's worse, this devout young man has been ordered by the New Morality--the American flavor of the conservative religious order that runs Earth nowadays--to spy on some suspicious research involving alleged Jovian life forms.

Think about this for a moment.

Try to wrap your head around:

A.) Apparently American Fundies run the world now. Billions of Chinese, Indians and Islamists all agreed with this...somehow.

B.) This fundamentalist government overrules science with scripture...yet we have a fucking permanent station around Jupiter manned by dozens at the least.

It all doesn't compute just from that brief blurb.

Bah.

*goes back to MURDEROUS ICHTHYSOIDS*

[DrMckay]

"Jupiter" is one of the middle books in Bova's large "Grand Tour" Series, and is not the best representative of the overall story arc. The series was perhaps more topical for the mid to late nineties with a "greenhouse cliff" drastically altering the climate and fundamentalist religious movements joining together and "exiling" the secularists to the stars. Part of the problem is that the series takes place and was written over a period of decades, so the books actually become a barometer for the fears and worries of the time (UN takeover in the Moonrise/moonwar duology, Unchecked corporations fighting a bloody war in the asteroid belt,) rather than being a necessarily "accurate predictor of the century to come, with admittedly a bit of organ grinding. However, there is still a combat between religious nations and a secular international bureaucracy.

Personally, I like the books from a speculative tech section, funding the characters pretty cookie cutter, but enjoying the descriptions of possible uses of nanotech for say, lunar colonization and asteroid mining

[Shroom Man 777]

I wonder what would happen if like we made something like a Popular Science magazine, but instead of the usual stuff, we intersperse the oooh radical futuroid tech stuff with pew-pew explosion pictures, and possibly like pop-ups and 3D stuff of exploding people and scratch and sniffs that release the scent of burnt human flesh and testosterone, and see if this would eat into the market of military sci-fi novels.

[Connor MacLeod]

I suppose that depends on if its a dehumanized enemy or not.

Me I always kinda liked stuff like LoGH because you have to pay a price for all the action and stuff by seeing all the gruesome and horrific elements as well. It's not mindless bloodshed or slaughter and there's sort of a conflict in that.

[Simon_Jester]

Also, in stories of that nature, you're often rooting for both sides, or against both sides. Which is good because it keeps the violence from turning mindless or into some kind of horrible wish-fulfillment fantasy.

[Ahriman238]

It really is, and I'd highly recommend it. There's also the catch that Dahak was scouting for a massive alien invasion, and is accelerating his timetable for dealing with the mutineers because the invasion is imminent.

You forgot the part where NASA has laser rayguns pew pew on it's exploration ship; just because.

I did, actually. It's a very minor point, but the book does take place at some point in the future where, IIRC we have a moonbase, China has formed a Pan-Asian alliance to resist western influences, which is running a rival space program, and a terrorist group called Black Mecca (secretly backed by the mutineers) is activelt and repeatedly attacking the aerospace industry. Arming the Beagle really isn't that much of a stretch under the circumstances.

[jollyreaper]

I wonder what would happen if like we made something like a Popular Science magazine, but instead of the usual stuff, we intersperse the oooh radical futuroid tech stuff with pew-pew explosion pictures, and possibly like pop-ups and 3D stuff of exploding people and scratch and sniffs that release the scent of burnt human flesh and testosterone, and see if this would eat into the market of military sci-fi novels.

Will there be titties?

[Norseman]

OK minor necroing perhaps, it's been less than a month so I hope this is alright...

If you want one where humanity has a chance, you wouldn't enjoy the War against the Chtorr, by David Gerrold. Earth is being xenoformed by an alien ecology very effectively (first waves of plagues took out 3/4 of humanity). In the book, they estimate a worse-case scenario of losing in 10 years (aka humanity is extinct). Best case scenario is winning in 300 years. Oh, and the various nations aren't working together either.

I'd argue against that one. It went into some woo woo bullshit in the later books; about how humanity can't defeat the Chtorr, because we're too weak or some shit. Nevermind that you don't need to be mentally pure or have a strong mind to push a button to drop napalm from a B-52 on a suspected Chtorr hive, instead of sending a few guys with flamethrowers to handle it all.

Yes. The whole Modie thing was very impressive when I was 14, but now I realise what a carnie huckster show it is. There's also some woo-woo stuff right in from the start, for instance the scene where the guy (former spec-ops sergeant) in charge of one college class says

"I won't accept a single absence!"
"But what if we get sick?"
"Make sure you don't."
"But what if our car breaks down."
"Make sure it doesn't, or have alternate transport. Don't you see what you're doing? You're trying to give yourself permission to fail."

Paraphrasing of course, but that sort of thinking runs through the entire series, and I hope you see why it's ridiculous.

It is however unusual in that it tries to portray an alternate future system of sociology. LIke most sci-fi that tries to do that it does a very bad job of it, because many of the concepts used are either very silly at the time of writing, and tend to turn out even sillier as time goes by.

[gigabytelord]

I have no problem with the necro myself.

On another note, I have finished the first book in the Dune series and started on the second, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

Yes I'm a slow reader, I like to actually take the time and enjoy what I'm reading.