Let's Examine Crusade
Posted: 2011-10-01 11:17pm
The TBO series is interesting in that they're both the most and least ideal books for self-publishing. An honest writer would find them as niche works for the small audience of forumgoers they're originally posted for prior to work. However, the giant egos of Stuart and his fans claim them not as those, but as works that are both technically accurate and deeply meaningful, beyond the combination of weapons fantasy and axe-grinding strawmen that they really are.
As someone who actually enjoys reading Baen sci-fi, I can certainly accept that combination as a guilty pleasure. But Stuart's writing is at the point where the books even fail at that, and given that Crusade has the greatest portion of the latter of any of his books, reading it is one near-continuous groan-either at the setting, the characters, or the prose. Still, I'm going to show this off, so here it goes:
Obligatory Disclaimer: Crusade is copyright by Stuart Slade. All excerpts are fair use for the sake of literary review.
Chapter 1
The year is 1965, and we start in a school in South Carolina, where a crazed Muslim has broken into a classroom, raving about the sins of teaching boys and girls in the same room. He's stabbed the teacher, and is using a girl as a shield. Is he one of many? Is this going to be the beginning of a brutal, tense, American Beslan that will cost many lives and shock the nation to its core?
No. A former Red Army sniper visiting the town with her American husband takes him out, with the stabbed teacher living.
Then we go to the Middle East in the newfound Caliphate, in Palestine, where a mob howls as fair-skinned "Guardians of the Faith" speaking in a "Guttural Language" that isn't Arabic drag a guilty family through them, en route to burning them at the stake. A small statement is made about how this isn't a Muslim punishment, but no one is either brave enough or intelligent enough to ask questions. The real inaccuracies about the Middle East will come soon.
Then it's revealed that a U-2 recorded the whole thing, and we cut to President Lyndon Johnson in a meeting with his cabinet and advisors. There's a huge infodump about the Caliphate, the fictional Muslim state that serves as the antagonist in this book.
Suffice to say that the Caliphate makes about as much sense as American Southern Baptists, Russian Orthodox Christians, and Scandanavian Lutherans creating a government ruled by a council of popes. I could go on for hours about how militant Islam in its modern form didn’t have much going for it in the time the book's set in, that exposure to WWII Germany would make them more secular, not less (and result in Baath-esque regimes ruling), that secular nationalism would persist longer without the rude awakening of defeat in the Arab-Israeli wars, that Arab nationalists or Sunni Islamists would want nothing to do with Iranians or Shiites, but never have logic stand in the way of a good strawman foe.
Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan united in the Caliphate, supposedly a loose confederation that only lasts because its members hate the rest of the world more than they hate each other, but which in practice seems like a unified state.
We also meet Robert McNamara. Stuart really doesn’t like McNamara. He’s referred to as “McNorman” in the printed book because McNamara was alive when it was self-published to avoid a lawsuit, and for good reason. Why such hatred?
Well, McNamara was a part of getting the US into Vietnam (hardly the only one, though, and McNamara himself admitted he’d made a huge mistake in doing so). Stuart also slams McNamara for his technocratic managerial mind-set, although he’s ignoring the planks in his own eye, one of which was that the USAF of the time was equally guilty of that mind set as well. But another reason is that McNamara cancelled Stuart’s beloved high-performance aircraft, and that StrawMac must be punished for this horrific crime!
(Stuart has even called McNamara a traitor. Not just an incompetent, but an outright traitor.)
StrawMac is literally sneering about how “your precious bombers can’t help us now, can they?”, and talking about how without the wonder-gizmos that are the real main characters of the TBO series, the US could “afford a proper army”.
Of course, rather than answering the debate, Stuart simply answers with “The missiles vs. bombers argument had been fought and won years ago.”
Then we get a bunch of scenes of useless subplots involving India, Marines on a fleet in the Mediterranean, an excuse to show off the TSR-2 airplane that got cancelled in real life, before concluding inside the Caliphate, with Walther Model and his army of German refugees providing an excuse for another infodump on the Caliphate. Stuart says it’s “nowhere near as homogenous or unified as it appeared”, but that’s all told, rather than shown. What is shown is a strawman government that rolls up a very difficult problem with no easy answers in real life into a nice bullseye for Strategic Air Command’s bombers.
Buried into the subplots is the first talking bomber. Stuart has the bombers talk. It’s metaphorical, but the fact that he puts more attention into developing the character of the bombers than he does to the people crewing the bombers is simultaneously telling and disturbing.
Also, the pacing and formatting is absolutely terrible. It's obviously copied from forum posts and given a tiny trim before being published, and the myriad perspective shifts and subplots make it sound like a clunky "this happened, then this happened, then this happened", rather than a coherent flow.
One chapter down, many more to go.
As someone who actually enjoys reading Baen sci-fi, I can certainly accept that combination as a guilty pleasure. But Stuart's writing is at the point where the books even fail at that, and given that Crusade has the greatest portion of the latter of any of his books, reading it is one near-continuous groan-either at the setting, the characters, or the prose. Still, I'm going to show this off, so here it goes:
Obligatory Disclaimer: Crusade is copyright by Stuart Slade. All excerpts are fair use for the sake of literary review.
Chapter 1
The year is 1965, and we start in a school in South Carolina, where a crazed Muslim has broken into a classroom, raving about the sins of teaching boys and girls in the same room. He's stabbed the teacher, and is using a girl as a shield. Is he one of many? Is this going to be the beginning of a brutal, tense, American Beslan that will cost many lives and shock the nation to its core?
No. A former Red Army sniper visiting the town with her American husband takes him out, with the stabbed teacher living.
Then we go to the Middle East in the newfound Caliphate, in Palestine, where a mob howls as fair-skinned "Guardians of the Faith" speaking in a "Guttural Language" that isn't Arabic drag a guilty family through them, en route to burning them at the stake. A small statement is made about how this isn't a Muslim punishment, but no one is either brave enough or intelligent enough to ask questions. The real inaccuracies about the Middle East will come soon.
Then it's revealed that a U-2 recorded the whole thing, and we cut to President Lyndon Johnson in a meeting with his cabinet and advisors. There's a huge infodump about the Caliphate, the fictional Muslim state that serves as the antagonist in this book.
Suffice to say that the Caliphate makes about as much sense as American Southern Baptists, Russian Orthodox Christians, and Scandanavian Lutherans creating a government ruled by a council of popes. I could go on for hours about how militant Islam in its modern form didn’t have much going for it in the time the book's set in, that exposure to WWII Germany would make them more secular, not less (and result in Baath-esque regimes ruling), that secular nationalism would persist longer without the rude awakening of defeat in the Arab-Israeli wars, that Arab nationalists or Sunni Islamists would want nothing to do with Iranians or Shiites, but never have logic stand in the way of a good strawman foe.
Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan united in the Caliphate, supposedly a loose confederation that only lasts because its members hate the rest of the world more than they hate each other, but which in practice seems like a unified state.
We also meet Robert McNamara. Stuart really doesn’t like McNamara. He’s referred to as “McNorman” in the printed book because McNamara was alive when it was self-published to avoid a lawsuit, and for good reason. Why such hatred?
Well, McNamara was a part of getting the US into Vietnam (hardly the only one, though, and McNamara himself admitted he’d made a huge mistake in doing so). Stuart also slams McNamara for his technocratic managerial mind-set, although he’s ignoring the planks in his own eye, one of which was that the USAF of the time was equally guilty of that mind set as well. But another reason is that McNamara cancelled Stuart’s beloved high-performance aircraft, and that StrawMac must be punished for this horrific crime!
(Stuart has even called McNamara a traitor. Not just an incompetent, but an outright traitor.)
StrawMac is literally sneering about how “your precious bombers can’t help us now, can they?”, and talking about how without the wonder-gizmos that are the real main characters of the TBO series, the US could “afford a proper army”.
Of course, rather than answering the debate, Stuart simply answers with “The missiles vs. bombers argument had been fought and won years ago.”
Then we get a bunch of scenes of useless subplots involving India, Marines on a fleet in the Mediterranean, an excuse to show off the TSR-2 airplane that got cancelled in real life, before concluding inside the Caliphate, with Walther Model and his army of German refugees providing an excuse for another infodump on the Caliphate. Stuart says it’s “nowhere near as homogenous or unified as it appeared”, but that’s all told, rather than shown. What is shown is a strawman government that rolls up a very difficult problem with no easy answers in real life into a nice bullseye for Strategic Air Command’s bombers.
Buried into the subplots is the first talking bomber. Stuart has the bombers talk. It’s metaphorical, but the fact that he puts more attention into developing the character of the bombers than he does to the people crewing the bombers is simultaneously telling and disturbing.
Also, the pacing and formatting is absolutely terrible. It's obviously copied from forum posts and given a tiny trim before being published, and the myriad perspective shifts and subplots make it sound like a clunky "this happened, then this happened, then this happened", rather than a coherent flow.
One chapter down, many more to go.