dead soldiers

[ironymaiden]

Angelfire email is shutting down, so if you contact me by my regular address, it will be dead May 31. i'm a little pissed, since i used that address for all my business contacts since it was supposed to never change :( i can be reached via my LJ alias.

i finished reading a bit of swag from Norwescon yesterday, March Upcountry. since my contact with the Baen "brand" up to this point had been their line of reissues and the best concept anthology i've ever read, Chicks in Chainmail (i'm not counting Dangerous Visions or the Datlow/Windling fairy tale collections in here, i'm talking about themed by specific subject matter), i actually had no clue that their bread-and-butter was "military sf."

i like a good war movie. i am genuinely fond of Starship Troopers and the other militaristic Heinlein juveniles. i like Joe Haldeman and even Tom Clancy. my dad was in the Army. i like to watch Mail Call on the History channel when i come across it. i consider myself to be fiscally conservative and believe that armed conflict is sometimes the most appropriate course of action for a government.

all this is to pad my saying what a steaming pile of shit that book was. the prime characteristics of Prince Roger as a problem character are his long hair and a taste for clothes. the vile enemies of the state are environmentalists with smelly armpits. our heroes choose to commit genocide in order to complete their journey. the human characters are paper thin and the aliens moreso. plus Star Trek has taught me the prime directive, so i am appalled whenever our heroes casually pass on technology to the natives, especially when it only applies to weapons.
using a character with a silly accent is so painfully weak, especially when it seems to be a dodge to avoid saying "fuck." the media tells me that soldiers are foulmouthed. please let them say fuck. i expect them to say fuck. how can they be allowed to intentionally wipe out an entire tribe, yet not say fuck?
i did find certain aspects of the book charming, and i finished reading it. i might like to know what happened, but i can tell that Prince Roger and some remnant of his force will get home (did i mention that it is not a self contained story, but just stops until the next volume?) and that his alien buddy will achieve a place of importance or die a noble death. so it held neither exciting ideas, nor characters that i was concerned about.

keep those reissues coming, Jim. some of my old Niven paperbacks are wearing out.

Comments

[raevnos.livejournal.com]

I don't like Baen one bit. Most of the original stuff they put it is bad military SF (The only Baen authors that are readable and write halfway well are Lois Bujold and David Drake (Sometimes, at least)). A lot of their reissues and fix-up collections are heavily edited from the original, too, with chunks taken out.

And the cover 'art'. Oh Cthulhu, the covers...


The only good thing about the publisher is how they're pushing free e-books. Buy a hardcover Baen book, and get a CD with lots of other (Equally crap) books on it. It's the concept, not the content, that's nice.

Did you say 'Chicks'?

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

The whole Chicks in Chainmail series of anthologies is a terrifically fun set. Esther did a fabulous job with them, and rumor has it that there may be another volume coming.

right on.

[ironymaiden]

it's the style of the text on the covers that make me squirm. they somehow fail to cross into a campy evocation of pulp fiction, and just look plain trashy.

what i appreciate even more is the idea of the free text on the website. i wish there were publishers with better material doing it. i was a a panel with Baen at Norwescon, and he says that the ones that are in electronic format do seem to help market the real books.