Military SciFi books

[Condottiere]

I was neutral on Stirling, until I read the Falkenberg sequels.

 

[ottarrus]

And guess what was the lead article on wikipedia today?
[btw, they derped the link on the front page... the intro talks about the novel, the link sends you to the movie]

Starship Troopers - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[actionman]

Oh, there's a whole BUNCH of stuff in the Draka series that doesn't sit well with pretty much everybody. SM Stirling has a fascination with writing about superior and inferior cultures [the outright slavery of the Draka, the British Raj, etc.] but if you dig down he has some worthwhile observations about it. And though is may appear so, he's no fan of that kind of social system.

As regards to Hammer's Slammers, Drake wrote the Slammers drawing on his Vietnam experience as an enlisted translator/interrogator in Laos in the latter stages of that war. That's where a lot of the moral ambiguity of the Slammers' characters comes from. He drew inspiration from the people he served with and the impressions they made on him. If you're more used to stories in the Western story tradition [clear heroes with virtues being exemplified, obvious villains, etc.], the Slammers will disappoint you. The Slammers and Tolkien are two VERY different things.
But I submit that Hammer's Slammers are a good look at what it's like to serve in a technological military on operations where the casus belli is less clear cut than War Two. And the Slammers has been incredibly influential in the sci-fi genre. Every major author since has been influences positively or negatively by the series. It's like Dune that way.
Now, I freely admit I have a 'tanker bias', but completely separate of that is one thing that I personally appreciate about the Slammers series. This is that it is NOT Horatio Hornblower in Space [like Honor Harrington obviously is] nor is it a John Wayne - John Ford cavalry movie. The moral choices are far more nebulous and gray. Drake didn't copy any other military adventure series. He wrote from his real life projected into a politically confusing future. I honestly thing I would have enjoyed the Slammers series if I was a supply clerk in the Air Force instead of a tank crewman in the Army.

With the Draka series, it wasn't the subject matter, it was that a lot of things didn't hang together to make sense. Also, for me personally, I would never suggest an author supports something simply because he wrote about it in a work of fiction, even if he depicted it positively. A great example of this is the Star Fraction series by Ken McCleod, in which he explores vastly different societies.

I haven't read the Draka books in a very long time so I apologize if I don't remember things correctly.

Spoiler: Here's a few examples of what didn't make sense to me:

• The majority of the population which became the Draka were British-aligned Colonial Americans. I have trouble believing that after losing everything because of one revolution, their descendants would go along with leaving the British Empire later instead of supporting it.
• All the populations that formed the Draka were solidly Christian, especially the Colonial Americans, but they have a neo-pagan influence in their culture, a cruel streak a mile wide, and later in the series, an even wider degenerate streak. It just doesn't follow.
• I don't remember when the Draka left the British Empire, but slavery was abolished in the British Empire about 30 years after the ancestors of the Draka arrived in Africa, and they didn't abolish slavery along with the rest of the Empire. Abolitionism was a largely Christian movement, but the Christian populations that formed the Draka rejected it.
• In the afterword of one of the books, the author states that in the Draka military "congenital screwups" are handled with "a grenade under the bed", etc. First of all, using a grenade in your own barracks or bivouac is profoundly stupid, and I have a very hard time believing that the socially united and supremely militarist Draka would do that. Also, the Draka as described in the books were cruel, hedonistic, heavily armed, highly trained citizen soldiers, and I found it extremely implausible that the murder of someone's son or daughter, screwup or not, would not cause terrible cycles of revenge and counter revenge.
• Automortars. I rest my case.

I found the whole series to be something like the daydream of a teenager trapped in a boring high school class. The author changed history as necessary to make the Draka as cool as possible. The Draka never lost, they never suffered serious setbacks, they quickly became the most advanced industrialized nation on Earth, they conquered India in a week with only the forces they had in theater, they genetically engineered themselves to be master race super people, all while being cool-sexy-bad Germanics despite being descended from mostly British people, and all while complaining that they couldn't match the Alliance's rate of technological innovation in electronics. The whole thing just didn't make sense.

TV tropes has a thorough article. A few notations might not be good for overly sensitive readers.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheDraka


As for Hammer's Slammers, I have a pretty bad case of tanker bias as well, and I thought it would be a perfect series for me. I just didn't like the characters very much, and my interest in how their stories turned out waned. But, our discussion of them has inspired me to read them again. And rest assured, I am profoundly thankful that the Slammers books weren't like the Honor Harrington books. I finished the Slammers books. I put the first Honor Harrington book away after a couple of chapters.

 

[Condottiere]

The first book was somewhat interesting, but the sequels were continuously less so.

As I recall my impressions, it may be that each wave of immigrants degenerated the nation state, which may have been self selection, since they brought skills and knowledge that helped the industrial base, and those that were interested in migrating, probably didn't have a high moral character.

 

[To Tha Moon!]

Good book, not sure I would classify it as military though does have some parts that could be.

I put Citizen of the Galaxy on the list because of the beginning reminding me of a certain movie.

 

[CordwainerFish]

I put Citizen of the Galaxy on the list because of the beginning reminding me of a certain movie.

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