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Notes -
The eternal book recommendation thread remains, most excellently. Read Through Struggle, the Stars based off last week’s thread. I liked it; the science really is a ten on the Mohs scale and it scratched an itch I’d had since finishing The Expanse for well done space combat. Had a very weird drop in quality in any sections on the surface. Reminded me of the Bobiverse that way. Anyone have any ideas why so many authors that can create fully realized space combat systems just default New Earth Sheriff Department Ford Skytruck as soon as they hit atmosphere? Also more book recommendations please and thank you.
I'm going to once again recommend "The Eternal Front" by Walter Blaire.
Technically it's a mildly hard mil-sf but the war is just the setting. Yes, there are fights, but mostly the novel is more of a mystery/spy/political story.
It's very well written for a self-published work and quite novel, to me. All the constituent parts have been re-worked and put in an arrangement that is arguably original.
As in, vastly better than the typical technothriller tier writing most SF has.
I once wrote a nice message to the author, saying it's on the level of how Iain Banks wrote when drunk. He really liked it. Hard to judge, but I don't think I'm more than mildly wrong.
Most books - like e.g. 'Bobiverse' are painfully contemporary. You've got SF trappings, but everything else - language, ethics etc feels like modern day West.
This book - the SF trappings are minimal, 99% of stuff used during the plot is pure electric age tech, or even late steam era. It's set on the fringe of a rapidly declining colony that started with cca 22nd century tech level - AIs, fusion power, 'reasonable' nanotech etc.
The languages spoken by the various groups are all recognizable modern English - but style / vocabulary wise feel alien. However, unlike Star Wars, it's 'actually sf' in that it tries to be internally coherent, cares about historical, political and technological constraints and so on.
People have their own odd ethics. The colonists, Haphans, culturally seem like a weird mix between 19th century Britain (social mores) and North Korea (politics). They're described as pretty much human, but clearly from a 'prepped*' population. There's no mention of Earth whatsoever in their history, or of other non-Hapha humans, although Earth clearly exists within the setting because there's one oblique reference to it - a Hebrew derived name in a minor, outsider character.
The natives ancestors were human once but aren't, anymore. They're descended from someone's 'plausible' idea of a supersoldier race. There's a small bit of 'art major biology' in the book, but most of the stuff is within bounds of physics and biology.
They're savants at fighting - much more accurate, fast breeding, love fighting, vastly better reaction time, far less likely to die from injury, immune to disease, a second grafted on nervous system preventing combat fatigue or undue fear of death, a whole set of instincts related to weapons and looks like also primitive armament production. Neurologically problematic for them to tell a lie. And so on. Interestingly, linguistic drift is also what they're missing entirely.
They seem about as intelligent as Haphans, who seem pretty normal, but the feral supersoldier heritage causes problems - e.g. engineers or scientists killing each other due to disagreement is a frequent, not very rare risk. By themselves, they only ever achieved high middle ages technology.
*Quote from Iain M Banks' Algebraist (spoilers):
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I'll shill my own hard scifi novel Ex Nihilo, Nihil Supernum
I assure you it has juicy space combat, and is about as hard scifi as I can write with my theoretical degree in physics. Even my lack of interest in calculating orbital transfers is explained by the fact that in this post-abortive singularity setting, we've got some serious torch ships, so brachistochrone orbits it is baby.
Should the mod-UI be altered to make filtered comments more obvious? I'm seeing more and more responses to them.
Huh. Is this one of those? Because it doesn't seem that way to me, except when I'm explicitly looking at filtered ones. Good point, maybe I'll raise it with Zorba. Either way, it's a perfectly inoffensive comment, so I'll take it as a prompt to clear the queue while the others are sleeping.
It's visible now, but yes, it was filtered when I commented.
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