Currently Reading - 15-Jan-2015
Jan. 15th, 2015 01:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidgillonJust one book read since the last of these, but I want to get back into the habit, and this one needs more back-story than most book reviews...
As I've been generally recuperating and taking things easy (aka being a couch-potato and indulging myself) I've been buying some roleplaying stuff for the first time in years, and the new development since I was last active is e-publishing, which means some stuff I'm buying for significantly less than I was paying for its direct dead-tree equivalents in the early '80s. Mostly that's been stuff for Traveller, the SFnal RPG, of which my favourite incarnation has always been the post-apocalyptic 'Traveller: The New Era' (aka TNE), the third edition that picked up after the second edition comprehensively trashed the 1100 year old 'Third Imperium' with a decade-long, multi-faction civil war culminating in the release of an artificially intelligent computer virus that turned every planet into an equivalent of the Terminator universe's post-Judgement Day Earth (actually worse as most instances of Virus tended to be actively psychotic, which isn't too bad when your toaster is infected, but seriously problematical when it's a one million tonne starship with planetary bombardment capability). One of the reasons I adored TNE was that the good guys were explicitly placed in a moral quandary: in order to raise civilization from the ashes they needed to find, cannibalize and rebuild any functional or semi-functional piece of technology they could get their hands on, but often that same piece of technology was all that was keeping other survivor communities alive. The official name of the good guys was the Reformation Coalition, their unofficial name was the Star Vikings, and it was an accurate description for how they went about their business.
In among the relatively limited number of releases for TNE before the publishers, GDW, went bust, were a handful of pieces of fiction. There was a trilogy by Paul Brunette, of which only the first two volumes were printed, though the third has now appeared in ebook form and I picked that up back in 2013. But there were also a handful of linked short stories and a separate novel by a second author, Martin Dougherty, that never saw print. I found, and liked, most of the shorts on the website for a later (and short-lived) revival of TNE that Dougherty authored a few years ago, but never found anything more than hints of the novel. However Traveller is back on its feet and Dougherty is the author for a lot of the new stuff, so has taken the opportunity to issue both the collected shorts, and the novel, in ebook form (well, PDF, but close enough), and I picked them up along with my other purchases from DrivethruRPG (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com, I'm not sure if they're available from any of the more conventional ebook publishers).
I haven't got to the novel, Diaspora Phoenix, as yet, I'm just about to copy it onto my Kindle for tomorrow's train journey, but I have just re-read the shorts, collected as Yesterday's Hero (the 'Tales of the New Era: Volume 1' on the cover page can be ignored, there was never a Volume 2), which collected add up to 11 stories and 100 pages, and I still like them as SF that features a very atypical lead character, Lisa 'Lander' Davies, a self-described 'five-foot wimp who has real trouble with stiff doors', or in the words of her later husband (and he's praising her at the time) 'a neurotic little woman who can't shoot straight'.
The first story, Graduation Day, has Lisa passing out from the very prestigious (think MIT crossed with West Point) Hiver Technical Academy and finding out that her dreams have passed her by, but then being tapped for a Graduation Day tradition that rapidly escalates from bad to worse.
Absent Friends reconnects Lisa with the other survivors of Graduation Day, and sends them off on a half-assed attempt to salvage a motherlode of medical data from the wilds of the planet Nicosia. Getting that data comes at a tremendous price, but reconnects her with her dreams. It's also where she picks up the Lander callsign for the way she pilots an assault lander (so hard she bends it). The timing in this one is a little forced, a little too coincidental, a few cliches are added to, but it's still a reasonable story.
Boarding Party is in some ways my favourite, but that's because as a TNE fan it's a near perfect evocation of Virus at its most horrific. The clipper Apollo comes across a derelict spacecraft, and Lisa is tagged to shuttle the Marines over to check it out. Think Aliens with Lisa in the Ripley role and her boyfriend, Bison, as Newt and Hicks combined.
Under Hostile Skies has Lisa again trying to rescue her boyfriend during a larger scale military operation that has gone to hell - there's a definite theme here, and for a studly-thewed marine Bison does seem to spend a lot of time dashing into places in order to become Robin the Boy Hostage.
Vampire is the generic name for a Virus-controlled starship, so no prizes for guessing what this one is about, and the story opens with Lisa being told she's up for promotion, but not ready for command, so no prizes for guessing how the story develops.
On the Carpet puts Lisa into a completely new role, chewing out a junior officer for trying to pull off one of her stunts and getting people killed. It's a very short story with a lot of not-so-positive introspection.
Decapitation Strike has Lisa back on Apollo, but now as its captain, and charged with conducting a spot of what we nowadays call regime change. For added angst the dictator in question is an old boyfriend. The plan she comes up with is a little too Star Trek-ish for my liking, I can completely imagine Kirk and Spock doing it this way, but it's probably a reasonable reflection of the way a lot of Traveller players would go about things - I simply prefer a more standard military set of behaviours.
Court of Inquiry opens with Lisa newly widowed and charged with war crimes on Nicosia. The kicker is that she admits from the outset she's guilty. I really, really like this story because it goes back to the 'Are we doing good?' question at the heart of TNE.
One Vacant Chair has Lisa washed-up after being cashiered, only to volunteer for a near-suicidal undercover operation on Nicosia. I'm not convinced that the woman who just committed war crimes against the planet is the logical choice for an undercover op, especially when she's an intermittently suicidal drunk who can't even be trusted with the care of her child, and this creates a consistency problem with the overly picky service of the first story, but that what the story runs with. The conclusion turns around a tricksy piece of writing that works, but may be annoying.
Devil's Advocate is the one story that hadn't previously been available. 18 months on and Lisa is the favourite to become Nicosia's first elected planetary president. No, I'm not convinced either, but that's where the author went. Her electioneering is brought to a sudden halt by a hostage crisis, and as it's her people being held hostage, well you can probably guess the rest. There's a majorly tricksy piece of writing here that had me, and no doubt every other reader, going 'hang on, WTF just happened?', but it also encapsulates a significant piece of character growth, so I'm half-inclined to let him off with it, but I guarantee you'll think you've misread something.
In Every Threadbare Sail Lisa has completed her presidential term and just wants to raise her son quietly on Nicosia, but there's a vampire in the system, it just shot apart every warship they had, and the only ship they have left is the old Apollo, waiting to be scrapped and without a crew. You can probably guess where it goes from there. Having previously read the collection without Devil's Advocate I'm not quite sure Lisa's motivation hangs together as well with the additional story as without, but the story does tie the overall themes of the collection neatly together.
Overall the writing is a little rough in places, there are a few places in which a rewrite from third to first person is evident and a few other self-publishing glitches, and I'm unsure how accessible these are if you aren't a TNE fan, but I still really like these as stories in which a very atypical heroine gets to be, well, a heroine, and kick butt just as hard as the guys, but also to suffer the consequences of every fight she goes through. There are very few named characters who get out of the collected stories alive, and in fact the cost of those losses on the people around them is a core theme. There is a lot of military SF out there, a lot of jutting-jawed, blonde-haired, bronze-thewed heroes riding out to glory, there's a lot less military SF that talks about the cost of being one of the people who keep on surviving.
As I've been generally recuperating and taking things easy (aka being a couch-potato and indulging myself) I've been buying some roleplaying stuff for the first time in years, and the new development since I was last active is e-publishing, which means some stuff I'm buying for significantly less than I was paying for its direct dead-tree equivalents in the early '80s. Mostly that's been stuff for Traveller, the SFnal RPG, of which my favourite incarnation has always been the post-apocalyptic 'Traveller: The New Era' (aka TNE), the third edition that picked up after the second edition comprehensively trashed the 1100 year old 'Third Imperium' with a decade-long, multi-faction civil war culminating in the release of an artificially intelligent computer virus that turned every planet into an equivalent of the Terminator universe's post-Judgement Day Earth (actually worse as most instances of Virus tended to be actively psychotic, which isn't too bad when your toaster is infected, but seriously problematical when it's a one million tonne starship with planetary bombardment capability). One of the reasons I adored TNE was that the good guys were explicitly placed in a moral quandary: in order to raise civilization from the ashes they needed to find, cannibalize and rebuild any functional or semi-functional piece of technology they could get their hands on, but often that same piece of technology was all that was keeping other survivor communities alive. The official name of the good guys was the Reformation Coalition, their unofficial name was the Star Vikings, and it was an accurate description for how they went about their business.
In among the relatively limited number of releases for TNE before the publishers, GDW, went bust, were a handful of pieces of fiction. There was a trilogy by Paul Brunette, of which only the first two volumes were printed, though the third has now appeared in ebook form and I picked that up back in 2013. But there were also a handful of linked short stories and a separate novel by a second author, Martin Dougherty, that never saw print. I found, and liked, most of the shorts on the website for a later (and short-lived) revival of TNE that Dougherty authored a few years ago, but never found anything more than hints of the novel. However Traveller is back on its feet and Dougherty is the author for a lot of the new stuff, so has taken the opportunity to issue both the collected shorts, and the novel, in ebook form (well, PDF, but close enough), and I picked them up along with my other purchases from DrivethruRPG (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com, I'm not sure if they're available from any of the more conventional ebook publishers).
I haven't got to the novel, Diaspora Phoenix, as yet, I'm just about to copy it onto my Kindle for tomorrow's train journey, but I have just re-read the shorts, collected as Yesterday's Hero (the 'Tales of the New Era: Volume 1' on the cover page can be ignored, there was never a Volume 2), which collected add up to 11 stories and 100 pages, and I still like them as SF that features a very atypical lead character, Lisa 'Lander' Davies, a self-described 'five-foot wimp who has real trouble with stiff doors', or in the words of her later husband (and he's praising her at the time) 'a neurotic little woman who can't shoot straight'.
The first story, Graduation Day, has Lisa passing out from the very prestigious (think MIT crossed with West Point) Hiver Technical Academy and finding out that her dreams have passed her by, but then being tapped for a Graduation Day tradition that rapidly escalates from bad to worse.
Absent Friends reconnects Lisa with the other survivors of Graduation Day, and sends them off on a half-assed attempt to salvage a motherlode of medical data from the wilds of the planet Nicosia. Getting that data comes at a tremendous price, but reconnects her with her dreams. It's also where she picks up the Lander callsign for the way she pilots an assault lander (so hard she bends it). The timing in this one is a little forced, a little too coincidental, a few cliches are added to, but it's still a reasonable story.
Boarding Party is in some ways my favourite, but that's because as a TNE fan it's a near perfect evocation of Virus at its most horrific. The clipper Apollo comes across a derelict spacecraft, and Lisa is tagged to shuttle the Marines over to check it out. Think Aliens with Lisa in the Ripley role and her boyfriend, Bison, as Newt and Hicks combined.
Under Hostile Skies has Lisa again trying to rescue her boyfriend during a larger scale military operation that has gone to hell - there's a definite theme here, and for a studly-thewed marine Bison does seem to spend a lot of time dashing into places in order to become Robin the Boy Hostage.
Vampire is the generic name for a Virus-controlled starship, so no prizes for guessing what this one is about, and the story opens with Lisa being told she's up for promotion, but not ready for command, so no prizes for guessing how the story develops.
On the Carpet puts Lisa into a completely new role, chewing out a junior officer for trying to pull off one of her stunts and getting people killed. It's a very short story with a lot of not-so-positive introspection.
Decapitation Strike has Lisa back on Apollo, but now as its captain, and charged with conducting a spot of what we nowadays call regime change. For added angst the dictator in question is an old boyfriend. The plan she comes up with is a little too Star Trek-ish for my liking, I can completely imagine Kirk and Spock doing it this way, but it's probably a reasonable reflection of the way a lot of Traveller players would go about things - I simply prefer a more standard military set of behaviours.
Court of Inquiry opens with Lisa newly widowed and charged with war crimes on Nicosia. The kicker is that she admits from the outset she's guilty. I really, really like this story because it goes back to the 'Are we doing good?' question at the heart of TNE.
One Vacant Chair has Lisa washed-up after being cashiered, only to volunteer for a near-suicidal undercover operation on Nicosia. I'm not convinced that the woman who just committed war crimes against the planet is the logical choice for an undercover op, especially when she's an intermittently suicidal drunk who can't even be trusted with the care of her child, and this creates a consistency problem with the overly picky service of the first story, but that what the story runs with. The conclusion turns around a tricksy piece of writing that works, but may be annoying.
Devil's Advocate is the one story that hadn't previously been available. 18 months on and Lisa is the favourite to become Nicosia's first elected planetary president. No, I'm not convinced either, but that's where the author went. Her electioneering is brought to a sudden halt by a hostage crisis, and as it's her people being held hostage, well you can probably guess the rest. There's a majorly tricksy piece of writing here that had me, and no doubt every other reader, going 'hang on, WTF just happened?', but it also encapsulates a significant piece of character growth, so I'm half-inclined to let him off with it, but I guarantee you'll think you've misread something.
In Every Threadbare Sail Lisa has completed her presidential term and just wants to raise her son quietly on Nicosia, but there's a vampire in the system, it just shot apart every warship they had, and the only ship they have left is the old Apollo, waiting to be scrapped and without a crew. You can probably guess where it goes from there. Having previously read the collection without Devil's Advocate I'm not quite sure Lisa's motivation hangs together as well with the additional story as without, but the story does tie the overall themes of the collection neatly together.
Overall the writing is a little rough in places, there are a few places in which a rewrite from third to first person is evident and a few other self-publishing glitches, and I'm unsure how accessible these are if you aren't a TNE fan, but I still really like these as stories in which a very atypical heroine gets to be, well, a heroine, and kick butt just as hard as the guys, but also to suffer the consequences of every fight she goes through. There are very few named characters who get out of the collected stories alive, and in fact the cost of those losses on the people around them is a core theme. There is a lot of military SF out there, a lot of jutting-jawed, blonde-haired, bronze-thewed heroes riding out to glory, there's a lot less military SF that talks about the cost of being one of the people who keep on surviving.
