Author Review: John Ringo, Part 3, the Thrillers. (Still, with Free Books.)

Here we go again.



As mentioned, John Ringo has written a LOT in the past decade.  He's only been writing since 1999, but he's been pumping out almost three to four books a year ever since.



However, despite the previous posts, he hasn't written only political-heavy science-fiction and fantasy novels. But, they're all published by Baen, so they're still free for download.



To start with there's this one character of his who's a navy SEAL ....

The Paladin of Shadows (series)

.... This one is odd.

Ghost --- This first book is made of a series of three vignettes, and stars one Mike Harmon, a veteran who is not a very nice person, but he does qualify as a good man. Ringo opens this book with a quote from George Orwell -- We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on our behalf.



Mr. Harmon is one such rough person.



“Ghost” is the code name of former Navy SEAL Mike Harmon. Trapped on a far-left college campus, the veteran feels isolated and discriminated against. But when he sees a co-ed being kidnapped, he charges in to save the day, only to find himself in the middle of a terrorist plot that takes him all the way to Syria, where he lands in the middle of a terrorist stronghold, and eighty hostages, all of whom are slated to die.



The second vignette... skim it. Trust me.  It's a thirty thousand word story that's twenty thousand words of bondage porn and deep-sea fishing.



Vignette three finds Harmon in Eastern Europe, and he finds himself hip deep in a plot to nuke Paris.



Kildar—Harmon, still moving through Eastern Europe, finds himself trapped in the middle of a valley during a snowstorm. He buys lodging to hold up in during the winter, but this new home comes with an interesting piece of real estate -- the entire valley.  The home also comes with a title for the owner.  The title is Kildar.



However, Harmon still has a problem.  The Valley is in the middle of a pathway for Chechen terrorists killing everyone in their way. Now, Ghost has to train the locals to stop the invaders, or else everyone is going to die.



Unfortunately for the Chechens, killing is what Ghost does best.



Choosers of the Slain: A US Senator has a problem.  The daughter of a major money donor has been disappeared into the Balkan sex slave trade.  Here's five million dollars, could Harmon and his merry band of mountain warriors do something about the matter?



And when Ghost and company discover that some of the clientele in this sex trade happen to be from Washington D.C. ... well, there's a reason I picked up certain songs from this author.



And, there's a reason that the cover looks like the movie poster for a James Bond film.



Unto the Breach.  After the incident with the slave trade, people in Washington figure that Mike "Ghost" Harmon is a great person to call upon when the situation is both dire, and politically inconvenient.



This time, a scientist has been kidnapped by terrorists.  The problem?  He's an expert in biological warfare.



And that's not even the problem.   The problem is when the terrorists follow Harmon home, back into the valley he has lived in for years. But the local people are warriors by culture, and by blood, and they've been itching for a good fight. And all Hell breaks loose.



Remember when I mentioned where I first heard Dragonforce?  This was the book.





A Deeper Blue.





Biological weapon at Disneyland, with a shootout at the Holy Rodent Empire.



I think that's all you need to know for this one. It was fun.













The Last Centurion. I'm still not sure what to make of this one. To start with, this is a non-Mike Harmon novel.  Technically, it's science fiction, but only because it's set a few years into the future.  The United States has invaded Iran, beaten it, and is still there, even though President "the Bitch" has ordered a half-asses withdrawal. This book was published in 2008, so you can guess who he means.  The world has been hit with a global pandemic, the Earth is in crisis, and American army officer "Bandit Six" is trapped in the middle of Iran, with no support, no help, and the only way out is through the hostile territories of six countries..



This is a heavily political novel.  Ringo WANTS to piss off everyone with SOMETHING in this book—he didn't piss me off, but I'm odd. It's a one-shot, and written in blog format, with all that the genre entails. It was written in early 2008, before Swine Flu, the rise of Obama, and the first 100 pages, you will NOT know what's going on... okay maybe you will, but it took me a few pages to get into this one. He shoots at Fox news, environmentalists, the army, the peaceniks ... pick someone, he shoots at them.

Recommended Reading; Larry Correia

Up until I embraced my inner politicians (which I gotta tell, you, is draining as all heck), I had never heard of Larry Correia.  He's published through Baen books, and I read their top authors already -- David Weber, John Ringo and Timothy Zahn -- and yet I had only been vaguely aware of him from my visits to Barnes and Noble.



After hearing his name bandied about on a political fiction group on Facebook, I shrugged and said "Oh, what the hell? Why not?"



And, being a bit of a cheap bugger, I figured "Screw it, I'll get the 3-in-1 of his biggest series, Monster Hunter International."



My reaction?

Yes, I have, at long last, resorted to gifs.



I promptly went out and bought ... well ... everything else Correia has written, including the rest of MHI, his three Grimnoir and his Dead Six novels.



Seriously, these books are kinda awesome.  I finished all of them in a matter of days.



One thing at a time, though



The really, really, really short version about Larry Correia is that he is an unstoppable writing machine who pumps out books the size of Tom Clancy doorstoppers at least once a year, in addition to maintaining an almost daily blog, is almost omnipresent online, and has a BS tolerance threshold lower than mine.  Which tells you something, if you've been here a while.



Correia is, personally ... Libertarian? I think? His politics show up very little in his books.  Any anti-government feeling here could be summed up by the same feeling in 24, or Harry Potter (see: the Cassandra Effect. Honest). He prefers his heroes to be smaller, private groups, rather than sprawling government bureaucracies, though even the bureaucracies get a fair shake in his books (one of them at the very least).  He also owns a gun range, so he likes his weaponry. Big deal.



I'd say he has an ongoing grudge match against John Scalzi and the SFWA, especially over the Hugo awards, but it seems more like Scalzi and SFWA has an ongoing war against everybody I find remotely interesting. There's a lot of ranting against Correia because he's "a straight white man," even though his background is Portuguese -- don't even ask me how that works.



If you care about personal politics and online grudges, I'm sure you can find a few links.  From what I read on his blog, a lot of Correia is just plain common sense. But me and common sense have very little to do with each other.



But, on to the important part: BOOKS.  And I highlight books because I haven't gotten to any of his short stories. If I've missed a few, don't shoot. I've had a lot of books to dig through lately, but I'll add them as I find them.

Monster Hunter (International)

Before I begin, MHI has nothing, repeat, nothing, to do with the Monster Hunter video game series. Thank you.



There are five books in the MHI series THUS FAR (it's ongoing), and you'd think there'd be an odd one out, if only for the regression to the mean (heck, there's one John Ringo novel I don't recommend, and at least two David Webers).  But, no, even though there's one novel in the series that you swear is going to be boring, it rallies at the midpoint, and ends with a demonic werewolf hellspawn and his legion of unkillable feral weres.



Imagine a fully-developed world for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where the government has been aware of monsters for decades, and those civilians who have been dragged into the nightmare little world in the shadows have become Bounty hunters in their own right.  Of five books, I saw only two punchlines coming ... only one of them was more like a feinted jab so we could be decked with an uppercut. That's not bad.

1. Monster Hunter International.

Five days after Owen Zastava Pitt pushed his insufferable boss out of a fourteenth story window, he woke up in the hospital with a scarred face, an unbelievable memory, and a job offer.

How can you argue with a description like that?



Yes, chapter one involves a brawl between the above mentioned Owen Pitt, and his boss, who has become a monster of a completely different stripe than he had been.  Let's just say that I would have considered throwing him out a window before he became a large furry sociopath.



Yup. Pitt has to go toe-to-toe with a freaking werewolf.  And he has no silver.



After Pitt hands in his resignation the hard way, he has officially fallen down the rabbit hole. Monsters are real -- all of them. Pick a B-Movie horror film or a Lovecraftian monster. There are only two forces that deal with the legion of nightmares (that we see in this book).  One is the Monster Control Bureau (MCB), a government bureaucracy that looks like it's run by either the Keystone cops, or whatever random thugs can be brought in off the street (though it'll turn out that they aren't random). The other group is Monster Hunter, a private organization dedicated to collecting bounties as they exterminate the world's nastier pests -- including vampires, giant spiders, and a few creatures from the black lagoon.



And MHI offers Owen Pitt a job. The perks are good -- play with weapons, hang out with the stunning woman who recruited him, and the paychecks are insane -- and, well, why not?



Unfortunately for Pitt, his first day on the job is going to get messy.  He soon finds himself being haunted by an old Jewish ghost, is getting visions of an ancient entity called "the Cursed One"who just arrived on US soil, is hip deep in ghouls, vampires, flying killer gargoyles that bleed magma, and did we mention that the Cursed One might be about to end the world?

MHI has a wonderfully colorful cast of characters. From a former Vegas stripper who is more vicious and bloodthirsty than the lot of them, to Julie, a member of MHI's founding family, who is also a sniper... and her physical description in the book reminds me a lot of Bayonetta, but we won't go there.



There is a wonderfully broad collection of folks here, from the high school chemistry teacher who had to blow up his school filled with spiders, to the poor guy who had to kill his zombiefied students, to the explosive-happy Q-variant, to Earl Harbinger -- an old member of MHI's founding family with an interesting history.  The characters are likable, the dialogue engaging, and I don't think I came across a single flaw in the execution.



And yes, this book was awesome from start to finish.  It didn't really slow down.  Despite the constant description of these books as "gun porn," I have yet to be bogged down by a single page on guns.  Most of the time, the weapon details are critical to the plot, considering what fresh new horrors they run into all the time. The chapters that amount to a large training montage are detailed and interesting, and establish the characters better than heading straight into the action.



Then the shooting started, and didn't really stop for another three hundred pages or so.



And just remember: vampires only sparkle when they're on fire.

2. Monster Hunter Vendetta

By the end of MHI #1, all is right with the world. The Cursed One is finished, Pitt got the girl, and while there were a few residual hiccups along the way involving some of the crew becoming vampires, everything is perfect ....

Except at one point, the government accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb through an interdimensional portal, getting the attention of a Cthulian elder god, who decides that only one human creature is to blame...Owen Pitt.  Yup. He has Murphy's own luck.  Pitt is being hunted by a death cult known as the Church of the Temporary Mortal Condition, led by necromancer known as the Shadow Man, who all want to feed him to their monstrous, world-devouring deity.



The (n)ever-helpful government wants the Shadow Man, and gives Pitt his own troop of bodyguards, including one MCB man known only as Agent Franks. It's the MHI versus the army of darkness, only they're better armed than Bruce Campbell ever was.



Interestingly, despite Correia's attitude on government in general, while he could have left the MCB crew as a bunch of mindless government automatons, even they get character development in this book.



MH: Vendetta might arguably be better than MHI. We need little to no setup for the action, the plot jumps out at you and never really leaves you alone, and we can't even have a nice, simply plot-starting exposition without it being menacing (when the two people telling Pitt that he has to save the world ... again ... are vampires, it's hard to have a relaxed conversation).



Vendetta really proves that Correia has assembled a strong cast, and a great sprawling universe out there.  There are no cardboard cutouts as characters, even the ones that you're not supposed to like.

3. Monster Hunter Alpha

Earl Harbinger has been around MHI for a long time. Longer than anyone suspects.  When an old Cold War enemy comes out of the shadows to threaten his position, Earl goes hunting.  Unfortunately for him and his enemy, a third player is in play, manipulating both of them.

This one starts off ... slower.  I really didn't feel much of anything towards Earl over the course of the previous two novels, and I found myself missing the rest of the MHI ensemble.  We have a group of MHI wannabes, a corrupt and cowardly MCB agent, a local sheriff who is a redhead (bitten by the wolves) as well as Earl and his personal nemesis. They're all sort of blundering around a bit for the first third or so.



But as I said, Alpha rallies at the midpoint, and ends with a demonic werewolf hellspawn and his legion of unkillable feral weres.  This is when the tree hits the submarine (Sum of All Fears reference), making four plot threads come together like your classic Tom Clancy novel, and we're off to the races.



While not as good, I'd still recommend reading it.  The first half is a three-star novel, the second half is a five-star novel, so average it out and call it a four out of five-star book.  And every element in this book becomes pivotal to...

4. Monster Hunter Legion

We're back with the old team again, and this time, we're going to Vegas.  MHI is going to join with other monster hunter groups from around the world at the first ever monster hunter convention. Yaaayyy.... Unfortunately, my first thought was "We've just made for a great big target."  You know this has to go wrong, otherwise there's no story.

When the handler for all of Strike Task Force Unicorn (STFU) challenges the various hunters to hunt down and kill an unleashed beastie, no one has any idea of the sort of Hell that is to be unleashed. Soon, all of their worst nightmares are literally about to haunt them, and just consider that nightmares the men and women of MHI will have, and you just know we're about to have a party.



For Legion, Correia is in full form, and I mean full.  The various and sundry side characters? All of them are colorful, well-designed and developed. The MCB? They're getting more interesting. The government bureaucracy? More and more insidious as time goes on.



As for this book ... well, the opening gif kinda summed it up.



And did I mention there's a dragon?  Yes. Smaug can eat his heart out.

5. Monster Hunter Nemesis

A few days after the events of Legion, Agent Franks of the U.S. Monster Control Bureau has to clean up a different mess -- one created by the people he works for.  Franks is a bit more than human, and he's been around for a long, long time, stopping America's enemies, and, for the most part, being the thing that stands between America and bigger monsters. He's even under contract ... With Ben Franklin (long, long story). As long as the US holds up its end of the bargain, so will Franks.  If the US violates the agreement, Franks is well within his rights to kill anyone involved.

And then there's Project Nemesis, a factory for building to-it-yourself monsters. And they can't be bothered creating one.  Oh no. They have to make a baker's dozen, lucky 13. It's in violation of Franks' agreement.  And then we're off to the races.



Don't ask me why, but this one worked so much better thank Alpha did.  Franks is ... interesting, and engaging in a way Earl and his story wasn't. It could be that there was more to Franks' story. No matter what, it still worked. Also, Franks has his own ensemble, with recurring appearances from the MHI team we've come to know and love.



And Nemesis may very well be the best of the bunch. It's hard to compare, next to Legion.  Either way, it proves that the series is only getting better.



Also, there was an sequence of Frankstein versus the Wolfman. It was brilliant.

Grimnoir

If you can't tell by the lack of numbering and the slight larger font, Grimnoir is a different series than MHI. This is a trilogy centering around an alternate universe where magic is real, and human history has changed. The Grimnoir are a secret society of magic users dedicated to stopping the threat of the Japanese Empire, which has already taken over China by 1933.  Book one deals with the Japanese leader Tokugawa, otherwise known only as the Chairman, who kills with a touch, and has his own armor of magic-wielding operatives and teleporting ninjas.

And that's only book one.  Book two has to deal with a demon straight from Hell, and the third features universe-destroying monster from beyond the cosmos.  And the only two people who can stop this threat are Jake Sullivan, a veteran of the Great War, and Faye Vierra, a teenage girl, and vicious killing machine.



This is a great little world, and I enjoyed every minute of it, from first to last. There are Iron Man suits of powered armor, a version of Marvel's Silver Samurai, great, epic battles on dirigibles, at least one army of darkness, depending on how you'd count them. There are "cogs" -- Correia's version of the Sparks of Girl Genius -- and teleporters and gravity manipulators and ... Imagine if the X-Men weren't whiny emo douchebags who complained about being picked on all the time, and make them really awesome.  That about sums it up.



Oh, who are we kidding? Imagine the best Marvel film you've seen, and Grimnoir at least matches it pound for pound.  This is the series that got Correia nominated for a Hugo ... and made everyone go batguano insane over it.

Dead Six / Swords of Exodus

No, I'm not 100% clear on the name of the series.  But let's just go for Dead Six thus far, shall we?

In a world that's only slightly altered from our own, this series is about two men: Michael Valentine, and "Lorenzo".  Valentine is a vet and former member of a elite private military contractor.  In the first books, he's been recruited to hunt down and eradicate terrorists.  Lorenzo is a thief who doesn't mind killing people from time to time, he's a master of disguise and of the heist.



Co-written with Mike Kupari, this one is actually darker than the others, and slightly stranger.  There are elements of paranoid thriller -- just plain don't trust anyone in these books -- and hints of dark, supernatural forces around the corner.  The series hasn't totally fallen off the map into fantasy, and is content to just hint at the deeper darkness. For now.



Thus far, the primary thread between these two books have been the Swords of Exodus, a religious group dedicated to wiping out evil on Earth, no matter where it might be.  They're terrorists, or extremists, and a few other labels slapped on them.



I enjoy this series just as much as any of the others, but I'll be damned if i could figure out where it's all going.



Thus far, my only complaint with the series is that they've both ended on cliffhangers. Kupari and Correia seem to think it's funny to play tag team with who they can threaten at the end of each novel.

In Conclusion

Read some Larry Correia, already, damnit.  Is he Ann Lewis writing Sherlock Holmes level of perfectly awesome?  No. But few are. He'll have to settle for five stars out of five stars, instead of six out of five.

DragonCon Report #3: Fightin' and Writing with Ringo; Buffy with Marsters and Landau

A Poison Ivy on line, with Zombie backup.

So, yesterday, believe it or not, didn't go exactly as planned. I would have sworn that I had filmed at least twenty minutes of the Furlan / Boxleitner panel. So much for that idea.

I had taken notes, but much of the notes I had taken had been posted online in various and sundry pieces and parts.

As I said, it wasn't exactly as I wanted it to go.

However, one of the things I did get to record involved John Ringo.  You might get the impression that John Ringo is my favorite author, given how much he's been mentioned lately (and considering my review of his latest novel). He might be, but considering that I read practically anything that's not nailed down, that would be hard for me to say.

I can tell you that it would be nice to be John Ringo when I grow up.  I'm already about as sane, but I would like to write as much, and as often ... then again, that would presume I'm also published, so....

Anyway, John Ringo appeared at one panel on the Saturday night of DragonCon, called Fightin' and Writin' ... yes, it was spelled exactly that way, try not to shoot me.  Things went a little strange with the audio, so I spliced the bad audio to the end --  the last part might be harder to hear, but it's a small part of the whole video. I thought the facts he went through are fun.

Writers really should be taking notes.

I shot her twice on two different days.

The Ivy's started to blur after a while.

Now, next, there was another panel that I was not at.

Again, it was a panel that I could not get in to.

Welcome to DragonCon.

Who was on this panel? The case of the Avengers? The leaders of a major TV show? Major film stars?

James Marsters and Juliet Landau.

If you're asking "Who?" the answer is Spike and Drusilla from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe.

The last time that I did a DragonCon report, I was pounding out transcripts for a month.  I am so not doing that again.  So I'm going to take my time, and assemble a lot of my notes in an orderly fashion.

Don't be surprised if I have a whole blog dedicated to pictures at some point next week.

Now, on with the vid.

Music Blog: Nightwish's Last ride of the day

This I grabbed from both John Ringo, and Mookie, of Dominic Deegan.

The group is Nightwish, who I've had in prior music blogs. The song is the "Last ride of the day."

And I suggest you hang around for the lyrics. They are truly something to be inspired by. I couldn't get the video I wanted, mainly because it couldn't be embedded. I'll live.

Music Blog: A Stirling Phantom

I'm starting to run out of ideas for blog posts.

Actually, it's 3:48 in the morning as I write this, and I just finished sending a manuscript to Baen Books -- you know, the guys who publish John Ringo, David Weber, et al -- and I just learned I'm not going to hear back from them FOR 12-18 MONTHS!  So, ahem, shoot me now.

Either way, I'm in no condition to write.

You know what that means.

Music!

And, what better way to relax as you read A Pius Man than another bout of Lindsey Stirling, this time doing a rendition of Phantom of the Opera (the two themes anyone knows), complete with electric guitars in the background.

Enjoy.

DragonCon Report #3: Fightin' and Writing with Ringo; Buffy with Marsters and Landau

A Poison Ivy on line, with Zombie backup.

So, yesterday, believe it or not, didn't go exactly as planned. I would have sworn that I had filmed at least twenty minutes of the Furlan / Boxleitner panel. So much for that idea.



I had taken notes, but much of the notes I had taken had been posted online in various and sundry pieces and parts.



As I said, it wasn't exactly as I wanted it to go.



However, one of the things I did get to record involved John Ringo.  You might get the impression that John Ringo is my favorite author, given how much he's been mentioned lately (and considering my review of his latest novel). He might be, but considering that I read practically anything that's not nailed down, that would be hard for me to say.



I can tell you that it would be nice to be John Ringo when I grow up.  I'm already about as sane, but I would like to write as much, and as often ... then again, that would presume I'm also published, so....



Anyway, John Ringo appeared at one panel on the Saturday night of DragonCon, called Fightin' and Writin' ... yes, it was spelled exactly that way, try not to shoot me.  Things went a little strange with the audio, so I spliced the bad audio to the end --  the last part might be harder to hear, but it's a small part of the whole video. I thought the facts he went through are fun.



Writers really should be taking notes.

I shot her twice on two different days.

The Ivy's started to blur after a while.

Now, next, there was another panel that I was not at.



Again, it was a panel that I could not get in to.



Welcome to DragonCon.



Who was on this panel? The case of the Avengers? The leaders of a major TV show? Major film stars?



James Marsters and Juliet Landau.



If you're asking "Who?" the answer is Spike and Drusilla from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe.



Anyway, this will be the last video I post for this week. The last time that I did a DragonCon report, I was pounding out transcripts for a month.  I am so not doing that again.  So I'm going to take my time, and assemble a lot of my notes in an orderly fashion.



Don't be surprised if I have a whole blog dedicated to pictures at some point next week.



Now, on with the vid.

Women in novels, and A Pius Man

On Monday, when I ripped a Tor Books blogger a new one, I wanted to go into an compare and contrast version of how to treat women in novels, mostly with novels I know, or novels I've written.



Then I looked at long long the bloody piece was, and decided to not bother.



After talking with Rebekah Hendershot yesterday, I've decided to go ahead and do just that.



Unfortunately, it's a hard to find a good beginning.  Seriously, where does one start?  With the fact that one of my favorite story of the Judges (biblical warlords) is a woman, Judith, walking into the tent of an enemy of Israel, and taking his head off, literally? Or, that when growing up, I found that the best part of Xena, Warrior Princess was not her leather outfit, but the glint in her eye right before she beat the hell out of everyone?



Do I start with Fr. Andrew Greeley, and his novels where the female and male leads had this tendency to save each other?



Maybe I could cover J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5, where the female leads practically dominate the series, and they have some of the best, strongest, most kick ass sequences -- usually without throwing a single punch, wearing clothing that's as revealing as your average monk's robes.



Perhaps I should start with the Irish mythology I grew up with, that had the belief that a woman was required for spirituality -- as in "a man could only go onto the afterlife after his woman drags him there, because otherwise the poor daft fool would probably just get himself lost along the way."



Or, perhaps I should just give my opinion in general, cite some specific examples, and move on.



Let's start with examples from the Tor article -- John Ringo's Ghost.  The premise is that a former SEAL, code-named "Ghost," finds himself in the middle of a terrorist plot, and literally gets dragged along for the ride. The blogger at tour uses Ghost's internal struggle between his instincts and his ethics (Ghost believes himself a rapist by nature, while on the other hand, he hasn't actually raped anybody, and he knows it's wrong), and the blogger uses that to paint all of John Ringo's work with one brushstroke.



However, looking in Ghost, the novel, we see multiple instances of women coming to the rescue.  During a firefight with the terrorists in question, Ghost only has a room filled with female college coeds for support. Of the course of one mission, he's saved by a gunship piloted by a female pilot (said pilot makes a comeback and also saves his but a time or two in later novels).  Sure, Ghost has problems, and the character knows that he has problems, and most of the character moment involves how his sublimates his own violent desires into something more socially acceptable ... which, alas, leads into sequences of more bondage porn than I ever wanted to read ... but the problem the character has is not a problem that John Ringo shares, and it's quite evident in practically every book Ringo has ever written -- even in later volumes starring Ghost.



And, of course, there is always Princess of Wands -- Ringo's novel where the hero is a tough, physically and spiritually fit, very beautiful and sexy .... suburban housewife who goes to church every Sunday, and married to the same man for years, with several children.



Like I said, Ghost's problem is not John Ringo's problem.



My point? In John Ringo's novels, no one is a passive participant. Even his civilian female protagonists make for strong characters, and are just as likely to pick up a gun and return fire, or throw grenades as needed.



With David Weber, another victim of the Tor hatchet job, his Honor Harrington character was criticized for  not having a sex life for multiple books.  Leaving out Honor's personal reasons for that (covered in the last blog), what the hell is a sex life supposed to add to a character, man or woman?



For the record: I don't write sex scenes. Period. My characters don't necessarily need to have a sex life. They're usually too busy being shot at.



In my novels, women are people, that they are women isn't all that special to me.  Of the main cast of A Pius Man, I have four women -- a secret service agent, a spy, an Interpol cop, and a forensic scientist.  Three out of four of them handle themselves well in combat -- two out of the three of them can give most of the main characters a run for their money.



In fact, I think the women are better action stars than my male characters -- Sean Ryan is the only main character who is overly equipped for combat (mostly through skill than through muscle). Giovanni Figlia has some combat experience, but he's mostly in a position of management, performing the job as detective and commander of the Swiss Guards. Egyptian cop Hashim Abasi is, literally, a member of a think tank. Scott Murphy, while he is a spy, can't even fire a gun well (which is why his trailer has him being knocked back by the recoil of his own gun).



Over the course of my life, I have found most women to be my equals, if not my betters. Of course, as I grow older, I have discovered that there are plenty of women who are screwed up, just in different ways than I'd expect.  But, in my books, I don't really have a weak female character. Ever. Man or woman, my characters can always find some sort of inner strength, even if it's pure, unadulterated stubbornness.  Though, as I think back on it, I think my female characters all have more combat training.



Are all of my female characters beautiful? They are in my head, though I don't know if they are on the page  For me, I find that there are few truly ugly women, and it usually takes effort.  I very often find that personality does make an appearance, and mar or improve the features. I'm told that none of the women I've dated have been beautiful, but, apparently, I've always managed to find something special in them. Give me time, I can usually find something in them that is lovely.



And, while on the other hand, there have been more occasions than I can think of where I have looked at a woman who is, superficially, quite attractive, but I can never really pass judgement if they're "beautiful" until they smile, or get excited about something -- even then, I concentrate more on the eyes. That's where I find the real beauty more often than not.....



And I'm starting to sound like a romantic sap, I apologize.  But that's pretty much how my brain works ... or doesn't. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? You decide.

Someone has jumped the shark: women and military scifi.

Just when I thought I ran out of material, someone on the internet goes and says something unbelievably stupid.



I don't know who set off one of the people at Tor books, but a recent blog focused on how women don't get a fair shake in military science fiction. Toward this end, they make a rather passing mention to David Weber's Honor Harrington, damning her with the faintest of praise.  They they follow it up with an attack on John Ringo, Tom Kratman, and David Drake, crying horror! Horror! at how women are treated in those novels.



Ahem ....



I'll start small, mostly by throwing David Drake under a bus. I've read some his stories, I found them as dry as dust. It could just be me, and my family, and my friends.



Now, onto some books I do know very well: those of Tom Kratman, John Ringo and David Weber.



While the Tor blogger does acknowledge that Weber's Honor Harrington is a good female character, an equal to the male characters around her, it immediate turns into a backhanded compliment, complaining that Honor didn't get laid for the first half-dozen novels -- even though it was pointed out in book one that Honor was sexually assaulted at the naval academy (well, "nearly" assaulted ... she completely trashed her attacker into next Tuesday. It was awesome). I'm sorry, but the rape victims I've read of and those I know personally (nine and counting) go one of two ways, nymphomania, or celibacy ... would the Tor blog have preferred nymphomania?



Not to mention that the article focuses on Honor Harrington as if she were the only woman in the entire "Honorverse" series -- ignoring, for instance, that the heads of state of the major governments are both women. And (for the brief racial whining they did), the article seems to gloss over the fact that the ruling family of Honor Harrington's government is all black. One wonders if the blogger even read the Honor Harrington novels.



Anyway, after bitching about Honor Harrington's lack of a sex life, they then go into how John Ringo's character Ghost treats women like sex objects.



I'm sorry, but who goes into a rant about over-sexualizing women after complaining that a woman lead isn't sexualized enough?  You know, aside from hypocrites.



Not to mention one tiny little detail ... Ghost, the novel, isn't even science fiction!



The article jumps the shark altogether at this point, in reference to Ringo and Kratman.

Their female characters tend to suffer unpleasant fates, or to be relegated to
backwaters of the narrative, and the old canard of “no women in the special
infantry” is once again in play 

At this point, I know from personal experience that this writer hasn't read Kratman and Ringo.  John Ringo has written over 33 novels in the last dozen years. The blogger focused on one.



In the category of "unpleasant fates," when people die in military science fiction, they don't die well.  Going through Ringo's Gone with the Wind-sized epic of The Posleen Wars, most of the main characters who die, die horrible, painful deaths -- they are either vaporized, eaten alive, or blown to pieces.  There is no good way to die in a John Ringo novel. This guy kills off so many people per book, he has contests dedicated to being a red shirt in his novels.



In Tom Kratman's series of A Desert Called Peace, et al, the women are essential to the novels: at first, by keeping our main characters sane (which is a job in itself at the best of times,) and, later, serving as front line troops. As the series progresses, there are no civilians in war zones -- culminating in The Amazon Legion, which is all about women soldiers.



And, looking at John Ringo's post-Posleen War novels, the Cally series, revolves solely around a female special forces assassin -- so much for "no women in the special infantry" whine-ery.  Even before that, if one were to read the joint Kratman-Ringo venture Yellow Eyes, one of the main fronts of the Posleen war in Latin America is held by -- wait for it -- a female commander of an artillery unit. The other major lead: the female artificial intelligence of a battleship (artillery barrage to the tune of O Fortuna, for the win!).



Continuing through the article, the author continues to screw up by focusing exclusively on John Ringo's non-scifi work, his Ghost novel.  And, even then, she shows her ignorance of the subject by focusing on the first book -- which even I criticized for having way too much sex -- and the point of the first book is in the opening quote: "We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us." Ringo went out and invented the roughest person he could create. And, had this blog author read the rest of the Ghost novels, she would see that, not only did the main character's initial crude proclivities disappear over time, she would have also seen that women become major front-line military troopers.



And, of course, the blogger skips over Ringo's Princess of Wands, which has a kick-ass female lead who fights demons that would make Buffy go "Aw crud."  And there's Ringo's Into the Looking Glass series, in which the spaceship, and most of their missions, is mostly held together by the primary female lead, Miriam ... who appears to be based off of Ringo's own girlfriend. (Whom I met. She was cute. And wry. And witty. And I can see what Ringo sees in her ... though the dye-blue hair is distracting.)



And Ringo, as in Kratman, even the women leads who are not front-line troopers, or major political and military tacticians, they become instrumental in keeping our heroes from falling to the dark side (or, in some cases, deeper into the dark side).



This article was petty, starting with "Well, there's Honor Harrington, but she didn't get laid for a long time" -- if I were to judge my novels by how fast my female leads got laid, I'd go into writing erotica, thank you.



At the end of the day, the most interesting part of the entire article is this: most of the books attacked have something interesting in common.  Ringo and Kratman work for Baen books. The Honor Harrington novels? Published by Baen books. The David Drake series mentioned in the article? Baen books.  The books praised in the article? All Tor books ... I'm shocked, shocked I say.



Not to mention one other tiny detail .... if this were a fair, open and honest look at military science fiction as a genre, there is one, gigantic, glaring omission.  A tv show called Babylon 5.




But J. Michael Straczynski has never worked for Baen, so I guess it's too unimportant to examine.  So are the dozens of other genre writers out there.  But if they don't work for Baen, I suppose it doesn't matter.



Don't get me wrong. I like Tor. I read their authors all the time. There's a reason I found this article -- because I'm on the Tor newsletter.   But this was a hatchet job from start to finish; the sad thing is, the blogger isn't even listed as a Tor employee, but a graduate student in Ireland, and a sometimes reviewer. Which is depressing -- if the blogger is going to pretend to know about what is being written, you'd assume that reading the books would be a requirement.

Author Review: John Ringo 2

Last week, I mentioned the author John Ringo.  He does several genres -- science fiction, thrillers, speculative fiction, and a bit of fantasy.

And you can get most of his novels for free.  Right here.  100% legal.

Last week, I had briefly covered his fantasy novel Princess of Wands, this time, let's try something a little different.

Prince Roger / Empire of Man

The Anabassis is an old story.  It's also known as the story of the ten thousand.  It's translated as "The March Up."

The original story is about ten thousand Greek mercenaries who went to work for a Persian king.  Unfortunately, their employer lost, and they were stranded in the middle of enemy territory.  Their only hope was to march, northward, to the sea.


This is the John Ringo version.

So, of course, John Ringo (writing off of a very heavy outline by veteran author David Weber), called his first novel in the series "March Upcountry."  And the second book is  March to the Sea.

However, instead of ten thousand mercenaries, Ringo starts with Prince Roger, the tertiary heir to the "Throne of Man," an Earth Empire that is based in Washington DC.

And Prince Roger is a royal bastard.

And I mean that literally.

Roger is the unwanted heir.  He acts out, has no sense of his place in the empire, feels like a waste, and every time he wants to say something noble and diplomatic, it comes out as a whine.  He's like a teenager permanently stuck in the awkward stage.

Which means that Roger's bodyguards dislike him with a burning passion.

However, when the Empire's enemies, known simply as "the Saints," try to assassinate him by blowing up his ship, Roger and his bodyguards are marooned on the backwater, the hostile planet of Marduk.  The terrain is hostile, half the population is hostile, and -- oh, yeah, did we mention that the tropical humidity makes the plasma rifles explode?  What do you expect when they're produced by the lowest bidder?

And, one more thing: there's only one spaceport, it's about eight months march and an ocean away, and it may be held by the people who had just tried to kill Roger and his people.

You can never say that Ringo makes it easy on his characters.

On the one hand, it's a growing experience for Prince Roger. He's going to grow up, or die.  On the other, what does he grow up into?  And, should he make it out of there alive, what will the empire look like after he's gone for who knows how long?

One of the interesting things about this series is how Ringo plays it. Not only does he have  several fully developed cultures, as well as an assortment of futuristic weapons, but -- due to the plasma weapons blowing up -- comes up with a great way to limit him and his men to local weaponry.  So, as they march across the planet, they go from fighting like Roman legionnaires, to medieval warfare, to a battle that looks like it came out of the Napoleonic wars of Richard Sharpe.

At the end of the day, this might be one of John Ringos best series, and the least political.  The only politics in the entire novel involve local, tribal politics of the planet Marduk, and (very briefly) of the Empire Roger is heir to. It mostly focuses on strong character, and it even keeps up as the actions sequences are ongoing.  And, while Ringo focuses heavily on infantry, even his space battles are well-done, and reminiscent of David Weber or Timothy Zahn.

All-in-all, it's fun. And, it's free.