I'd strongly recommend that everyone read "Warhead", the 13th book in the Stony Man series, because it promieniently features top secret commandos versus ninjas. There is a scene where the commandos walk into a building in Korea and ninjas with swords and AKMs drop from the ceiling, but the commandos pwn them with MP5s and .44 magnum deagles.



Looks like you can get it here: http://www.amazon.com/Warhead-Don-Pendleto...8689&sr=1-2

So... it's gun porn?

Are there pirates?

Oh, Mack Bolan... your hyper-violent adventures transported me away from the boring summers of my suburban home town.

It's so much more. Whenever I read that novel I have the urge to start doing bicep curls with the hand I'm not using to hold the book. For the most part, you don't find any porn that makes you start doing bicep curls.

Counterproposal: Read a novel that's actually, you know, good. Seriously, those are the worst five sentences I have ever read. I think I might have actually lost a couple of IQ points. I just finished rereading the Sprawl trilogy for the umpteenth time; I'd forgotten how awesome those books are. Gibson's prose is lyrical in its clean, spare elegance. I need to dig up my copies of the Bridge trilogy now.

If, for some inexplicable reason, you don't like William Gibson, I can unreservedly recommend Iain Banks' Culture novels as masterpieces of space opera. I think the only one I haven't read is Use of Weapons. I'm halfway through Matter now, and it's at least as good as my favorite in the series, Excession. Another of Banks' novels, not a Culture book, Against a Dark Background, is a fantastic example of a far-future ultratech shadowrun.

To be perfectly honest most novels bore me. I used to read a lot back in high school, and now I read a lot of factual stuff, and my reading speed is still really high, but I guess that as I got older and learned more how the world works, most novels that take themselves seriously had too many flaws in the details for me to enjoy, and character drama became less and less interesting. Usually now the stuff that appeals to me the most is stuff like Conan the Barbarian, Lone Wolf McQuade, Rambo 4, etc, because those films deal with ideals and philosophy; they're abstract and metaphorical rather than explicitly concrete.

And then when I just want to relax I'll go read about commandos vs. ninja and Mack Bolan having testicles the size of Rhode Island.

Also, you know which popular author I really, really hate? Orson Scott Card. I thought Ender's Game was well written, but sanctimonious and totally not overwhelmingly cool in terms of ideas.

I also was burned up by the forward he'd written where he stated that the people who didn't like his book/understanding of young people were all educators who had a vested interest in invalidating young people as dummies. My god, it takes a special type of person to think such extreme negative things of people who, like myself, just didn't think his book was that cool.

By the way, using your "frozen" legs as a sheild in what is supposed to be a wargame thus using metagaming isn't genius strategy. People do it all the time...look at taekwondo sparring tournaments where people turn their back as a defense against kicks since the back is an illegal target. That's similar metagaming right there. And it's equally non-applicable to a real combat situation as using your frozen limbs as a sheild.

You're over-thinking it. The genius of Ender's strategy wasn't in its originality, it was in that it was completely counter to how the children understood the rules of Battle School. The officers in charge of the program weren't looking for who could "win", they were looking for people who could think in three-dimensions and work outside a system that was obviously failing.

I dislike Orson Scott Card because he's a homophobic nutter with crazed religious views. That said, Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide along with Hart's Hope and the Homecoming Saga were rad. Everything else is total pap.

That said, I wouldn't recommend Gibson or Banks to you as they lack the pulp action appeal of Mack Bolan. I would recommend Duane Swierczynski's Severance Package or anything by Elmore Leonard. Pure action and plot, no boring exposition or explorations of human nature.

The basic principles are sound. You always face your best armor toward the enemy's weapons and in a zero G environment legs are fairly useless. It is a strategy that would work fairly well in real life. Enemy bullets would likely be stopped, deflected, or severely slowed by the long bones in the leg. Unless there is a lucky hit to the femoral artery, it works. The only real problem is that you need to get new legs afterwords. But at it's core it is essentially the same as a tank designer placing the thickest armor at the front.

Card's mistake was that no one else had even considered the strategy, since it is pretty damned obvious. But he wrote it in the days before online FPS games, which have pretty much proven that any exploitable strategy will be exploited, even the metagaming ones, especially the metagaming ones.

The orientation issues were better, and I think illustrated very well exactly what most space combat scenes in movies and television get wrong. The ability to choose an orientation arbitrarily in microgravity and pick the best attack angle without regard to orientation is very powerful, indeed. Most shows and movies, however, confine their combat to a single plane, which doesn't really work well at all. However, Card himself fell into the trap of equating space battle to modern navel battle, specifically carrier battles in this case. The use of fighters is a bit bizarre, given the likely superior effectiveness of unmanned guided missiles. But worse is the fact that they engage in combat this way at all. With FTL communications and relativistic propulsion, it is far more efficient to simply send unmanned vehicles that receive updates and orders from HQ. They don't even have to slow down, doing so is a waste of fuel. It's far simpler to just ram into the enemies at a significant fraction of c.

Well, yeah, that's part of what I'm saying. People metagame and exploit the rules in a sport all the time. It doesn't require you to be a genius to do something like that. FPS games are probably the "best" example, but I'll bet that the most common example is how every time a soccer player so much as nudges another soccer player, some of them will immediately fall down and grab their face to make the ref call a penalty.

Same here. I devoured the entire Dune series in a week(at a rate of about 1 book a day), but now I rather just read about grown men beating the shit out of each other.

I blame the Fighter Pilot Union.

I blame the fact that this book was written when Star Wars was still a fresh idea.

Didn't Card write an essay where he slammed Star Wars for being Homeric and praised Star Trek for representing the kind of egalitarian human-rights-driven society we ought to aspire towards? Or was that someone else?

No, that was David Brin. An egalitarian human-rights-driven society is counter to what Card writes. He's more into the notion of the "special chosen ones".

I'm only familiar with the essays where Card said that all homosexuals are psychologically damaged abuse victims who will burn in hell if they don't get help and that gay marriage is impossible. In that regard, I imagine not. Card isn't particularly humanist. He's actually kind of theocratic.


There is, however, this piece, where he basically states that Star Trek is total crap. He isn't particularly fond of Star Wars either.



I noticed that Brin seems to miss the point with Vader's redemption, that as compressed as it was it was, indeed, very humanistic. The idea being that anyone, no matter how heinous their acts, can be reformed and redeemed. It's a great argument against the death penalty, even though Vader's redemption did result in death.

Personally, I have this idea for a Highway to Heaven type series where Hitler's repentant ghost and a Jewish friend of his travel around the US in a muscle car helping people and preaching against racism.

If you read the Sprawl Books, remember to read Burning Chrome, which sets up a lot of the other books and is referred to.
I consider there to be Sprawl Quadrology, myself.

Have you tried the Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy by Richard Morgan [Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies] ??

I often feel uneasy with most "older" science fiction books.
Besides the fact that they're often not very well written or completely forget to deal with anything that isn't science fictional (such as the characters' psychology or relationships) they often have this notion of "superior race". Be it humans with special powers or the chosen human race that does (or should) rule the universe (or at least get free from these bad aliens) it always makes me think of Norman Spinrad's Iron Dream or more exactly Norman Sinrad's Adolf Hitler's Lord of the Swastika.

I hope they fight crime.

That's probably because before the internet, the intelligent, imaginative guys who would actually write sci fi were probably smarter than all their neighbors and felt their neighbors were so insular that it hurt.