For some reason, skimmed through David Weber's Out of the Dark. Skimmed, because the book does not permit close reading, it's too painful. The writing is nearly as bad as Harry Turtledove. In addition to every character type thinking the same thing (I believe these authors macro the ideas so they don't have to retype the whole thing when they change scenes!
) and in addition to everyone having the same sense of humor, there are the requisite substitutions of weapon specs and synonyms for "blowed up" for actual descriptions. Plainly military SF is not my thing. Actually, its popularity strikes me as a sign of terminal artistic decay.
At any event, this particular specimen is yet another example in my opinion of the malignant influence of steampunk. It is a disguised version, where something from the past is artlessly projected into the future. As is also usual, the supernatural is artlessly incorporated. In this case, Dracula is dragged from Bram Stoker (minus any inconvences from Jonathan Harker et al.!)
There, I've spoiled the whole damn book. Hope no one buys this ignorant sucker now.
) and in addition to everyone having the same sense of humor, there are the requisite substitutions of weapon specs and synonyms for "blowed up" for actual descriptions. Plainly military SF is not my thing. Actually, its popularity strikes me as a sign of terminal artistic decay. At any event, this particular specimen is yet another example in my opinion of the malignant influence of steampunk. It is a disguised version, where something from the past is artlessly projected into the future. As is also usual, the supernatural is artlessly incorporated. In this case, Dracula is dragged from Bram Stoker (minus any inconvences from Jonathan Harker et al.!)
There, I've spoiled the whole damn book. Hope no one buys this ignorant sucker now.
O I have most of May's books the first series then leading into the jack the bodyless stuff ., intense psi-fi works... :
