#military sff

[silverspleen]

Re: Love Death + Robots longpost.

I’m super duper normal about military science fiction, yeah.

[literaryelise]

“He is Nizahl’s Commander. I should burn with hatred every second spent in his presence.”

The Jasad Heir, Sara Hashem

[lurking-latinist]

I think I might need the mathematical resources of category theory to express the blorbo thoughts I'm having right now

[chiropteracupola]

actually I have decided that I need to restore my Discussable Fantasy Enjoyer Qualifications so I am going on a quest for a copy of temeraire Right Now

[dzelonis]

M.R. Forbes - Forgotten Vengeance #1-3

[lightyearsandbeyond]

Daimonion and the human (part 6)

The heat of Crucio industrial district, largely owed to the three metalworks plants, was conspicuously absent. Smelters and forges that should’ve been working non-stop lay as the dead. Union workers now elsewhere in the city, worker-drones all in a dormant state, and city animals capitalizing on the down time to emerge from their hidey holes. Three white and orange cats chased a throng of…

[tridentsff]

Our rugged embedded small form factor (SFF) computer is designed for harsh environments of military, aerospace and heavy industries and addresses the challenging needs for many space constrained applications in avionics, aerospace and defense industries.

For more information, contact our expert : https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1W9hDEwQFPOZm7pFTAjzR27NsNuwczMrMt5tW5LkITVI/edit?pli=1

[booksandchainmail]

Hugo Best Novel Finalists 2024

I've read all 6, so here's my impressions and loose ranking. The numerical ranking is only approximate for now, I'm going to pin it down once we get closer to voting closing. I could see the top two books switching places, or any rotation within books three, four, and five.

The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera This was one of my top books of last year and one of my own nominations. It's a very strange book, twisty and creative, and left me with a lot of thoughts, particularly about how it handles government. I appreciated the mishmash of worldbuilding, all sorts of things that felt incongruous next to each other but somehow fit together. It also felt more literary than most sff novels? I am not normally deeply noticing of language, but I kept coming back to individual turns of phrase here. All books should have a 50-page chapter in the middle where the protagonist wanders through a neverending surrealist prison land.

Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh Another of my nominations, this is a more straightforward exploration of, essentially, the deradicalization of someone raised in an authoritarian military camp. I respect how this book lets Kyr be awful, be completely convinced she is correct, and be defensive and lash out when confronted with her home's issues. I think the ending stumbles a bit, but really I mostly wanted this book to be much, much longer and have Kyr's character arc spread out more. Also, the choice of title and epigraph is excellent.

Translation State, by Ann Leckie Not much to say here, it's a new book in the Imperial Radch universe, I read it when I came out so don't remember detail. I liked the different intersecting plotlines, and particularly the Presger merge-and-devour adolescent instinct

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty This one I hadn't read before but enjoyed. I don't know how deep I'd say it is, but it's fun, a good classic adventure story with a putting-the-crew-back-together plot common to heist narratives. It benefits a lot from its setting: my main takeaway was that the Indian Ocean in medieval times is a criminally underused setting for any kind of nautical/swashbuckling/adventure story.

Witch King, by Martha Wells I read this one when it came out, and remember liking it a lot. The two intertwined narratives, set centuries apart, worked well for me to let the backstory unfold to inform the main plot as it progressed. I think I preferred the backstory narrative? But that might be due to also having the present narrative, since my favorite part was seeing how the echoes of relationships are still going on centuries after we get to see them form

Starter Villain, by John Scalzi I did not like this. I had some criticism last year for Scalzi's Kaiju Preservation Society, on the grounds that it was fun but not substantive enough for an award. But at least with that one I enjoyed reading it! My main thought while reading Starter Villain was "Well, at least it's short." I think my main problem with this is tonal: it doesn't commit enough to the over-the-top goofiness of "guy inherits his uncle's supervillain empire" and keeps trying to ground it in what an actual secretive genius billionaire pulling strings behind the scenes for his own nefarious purposes might look like, but then any attempts to actually be serious with the grounded stakes and world established kept running into the fact that it also featured sentient cats and talking dolphins! Also, I couldn't stop noticing that the protagonist talks the same way as the major supporting characters, which is the same way the protagonist talked in KPS last year

[star-anise]

i see you have discovered history professor bret deveraux, my beloved. i highly recommend his battle of helm's deep and pelennor fields series if you want to learn about historical battlefield tactics (and operations and strategies) and his fremen mirage series if you want to learn about the facist view of history and why it's complete and utter bullshit. his series on sparta is also phenomenal

I'm having such a good time working through his back catalogue. AGreatDivorce on Youtube has recorded audio versions of many of his posts, which is a godsend for me.

The Fremen Mirage series was a balm to my soul after having to deal with SO many "military history buffs" and SFF reply guys who think that violence is the pinnacle of human achievement, and therefore acknowledging the personhood of anyone but the apex warriors is like, taking resources away from the war effort or something.

For the uninitiated, the "Fremen Mirage" is what Devereaux calls a "pop theory of history" that believes:

that a lack of wealth and sophistication leads to moral purity, which in turn leads to military prowess, which consequently produces a cycle of history wherein rich and decadent societies are forever being overthrown by poor, but hardy ‘Fremen’ who then become rich and decadent in their turn. Or, as the meme, originally coined by G. Michael Hopf puts it, “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.”

And then in his series he applies rigorous historical analysis to this idea, and takes it apart like Christmas wrapping. It's almost as fun as the Sparta series, where he demonstrates that Spartans would hate their modern fanboys, and also aren't actually as special or amazing as they're made out to be.

After a while, though, I got tired of the military side of things, and gone wandering. What I've found most refreshing this week were posts that take a step back from direct pop culture criticism and just simply lay out the material realities of life in the past. The really basic building blocks that help us get in tune with the daily life of the past. Stuff like the Lonely City series.

Or the clothing series! I said that I've been trying to figure out just how rare or common looms were, and while I've been looking at archeological evidence of loom types, he's just found the numbers that let me calculate it.

I'm using a base unit of 5 yards of cloth, which is, with a generous hand wiggle, enough to make one person's outfit, maybe two.

According to these estimates:

In the early middle ages, using a hand spindle and warp-weighted loom, that might take about 70 hours of weaving and, at a low estimate, 500 hours of spinning. If someone devoted eight hours a day to nothing but spinning yarn, it would take them over two months to have enough to weave with.

In the Late Middle Ages, with the invention of the spinning wheel and horizontal loom, that figure would go down to 180 hours of spinning and 30 hours of weaving. The change in technology reduces the time down to almost a third of what it was before!

This really settles for me the question I had about my early-medieval fantasy setting, which is that there would be a lot of looms, a loom in every household, and that it would not at all be out of place for even aristocratic women to spin and weave on a regular basis.

Which like, to be cranky about fantasy heroines who hate sewing: In that kind of world, embroidery is a luxury. Weavers and spinners have to bust their butts just to put clothes on everybody's backs. Spinning and weaving that much is gruelling work that I would absolutely understand hating. However, it is not stupid, silly, or useless. Being able to embroider—to do something primarily decorative and artistic, just because it looks good and feels nice—is likely to be more of an escape from drudgery than the drudgery itself.

It really can't be overstated, how much the Industrial Revolution was a textile revolution. Our relationship to cloth and clothing has transformed out of all recognition over the last 300 years. There are undeniable advantages to this, because it frees us to do so many other things with our time. But it also makes it tough to look back into the past clearly, because it's so easy to forget that the burdens we've shed still existed back then.

[nkjemisin]

Things in my Ask Box #3

Oh, I’m gonna lose track of the numbering on these things, I can just tell.

Anyway, a shorty this time:  “Have you heard about the Inheritance Trilogy? Not yours, the one by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. Do you hate that she stole your trilogy name?”

Oh, there’s another one? Cool! There’s also Christopher Paolini’s (now Inheritance Cycle, but for a while it was Trilogy), and before both of us there was a military SFF one by William Keith. Probably a few others I haven’t found.

So, no, I don’t hate the name. It’s a good name, which is why it keeps popping up. Sells lots of books! (And it’s entirely possible that Barnes didn’t suggest or name it herself; I didn’t, after all, with my trilogy. That was my publisher’s idea.) I wish the new Inheritance the best of luck -- until the next one comes along.

[silverspleen]

People are like “hm Love Death and Robots sure does have a lot of military scifi in it, why is that, I sure don’t like that” and I must inform you that *squints*  Someone on the production and/or writing team has got to be specifically a very narrow subset of military sf fan, because so far season 1 and season 3 have multiple stories directly from the military sf short story collection SNAFU. Someone on the development team is a SNAFU fan (it’s probably Tim Miller). SNAFU is an anthology of literally only military sf, with twelve (YEP. count ‘em. TWELVE.) anthologies around various flavors of military scifi. Entire series just of“guys with guns fight monsters/demons/werebeasts/radioactive monsters.”

The publishing house who releases these, Cohesion Press, is the one that collected all of the stories for the official LD+R anthology book release on Amazon (you can buy all of the stories from season 1, and season 2+3). The guy who owns Cohesion Press (Goeff Brown) has in his bio on the site that he works with Deadpool’s Tim Miller as a senior story consultant. Like Tim Miller who MADE Love Death + Robots in the first place. Was there an actual conversation between them about including stories from the anthology in the show? Yeah probably.

So yes, you are absolutely right there is a bunch of military sf in that anthology and that’s most likely why.

As for the others non-SNAFU military sf stories, it’s not unreasonable to think that whoever on the team that really likes SNAFU is probably also recommending other military sf. Like for Shapeshifters (which is not a SNAFU story but like.... a very clear-cut military story).

Plus military sf is just like... Pretty mainstream popular with the blood and guns and titties crowd of twentysomething young men, which is usually what people think of when they hear “adult animation.”

(Obviously they are wrong, but we’re talking like Average American Adult thinks adult animation means 1. South Park/Family Guy 2. porn or 3. something with gratuitous gun violence and porn, and something called ‘Love Death + Robots’ evokes that vibe.)

-

(For reference I own three of the SNAFU anthologies, the original one, the werebeast one, and the “monsters” one. I have not read them yet they are on my TBR. Why yes, I do own too many books.)

Anyway. I enjoy military sf, hope you enjoyed my infodump.

I am very excited for season 4.

LD+R SNAFU stories under the cut! As well as the article I referenced.

Not my information, sourced from this culturedvultures article

Season 1

The Secret War - SNAFU: Hunters

Suits - SNAFU: Future Warfare

Sucker of Souls - SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

Season 2

n/a

Season 3

Kill Team Kill - SNAFU: Unnatural Selection

In Vaulted Halls Entombed - SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

[sam-glade]

Writeblr Intro

Hi! My name is Sam (they/them), and I write SFF.

About me:

I'm queer, in my late 20s, and I live in Europe.

Pets? Two cats + 1 orange braincell

Favourite food? Please don't make me choose.

What I write? Hard fantasy with excessive worldbuilding

Favourite books? The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien. The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson. The Traitor by Seth Dickinson. Red Rising by Pierce Brown. Uprooted by Naomi Novik.

Fiction I probably won't enjoy? Romance. Middle grade. Most High School YA. It's just not my cup of tea.

Outside of writing? I'm a mathematician-turned-programmer who wishes they've gone into a more creative career

Silmarillion blog: @ward-of-irmo

Personal blog: @careening-mind

Read all the snippets I've posted under this tag.

DMs/Asks/Tag games? Yes, please

This blog is a mix of things related to my writing, from snippets, through info dumps, to historical trivia and inspirations for the setting. Also, cats.

I'm happy to do beta swaps.

About my writing:

Expect themes of found family, battling inner demons, finding one's identity and strength. But also, superpowered sword fights and epic locations. Don't expect romance front and centre, and don't expect characters who are minors. Most of my characters are openly queer; I enjoy seeing people I can identify with partake in fantasy adventures, without their identities being a burden.

I write multi-POV stories, 3rd person only. I'm not that keen on seemingly unrelated POVs coming together, but I love seeing group interactions through the eyes of a different person each time.

I like turning 'what if' questions into stories - what if the Chosen One was chosen by the villain? What if a Bronze Age civilisation experienced a first contact with an alien race? What would crime-scene investigation look like in a setting where people turn to dust upon death? I also love learning, and I learn by researching random areas that are tangentially related to my writing projects.

Are my fantasy settings too realistic? Maybe. Am I having fun writing it? Definitely.

About my WIPS:

The Sunblessed Realm

Hard fantasy, queernorm setting inspired by Slavic folklore and the history of Central-Eastern Europe. The age of heroes has passed. The heroes remain alive.

A list of all stories and longer snippets in this setting that I've posted.

Days of Dusk trilogy [Tag]

Swords used to be the protectors of the world, channelling the power of the Elements to fight against the Primeval Darkness. Now that the threat is contained, they are perceived as a danger themselves. Their powers are feared, while any advantages they can give are made up for with developments in science.

Info dump posts: Map || Magic system || Fashion || Architecture || Cast || Rites of passage

⚔️Gifts of Fate ⚔️

Intro post || [Tag]

The Witcher x Fullmetal Alchemist

Genre: NA hard fantasy

Pitch: The hero was chosen by the villain to become might incarnate. With all due respect, he'd like to decline.

Expect gratuitous superpowered HEMA fight scenes mixed with fridge horror.

Progress: First Draft done at 107k, beta readers' feedback received

⚔️The Prince's Shadow⚔️

Intro post || [Tag]

NA military fantasy.

The hero of the first instalment was deemed to dangerous to live or be killed. The Army's spymaster and the Chief Strategist set him up to die a hero's death.

Note: This was the first story I've written in this setting, with the pitch being 'the hero has just saved the world and needs to figure out what to do with his life'. It has evolved a fair bit since then.

Progress: Needs rewriting, now that the prequel is written.

⚔️Prodigal Children⚔️

[Tag]

Political fantasy.

The last - the only - war fought by Swords took place two millennia ago, and the memory of its horrors kept the princes motivated to stop it from happening ever again. When an uprising in one of the princedoms spills over the borders, it again becomes a real threat.

Now with more intrigue and sapphic romance.

Progress: First Draft done at 128k

To do: I've got feedback to incorporate

The Truth Teller [Tag]

Intro post

Urban fantasy version of the Eastern Bloc.

Three thousand years later, the heroes of the previous stories have passed into legends. There are no more Swords to protect, Crystals to heal, or Elemental Dancers to mend and build. There are only Knacked, shunned by the society.

Progress: Outline done, writing started.

Other

The Fulcrum

First Contact Sci-Fi from the point of view of the alien species. While their civilisation is comparable to early Iron Age ones on Earth, don't worry, they have nukes.

Progress: First Draft - 24k/100k

To do: more research

[lilareviewsbooks]

Morally Grey Characters in SFF Books

Here are some book recommendations for speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror...) with morally grey or morally ambigious characters! This is definitely something I look for and I love having a twisted protagonist I can follow! Makes things a lot more interesting, I think.

The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang

This is definitely a must-read when looking for morally ambigious characters, and if you've been looking for that then you might've seen this series around. This fantasy trilogy follows Rin, an impoverished orphan living in the Nikara Empire, who aces the Keju, a test meant to select the nation's richest into military colleges. Selected into one of the most prestigious schools, Rin must now face issues of colorism, gender and class, while the possibility of war dangles over the college's head.

Don't be fooled by the synopsis, though. The Poppy War is not a magical-school type of story. This series revolves around Rin's corruption arc - which Ms. Kuang crafts incredibly. The character development and the attention to detail with the world-building in The Poppy War are both impressive, especially considering that the first book in the trilogy was Ms. Kuang's debut. Rin's decisions will leave you screaming, crying and (you guessed it) throwing up, as she gradually destroys everything around her.

She Who Became The Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan

Another debut, She Who Became The Sun is definitely reminiscant of The Poppy War in the sense that it not only features morally grey characters, but is also set in an Imperial China-inspired world. Here, we follow Monk Zhu, who assumes her brother's identity, sure that she is destined for greatness, and the people she meets in her quest to achieve this. Simultaneously, we read about Ouyang, an eunuch general who serves – and is lowkey in love with – Esen, the son of a province's Prince and the war they're involved in.

Ouyang and Zhu are prime morally grey material. Zhu is motivated by her desire to achieve greatness, which was profecized for her brother, and, as she assumed his identity, she believes is now her destiny. Ouyang, on the other hand, is a more spoiler-ly case - but trust me when I say his decisions are questionable at best. 

This is another case of masterful character development, beautifully crafted by Mx. Parker-Chan. Not to mention their writing is absolutely incredible here, flowerly without being too much, and their inclusion of the themes of gender is so well done. 

Oh, yeah, did I mention this is queer as all hell?

The Traitor Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson

Since we're talking about books that are queer as hell, I give you: The Traitor Baru Cormorant! I finished this one the other day, actually, but this trilogy, soon to be a quartet, is definitely a must-read if you're into morally grey protagonists. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is about (say it with me) Baru Cormorant, a native of Tananoke, a small island nation that is conquered by the Empire of the Masks. The Masquerade's  homophobic and sexist policies affect Baru's family as one of her fathers is killed for being queer. Baru swears revenge, and she knows exactly how she'll exact it: from the inside. 

The Traitor Baru Cormorant follows her path of revenge as she inflitrates the bureaucracy of this Empire. So, as you can probably guess, it's a very politically-driven book, and it's for sure very dense. I would definitely recommend it, though, if you're up for it -- The Traitor Baru Cormorant has probably the best representations of moral greyness I've ever read. Baru's character is so layered and complex. Her every move is questionable, though you know her motives are good, all focused on the liberation of her home, Taranoke, from imperial rule. 

A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin

Another dense, political one, but this definitely needs to be on the list. Mr. Martin is a master at creating dense plots with the most complex characters you've ever read - and none of them are good. Every single character (except for maybe Ned Stark??) in this series makes questionable decisions, and as the plot progresses they only get more fucked up. The A Song of Ice and Fire series, also known as Game of Thrones, the title of its first book, follows the political situation of Westeros and its surronding countries, as its noble families fight for power in the aftermath of a rebellion.

Although this is definitely a must if you're into grey morality, Mr. Martin's masterpiece comes as a big commitment. The series currently spans approximately 5,000 pages across five books, and it has been more than a decade in the making. Fans (me included) have been waiting for the mythical Winds of Winter for years, and after that is published, there's still A Dream of Spring, which hasn't even begun to be written. It's important to keep that in mind before diving into this one, but let me be the first one to tell you, it's definitely worth it.

I have a couple of more of these, so if you ever need a book full of morally grey characters, just drop me an ask and I'll get back to you with a couple more :)

[clonerightsagenda]

While talking with people about the ways FMA approaches the topic of Ishval, I've realized it falls into a SFF trend I jokingly call "are we the baddies?" stories. These are stories that focus on characters from a colonialist and/or imperialist society who are active parts of the imperial project, and they often spend most of their time investigating harms coming to people within the empire. Examples include Imperial Radch and the Locked Tomb. (Nona has started to move beyond that, although the core characters in Nona remain former high status imperial citizens.)

What I've noticed is that these stories are often written by comparatively privileged residents of imperial/settler colonialist nations (America, Aotearoa, Japan, specifically Hokkaido). Something that has also interested me is that there's often a level of distancing imposed through the characters' races. Many of the 'are we the baddies' stories by white authors that I've read have mostly brown characters (whether this is because ambiguously brown spacefutures are trendy, it's a quick way to check the diversity box without having to research culture, or they don't want to ask us to sympathize with white imperial villains, idk) whereas FMA makes its fascist military state European and Germanic-influenced, gesturing toward Japan's imperial history via a former ally without confronting it directly.

I've seen enough of these that I wonder if it's people trying to grapple with what it means when instead of being one of the scrappy rebels fighting the faceless evil empire, you are a citizen of the evil empire. What does it mean to be part of that system when you consider yourself, your family, your friends to be good people? How do you become more and more complicit? What can you do about it?

That's a storyline that will probably hit people differently depending on whether it's a question they're wrestling with or if they've been victimized by these systems and never had to stop to go "huh are those the baddies"? And there's certainly room to criticize stories like these for glossing over the damage done to external victims of empire, but I think they're deliberately focusing on people within the system for a reason.

[dzelonis]

Steve Perry - Cutter’s Wars #1-3