(1) Some of these antics would be perfectly at home in the U.S.
While China’s vice president is meeting with the respectable author of Three-Body Problem, other officials are occupied cracking down on fake aliens and zombies says the New York Times.
Science fiction and fantasy tales have been growing in popularity in China, where some creative efforts have earned official endorsement. Vice President Li Yuanchao met this week with authors — including Liu Cixin, who wrote the Hugo Award-winning novel “The Three-Body Problem” — and called on them to inspire young people’s interest in science and encourage “faith in realizing the Chinese Dream,” the state news agency Xinhua reported.
But even as the Chinese leadership offered praise for the writers, the police have been less tolerant of social media users’ flexing their creativity. Several people have been punished in the past few years for relaying tales of the walking undead and extraterrestrial invaders for fear of touching off public panic….
This is the "alien" found in China that had Weibo on fire over last few days. Farmer who made it is now in jail pic.twitter.com/p5r7CHek2I
— Deirdre Bosa (@dee_bosa) June 12, 2013
In 2013, a farmer in Shandong Province claimed to have encountered five extraterrestrial creatures, one of whom was killed by an electric fence. The farmer’s story, and photos of the purported alien corpse he kept in a freezer, drew widespread attention online. The local authorities investigated and held a news conference to announce that the dead alien was actually made of rubber, Southern Metropolis Daily reported. The farmer was sentenced to five days of detention for disturbing public order, Xinhua reported.
I guess if Orson Welles had pulled his “War of the Worlds” stunt in China, they’d have made him the star of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing instead of Citizen Kane….
(2) Your 2015 Ig Nobel Prize winners include these scientific advancements —
PHYSICS PRIZE — Patricia Yang [USA and TAIWAN], David Hu [USA and TAIWAN], and Jonathan Pham, Jerome Choo [USA], for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds).
REFERENCE: “Duration of Urination Does Not Change With Body Size,” Patricia J. Yang, Jonathan Pham, Jerome Choo, and David L. Hu, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014: 201402289.
LITERATURE PRIZE — Mark Dingemanse [THE NETHERLANDS, USA], Francisco Torreira [THE NETHERLANDS, BELGIUM, USA], and Nick J. Enfield [AUSTRALIA, THE NETHERLANDS], for discovering that the word “huh?” (or its equivalent) seems to exist in every human language — and for not being quite sure why.
REFERENCE: “Is ‘Huh?’ a universal word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items,” Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira, and Nick J. Enfield, PLOS ONE, 2013.
(3) “How did George R.R. Martin end up at Janis Ian’s wedding in Toronto?” asks CBC Radio in its post “Janis Ian’s Toronto wedding, where Game of Thrones’ creator was a best man”.
That’s a question we had after reading this Sunday’s New York Times. The newspaper featured a story on the well-known musician’s relationship with Patricia Snyder. It turns out they were the first same-sex couple to be featured in the newspaper’s ‘Vows’ section. You can read more here.
But, it was a photograph published farther down the article that also caught our attention. A short caption reads as follows:
“In 2003, before same-sex marriage was legal in the United States, the couple wed at Toronto’s City Hall. Author of the ‘Game of Thrones’ series George R.R. Martin was best man.”
Seated: David Axler, Mike Resnick, Parris McBride, George R.R. Martin. The couple: Janis Ian and Patricia Snyder. The minister is Malcolm St. Clair. Photo by Steve Payne.
This turned out to be a simple why-was-this-celebrity-at-another-celebrity’s-wedding post, not a sly juxtaposition of real life Martin attending a wedding with a reference to the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones. That is left as an exercise for cheesy fan bloggers. Oops.
To make up for it, this fan blogger can name all the people in the photo, which the CBC incompletely captions, “In 2003, before same-sex marriage was legal in the United States, the couple wed at Toronto’s City Hall. Author of the ‘Game of Thrones’ series George R. R. Martin, fourth from the left, was a best man. (Steve Payne)”
They are, in order, David Axler, Mike Resnick, Parris McBride, George R.R. Martin. The minister is Malcolm St. Clair.
(4) Lunar rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts have a tendency to change characteristics once scientists start handling them notes a Space.com article “Some Apollo Moon Samples ‘Crumbling to Dust’”
Between 1969 and 1972, Apollo astronauts brought 842 lbs. (382 kilograms) of lunar rocks and dirt back to Earth. Eighty-three percent of that material remains unexamined in nitrogen storage at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Cooper told Space.com via email. The other 17 percent has been allocated to researchers for study in a number of different laboratories….
The most likely explanation for the degradation is damage caused by water vapor, the scientists say.
“Leaching by water vapor causes the specific surface area of a lunar soil sample to multiply, and a system of pores develops,” they wrote in the study, which was published online last week in the journal Nature Geoscience. “These structural changes may be attributed to the opening of existing, but previously unavailable, pore structure or the creation of new surfaces through fracturing of cement or dissolution of amorphous particles.”
The new results suggest that the Apollo soil samples being studied by scientists are not pristine, Cooper said.
“People should not assume that the Apollo lunar soil samples remain representative of soils found in the natural environment of the moon, especially if they have been exposed to air,” she told Space.com via email. “In addition to particle size distribution, other geotechnical properties (such as strength and cohesion) must also have changed. Also, for example, water found in the sample might be taken to be lunar in origin when in fact it is the result of contamination.”
(5) Yesterday I linked to Kameron Hurley’s commentary, from the viewpoint of someone with ascending sales. Today at Mad Genius Club, Pam Uphoff, who hasn’t had the success yet (“my sales had flat-lined”), talks about the jump start she got from the site’s Labor Day Sale.
Umm, how about the book that had just crept past 200 sales in almost three years selling over a hundred in a week? Call me gob smacked. It briefly broke into the top fifty in its sub category. Call me impressed. And that was before the KU pages counts skyrocketed.
(6) Here are more positive numbers about another market segment — “Nielsen Summit Shows the Data Behind the Children’s Book Boom” – from Publisher Weekly.
The book team at Nielsen held its second-annual Children’s Book Summit at Convene in downtown NYC on September 15, to discuss trends found in their data for publishers to make use of, in an effort to better reach consumers. The days’ panels touched on many aspects of the industry, including adult readers of YA, suburban teens, and multicultural consumers.
Jonathan Nowell, president of Nielsen Book, began the day with plenty of figures: for the time period between January 2014 to September 2015, children’s book sales are up 12.6% in the U.S., 28% in Brazil, and 10% in China, with 11 of the 20 bestselling books in the U.S. being children’s titles. The proliferation of tablets has brought the age kids start reading e-books down from seven to five. And board books have seen 20% compound growth over the last three years.
(7) Naturally, the Neil Gaiman Humble Bundle is selling great guns. It went live on September 9 and was raising huge amounts in no time at all.
It’s broken all the previous Humble Bundle records for Books. As I type this, about 7000 people have already bought the Bundle. It’s raised $133,000.
The bundle is on sale for four more days.
Gaiman isn’t the only author in it, and the others aren’t necessarily donating their proceeds to charity like he is –
I’m giving my entire portion of Humble Bundle creator-money directly back to the Gaiman Foundation. (My agent Merrilee has donated her fee, too, so 100% of what comes in to me goes to the Foundation.) There are, obviously, other authors and artists and publishers involved. Some have asked for their money to go to charities, and some are, perfectly sensibly, paying the rent and buying food with it.
But no doubt the Gaiman rarities in the bundle are driving sales.
Books that were long out of print, stories and such that collectors would pay hundreds of dollars for, obscure and uncollected comics and pamphlets and magazine articles. Even the things I am still vaguely embarrassed by (like the Duran Duran biography, a hardcover copy of which, as I said, can set you back thousands of dollars these days, if you can find one).
Books which have been out of print for 30 years, like GHASTLY BEYOND BELIEF, a collection of quotations from the strangest SF and Fantasy books and movies that Kim Newman and I made when we were 23 and 24 respectively. Things that were absolutely private and never before sold, like LOVE FISHIE, a book of poems and letters from my daughter Maddy (aged 8) to me, and from me back to Maddy, that was made into a book (with help from my assistant the Fabulous Lorraine) as a gift for my 42nd birthday.
Two long out-of-print books from Knockabout Comics: OUTRAGEOUS TALES FROM THE OLD TESTAMENT and SEVEN DEADLY SINS, with stories written and or drawn by me, Alan Moore, Hunt Emerson, Dave Gibbons, Dave McKean and a host of others.
Rare out-of-print comics stories by me and Bryan Talbot, by me and Mark Buckingham, even by me and Bryan Talbot and Mark Buckingham.
There would be small-press short story & suchlike collections like ANGELS AND VISITATIONS and the LITTLE GOLD BOOK OF GHASTLY STUFF containing stories that went on to win awards and be collected in the more big, official collections (Smoke and Mirrors, etc), and stories no-one has seen since, not to mention non-fiction articles, like the one about the effects of alcohol on a writer, or the one where I stayed out for 24 hours on the streets of Soho, that are now only whispered in rumours.
There would even be a short story of mine, “Manuscript Found in a Milk Bottle”, published in 1985, that is so bad I’ve never let it be reprinted. Not even to give young writers hope that if I was that awful once, there is hope for all of them.
(8) I need hardly tell you what the Han Solo mini-fridge is a reference to, although this post on Yahoo! Games drops a heavy hint —
The refrigerator’s design references, of course, the state that the hero is left in at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Wal-Mart notes that your hibernating Solo fridge is an “official” Star Wars product, and can hold up to six cans of soda.
That silly thing could wind up on my Christmas list….
(9) Rocket Stack Rank (RSR) aims to help casual SF fans efficiently identify, obtain, and discuss great original short fiction to nominate for the annual Hugo Awards.
“My husband and I have created a new website to make it easy for people to find good SF short stories and figure out how to read them online,” explains Gregory Hullender. “Lots of people are setting up sites to recommend stories, but I think we’re the only ones to put a lot of work into helping people find online copies once they’ve decided they wanted to read a particular story.”
Here’s what they’re planning to do.
After witnessing the problems with this year’s Hugo Awards, we decided to create a website to encourage readers of science fiction and fantasy to read and nominate more short fiction. Lots of other people are doing this too, but we specifically wanted to tackle the problem of helping people get copies of short stories, novelettes, and novellas once they decided they wanted to read them.
The three big professional magazines, Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF are all available online by subscription, but they don’t make it easy to get back-issues online. Our 2015 Magazines page covers just about every possible way to do this, and there are good strategies for people with tablets and smartphones, people with eReaders like Kindles and Kobos, people who want to read everything on their desktop or laptop, and even people who want to stick with print.
Our rating system, on a scale from one to five stars, aims to produce a small “bucket” of five-star stories by the end of the year. These are the stories we think are award-worthy, and there should be few enough of them that a person with limited time could read just that subset and find things worth nominating. Since we’re trying to apply fixed standards rather than hit a particular target, we’re not sure how many there will be in each category, but it won’t be more than a dozen or so.
(10) You can tell Fred Kiesche is Paul Weimer’s friend.
https://twitter.com/FredKiesche/status/644968628295741441
(11) This Screaming Marmot loop needs an caption from File 770 readers. (Via Boing Boing.)
[Thanks to Daniel Monson, Will R., Susan de Guardiola, Gary Farber, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Shambles.]
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First! Does first get to grant knighthoods?
Like “the Order to Take A Bath”?
Third. Ummm…. maybe you can grant dayhoods?
Fifth!
(Yes, I know it looks like fourth, but that’s just rhetoric.)
Actually, Janis Ian is something of a fan herself, and has been at a con or two. There’s a collection of SF stories loosely inspired by her songs (Stars) which contains some good ones; Martin didn’t contribute anything to it but Ian herself did.
I met Janis Ian at a party at her first Worldcon. She had met a few fans (probably including Axler) the previous weekend, during the Philadelphia Folk Festival, when she overheard their hotel-breakfast conversation, and noticed words such as “Hugo”. This was probably in 2001, at Millenium Philcon. She amused my then-1-year-old son by shining a laser pointer at the carpet for him to chase. I think this was around the time Mike Resnick was editing an anthology of sf stories based on Ian’s song lyrics.
So none of the guests at that wedding are any surprise to me.
Cassy B: shouldn’t that be “kdayhoods”?
You can pick the order, I just want to give Kyra a knighthood because of the brackets. Dame Kyra of Bracket.
An addition to #8:
Han Solo in PopTarts.
(They’re plastic, and not edible.)
And speaking of all those Hugo suggestion lists, I’ve been trying to make the Wikia more useful by adding links to online reviews and discussions, but not having much luck because it is buggy, especially the captcha. That site was a good idea but i’m not too happy with the results so far, from the sketchiness and anonymity of the suggestions, to the inconsistent formatting; and the bugs are fit to make me give up on it.
@Vasha it’s a hard problem. That’s why we decided to just focus on the top six magazines for Rocket Stack Rank. That eliminated the problem of deciding who could nominate, verifying that the nominations were real, eliminating duplicates, spam, etc. It’s still a huge number of stories. We estimate it’ll be about 320 by the end of the year.
Are we quite sure RSR won’t be tantamount to an ESS ELL AY TEE EEEEEEEE?
It just ate my post! My lovingly created in depth expose of the time travellers who are researching the indisputably premier hive of scum and villainy, otherwise known as us, has been despatched into the Cybervoid, from which no traveller returns!
Things are even worse than I supposed, since clearly there are Unenlightened individuals, or possibly gestalt minds, trying to put a spanner in the works, but I shall fight on, secure in the knowledge that the camaraderie and esprits de corp, forged in the hell that was the Hugo packet this year, as we grimly read the whole damn thing so we could vote on merit, will not fail just because people are bending time and space in the hope of quenching our passion.
It’s just as well that Mike has Plan A, that, the code writers and cryptographers, and the pre-planned disability friendly routes, will ensure we get to our destinations, whenever they may be, with ample scope to ensure we get our nominations in time. The supply of works may be a tad trickier, but we shall overcome!
Have I mentioned before that Greek monasteries are inordinately keen on cats? I think I see a possible supply route in that fact…
Jim Henley: Well, as long as the list contains at least a dozen or so stories, all with five stars and not otherwise sorted except maybe alphabetically . . . I’d be happier if I knew how the ranking was counted, and even happier of the aim was more clearly to have lots and lots of stories in each category (seems to me that even 20 or 30 five-star rankings out of over 300 stories isn’t all that many), but still.
Finding stories available on line can be difficult, and a site pointing people to where those stories exist and can be read is a service, I think.
Vasha: Janis Ian is something of a fan herself, and has been at a con or two. There’s a collection of SF stories loosely inspired by her songs (Stars) which contains some good ones; Martin didn’t contribute anything to it but Ian herself did.
Actually, Janis Ian’s involvement in SFF is far more that that. She’s gone to many Worldcons and other cons. She’s had a number of SFF fiction stories published, along with some non-fiction fan writing — and she wrote and performed “Welcome Home (The Nebulas Song)” (a filk of her hit song “At Seventeen”) for the Nebula Awards ceremony in 2009. The lyrics were subsequently published in Asimov’s, won “Best Poem” in the 2011 Asimov’s Reader’s Poll, and came in second place in the Short Poem category in the 2011 Rhysling Awards (for SFF poetry).
Janis Ian doesn’t just have links to SFF fandom. She is part of SFF fandom. One of us!
@Mary Frances We’re trying to use fixed guidelines for the ratings, so it’s hard to predict how may 4 and 5-star items there will be. At the rate we’re going, there may only be one or two five-star novellas but there might be 10 or so short stories.
Did you look at the Q&A? It gives a description of the criteria we’re using to rate stories. Also, we’re indicating which stories were highly ranked by a few other reviewers. So there should be lots of stories for people to choose from.
Yay post title !! It was a play on Lin carters’ series called flashing blades.
ETA: clicky
Ha, yes, Fred Kiesche IS a good friend of mine.
Greg Hullender: Did you look at the Q&A?
Okay. I read it just now–and while I think the references to other review sites might be helpful, I find your criteria a bit disturbing. You seem to imply that most criteria for ranking within categories aren’t all that subjective; except maybe for “one star,” which I assume refers to very basic, almost grammar-level errors, I’d say all of your categories are extremely subjective, especially the “not rated” one. (That’s a pure judgement call right there, that a story “isn’t really science fiction.”)
I honestly don’t see how you can get any less subjective, to tell you the truth, but at least recognizing that you are ranking stories largely on taste might be helpful. On the other hand, I find myself wondering why you are bothering with such a multi-level ranking system at all, rather than just calling attention to stories (with blurbs, so people can decide whether or not they are interested) and their locations. It really is getting awfully close to trying to develop a slate, which I do not believe is your intention, fwiw. Hiding the “mini-reviews” does help–I can tell you right now that I probably would never read them–but so long as the rankings are that detailed, I think you have a potential problem.
@Paul Weimer:
Well I’ve met Jeff Patterson in real life.
Lois McMaster Bujold, Wen Spencer, Brendan DuBois talk about creativity and a reading of John Ringo’s Under the Graveyard Sky
Part 1, they start about 4 minutes in
http://www.baenebooks.com/podcast/mp3/Baen-Free-Radio-Hour-2015-09-11-Bujold-Spencer-DuBois-Graveyard-Part-14.mp3
Part 2
http://www.baenebooks.com/podcast/mp3/Baen-Free-Radio-Hour-2015-09-18-Bujold-Spencer-DuBois-Creativity-Graveyard-15.mp3
@Jim Due to Happenstance, I am about the only of the major SF Signal irregulars that Jeff hasn’t met yet.
I haven’t been to the Virginia area in a number of years. Need to correct that.
I don’t recall meeting *you* directly, yet, although we have a number of friends and acquaintances in common, besides Jeff (Ginger Stampley and Michael Croft, frex)
Lois McMaster Bujold talks about technology and real world culture in science fiction.
http://youtu.be/mBBWm7fDEz4
My reading note for today, with a recommendation: Supernatural Tales 30, containing the fine short story “An Element of Blank” by Lynda E. Rucker. Mary Frances, since you would rather I didn’t say why I’m recommending it, I’m putting that in a separate paragraph!
“An Element of Blank” focuses on three women who, back when they were thirteen, encountered something bad in an old house; you might wonder why the story spends a lot of time talking about their friendship and the vagaries of memory rather than that encounter itself, but in fact nothing in the story is superfluous, and it all adds up to a delicate reflection on the value and fragility of life, with what seemed to me rather original ideas.
The rest of the issue contains some good stories too (some better than others); what struck me was that there was a certain thematic continuity throughout the issue. The tension between erasure and survival of memory inherent in death and loss came up several times in different forms. One of the stories wasn’t even fantastical and yet it fit in because of style and theme. I admire an editor brave enough to bend the boundaries of what to include in a collection like this, and wise enough to assemble a good assortment. In fact, the magazine was nicely done in general, formatting, editing, proofreading, etc. On the strength of this and the also-good issue 29, I’m going to nominate the editor, David Longhorn, for BE(SF).
I saw the anonymity as a feature, not a bug. I’m sure some things are being submitted in poor faith, but from what I can see, they’re being (generally) drowned out by the genuine recs. I really like the fact that I (unless specified) can’t tell who submitted what; it helps keep the focus on the work, not the online credentials of the person submitting it.
This might seem like a stupid question, but . . . is there some reason people can’t just post reviews in the comments below each entry? It doesn’t look like people have been doing that—the comments I’ve seen are mostly eligibility-related. Links to reviews and discussion are good, but . . . will the comment section of the wiki just not support anything substantial in that area? (Rot-13 would take care of spoilers.) Cause it just seems like an obvious way to centralize things.
Thank you, Vasha. I appreciate it.
Just to clarify, I really do like the idea of a site that lists multitudes of stories with a brief blurb about them; in fact, if RSR put the rankings behind a cut with the mini-reviews, I personally wouldn’t even have a (potential) problem with the multi-level ratings! Being able to find authors, titles and brief descriptions that might or might not catch my interest would be extremely useful, I think. In any case, just locating and describing that many stories is a tremendous amount of work, and I commend RSR for being willing to put in the effort.
@Paul Weimer: Indeed, our not having met yet is madness.
[ominous clicking sound]
Android Slate Simulator now has the combined 4 and 6 with EPH, as well as EPH with square root alternative.
A handy tool for seeing how the various counting methods work with the 1984 data and a simulated slate.
@Mary Frances. Thanks. We’ve only been working on it for three weeks (since we got back from Sasquan), so the structure is dictated by what was easiest to construct. The biggest value we hoped to provide to people was telling them how to get online copies of back issues of the three prozines.
The general idea was that people would
1) pick stories that interested them–either from our blurb, our rating, or from the ratings of any of the other folks we’ve listed. Or even because someone passed them a link to the review on our site.
2) use our guide to figure out how to get a copy to read.
3) read the story.
4) Come back to the site to see the mini-review, to follow the links to other people’s reviews, and to leave their own comments.
What would be ideal (from our perspective) would be if people used the site to actually have discussions about short fiction. If you disagree with our rating–great! Say why.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34281621 Soviet cosmonaut propaganda posters at an exhibition in London.
For anyone interested, a chapter-by-chapter discussion of God Stalk is kicking off HERE. If anyone interested has trouble getting a free login, you can email me at (rot13) [email protected] and I’ll do what I can to help…
Recommendations needed!
Somebody help me find more MilSF based on space navies Fighting Thr Good Fight. Swashbuckling is acceptable but not required.
I’ve read Weber’s Honor Harrington books, Drake’s Master and Commander in Spaaaaaace (actually the RCN series), the Risen Empire, Campbell’s Lost Fleet (I prefer less angst and fewer physics errors), the Lensman books (several times), Kloos’ books on fighting the Lankies, and even enjoyed the ‘turned out not to be MilSF scene with the Admiral Vanek in Singularity Sky. I’ve read some self-pub stuff lately, some was okay, I’m willing to try more.
Any thoughts one what I should look for next?
A couple of years ago, Janis Ian was playing in town over Labor Day weekend. I was really hoping that she would be at Dragon*Con. Alas, no such joy. 🙁
@Maximillian Elizabeth Moon’s Familias Regnant books. You can start with the Herris Serrano omnibus and work your way up to space navy or start with Once a Hero/The Serrano connection omnibus and jump right to it. She also co-authored two of the Planet Pirate books If Space marines are acceptable there’s the first to fight series starting with Starfist.
Sorry, I should note David Sherman wrote the first to fight series.
@Iphinome Thanks, read ’em.
I like Moon, but prefer the Paksenarrion books. Pretty sure I read at least a couple of the Starfist books years ago.
Is your name ‘iffi-gnome’ or ‘if-in-o-me’?
efff e gnome is how I pronounce it, I gathered the names of as many of the amazons from mythology as I could find and then picked one I didn’t think anyone else would use for a handle.
That didn’t work but at least I’ve only noticed three or four others and I’ve got the twitter handle 🙂
@Maximilian
Adam Christopher’s The Machine Awakes. I think he’s only got a couple of books out, and I’ve only read this one, but it’s a pretty good MilSF yarn (if not Hugo-quality).
[also ticky]
@Maximillian
Maybe Feintuch’s Midshipmans Hope ?
Cook’s Starfishers or the Dragon Never Sleeps or a Passage at Arms ?
Maximilian: Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep has some amazing space fleet action sequences, along with a lot of other stuff (including the extent to which a kind of archeology is necessary for programming in a billion-year-old multi-species society). The Blight is one of the great space opera villains, and as its power grows, the demands of opposing it rise, and things get pretty epic.
Much more problematic in some ways, Niven and Pournelle’s The Mote In God’s Eye has a great first-contact scenario and the space combat is quite cool, though there isn’t a lot of it.
Regarding the Marmot. I once filmed this weird screaming creature at a Zoo in Cambodia. When starting filming, it had already screamed at us for 10 minutes.
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@Shambles – loved the latter two, absolutely hated the Hope series. I will never again read anything by Feintuch.
Man, The Dragon Never Sleeps was excellent.
@Bruce Baugh – Yes, loved AFUtD. It might be time for a reread, I don’t remember any fleet battles.
Mote was of course amazing. Heinlein was right about removing the opening space battle, but I found it later as a short story.
I even enjoyed Footfall, even though it wasn’t as good as Mote.
@redheadedfemme – I’ve got a different one of his books on my phone, will give it a try. From the description, it seemed more like a SF horror, but my impression could certainly be wrong.
@maximillian: I’d suggest any of Ian Douglas’ books: the three linked trilogies that start with the Heritage series are worth a look, and his current Star Carrier series has just hit volume 6 and doesn’t seem like stopping yet.
Douglas writes MilSF set in a hostile universe, where humanity is very much the underdog, trying to understand where it fits in (often with a lot of archaeology). He’s also obviously a space geek, and has brought in a lot of modern exoplanet thinking. Star Carrier involves a human race that’s on the verge of a Vingean singularity and the alien confederacy that aims to stop it happening, even if it means dropping near relativistic rocks on Earth…
(Douglas is a pen name of William H Keith Jr, who wrote a lot of Battletech novels in the late 80s, and then his own Warstrider MilSF.)
@Simon I’ll take a look at Douglas. I think I’ve read some of his work as Keith, but didn’t realize they were the same person.
Speaking of humanity as an underdog, I have also read and enjoyed Ringo’s Through the Looking Glass and Space Thermopylae series. You just have to be able to fast forward through the ‘Oh John Ringo No’ parts.
10fifth
@maximillian Ringo’s Citadel series is of course the back story to Howard Tayler’s Schlock Mercenary…