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- Penn
Yeah, Honor prefers to commit her war atrocities against Havenite military personnel.
Let's Read: David Weber's Honor Harrington
- Thread starter The Victorian
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- Books
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- Mid-Atlantic
Also under pretty freakin' extreme circumstances.
Hmmm. The only ethnic group on Bellevue that's close enough to any Earthly culture to be clearly recognizable is the Colonists. When you talked about slurs, were you talking about slurs used by Civil Government troops against the Colonists?
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
I mean the Star faith is basically space parody Catholicism, with the minority Christians being treated much like Middle Ages Christians treated Jews (eg, not well)
that part was kinda funny for the irony -once.
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- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
Yes. Pretty sure the w-word gets dropped at least once in every chapter the Colonists appear.
Not to mention the certain negative stereotypes.
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- Mid-Atlantic
Yes, but the specific thing being discussed was the use of real world racial slurs by the Civil Government faction protagonists. I'm pretty sure that the Christian minority isn't being targeted with such slurs regularly, if only because they're not all that visible in most of the novels, and because English doesn't contain many slurs designed to be thrown at Christians without the implication that they're heretical Christians, making them slurs that can only be spoken as slurs by other Christians.
By contrast, the "Colonists" (that is, the first group of humans to arrive on Bellevue) are very recognizably Middle Eastern Muslims, and serve the same strategic role that Persia did in Justinian's time. Since the other nationalities on Bellevue are so different from any Earthly source group that slurs against them would be effectively made up out of whole cloth, I figured it was Islamophobic slurs showing up in the writing.
...
Notably, Drake uses "wog" all over the damn place in his RCN Series novels, but it's directed by natives of the planet Cinnabar against, well... pretty much everyone who isn't a native of the planet Cinnabar, so I'm not sure what to make of that. Earthly racial and ethnic groupings don't really exist in recognizable form in the RCN Series, as far as I can tell, presumably due to a lot of blurring and intermingling in space, with Earth itself being uninhabitable.
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- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
My issue is how many of the books I am allowed to post, and what I cannot post.
Exactly what I meant. I blame Stirling.
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- Mid-Atlantic
Not... entirely sure of that. Drake uses the derogatory acronym...
"wog"
...in his fiction (the RCN Series).
On the other hand, it's used by natives of the planet Cinnabar to refer to... pretty much everyone who isn't a native of the planet Cinnabar. The RCN setting is basically post-racial in terms of the races recognizable on Earth; intermingling in space seems to have pretty well leveled it out and planetary nationalism is pretty much the only kind of prejudice we see from the viewpoint characters.
I suspect Drake uses the word as a translation convention, because he's got a preface section in every book of that series containing remarks like "yes, I know people thousands of years in the future won't be using feet and inches, but they probably also won't be speaking the English language either."
But Stirling's the more Islamophobic of the two by a sizeable margin, so I'd expect it from him.
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- Location
- Finland
It is also to be noted that the narrative in RCN seems quite self aware of just how bigoted its characters are.
Daniel Leary is nationalist bigot who is fully onboard with Cinnabar imperialism.
Adele Mundy is borderline sociopath who tries to be decent person, but is very much on the "us vs them" train when it comes to those who she cares for, but among whose virtues is awareness of how terrible she is.
Daniel Leary is nationalist bigot who is fully onboard with Cinnabar imperialism.
Adele Mundy is borderline sociopath who tries to be decent person, but is very much on the "us vs them" train when it comes to those who she cares for, but among whose virtues is awareness of how terrible she is.
- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
I mean, in the case of Bellevue, 'wog' is used against the actual MENA Muslims, who often display rather stereotypical and racist traits as well.
EDIT: And considering the portrayal of the Errifans in The Chosen, also very recognizably North African Muslims and Expy of Moroccans under the Spanish colonial empire, yeah, I am going to blame Stirling.
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Just for clarification, as far as I can determine his bigotry is solely focused on his nationalism. I mention this mainly because it makes him weird by modern Earth standards; most people that nationalistic in real life would react with more than a neutral shrug at the female petty officer who's brought her "girl in this particular port" aboard during a shore leave period.*
But with that caveat, the description "nationalist bigot fully on board with Cinnabar imperialism" fits well enough, yes.
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I noticed that throwaway sentence only on my third read of the novel, rather recently. For a book published in 1998 by an author who relies heavily on sales to military history buffs and the Baen crowd, it surprised me.
Now, I did want to dissent from the characterization of Adele Mundy, but then I really thought about it and decided, eh, the shoe arguably fits.
"Borderline sociopath" I wanted to rebel against, but honestly that's may very well be because we draw the borders of sociopathy in different positions. Adele Mundy underwent enough in her childhood to leave nearly anyone dissociated, cold, and disengaged from human society. And while she surely has nightmares about all the people she's shot while in RCN service, along with the few she shot before entering RCN service... She doesn't choose to retire to a job that doesn't involve shooting people.
Hm. I can't comment, having never read that particular novel.
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- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
They are basically the not-Morrocan colonial troopers under the not-Nationalists (led by some general called Libert - get it?) in the not-Spanish (because they speak French) Civil War, explicitly wear striped kaftans and curved knife, and described as:
Notably, the post-Stirling books tend to have cultures that are much less connected to the RL cultures, except for their roles in the story.
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1998 was before the 9/11 attacks, which is when that subculture really started going around the bend. Baen's Bar back then was a sci-fi nerd hangout that talked about typically sci fi nerd stuff, not what it eventually turned into.
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- Finland
Daniel is also very much an aristocrat, and while he is largely a nice aristocrat, he is still an aristocrat with lot of learnt attitudes that come with it.
Adele would not be diagnosed as sociopath. But, for all the things you mentioned, she kinda starts to resemble one at times, even when standing next to her servant who is a sociopath.
Adele has nightmares of all the people she has killed, and worries of someday no longer having them, and those two things help keep her grounded and sympathetic as a character.
I don't blame you. The books had some really good parts, but there were definitely some...less than moral moments. I still have mine, but i don't recommend them to others. And the books after the first five are...varying degrees of quality.
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- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
Honestly, I like the last two books because it's less of a sci-fi rehash of historical events compared to the others. Not to mention that they have some pretty interesting ideas.
Agreed on the quality of books after the Bellevue series, though. Book 7 and 8 were bad.
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Number 6 (The Chosen) was good. And at least the rape and torture was all performed by clearly identified bad guys.
7 & 8 (the pseudo-Roman ones) were crap. Felt like a longer series crammed into two books.
There's another series of two, on another planet, but I read the first one, and it was terrible, so I assume the next one was too.
You want Byzantine history sci-fi, read the Belisarius books.
7 & 8 (the pseudo-Roman ones) were crap. Felt like a longer series crammed into two books.
There's another series of two, on another planet, but I read the first one, and it was terrible, so I assume the next one was too.
You want Byzantine history sci-fi, read the Belisarius books.
Odd as it is to defend Stirling, I will say that everyone in the General universe is fairly awful. The Muslim nation is portrayed as a brutal, hierarchical, decadent nation which practices slavery, murders nonbelievers, and seeks to conquer its neighbors. The Civil Government is portrayed...in the same way. The lack of good guys was one of the things that made the series hard to read for me, though YMMV.
The Chosen will never be mistaken for a work of great literature, but I liked it. The villains were weirdly self-aware about what a dumpster fire their "grand plan" was, but they still bought in to the underlying mindset. It was an interesting portrayal of why "conquer the world" is so supremely impractical; at some point, just garrisoning all the people you've conquered becomes almost unmanageable, and each "success" brings you more problems.
@Simon_Jester and I once argued over the Belisarius books, but he won, so I'll back your recommendation. They're nice and sweet and super optimistic, so it's basically the polar opposite of the General series. Though I guess the General series is long term optimistic; it's just hard to keep that in mind when Dear God These People Are Awful.
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- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
Eh, I liked them.
It's basically Drake's take on Stirling's Draka and why they won't work without massive plot armor.
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Yeah, but on the other hand it was the '90s, so authors casually throwing even tiny sprinkles of LGB representation into their work is still doing less badly than I would a priori have predicted, especially from that slice of the subculture.
Hot Take:
The Belisarius series is basically a result of David Drake facepalming at how disappointingly the General series turned out, and going "you know what, I need a better caliber of writer-peon to implement my outlines properly" and then finding one in the name of "and this time, do it right!"
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- Mid-Atlantic
That's totally fair.
What I think it comes down to is that Stirling is fairly realistically portraying the kind of army and nation-state that can exist at a roughly 18th/19th century level of development. Yes all sides are racist towards each other, all sides have anti-democratic governments, all sides range from bigoted to eliminationist towards ethnic groups that give them problems, and all sides will likely seek to conquer their neighbors. That's... to a large extent how Early Modern and Industrial Age nation-states tended to behave; insofar as peace existed within delineated spheres, it was usually because all the states in question were busy ganging up on the poor fuckers on the next continent over.
By contrast, the Belisarius series is so much more optimistic and shiny precisely because the main viewpoint characters wouldn't seem nearly so out of place as horrific war criminals in modern society. They're relatively egalitarian,* relatively non-sexist when confronted with Female Characters Getting Shit Done, they're relatively sensitive to the suffering armies and bureaucracies inflict on their populations, and none of them do anything bad enough to their own nations and peoples (or conquered nations and peoples) that you even begin to wonder "so... why are we rooting for these fuckers anyway?"
But the flip side of that is that if you really think about the books, you realize that yeah, the characters are kind of anachronistic.
...
This is something I've pointed out before: that if your standard for what constitutes an acceptably decent person in historical or quasi-historical fiction are high enough, then you get into a trap:
"Reasonable historical accuracy. Morally acceptable protagonists. Reasonably broad range of possible storylines that can be told. Pick any two."
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*(Even if they don't believe in democracy this is to a large extent because they have no direct experience of it working on anything above the city-state scale and often not even then).
Belisarius got pithy one-liners and good byplay with Aide, which was nice; the relationship between them was far more human and two-sided than the relationship between Raj Whitehall and Central.
But that's more to do with Aide getting better characterization than Central, and less to do with Belisarius versus Whitehall.
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Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
I felt like General was a bit stronger as a narrative, but Belasarious was just a lot more fun and therefore the more enjoyable read by far.
but then I have enjoyed works that are more skeevy than the General, despite thinking that they are pretty skeevy.
but then I have enjoyed works that are more skeevy than the General, despite thinking that they are pretty skeevy.
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- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
The General also has a casual bi-homo-hetero polygamous relationship, with Gerrin Staenbridge, Barton Foley, and Fatima.
In a sense that Aide does have an actual personality and a plot arc of its own, while Center is mostly an impersonal exposition - plot device.
Not to say that Aide has a bad characterization, but anything is better compared to near-zero characterization.
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- Mid-Atlantic
True. Between that and Isle in the Sea of Time, you won't find me arguing that Stirling has problems with the ideas of writing, well, LGB characters into his books- I don't feel I can comment on T.