#s.m. stirling

[captainsvscaptains]

Round 1 Part 7 Poll 5

Propaganda

James Flint's gay. He waged war on all of civilization in the name of his gay lover and expanded to racial equality and he almost fucking won. They (civilization) took everything from him. And then they call HIM the MONSTER? The moment he signs that pardon, the moment he ASKS for one, he proclaims to the world they were right. This ends when he grants them HIS forgiveness, not the other way around.

Marian's the black lesbian captain of the USCGC Eagle, we don't get much of her backstory other than that her shitty husband took her kids, but in the first book she gets a nice pre-celtic girlfriend she rescued from the evil proto-celts, and by the second book she's in charge of the world's biggest and most powerful navy as the "commodore of the Republic of Nantucket Coast Guard". Really cool character, I think

[that-dinopunk-guy]

Hell yeah, now I have all but five of the Babylon 5 novels. All I need now are Final Reckoning, Casting Shadows, and the novelizations of In the Beginning, Thirdspace, and A Call to Arms.

I love how the titles on some of these range from boring and utilitarian to amazing:

Also, they chose some interesting angles to show the station from on a couple of these:

[arthurdrakoni]

The Peshawar Lancers has some of the best world building I’ve seen in any alternate history novel. This is my review.

There are plenty of books I want to listen to, but they just aren't available in audio form. It frustrating, but it is what it is. Sometimes, however, my patience is rewarded in a big way. Case in point, The Peshawar Lancers by S.M. Stirling.

The Peshawar Lancers by SM Stirling is set in a world where Earth was struck by a series of asteroids in 1878. It wasn’t enough to wipe-out humanity, but it did screw up the climate. For example, it lead to five years of non-stop winter. As such, the various Europeans empires evacuated to their colonies in the southern hemisphere. For the British Empire this meant South Africa, Australia, and especially India. By 2020, the climate has stabilized, but the world is forever changed. The world is stuck in the Victorian era, but with some slight steampunk elements. More importantly, the British Empire, now called the Angrezi Raj, is home to an Anglo-Indian hybrid culture. The story follows a wide verity of characters, including the titular Peshawar Lancers, the Raj’s first line of defense on the frontier.

Interesting that Peshawar is where the Lancers are based. In ancient times, it was part of the Bactrian Kingdoms, a place of great culture exchange between Greeks and Indians. In fact, many of these Greek Indians eventually converted to Hinduism and Buddhism, eventually lead to a very unique culture and art style. I’m very tempted to thing that this was deliberate on Stirling’s part.

There are airships, Babbage Engines, and a couple steam-powered cars, but not really anything too fantastical in terms of technology. This is explains somewhat in-universe. Humanity had to focus on rebuilding after The Fall, so that stunted technological progress. Moreover, India doesn’t have access to a lot of mineral fuels, and there isn’t much need when wood is so plentiful. It is mentioned that steamships only recently surpassed wooden sailing ships in terms of capabilities.

Like I said, I utterly adore the world building that went into this novel. There’s even an index at the end containing certain details that didn’t make it into the novel proper. I loved the Anglo-Indian hybrid cultures of the Raj, France-outre-Mer in North Africa (which actually retained its French culture), andd the balls to walls insanity of how Russia is now an empire of Satanic cannibals.

The writing is also quite good. It reminds me very much of Victorian adventure novels by people such as H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling. I went on a kick of those in many younger days, so I was all onboard for that aspect.

Stirling has stated that he very much would like to write a sequel, but the sales weren’t good enough for his publisher to greenlight one. Oh well, I guess we can always hope that one day a sequel will come. Also, the man himself was nice enough to personally leave a comment on my blog saying that he appreciates my review.

The audiobook version is, of course, the whole reason we're having this review. It is narrated by Shaun Grindell, who perfectly captures the story. I'm very happy that this amazing work of alternate history is available in audiobook form at long last.

Have you read The Peshawar Lancers? If so, what did you think?

Link to the full review on my blog is here: https://drakoniandgriffalco.blogspot.com/2018/09/book-review-peshawar-lancers-by-sm.html?m=1

[kandoros]

Getting a book on interlibrary loan

I was browsing through my library's online catalog, and saw that another library about an hour away had a copy of a book I've been looking to read for at least ten years.

So I went to the library and put in a request to get it sent over. Then I checked on the request the next time I was in. The librarian told me it had gotten delayed; sent to the wrong library first or something.

"Don't worry about it ma'am. I've got something else right here to read, and I've never actually seen a copy of that other book. Until now I assumed it was entirely fictional." "Well, even more fictional than 'What if John Carter of Mars was set during the start of the Cold War?"

Hopefully they've have it in this week, in time for me to read over Thanksgiving.

[threeravenspublishing]

Are you Ready for new Car Warriors fiction?

Are you Ready for new Car Warriors fiction?

Because this Friday, April 19th, 2024, Go Hard or Go Home, a Car Warriors Autoduel Chronicles Anthology goes live! The big events may get most of the limelight, but that’s not where all the action happens.This collection of fast-paced, action-packed stories highlights the road warriors who struggle to survive, without the glory of the duel. Caravan guards, gun bunnies, insurance adjusters,…

[tuulikki]

S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse (a.k.a. Changed World series) did this better than anything I’ve ever seen. There was an apocalypse and the immediate result within even a generation or two ended up with pretty distinct dialects, especially if some or other of the founders of the groups had distinct accents that became associated with prestige.

CLAIM: It's unrealistic for characters in the Fallout series to have accents that differ from the basic American fare (Cait, Moriarty, Quinlan, etc.)

FALSE. If anything, there should be MORE accents and dialects across the characters. Do you know why there's a new accent in the UK every 15 miles? Because until the 1930s, communication between communities was very limited, which limited the patterns of speech in every town until it turned into something distinct. You know what else limits travel? The end of the world. If you're stuck in the same settlement for most of your life because it's too dangerous to leave, you're gonna develop a regional dialect, primarily from the languages and accents of the cultures already in your community. Surprise, surprise, the US is chock full of little cultural communities that would absolutely band together during times of strife and become little linguistic islands, be they Irish or Hmong or Greek or Yinzers.

[wandringaesthetic]

Want to write some kind of ode to solid 7 outta 10 scifi novel series that run for like 20 books.

[bedlamsbard]

i will say—the whole "reaction shot roundup" thing that post is mentioning also just comes off as...relatively bad cinema. like, something you could make work if you were GOOD at it, but also something that a lot of people attempt to do without a lot of skill when they have too many cast members to effectively balance. YOU, on the other hand, do write in a cinematic fashion but you are so fucking good at it. the way you paint pictures in scenes and the way you build and release tension is just pitch perfect. it's tv/movie magic translated into a different medium at its finest

Aw, thank you. I mean, part of my reaction was definitely the bog-standard "this person is saying a thing that I COULD relate to so DOES it relate to me?" which I'm as susceptible to as the next "I am uncomfortable when we are not about me?" birb.

but also I genuinely think that this writer is talking about several different (though related) things and falling back on "it's television's fault!!!" instead of actually like. thinking about them. now I don't know what's going on in creative writing classrooms, I'm a history teacher (though I'm teaching 'how to write research papers' this semester and next semester), but I think these are just...normal "how to write fiction" problems. like the fact that OP isn't using any actual examples from published fiction makes it just sound like they have just noticed something so therefore it's A Problem And Those Darn Televisions And/Or Video Games Are At Fault.

there are very, very good pro writers who are very visual and very cinematic in multiple ways, which is not just about balancing reaction shots or pacing or stunning visuals. John Jackson Miller, who writes primarily tie-in novels, is really good at it. part of that is because he's also a comics writer, so he's used to thinking about things visually and how that translates to prose. (I know everyone thinks about Kenobi and A New Dawn with JJM, but the Knight Errant book and comics are interesting because he did both prose and comics for the same character. Also if you like JJM's stuff, go read his "behind the scenes," there's stuff he said about writing the KOTOR comics that I think about to this day.) Martha Wells is also great at it, so is S.M. Stirling; so are many others, those are just the first three that come to mind because I think they're three of the most visual writers I read regularly. And all three are tie-in writers and very good tie-in writers and good tie-in writers, like good fic writers, have to think about translating between media. (One sign of a bad tie-in writer -- who may otherwise be a very good writer -- is that they struggle with translating between media. Tie-ins are a very specific genre and even medium which I think many people don't realize until you read a terrible Star Wars novel written by an author who writes really great non-IP novels and then can't figure out why it feels Wrong.)

I do think writers (and readers and viewers) should think about how to translate something that's natural in one medium (film, video games, prose, comics, whatever) to another medium, because it's not as straightforward as "you just can't do it because they're different media." You can! You may have to think about it differently, but you can still do it! Some of the best writing advice I've ever read has not come from prose writing, it's come from comics writers about writing comics. Depending on your genre or your medium, advice for writing novels may not apply -- I don't structure my fanfic the way I would structure a novel, because I write serial fiction. My scene beats and chapter breaks are not necessarily translatable to a novel, because that's not what I'm writing and that's not how I expect people to read it. (I mean, for one, if I was writing novels, I would not be writing 10K chapters, because for a novel, that's insane.)

anyway, that was about like. six different vaguely related things, the tl;dr of which is something I don't usually say but which comes down to "perhaps OP, as a creative writing instructor, should think about what they're doing in THEIR classroom instead of blaming the television." (this is based on the whole article and not just that bit that's excerpted.)

[conv1ncent]

Hi,

i discovered your gorgues Art at instagram once and i'm soo Happy that you shipping Sarah Connor/T-800 "Uncle Bob" from Terminator 2, since they are a quite rare pairing but an so right and wholesome one:) Thank you so much for your passion about them as well to draw constantly pictures with them!!

I also saw that you posted an piece of an actual Comic with them in your IG Story once and I'm extremley interested in that Project and Comic. How much do u have already done of the Comic and did exits an larger Script for this? My absolute dream would be an Comic whpo centered at an What if the T-800 Survived?! and Skynet was gone for good? So that we have some Cool and Sweet Terminator Family Fluff with them:)

Believe it or not, but it was actually a Cartoon Series in Development that did exactly this Scenario with John, Sarah, and the T-800 as Main Characters who would be this funny Family together. The Show was in early development as it got canceled.

I would love to see more of your Terminator Art and hope that i could inspire you to do more:)

Best Regards

Lukas

Oh gosh I meant to reply to this a while ago- my apologies! But thank you so much, no one ever said anything like this to me before jfnfkdkd /Pos. I'm planning to draw more of this pair, they're so underrated yet have plenty of potentials ❤️❤️ Know or not, Sarah actually got into a relationship with dieter von rossbach (aka the man skynet based off the T-800) In the S.M Stirling novel trilogy, which I recommend reading :-)

Thank you for the kind words, Lukas! Glad there's plenty of people that ships them

(Old doodle/sketch of them)

[zahri-melitor]

Did a quick Tynion sample read of his horror, as I was trying to judge it:-

The Woods #1-4: I really wish this was something slightly different to what it is. I'll probably work through the rest of it, but what the premise indicated to me was that it was a sort of horror version of Eric Flint or S.M. Stirling universal transfer of a small section of territory, and it is, but also it feels underpolished and underdelivered. It's unfortunate that this is a premise that exactly hits one of my interests and I've read it a bunch of times, so I was hoping to see him do a bit more with the opening. As said, will probably continue and I hope it develops more complexity.

Something is Killing the Children #1-5: goodness gracious the difference 5 more years of experience makes. The characters are easier to pick up and enjoy, the looming threat is a lot more creepy and foreboding, the politics among the children feels more child-like in terms of the shape of their cruelty. I would probably skip straight forward to here if I were giving recommendations for a new reader.

The Nice House on the Lake #1-2: you can TELL this is his COVID piece in terms of what it says about alienation from the rest of humanity and the fear of being locked away together at the end of the world. It's my favourite opening of the three.

Also after only dipping into the premises of three of his indie pieces, bits of the 'hi I am mining this material from my own real life experiences' stuff already started becoming quite obvious, as correlations lined up.

[fiabex]

Dreamwidth Roundup

Nominations are now closed, and our closing posts are up! We have final clarification posts, and we have the post about tag set clean up!

Mods will be going through the tagset, but we also welcome your input! If you see an issue with tags already in the tagset, please comment on the tagset cleanup post, but if you think that a tag you nominated didn't make it into the tag set, please send that comment to clarification post 4!

More details about the fandoms that are parts of the clarification posts below the cut:

Nominations Clarification Post 3

Nominations Clarification Post 4

Tagset Cleanup

Nominations Clarification post 3:

Fandoms with Queries

+Anima (Manga)

Crossover Fandom

DCU (Comics)

Dimension 20 (Web Series)

Dredge (Video Game)

Dungeons and Dragons (Cartoon)

Elden Ring (Video Game)

Fairy Tail

Gary and His Demons (Cartoon)

Gundam 00

Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie

Magic Kaito

Nantucket Trilogy - S.M. Stirling

Original Work

Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series)

QSMP | Quackity SMP

Red Dwarf (UK TV)

Ride Kamens (Video Game)

Shadow and Bone (TV)

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types

Transformers Generation One

Westworld (TV)

Xenoblade Chronicles (Video Game)

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Video Game)

少年白马醉春风 | Dashing Youth (Live Action TV)

Fandoms with Rejections

A Date With Death (Visual Novel)

Crossover Fandom

Disco Elysium (Video Game)

Dungeons and Dragons (Cartoon)

Earth Girls are Easy (1988)

Exordia - Seth Dickinson

Gothic (1986)

Hazbin Hotel (Cartoon)

Persona 4

Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series)

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon

Warframe

방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS

人渣反派自救系统 - 墨香铜臭 | The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù

少年白马醉春风 | Dashing Youth (Live Action TV)

Additionally, we have some updates about In-Universe tags and the umbrella tags that reference them (example: "Medium Opt-In: Any - Any Nominated In-Universe Medium")!

Nominations Clarification post 4:

Fandoms with Queries

Barely Lethal (2015)

Batman Beyond

Benjamin January Mysteries - Barbara Hambly

Books of the Raksura - Martha Wells

Chicago Fire

Crossover Fandom

Digimon Adventure Zero Two | Digimon Adventure 02

Doctor Strange (Movies)

Fallen London | Echo Bazaar

Fire & Blood - George R. R. Martin

Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling

In Nomine

Mapp & Lucia Series - E. F. Benson

Monster Prom (Video Games)

Murdoch Mysteries

Original Work

QSMP | Quackity SMP

Sanders Sides (Web Series)

Schmigadoon! (TV)

Stellar Firma (Podcast)

Stellaris (Video Game)

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - Suzanne Collins

Thor (Movies)

What If...? (Cartoon 2021)

僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Manga)

英雄伝説 閃の軌跡 | Sen no Kiseki | The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel Series (Video Games)

龍が如く | Ryuu ga Gotoku | Yakuza (Video Games)

Fandoms with Rejections

A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin

Biggles Series - W. E. Johns

Chicago Fire

Chicago Med

Children of Time Series - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Compilation of Final Fantasy VII

Crossover Fandom

Digimon Adventure Zero Two | Digimon Adventure 02

Fallen London | Echo Bazaar

Friends at the Table (Podcast)

John Wick (Movies)

Ladyhawke (1985)

Original Work

Stranger Things (TV 2016)

The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey

The Fall of the House of Usher (TV 2023)

The Long Earth Series - Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter

The Saint of Steel - T. Kingfisher

Voltron: Legendary Defender

Welcome to Night Vale

[captainsvscaptains]

Just realised I didn't submit The Eagle (real life US Coast Guard/ most important object in the book Island in the Sea Of Time by S.M. Stirling), fuck

That's her ? Cool looking lady. Well, at least she gets an honorable mention

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

90s sci fi is a hellscape because you'll get okay books and then you'll get things marketed as sci fi that are obviously urban fantasy and then you'll get a book written by a man who has a weird relationship with creationism who also thinks AIDS is caused by drugs and then you'll get a book where you hate everyone involved and there is an incredible amount of casual racism and the author does not seem to understand how a vagina works and every single explicit sex scene is some form of rape

and then you'll get a genuinely enjoyable anthology that's so obviously the author having fun and going "yes, and" to his own narrative for 400 pages. and then you will look at the copyrights page and realize that it was written between 1958 and 1966.

anyway read Interstellar Patrol by David Weber Christopher Anvil if you get the chance. Do not read Drakon by S.M. Stirling.

[keystonewarrior]

A character in "The Cage" by S.M. Stirling named Shkaira had a cat named Ten Knife Foot

cat: I will just hang out on your lap now me: yay cat: I have brought ten knives

[geekpopnews]

Conheça o livro “Conan: O Sangue da Serpente” da Alta Books

A Alta Books está lançando "Conan: O Sangue da Serpente" do autor S.M. Stirling. O livro independente traz de volta o personagem lendário de Robert E. Howard, agora em uma nova aventura. Confira. #Conan #OSanguedaSerpente

A Alta Books está lançando uma nova história de um clássico que conquistou fãs no mundo todo. “Conan: O Sangue da Serpente” de S. M. Stirling traz de volta o personagem criado por Robert E. Howard. Esse é o primeiro romance de Conan em mais de uma época, sendo uma produção independente de Stirling, autor best-seller do The New York Times. Conan agora enfrenta uma aventura ainda mais emocionante.…

[reality-breaker]

Βιβλιοκριτική: Eons of the Night, του Robert E. Howard

Αυτή είναι μια συλλογή με διηγήματα και νουβέλες του Robert E. Howard τα οποία έχει επιλέξει ο S.M. Stirling. Δεν είναι ιστορίες με τους πιο δημοφιλείς ήρωες του Howard, όπως Κόναν, Καλ, και Σόλομον Κέιν. Είναι κάποιες από τις λιγότερο γνωστές ιστορίες του, οι οποίες όμως με γοήτευσαν με το βαρβαρικό μεγαλείο τους. Είχα καιρό να διαβάσω βιβλίο που να μη βλέπω την ώρα να το ξαναπιάσω για να δω τι γίνεται παρακάτω. Και ήταν διηγήματα και νουβέλες, όχι ένα ολόκληρο μυθιστόρημα. Κι όμως – ούτε μία από αυτές τις διηγήσεις δεν έτυχε να με ��πογοητεύσει. Η συλλογή περιλαμβάνει τις εξής ιστορίες: House of Arabu· The Garden of Fear· The Twilight of the Grey Gods· Spear and Fang· Delenda Est· Marchers of Valhalla· Sea Curse· Out of the Deep· In the Forest of Villefère· και Wolfshead. Οι μισές από αυτές διαδραματίζονται στο μακρινό παρελθόν του κόσμου μας, το οποίο είναι, ουσιαστικά, σαν άλλος κόσμος. Ή είναι μια φανταστική εποχή, ή μια εποχή που η φαντασία του Howard την έχει αλλοιώσει έτσι που μοιάζει σαν φανταστική. Παντού υπάρχουν εφιαλτικοί δαίμονες και παράξενη μαγεία. [Συνέχισε να διαβάζεις] ➤ https://www.fantastikosorizontas.gr/kostasvoulazeris/bookrev.php?ID=eons_of_the_night