Forum: Story Recommendations

There is one I left out because it violates your "no military" restriction, https://storiesonline.net/s/17041/the-return-of-thomas-grey. It describes how a semi-trained, privileged teenager rises through the ranks to become a senior captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. Luck, bravery, patronage and a large dose of competence all played a role in his rise. There are a couple of battle scenes in there.

It is part of https://storiesonline.net/universe/102/anthony-carter, some of the characters from the first two stories there make an appearance in this one.

Only the two stories by Cat5 that Dinsdale recommended.

but there is a lots of building dams, power plants, housing, shooting ranges etc

Don't forget beer brewing.

HM.

there's the problem that Ringo's writing puts my teeth on edge. I just can't stand his stuff.

How many of his works (series) have you tried?

There are quite some I stopped reading after a few chapters.
I read the whole "Gost/Kildar" series but had some problems with the BDSM.
I like the "Black Tide Rising" books.
I love "Princess of Wands" but "Queen of Wands" disappointed me, Baen should not have accepted it. Obviously he wrote it just to get rid of his obligation to write a sequel to "Princess of Wands".

I found "Last Centurion" quite good.
I tried to read "A Hymn Before Battle" and finally in the forth attempt succeeded but decided not to read any other Posleen stories.

HM.

How about the Empire of Man series by Ringo and Weber? I liked that one.

How about the Empire of Man series by Ringo and Weber? I liked that one.

I liked it too, but I regarded them as 'Weber books'.

HM.

The Last Centurion is based on the Anabasis of Xenophon (Sp?). I found it hard to read, unfortunately the Pentagon decided it was a how to manual for Afghanistan and not a warning.
The Posleen books I also found unreadable, the cut price Chinese Quicky Mart copies in the Swarm Universe are often better.
Princess of Wands was different and enjoyable.
Ghost and the first three sequels were great, the later books not so much. Less building and more darkness of the mind.

Live Free or Die and its sequels are on my reread every year list. They are definitely Competence Porn well before the inevitable massive space battles. Create interstellar trade and alliances, starting with drunken smugglers. Bypass bureaucrats and politicians, lease ancient space tugs and develop space mining, distributed laser mining arrays, schools for space welders, bootleg anti-gravity drives, battlestations the size of the moon, etc, etc. I highly recommend you try it. Its better than Star Wars for space opera adventure and well surpasses Communists in Space / Star Trek.
I expect the stoning to begin in 3, 2, 1...

Fucking all of them. Ringo DESTROYED Baen Books for me. Don't get me started on his whole 'Jeremy X' dilution of Weber's Honorverse.

Now I have Johnny Cash as an earworm. "I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel.."
Why keep reading if you hate them so much? I just stop and find a new author if the one I am reading becomes unbearable.
Do you have a story / author you want to recommend? Preferably one on here so Laz doesn't get pissed at us for turning this thread into a Baen/Amazon book club meeting.

Are you possibly confusing Ringo with Eric Flint?

Ringo has good ideas, but he has a serious problem with escalation and OP characters. I've read several of his series and they've all followed the same general pattern: the first one or two books are generally fun, the third is okay but problematic, and anything after that just becomes a mess.

The guy either needs to take some writing classes or stop writing series.

If you're going the Dead Tree route, a large number of Frank Herbert's works qualify. Apart from the obvious (Dune + sequels, often military) we also have the ones featuring Jorj X. McKie - "Whipping Star", "The Dosadi Experiment" and a couple of short stories. Let's hear it for BuSab.

I've worn out two copies of Dune and I read all the sequels. Even tried to watch 'Twin Peaks in the Desert' when it first came out. Weird, I had no clue that he wrote other books. The Sci-fi & fantasy shops that I visited each pay day always had Dune, Dune Messiah & Children of Dune, nothing else.

Radagast - concur on Ringo's Live Free or Die trilogy.

Other possibilities - Liaden universe novels and shorts by wife/husband team Sharon Lee/Steve Miller.

Modesitt's Imager novels

Weber's Safehold novels

...

The author doesn't say it but the stories seem like fan fiction in the Honor Harrington universe. I liked them.

Lonny

Thanks for the tip. I've downloaded "16 ways to defend a walled city." The description of the MC made me think of Remus, which was a good enough excuse.

Concur ... Delta is very good ...

Well, in the story there were the state highway mileage and the city streets. but yes, in general, roads in a rural county in most states are all gravel, although Texas seems to have some 'caliche' surfaced roads. There are occasional 'Farm to Market' roads that have been upgraded to pavement.
I know of at least one state that has a whole class of roads classed as Farm to Market and labeled as FMnn.

there were NO PAVED ROADS in that entire county.

Take a look at Alaska. Only 20% of the entire state is accessible by road.

https://alaskatours.com/alaska-stories/before-i-visited-alaska/

Alaska is more than twice the size of Texas, the largest state in the U.S., and larger than the combined area of the 22 smallest U.S. states. Only 20 percent of Alaska is accessible by road. Despite a land mass of 586,412 square miles, Alaska only has 12 numbered highways. This means most of Alaska is wilderness – untamed, untouched wilderness, rare to find anywhere else in the US. When planning your Alaska vacation, distances can be deceptively large. It is important to allow yourself enough time in your itinerary to not only visit, but to experience each place. You also will need to move around the state in order to have the opportunity to experience all the diversity here.

Yeah, but there are not any people living in Alaska, just Grizzlies.

😉

Yeah, but there are not any people living in Alaska, just Grizzlies.

There are some people living in the Alaskan interior. Just not a very many of them.

Don't forget that road treatment the road guys were hot to try that creates a semi-permanent surface good for several years. It won't show up from satellite as paved, but I have driven on the equivalent and it's a lot nicer than gravel. It should especially prevent 'washboarding'. On a dirt or gravel road, when there is a stretch of road where drivers usually accelerate slightly as they prepare to climb a grade, their tires dig a little pit in the surface. After a while, that stretch begins to resemble a washboard with the accompanying roughness when driven over. One of the things that happen when a grader touches up such a road is that the gravel, etc. is moved into the groves and temporarily smooths them out.

One of the things that happen when a grader touches up such a road is that the gravel, etc. is moved into the groves and temporarily smooths them out

this remembers me of Oljegrus used in Scandinavia back in 1965 when I first visited Norway.
BTW, there is a short entry about oljegrus in the Swedish Wikipedia with a link to chipseal. However it's not the same. Oljegrus back then was dirt and gravel mixed with something called "vägolja"(=street oil) which is now banned. The "street oil" was used to prevent dust and stabilize the dirt and gravel mix. Oljegrus never really hardened, it got harder when the lighter components of the street oil got washed away by rain.

HM.

At least some of the counties in Iowa do the same thing. There was a big kerfuffle a few years ago when it was discovered that the waste oil being used was contaminated. I don't remember what the contaminate was, but it was something that shouldn't have been put out where it was.

Speaking of which, I recently re-read that and figured out that apparently there were NO PAVED ROADS in that entire county.
Just saying...

Paved roads don't need as much maintenance so you won't hear about it. Also when I was young I lived on an unpaved road in a major northeast city so it's not just in rural areas. That was only . . . what? (that cant be right - where's the calculator) err 45 years ago? My, how time flies.

Good Hunting, limab