Sake White

I don’t know why folks who have read all of HOrnblower’s series don’t mention Honor Harrington by David Weber. Those two series were made to complement each other in my opinion.

Oh, by the way, incidentally when you italicize Wind and also underline it, it really looks like Wing on my mozilla. Gone with the Wing, heh.

I’ve tried to get Book to watch Serenity or the 14 odd episodes of Firefly, but no luck so far. Laer actually watched Serenity already, based upon the advice of a family member if I recall correctly. Now he is going to watch Firefly because he liked the movie so much, now that he knows about Firefly at least.

As advertisement, I can pretty much say that the characters of Firefly, living in a great big glowing bug of a spaceship, share many characteristics with the “out in the boondocks” situation of British Imperial captains. You got your civilized locations where law and order are encroaching upon full Hive mode and you got Indian country (i.e. dangerous to your health country).

Book, however, is a fan of books. So I will mention the books and series I have read that would cater to her interests, as described in her post.

The Belisarius series starting off with this novel, is one of the greatest military science fiction series I have ever read. Hornblower paints a nice picture of bygone days, and so does Belisarius paint a good (definitely not nice) picture of Ancient Roman times. Three of the books in the series is fully available in full, and for no fee, at the Baen Free Library. You may be able to resist getting the Firefly/Serenity DVD, Book, but how about readily available literature?

The Honor Harrington series, aka Hornblower in space, also has two of its books available for free at the library.

Another series similar to Belisarius is the General series by SM Stirling, focusing in on recovering a fallen human civilization through warfare and conquest. It is told in the omnibus novels The Conqueror and Warlord His Falkenberg’s Legion is also a great tale of the 300 Spartans in space. As close as you can get anyways. I only knew of Thermopylae (before the movie) because I had read Go Tell the Spartans in the omnibus Prince. SM Stirling differs from Eric Flint in that SM Stirling prefers to tell the darker side of warfare in barbarian lands. So you will see much more explicit violence and mayhem in his novels. For one thing, his Falkenberg legion pits Spartans up against Helots (aka terrorists). The Helots are every bit as brutal and uncivilized as AQ. The upshot is the Spartans win, so you’ll be getting your reward at the end, if you can withstand the shock long enough.

And when an author I like has written a series, I’m all over it.

That doesn’t always work for me. The Deathstalker series was magnificent in its scope and voice, but the other novels by Simon Green never really interested me as much as his Deathstalker series. Partially because it was science fiction that I always prefered, but also because Simon Green adequately combined several successful literature themes in the Deathstalker series, such as horror scenes and full villain characters with as much screen time as heroes. Simon Green’s fantasy centered series never really had that sort of consistency and edge.

I’ve noticed that bit about the author voice, though. For one thing Eric Flint can be recognized simply through how he words certain narrative passages and how he does some of his inter-character dialogue. No other author does it quite like that. Also for John Ringo, he is almost always assured to pop in some pop culture references, such as music or modern day novels/authors, into his fantasy/science fiction novels. On collaboratives he had to keep it down a bit, but even there he manages to sneak in some shots. For one thing, he continues to mention real life bands such as Cruxshadows, Evanescence, and so forth when he has his characters play music, in battle or elsewhere. It is a sort of light meta-fiction, where in full meta-fiction the author/narrator is clearly speaking to the reader.

that follow the same characters through a grand adventure, with the last book being the culmination of the sequence.

There is definitely a worthwhile end to the series I have mentioned. If by grand adventure you mean life disturbing and shattering events that must be overcome, then yes, that too.