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Originally Posted by fjtorres
I've read Caliphate.
It is, no question, an *uncomfortable* book to read and should be avoided by those that don't like to have their worldview challenged. Just as Heinlein's FARNHAM FREEHOLD, Stirling's DRAKAS books, or Niven and Pournelle's FALLEN ANGELS (heh! Also free at Baen), or L. Neil Smith's PROBABILITY BROACH, or F.M. Busby's RISSA KERGUELEN, the author takes a contrarian premise, drops a bunch of very flawed human beings into it and spins an adventure story.
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I'll start here, I've read only two of the above books, neither was very good. Farnham's claim to fame is in being able to displace To sail to sunset as Heinlein's worst book. Readers of other Heinlein can see what he was trying to say and understand it but it was honestly poorly executed and insensitive even for its time. It took a simple idea of the oppressed and ill-treated take power and do the same thing to their former oppressors and then turns up the dial to make them worse. A cautionary tail on not treating people badly because of their skin color, great but then he plays into the white American fears about black people that were more prominent at the time, I don't think for one second his intent was racist, not Heinlien, not after reading his other work, but his execution played right into it. They didn't just enslave white people, they ate them for dinner, how very deepest darkest Africa Stanley and Livingston tribal story. And the matter of sterilizing white slaves? Fear of some assumed black man's sexual prowess and of course the other 1950's fear with white women used as pleasure slaves for black men?
I might consider it a product of its time except that I know Heinlein knew better and wrote the book anyway.
Fallen Angels was just poorly written. it has a few funny nerd jokes, would probably have more if I knew the people characters were based on but as I've notied more with Baen than other publishers, the pacing was off, and the info dumps were too long.
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Oh, and in case you haven't heard: the Baen Free Library features whatever books the writers choose to offer up. If you have a bone to pick, take it up with the author. Toodles!
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There is that but we might as well get to my biggest problem with Baen of late. I don't know if the authors are refusing to be edited or the editing staff are just sub-par but as gatekeepers Baen is doing a poor job. No one seems to be taking an ax to the 6 page long chunks of expository text, saying hey how about you try to let some of this information come out naturally as part of the plot and how about cutting this down to two sentences because if this is the eighth book or whatever in the series, anyone reading it probably read the seventh and we don't need a 12 page recap of events from the last book in the middle of chapter nineteen, just saying.
What I'm trying to say is that if it pushes a political agenda quality doesn't seem to matter, the authors might as well be self publishing if their editors are going to let anything though so long as it promotes a right of center agenda. Hell why else wouldn't someone in the office call up the authors and say, Uh, Mary love the book just great, we'll sell a million copies if you could just maybe cut down that 25 page rant on the evils of public schooling to maybe 2 pages and get on with the space battle?
And that's why I made my earlier comment. It must be a day that ends in y because someone decided that their niche should be pushing a political agenda over the quality of the finished product. Try a test for yourself, pick something Baen has published in the last 5 years, better yes, pick give or six and tell me how many could have been published by Ace or Tor even with the politics left out?