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Originally Posted by Iphinome
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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Fallen Angels was a love letter to fandom, for the most part. Beyond that, it was hard to take the story seriously and enjoyed it on that level. And I instantly recognised one character. Kinda hard not to recognise Leslie Fish if you have ever met her.
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The thing about the number of the beast and his other late books is you can watch Heinlein's brain though the text, it stretches and then about 2/3'rds of the way though a nice adventure story, *snap* like a rubber band and all of a sudden it's all about incest nudism and plural marriage and you're like what the hell man? Youput up with is in Time enough for love becuase the tale of the adopted daughter makes you cry, you put up with it in the cat who walked though walls because it's an awesome future adventure till they get to tertius. Farnham didn't have the saving grace of being decent up until he shook things up, it was lackluster before then and then just bad and racially insensitive.
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At least with most of those books, Heinlein had the excuse of his failing health. That being said, I still think Job and Friday are pretty good books, even if my wife says that he doesn't understand women at all.
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The 163x's started decently but have now just become awful. The storylines go everywhere, nothing ever seems resolved, they're not books, they're not even chapters, they're low on plot snapshots of a place and time. Building a world is great but what happens in it should be solid plot arcs that have a point and come to a resolution. Characters don't grow past whatever they were needed to be to start the plot of that book. His naval series with Webber is decent though.
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Funny, but I just had a conversation last week about these books. I have a friend of mine who has decided that avoiding all the Virgina DeMarce books is a good policy. Personally, I've never read that far (I've only read the first two books), but my wife is a big fan.
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Much like with 163x Webber's collaborations with Flint are better, they seems to brace up each other's shortcomings acting like the missing editor they'd both do much better to have.
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Funny, because politically they are opposite of each other. (I remember reading Weber's Dahak series and him randomly taking shots at labor unions, which seemed to me out of the blue.)
Personally, when you have a label that does a lot of military SF, you have to expect a lot of conservative writing. That just comes with the territory. It is just a question of how obnoxious it gets. Weber isn't bad, but Ringo can be. (I remember reading "Into The Looking Glass" and was amused by his Mary Sueish athletic conservative scientist ubermench main character.) But, there are also authors like Flint and Bujold that are on the other side of the spectrum, so I don't think it is all what Baen is about. I do tend to be chosey about what I read from them, tho.