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Originally Posted by HorridRedDog
I could easily be wrong but it was my impression that they objected to SEEING any military reference while looking on Baen (for what little they do have).
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I think you may be reading a tad too much into it.
All I saw was a lack of familiarity with the actual books and I was cautioning that appearances/reputation/inferences from promo blurbs can be deceiving.
David Drake, for example, is an esablished author of alout military SF and ne of his more prominent series, the RCN/Leary&Mundy stories, has all classical trappings of the same, yet within the series (about a young, dashing, womanizing starship captain and his best friend, a slightly older, female librarian) you'll find all sorts of different kinds of adventures ranging from the oh-so-common "escape from behind enemy lines" to stories of political intrigue in a very Classical-rome milieu, to an outright, 19th century-style travelogue narrative full of colorful planets, cultures, and peoples. As a whole, the RCN series gets classified as military SF (fair enough as far as that goes) but an individual story like the FAR SIDE OF THE STARS most definitely is not, even if it does feature a space battle climax. But the only way to appreciate this is to actually read the thing. Easier to say all the RCN stories are military SF and move on, right? Except for the fact that it is a very good story and an example off the kind of experimenting BAEN does. (It is available for free on one of the BAEN Promo CDs available at the FIFTH IMPERIUM website and the promo CD includes a free audiobook version of the story in DRM-free MP3 format. I nice reading, too. As I said, those folks experiment with publishing tech; they don't stand still pretending its the 19th century out there.)
Now, examples/anecdotal evidence is easy to find for any position, of course, but the issue of SF militarism is intrinsic to the genre. Simply put, good drama/adventure comes from conflict and/or danger. SF, naturally, tends to play out large; large in ideas, large in milieus, large in ambition (world-building is usually the smallest part of the author's job), and off course large in scale. And large-scale conflict is but another definition of war.
Lost in all the debate (which will not be settled any time soon--it is 80-90 years old I suppose) is that good SF is all about humans (we're the readers and the writers after all) and their ideas, their conflicts (even if often wrapped in alien metaphor) and that humans are by nature tribal. We *always* seek to define ourseves in terms of the familiar vs the alien, us vs them, in every large scale activity. (Even if we have to invent artificial distinctions like sorts team affiliation.) And when these "tribes" come into conflict we invariable end up with War.
We are used to thinking of large-scale conflict as war and of war as something to be avoided. Which it is.
But the reality is that things that should be avoided can't always be avoided and rarely are. That too is human nature. And it can be discomforting to be confronted with that reality too closely, too often. And since SF at its best aspires to examine/illuminate the so-called human condition by looking at human issues and concerns from other angles, other viewpoints, through story-telling (which, as I've said, involves large scale conflict), good SF is going to inevitably poke at the sore spots that make us uncomfortable.
Hence the long-standing debate ad sensitivity about the "militaristic" nature of SF. Which teds to make us long-term consumers of the genre antsy because we are familiar with the genre's aspirations, conventions, and subtleties that are not apparent from the outside, and because a lot of the charges of militarism have *historically* come from outsiders with no real interest in the genre's aspirations.
Doesn't mean we're ready to go to war over it but we do get defensive about inaccurate charges. After all, we *have* to defend our tribe, no?