John Ringo: Right-Wing Nutjob
I've just finished today reading "Yellow Eyes", one of the "Legacy of the Aldenata" books by John Ringo. I've been a fan of these for a while, but I will now not be reading any more of his work, partially due to some of the main content of this book, but especially the "authorial afterword" which was several steps too far in my opinion.
In all fairness, I knew what I was getting into. The books are basically about humanity with the aid of some pacifist aliens trying to defeat another alien species (Posleen) that's invading enmass (and I mean *millions*). That a series of books written about and glorifying near-future war is written by a right-wing gun nut is practically a given. I didn't mind this, because they were *fun*, and provided they stuck to new and novel ways to kill the Posleen, I was happy to keep borrowing them from ICSF's library. Boys with toys, etc.
Yellow Eyes stepped over a line and started espousing what I would regard as bonkers opinions on certain current-day political issues. Well, I say issues, they're kinda AFAIK non-issues outside of the US, but they're still bitching. So, various folks on the run/trying to kill the Posleen do various things that are against a number of current war treaties, banning such things as the use of child soldiers and landmines. One of the groups of pacifist alien (the Darhel, who are a bunch of real bastards, but got genengineered a long time ago so if they actually kill people directly themselves they go into comas, so they stick to manipulating and bribing folks instead) using their patsies "the Europeans" manage to do some International Criminal Court stuff resulting in the arrest of all the critical people who might actually save folks from the Posleen. This all gets solved via some extra-judicial whatnot and a cout d'etat, and everything works out ok in the end.
However, the message of various bits of the book is that "rules of war" (especially the Fourth Geneva Convention), the International Criminal Court and things like various countries not needing an army any more will result in the death of humanity as a whole. I was able to skip over a lot of this until near the end, when it became much more storyline-critical.
The authorial afterword gets even more nuts, claiming that the ICC, the EU and various other things are the direct descendants of Marxism-Leninism, and has a bunch of massively flawed bits wittering on about "American national sovereignity" and so on. It's pretty much a variant of "you'll have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands", but with fractionally better use of language.
So, yeah. Nutjobs. Having looked up the co-author on this one (Tom Kratman) it looks like he may well be substantially responsible for the new slant here, but it's enough to put me off reading any more of it ever again...
In all fairness, I knew what I was getting into. The books are basically about humanity with the aid of some pacifist aliens trying to defeat another alien species (Posleen) that's invading enmass (and I mean *millions*). That a series of books written about and glorifying near-future war is written by a right-wing gun nut is practically a given. I didn't mind this, because they were *fun*, and provided they stuck to new and novel ways to kill the Posleen, I was happy to keep borrowing them from ICSF's library. Boys with toys, etc.
Yellow Eyes stepped over a line and started espousing what I would regard as bonkers opinions on certain current-day political issues. Well, I say issues, they're kinda AFAIK non-issues outside of the US, but they're still bitching. So, various folks on the run/trying to kill the Posleen do various things that are against a number of current war treaties, banning such things as the use of child soldiers and landmines. One of the groups of pacifist alien (the Darhel, who are a bunch of real bastards, but got genengineered a long time ago so if they actually kill people directly themselves they go into comas, so they stick to manipulating and bribing folks instead) using their patsies "the Europeans" manage to do some International Criminal Court stuff resulting in the arrest of all the critical people who might actually save folks from the Posleen. This all gets solved via some extra-judicial whatnot and a cout d'etat, and everything works out ok in the end.
However, the message of various bits of the book is that "rules of war" (especially the Fourth Geneva Convention), the International Criminal Court and things like various countries not needing an army any more will result in the death of humanity as a whole. I was able to skip over a lot of this until near the end, when it became much more storyline-critical.
The authorial afterword gets even more nuts, claiming that the ICC, the EU and various other things are the direct descendants of Marxism-Leninism, and has a bunch of massively flawed bits wittering on about "American national sovereignity" and so on. It's pretty much a variant of "you'll have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands", but with fractionally better use of language.
So, yeah. Nutjobs. Having looked up the co-author on this one (Tom Kratman) it looks like he may well be substantially responsible for the new slant here, but it's enough to put me off reading any more of it ever again...