A Sea of Series

[emo_snal]

   It all began with Master and Commander. And that was so good that then there was Hornblower. And then, between audible and amazon there were recommendations of more and more similar series. The weirdly specific genre of dozen-book-series-about-a-protagonist-in-the-Royal-Navy-during-the-Napoleonic-Wars seems to have a surprising number of

Comments

[lookfar]

Even I have read some of the Aubrey-Maturin books!

Of course, I must point out that if you want to see these characters cross paths, you can find that in fan fiction, some of which is of very good quality, and some of which is smut. In fact, you would have to carefully avoid the Aubrey/Maturin and only read the gen Aubrey-Maturin.

[emo_snal]

Haha yikes yeah I don't want to know what kind of smut has been imagined about Aubrey/Maturin by particularly feverish minds. Is that the convention, that with a / it is smut and with a dash it's just tame fanfic?

On any account it's not so much I want to see anyone's imagined interactions of characters so much as I'm just curious if canonically any would have met.

interestingly on a recent re-read of Master and Commander I answered a question I had had - Thomas Cochran, on whom Aubrey is based, _does_ exist in the Aubreyverse. That's certainly grounds for a temporal paradox if one tried to trace both their whereabouts and actions within the same universe.

I think my favorite canonical character cameo is in an otherwise serious and factual quartet of novels about Napoleon and Wellesley by Simon Scarrow, at Waterloo Wellesley makes an offhand remark to "a tall scarred colonel of infantry who, unusually for one of his rank carried a rifle over his shoulder" or some such to that effect, which to those who don't know would just seem

[lookfar]

Oh, yes, I love that kind of play. It's what I loved about Harry Potter fanfic - it wasn't that I loved the books so much as the conceit, which informs all fan fiction, that the fictional world extends infinitely in all directions. So if you wished, you could enter the Staff Room at Hogwarts and hear what the teachers are doing when they are not with the students. In video games, it's called "open world." It's really about how you experience imagination.

The slash, in fan fiction, indicates that these two people are a couple and yes, smut alert - Harry/Hermione, Snape/McGonagall, like that. But "slash" as a term, then came to mean specifically gay fic, eg., Hermione/Luna, Wolverine/Captain America. There isn't really a dash thing; you just call it "gen" which means, smut free.

[bearshorty]

If you enjoy a fantasy twist, Naomi Novik did 9 books that is basically Napoleonic Wars with dragons. (The dragons are intelligent and are part of aerial corps). Temeraire series.