1634: The Baltic War was released last weekend. Where have you been? 
And when is Flint gonna get off his ass and finally write that “What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?” novel he’s been promising?
:smack: On and off in hospital…and re-reading John Ringo’s A Hymn Before Battle series. Damn, got to run out and get Baltic War today for sure! Thanks for the tip!
-XT
Well, technically Swindapa isn’t lesbian, she’s bisexual. But her partner Marian Alston* is* lesbian. However, they’re monogamous with each other, so no chance there silenus.
Besides, Stirling’s lesbian warrior women are only interested in sexually enslaving other women.
Swidapa would swing, given the chance. In any case, neither of them could hold a candle to the Wolf Lord’s wife, she of the cult. That gal was just plain scary.
Lemur, this is a bad thing how?
I like the stories ok, but I’m afraid Sterling has what I refer to as Dan Brown syndrome. He’s got the same recurring themes over and over again in his works, and it’s kind of annoying.
But I do enjoy them as escapist fun. I just can’t let myself overanalyze them to deeply, or my ire gets worked up and I find them less fun.
MaC is in paperback yet, or is it still just hardback?
I’ve only seen it in hard cover myself…and I was just at the bookstore getting my copy of The Baltic War. As I’ll probably have some more down time soon due to illness I’m glad for the tip!
-XT
Put that kind of action in the Willamette Valley and I am so there.
I actually like realistic depictions of warfare, and that’s something that Stirling does well. Fighting is a nasty bloody affair, and most people with any sense avoid it if they can. That’s another thing that Stirling does a good job of showing; reasonable people don’t like fighting, but they know that if they don’t get good at it, they’re in trouble when they run into a more aggressive group of people.
I particularly liked how he handles the implications of gunpowder not working for the Dies the Fire people and the loss of infrastructure for the Nantucketers. Guns are equalizers, and it really sucks if they don’t work or aren’t available. If you’ve only got hand-powered weapons, suddenly size, strength, and conditioning become pretty darn important, and training for war gets a whole lot more intense.
Take it from someone who’s done martial arts for a looooong time, you don’t want to fight hand to hand or with swords and spears if you’ve got a choice. It’s hard, it’s dangerous, it takes lots of practice to get good at, and it takes skill (and sometimes luck) to beat someone bigger than you are. In contrast, you can spend a couple of weeks teaching people to shoot and have a halfway effective fighting force, and they don’t necessarily need to be all that fit.
The dialog is more realistic when you get into the mindset of people who have had science and technology pulled out from under them, seen society collapse around them, survived plagues, raids, and famine, and are rebuilding communities on principles that have been history for about 1000 years. Besides, I know a couple of Pagans and they take that stuff fairly seriously. For them it’s ritual in the same way that taking communion or chanting sutras are for Christians or Buddhists. Might seem silly to outsiders, but it’s pretty solemn for participants.
The novels assume “the Change” kills off more than 9/10 of the world’s total human population; and many nations, such as France, die off so thoroughly that no survivor-societies emerge at all. Would that really happen? Even in Third World countries?
And would our built environment really decay so thoroughly? The Protector’s War assumes that, just a decade after the Change, practically all of England’s paved roads are so overgrown with hedge and thorn they have become impassable.
Watch out for the next trilogy in the series: The Sunrise Lands! Set a generation after A Meeting at Corvallis. You can read nine sample chapters on Stirling’s website.
Oh, I agree that the battle scenes are accurate as far as I can tell and that Stirling does a good job describing the characters’ reactions to them. It was just after the tenth or so time I’d read a description of an arrow going through somebody’s chest or neck, dripping all sorts of gore or breaking teeth and jaws and blech – I was ready to say, “Yes, I know. Detail not necessary.” I’m not a big fan of gore and am more than willing to sacrifice accuracy for its absence.
The one thing I’ve noticed he leaves out, though, is the description of the many, many mortally wounded but not yet dead people typically left on a battlefield. There are a few mentions of putting the dying out their misery, but not much of the, hmmm, human noises that would fill the air after what is basically a medieval battle.
Oh, I don’t doubt that. I’ve done archery myself, but never got very far because there weren’t many places to practice (the deer hunting guys at the archery range were fairly bemused by 16-year-old girl) and I wasn’t really interested in developing my upper body. I agree that the logistics of warfare are pretty damned good.
I guess I just live in a profoundly agnostic world. I’m not a person of faith by any sense of the word, and I have trouble identifying with people who are. Add that into the fact that I’ve read a lot of fantasy novels where deux ex machina is in the hands of the people, rather than the hands of god, and I’m turned off by the whole idea.
I don’t know about England, but here in Wisconsin, it only takes a year or two for brush and scrub to make unmaintained gravel roads/paths impassable. You don’t need to travel a road often to keep it semi-travelable
And the devastation of the human population is on par with what happened during the Black Death, where between one-quarter and two-thirds of the population died. That’s far from nine-tenths, but when you figure in widespread famine and the chaos of anarchy, it becomes a little bit more believable. I’m not sure why France should be so thoroughly depopulated, but I kind of feel that it might a little bit of a joke. Or an attempt at irony.
By the way, do the lesbian warrior women enter in Meeting at Corvallis? Because I don’t think I’ve encountered any yet in the series.
Let me finish this thought.
You don’t need to travel a road often to keep semi-travelable, but if you ignore it for a year, you’ll for sure have to clear the brush off it. And it only takes one hard winter to crack asphalt all to hell and back.
As for the brambles, this is what Farmer Bob of Jamaica Farm has to say about them:
“Dese, dey got canes grow t’ree inches a day, and grow new roots where da hell dey touching; you leave one bit of root, dey grow up again. And we out of weed killer – use de last from Wyevale Garden Centre, two, t’ree year ago. Feeling de English roots more and more on Jamaica Farm.” (The Protector’s War 28)
Sounds like the equivalent of English kudzu.
A few, in fact. Aoife Barstow takes a lesbian lover; and Sarah Arminger (the Protector’s wife) has a loyal bodyguard who is lesbian and figures pretty prominantly in the story. There are no lesbian love-scenes though.
I really like the books, but I agree with most of your criticisms. I’m the kind of person who skims battle scenes, so book three, the culmination of the war that’s been building, is my least favorite. The characters are also very one-dimensional, which in my opinion is why the dialogue can be so unrealistic.
Well, here in the Pacific Northwest, blackberries will cover an entire field in 2-3 years. They are an incredbily invasive non-native species. There are native blackberries, but the himalayan blackberries are a scourge. They don’t do well in established forest, but thrive on disturbed soil. After a massive human die-off, I imagine blackberries would be covering the Space Needle in a few years. And they’ll choke every road that isn’t kept laboriously clean.
As for lesbian warrior women, no SM Stirling series would be complete without them.
I had a similar thought when I was reading the story. Basically it becomes a matter of civilian logistics…there is simply no way to transport the food from where it grows to where the majority of the people are. Once people start figuring that out they decend like locusts on the places where there IS food and fight over the scraps. The few places that survived were pretty much sheltered from this by various factors…distance, terrain, sometimes ruthlessness of the folks involved, etc.
I think the reason Europe dies is the author supposes that, like a few of the cities described in the US, the European authorities are slow to figure out the extent of the problem, and lack the ruthlessness to do what needs to be done to save what can be saved. In England, the King basically pulls back a small core group onto one of the islands (I don’t remember which one…Orkney?) and holds out until most of the population dies off then returns to rebuild. I think the author feels that in continential Europe there was no place to run or hide. Plausable? I suppose, though I’m guessing that some places would be defensible AND fertile enough to hold at least a remnant population.
But I think it IS plausable that 9/10ths of all people would end up dieing off…there would quite simply be no way to feed them rapidly enough, and a weakend population would be very susceptible to disease and such.
As to 3rd world countries…I guess it would depend on the country. I figure most would fold for the same reasons…lack of the ability to transport food to the cities, people in the cities in a panic and decending on the country side, chaos, disease, etc. I’m sure some remnant populations would survive but like in the US it would be pretty grim. While I was reading I was thinking that basically every one of the desert cities of our South West (where I happen to live :)) would be completely depopulated except maybe some of the very rural towns that have access to a good supply of water and decent farm land.
-XT
That’s why I moved to the Pacific Northwest.
wrt the level of collapse of stuff, we’ve seen relatively little of what, say, downtown New York City looks like 5 or 10 years post-change. Most of the places people live now are not the places where you’d expect the biggest and most long-lasting man-made structures.
(Which is an interesting question, actually. What, built in the last 200 years or so, would remain recognizeable longest if all humans died out?)
As a native Oregonian (born in Corvallis, no less) I’m incredibly pleased by Stirling’s attention to detail. His depiction of plants, topography, etc. is dead on. And there are lots of nice little bits. I’m about halfway through Meeting in Corvallis, and have to chortle at the passing references to Odell in the Hood River Valley, where I went to high school many decades ago. How many people outside of Oregon have ever heard of Odell?
Yes, the books have inspired the longest marathon reading sessions I’ve undertaken in many years. Great stuff!