John Ringo is a good writer. I don't think many people dispute that. The point of contention is the thematic content of the stories...
...not so much the quality of the storytelling or narrative. It's good prose, whatever you might think about the subject material.
When I bought Ghost and Kildar, the first two Paladin of Shadows books, I didn't know about the sexual content. I was browsing, and found the early bits of Ghost pretty engaging - I didn't follow it through to the denoument. And while I was there, I picked up the next book in the series and looked at the first few pages of that. So I decided to buy both books based on the quality of the prose.
Let's be clear, the books are well written. The action sequences are very good, and it's a nicely idealised view of contemporary military stuff. It takes a good book to make me think that, because my own uniformed experience left me pretty damn jaded about the Army for a very long time.
But. It deals with dark themes, very dark themes. Mainly sexual ones, but arguably the sex is just symptomatic of a more disturbing thread running through the stories.
I see the Paladin of Shadows books as the same sort of wanton escapism that makes people write...oh, I dunno, fanfiction where the chosen main character...goes around blowing the crap out of the bad guys and screwing everything with legs and mamillary glands. Consider Harry Potter fanfiction, for instance, or all those Xander-centric Buffy fics out there, those are good candidates for this kinda thing. The worst self-insert fanfics follow this pattern as well.
John Ringo does exactly that, but he does it better. For a rather unsettling value of 'better'.
Incidentally, the full text of the first four novels in the series is available here:-
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/11-U ... eBreachCD/
Presumably legally, since that site's been uploading the Baen ebook CDs for yonks now, based on the publisher's 'free license to share'. I don't think it's fair to judge something unless you've actually looked at it, even if only briefly. Take a look, perhaps, come to your own conclusions.
(And if you still think it's scum-of-the-earth, there's a hell of a lot of other Baen books on that site...)
-- Acyl
...not so much the quality of the storytelling or narrative. It's good prose, whatever you might think about the subject material.
When I bought Ghost and Kildar, the first two Paladin of Shadows books, I didn't know about the sexual content. I was browsing, and found the early bits of Ghost pretty engaging - I didn't follow it through to the denoument. And while I was there, I picked up the next book in the series and looked at the first few pages of that. So I decided to buy both books based on the quality of the prose.
Let's be clear, the books are well written. The action sequences are very good, and it's a nicely idealised view of contemporary military stuff. It takes a good book to make me think that, because my own uniformed experience left me pretty damn jaded about the Army for a very long time.
But. It deals with dark themes, very dark themes. Mainly sexual ones, but arguably the sex is just symptomatic of a more disturbing thread running through the stories.
I see the Paladin of Shadows books as the same sort of wanton escapism that makes people write...oh, I dunno, fanfiction where the chosen main character...goes around blowing the crap out of the bad guys and screwing everything with legs and mamillary glands. Consider Harry Potter fanfiction, for instance, or all those Xander-centric Buffy fics out there, those are good candidates for this kinda thing. The worst self-insert fanfics follow this pattern as well.
John Ringo does exactly that, but he does it better. For a rather unsettling value of 'better'.
Incidentally, the full text of the first four novels in the series is available here:-
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/11-U ... eBreachCD/
Presumably legally, since that site's been uploading the Baen ebook CDs for yonks now, based on the publisher's 'free license to share'. I don't think it's fair to judge something unless you've actually looked at it, even if only briefly. Take a look, perhaps, come to your own conclusions.
(And if you still think it's scum-of-the-earth, there's a hell of a lot of other Baen books on that site...)
-- Acyl