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Oh, John Ringo, no!
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A rather amusing review of the Paladin of Shadows series by John Ringo - it's actually fairly well-balanced and comes off as a guy telling you how both bad
it is and how much a guilty pleasure it is: http://hradzka.livejournal.com/194753.html#cutid1 But I'm still not reading it. ^_^ 
Heh.
It's James Bond for the post-9/11 set. I read it. I enjoy it. I don't feel guilty at all. This is an absolutely horrible review, that focuses all its attention on, perhaps, less than 10% of the total page count of the books. It's about as useful in deciding whether or not to read them as knowing that the Mona Lisa has no eyebrows is useful in deciding whether or not to stop in and see her when you're visiting the Louvre. -- Sucrose Octanitrate. Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
I can't say I disagree with the review. I have enjoyed Ringo's Posleen books. I have enjoyed his Fallen Earth books a great deal. I have read the first
three Paladin of Shadows books. They are excellent military action books, with a competent command of tactics, hardware and capabilities. Full points all around. They are also greasy. Wrap your body in bacon and run a marathon greasy. No John Ringo No does not even begin to cover how seriously fucked up these books are. The protagonist is a fucker, in every sense - and I do mean every sense of the word. The only thing that keeps you from wanting to see him kicked in the groin until his testicles are dangling out of his nostrils like gaily bobbing yo-yos is that he is surrounded by, and killing, worse people. Ghost is the worst, a self-indulgent wank-fest of the first order, from killing Bin Laden, to bondage threesomes with co-eds (with permission of their rope'n'leather happy mommas), to unlimited cash. It just keep rolling along like a rice-ball in a urinal, picking up every single diseased pube it runs across. The next two books are not quite so bad, and I will admit that I will pick up the fourth one that just arrived in paperback. They are I fear a guilty pleasure. I like good military fiction; I like good erotica. These books meet me halfway. The Mona Lisa analogy is not apt. If you left these books alone with the Mona Lisa you would return to find her tied up and being alternately penetrated and pecker slapped by them, while crying out pleasurable in a Romance language. Too crude? Compared to these books, it is just a glass of milk and a kiss on the cheek from a ball-gagged MILF.
And I bring this thread back from the dead for an update:
http://hradzka.livejournal.com/199220.html John Ringo's response is two thumbs up to the review. ^_^ 
No surprise at all there... PoS is as much a guilty pleasure for him to write as it is for the readers to support. He said so himself somewhere on his site,
but I forget just where; you can probably find it hanging off the Ghost subpages I;d expect. IIRC, what it comes down to is Ghost started as something he had to write for himself because the idea wouldnt leave him alone, it was write it even if the market was never right for it so the bunny would leave him alone long enough to finish work that he'd already been paid for. And it sort of snowballed from there. The PoS series seems to be a way for him to purge his darkside, so to speak, and he too admits that the storyline events are very... disturbing. I'm playing Jr. Freud here, but it kinda wouldnt surprise me that he's slightly squicked himself about how the success of the stories, or at least how they seem to keep evolving on him. But he cant stop writing, kinda like the way a Cobra is said to hypnotise its prey, ya know? Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky? That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry- NO QUARTER!!! -- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children
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
I'm no John Ringo expert. Heck, like I've mentioned before on other threads I don't really read Baen Book (I've gotten better at that, by the
way). I'm certainly not going to read neo-con revenge-porn (the first three seasons of 24 was enough). But I have to say that I wasn't as turned away from John Ringo's work as I was when I flipped through Von Neumann's War. Story goes, from what I understand, alien robot things take over Mars in order to take over Earth. And sheer American cussidness beats them back like the dirty stinking foreign invaders they are. Rah. And it's not like it's a bad idea. There's probably a very good idea in there. But Ringo and his co-writer just hacked it up. And let me say that it wasn't the politics of it that turned me away from this book. I have read Vernor Vinge and he's some sort of Poul Anderson libertarian capitalist. I've read and enjoyed Poul Anderson. No, no. It was the bad writing. Just, just awful. There must be something about John Ringo that makes people come back to his work. Maybe this was just a particularly bad book of his. Every writer has something that's awful. But this is it for me and Ringo. No more will I feel guilty about avoiding him. No more. Much like the Wolves of Calla was the last Stephen King book I will ever read, I am done with him. -murmur Oh, and, um, sorry about the rant.
Acyl: The owner of that site has specifically asked for and received permission from Baen to host the CD's on his site. It's not only legal, it's
endorsed by the publisher. -- Sucrose Octanitrate. Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
And, I should add, he plays it totally above board about it. ONLY those materials actually released on the promotional CD's are hosted, as the site owner
agrees with the philosophy of sometimes handing out the first couple of books in a series can be the best promotional material there is... Its almost how I got into Webber's Harrington series, though originally it was via a $2 promo priced copy of On Basilisk Station. War of Honor, and At all Costs I went straight to the hardcover because of the promotional cd in it. That reminds me. I really really need to find the cash to dig up the Echo Children's CD with the originals of the Harrington filk on it too. Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky? That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry- NO QUARTER!!! -- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children
"Vernor Vinge"
*Morgan's ears perk up as she hears a name she thinks she recognizes.* *Goes over to a Stack O Books, checks the copy of "Across Realtime" on top.* Ah! Not really sure what the political issues are (since I tend to ignore or flat out miss that sort of thing when I'm reading fiction), but I must say that the bobble generator is one of the most fascinating pieces of imaginary technology I've ever heard of. -Morgan. |
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