Picking Up The Threads

Where were we? I was reading Jerry Pournelle's and SM Stirling's third Man-Kzin Wars story, "In The Hall Of The Mountain King," realizing that I had not read it before. Pournelle's and Stirling's Man-Kzin trilogy is integrated with Poul Anderson's and I will probably reread the latter next.

However, when the laptop died, I temporarily stopped reading the Man-Kzin series becaue I had stopped being able to blog about it simultaneously. Also, wanting a change of genre, I instead reread Garth Ennis' graphic series, The Boys, which ingeniously integrates the fantastic concept of superheroes into an alternative twentieth century history of American business, politics and warfare. The Twin Towers still stand but not the Brooklyn Bridge. 9/11 happened but differently.

Ennis knows his comic book stuff and his real world stuff and also writes a lot of straight war fiction. Although he presents different genres in a different medium from the different perspective of an Ulsterman living in New York, Ennis' graphic fictions are comparable to Anderson's, Pournelle's and Stirling's militray sf - and he even wrote some sf in a Dan Dare revival. Common themes are military hardware, the experience of combat and the causes of conflicts. What more could we want?

Well, I would like an end to such conflicts but even then we would still have to study and read about military history. Larry Niven's ARM are out of order trying to suppress that history. The FTL interstellar scenarios of Anderson, Niven, Pournelle etc would at least ensure that humanity can survive even when weapons can wreck worlds.

Next, we must return to the Wars Against Men.