What is the worst sci-fi novel you've ever heard of, Veeky Forums...

Completely unironically I have to say Starship Troopers. Like the novel had cool ideas with the power armor, but they were just window dressing for poorly written slog.
Like holy shit the tone is all over the good damn place, and every character was a lifeless strawman.

If not that, then that Gaunt's Ghosts novel were they return to that daemon planet from Traitor General. So much wasted opportunity, and ingeneral it seemed like Abnett was really phoning it in by that point.

You aren't suppose to read it for the adventure, your suppose to read it for the ideas it's bringing out.

But the ideas are pretty right wing, almost Facistic.

Not the guy you responded to, but that's the entire point.

Also if you want something more like Starship Troopers was billed as on the cover, try a book called 'Armor.'

That's not a problem you idiot. It's literally someone talking about there beliefs and dressing it up as a story about a man fighting a war.

I read that book, it was actually kinda good. I'll take creativity over "writing skill" anyway, especially given that most authors' idea of "writing skill" means blandly sticking to convention.

Your reasons are entirely subjectve anyway. X doesn't interest you but Y does, and you wish there'd been more Y than X. Stop pretending this isn't anything more than tastes.

I'm thinking of some soviet sci-fi I have read, but I can't remember author, titel or even plot because it was so boring. Spy is sent to city to do stuff... learn something about mind controll plans or something. Hangs out in cafés all day and goes to a bunker club/ghost house and learns basically nothing the whole book.

Another one was about some glorious soviet space men following the first directive and doing absolutely nothing as a revolution goes down on a medieval planet, contained in a framing device with kids playing in the countryside that doesn't relate to the plot in any way.

pic unrelated

That book is hilarous. It opens with a militaristic quasi-Fascist human society locked into a galactic war for survival against aliens. And how did this society come into being? Well the book spells it out for us: it was because juvenile deliquents were making the streets and parks unsafe at night. They'd gotten out of hand because liberal parents didn't discipline them properly and now the nations of Earth were falling into chaos. Only thing for it was to make 'em all go to military school! No active service record, no right to vote.

It's typical right wing paranoid shit. Look throughout recorded history and you'll see people banging on about this same thing. Just in the last 50 years we've had Teddy boys, mods and rockers, punks, ravers, hoodies and chavs all denounced as a wave of youth terror threatening to destroy civilization. A new flavour of danger every decade, and yet somehow civilization stayed healthy and hale.

The actual biggest threat to civilization is hard right old men who are terrified of everything. They tend to overreact.

There may be worst, but this one will give it a fair fight.

Really? Paranoid right wing is what destroys nations and empires, not decay from within?

You sure about that?

You know you're just proving his point, correct? Because bullshit like this that you're spewing is proving him right.
>biggest threat to civilization is hard right old men who are terrified of everything
No. It's people who don't know, or think they're some protagonist who knows better.

Yes.

yes. reactionary thinking is the decay from within.
when nations are rising, they respond to new challenges (Teddy Boys!) with new solutions.
Paranoid old men respond to new problems with "muh traditional values," which has never worked for anyone ever.

/off topic

Go be a faggot somewhere else.

I think it has more to do with the fact that fantasy sort of has an innately lower barrier of entry for worldbuilding than sci-fi does. Geographical impossibilities and racial inconsistencies can just be explained away with "magic, bitch" by the average fantasy writer, whereas even those not going for pure hard sci-fi might still balk at tackling the genre at all just because they know its fans are going to scrutinize the physics of the universe down to the last particle. Which is a shame, because I really miss the days of more fantastical, campy sci-fi.

Except this is incorrect.

The looting and rioting of the Disorders is never related to liberal values, it's all occurring because a catastrophic world war just happened, and governments are in collapse. Ultimately, the veterans decide to take manners into their own hands to save society, as they consider themselves the only ones fit to rule at that point.

And Heinlein never purports the military rule as a utopia. In fact, the justification given for the continuation of the system is literally "The practical reason for continuing our system is the same as the practical reason for continuing anything: It works satisfactorily."

what about that really weird one with the mary sue race of like hermaphroditic space furries that are also telepathic?

Wraeththu?

Because the answer to your question and OP's is Wraeththu.

The Giver

Anything thing hard left or right is a bad idea

like if we go far left we get "Brave New World"

>Wraeththu
Fucking yup, I guess I wanted to forget, and then I remembered all over again

Everything in the Otherland series after City of Golden Shadow, and even that was kind of shit. The setting and plot were great but you couldn't go two pages without a paragraph explaining some shit about south african aboriginal culture that was only tangentially related to the situation at hand.

I imagine just searching for that book is going to be rather hard with such a generic common single word for it's name.

Is there anything else more iconic/unique to the book? Author name? Important character?

>Another one was about some glorious soviet space men following the first directive and doing absolutely nothing as a revolution goes down on a medieval planet, contained in a framing device with kids playing in the countryside that doesn't relate to the plot in any way.

Hard to Be a God by Strugatskys, right?

Sorry, should have clarified. It's titled "Armor" by John Steakley. Cover is a guy in, well, sci-fi armor.

Caliphate, Tom Kratman. Unfortunately, it's impossible to say anything bad about the book without being accused of being a gay black Jewish tumblrina who was just offended by the concentrated TRUTHINESSS, but like, seriously, the book is just horrendously written. The prose is absolute garbage, the plot is riddled with holes, the characters make 80's B-movie cardboard cutouts look like Dostoevsky's greatest masterpieces and if it was any clearer that the whole thing was just written as political (and literal, for that matter) masturbation material with everything else coming as an afterthought it'd have been a John Ringo book (except John Ringo has a sense of humor, which I can respect with SOME of his own bullshit "America Fuck Yeah" novels).

It also has a character who speaks only German (it's a plot point that she does) make a mental joke to herself (presumably in German), which can only work as a pun in English. This makes her giggle.

Tiny little case of inattention by the author, assuming that Kratman's insanity doesn't extend to the belief that all humans instinctively think in English, but damn if my autism doesn't trigger.

Note that this paranoia isn't particularly politically aligned, or at least can not seem like conservative to outsiders.

Example, the French being assholes to Muslim women.

I think it was partially because LOTR was a thing and because Harry potter was a thing.
Suddenly there was fantasy stuff and folks reading books, so why not cash in on that?

It's basically shitty lovecraft in space. With no shoggoths. And strangely well liked by many, it teaches us nothing except that communication with alien minds might be hard? No shit.

Sounds like a typical hard scifi novel in the style of Jules Vernes.

I once read through an "erotic" sci-fi collection. It had Niven's Man of steel, woman of kleenex which I still like to this day, but otherwise it was some freaky shot. The one I can still remember to this day started out with a man scraping off mold from toast to make for breakfast for himself and his wife, and ended up with body horror as the mold gave them telepathy and polymorphism.

I think that's more of a case of "writing skill matters more than scientific accuracy", which is an equally valuable lesson to young science fiction writers, especially around these self-aware parts. Veeky Forums and Veeky Forums and /m/ are FULL with people who think that they're 8 hours with a keyboard away from publishing their first science fiction bestseller, because they know all about the equations you need to show to prove that you can't have stealth in space, but all of this is completely irrelevant if you let your knowledge drown out the story. People don't actually READ science fiction to be shown how heat dissipation works in a vacuum. Even the most hardcore diamond hard science fiction fan would view this as a BONUS to an otherwise well-written story.

(same goes for wannabe fantasy writers and sticking it to mythology/folklore/"the literary sources" people around here like to jack off to. Nobody gives a shit about from faithful to Norse mythology your dwarfs are if all of your characters are flat).

If you didn't like Starship Troopers' pro-fascist and militant ideology and want thought provoking, heartfelt, oftentimes terrifying powered armor space war adventures with a political message which is as subtle as it is poignant, you NEED to read The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. Like, right now. It was actually written as a literary retort to Starship Troopers by a traumatized Vietnam vet who disagreed with Heinlin's politics, but that doesn't matter because the result was just a gorgeous, beautiful book.

Bernie lost you parasitic fuck, fuck off to north korea if you are triggered by democracy so much

when donald wins i hope you workshy leftist cucks do the honourable thing

read like 20 pages, it was just bad

It's not Wraththu, I think I know what user's talking about. It's a Star Trek fanfiction that went completely out of control. Let me google it for a bit...............

CHAKONA SPACE. Bernarde Doove.

That's what you were thinking about.

>People unironically believing that Starship Troopers wasn't a satire.

Fuck off, I've read far too much of Heinlin to fall for this meme. The man literally believes his own shit. If he exaggerated it in Starship Troopers to the point of hilarity, that was just his own fault. He totally WOULD have gone for a society that doesn't let you vote if you don't serve in the military. Don't they do that in Israel, or something?

One of the bad guys is called Rob S. Pierre. Fucking subtle, right?

The first two books are frequently broken up by rants on how terrible the writer thinks universal basic income is. Regardless of your opinions on it, the rants are obnoxious, far too long and totally out of place. This happens less often in later books, but the main character, Honor Harrington, becomes more and more Mary Sue. She starts off as this awkward loser who is autistically good and spaceships, but she goes on to be beautiful and immortal and perfect and she has a psychic cat that lets her instantly know the intentions of anyone else. You can tell when someone is evil because they disagree with her. 'Good guys' always agree with Honor, while everyone who disagrees is fucking satan. She's hailed as this amazing spaceship captain, but every victory is because she showed up with some new shiny bit of tech that is going to turn the tide of the war.

And the worst fucking thing? Pic related, this classy motherfucker, is the best character in the series. Lester fuckmothering Tourville is actually fun to read about. Him, and allies like Shanon 'Oops' Foraker and a couple of others are actually interesting charracters and have interesting stories. But because they're not from MANTICORE, BEST EMPRIE EVER, and specifically not HONOR HARRINGTON, BEST CAPTAIN/COMMODORE/ADMIRAL/POLITICIAN (also all politicians are evil, except the ones that are extremely pro-military), they barely get any page time. You might ask, but user, of course the main character should get 90% of the page time, why is this a bad thing? Well user, that's because Honor's stories are fucking boring, with her easily winning every challenge the faces and being beloved by every character within 100ly that isn't portrayed as some sort of evil retard. Meanwhile, the plot for Lester Tourville is a struggle between his own government on one side, a superior military on the other and his own doubts about what he's doing.

>Don't they do that in Israel, or something?
Nope. It's a law that gets suggested every few years by the extreme right, but not even Israelis are that nuts. It never came close to passing.

Doesn't make sense anyway. If you've got mandatory service in the armed forces for every adult, why then throw needing to have served to be able to vote on top of that? You've basically already got that working now, but people don't have the option to not serve.

Additionally, Israeli women are the fucking hottest.

I may be confusing a few different novels in here, but isn't Honor Harrington the one who was genetically engineered for extreme gravity conditions/genetic perfection/something (I think), which makes her super strong, super tall, super long lived and super healthy, and she views it AS A DISADVANTAGE because being tall is unfeminine, she looks too young for her age and she needs to eat like 20% more than a regular person?

>He totally WOULD have gone for a society that doesn't let you vote if you don't serve in the military.
There is nothing wrong with this. Switzerland is far better off than Sweden. The lessons of collaboration and discipline are priceless, if nothing else.

So basically Sword of Truth with a woman instead of a man.

I think the issue is that there a few ways of being exempt from service, and from what I remember from Israelianons on /pol/ apparently there're more cases of those with each passing year. It's something to do with being a certain kind of religious, IIRC, which is apparently easy enough to fake that the Israeli government is afraid that like 60% of the youth will just do it one day and their conscript army will shrink to nothing. The "can't vote without service" idea was meant to give people an incentive not to try and cheat the system to get an exemption.
I also remember that there's a thing where the IDF will not force you to enlist if you are declared mentally or physically unfit, and there's some kind of huge industry of corrupt doctors in Israel who will declare anyone unfit for a bribe, resulting in a situation where upperclass rich kids can cheat their entire SOCIETY by having themselves declared unfit so they can go to and finish college 3 years before anyone else in Israel, giving them a massive professional edge.

fuck, *at spaceships

Anyway, so while Honor is gallivanting around stealing the husband of a maimed cripple (who is totally fine with this), becoming the FIRST WOMAN to be some sort of lord on what becomes the second most powerful planet in the setting, being the best space captain ever, and literally becoming psychic (because the cat wasn't enough, right?), beating a professional duellist her first time trying and being rich and famous and attractive, sometimes there will be a few pages updating us on what the actually interesting characters are doing.

Because they're not Honor, there's some actual tension as to if they'll succeed or not. They struggle against their government and its commissars, while MANTICORE, BEST EMPIRE EVER, hands them their ass in every engagement because MANTICORE, BEST EMPIRE EVER has better ships and Honor, who can't lose. There's no tension with anything involving MANTICORE, BEST EMPIRE EVER, because all through the series they have better ships and Honor Harrington on their side. The idea that they're outnumbered becomes totally irrelevant about four books in, though it wasn't much of a hindrance before. Lester Tourville, Shanon Foraker and their lot, meanwhile actually have interesting goals (save their nation from both the invading fleets and its own government), a chance of failure (because not everyone loves them instantly), and some interesting character development (which commisars are dickwads? Which will actually fall in with Tourville and the like?).

If you must read them, read Echoes of Honor, because Honor isn't in it that much while she escapes the impossible to escape from prison planet.

Yes.

It's a combination of both those things, yeah. The religious Orthodox population has always been a thorn in the side of Israeli society because of its fucked up place in it originating from the messy process of founding the country (long story short, they got enormous political privileges in return for supporting the motion). Since Orthodox religious Jews marry younger and breed way more than secular Israelis, and since they get equal democratic rights, they have a huge political pull since nobody will be elected if the Orthodox population doesn't support them. One of their uses for this political pull is to get themselves exempt from service. Their percentage in the population keeps growing because of how fast they breed, resulting in a vicious cycle where one could see the IDF shrinking over the years as more and more Orthodox Jews are exempt from enlisting in it.

A few years back, there was a gigantic political cockup in Israel revolving a law that would force them to enlist anyway, but they still managed to get the last laugh: part of the law required that if the Orthodox enlist, they get to serve under "suitable conditions", fitting their spiritual needs. As anyone of you who's lived alongside Orthodox Jews knows, their spiritual needs are fucking insane. The IDF had to rebuild entire bases and rearrange its structure and bureaucracy in horrendously inefficient ways to insure things like that men would never see an "immodestly clothed woman" (recall, the IDF is 50% women and a military uniform is considered immodest), all food would be kosher, soldiers would get to pray and perform rituals when they need to, no work will be done on the Sabbath...

They ended up causing the IDF more damage by ENLISTING in it so that they have to be accommodated than by never doing so in the first place.

They had it in Switzerland, iirc. It was why women there couldn't vote until the 70s.

>had

Name one civilisation that fell due to the 'overreaction' of old men.

>It actually taught me a very important lesson, that writing skill is more or less independent from creativity.

No, it's a case of storytelling skill being independent of one's commitment to realism. Far too many writers think that being absolutely, excruciatingly realistic (or at least, excruciatingly pedantic about the details of their fictional universe) is more important than telling a well-paced, dramatic story.

Qu'ran schools at least teach their pupils that they can be suicide bombers the whole week.

How's Judaism on suicide? Do they at least have a martyrdom culture to make death in hopeless battle religiously cool?

>The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Yeah, that's a good one.

The worst book I ever tried to read was part of Janet E. Morris's High Couch of Silistra series. It was basically unreadable.

amazon.com/High-Couch-Silistra-Janet-Morris/dp/0553105221

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_suicide

tl;dr Jews are anti suicide, but consider death from suicide to be in the same category as death from disease (since their definition involves mental illness), meaning offering sympathy, etc.

Views on martyrdom in Judaism are very mixed, one of the most famous Jewish "war story" of all times is that of Masada, which ended with a mass Jewish suicide, but half Rabbis say they did the heroic thing while half say it wasn't justifiable theologically.

Like everything in Judaism it's mostly an excuse to argue.

Anything by L. Rob Hubbard. That man's writing stunk so badly he had to turn his books into a cheesy cult/pyramid scheme to make a living. You know your sci-fi sucks when all it's good for is bad cult literature and an even worse John Travolta movie.

Black Library books.

What's weird is his collaboration series with John Ringo, an equally shitty writer, is actually pretty good.

The Empire of Man series is quite good, yes.
tl;dr: spaceship transporting an unloved, pampered prince of the Empire of Man and his honor escort battalion (IIRC? probably smaller than that) crashland on a primitive planet and they try to escape. On their way, loads of aliens of differing cultures and tech levels, and the bad guys that ruined the ship in the first place.

Take back that shit you said about Lem and nobody gets hurt user.

It's a Polish novel, its title would translate to "colors of banners". It had one neat idea of dolphin brains controlling spaceships. The rest of it was, in equal parts:
>security procedures described with all the details
>fetish shit with removable dicks, completely out of place
>wanking over how conservatives are better than progressives because muh honor and muh tradishun

I hated Feed, which was basically "Teenagers ruin everything and this girls going to get brain cancer because of terrorists."

Tell that to Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson.

Hey, I think that's it! Props for getting that from my ramblings.