I'd prefer military fiction books that are ...
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This poll is lame. (Score:4, Insightful)
Where is the I DONT CARE button? We should at least have one to prove the point of how lame this poll is.
Well written (Score:5, Insightful)
One, two and five (Score:5, Insightful)
Radio buttons are not the right entry method for some polls.
All of the above (Score:5, Insightful)
... original works (Score:5, Insightful)
Recent - but not too recent (Score:5, Insightful)
I enjoyed the Cold War thrillers (both military and espionage) that were popular in the '80s and '90s. Military fiction these days seems to be mostly focused on terrorism, which makes for boring adversaries (rabid dogs that need to be put down versus an intelligent, wily, and rational enemy).
Re:Not at all (Score:2, Insightful)
What terrible social ideas did Heinlen put forward in Starship Troopers?
The main one that people always talk about is that in the novel citizenship is contingent on having served in the military. That, and the general interpretation that the book is pro-military (e.g. GP's "utopian vision of war").
Personally, I think that we've been so conditioned to see metaphors and morals in our stories that we automatically assume that there must be a subtext to narrative choices. The whole concept of Chekhov's gun - if it's worth mentioning, it must be critical to the plot. We always have giant semaphore flagmen pointing out the dramatic ironies, and cluing us in to where the plot is going. Have a significantly different social policy without having it lead to absolute ruin? The author and the book must be promoting that policy. Show war and violence without immediately showing the horrors and highly negative consequences? You must be glorifying it. There's something of an inability to just take things at face value. ("Society is ruled by superintelligent apes?", "Okay, that's cool and different." versus "The apes must symbolically represent mans' savage nature - if things turn out well, that must mean the novel is a cautionary tale against progressivism and urging us to throw off what dehumanizing technology and return to a "noble savage" state, but if things turn out poorly, it's obviously a paean urging us throw off our base nature and become more civilized and technologically advanced.")
But then again, I managed to read and enjoy the Chronicles of Narnia as a child without really picking up their Christian subtext, and was absolute shite at the "by painting the room blue, the author is hinting at the character's repressed longing for his mother" game that high school/university literature classes played, so I might have a different perspective on this that most people.
(This is the point in the argument where someone pulls out some quotes from Heinlein, attempting to prove that a pro-military mindset really was the impetus behind the book. Personally, I don't really care. If literary critics can argue that the author's intent is irrelevant and the book has obvious homoerotic subtext, I can certainly argue in the other direction and say that it doesn't matter what the author intended, the cigar is just a cigar, and the book is still enjoyable.)