(Part 2) Top products from r/HFY

/u/hewholooksskyward

Your bono-fides and progenitors are starting to show here.. :)

I'm starting to read references and connections to the following:

1. Wing Commander, the games
   
   
2. The Wing commander Extended Universe book series, specifically this book: https://www.amazon.com/Fleet-Action-Commander-William-Forstchen/dp/0671722115
   
   
   
3. Not to forget the Dahak series by David Weber
   
   
   any other pre-Internet inspriational material I've missed? :)
   
   
   On a side-note, I wonder how Allie would fair if after the mission, post-war, she & Katherine get a explorer-class ship & mission and run into something like the Moties from Niven/Pournelle duology, if you're read that series?
   
   
   That said, as I've loved every series you've written in tthe past, I love this series,
   I love the characters & the story; I can't wait to see where all you take to by the end of this story!!!! :)
   
   
   Thank you again, and please keep track of yourself & your health as you work on the next section!
   
   
   Word to your mother!

Well, I'd order them all, but Sword Staff and Crown is apparently $355.00 for a Kindle edition, and while I like supporting you, Wordsmith, that's a bit rich for my blood.

Kindle Price: 355.00inclusive of all taxes

https://www.amazon.in/Sword-Staff-Crown-Lee-Hadan-ebook/dp/B07XVT4P1G

You might be interested in the book Not by the Sword. It's a worthy read.

The Amazon blurb:

>Not by the Sword tells the inspiring true story of how a Jewish cantor and his family changed the life of a virulent white supremacist leader. This riveting account begins in 1991, when Cantor Michael Weisser received his first threatening phone call from Larry Trapp, Grand Dragon of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Nebraska. But Cantor Weisser and his wife, Julie, refused to be intimidated by Trapp's escalating threats. Instead, they made a stunning offer of friendship. After an emotional confrontation with the Weissers, Trapp shocked everyone—including himself—by resigning from the KKK and breaking his ties with other neo-Nazi leaders.

>Not by the Sword recounts Larry Trapp’s life as a racist, his startling transformation in response to the Weissers’ kindness, and his subsequent crusade to redeem his past. Kathryn Watterson movingly describes how one family feared, fought, and then forgave a man who had tried to destroy them.

>This gripping tale gives the reader an inside view of hate mongering and offers a powerful testament to the triumph of the human spirit and the transforming power of love and tolerance.

Lovely story, BTW. The militaristic ones are fun, but this one... This one is special. Thanks for that.

Thank you for the links.
The wiki one actually helped quite a bit, which is honestly a rare thing for wiki articles to do ;)

Got some more questions, if you don't mind:

Is information transfer possible between something traveling near speed of light, and something else?
Say we have a "room", and inside it a person is traveling at the speed of light, in what ways, if any, could people outside the room interact with the person inside, and vice versa?
I guess what I'm asking is: Is it possible for the traveler to detect events outside the room and/or is it possible for people outside the room to detect changes/events inside the room?

If information can't be exchanged; in the same scenario of the near lightspeed room:
Every X minutes in the travelers reference he stops, and exchanges information with people outside the room, then goes back to near lightspeed for another X minutes.
Wouldn't this effectively be a time machine? Since every time he'd stop, a much longer timeframe would've passed by outside the room?

What I'm getting at is:
If everyone is in such a room, wouldn't that effectively eliminate things like, say, processing speed for a computer? Just let it take as long as it wants, travel faster to counteract the effect?
So if an operation takes a year in "normal" time, pop into the near lightspeed room for a second, and a year will have passed outside it, but only a second for you?

And if everyone is traveling at near lightspeed, but separately? Kind of a reverse lockstep society?


Sorry if I'm being stupid, I just find the idea fascinating.

I really enjoyed The Cross Time Engineer. It's about being dropped into the medieval era, but still works. (Later books get further "out there", but I still enjoyed them.)

I would recommend checking out the book "The Case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin. In it he covers how we could begin to colonize mars within 10 years.

I would recommend reading it or listening to the audio book

Use whatever makes the most dramatic and compelling story, and whatever reinforces the narrative itself. I'd probably start with throwing the reader into the middle and fill in the background as the main story progresses. For example, how Paolo Bacigalupi builds the setting in The Windup Girl or John Scalzi allows the setting to unfold in the background of Old Man's War.

You can always go back and write prequels, first contact stories, and the like afterward. Remember, Tolkien didn't start with the Simarillion either- he just threw the reader into the setting.

The question however is this: who's your target audience? Adults or young adults? If you can get an illustrator like Drachen to work with you (cause damn he's good), That would be something to consider in and of itself.

This isn't exactly what you asked for but "On Evolution's Shore" and it's sequel (and short stories) by Ian McDonald are amazing and criminally under-known. It has to do with people investigating a crisis in Africa caused by an alien "spore" crashing into jungle and terraforming it into "Chaga." I don't want to spoil things but, the Chaga isn't as hostile as is first believed (the gov version is that it's like the Chtorr). It tailors itself to maximize the habitat volume of it's occupants and allows them to make biotech. It eventually pits humans using Chaga derived / hybridized tech against "Mech" Tech. Sort of like the Yuuzhan Vong.

https://www.amazon.com/Evolutions-Shore-Ian-McDonald/dp/0553374354

Do you have any plans to add some of the lesser known/connected Jverse entries? Guttersnipe by /u/Crocodilly_Pontifex, Stranded by /u/Exotic_fish, Silence and Ravenous by /u/Mister-Book, and any others I may have missed could make a cool collection of side stories like this. Provided, of course, that /u/Hambone3110 approves.

Ironically enough one of the songs on there by Leslie Fish also inspired a book of short stories,

https://www.amazon.com/Carmen-Mirandas-Ghost-Haunting-Station/dp/0671698648

Unfortunately it is out of print and was never released as an ebook.

surprisingly well written, part two is already out and part three is out in january

http://www.amazon.com/Libriomancer-Magic-Ex-Libris-Book/dp/0756408172

it has a few odd relationship parts but it doesnt take from the book in my opinion.

Invitation to the Game: Book (thanks /u/zimtastic, found it doing a search of /r/tipofmytongue for your posts :) )

I coudn't find an audiobook anywhere, sad as I normally only have time to listen to books anymore. Still, there it is.

As for an ebook, doesn't seem to be availiable. The only one I found was a not exactly techy teacher has uploaded the whole book as part of her lesson plan, and it is "public", that shows up as the 5th result when searching for it :(, just using "Invitation to the Game" too.

Unless you want to wait to 12-31-2030 to get it from Booksamillion

This reminds me of the ending of the book The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.

Here's the first book.

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Dragon-Donn-Kushner/dp/0380707691

Couldn't find a source online.

may I introduce you to this book.

Which one? I think Salvation War was cancelled after someone uploaded it on a torrenting website. You can find the third Worldwar book on amazon, though.

https://www.amazon.com/Upsetting-Balance-Worldwar-Harry-Turtledove/dp/0345402405

Look, if you thought the out of the way industrial center of Stalingrad was a difficult fight then Moscow would have been an apocalypse. The Soviets had the place trenched and defended on a scale that would have eaten and spit out entire army groups. It was a preface for what would be prepared for Kursk. We look back on the sewers of Stalingrad as the apex of urban warfare hells? Imagine all the subway tunnels in Moscow. There was in no possible conception a way for the Soviets to lose Moscow unless it was the Germans getting supplied by the US and even then its a big if. Also, "Japanese assaults in the East". Do you...what...what? Did you forget that the Japanese had tried that, got stomped because the IJA high command had deluded itself and had to sign an accord with the Soviets? They were also far more preoccupied with China and couldn't have been arsed to spare the men. It was actually the fresh recruits from that non-front that revitalized the Soviets (where did you think Zhukov was the first months of the war? Gulag?).

Also as a note, Germany stumbled into a lot of luck to get as far as it did. The French and British spent the previous two decades in detante and reducing military expenditures (Germany on the other hand put 10% of its domestic budget towards the military). They sat on their hands when Hitler had all of his forces in Poland and then proceeded to act with all the speed of a geriatric panda when Germany took weeks to switch focus and bring it down on them. As sad as it is to say, the Germans were much more willing to bite the bullet and fight than the Franco-British Alliance. This gave the Germans all the initiative and they used it to its fullest.

On the Soviet front there are two huge reasons benefiting the Germans in their successes. The first is that the Soviets were still in the process of moving their defensive positions to the new borders after Hitler and Stalin had split the continent. Thus when Germany invaded much of the Red Army was in disarray and able to be outmaneuvered fairly easily. Secondly, the Soviets had also decided to embark on one of the most ambitious and comprehensive rearmament and upgrade programs. This left them with not enough of the new stuff and not enough replacements for the existing material. People will often say "oh, Germany should have waited a year!" or some other such bollocks but the fact of the matter is that the timing of Barbarossa was one of the few things they got right. It was the Red Army at its weakest and they couldn't afford to wait. Their failure laid more in the fact that the Germans did very little in the way of studying Soviet tactics and thus were wildly surprised when they ran into the third echelon of Soviet forces (Deep Battle dictated that they be three echelons deep, the Germans expected two, smashed those two, then got roundly stalled when they ran into the third).

Also, the Germans were still using horses for transport. Good god that was a terrible way to try and supply an army whose supply was expected to run in the hundreds of kilometers.

Hey there. So I wanted to reply to your statement and maybe compare your research experience to my field experience, and maybe expand a little bit on some of the points you made, or refuted.

BTW, I don't know anything about your background other than your writing here, so please don't misconstrue what I say as a judgment on you or our experiences. My perspective comes from 8 years as a US Army soldier, with a few overseas tours, and 4 years as a LEO.

I think a good insight into the original OP's comments is LTC Dave Grossman's book On Killing. Grossman breaks down his own research into the killing impulse, conditioning, and how killing affects the individual's psyche. I would recommend reading both of his books (On Killing and On Combat) if you haven't done so already.

Although I'm not really qualified to speak to the vast socio-cultural implications of large-scale conflicts (you mention that "War is a contest of wills"), I can talk a little about the process of getting one person to kill another without creating massive psychological trauma. (FYI, my experience is US centric, so I'm not remotely qualified to opine on the traditions of other countries.)

Paramount to this process is the concept of "dehumanizing" the enemy. Common slurs used to refer to the enemy throughout our history (kraut, charlie, hajji, raghead, VC, sand-nigg*r, japs, chinks, etc) exist as a way to dehumanize the enemy, making them much easier to kill from a psychological perspective. Humans, as a default, are social creatures. From an evolutionary standpoint, any true violence between groups is a threat to their survival, hence the prevalence of posturing, ceremonial battles, proxy fighting, etc.

I think it may be helpful to step away from a discussion that centers around "soldiers vs warriors" and focus more specifically, and fundamentally, on "humans that can kill without suffering crippling emotional trauma vs humans who can't." If we recognize that basic distinction, then we can begin identifying the underlying characteristics that separate these groups from one another.

The main traits trained into a group of individuals that are expected to kill another person as part of their duties (military, law enforcement, etc) are:

• the ability to dehumanize the enemy,
  
• the ability to overcome the physiological response brought on by imminent interpersonal violence,
  
• the ability to sustain an appropriate response after the act of violence has been committed, and
  
• the ability to consistently engage in this behavior without an exceptional extrinsic motivator (like somebody threatening your life or your loved ones' life, a heightened emotional state like anger or hatred, etc).
  
  I think it would be fair to say that many people can exhibit one of these behaviors, but the application of all of these together requires extensive training in desensitization, stress-response control, and muscle memory.
  
  Killing is an unnatural state of affairs for most people, especially in our fairly evolved social behavior models. That is not to say that people are incapable of violence when presented with no other choice; and also not to imply that there are way more confounding factors than can be explored in a Reddit comment (mental illness, cultural tendencies, extreme hunger/poverty/trauma, etc). But I think it is important to recognize the common threads that tie violent acts together.
  
  I'm definitely not going to try and refute every single point you've made, since
  
  

1. I'm not a sociologist, just a former cop/soldier, and
   
2. This debate is very far from being resolved within the professions that perform this type of research.
   
   I just read an article that contradicts much of what I've read on the topic (and what I've said here!), but the argument is still quite heated and lively.
   
   So, anyhow, this is my opinion, and I'm glad we can discuss this openly. Cheers!
   
   ^(BTW I love your writing.)