Tag: Conquistador

Book of the Week: Conquistador.

Ah, Conquistador. Picked it up to look up something about farming, reread the whole thing. Alternate history, in which an officer (and Virginian fighting-man) discovers in 1946 a stable dimensional portal to a North America undiscovered by Europeans. It’s a great book, visibly showing the influences of Silver Age science fiction (particularly H. Beam Piper), but it’s also telling that S.M. Stirling needed to quote Niven’s Law* in the foreword. I imagine some of the hate mail was epic.

#commissionearned

*Well, one of Niven’s Laws:

There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author.

The term is ‘idiot.’

Book of the Week: “Conquistador.”

Conquistador by S.M. Stirling is an… interesting book. The premise is classic Golden Age science fiction: a H. Beam Piper*-esque hero creates a stable dimensional portal to an alternate California that Europeans have never colonized, or even visited.  And so, in classic Golden Age style, the aforementioned Great Man of history goes and carves out a nice little kingdom for himself and his fellow freebooters… and that’s where the book gets a little enjoyably awkward, because S.M. Stirling quite enjoys reminding us that our grandparents and great-grandparents were from a completely different people.  The book is not precisely a dystopia, but the society it describes is perhaps not somewhere you’d want to live.  Read about? Sure.  Live? …Not so much.  But it is indeed a page-turner.  Especially if you like your adventure fiction to come with appendices, and who among us does not?

And so, adieu to Digital Divide.

Moe Lane

*This was so totally a homage to H. Beam Piper.  Stirling made it pretty explicit, in fact.

Looking for something to read? (SM Stirling)

(Today’s writer: S.M. Stirling)

A lot of people love to hate this particular author – and, given his remarkable lack of suffer-fools-gladly, even by the standards of a genre where it’s practically a prerequisite for writing in it, it’s not entirely surprising – but it still remains true that Stirling’s a crackerjack writer. For this one, I’m just going to toss out a few authors & topics: if you’re already interested in any of them, check out the book associated with it.

That should get you started: fair warning; all of those are alternate history.  I’m fond of the genre, you understand.