SFBRP Listeners discussion

Just listened. Ha, loved the line, after Part 1: "Unfortunately, that isn't it. It goes on." Yeah, pretty good summary of the Jack Crow storyline. What sticks in my mind is the Felix novella at the beginning, so I forgot how much the Jack Crow storyline drags on and on and is so lame. I agree with most of your observations. I also remember hating the casual violence and misogyny of Jack Crow. The whole book probably would've been much improved by just cutting everything after Part I and making it a novella with a tantalizing and unexplained backstory.

I would say this: you mentioned the problem with the technology used is that it seemed like nobody had tried it out and worked out the bugs: the way I remember the book it was implied that humanity really hadn't done this whole "interstellar war" thing much: this was their first foray into really using these suits, so they were pretty untested. I'm listening to a lot of WWI reflections, and there are many examples there of how when new military technologies are introduced, they often are subject to gaping design flaws that are obvious in retrospect, but were not noticed by the bureaucracy that rushed them into production and adoption. I think the implied Earth gov't incompetence (I agree, a staple of military SF, but also fairly accurate if you look at military history) is a good explanation for that whole thing.

I get the idea that sometimes war technology is introduced during a war, and the kinks have to be sorted out, but the suit tech is old. Or so it seems. Those marines were had done many combat drops. There had been enough suit history to include a series of suit Olympics, a competition so popular that the winner was famous throughout the human worlds. This is nothing like the introduction of the tank in WW1. It's more like the introduction of the Spitfire in WWII, where they took an existing sports plane and converted it into a fighter. But the worst thing isn't that there were obvious technical limitations, and that's what the story was about, it's that there were obvious technical limitations that even the author didn't seem to see or understand. You know what is included in any vehicle going into rough terrain? A rope. Or cable. Everyone going somewhere new should take rope. Rope makes everything easier, from getting up and down things, to tying things together, to dragging a comrade from a battle. Did john Steakley never go outside before?