April 2020 - AMERICAN PRAETORIANS

Incident at Trakan Part 3

“Rare earth minerals, several fortunes in heavy metals, and more M’tait artifacts than anyone has ever seen, let alone had a chance to get their hands on without them turning explosive,” Troop Captain Nikoilo said. “No wonder they tried fighting us over it.” “It was still stupid,” Vakolo growled. They were standing in the entry chamber that the Caractacans had cleared. It was now the Sparatan groundside command post, with Sparatan troops on security at the various openings, some descending into the pits to explore the nether regions of the base. Vakolo himself was in combat armor, standing next to the troop commander at their hasty command and control station where a portable holo tank had been set up, updating the base layout and troop dispositions as reports came in. “They were vastly outnumbered and outgunned. They should have had the wit to surrender immediately.” “I have yet to meet a pirate who would qualify as a great thinker, Strategos,” Nikoilo said dryly. Vakolo just looked at him, but the Troop Captain’s helmet was as faceless as his own. He just shook his head. He should take the man to task for the remark, but if any of his men

Maelstrom Rising and the Wuhan Coronavirus

So, the question has come up, whither the Maelstrom Rising series in the aftermath of the Wuhan Coronavirus? It was originally floated as question about whether people would really want to read more about the world unraveling while it appears to be doing just that in real life. It’s since turned into a different question: Since the original backstory was written before the coronavirus outbreak, how would it effect the overall storyline? After all, there’s no mention of a global pandemic in the backstory. And how would the current crisis play out in such a way that the backstory remains mostly intact? I think it’s actually somewhat simpler than I might have thought. The economic fallout from all of this is going to be far worse than the death toll from the disease itself. The global economy is taking a huge hit, that will only get worse as quarantine measures continue. At the same time, global interdependence has also taken a blow that it might not recover from. (There were op-eds published several weeks ago, bemoaning the fact that the coronavirus has dealt a blow to globalization that it might never recover from.) The rapid spread of the coronavirus, both due

Incident at Trakan Part 2

Squad Sergeant Jules Ncube crossed himself as the dropship began its final braking maneuver, gee forces pressing his armored form deeper into his acceleration couch. He had not yet faced the M’tait in combat, and while the initial scans of the planetoid below had led Centurion Waylander to believe that there were no actual M’tait present, he had seen enough combat to know that the initial orbital reconnaissance was rarely to be relied upon entirely. There were always things below that the radar, lidar, and thermal and optic telescopes couldn’t quite see. The dropship began to shudder a little, and in the visual feed on the flatscreen in front of his face, Ncube could see the faintest trace of an orange nimbus start to flicker around the truncated, conical hull. It was nowhere near some of the fiery displays he’d seen on hot drops; the nameless planetoid known only as Trakan Target One had only barely enough of a trace atmosphere to warm the hull a little. Almost as soon as it had formed, the nimbus was gone, as the dropship’s drive accomplished more to slow its descent than any aerobraking could hope to. The horizon was a golden line

The LOTR Movies Aren’t Really Tolkien

Yesterday, a friend posted on Facebook that the Lord of the Rings movies did the character of Boromir dirty. I countered that those movies did every character dirty, with the possible exception of Sam and Gollum. The best parts of the movies are the visuals and the soundtrack. This is because Peter Jackson, Phillipa Boyens, and Fran Walsh don’t actually understand Tolkien’s work. They certainly lack his subtlety. (Yes, I’m going to go into some detail on what they got wrong. Some. Those who don’t like people trashing movies for screwing with the source material might want to stop reading now. Because I’m not going to stop, because it’s my blog.) And every character change they made watered down the character. First of all, Aragorn didn’t need an arc, where he agonizes and broods, worried that he shouldn’t be king because wanting power is bad. Because The Lord of the Rings isn’t the entirety of his story. It’s the culminating chapter of a long life of hardship, toil, and duty, that has led him to this point, where it is time to take up the mantle left to him. He’s got the experience, he’s got the hard-won wisdom, and he knows that