Do the dorsai books improve?
Got the first three dorsai books from my dad.
Read tactics of mistake.
What an awful mess of a power fantasy that was!
The main character is an arse who succeeds against "insurmountable odds" every time in a row with no failures and gets his way every time.
Add to that the author is capable of imagining soldiers being able to go into intense psychological states where they can run 50 miles a day or regrow their own knees, but only if they are men. There is only one woman in the book, and that woman falls deeply for the main character despite no flirtation, romance or pleasant words being exchanged.
The reviews on the back say its "humanly real" with a "strong philosophical foundation"...
He gets shot in the denouement and I was like ooooh maybe this will be comeuppance but no "your nemisis used the wrong sort of weapon: things designed to paralyse the mind don't work on someone with such precise mental control as you"
I know that a lot of old sci fi was like that but at least in the lensman series he occasionally fails at stuff.
This isn't even that old.
In 1975 when first published there were already women in officer training in the US army, thatcher was already head of the tories and indira gandhi had been prime minister of india for a decade.
To write speculative fiction full of military and politicians with not a single woman in it in the 70s is lazy and not so much speculative as conservative.
The ideas were nice but more of a military tactics written by an arrogant nerd than a novel.
Do the other books read better than this one? (I also got the next two from him)
Are there any that pass the bechdel test?