John Ringo (1) (1963–)

This book certainly has a distinctive voice. It is the voice of a know-it-all who won't shut up even though you stopped buying him beers two hours ago. In this book he tells the army how they should be doing things, the middle east how they should be governed (while shooting quite a few of them), a new farm wife what to cook her farmer husband for breakfast, and finishes with an interminable, oops, stirring, speech telling every citizen of the US how to be a proper citizen. No need for show more personal liberty when you have John Ringo, oops, Bandit Six, to tell you the right way to think.

A wankfest for people with a John Wayne fantasy. show less

If you have a nostalgic yen for a space opera with don’t-even-ask technology and lots of big, mean critters to shoot, Ringo and Taylor have you covered. The eggheads and the SEALS, now dubbed Space Marines, from Into the Looking Glass have a few shiny new recruits and an FTL starship cobbled together from some alien tech and a submarine design. It has an impressive bowsprit, so Vorpal Blade is the only possible name. Ringo knows his audience.
March Upcountry, which he co-authored with show more David Weber, is better. They steal from Xenophon—a step up from Lewis Carroll. show less

Weird and wonderful. If you liked the Ghost series by him, you'll love this - it's not quite as nasty or explicit, but there's an awful lot about the technical aspects of blowing people and things up. Very heavy politics - Ringo is well over to the right. I actually find this fascinating - being a (more or less) liberal myself, I'm quite familiar with liberal stereotypes of conservatives. I enjoy seeing the reverse. Ringo displays his stereotypes very strongly ('tofu-eaters' is a frequent show more identifier), but when it gets down to people (only in the last third or quarter of the book) he's (character, and apparently author) perfectly willing to accept that there are decent people on the 'other side' and with training they can become quite acceptable...

Interesting variant on apocalypse and post-apocalypse story. Civilization doesn't fall apart, despite a double hammer-blow of epidemic and sudden mini-Ice Age; it's all about hanging on until you can work through these problems and get back to normal. More or less. The first part of the book Ringo spends a lot of time talking about how different areas handled the problems - these are the most annoying to a liberal, because he states categorically (and with liberal use of stereotypes) that the 'tofu-eaters' fail in every possible way. The middle is the character's own adventures - not only fights his way through a destabilized Middle East but leaves it on the road to recovery (reasonable borders are a good idea, but it's a bit Mary Sue that he can produce them so easily). The last section he's back in the US and dealing with individuals instead of stereotypes - and wonder of wonders, there are idiotic conservatives and capable-of-thought liberals to be found...that's the best part - most realistic - to me. And where-o-where did that wife come from? It stops rather abruptly, I'd have liked a little more or at least an epilogue. And there's one logical hole - when he's swept off to the Pentagon. If the MSM are as much worshipers of the President and her policies as depicted, why are questions about the farm policy a problem, or why are they happening at all? Sorry, weakness.

Overall a not-bad book. Part primer on how civilization can fall apart, part men's adventure story (blow things up! and girls!), part an interesting exploration of people getting things working again. Better than Ghost but very much in the same vein. I like Ringo better when he co-writes with David Weber, but I'm glad I read this and may well re-read. show less

Well. Leaving aside the ideology, this is a colonizing-a-new-planet romp. The protagonist gets to go down to the planet and hunt - with rifle, speargun, and (mostly) nets and snares - in order to feed those on the station above. He's very ingenious, as are his protogés, and aware of his limitations - which are mostly, he dislikes paperwork and doesn't understand money flow. But if it's explained to him where and how money is needed, he's really good at figuring out how to create it. Nice show more guy; I particularly liked his tendency to poke holes in people's assumptions.
And then there's the ideology. The story is, aliens "rescued" humans from a destroyed Earth, put them in stasis and terraformed a bunch of planets, in a bunch of systems, for them. Then they divvied up people by their political preferences, and this is the story of the "conservative" group. Who are all, of course, go-getters and entrepreneurs and are going to create wonders on this planet with the stuff the aliens gave them - yeah, right. Ringo does a nice job of showing a variety of people, handling this switch (The Transition) with varying levels of grace. He also sets it up on Easy mode - because a system of rugged individualists works best in a society made up entirely of healthy young adults. So that's what they have - everyone's rejuvenated to about 20. But again, not everyone takes it well, not everyone can handle the separation from loved ones based on ideology... And some are fine with it. Nice variety.
There is one scene that is so counter to the tone of the book that I seriously wonder if someone else inserted it. The protagonist and a small group start speculating about how the Liberal system has been worked out - and the whole scene is people spouting the most ridiculous stereotypes (it will start out parliamentary and quickly go to Russian-style communism, so that the ones in power get the good stuff and everyone else gets nothing) (this is particularly amusing since they're at a fancy party with high-end food, and it's been shown there are still people looking for work...). Given that the protagonist has already been shown to puncture such unthinking stereotypes... It just doesn't make sense. Someone decided they couldn't be real conservatives if they didn't believe that kind of nonsense? Dunno.
And then there's the economic structure. Everyone starts with 2000 credits, and by the end several people are throwing around multi millions (to produce more useful stuff, but...). Are there now people who have no money at all? Or where are all these credits coming from? It's presented as a closed system - credits don't magically appear when, say, someone brings up a load of meat from the planet. The provider gets money, but it comes from someone else's store of credits. I'm no better at financial stuff than the protagonist, but the whole thing doesn't makes sense to me. Therefore I ignored most of it and just enjoyed the story. On that level, it's fine. But the more I think about it the less sense it makes.
And of course, what needs to be written next is the liberal system. And the Islamic one, and... Whatever else Ringo picked as divisions. I doubt they'll actually be written, but it would be interesting. show less