Re: Printed works of future combat

At 12:49 8/13/98, Thomas Barclay wrote:
>There is a series by an author whose name I forget (but I will look
>up) on La Legion Etrange in the future (FSE Legion if you wanted to
>put it roughly into the FT universe). It had two or three books that
>were all worth looking at. Including a good discussion of 'defeat in
>detail' as a concept.

You're probably thinking of the Fifth Foreign Legion series by Andrew
Keith
and William H. Keith Jr.: March or Die, Honor and Fidelity and a third
one
which escapes memory. Good hard-SF tactical grunt combat.

There was another series about the future of the foreign legion (Legion
of
the Damned was one of the titles) whose author I forget. This series was
a
bit more on the space-opera side, but was interesting in that most of
the
legion (especially those sentenced to join because of capital crimes)
were
cyborged into various types of killing machines.

>There's some current series featuring US Marines in the future, whose
>name an author I forget (again, I'll look on my bookshelf).

For what it's worth the Aliens Colonial Marine Technical Manual actually
goes beyond the cheese one expects, and deliver's some surprisingly well
thought-out development of the Colonial Marines: rough TO&E, and
detailed
looks at equipment, tactics, etc with some good 'color' bits thrown in.

David Drake wrote a novel called The Forlorn Hope about a mercenary
regiment much like the Slammers. I believe this predates the Slammers,
actually.

In the short story side of things: Any of Jerry Pournelle's There Will
Be
War series is good source material. Joe Haldeman did a couple of themed
anthologies: Supertanks and Body Armor:2000 with interesting tidbits.
David
Drake has a collection called The Military Dimension, and there is also
the
War World shared universe (ed. by Jerry Pournelle) which varies wildly
in
quality, but the short story Necessity by SM Stirling is well worth the
price of Vol 1: The Burning Eye (if you can still find it. Baen Books,
1988)

On the fringes: Hyperion by Dan Simmons has (in places) some detailed
combat sequences, including a rather good Zero-G fight. It's also an
excellent book, very thought-provoking,  and deserves to be read for
that
reason alone. Space Vikings by H. Beam Piper is on the space-opera side
of
things, but still a fun concept. He also wrote some more hard-sf type
stories (collected in Federation and some other book), neither of which
I
own, unfortunately :(

------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
Jim 'Jiji' Foster / jfoster@kansas.net / Jiji @ AnimeMUCK / TIP #28 /
PPIG #42

"The wisest and best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions,
may
be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.
"
    - Jane Austen, _Pride & Predjudice_