Tag Archives: Larry Correia

Authors, Publishing

Baen Books under attack

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As you may be aware, I have been and am one of Baen Books’ authors (in electronic form in recent years). Going back to the time of the late Jim Baen himself, Baen Books has always honored the classic view of First Amendment freedom — they publish authors who run the political gamut from me (a Christian conservative) to Eric Flint, who is a Communist. All Jim ever cared about was telling a good story, and his successor Toni Weisskopf has carried on that tradition, in a way every American should approve.

Today we learned, via bestselling author Larry Correia, that Baen has come under attack as a threat to national security. (Cautions for language.) The precise target of the attack was Baen’s Bar, a free-wheeling online forum in which readers and authors interact. The Bar has always been an unrestrained sort of place, where people felt free to engage in hyperbole and “hold my beer and watch this.” Today, of course, you’re only allowed to hyperbolize if you have a government-issued Hyperbole Permit, so an effort is being made to close it down.

Because nothing is more offensive to a Leftist than any talk of revolution.

Anyway, if you’d like to stand up for free speech, you might want to buy a book from Baen. One of my e-books, even.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Monster Hunter International,’ by Larry Correia

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I hadn’t noticed until tonight, but our friend Loren Eaton reviewed Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International over at I Saw Lightning Fall, just the other day.

And here I am, reviewing it now.

I recently reviewed Correia’s Grimnoir Chronicles books, so I thought I’d try the Monster Hunter series too.

In brief, not bad. But I think it’s not for me.

Owen Z. Pitt is the hero of the series. When we meet him he’s an accountant, albeit a large and vigorous variety of the breed. One night he’s attacked in his office by a werewolf, and manages to throw the monster out of a window to its death. He’s badly injured, though.

During his recovery, he learns that such attacks are more common than the public is permitted to know. A whole government agency is devoted to dealing with the threat – secretly – and there’s a secret government bounty for each monster killed. The agency has competition – the private Monster Hunter International group, which recruits Owen, who realizes his heart wasn’t really in accountancy after all. Fortunately his soldier father raised him with fighting skills and arms proficiency.

Also there’s a beautiful monster hunter, a member of the group’s founding family, with whom Owen falls promptly in love.

What follows is basically a written version of a CGI-intense Hollywood summer movie. With very short hiatuses in between, one monster attack follows another, each one involving more terrible – and numerous – monsters.

And Owen, it seems, is the key to the destruction or salvation of the space-time universe, because of a series of visions he’s been having.

It’s all pretty overwhelming. I can see why the Monster Hunter books have acquired such a large, loyal following. Many of you are probably among them, and many others of you will enjoy the books if you try them.

But it’s frankly too much for me. I’ve decided I like my books a little quieter, a little more introspective.

There are occasional references to religion, and it’s stated as a fact that faith has efficacy against monsters. Any faith will do, however – the faith itself, not its object, is what counts.

Cautions for violence, language, and not very explicit sexual situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Spellbound,’ and ‘Warbound,’ by Larry Correia

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More than a year ago I reviewed Larry Correia’s fantasy novel, Hard Magic, set in the 1930s in an alternate world where real magicians have appeared in the human population, making the world rather different than the one we know. Germany was defeated magically in World War I, and has ceased to be a serious power; Berlin is a quarantined dead city, full of zombies. Japan decisively defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, and is now the dominant power in the east, under the rule of a ruthless magician.

Meanwhile in the USA, there’s controversy over how magicians (called “Actives”) ought to be treated. There’s a strong movement to round them up and mobilize them for government purposes. In Hard Magic we met the Grimnoir Knights, an international organization of benevolent Actives, devoted to fighting the evil Japanese Imperium, but forced to work underground due to public hostility.

The central characters in the trilogy are two recently recruited Knights. One is Jake Sullivan, a Heavy (he can manipulate gravity) who has proved to be unusually intelligent and is emerging as the effective fighting leader of the Grimnoir. The other is Faye Vierra, a poor “Okie” girl whose gift is Traveling (teleportation). At the end of Hard Magic, it began to be clear that she is perhaps the most powerful Active in the world. And not everyone’s happy about that, because the last time someone like her showed up, it didn’t turn out well.

Spellbound, the next book in the series, involves the arrest of a couple of the Grimnoir leaders by a secretive government agency, and a plot to commit an act of terrorism in Washington, DC, and to blame it on the Grimnoir. An unlikely ally appears in the form of a Japanese Iron Guard, a highly disciplined and arrogant fighter who has come to realize that the Imperium has fallen under the control of evil forces (it’s an interesting complexity in these stories that the main enemy, the Japanese Imperium, exists for the purpose of fighting a cosmic evil even worse than itself).

Warbound, the third novel, involves a journey by Faye into dead Berlin (where she learns things about her own power that terrify her), and a couple of suicide missions (by airship) by Jake and his knights to secure a lost weapon and to use it to prevent a Cthulhu-like evil from outer space from turning the power of the Imperium against human life itself.

Lots of fun. Interesting characters, and pretty good values (author Correia is a Mormon). There’s some mild rough language, and off-stage sex, but nothing very offensive by contemporary standards. I enjoyed the books and recommend them.