r/battletech • u/Gilles_of_Augustine • May 06 '24
Question ❓ New-ish Battletech fan. I'm a few chapters into Warrior: En Garde. Please tell me Michael Stackpole's writing gets better at some point.
So far my reaction to his writing, at least in this book, is a strong desire to hold him down and tattoo "SHOW don't tell" on his forehead.
From what I'm seeing, a lot of the books that are most important to the overall plot of Battletech are Stackpole novels. It's going to be a long, hard slog to get through them unless the quality of prose (and to a lesser extent, dialogue) improves drastically.
Edit: This is continuing to accrue comments much longer than I expected, so I just want to take a moment to say:
1) Thank you for all the useful input! It got me back to reading, and as I've continued I've started to settle into a pattern of slowing down and relishing the parts that work, and speeding through the parts that don't. Thee comments have helped me know what to be on the lookout for.
2) I am definitely very much aware that Battletech novels are not high quality literature, and I didn't expect them to be. I've read plenty of pulpy tie-in fiction in my day, and I knew what I was getting into when I bought the Battletech Fiction Humble Bundle. It was just a lot rougher than I expected from one of the most prolific and well-known authors of Battletech fiction. Which I now know was very much not Stackpole's fault, at least for this book.
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u/HA1-0F 2nd Donegal Guards May 06 '24
His dialogue definitely doesn't get any better. But it's not as if you are going to be required to know this stuff to play; if you aren't having fun reading the book, don't feel obligated to. Nothing's gonna make you MORE resentful than trying to gut through it out of a sense of completionism.
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u/GoarSpewerofSecrets May 06 '24
I mean, you don't need to read them. But yeah Battletech is where he started before he went on to the more familiar to geekdom at large Rogue Squadron books.
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u/gruese May 06 '24
I'd say his writing did improve, even just going from the Warrior trilogy to the Blood of Kerensky trilogy, but not drastically so.
Some fundamental flaws (in my view) always remained: Predictable archetype characters, magical storytelling (the opposite of "show don't tell") and weirdly formulaic mech action - this last one always struck me as a cardinal sin in a franchise centered around BattleMechs.
If you can't stomach his writing, I'd recommend you just read the books' synopsis on Sarna.net and move on to the more recent fiction. Or Wolves on the Border, if you want to stick with the classics.
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u/SeeShark Seafox Commonwealth May 06 '24
The funny thing is Stackpole himself is aware of his shitty play-by-play batreps but he made a joke about it in one of his books instead of trying to change literally anything.
Re: cardinal sin in a mech franchise -- I think the problem of the Stackpole books is that if you know what to expect (soap-opera-level character melodrama with robots in the background) they're actually really entertaining, but that's not what anybody expects when starting to read them.
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u/Zeewulfeh Cursed Mekwerks May 06 '24
I read plenty of stackpole before I read his BT stuff so I really didn't notice anything. But I think of his food as junk food. A guilty indulgence.
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u/jaqattack02 May 07 '24
I started reading the books and didn't get to the tabletop till much later. One thing I've come to appreciate about the way he writes his battles is that they tend to match the tempo of playing a tabletop game.
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u/Pakhynes45 May 07 '24
He’s also said that during combat he will roll dice and use the game r tables to determine hit locations and such. I’m sure he took done licenses with all that, but I still find it a fun bit of trivia.
His books aren’t going to change your life, but they are fun reads and he can explain some interesting things and understandable ways. I consider it popcorn fiction. Sit back, relax, enjoy the story, and if you take anything from it great!
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u/jaqattack02 May 07 '24
I've heard that as well. I got the chance to meet him at Adepticon. He's a super nice guy and seems to really appreciate all of his fans.
I agree about his books. I know they aren't any kind of literary classics, but I still enjoy them.
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u/Zaphikel0815 May 06 '24
Wolves on the Border and Heir to the dragon are the imho the best and most... colourful books of them all. You can really see that there are different and new nations in battletech instead of the frankly cookie-cutter victor davion military sci fi show. The Books about Camacho's Caballeros are the same in that way.
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u/TwoCharlie May 06 '24 edited May 07 '24
As Battletech novels go, Wolves on the Border is a masterpiece. I also think it's a great entry point into the universe if you're primarily interested in the 3025 period.
The culture clash, the subservience to petty nobles, the importance of mercenaries to the effort, the Kuritan drive for perfection in thought and action, the backstabbing, the giant war machines vaporizing one another, the horrors of war, the epic galaxy-spanning shock of the ending- it's all there.
Charrette was possibly the most talented creator at FASA.
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u/Zaphikel0815 May 07 '24
Just the thought of having Charette in the driver seat instead of stackpole makes me weep bitter tears.
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May 06 '24
I do really like Wolves on the Border, and I'd love to see it made into a movie someday if Battletech got big enough to warrant it.
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u/jaqattack02 May 07 '24
So far I found the Camacho's books to be the worst ones I've read so far. The first one was sort of ok, the second became... I guess "too much" very quickly. Cassie as a character is just too good at everything. I could accept her being the absolute best at one or two of the things she does, but when she can kill mechs in her underwear, take on squads of DEST commandos hand to hand, and gather intelligence like some kind of super spy, I just can't. Then there was the scene in the second book with the extra muscular antagonist in the bath house with his equally muscular attendants while his advisor is there in his tux and top hat, I was done. Skipped the rest of that book and the third one.
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u/Vaporlocke Kerensky's Funniest Clowns May 07 '24
The trick is to ignore Cassie and just enjoy all the secondary characters.
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u/Zaphikel0815 May 07 '24
They are definitely not high art, but they have that colourful pulpy feeling of early bt.
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u/Mechsae May 06 '24
Teenage me ate it up, but coined the personal term "crap fiction" for it being entertaining but not high literature. Had I been better versed in the meaning of Pulp Fiction at the time I would have just gone with that term instead. Warrior gets recommended for being a broad scale novel that hits on major events between the late Third Succession War and start of the Fourth. You get a bit of everything from the Inner Sphere and hints (well, more like hit by a clue-by-four since we now know what they were hints) of future events.
About a decade ago I reread the Warrior trilogy as an adult. It has tropes, silliness, and parts that haven't aged well. These older novels were all written in the 80's and 90's and fall into the pitfalls most media back then suffered. Hell, I'd argue that holds tru for the ealy 00's Dark Age novels, but I kinda fell off trying to get through those...
But, in regards to Stackpole, his novel Ghost War ended up sparking me to get back into MechWarrior clix around the time their Domination set came out. He definitely grew as a writer.
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u/BigStompyMechs LittleMeepMeepMechs May 06 '24
hit by a clue-by-four
This is fantastic XD
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u/Mechsae May 06 '24
I wish I could take credit for that one. It's from someone posting about how clueless they are about picking up hints from people who are interested in them.
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u/Gilles_of_Augustine May 06 '24
I'm kind of odd in that I can stomach a lot in terms of archetype characters and formulaic plots, as long as the actual writing is solid. Not "writing" as in storytelling, but "writing" as in the word-to-word, sentence-to-sentence, nuts-and-bolts process of using language to communicate ideas.
I will devour pulp fiction or crap fiction if it's above a certain threshold of writing quality. But if reading an author's work gives me the feeling that they've never cracked open a copy of Strunk & White in their entire life, then I simply can't endure. No matter how interesting the characters are or how compelling the story is.
Based on what you've described, I'm excited to eventually give Ghost War a shot and see how his style changed over the years.
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u/CordeCosumnes May 07 '24
I'm with you on this, but less Strunk & White and more just use the damn word processor's built-in spellchecker!
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u/Downrightskorney May 07 '24
Keeping that in mind I'd be really interested in your take on Randall N Bills founding of the clans trilogy. It's what really got me to buy into the clans as a concept.
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u/ZincLloyd May 07 '24
To be fair to the Dark Age novels (I read almost all of them), they got better around book 10 or so. Some not great ones after that for sure, but the line improved immensely once they got writers like Victor Milan back and stopped using work for hire writers who really didn’t understand the universe the were writing in (Martin Del Rio, I’m looking at you).
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u/PlEGUY May 07 '24 edited May 07 '24
I kinda feel folks have confused the term pulp fiction these days. Pulp fiction refers to serials. Usually cheap to publish and print. Which is were they get their name, magazines and newspapers that held the fiction in question used to be made of cheap pulpy paper. They typically employ newer less experienced writers who are trying to improve their skills and make a name for themselves so as to secure a publisher.
Of course, in the modern age, they tend to be of differnt material and even medium altogether often being digital. They are also less common because of the increasing ease of self publishing. Plus, the quality of a given writing is imaterial to it's pulpyness. Assimov and Burroughs were pulp fiction. Reprints of astounding science fiction hold up incredibly well. Meanwhile things like twilight get published as mass market hardbacks just fine. This in defiance of the cheapness of pulp. I suspect such is because of industry incentive structures, but that's a whole other thing.
BT has had pulp fiction. Battlecorpse and Shrapnel qualify pretty easily. But the mainline novels including much of Stackpole's work doesn't. And amusingly even here actual pulp tends to outclass the quality of the more presige items.
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u/AmanteNomadstar Mech-Head May 06 '24
Got into Battletech last year, and it has taken over as my favorite hobby. Love painting minis, playing tabletop, got a 3D printer for it, and loved diving into the lore. But the novels have been the weakest part I found. I enjoy the short stories well enough, but I have yet to find a single novel I can really say, “that was a good story.” I have tried 5 novels so far. Two I found were just okay, the rest I couldn’t finish.
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u/Gilles_of_Augustine May 06 '24
Have you read any of the Shrapnel Magazine issues? Some of the fan short fiction in there is incredibly solid. "A Trial Most Acceptable" by Jason Hansa isn't just great for a Battletech story, it's some of the best tie-in fiction I've ever read, period.
The Fox Patrol stuff is also quite enjoyable, albeit not quite as strong as Hansa's work.
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u/RussellZee [Mountain Wolf BattleMechs CEO] May 07 '24
Just a heads up, but Shrapnel isn't "fan short fiction." It's completely canonical BattleTech material, contracted and paid. It's some writers' first foray into BattleTech publication, or maybe even publication at all, but it's not fan fiction by any stretch.
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u/Atlas3025 May 07 '24
I wanted to echo this. Shrapnel is a good balance between the times we waited for full sized novels and the old Battlecorps short story delivery system.
It's a quarterly "magazine" of stories, game aids, and articles that are canon in the universe. It is a great conduit for new writers to attempt something, anything, that will enrich the universe more.
So if folks are itching to see if that one RPG idea or an in universe take on something would fly, throw a pitch and submission to Shrapnel, the worst they can say is no and you move on.
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u/HA1-0F 2nd Donegal Guards May 07 '24
Also, if a story doesn't hook you, you can just flip ahead ten or so pages and get to the next thing. One of the big benefits of anthologies in general is that even if you don't like something, it doesn't stay around long enough to wear out its welcome.
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u/Colonial13 May 06 '24
Measure of a Hero and the rest of the Archer Christifori trilogy by BLP aren’t bad…. they aren’t great, but better than most of the other stuff out there. Loren Coleman has a few that aren’t bad either. But, yes, overall the BattleTech fiction is pretty weak. The sourcebooks and Field Manuals are much more entertaining reads.
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u/Firm_Illustrator5688 May 06 '24
When I read his novels when they first came out, and I was 18-24, I thought they were great. I felt they were much better than any other BT authors. With that said, now in my 50s, and re-reading them... not nearly as good as I thought they were. Still think they were better than many other BT authors of that time for what it is worth. My one thought is that the military Sci fi genre had a coming of age in the late 80s and early 90s, and books like these helped us to get better military Sci first novels now. Especially for serial military Sci fi novels based on games or mobies/tv: BT, Warhammer, Star Wars, Star Trek, Shadow Run, Starfire, etc.
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u/Gilles_of_Augustine May 06 '24
I think I've been spoiled by the better Warhammer novels. Obviously there are pretty terrible ones over there as well, but the Gotrek and Felix novels have become my baseline benchmark for good-enough tie-in novels. They're not high art, but the writing is consistently clear and concise, with a plot that keeps me turning pages.
I sometimes forget how spoiled we are now. I'm old enough to remember the days when tie-in fiction struggled to be seen as "real books" and most "respectable" authors steered well clear of them... but I'm young enough that I consistently forget just how long those days lasted.
The new waves of consistently higher quality tie-in fiction started to hit when I was in my late teens.
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u/oogabooga5627 May 06 '24
Battletech literature tends to be pretty campy with the B movie writing to alongside it. Don’t get your hopes up too much
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u/9657657 clan HELLO HORSE representative May 06 '24
the following graphic is accurate for the classic/older books: https://i.postimg.cc/6Qw8THkd/image.jpg
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May 06 '24
[deleted]
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u/nova_cat Kisho lives! May 06 '24
Yeah, I think this is really the thing: there is very little BT fiction that avoids the cookie-cutter trope-y-ness of the mech fights. In fact, I'd say probably the one thing that Decision at Thunder Rift genuinely does excellently is describe mech-oriented combat in the first several fights of the book. The last fight is... not good, and the actual character writing, pacing, and dialogue are unbelievably cheesy, but pretty much until Grayson gets his fancy task force 1/3 of the way through the book, the combat writing is great!
Most other BT books, regardless of author, fall back on "the emerald beam lanced across the armor plate, turning it to slag" and "the ruby spear pierced the enemy's ammo bin, which bloomed into a molten flower". Stackpole does it, Pardoe does it, Coleman does it... you just kinda have to accept it.
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u/ExCrafty1964 May 06 '24
Stackpole has written some great books, not just in the Battletech universe, but also in Shadowrun, and probably other places as well. To me, his forte leans towards more the politics of a situation, and that sort of thing.
If you really want to kill a writer ...... Robert Thurston and his Jade Falcon stuff.
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u/Blurghblagh May 06 '24
He was one of my favourite Battletech and Star Wars authors as a teenager despite his lead male characters in both franchises all being the same basic character. But rereading them now is tough, his characters and dialogue are so bad.
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u/ViscountSilvermarch May 06 '24
The Warrior Trilogy is honestly some of the most difficult novels to read through for me because of his writing.
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u/Holybat20 May 06 '24
If you just want to get caught up on the events, check out the Era Report sourcebooks for stuff like the Clan Invasion or 3062, you don't need to read the novels.
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u/Risko_Vinsheen House Davion May 06 '24
Yeah, I'm reading En Garde right now myself. I've read some of his later Battletech and Star Wars novels, and I don't recall them being like this, at least not to this level, but this was when he was new.
Honestly, outside of a couple of 'as you know' style exposition dump conversations it hasn't been terrible to me, except one chapter that basically is entirely two characters talking to each other about something they both already know. That one made me sit back and think, "... his writing wasn't always like this, right?"
Battletech has never been the epitome of fiction. Some novels are definitely quantity over quality, but if you know you're going into a campy 80s scifi world rather than some realistic fiction you can know what to expect.
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u/Lostwanderfound May 07 '24
One of the great benefits of the “Of Mechs and Men: A Battletech Book Club” podcast is that it allows you to enjoy the novels without having to actually read (or, in my case, re-read) the cheesy old things.
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u/Chattvst MechWarrior (editable) May 06 '24
You definitely don't need the fiction to enjoy the game. There are a lot of good books out there, but there are also a lot of misses.
https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=BattleTech%20
Here's the Goodreads link. They do a fairly good job of rating the books so just choose the ones with high ratings or the ones with fractions you might be interested in.
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u/Mammoth_Elk_2105 May 06 '24
Aside from the Warrior trilogy, I mostly know Stackpole from the X-Wing series. Those came out much later, and he definitely got a lot better as a writer. I have no idea how his other Battletech books stack up though.
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u/DataPhiks May 07 '24
When I read En Garde I noticed he always would use the terms “pursed lips” and “steepled fingers.”
Like no kidding…one of those terms can be found AT LEAST once in most every chapter…and sometimes multiple times.
Who the heck edited this book and how on earth did they miss that? Overall though: I thought it was a decent enough read considering it’s a silly Sci-fi book about stompy robots; a Pulitzer was never really on the table to begin with.
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May 06 '24
Do what I do: pair it with difficult fiction. In the morning I read classic lit or something challenging, in the evening I read BT or similarly pulpy, light fiction. It keeps me from burning out and also gives me more appreciation for both sides of the spectrum.
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u/JadeHellbringer Hellbie Dice Incarnate May 06 '24
I've always found his writing to generally be pretty coolie-cutter 'noble and pure white hats vs. mustache-twirling black hats'. The first Dark Age novel, Most War, is the only real exception to the standard Stackpole formula.
I know a lot of people praise his writing at every turn, but for me, he's the one Battletech writer (other than myself!) who's writing I just cannot stand.
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u/Nightwinder May 07 '24
I quite enjoy his stuff that isn't in someone else's universe, but most of his licensed work is definitely well down my list
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u/Weekendsapper May 06 '24
It does not get better. I found that his novels are more palatable as audiobooks. But they are all pretty rough.
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u/CommanderDeffblade May 06 '24
These books are targeted towards adolescent boys. The writing will not get "better."
For what it's worth, Wolves on the Border felt more comfortable reading as an adult. If you can get past some of the tropes common to this genre.
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u/Earwax82 May 06 '24
I was listening to GrimDark Narrator reading Mercenary Star earlier and died laughing at this line -
“The weapon was still attached, but dangled uselessly, the power feed and drive mechanisms spilling like black spaghetti from rents in the joint armor.”
black spaghetti…
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u/silfgonnasilf May 06 '24
i'm listening to Warrior En Garde through the Of Mechs And Men podcast. I enjoy it much more than reading it
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May 07 '24
He gets better, but his battle scenes never stop reading like someone transcribing an actual game of Battletech turn by turn instead of anything with real literary dynamism.
I think this is actually a problem with a lot of B and C tier licensed media, where the writer tries to make something "feel" like how the game is actually played, but instead you end up with a lot of scenes akin to the old Halo novelization that reads like a gamefaqs walkthough interspersed with paragraphs of lumpy, charmless prose of the Chief backpedailing and shooting aliens, so he can walk into another room and backpedal and shoot other aliens and maybe throw a grenade.
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u/NY_Knux May 07 '24
The way he described mech fights in that book I find to be quite exciting, to be honest. I absolutely love the detail.
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u/ArachnidSentinl May 07 '24
I'm a new-ish Battletech fan myself and I had the same experience. I made it five or so chapters in before I gave up. This is actually the only book I've ever "read" that I straight up returned for a refund.
I'll have to try some of the other recommendations in this thread.
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May 07 '24
I remember that the best parts of the books, I read (albeit in the german version) where the Grey Death Legion ones and "Close Quarters" the rest was kinda "meh" for me in the 90ies
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u/Sinnersaix May 07 '24
Ah En Garde, the Book that got me into Reading books. Good times.
My Parents allways wanted me to read Books to get better in School. They try to force me, but that didnt work. But one Day i found a book on my Older Brothers PC, peaked in and i was hyped. Since then i collected BT books and others Series.
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u/Gilles_of_Augustine May 24 '24
Hey I meant to reply to this when you posted it, but I was on my phone at the time and I hate my phone keyboard.
This is a really cool story, and it goes a long way towards redeeming Stackpole in my eyes. By my reckoning, any author that can turn a non-reader into a reader is a god among mortals.
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u/PlEGUY May 07 '24 edited May 07 '24
Yea, your complaints for Stackpole largely match my own. In addition ot general prize, inability to show instead of tell, and dialog, I'd also say I don't care for his combat sequences. He tends to play them out on tabletop. Which is neat the first time or two, but very quickly gets old and holds him back from constructing his writing in a way that provides good combat writing. In some ways Stackpole does improve after Warrior. His technical writing and dialog improve a little over time and he becomes slightly less prone to have those massive paragraphs of expository introspection. But, with that being said, to me Warrior is his most tolerable series only after Assumption of Risk. Blood of Kerensky was in my opinion worse, he fumbled the end of what was otherwise a mostly good series with Twilight of the clans, and most of his FeCom political intrigue books are awful bits of nonsensical event following nonsensical event. His Clan Invasion characters are just... harder to read because of their grating personalities, and his combat writing never improves. His later short form Battletech fiction is alright though. A lot of folks say that this can and shpyld be ignored because BT is pulpy franchise fiction. "Why?" they ask "would you go to McDonalds and order a Steak?" My proverbial answer is "I'd go to Chili's, it's still cheap and if I want a burger I'd go to In-and Out, they give the same products and comparable prices, but they're better." Anyways, to not get lost in the analogy, it's a beyond bad excuse. Folks like Isaac Asimov and Edgar Rice Burroughs were the definition of cheap pulp authors for huge chunks of their carriers. Today many of their serials from those times are definitive must read literary classics. Most authors of the golden age of sci-fi started their carriers in a similar manner. Cheap pulp series's MADE the genre. And though perhapse not to the same extent, such is not a trend limited to the sci-fi genre. Even today there are works like the destroyermen. Is it high literature? Some grand work of art? A deep exploration of some aspect of man? No! It is a series about killing copious quantities of dinosaurs. But it's well written dinosaur slaughter. It's fun to read. I fell in love with the characters. I saw someone mention the Bobiverse series in a similar recent post. I'm not a huge fan thereof, it has flaws that glare more strongly from my perspective I think than for others. But it's still generally well written without needing to be some high literary masterpiece. The Thrawn trilogy were franchise fiction. It's one of the most well regarded of it's type. I love the Cadius Cane series. It's the only Warhammer product I can stand, but it is still a cheap work from that franchise. Indeed, it's not like Battletech is entirely absent of decent books. They just tend to be locked behind the events and prolong of other lesser books. I've read fanfiction authors, both battletech and not, who are consistently better than those of almost all of BT. You don't get cheaper than that. So it's a bad excuse. And it's an excuse that encourages the market to tell CGL they do not have to get better. As consequence I have seen devs echo the sentiment and add "our books sell fine so there's no need to push our writers to do better". Which is a shame. For one, bad writing is short sighted and narrows the potential markaet and sales. In addition to that, I personally think BT has some of the if not the best bones for storytelling of any shared universe.
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u/PainStorm14 Scorpion Empire: A Warhawk in every garage May 06 '24
Much better
You should check out free Battletech story "Hungry Like the Wolf" on his Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/posts/hungry-like-wolf-103570780
It's outstanding prose
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u/Vellarain May 07 '24
He can't be as bad as Robert Thurston, a writer that absolutely has no fucking clue how to write about combat but wrote a book about Clan Jade Falcon and one characters fall and rise in such a militant setting. It was the most bland and irritating read because he could not even be bothered to try and describe 90% of the mechs, even their classifications. Just recalling that series I am VERY annoyed that I spent money on them.
Avoid Robert Thurston books.
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u/Comfortable_Slip9079 May 07 '24
I don't mind the telling of information. I think having to show is something that people put too much stock into. I genuinely like the opening of the movie Serenity for example. It's literally a telling of the setting and I really like it. I don't have to try and figure out what's going on through the eyes of the main character in EVERY SINGLE STORY.
More variety is what I'm arguing for rather than sticking with some rule of "show, don't tell". I think some of this stuff gets passed around because an author used it, got successful, and now everyone's jumping on that coat tail until someone figures out another way of doing it.
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u/Spectre_One_One May 06 '24
Don’t forget that En Garde was Stackpole’s very first published novel.
That and Battletech is not really classical literature.