Why would he feel that way about the Looking Glass novels?  They're probably the series I've enjoyed the most of his.  Though I think he should have kept Two-Gun as an NCO, not an officer.

There’s nowhere to go with the characters without making them completely absurd, unless you kill them off, which kills your metastory... so there it sits, in limbo. Rather than see it fall into suckdom I’d bet ringo never touches it again.

(Note: I’m a fan of the series)

It’s not like Ringo is the only person to fall into this trap. Webber; George RR Martin, Jim Butcher have all done this with very promising storylines.  My opinion is that it often happens when a writer either gets too personally involved or lets editors/publishers drive the story, preventing certain story arcs from reaching their natural conclusion and instead feels compelled to stretch things abnormally.

Oh, I totally disagree with that.  I could think of a dozen different places to go with the characters.  Maybe not ALL of them, some would have to get transferred off to do bigger things, but some of them.  And then bring in new characters to crew the ship with them.

Regardless, I seriously doubt we see another Looking Glass book.

One was sketched out by John and Travis as a panel at a convention, but I don't know if either of them actually kept notes about it.  Travis has gotten busy with his various TV shows and also coaching his kid's soccer team, so it's been very difficult for them to get together.

I got under a graveyard sky for Christmas,  I'm putting it off for a little while until I catch up on some other books because I know that I'll get sucked in to a new series.  How many books are in this series and is it wrapped up yet?

4 books. Wish there were more as #4 seemed at a rush to wrap things up.

7 so far, with an 8th on the way. 4 books in the main series, 2 short story compilations from various authors, and another series being worked on right now with book 2 of that series due out in a few months.

If I win my bet, I’m clever and perceptive... if I lose, I get another book I like. Win/win

@LoneWolf545
@RikWriter

Here is my issue (yeah I reread all the Looking Glass and Troy books in the last week):

The problem with the Looking Glass books, and my reasoning behind saying the author(s) painted themselves into a corner is this:

It starts with a really good setup- get a physics nerd and a military sci-fi writer together, shake thoroughly, and see what pops out. Fuck yeah, I’m all in for that. Add in some fun characters (ok, maybe a little cookie cutter for the sci-fi guy if you’ve read his other stuff, but hey, we’re looking for a fun Saturday afternoon on the couch book, not a Nobel prize for literature here), and a neat antagonist species. So far so good. A few plot twists down the road (and a little forgivable general weirdness), and they’re batting a high average.  The series is rolling.

Then we hit a major rhetorical snag- they’ve made their antagonist too damned powerful. They wade through far tougher (and multiplanetary) folks than our little mudball, so (even with one nifty ship) there just isn’t a good way to win (or even survive). The enemy is just too powerful and too big. No matter what exceptional grit is on the side of old Terra that all that other starfaring cannon fodder lacked, there just isn’t a way for them to compete against a combination of (1) more and superior tech and (2) essentially unlimited numbers.

Ok, no problem... we make them so far away that it’s not practical to find us or get here if they did. The logistic bottleneck of the Looking Glass is apparently saving the Adar, so why not? Nope, we’ve written in that they know where we are, so the clock is ticking. They have the means to bring essentially unlimited force here without logistical issue. Maybe we’re not a threat or worth messing with... except that for some reason we wrote in that we’re specifically tagged for extinction and extra effort (though the Adar seemed a bigger threat, oddly enough).

We’ll give them some key weakness that can be exploited, that’ll work.  Well, not really. It’d have to be something that numerous others didn’t figure out (even ones much further along than us). Plus the whole “we are legion,” thing means they could take catastrophic losses and still win.

Well, shit - what’s left?

(1) we left an escape hatch of even more powerful species (even acknowledging that they’re there)- maybe we can let our heroes befriend them and get their bacon saved. Problem: that has a really cheesy deus ex machina thing. Looks amateurish (no true pro wants to do this), plus humans need to be the heroes, right? It’s anticlimactic to build up a story so well, elevate tension with the thrill of potential failure, then erase it with a snap of the godlike fingers of uberbeings.

(2) humans discover some mystery ubertech that saves the day. Problem: without the same deus ex machina that was a problem with option 1, it’s hard to make this feasible, since once again we’ve made our enemy too damn big. The only way this works is if the ubertech is godlike invincibility, but then we drown in a sea of cheesy, low-rent sci-fi cliche again. Authors with well-defined chops don’t like to descend into amateurish tripe like that, in general... it is bad for the ego (not that popular science fiction writers ever have inflated opinions of themselves).

(3) our overpowered bad guys can run out of resources!  Well, considering that they can apparently rebuild with anything organic, this is pretty much out. This means that, given their overwhelming size advantage there is essentially no way to kill them faster than they can regrow sans godlike interference from (1) or (2) above.

(4) humanity puts up a brave fight, but ultimately goes down swinging and is exterminated. We’ll call this the “game over” solution. That’s no fun, and if we get bailed out by the wave of Tuffy’s pseudopod or whatever we circle back to cheesy bullshit again (the “free life” escape).

This, basically, is why we’ll never see an end to this series. It’s a great and fun combination of physics dorkery and militaria, and it could easily be strung out for a few more books, but conclusion-wise, it’s a dead end, and I suspect our intrepid authors know it.

Dang Tex, all you forgot was the cheesy Tuffy can send them back in time to stop Chen's experiment from happening in the first place, they all live happily ever after scenario.

#4

I’m actually a fan, not hating at all... it just looks like a hopeless cul-de-sac for the author.  A (sad?) side effect to reading too damned much fantasy/scifi is that, after a point, how an author constructs a story is almost more interesting than the story itself. I throw down roughly 75K pages/year of fantasy/sci-fi. It’d be bad ass to be a writer- too bad I suck at it.

Hey LoneWolf 545,

By any chance.

Do you know if Mr. Ringo will have an audiobook book version of River Of Night?

@Tygon  Mike said they were working on it and he thought it *might* drop in August.

Tesco and Lone,

Thank you for the update.... Audiobooks and Graphic Novels Oh My!

@Tygon  the audiobook is now available

OH HELL YES!!!!!!!

Thank YOU!
Thank you!
Thank You!

Anything on another Empire of Man book? Goddamn that's all I want.

Edit: Just re-read the post above:
Hot damn!

I'm friends with Weber on Facebook and know people personally who co-write with him.  Wonder if he'd be annoyed if I asked him about it...

Plz. I'd love an update.

The Road to Damascus was a great book.

I'm waiting on it to come out on audible, I haven't had a lot of time to sit down and read lately.

How tall is John?  I'm wondering because a good number of his main protagonists are "below average height" and was thinking he might be writing them after himself.

I'm about 5'10, the guy on the left obviously.

I wonder what John thinks about what is going on in China right now, since it is so similar to the situation in The Last Centurion