Grand unified books thread

[The Brain]

I got a question:

Can anyone recommend some good and reasonably modern Fantasy and/or Military SF? I am currently reading the Song of Ice and Fire books, one of the few things in these genres that I've read that's written after 1985.

John Scalzi's "Old Man's War" and it's sequels. fast reading galaxy spanning SF with a touch more than a hint of SS Troopers era Heinlein.

ty will check it out

[Ed Anger]

For Fantasy, the Joe Abercrombie books are pretty good. The blade itself is the first one.

[jimmy olsen]

The horrifying implications of Nazi logic are stated to be that the Jews were just the beginning of the Nazi ambitions for genocide; pretty clearly (according to the authour, who makes a good case), certain elements among the Nazis had the same fate in store for lots of other disfavoured nationalities, once the war was won.

I thought it was pretty well accepted that the Slavs were going to be next after the Jews?

I don't think there was really any one plan. Different factions of the Nazi hierarchy had different, often mutually contradictory, plans. Many wanted to run basically feudal estates with slavic serfs, carefully "culled" like spartan helots to ensure ignorance and docility. Others thought that this would inevitably lead to "race mixing" and wanted to essentially "deport" the slavs en mass (using exactly the same terms previously used for the Jews - 'deportation' being pretty clearly a euphemism for mass executions). The lands the slavs lived on would then be settled by German farmer-soldiers.

Problem was, where were they going to get the Germans from?

Wasn't the birth rate of Nazi Germany really high for a modern society, even for it's time?

After all the impression I had was they weren't going to kill the Slavs all at once. 30-50 million would be killed over the next 40 years. It would be rolling genocide followed by settlers.

[jimmy olsen]

I got a question:

Can anyone recommend some good and reasonably modern Fantasy and/or Military SF? I am currently reading the Song of Ice and Fire books, one of the few things in these genres that I've read that's written after 1985.

Mistborn by Sanderson

[Razgovory]

The horrifying implications of Nazi logic are stated to be that the Jews were just the beginning of the Nazi ambitions for genocide; pretty clearly (according to the authour, who makes a good case), certain elements among the Nazis had the same fate in store for lots of other disfavoured nationalities, once the war was won.

I thought it was pretty well accepted that the Slavs were going to be next after the Jews?

I don't think there was really any one plan. Different factions of the Nazi hierarchy had different, often mutually contradictory, plans. Many wanted to run basically feudal estates with slavic serfs, carefully "culled" like spartan helots to ensure ignorance and docility. Others thought that this would inevitably lead to "race mixing" and wanted to essentially "deport" the slavs en mass (using exactly the same terms previously used for the Jews - 'deportation' being pretty clearly a euphemism for mass executions). The lands the slavs lived on would then be settled by German farmer-soldiers.

Problem was, where were they going to get the Germans from?

Wasn't the birth rate of Nazi Germany really high for a modern society, even for it's time?

After all the impression I had was they weren't going to kill the Slavs all at once. 30-50 million would be killed over the next 40 years. It would be rolling genocide followed by settlers.

Yeah, they gave medals out for mothers who had the most children and stuff.

[Malthus]

For Fantasy, the Joe Abercrombie books are pretty good. The blade itself is the first one.

I second this; I actually prefer Abercrombie to Martin. For one, he finishes his series. 

[Malthus]

Wasn't the birth rate of Nazi Germany really high for a modern society, even for it's time?

After all the impression I had was they weren't going to kill the Slavs all at once. 30-50 million would be killed over the next 40 years. It would be rolling genocide followed by settlers.

That was one of the various plans mooted, certainly. It was not the only one, however. It competed with the notion of ruling estates filled with labouring helots, or even with forming puppet ethnic states ruled less directly by Nazis (the latter was never a favorite of the Nazi high-ups themselves; it was briefly discussed at the beginning of the Nazi conquest, some gestures were made in that direction during the war; but, never seriously entertained by Hitler or the SS, it basically fell out of favour when the Nazis appeared to be winning - only to be revived when they started to lose. Of course by that time, no-one took it seriously as anything more than providing cannon fodder). 

The fact remained that during the war itself, Germany faced serious labour shortages (and indeed much of the resistance to Nazi rule was stirred up by attempts to round up slave labour for use inside Germany itself).

The notion that a gigantic expanded German empire could be filled with ethnic Germans was always pure fantasy, even on a 40 year time-frame. Even before the war, Germany was dependant on low-cost immigrant labour for certain tasks (as a greatly shrunken Germany was after the war and indeed to this day - see the current controversy over immigrant labouring "turks" and "guest workers" etc.).

No amount of handing out metals for motherhood would change this. The ideal of German smallholders living on lands rendered free of non-Germans in an eastern empire stretching over all of what is now Poland, Ukraine and the Western half of Russia was never going to be realized in any sort of reality; and the more territory Germany took, the less likely it was. 

The fact remains that the war was begun on a wholly false premise - that the teeming masses of Germany needed "living space". In fact, no such teeming masses existed, let alone in sufficient numbers to fill eastern Europe. It was pure Nazi wishful thinking. The notion that the Nazis could forcibly breed enough Germans to artificially create the required 'masses' lacks credibilty, to say the least. 

[Queequeg]

I think "living space" means something a bit more complicated than that, though.  Germany is a small country, and when compared to the USSR and the USA it is naturally poor in resources.  I think part of what Hitler and the Nazis intended was not just (literally) playing Cowboys and Indians with the Slavs, but putting all of Russia's natural resources to use in German industry.  Interestingly, the Reich had something similar in mind after Brest-Litovsk; in some sense Hitler's policy was a radical interpretation of that. 

[Queequeg]

That said, I think a hostile conquest and settlement of all of European Russia/Ukraine/Belarus was always fantasy.  The land is alternatively swampy and heavily forested, and the people are already tough as shit.  Think Vietnam, only make it a dozen times larger. 

EDIT: This makes Germany's manpower problem all the more pressing; Germany would have lost a ton of men in the push to the Urals, the invasion of Britain and setting up some kind of Cold War with the US, as they never had the ability to mount an invasion with the remnants of the British Fleet and the American Fleet between North America and Europe.  They just would not have had the manpower to mount a constant war in the Urals or wherever they decided to stop in the invasion of Russia while simultaneously establishing colonies in Partisan-heavy areas.  Even if they did something crazy like institute polygamy or even allow German men to marry "Aryanized" Slavs, it would have been impossible. 

[Josquius]

I really don't understand what the Germans had against Slavs though.  Were the Balts in the same boat?  The Slavic, Baltic and Germanic people have way more in common than they do differences, from a genetic, cultural or linguistic standpoint.  Heck, they even look a lot alike; Hitler could have easily passed for Czech (and iirc his name is of Czech or other West-Slavic origin), so could most of the German higher-ups. 

Wasn't the excuse that the slavs had stolen historic/rightful Germanic lands?
They're a pretty common sense anyway, what with Poland owning lands that were German just a decade or two back and them being all there is to the east.

[Malthus]

I think "living space" means something a bit more complicated than that, though.  Germany is a small country, and when compared to the USSR and the USA it is naturally poor in resources.  I think part of what Hitler and the Nazis intended was not just (literally) playing Cowboys and Indians with the Slavs, but putting all of Russia's natural resources to use in German industry.  Interestingly, the Reich had something similar in mind after Brest-Litovsk; in some sense Hitler's policy was a radical interpretation of that.

Hitler certainly had a drive towards ecomonic autarky, but that was never his sole motivation. In point of fact, Hitler really *did* want to play cowboys and indians with the Slavs - quite literally; the fate of the Indians of North America was, allegedly, a common refrain with him. He took comfort in the fact that the Americans still saw themselves and were seen by others as the "good guys" even after slaughtering Indians to make way for their civilization. He thought that the Germans could (and should) pull the same trick with Slavs.

With Hitler, it was always a mistake to try to intertpret his utterances as not meaning literally what he said, because what he was saying was nuts. Many contemporaries made this mistake and in many cases, paid for it with their lives.

[Savonarola]

I'd have thought you'd have preferred his Secret History.

For one, it's reminiscent of the doings of your beloved Detroit politicians. 

That's next on the list.   

Well that was entertaining, but it reminded more of The Weekly Midnight Star than The Detroit Free Press.  I hope the part about Theodora performing in shows in which geese ate grain off her nude body is true.

Next up:  Gildas's Ruin of Britain

[The Minsky Moment]

Wasn't the birth rate of Nazi Germany really high for a modern society, even for it's time?

Not at all.  Birth rates in Germany declined precipitously after WWI; the Nazi pro-natal programs stabilized the collapse, but that is about it.

Malthus is correct that the Nazi settlement policy was a triumph of wacky ideological excess over reality, and ended up being compromised when the exigencies of carrying out a globla war forced reality to the forefront.  Both the helot and the extermination models were considered, and the precedent of the American frontier did seem to have a strange impact on Hitler's mind.  Neither of those models was remotely feasible in any conceivable time frame, at all.

The truth was that Germany in the 30s was is some ways still a backward country, with over 1/4 of the population still working in argriculture, most smallholders using rudimentary techniques.  Germany had too many farmers, not too few; the problem in the agricultural sector was not so much a shortage of farmland as a lack of capital, knowhow, techology and technique among the vast bulk of smallholders.  But Nazi ideology glorified the "Volkisch" virtues of these simple peasant types and rather than pursue the logical policy -- encourage consolidation of plots, transitioning displaced smallholders to industry and encourage techical development in the agrarian sector - they concocted a fantasy scenario of pure race German farmers establishing communal "marks" deep in the Ukranian breadbasket, lording over a remnant of enserfed locals like neo-carolingian knights.

[Savonarola]

Well that was entertaining, but it reminded more of The Weekly Midnight Star than The Detroit Free Press.  I hope the part about Theodora performing in shows in which geese ate grain off her nude body is true.

Next up:  Gildas's Ruin of Britain

About what I expected from a dark ages sermon; though there were some intersting glimpses of (what were then) current events. 

Next up: The Kojiki.

[Savonarola]

Next up: The Kojiki.

I have the turn of the century translation available on Gutenberg.  The author translated all the smutty parts into Latin.  I should have studied Latin better since the text reads like "God and Goddess meet and then LATIN LATIN LATIN and the child was born.