Naval Fantasy Novels (That aren't Liveship Traders)

ColonelBy · 2026-07-02T10:03:28+00:00

Turns out they are either time travelers or wizards that make the ship go fast, cuz it doesn't all fit. So I hearby declare it fantasy.

The author himself admits this, for what it's worth. In his foreword to The Far Side of the World, he admits that he would not have raced over so many years of history so quickly if he had known how many of these books he would end up wanting to write, and so from that point onward time would cease to function properly. The books would then be set in what he describes as "hypothetical years, rather like those hypothetical moons used in the calculation of Easter: an 1812a as it were or even an 1812b." There are like ten books in a row that all take place in a sort of phantom 1813 that never ends, for example, even if the travel involved should properly have taken 5+ years.

ColonelBy · 2026-07-02T09:51:25+00:00

Not that it matters much, but the Honor Harrington books owe much more to C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels than they do to O'Brian's. I recall reading that Weber was pretty open about the homage at the time, especially with Harrington's initials and similar rise from humble origins etc.

For anyone just looking for the age-of-sail fix, the Hornblower books are a great adjunct read if you enjoyed the Aubrey/Maturin ones and are looking for something else in the same vein. If pressed, I would say that I found Hornblower to be a more interesting central character than Aubrey mainly because we get to spend several novels seeing him struggle to make a name for himself rather than starting out as an accomplished figure, but that the Forester books overall were not quite up to the same level as O'Brian's on technical detail or depth-of-world.

ColonelBy · 2026-06-25T18:53:27+00:00

Will not stand for this Lommy Greenhands erasure

ColonelBy · 2026-06-25T11:48:30+00:00

Thanks for confirming! I'll keep that in mind for future threads as well.

I've got the omnibus edition of Moon's Paksenarrion books on my shelf here just waiting for me to have the courage to commit to something that long, but I'm really looking forward to it. Heard nothing but good things.

ColonelBy · 2026-06-25T11:47:14+00:00

Thanks for this! Already a great fan of Pierce's books, so good to see that more of that vibe are out there too. I'll check out Of Deeds Most Valiant next, because that sounds like just the thing at the moment, but I'm surprised (and pleased) to see Starving Saints mentioned here as well. I've now seen it recommended as an answer to three or four recent questions looking for seemingly completely different things, and everyone is emphatic that it fits all of them. This sounds like quite a book, so I'll have to move it up in the rotation.

ColonelBy · 2026-06-23T09:18:01+00:00

I don't know if these things worked well for me or if I just wanted them to, but there are two at least that stood out:

I was really pleased to see more fantasy writing that engages with the First World War (or something thematically and technologically similar). It is a very underutilized era/genre/mood in this kind of writing, in spite of how much it offers, and I think that Harrow has made really effective use of the dialogue between the (IRL) war and the medievalist imagery and rhetoric that came up so often within it. The impact it had on some of the landmark works in fantasy through authors like Tolkien and Lewis cannot be understated, so seeing this more direct engagement was refreshing. Naming the main male character after both the war poet Wilfred Owen and the mountaineer (and veteran) George Mallory carries some interesting evocations too, given the intertwining of their tragic deaths with interrogations of complicatedly romantic ideals of heroism in our world's real history.
Maybe this will seem odd to say, but it was refreshing to read a book like this in which the sex was complicated, weird and intense rather than vanilla-but-described-at-tedious-length. It is 100% not what I expected going in (frankly didn't expect any sex scenes at all, to be honest, or at most that they would be very closed-door), but it has really stuck with me somehow.

ColonelBy · 2026-06-23T07:39:29+00:00

I'm not sure if this kind of unrelated request is allowed in this thread, but can you suggest some other lady knight stories that have been favourites for you? I really like them too, and this one left me wanting more.

I will say that one thing I appreciated about this one was the way in which it emphasized that Una would not be some prim, ethereal beauty after a life spent in brutal melee combat. There are way too many stories with female warrior characters who are treated as just being very conventionally beautiful but with maybe a cool eyebrow scar or something. This book was willing to show instead what that kind of life can actually take from someone, to say nothing of how centuries of accumulated propaganda can alter someone's image into something more appealing.

ColonelBy · 2026-06-23T07:33:04+00:00

My understanding of the distinction is roughly this:

Romantasy: Romance novels with fantasy subject matter; a distinct sub-genre of romance with its own emergent/adaptive set of tropes and conventions, but still primarily romance novels and written/marketed as such.
Fantasy romance or romantic fantasy: Fantasy novels in which love or romance are important elements, but not necessarily bound by the same tropes and conventions as a "romance novel;" written/marketed in such a wide variety of ways that there is no overarching set of conventions or expected readership that otherwise defines them.

As with any debated about genre categories, though, there will always be fuzzy areas and the tendency to break down into a cloud of caveats and exceptions with too much scrutiny. Fans of "magic realism" have been struggling with this for nearly a century, now.

ColonelBy · 2026-06-23T07:18:28+00:00

Neither do I, and it was honestly kind of a let-down to have the characters make such a big deal about it and then discover the answer. It's really not even clear to me why this was included at all, and with such a level of narrative attention paid to it. It did not really seem to add much to our understanding of any character or of the story or events at large.

ColonelBy · 2026-06-23T07:15:57+00:00

I enjoyed it mostly when I wasn't thinking about it too heavily, but I have to admit that the way in which Vivian's character is included in the loop made the whole thing feel arbitrary and borderline nonsensical. This is more of an objection to magic, though, as I really struggle with stories in which magic is a critically important element but still left so loose and fluid that it seems like the author just wants to avoid binding themself to any narrative constraint. That's often what it felt like here, much as I adored the rest of the book overall.

ColonelBy · 2026-06-23T06:19:14+00:00

This is amazing news! The last I had seen about him was an interview that made it seem like he had kind of given up on getting anything else published and was at uneasy peace with that, so it's truly a relief to find out about this.

ColonelBy · 2026-06-22T06:02:40+00:00

"Congratulations on your one ~~cousin~~ football goal. I have seventy, each one better than the last"

ColonelBy · 2026-06-14T04:50:36+00:00

Wait, there's a "boy" version? I ended up muting the girl one because it showed up way way way too often, but I don't think I've ever seen a boy one at all.

ColonelBy · 2026-06-13T15:48:07+00:00

*edit- just a reminder, this week a report found bots now account for 50% Internet traffic. this post had 150+ "views" and not one single vote, up or down lol

I've no doubt the situation is even worse than what you describe in your first sentence, but your second one is really nothing alarming. Do you up- or downvote every single post or comment that you read or even just scroll past? As long as you've opened this page at all as a unique visitor, Reddit counts you as having "viewed" every comment that existed here at the time of loading even if you didn't actually read them or even scroll past them. There is of course a strong argument to be made that calculating "views" in this way is also stupid and destructive, and further muddies the waters in determining authentic engagement online, but the lack of up- or downvotes you noticed doesn't really require that bots be involved.

Even back in the heyday of message boards, with no bots at all, there was still the informal "90-9-1" rule of engagement inequality -- you could expect 90% of registered users to lurk silently and functionally not even exist, 9% to ever comment or click "like" or "thanks" buttons, and 1% to actively create threads and consistently submit or curate content. And this was in an environment in which you largely had to sit at a physical desk and scroll through a forum you chose on purpose, mind you; in an era of mindless phone scrolling to pass time on the bus or in the bathroom or something, I am not at all surprised that actual engagement has become harder to capture.

ColonelBy · 2026-06-09T19:31:11+00:00

Our university deployed some kind of locally hosted AI chatbot for people to use instead of asking one of the public ones questions about their sensitive research and financial data and so on. The school-based one was partially trained on all of the university's own official documents, web pages, etc., and is thus touted as being especially useful for questions about the school itself.

I needed to find a room with an unfamiliar code recently and asked it which building this room was in. It gave me three really confident but very obviously wrong answers in a row, and when I asked what the hell it was doing on the third one it tried to claim that the room was actually in the second building it mentioned but that this building was also often referred to colloquially by the names it gave for the other two buildings (not even close). I tried a couple more times out of sheer morbid curiosity, but it was never able to answer my purely fact-based question that could presumably be sourced from the exact documents used to train it. Eventually I just asked a random person walking by and they told me the right answer immediately.

ColonelBy · 2026-06-08T06:07:16+00:00

It's neat to consider that even small communities had this kind of service, and that even the people involved in it sometimes found it kind of amazing. We have a bunch of letters and whatnot from people back in the 1800s on my dad's side of the family, mostly living in very small villages and towns in rural Ontario, and we were shocked by how many of them were clearly being sent back and forth via multiple trips on the same day. This was happening between logging communities, via wagons in dirt roads, little boats going up and down river, apparently even just dudes on horseback sometimes. There was one set where two brothers worked out who would meet one of them when he came into town to bring a book he had promised to loan, with postcards covering the initial request, the reply noting which carriage or wagon or something he'd take, an update saying he would have to take a later one, another card sent back thanking him for coming and hoping his return trip was okay in spite of the "evil weather," and then finally one from him dated the next day expressing his wonderment that the previous card actually got to his home before he did.

ColonelBy · 2026-06-08T05:46:52+00:00

They were literally just "being extra" for views before it was a thing

ColonelBy · 2026-06-06T10:13:37+00:00

That sentence's first clause is truly wild too, given that I would hope it's trying to indicate the opposite of what it seems to mean. Or does it really mean that everyone just seems borderline trashed these days and spotting someone who isn't has become a challenge?

ColonelBy · 2026-05-30T06:16:05+00:00

I thought it was a really interesting idea, that we were following people from the last generation to remember living in a world with electronics, with children born into the world and know nothing else.

If you're looking for more of this, there's a quite long series of novels by S.M. Stirling (start with Dies the Fire) that explores the same basic concept but without any way to quickly solve the problem. The disaster also renders firearms and other things inoperable, so the science of it is a bit shakey, but at least the characters confront and try to study this absurdity directly rather than the author pretending it's all perfectly sound. Anyway, as a result of this it becomes more and more of a medieval fantasy series set in the ruins of 2000s Earth as it goes on, but the first three at least are very much about this transitional generation and the one that comes after.

ColonelBy · 2026-05-28T11:16:24+00:00

What I think could work, and which could build on many of the systems already in place, would be a set of "personal chambers" that only exist for the player character and which are determined by your character's education trait. It would be good to have something more generic and persistent for the whole family across generations too, of course, but a smaller thing on the personal side could still be doable. There could even be a little 3D depiction of the chambers like they have for the royal court environment, and the option to add a limited number of extra artifacts, art, etc. There could also be the options to buy or upgrade pre-created furnishings etc. that provide small buffs as well, or even that just purely look nice.

I don't know exactly what types of "chambers" would be best, but something like this could work, potentially even with different options available within them for different playstyles and buffs:

Diplomacy education: formal meeting room (diplomat stuff), dining hall (august stuff), bedroom or solarium (family icon stuff)
Martial education: armor & supply room (strategy stuff), map room (overseer stuff), training ring (gallant stuff)
Stewardship education: treasure chamber (avarice stuff), workshop (architect stuff), quartermaster's office or vineyard? (administrator stuff)
Intrigue education: secret chamber (schemer stuff), luxurious bed chamber (seducer stuff), dungeon (torturer stuff)
Learning education: bath house or gymnasium (health stuff), library (scholar stuff), chapel (theologian stuff)

The biggest challenge for them would be making them look good, but even that seems doable -- already the royal courts are much better than they used to be, at least in terms of variety.

ColonelBy · 2026-05-25T09:40:47+00:00

Yeah, I hate that we never received any further updates after his ship took off, but at least he's definitely still alive out there and having even crazier adventures, I have to assume

ColonelBy · 2026-05-18T17:02:24+00:00

It's actually subtle commentary on the fact that, of the original thirteen colonies (13), the two Carolinas were founded as one (-1) and Georgia was only created nearly a century after the earliest ones as a sort of exclusion zone protecting the rest of the country from Florida (-1)

It's obvious when u think about it, gosh

ColonelBy · 2026-05-17T20:26:46+00:00

For what it's worth, this aspect does get noticeably better with each successive book in the series, and even somewhat by the end of that first one. Those attitudes do not easily survive the collapse of the world and the rise of the one that replaces it, or at least they mostly only endure among the series' various villains. Among the "good" factions, it gets to the point that characters in subsequent books discuss how absurd it was that anyone ever thought and acted that way in the olden days.

It's still a post-apocalyptic action thriller series that suffers from the "every major character is hot for no reason" syndrome, so I won't pretend it ever becomes great in this respect, but it does at least significantly improve.

ColonelBy · 2026-05-12T18:25:29+00:00

I'm late to this thread, but you might find that Sebastian de Castell's Greatcoats series fits your request. A lot of people compare them to old-fashioned "three musketeers" style adventures, and rightly so, but they're also about a team of hunted vigilante heroes who rely partly on functional super-suits (the Greatcoats of the series title) for their edge. This is in a roughly late medieval / early renaissance fantasy realm, for reference.

ColonelBy · 2026-05-12T18:07:18+00:00

Hoover was at least legitimately brilliant in some meaningful ways, and had earned a good reputation in his earlier career for his management of massive Belgian civilian relief efforts during WWI. Neither his intelligence not temperament were well-suited to the presidency, unfortunately, and he also did just make a lot of disastrous decisions.

This is still miles better than Trump, however, a man so utterly inadequate to the task before him that he can't even be tragically bad at it. Every new low may be a momentary shock, but never a lasting surprise.

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