W_L

You just have to create a story with a character that aims for freedom of action and thought. The Medieval era of Europe might have been socially conservative, but it's economical and ideological background was very collectivist, akin to commune systems of the 20th century. Creating an opposing idea against both the historic facts of Catholic collectivism and Protestant elitist crony capitalism (the nobles who sided with reformation weren't doing it for free, why do you think English Crown is the largest landowners in the world), Libertarian thought is the obvious 3rd choice with a modern outlook at the results of both historical forces. That's why I tagged it the story as Libertarian Sci-Fi. Most people assume Libertarian thought runs in lockstep with conservatives, but it's different. Capitalism is not the end goal of Libertarianism: individual freedom and individual obligations are.

True, surprise no one else has done Sci-Fi Utopia and we're the only ones to tackle Libertarian Sci-Fi.

Dick had bouts of paranoia later in his career from extreme drug use. Ubik is extremely hard to read with a meandering plot; though, it's considered one of the greatest science fiction novels of the 20th century. I can understand your issue with reading his work. His work has influenced a lot of sci-fi writers into modern times with several film adaptations, plus you can draw a direct line between his paranoid conspiracy stories and TV series like the X-Files.

I prefer his sci-fi more rather than his fiction. I do agree Tet. He went overboard with Hogg. Not my cup of tea, either. Maybe it got worse as it went, I did not finish it. Gratuitous rape without a real plot and too much sadism. I think Delaney was angry at the world when he wrote this, representing the entirety of American males across all racial and social backgrounds as rapists, sadists, and pedophiles. As for the other title, The Mad Man is not so bad and has merit to be read, it's partially based on the relationship between him and his partner, who was a homeless gay man. There's also a good historical perspective on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, both pre-HIV and post era. It was normal among gay men back in the day to have hard lives. As for the fetish elements, we know it's out there, most of us don't play in that world (Scat is a hard limit for me), but it doesn't hurt anyone and there's consent. Unlike Hogg, I thought modern gay adult audiences could finish this book.

Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Herbert, and Dick are usually named among the greats of Science Fiction with a lot of their work made into popular media, but expansive science fiction fans have a wider view on this genre of literature. Samuel R. Delaney, a gay African American science fiction author and winner of the 1967 Nebula Award, hasn't seen similar treatment, but he deserved just as much respect as a science fiction writer. His novel, Babel-17, which focuses on the theory of language and perception (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), is one of the most imaginative concepts that have yet to play a major role in mainstream science fiction, but the idea has led to other writers developing their modern concepts. Give his stories a try, he's one of the great forgotten sci-fi writers of the 20th century. He was even cited as one of the inspirations for "Benny Russell", a fictional avatar of Benjamin Sisko from Star Trek Deep Space Nine's episode "Far Beyond the Stars", pretty cool nod when I learned about it years after the episode. I have read a lot of mainstream sci-fi and dabbled in non-mainstream stuff.

Not sure if he was gay, but he did write about the gay experience in the 1950s with Crooked Man, so possibly in the closet if he was. Of course, he might just be an ally. He did have a wife and son, but during that era and even into our own, it's not uncommon for gay and bisexual men to pass as straight, while have liaisons with their preferred sexual partners on the side for social conformity.

Fun Fact: Charles Beaumont, the famed writer for several Twilight Zone episodes, started getting published in Playboy starting in 1954 and test this was one of his stories, being gay in the 1950s was no picnic. My personal favorite among his Twilight Zone stories is "Valley of the Shadow", he essentially created the transporter, replicator, and force field technologies that we see in future iterations of Star Trek, along with the concept of an advanced civilization hiding in plain sight to avoid the dangers of human technological perversion (aka. "Black Panther" in small town America). It's modern sci-fi at its core.

Could be Albus with a time tuner, we know that kid loves making messes with the timeline.

From prior chapters, you know where Jamie is headed at the end, I'm glad you like the character. Though, he's only a 3-year-old, being an Omega in this literary reality grants a deeper level of prescience and penetrative insights. However, Jamie is still a child and can be distracted by illogical concepts, such as disjointed paraphrase structure in this case (It's a mild critique on the late Queen Elizabeth II, since it's hard to draw relationships between abstract concepts). The historical king James was well-known as an intelligent and perceptive leader, who could lead two nations, balance requirements for religious reforms, and still maintain a relationship of respect with his statutory wife or love with his boyfriends. Jamie isn't king James, just as Eli isn't Queen Elizabeth, but some aspects of history are still there.

@Cole MatthewsRandy has good taste. We should compare notes on isekai

In our original lives as Eric and Jack, Robert and I never studied military strategy as kids; though, Jack might have done so later in his life after my death based on how well-planned his alter-ego’s actions were. Like many other youths in our era, our knowledge of tactical warfare was ingrained through various popular media like manga graphic novels, and games, which we treated as common entertainment. The copious game-like plots such as occupying strong points for protagonists, cutting off re

Not a fan of Denis Villeneuve either, I didn't like Part 2 of Dune. His revisions in part 2 will make the rest of the adaptation difficult for the next movies, major divergences are impossible to avoid. I do want to see Leto II and his God Emperor serpentine glory, but it's the transhuman element that is cool as a sci-fi fan, not just human drama. Hollywood wants to entertain people with spectacle, the source material wants to leave people with wonder and new thoughts for exploration.

Glad you guys caught on

I am enjoying this off-beat urban fantasy Queer series right now called The Daily Grind, it's about a group of friends who find an extra-dimensional dungeon in their office building. The monsters look like staplers, ferns, copiers, old-fashioned desktop computers, and snake-like wires It's a great escape for office workers to imagine things in our daily lives that we have a love-hate relationship with try to kill us, very creative and I enjoy the social commentary aspect. The main character is pansexual and in a loving poly relationship with his boyfriend and girlfriend, but the romance is low-key in the story . Also, it's the first time I've seen a good positive use case for the "Utopian Fallacy", kind of a counter to the realist use. Essentially, the author figured out a way to fight unhappy realism through fun fantasy. For those who want to know what I mean, the utopian fallacy is

Glad you enjoyed Chris

There's a tactical move involved here, sometimes you have to do something in order to gain a more advantageous position. At this point, the Russian fleet is impossible to spot and there's only one attack sub in position to take them out. Eli is not simply trying to win a single battle, which can be done via allowing the Russians to retreat and regroup, the goal is "total annhilation" of all forces. No trace of tactical information can be allowed to escape.

In short order, Marc gave me a condensed report of the fight at Whitehall along with the movements of enemy troops from other mecha knights in London. I found the fight with the Russian troops to be the most fascinating. Henry had discovered the invisible troops operating near the palace due to their innate physical limitation, despite their near-perfect optical refraction. Additionally, the body suits that they used had the secondary ability to prevent kinetic and explosive damage from the mech

Thanks for reading these, I wanted to make the short stories supplements to my main story, like an expanded universe

Yes, but it's different based on the style of swordplay too. Western sword styles relied on blunt damage rather than cutting power, so the focus on thrust and parry for damage means users must be big and strong. Eastern sword styles relied on cutting power rather than blunt damage, so the focus is on swings and slicing motions against joints. Armor influenced these styles, too.

Thanks

@drsawzall and @Al Norris, it's one reason why these various factions from our time can manipulate and control their populous so well. I view the various factions within Christianity to likely be all different from the original beliefs of Jesus. Though they may all claim fidelity with Christ, but different groups claims they are the chosen like the Seventh Day Adventist or Latter Day Saints for instance. At this point in history, people still believed in the divine rights of kings and nobles, the order of society has not seen the rise of the Enlightenment and its Scientific Revolution, and states were run by great noble "houses" with deep in-roads into Christian faith (Catholic/Protestant/Eastern Orthodox, it doesn't matter). Like Harry Turtledove before me, alt-history fiction is best when you have a dynamic point in history where things did tip over.

On the other hand, which version of Jesus do you follow? The "clean" version that Romans approved at Nicene or the "dirty" version that had many different believers, aka the gnostics, Cathars, and so on. The problem with Christianity whether it is Catholicism, a protestant denomination, or Eastern Orthodox, the very heart of the religion was "cleaned" to make it more acceptable for the vast majority of Roman pagans.

Remember, you don't need to have cores in everything to make them comparable to modern technology. For instance, the sky fortress created by the joint efforts of the Habsburg-Roman alliance is quite inefficient as a flying weapon platform. The reason why the sky fortress works is due to the sheer amount of power output a single core can generate. Essentially each core is equivalent to a hypothetical Dyson's Sphere in terms of energy, so even lower-grade material can create and sustain lift along with a primary weapon based on a conversion of applied EM energy to kinetic force. In this situation, they're not really using that much energy to generate "invisibility". Even with limitations on our tools, we have invisibility suits in existence right now. They're metamaterials should not be easily available, especially for a pre-industrial era like 16th century. However, remember the little note I gave in the short stories, the Russians were the last faction to consolidate their holdings from the future timeline. Why did they among the various powers delay? Also, the energy from the cloak is redirected to a "shield" that prevents air-based attacks, essentially "active electric armor" defense, something we already have in the modern world setting. The US and UK are using similar defense systems on tanks. One advanced aspect of Russian technology is material sciences. Resources are important, by delaying their world conquest goals, while securing materials for it is a long-term strategy, they created battlesuits equivalent to those they possessed in the future. Still inferior in terms of raw firepower, they reached parity on the battlefield. That is unless you are facing androids/mechanical combatants, like the mecha knights. I am hinting at a lot of future tech that the cores made possible. Unlike the Western charter, who have an abundance of cores, charging stations, and various weapons of mass destruction (beyond the sky fortress, the tsunami weapon that took out Zeeland in future Netherlands has been hinted), the Russians took longer to settle their domestic affairs and consolidate territories. It's connected with the materials currently present in Russia, which is the basis of several practical and theoretical energy storage technologies such as the rapidly developing electric car batteries in the last decade. Each faction has their own unique benefits and disadvantages in this scenario; otherwise, the western charter should have overrun their rivals and didn't need allies.

The cores operate as solid-state technology on a nano-level. They were discovered in the future of Robert and Eli's original timeline on the Moon, when Corporate and national interests were performing a gold rush for this unique resource. They can absorb ambient energy and active energy with no resistance, superconductivity, and hold energy within equivalent to a star's output. This type of technology is quite advanced and not human by origin, along with a complex interconnected AI.

True, but the view counts were low for the linked blog entries versus the stories and no one really comments so it's an extra readers didn't really like I guess. That ties into the encounter between Marc and Thomas Radclyffe in the interlude chapter. Thomas Radclyffe headed to Westminster on recommendation from his armed supporters in Parliament. I am just tying up the loose ends within the short stories to the main story The phantom legion within the city are being hunted by mecha knights and the forces outside the city will soon face incoming troops from various barracks and military installations. As for the Russian fleet off the coast of London, Francis Drake in his HMS Golden Hind, a "core" powered attack submarine in my story, along with Robert will take care of them. Remember what Robert can do with his ability to manipulate matter and energy within an area. If you guys want a short story on that battle, I'll write it in Res Publica Christiana. AoE attack incoming Thanks for the support Chris