Columbus
Authors: Craig AlansonNarrator: R.C. Bray
Duration: 16h 23m
My Rating: 🌑🌑🌑🌑🌑
Tags: sci-fi - action - adventure
I’ve stopped listening around 4 book, such annoyed I was with a tin can AI. First few were great though.
Space adventure. Traitorous aliens. Big guns.
Quotes
Where was the self-guided ammo, the lasers, the genetic enhancements to make us super soldiers, the bionic eyes, the mech suits that allowed us to jump thirty feet in the air and run a hundred miles per hour? Where was all the cool stuff we’d seen in sci-fi movies? This was bullshit! The Ruhar could pound us from orbit with masers, railguns and smart missiles, and all we had were Vietnam-era rifles with fancy firecracker bullets?
“Hearts and minds?” That was the Army term for attempts to get the civilian population to cooperate with us, or at least not actively resist us. It had started in Vietnam, and continued in various forms and terminology in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria and pretty much every place the US of A had gotten involved. We built schools, roads, water and power distribution systems, and helped plant and harvest crops. Long-term, it was cheaper and more effective to avoid making more enemies, than it was to kill enemies. Especially since the enemy you killed was someone’s relative, and they, and probably their entire tribe, then became your enemy. If you know anything about history, you know these kinds of hearts and minds campaigns have, let’s say, a mixed record. A month after we pulled out of a third world area, the schools got burned out, the water system blown up, and the power lines stolen for scrap copper. Our politicians declared victory anyway, and moved onto the next crisis. Hooah.
you find the worst psychopathic antisocial losers in a society, give them power, and they would give you their complete, unquestioning loyalty
I felt ashamed that Chang spoke English, while the only word of Chinese I knew was ‘pinguah’, which I think was the word for ‘apple’. I’d seen it on a fortune cookie, and it stuck with me. My entire language knowledge of one of the world’s oldest and greatest civilizations was from a fortune cookie. And fortune cookies were an American thing, not Chinese.
“An idle mind is the devil’s playground”