{"id":3091,"date":"2011-08-23T11:00:49","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T17:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=3091"},"modified":"2011-08-23T11:00:49","modified_gmt":"2011-08-23T17:00:49","slug":"pony-soldiers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/?p=3091","title":{"rendered":"Pony Soldiers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am kind of relieved to see some errors cropping into the Deathlands series. It&#8217;s not that they&#8217;re great literature; they are little more than fun sci-fi romps that would make a great 80s TV show[1], but in a way, that&#8217;s kind of my point. They have no business being as forward thinking and well-constructed as they are, considering their genre and their publication era alike. So it&#8217;s nice to see <a title=\"Pony Soldiers by James Axler, at Amazon\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Pony-Soldiers-Deathlands-James-Axler\/dp\/0373890044\/\" target=\"_blank\">Pony Soldiers<\/a> come along and suddenly provide a recurring villain as well as letting the characters act uncharacteristically foolish toward him now that he&#8217;s finally on the scene. Of course, then I think, no wait, they don&#8217;t know here in book five that the series is going to get into triple digits and still have new books coming out even as I castigate them for that lack of foresight, and most of those same 80s TV shows waited less than a year between recurring villains, which is about the length of time between the first\u00a0and\u00a0fifth books being published, so really this probably isn&#8217;t an error after all. Dammit. Fine, but I&#8217;m holding on to the part about them acting foolishly around him, instead of him just being so clever as to avoid his fate. At least it&#8217;s something?<\/p>\n<p>In addition to all that, the story delves a little bit more into the concept of time travel that has been looming over everyone&#8217;s heads, by\u00a0virtue\u00a0of apparently dropping General Custer in the middle of a pitched war with the post-nuke Apache somewhere in the mostly radiation-free Southwestern deserts. Between that little mystery, viewpoints from a few more characters than we&#8217;ve had before, and ever-greyer moral quandaries, the series is definitely getting more interesting the further along it goes. And that&#8217;s not just my relief over the misstep talking.<\/p>\n<p>[1] \u00a0Think A-Team, except with more continuity than they ever could have dreamed of in those days. And more female characters outside refrigerators than they ever could have dreamed\u00a0of, for that matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am kind of relieved to see some errors cropping into the Deathlands series. It&#8217;s not that they&#8217;re great literature; they are little more than fun sci-fi romps that would make a great 80s TV show[1], but in a way, that&#8217;s kind of my point. They have no business being as forward thinking and well-constructed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1247,1230,430],"class_list":["post-3091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-deathlands","tag-mens-adventure","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3091\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}