SciFy AU?

Jan. 30th, 2025 10:34 am
dasmims: cat with butterfly on its nose (Default)
[personal profile] dasmims posting in [community profile] hmsloop_hotspur
For years now I've been thinking in vague terms about Hornblower in Space. That's mostly born out of a discussion about Hornblower influences on scify media like Star Trek and Honour Harrington, my personal feeling that scify usually doesn't have the vibe I love about age of sail and for some reason the abandoned fic The (unexpected) Return - I don't know if I have a point here. But I'm very curious if anyone else has some thoughts on this?

Date: 2025-01-30 05:09 pm (UTC)
sanguinity: woodcut by M.C. Escher, "Snakes" (Default)
From: [personal profile] sanguinity
Vorkosigan Saga also has Hornblower influences. (And the rice ship shows up explicitly -- but in spaaaaaaaace!)

I think you have an unfinished sentence there: The (unexpected) Return what? Does or doesn't have the vibe? (And are you reccing it?)

Does Treasure Planet have the vibe for you? I did have strong Captain/Loyal-Second feelings about their Smollett and Arrow for a hot second there.

And while Firefly has more Wild West vibes than Age-of-Sail vibes, I did have Captain/Loyal-Second feelings about Mal and Zoe, too.

Neither of those, though, have the "stiff formality, pretending they're not besties" part of it, though.

Have you seen the tumblr art series for Hornblower space AUs? There are at least two artists who have done them. Chiropteracupola and... I don't remember the other, I'll have to do some digging when I have time.

Date: 2025-01-31 12:18 am (UTC)
sanguinity: woodcut by M.C. Escher, "Snakes" (Default)
From: [personal profile] sanguinity
Vorkosigan Saga: the rice ship has only a glancing mention, barely a paragraph! I was more amused to note that it's part of the saga's canon. That said, Miles and Bothari in Warrior's Apprentice might give you some of the vibes you enjoy? (And that's where the rice ship appears, anyway.) If that works for you, there's additional Bothari-and-Vorkosigan feelings in the novels about Miles's parents: Shards of Honor and Barrayar (collected in the Cordelia's Honor omnibus).

[tumblr.com profile] chiropteracupola's Hornblower Space AU: one, two, three. I'm still looking for the other artist I'm thinking of.

ETA: [tumblr.com profile] janirah ! Sci-fi Hornblower AU
Edited (found the other artist I was thinking of!) Date: 2025-01-31 12:21 am (UTC)

Date: 2025-01-31 03:25 am (UTC)
dragoness_e: Ghost Duskwing with no text (Duskwing_no_text)
From: [personal profile] dragoness_e
Well-known scifi series that I'm familiar with and were attempts to do Hornblower in Space with the serial numbers only lightly sanded off:


  1. David Drake's Lt Leary series.
  2. David Feintuch's Seafort Saga. He's the only author I know of who made his hero as angsty and self-doubting as Hornblower. I personally think he went a bit overboard with it, as he piled on tragedies and took the angst well beyond Hornblower levels to "Jeez, let the poor guy catch a break!"
  3. The above-mentioned Honor Harrington series was intended to be "Hornblower in Space", but it rapidly diverged into "WW2 in Space".

Date: 2025-01-31 11:53 pm (UTC)
dragoness_e: Ghost Duskwing with no text (Duskwing_no_text)
From: [personal profile] dragoness_e
Well, it's been a while, and I don't remember all the tragedies piled on Nicholas Seafort, but he starts with being raised by an abusive, hyper-Calvinist father who convinced the kid that if he disobeyed his father, he was damned to hell. When he ran off to join the Navy, he was disobeying his father, and he's still privately sure he's damned and all the tragedies that come his way are God's punishment. He's functional enough as an officer, because he has a really strong sense of Duty, but as a human being? Not so much.

In Honor Harrington, in various story arcs we also get the French Revolution/Reign of Terror, and the collapse of the Roman Empire with the serial numbers scrubbed off. Also a side series fighting a star nation of asshole slavers starring some of my favorite Gary Stus in sci-fi.

Date: 2025-01-31 06:15 pm (UTC)
yourlibrarian: Horatio and Bush Run (HORN-HoratioBushRun-nimrodel_river)
From: [personal profile] yourlibrarian
I would love to read a fic about Hornblower in space. It could even be a fusion with other well known space sagas. I remember reading a Merlin fic set in the Star Wars verse that worked very well because it was its own story but just using the conventions of that verse. I could see Hornblower working for the old Republic.

Profile

hmsloop_hotspur: Hotspur under sail, aft view (Default)
HM Sloop Hotspur

January 2025

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
26272829 3031 

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 6th, 2025 03:53 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios