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Joe Buckley bites the dust in new book:

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Joe Buckley bites the dust in new book:
Post by pokermind   » Sat Nov 15, 2014 7:58 am

pokermind
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New Baen book cronicles the many deaths of Joe Buckley a tradition started by our own David Weber. The cover:

Image

Link to book discription on Baen http://www.baenebooks.com/p-2613-the-many-deaths-of-joe-buckley.aspx. Quote from book:

David Weber:

Unlike anyone else in this anthology, I can claim credit as the very first author to slay Joe Buckley in print, and he had it coming. I believe John Ringo holds the record for the number of times he’s killed Joe, but it was I and none other who inaugurated this grand tradition of Baen Books.
Joe had had the impudence, the gall, the barefaced, brazen effrontery to point out a math error in something I had written. Obviously, faced with that action on his part, Something Had to Be Done.
Fortunately, the evil and unscrupulous Timothy Bolgeo of LibertyCon fame, had provided me with the perfect vehicle for wreaking my vengeance. Tim, you see, had set me on a nil bid in the rubber game of one of the spades tournaments associated with LibertyCon. Not only had he set me, but he’d done it on the final trick of the hand, when the only card left in my hand was the three of clubs. Tim, you see, had the two of clubs as his final card, there was no more trump, and he had the lead. Having set me, he proceeded to prance about the room in most unseemly fashion, chortling “I set Weber on the three of clubs! I set Weber on the three of clubs!”
Clearly he and the other participants in and witnesses of my humiliation must be punished, and in that moment the crew—and fate—of Her Majesty’s Light Attack Craft Cutthroat burst upon me. I would place the so-called friends who had rejoiced at my misfortune—my freakish and totally undeserved misfortune—aboard a warship which would then, when victory seemed assured, be destroyed by a freakish (although in this case totally deserved) hit. And since that well-deserved fate was about to overtake Chief Bolgeo and his cronies, I saw no reason to spare Joseph. Instead, I placed him aboard ship and thus took my vengeance upon them all.
[Cue suitable mustache-twirling cackle.]
Some years later, in the course of writing Mission of Honor, I needed a suitable name to foreshadow the doom of a Solarian League Navy capital ship, at least to experienced Baen readers. As I cast about for a suitable candidate, Joe was, of course, the very first to come to mind. By this time John had cornered the market on total Buckley fatalities and Eric Flint had probably cornered the market on goriest Buckley fatalities, so I needed something . . . more spectacular if I meant to stay in the Buckley Bashing game. Thus it occurred to me to create the Solarian League Navy’s “cursed ship,” SLNS Joseph Buckley. There was an additional resonance for me personally in making him a scientist whose theories went awry, because Joe was one of the very first readers to assist me in matters of Honorverse technology. He’s created two or three very useful little software applications that help me calculate accelerations and turnover times, for example, without doing it the hard way as I did when I first began the series. In addition, he’s provided me with a date converter which helps me keep things straight between T-years, Sphinxian years, Manticoran years, Gryphon years, etc. Since he’d been so helpful to me in a technical sense, it seemed inevitable that I should repay him by casting him as a brilliant, albeit somewhat addled and misguided, scientist. And because I had made the simple act of naming a Solarian warship the Joseph Buckley the kiss of death, I had the opportunity to effectively kill him six times in a single book by listing the fates of all the earlier bearers of that name. Still something of a piker compared to John’s, but respectable, I thought. Respectable.
Actually, the real reason I killed Joe for the first time was that I regard him as a close personal friend and the sort of fan who becomes almost a collaborator. His deep and abiding interest in the Honorverse and my other fiction has constituted one of the compliments of which I am most proud, and his maintenance and archiving—entirely on his own time and as his own project—of the “Pearls of Weber” on his Jiltanith site has been more valuable to me than I could possibly express. I’m honored to know him, and anyone else who knows him understands that he has a huge heart, a marvelous, quiet sense of humor, and one of the sharpest brains around. There’s a reason so many Baen authors feel the kind of personal closeness with Joe which leads us to include him in our books and do the sort of horrible things to him that really, really good friends who are somewhat . . . twisted practical jokers find hilarious. And one of the best things about it is that Joe gets a laugh out of it, as well.
It’s been a privilege to have been his friend for lo, these many years, and I look forward to many more years . . . and, undoubtedly, at least a few more fatalities along the way.
After all, what are friends for?


Well no snippets or posts from RFC for a while but an interesting quote from the original Buckley slayer ;)

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