Hey man, great to see you're back. I remember reading that post, it's a solid list of great books.

Starship Troopers definitely isn't strictly sci-fi. While it has great sci-fi concepts, it's much more of a political philosophy novel- and a great one at that.

The Tuloriad was decent, but I found myself more attached to Watch on the Rhine and, of course, the last centurion series… Then again, who knows… in a Thousand years perhaps the chosen will have forg… ahh who am I kidding, the actions of the Third Reich will still be alive and well in memory for my children's great grandchildren.
But I do hope that some of John Ringo's work becomes akin to Robert Heinlein's in living long past the relevance of it's Macguffin.and considering that both the odyssey and Dante's work contained many macguffins of their own (The cyclops, the underworld, Hell.) It might not necessarily be a drawback.

The biggest problem, as I see it, is that there is so MUCH fiction now, that wading through it to find the gems is a thousand times more difficult than when the greatest works were hand-copied by scribes. Not to mention the fact that Literature, as a whole, has matured greatly, hiding the actual themes and stories of great fiction beneath a veneer of style without substance, form without depth.

I agree. Very few sci-fi books, if any, make you really sit up and think about serious issues all the time. Their primary purpose is to provide a sense of escape from the mundane realities of daily life into strange and amazing new worlds. Great sci-fi does this exceedingly well.

There are a few great sci-fi books that also address deeper questions about the human condition. But they are vanishingly few in number. And of these, almost none can be considered great literature in any meaningful sense.

Well, with those books, the important question is whether or not they will be read by our children, and their children, and so on, down into the centuries. The works of Homer, Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare, and so on, will still be read long after we are all dust- but can the same be said of John Ringo's work?

Don't get me wrong, John Ringo is a phenomenal writer. I'm re-reading The Last Centurion right now, for like the umpteenth time, and I find more value and pleasure in it every time I do so. But will my descendants feel the same way? Probably not. You and I are in agreement, though, that those sci-fi books that come close to achieving the status of "great literature" aren't actually truly science fiction.

The Posleen war series, for example, is far less about the (relatively shallow and meaningless) alien aggressor, than it is about the PEOPLE that choose to fight them, the meaning of courage, and the true enemy within

Agreed. Personally I think the best book in the series is actually The Tuloriad, because it fuses the kind of writing style found in epic poems of the past with military sci-fi concepts and a reasonably rigourous examination of the need for faith. But even then, it still lacks sufficient weight and depth to be on the level of, say, The Chronicles of Narnia.

The interesting thing is that one can really only apply that label to science fiction that generally falls under the auspices of 'military' scifi. I think the reason is that milsf strips away the utopianism that destroys any connection to the human condition, and reduces the 'sf' to little more than a storytelling aid for an otherwise great piece of fiction. The Posleen war series, for example, is far less about the (relatively shallow and meaningless) alien aggressor, than it is about the PEOPLE that choose to fight them, the meaning of courage, and the true enemy within.