Month: September 2018

Review: World War III: The Beginning

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World War III: The Beginning

By the early 2000s, while the mainstream technothriller was declining, the self-published one was on the rise. In time this would lead to a very unique paradigm that I definitely wish to explore. But it also got some stinkers, like this. Despite the title, I could find no other books by Fulgham.

This is a submarine book, so it has the perils of submarine fiction. Or at least it would have if it wasn’t so badly written that any genre problems become secondary.

Icelands

The structure of this book is rather cliche and technothriller-y, albeit applied in a very, very sloppy way. What it does is have its cake and eat it too with a “Islamic Republic” that has a giant carrier navy. (The first edition was in 2000, after 9/11 the author tried to claim it was prescient.)

So yes, we get Conference Room Infodumps. Rushed and sloppy conference room infodump.

Rivets

A lot of the technical designations for aircraft and the like are just made up, but where this book shines in rivet-counting is in submarine operation commands. I hope you like reading submarine bridge commands, because it feels like 3/4 of the book consists of them.

Zombie Sorceresses

The antagonists-a Middle Eastern superstate with three times as many aircraft carriers as the US Navy (!), are the perfect zombie sorceress state. Very little else really comes close.

The “Wha”?

Well, the characters are mostly flat, the biggest issue being that they’re always referred to by their first names. The plot is a confused vague mess of technothriller mush and some submarine bridge commands. Oh, and a romance. Mustn’t forget the romance between the female commander and her male XO (who I suspect strongly is an author Mary Sue). Yeah.

The Only Score That Really Matters

As a book itself, this is forgettably bad, one for just the self-published slush pile. But as an example of a certain kind of book, it’s a good early case study. The self-published thriller that lacks both the polish of a mainstream book and the attention to detail of an enthusiast story is one I’ve seen too much of.

So while a mainline technothriller, especially a later one, will have somewhat exaggerated gimmicks (IE, Dale Brown’s “stop the superlaser”), and an enthusiast one will have detailed, at least nominally grounded forces (The 20th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade and 2nd Tank Brigade crossed the border…) , this just goes “unite the Middle East and plop down dozens of aircraft carriers”. In a way it’s actually endearing.

One slightly redeeming quality to Fulgham’s book is that it’s short, unlike the somewhat similar but utterly unreadable Dragon’s Fury by Jeff Head.

I cannot recommend World War III: The Beginning, unless you like submarine steering commands. Then it’s the best book ever.

 

Why 1985?

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In his review of Dark War Revelation, the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Reviewer remarked  “(it’s always 1985 in these books for some reason)”. So, why is it always 1985?

One possible reason is (even subconciously) imitating Hackett’s original The Third World War: August 1985. Another,as argued by the WW3 1987 blog is that 1985 is the most “fair” of the time periods. Still another may just be that it’s the middle of the decade, so it’s an easy number to reach.

But yes, 1980s WWIII stories often appear in 1985.

Review: Tin Soldiers

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Tin Soldiers

I’ve talked before about Michael Farmer’s Tin Soldiers on my main blog, and his debut thriller pictures a regional war quite different from a Fuldapocalypse. But it’s worthy of a detailed review for two reasons. One is that it, published in the early 2000s, remains a picture-perfect example of the tropes of post-USSR technothrillers. Another is that it, although hardly flawless, is by and large an example of how this can be done right.

Icelands

Tin Soldiers, sadly, manages to be both divergent and cliche at the same time. A rejuvenated Iraq is making another go at Kuwait, and the first line of defense is the main character’s comparably small unit.

What makes this interesting is how it follows the classic “balancer tropes” mentioned here almost to a t. The American forces present are small at first, and the Iraqis have sneaked-out satellite footage and, more importantly, advanced Abrams-busting ammunition for their tank guns. The “crisis overload” is also there to a degree with a small subplot about a rapprochement with Iran that goes nowhere and ultimately is handwaved away.

Political shenanigans are there and “make up” for being less important to the plot by being horribly written. So is a shoved-in “save the helicopter pilot damsel in distress” subplot that rivals even the capture scene in Chieftains for being out of place. Perhaps fitting for a genre on its last mainstream legs, Tin Soldiers manages to fit the formula exceedingly well.

Rivets

This isn’t too bad in terms of rivet-counting. There are mostly familiar platforms, so there’s less need to describe them, and I didn’t feel that bothered by the infodumps that did take place. It’s not perfect and it’s not vague, but somehow most of it flows.

Zombie Sorceresses

This is a book that has all of the usual technothriller contrivances, all the odds-equalizers, and all the stock characters to set up. And yet the final nuclear-chemical escalation was the only one where I went “come on”.

Somehow it felt like the zombie sorceresses didn’t need to intervene as much as they had in other books. Perhaps using a country that was already suited for a regional conflict as the antagonist made it feel better than say, Cauldron did. Perhaps using an “equalizer scenario” of a stronger enemy force in theater against a limited reinforcement that has been feared since the time of TF Smith works better than some of the goofier ones.

They’re still there, but the zombie sorceress hand isn’t as visible in Tin Soldiers, I found.

The “Wha?

The characters are mostly stock. The hero, the supporting hero, the generals, the slightly sympathetic villain, the inept weasel ally, and the politicians. The scenes with politicians on either side are cringeworthy. Farmer’s fictional American president comes across as a figure written as a “bad dude with bad taste” by someone whose cultural clock stopped in 1979.

The low-level characters, while less developed, are at least sufficient for the course of the book. But the real treat is the action itself. Barring the “look at the stealth fighter go” scenes, the final Dale Brown style WMD escalation, and the save-the-girl side-plot, the tank battles are well written. Yes, the book has its share of technological gee-whiz. But it also has more than its share of basic grit, where tanks are very vulnerable.

Also like Team Yankee, a limited theater means that the story becomes more focused and tight.

The Only Score That Really Matters

Tin Soldiers is the perfect example of this category. On paper, it’s got every flaw a military thriller in general and a post-1991 one in particular would have. Its digressions into romance and politics go from awkward to slightly disgusting and offensive. The prose and flow isn’t the smoothest. And yet, in spite of all that, I like this book.

When the tanks get to exploding, it’s at its perfect height. The tank battles themselves are, for the genre, well-done. It manages to maintain a decent scope in those parts, not feeling like it hops around too much and succeeding at the difficult task of making a viewpoint between either “squad in the dirt” or “big picture”. And while it may have just been a happy coincidence, the tank battles against the early T-72s with super-ammo have just the right level of threat, showing that there’s much more to a tank than just how strong the gun is and how thick the armor is.

Tin Soldiers is still a cheap thriller with more than its share of unforced flaws. But it does a lot right, and is one of the best post-1991 “regional war” thrillers I’ve read.

Technothrilllers and WWIII

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Technothrillers and WWIII

There is obviously an extreme amount of overlap between the two, but as someone who’s read a lot of both, I don’t think that every World War III story is a “technothriller”, and every technothriller certainly isn’t a World War III story.

Technothriller is hard to define. In some ways (and keep in mind I love weird analogies) it’s like progressive rock-hard to truly explain but often identifiable as part of a genre if viewed/listened to[1].

Also like progressive rock, the technothriller genre was arguably something of a specific time, was ultimately niche at heart, contained elements that would seem to make it unfavorable to a mainstream audience, was generally scorned by serious critics, had a seemingly imaginative premise turned too into follow-the-leader[2],  fell into decline both from outside factors and its own excesses, and was lucky to last as long as it did at the top of the charts.

Ok, I might be taking it too far. But still.

The decline of the technothriller can be studied in several critical articles. Among the reasons given, by both them and me are:

  • Simple changing tastes and trends. (This is probably the most realistic answer, but the least complex. Oh well.)
  • The fall of the USSR contributing to those changing tastes and trends by sapping the technothriller of its immediacy and forcing them to be more contrived.
  • Said contrivances becoming more and more blatant[3], combined with the genre staying with a “big picture” format not as conducive to grubby brushfires as a small-scale focus would be.
  • High-technology stuff in the post-Gulf War period becoming ubiquitous, losing its earlier novelty value. Smart bombs and cruise missiles? Those were routine now.
  • The genre arguably being more suited to video games like the Splinter Cell series than books.
  • The genre arguably being niche to begin with and only staying in mainstream consciousness due to two things happening as it emerged. Those being the beginning of the digital era and the intense late Cold War (the argument in this article).

So for specifics, it’s easy to find perfect overlap. Red Storm Rising, the archetypal World War III story, is also an archetypal technothriller. But even at the time, there were examples on both ends that did not fit neatly into the other’s niche. One of the best-executed was Ralph Peters’ classic Red Army, one of my favorite World War III tales.

Not only is Red Army decidedly gritty and focused on a Soviet victory, but Peters frequently takes care to not go into details about bits of hardware. This helps add to the immediacy and fog of war a lot, but makes it feel less like a techno-thriller. But even in the more conventional examples, there’s differences. Larry Bond’s 1989-published, ultra-formulaic Red Phoenix[4] is still a regional conflict, while the genre-booster of The Hunt For Red October is focused on avoiding the Third World War rather than starting it.

_ _ _ _ _

As the technothriller began to decline from mainstream bookshelves, the World War III subgenre, already a niche-within-a-niche, did so as well. But it fell back on a smaller but very stable base. The wargamers.

Red Storm Rising was famously aided by the original Harpoon board game, and the setting became popular among wargamers for very obvious reasons. Even beyond politics, its appeal is great, for it allows for massive battles of tanks, artillery and aircraft impossible in any regional clash.

This, combined with the influence of the existing 1980s classics, had many effects on how the subgenre developed. But what was more important was the increasing “decentralization” of publishing as a whole. The technothriller/world war genre got a small bump in the mainstream market as the rise of China and resurgence of Russia from its 1990s slump brought “high-tech”, high-end conflict back into vogue.

But beyond that, self-publishing and the internet made it far more easy for “niche” fiction to spread[5], which meant that all kinds of thrillers-World War III, cheap thriller, homage technothriller, all could flourish. In some cases, this pulled the heirs of Clancy and Hackett closer together, in some cases it pushed them farther apart.

How this new paradigm manifests in the actual stories varies considerably, and thus it can only be examined on a case by case basis. But there is a trend throughout the period-the technothriller and World War III stories are never entirely together, but never entirely apart.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

[1]At its most broad, prog rock can be defined as “any rock music made in the 1970s with synthesizers.” Likewise, technothrillers can be defined as any thriller book featuring high technology while not reaching the level of outright science fiction. It’s not helped by Tom Clancy, its forefather, not liking the term and insisting he didn’t create or expand a new genre.

[2]For technothrillers, it was Clancy and Bond. For prog rock, it was the hordes of Yes copycats.

[3]See the opponents in Cauldron.

[4]If I had to list a single commercial book that had the most and most obvious technothriller tropes, it would be Red Phoenix. Note that this does make it necessarily bad, just formulaic, at least in hindsight.

[5]On a personal note, it was internet published/posted military alternate history that played a gigantic role in getting me into this kind of genre to begin with.

Review: Stand To

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Andy Farman’s Armageddon’s Song series starts with Stand-To, published in 2013. It’s-something. It tries to be a post-USSR thriller, but that description does not do it justice. It’s something. I’ll put it that way.

Icelands

The spy-novel intro is out-there, but then it manages to devolve into a sort of meta-WWIII against a Sino-Russian alliance, diverging from formula via pure spectacle and some very bizzare national alignments.

Rivets

Stand To might as well be the rivet capital of the world. It has, especially after the war starts, infodump after infodump after infodump after infodump after infodump after infodump after infodump after infodump after-you get the idea. I’ve seen outright pseudo-historical summaries that have fewer infodumps than this. Far fewer.

Infodumps on everything from artillery trajectories to squad tactics to equipment to chemical suits to chemical paper to radar types to training to repeated rants about how the British military is underfunded and underequipped are tossed clunkily onto the pages.

Zombie Sorceresses

This book opens with a ridiculous spy-novel plot involving femme fatales so tasteless and ridiculous they’d be rejected from an Austin Powers movie, and just incredible sleaze as tasteless as it is ridiculous. Then once the war actually starts, well, it has a Slavic ex-Soviet republic, deeply divided, with parts of it allying with the Russians but the bulk of it siding with the West.

It’s Belarus. That other big former SSR you might have thought was the culprit from the description is barely present, but the Czechs have flipped and are the spearhead of the enemy into Western Europe (so that the opening lines can still be in Germany).

Then there’s plot-nukes that open the war but don’t distract from the chemical-conventional clashes (and infodumps). The zombie sorceresses were very busy here.

The “Wha”?

First, the prose isn’t very good. There’s typos galore, everything is spelled out in amazing detail, and it makes gory deaths seem yawn-inducing. Second, the characters zig-zag from the raunchy spy novel caricatures of the opening to the flat infodumped “there to provide an anchor for the action and nothing else” ones of the proper war. Even when there’s a hint of personal struggle, it’s right back to more infodumps.

Second, the entire story takes a 180 turn from the bad spy novel tone to the infodumpalicious actual war.

The Only Score That Really Matters

And yet I felt amused by this. This is raw, unpolished, unfiltered-something. It earnestly combines infodumpy “boom boom goes the tank” action with sleazy spy novel stuff. It honestly felt a little novel in its excess. This kind of fiction at its worst tends to be either ultra-infodumped and over-researched or slapdash with stuff done for the fun of it. Stand To somehow manages to be both at the same time.

For normal readers, I wouldn’t recommend it. But for someone like me who enjoys such spectacles, it was amazing. It takes a lot of effort to shock me with too many infodumps, but this managed.

 

Review: Cauldron

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Cauldron

The 1990s were not a good decade for technothrillers in terms of popularity and sales, and in my opinion, no book illustrates the problems they faced more than Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin’s Cauldron. The question of who to fight a World War III against loomed greatly, and the usual suspects had lost all credibility in the immediate post-USSR, post-Gulf War period.

So it was the US against a-French/German nationalist alliance? Ok.

Icelands

While Cauldron obviously doesn’t fit the “Iceland Pattern” of a Russo-American WW3 in terms of direct events, it does follow the story structure greatly. Too greatly, and this is one of the problems that too many post-1991 technothrillers had. With the scope of conflict (usually) shrinking, too many of them decided to be scaled-down great-power thrillers rather than scaled-up adventure thrillers.

Cauldron is more a symptom than a cause of this decline. It has most of the same issues that Bond’s own Red Phoenix struggled with. That book was written during the Cold War and featured a far more realistic opponent, but they both shared a similar formulaic attitude and a “but we have to show battles at land, at sea, and in the air” attitude.

Rivets

It’s infodump city here. Lots of political infodumps, lots of military infodumps, you name it. Par for the course.

Zombie Sorceresses

After December 26, 1991, the zombie sorceresses were at work finding opponents. The problem of what the opponent would be between the fall of the USSR and 9/11 plagued factual researchers as well as fiction writers-one of the most notorious cases I’ve seen was a RAND study that featured a joint Syrian-Iraqi invasion of Turkey (!) as a contingency plan.

Still, the decision to include not just Western Europe, but a cherrypicked part of Western Europe is very zombie sorceress, made all the worse by Bond’s decision to have a lengthy political intro. This means the implausibility is dwelled on rather than handwaved past.

The “Wha”?

Ok, so Cauldron has a laundry list of issues that plague the genre. It’s as if Bond was trying deliberately to chain them.

  • Having the story be self-contained in one book. This is a valid stylistic choice, a necessity given traditional publishing, and most of the time is a better alternative to the bloated series where nothing happens (see my Axis of Evil review for an example of that). But it means space is at a premium. The later points show how the book wastes that precious space.
  • There’s a too-long opening act. There’s no surprise at the outcome (in a book about a war, a war starts), and the political maneuvering isn’t well written.
  • Even once the action starts, there’s a checklist to fit land, sea, and air clashes all in one book, getting in each other’s way.
  • The entire Russian subplot is both clunky and pointless, an example of too many plots for ones own good.
  • The prose, while not terrible, gets a little too clunky and rivet counter-esque for its own good.

Beyond that, very little can rise above that. There are some tales where massive flaws can be forgiven because the good things are equally spectacular. Cauldron goes from iffy to merely decent-in action and characters.

The Only Score That Really Matters

Completely in isolation, Cauldron is a middle of the road technothriller with all the faults and features of one. But in context, it serves as a picture-perfect example of a genre that was fading from its height, shifting from mainstream to enthusiast fiction. Most of this was due to political and cultural factors beyond its control. But Bond’s literary choices didn’t help.

The shift to being more niche would have consequences for later WWIII/army thrillers, but that’s a subject for another time.