The Seventh Carrier

Peter Albano’s The Seventh Carrier is one of those novels that rivals even Lunnon-Wood’s Dark Rose for “most ridiculous premise yet”. In it, an American boat, and later a Coast Guard helicopter are attacked by something using World War II Japanese ammunition. There are rumors that it’s some kind of privateer using surplus weapons, but it’s not, as the survivors of the boat, held captive, can attest.

It’s the Yonaga, a fourth Yamato hull, turned into a carrier like Shinano. Kept hidden in a cove, it was frozen for forty years. According to the book it was because of a glacier rockslide, but I know a zombie sorceress froze it with her fimbulvter ice magic. They survived (not in suspended animation) by, among other things, tapping into geothermal steam power. Then they eventually attack Pearl Harbor anyway with their propeller planes and do better than they ought to. This is not the kind of book where thinking about how things in it would plausibly happen is encouraged.

The action is good, even if it’s somehow both a little kooky (guess why) and a little rote (a few too many exact descriptions of what the aircraft did). The characterization is not. To say that the portrayal of the Japanese is stereotypical is like saying that Manute Bol was a little tall, and the other characters aren’t much better.

It’s not the worst book ever, but like Dark Rose with its Libyan-Palestinian invasion of Ireland, The Seventh Carrier is better for the ridiculous novelty of the premise than the actual substance of the execution.