Escalation

Escalation by Peter Nealen is meant as a kind of spiritual successor to his American Praetorians series. It starts in a dystopian future world where everything bad in current society is made dozens of times worse, and every taken-for-granted part of the international order is going to crumble. I was reminded of an old classic alternate history timeline called “For All Time” , where in place of the postwar western world, we get…. something else.

I have mixed feelings on all this. On one hand, most of the time, like a lot of the best political commentary, the exaggerations are close enough to be genuinely chilling. On the other, that every single shoe drops stretches my credibility a little too far, and some of the pushing that does go too far stretches it even more. Still, compared to his axe-grinding contemporaries, Nealen is both more intelligent with the political commentary and  better at making it more important and relevant to the main plot.

Said main plot is a struggle to fight through a war-torn Slovakia. Nealen’s action is, as always from him, top-notch. The soldiers of the Triarii (the protagonist organization) face everything from tanks to ordinary enemy footsoldiers in well-written action that balances well between “just grounded enough” and “just spectacular enough”. The biggest problem is an insistence on a big-world, big-battle story told through a first-person viewpoint. This doesn’t really work as well, and it’s a credit to Nealen’s skill that it’s not an even bigger problem.

I still prefer the breezier, less political and lower-scale Brannigan’s Blackhearts books from Peter Nealen, but a lot of this is just preferring apples to oranges. It’s good that he’s willing to push the limits, and for all its faults, I enjoyed Escalation.