USS Stonewall Jackson

The book USS Stonewall Jackson is about a submarine with that name as it battles the North Koreans. Leaving aside issues with the name (which was real ), it’s also a new-build American diesel submarine. (For those rivet-counters, it’s based on the new Soryu-class).

This is basically a run of the mill technothriller, only shortened. Actually, it feels like a minimum viable technothriller, where the plot elements of such a book are stuffed into as small a space as possible (in this case only over slightly a hundred pages). This makes the technothrillery-parts that do take up pages (I’m talking rivet counts, because of course) all the more jarring.

This book basically stands as an example of why you actually need “filler”. While it may seem to be (and often is) unproductive padding, without any of it you get a distorted work like this.