Tiger Chair

The recent Tiger Chair is the Max Brooks short story of the Chinese invasion of the American West Coast. Told in the form of a letter back home from a Chinese, it mentions how all the high-tech contraptions that were supposed to win were countered by know-how.

I’ll be blunt, this is not a good story. It’s told entirely through less-than-ideal exposition, and is loaded with both references that are bound to age like antimatter (mentioning some minor celebrity controversy from four years before this post that a normal person like the narrator would almost certainly not even know about) and older ones (there’s a ton of Iraq War lingo that makes me think at least part of this was originally written back in the 2000s).

But the real problem (at least for a military nerd like myself) is that Brooks’ Pentagon Reformerism is on every page. Obvious from as early as the Zombie Survival Guide (where he praised the AK and scorned the M16), this goes from “there are counters to high-tech contraptions” to “they make high-tech contraptions useless”. This is hammered home in a hamfisted manner continually.

Don’t get this.