Author: coilerxii

Review: Raptor Force

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Raptor Force

raptorforcecover

Bill Yenne’s Raptor Force is a case of a book that dips into multiple action subgenres and seems determined to take the worst parts of each while being unable to grab the best. It’s the kind of commandos-vs-terrorists novel that might seem simply pedestrian if it didn’t have the premise it did.

See, the reason the task of hunting down bloodthirsty and effective terrorists is entrusted to this mega-top-secret band of off the grid commandos (based on the Flying Tigers in-universe) is because the US (along with most other countries) gave the UN veto power over its military power projection (!). This is the kind of thing that zombie sorceresses were made to do.

The heroes are all flat space-fillers, the villains are the most cliche terrorists straight out of Command and Conquer Generals, and the stock supporting characters are exactly who you’d expect them to be. This wouldn’t be a big problem if the fundamentals were good, but they’re not.

Raptor Force has the constant perspective and place-hopping of a technothriller but none of its technology or great power conflict. It has the focus of a small-unit book but none of the spectacle or “punch” that a good one has. The actual action scenes are decidedly underwhelming, the worst thing a cheap thriller can be.

This was not a good novel. Even the potentially over the top premise wasn’t run with, opting for the overly serious technothriller style instead of a shameless spectacle.

 

 

Review: Marine Force One

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Marine Force One

The book Marine Force One is an example of a “51% book” that is elevated by the context in which it stands.

The book tells the story of an elite commando force tasked with hunting SAMs in the Balkans, in a conflict that feels like a jumbled mix of historical recollections of Operation Allied Force (evasive SAMs! Stealth fighters lost!) and think-tank reports (Resurgent Red Russians!) all tossed together. The Cobra Force of our heroes has to hunt the SAMs while butting heads with a Spetsnaz force assisting their Slavic ally.

If there’s one thing distinctive besides being dated, it’s that the main character, Maj. David Saxon, is an ass. He’s a one-dimensional figure who gave up his material possessions and marriage to focus on being in the military (and doesn’t miss his ex or even his son at all), he punches someone for being annoying to him during a debriefing, and when (however briefly) off-duty, he just uses prostitutes as the sole “relationship”. Yet rather than have his seriously flawed character be taken advantage of, Saxon is otherwise treated as a Mary Sue who can do what the rest of the military can’t. Very few other characters, even the villains, enjoy such detail.

Other than that, everything is just good enough. The action is just good enough but not the best. The pacing is at least fast, if not the best. The exposition can be annoying but isn’t too annoying, and so on. So why did I feel better about this book than I ‘ought to’ have? Well , the first part is that sometimes a 51% book is what one needs.

The second part is that given the publication date of 2001, the beginning of a very, very dark decade for technothrillers, the “competition” is less serious. In a context full of overpriced, under-proofread self-published books, legacy series continuing on pure inertia, and the few remaining editor-proof super-authors, a nice light 51% book isn’t bad at all.

Review: Burmese Crossfire

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Burmese Crossfire

burmesecrossfire cover

One of the reasons why I sound more critical towards Peter Nealen than I actually am is because this particular book set the bar very high. From the moment I read it, I fell in love. The Brannigan’s Blackhearts series was meant to be a love letter to the classic action-adventure novels of the 1980s, and Burmese Crossfire delivers.

Colonel Brannigan, leader of a small mercenary band, gets a mission to go to the titular Southeast Asian country. Cue a “rumble in the jungle” (with apologies to Ali and Foreman) against many Burmese and North Koreans. This isn’t that much more than a classic simple action-adventure novel. But it takes that formula and with beautifully written, well-done action, hits a home run.

It’s in a well-researched, obscure part of the world that’s an ideal place for a book of its genre. One of my favorite small-unit action-adventure books of all time, this is well worth a read.

 

Review: The Blue Effect

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The Blue Effect

The final entry in Harvey Black’s Effect series is The Blue Effect. This book manages to be slightly better than its predecessors in some ways and a lot worse in another. There’s a sorta-kinda-semi-plot where the British face the Soviets in what could be the make-or-break battle near Hanover. But once again, it never really clicks into a whole that it could have been. If The Red Effect was just listing the ingredients before hurriedly pouring them into a bowl and The Black Effect was having them sit in the mixing bowl doing nothing, this at least turns them into batter-but not a finished dish.

The highlight of this book, besides more tanks exploding, is a very long scene in which a Vulcan bomber soars into action. A part of me was going “oh come on, this relic would probably be shot down, malfunction or just miss”, but another part of me, the part that likes unconventional units, was going “WOW NICE”. I mean, I’d love to read (or even write) a book of unconventional relic units flying into battle. This is not that book.

What really sours the The Blue Effect is not any of the action in the main book, but rather its anticlimax of an ending. Here was where going the Chieftains/Dr. Strangelove route and just nuking everything might very well have been better. Instead, it’s a have your cake and eat it too deal where after a few plotnukes and a few losses, the Warsaw Pact just gives up very abruptly. It’s a circumstance where either another full length tide-turning installment (with proper plotting) or trimming the entire three-book series into one could have been better. And there’s a lot of fat to trim.

Furthermore, all of the hindsight-driven greater “micro”- accuracy of the series (See the now-known durability of tanks with Kontakt-series reactive armor! See the proper tank mix in GSFG instead of just having everything be a T-72!) is squandered by this “macro”-level flop in the conclusion. Whatever issues there are with a clean NATO win in 1984, there are a lot more with it happening in this fashion. If the goal is realism, it’s implausible. If the goal is storytelling, it’s a contrivance and makes the victory seem unearned.

The result is something that could have risen higher than it did, both in this specific book and the overall series.

The Fuldapocalypse 100 Post Special

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So Fuldapocalypse has reached a hundred posts. What a ride.

As I’ve said many times before, I went in to Fuldapocalypse expecting a very narrow spectrum where Red Army was on one end and Hackett’s The Third World War was on the other. The formal scale was in part to get me to be more rigorous in my reviewing and in part because I thought the works would be so inherently similar that I needed to highlight their differences.

Almost immediately, though, I became burned out. As I branched out, my scale gradually faded away. “Zombie Sorceresses” aren’t really relevant in outright supernatural stories, and don’t work when the story is implausible and ridiculous from the get-go. Eventually, I just resorted to an inherently “unstructured” review system-and it’s worked out very well. If I want to mention a story is “rivet-countery” or has a huge “zombie sorceress” contrivance, I can just say so in the review without having a formal section.

So, what I have learned from Fuldapocalypse? A lot, but the biggest is…

There’s a lot fewer “World War III” stories than I thought.

Blame my weird tendency to read the imitators first. Take my wargaming background and looking on only a few places at first, and a narrow tendency emerges. After all, if all I see is infodumpy Hackett xeroxed fifty-times stories, it’s like someone only reading fanfics and concluding that Pokemon is about betrayal. Understandable given the narrow perspective, but not really accurate.

Even at the height of the 1980s boom, there were still were a lot more books about stopping World War III than fighting it. And frankly, to me it’s a lot more fun to see the different, the strange, and the classic-but-unread. If I have to choose between either:

  1. zigzagging between feminist superpower stories, basketball mysteries, conventional thrillers, and classic vigilante adventure stories (all of which I’ve reviewed here), with World War III novels when I feel like it…
  2. Reading the entire collected works of William Stroock for the sake of reading something concerning World War III.

I’m definitely going with Option 1.

Even “cheap thrillers” can vary to the point where depending on the era, the prevalent cliches are going to be almost the exact opposite of an earlier/later time. Or there’s an individual work that stands out from that time period.

Reviewing good books is more fun than reviewing bad books.

I’ll review bad books on Fuldapocalypse. But I’ll be honest, I feel a lot better about going “this is an obscure book almost no one has read, and it’s really good” vs. “this is an obscure book almost no one has read, and it’s really bad.”

Part of it is that if I had more fun reading a book, I’ll have more fun reviewing it. Part of it is a feeling that I’m (consciously or not) just selecting easy targets to smash, especially more obscure authors, and an increasing feeling that it sometimes isn’t really fair to do something like that. Well-established authors are another story-I had zero hangups about ripping Executive Orders to pieces.

But part of it is that I think I’ve outgrown my old “deliberately look at something I know is bad to see just how bad” (to a degree), and have come to love sharing hidden gems. I think it may be me being more of a writer (or Command LIVE scenario creator) myself and thus being on the other side of the critic/author divide, so I’m no longer the fire-breather I’ve been in the past.

That being said, as a writer/content creator, you will get criticism. You will get unfair criticism. You will get unreasonable criticism. That’s just how it goes.

The worst titles to review are the uninteresting ones

Uninteresting does not necessarily mean “bad”. In fact, many books I personally enjoyed I struggled to review. Thus the paradox emerges. A solid title in a series I’ve reviewed a past installment in leaves me having to work hard to write something other than “Like Book X in Series Y, Book Z in Series Y is good to read”.

Meanwhile, a book I didn’t like and could think of a very solid, distinct reason why I didn’t like it can easily get a review.

The most and least-reviewed decades are…

At least according to the tags, and as of this post, the number of books reviewed by decade are…

  • 1970s and earlier: 5
  • 1980s: 19
  • 1990s: 20
  • 2000s: 16
  • 2010s: 31

So the “technothriller heyday” of the 1980s is actually the middle of the road.

Reading obscure books is more fun.

I’ve noticed obscure [e]books come a lot more easily to me than big-name thrillers. It obviously depends on the individual book, but I’d think the biggest reason is they’re too long for their own good. I’d rather, all other things being equal, read two 300-page books than one 600-page one. Or three 200-page books. If only because it gives me a chance to review and ever so slightly widen the exposure of an author if that 200-300 page book happened to be good. This isn’t to say there aren’t good long books or bad short books, but it’s a matter of overall taste.

The second biggest reason is there are only so many real big time authors, and I don’t want to read too many books by the same wri-wait a second….

Somehow I read Jerry Ahern’s entire Survivalist series. I might be crazy.

Yeah, I don’t really know how this happened. Maybe blame the season and the fact that the books acted as a valuable time-filler. Maybe blame Ahern writing it as a serial and me going “ok, what’s happening next?” Maybe blame Ahern being surprisingly good with the literary fundamentals, so that even the worse books didn’t feel bad to read and I could always get through them quickly.

I also think reading the entire ‘epic’ has made me less judgemental. Let me put it this way- reading and enjoying dozens of ridiculous pulp tales is a pretty glass-filled house to be throwing stones from.

I’m torn on when to try and read more Jerry Ahern books. On one hand, he could write and some of the premises look good. On the other, well, aren’t two dozen books by one author more than enough. I mean, the Casca series has around the same number, and I’ve liked many-but not enough to want to go “Yep, I want to read every last one of them”.

And finally…

Fuldapocalypse has been a fun experience.

I’ve really loved how Fuldapocalypse has turned out. It’s legitimately broadened my scope of literature I’ve read, given me the chance to write lots of reviews, and given me a lot of fun.

If I had to list the best author I’ve discovered after I started Fuldapocalypse, it’d be Mack Maloney. Maloney has managed two things. The first is providing a scope that’s (for the most part) between the small-unit thrillers and the giant worldwide technothrillers/army books. The second is having a sense of fun and imagination.

But I’ve found many more good writers after starting this blog. And I’ve had many fun experiences with writing about what I’ve reviewed here, good and bad books alike.

Review: Sacred Mountain

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Sacred Mountain

blackeagleforcecover

The second book in the Black Eagle Force series, Sacred Mountain, takes a look at the over-the-top goofiness of the first and goes “all right, time to unleash the cheap thriller equivalent of the dubstep gun.”

The president is kidnapped by ninjas. Are the people of Black Eagle Force bad enough dudes to rescue her? That is the plot of the book, but the execution is something. See, the Mexican billionaire from the first book returns in his volcano-lair. And so does Osama bin Laden (see, it was his brother acting as a stand-in who died in Abbotabad). And so do a huge number of Russian mercenaries with their accompanying hardware. It’s like the opening scene of The Naked Gun, only stretched into a ridiculous, and ridiculously fun spectacle.

The book is still a little too long and clunky, it has a few typos including one of the character’s names being slightly inconsistent, and at times it got a little bit too tasteless. But it manages to be ridiculously goofy while taking the action just seriously enough, and I enjoyed it a lot for being “more Mack Maloney than Mack Maloney”.  It’s hard to go wrong where one of the protagonists is a dog in a suit of armor.

Review: The Guns Of The South

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The Guns of The South

gotscover

Harry Turtledove’s classic alternate history novel started when another author complained to him that the cover art on one of her books was as anachronistic as “Robert E. Lee holding an Uzi.” After that, writing a book about South African time travelers changing the fate of the American Civil War via a huge quantity of AK-47s was in order.

Guns of the South is a frustrating book, because it manages to be good, bad, and unnerving at the same time. The good part of the book is in its action and use of viewpoint characters. It has only two, Lee himself and low-ranking soldier Nathan Caudell, and the perspectives they can apply are well taken advantage of. As for the action, it keeps it well-written even when one side has muzzleloaders and the other AKs-and that’s not always the case.

The bad part is mainly in its ultimate antagonists, the time travelers themselves. These rank in my eyes as some of the worst villains I’ve ever seen in fiction. Besides the moral issues which I’ll discuss in a bit, they’re ultimately dumb and mysteriously stop taking advantage of their high technology and training at exactly the moment it’s convenient for the plot.

The unsettling part is that Guns of South has a disturbing feel of Confederate apologism to it. I think it’s just the result of unintended consequences, but still. Make Confederate protagonists who a modern audience will find relatable and sympathetic, and there’s going to be some (no pun intended) whitewashing. The two biggest problems are the Confederately ultimately phasing out slavery without much protest and the behavior of the time travelers. Said time travelers are stupidly and cartoonishly racist in ways that exist to make the CSA look better in comparison. It’s not only creepy, it’s lazy and annoying-and makes them even worse as antagonists.

This is still readable and it’s still one of Turtledove’s better books, lacking the bloat a lot of his later novels have. It’s just weighed down by its terrible villains.

Review: Sixth Fleet

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Sixth Fleet

meadowssixthfleet

I look at the Sixth Fleet series by David Meadows. Looks like it could be to naval warfare in general what Tin Soldiers was to tanks and Raven One was to aviation. Then I look at the publication date-2001. I start to have a bad feeling. Still, I shouldn’t stereotype 2000s technothrillers, so I go ahead anyway. Then I read the book in full, and yipes.

It’s very much a 1990s technothriller at heart. Regional enemy (Libya) with a super-gimmick? Check. Hand-wringing over defense cuts? Check. COMPUTER DIGITAL WARFARE? Check. Even leaving all of that aside, the prose is just very, very clunky and any scene with a character who isn’t American is rather “dubious”.

Worse still is how the first book is meant as the opening act in a long series. This means the pacing goes from “bad” to “REALLY REALLY BAD”. I’ve seen better pacing in later Survivalist books than here, and instead of Ahern’s flights of fancy, there’s a generic “mustache twirlers with super-gimmicks” story with the usual technothriller viewpoint jumping.

I wanted to like Sixth Fleet but just couldn’t. The fundamentals are too iffy, the subject isn’t that conceptually interesting, and its pacing is just horrifically slow and uneven. In many way, it feels like the stereotypical late-1990s/2000s technothriller writ large.

Tank Losses

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The Soviet calculations for tank losses in a World War III were incredibly high by the standards of “smaller” wars, around the level of each front losing 6-15% of its tanks every day (and even more when facing either nuclear or advanced smart weapons)[1]. Interestingly, their theorized APC/BMP loss rates were substantially lower despite thinner armor. This probably has to do with tanks leading the attack and thus being more likely to hit minefields and the like, as well as being the first targets.

“Loss” does not necessarily mean “permanently destroyed”, and one of the crucial determinants is who holds the battlefield, since that can turn a knocked-out but repairable tank into a permanent loss.

Still, even the best-case scenario still involved more than a division worth of tanks being knocked out each day, and this in a period where the Soviet advantage over NATO was arguably never greater.

 

[1]See “Generic Enemy: Mobile Forces Part 1, Operational Art And Tactical Doctrine”, pg. 11-18, par. 1141, “The Front Offensive Operation, CIA/DO Intelligence Information Special Report, 15 June 1979“, pg. 316, and “Front Offensive Operations“, pg. 369”.

Review: The Black Effect

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The Black Effect

blackeffectcover

Harvey Black’s The Black Effect is the kind of book I thought I’d be reviewing en masse on this blog, at least in terms of basic plot. Namely, in 198_ World War III breaks out. Cue a lot of tanks exploding. This is the second book in Black’s _____ Effect series, and the first I reviewed at Sea Lion Press before this blog even started.

The Black Effect is what I feared Team Yankee would be before being pleasantly surprised.  It’s a mostly-conventional 198X WW3 book that happens to be a picture-perfect case for why a bowl of ingredients does not equal a meal.

Some of the individual ingredients (battle scenes) in the novel are good, if repetitive. Others are weighed down by things like Black constantly listing the full designations of every piece of equipment in overwhelming detail (fog of war? target fixation? Limited viewpoints? What are those?). But as a whole the book just amounts to a disorganized parade of various pieces of military equipment and graphene-thin Steel Panthers Characters differing only in what they’re crewing and how much ‘camera time’ that they get before being blown up.

There is an almost total lack of anything cohesive or coherent beyond “WW3 stuff happens”. It gets to the point where the intelligence photographers who were the high point of the previous installment turn into just another pace-breaking liability. This at least doesn’t have The Red Effect’s using up nearly all of its space on historical events with names badly changed (ie, Stanislav Petrov became “Perov”) before rushing to stuff a bunch of battles into the last thirty pages.

The Black Effect isn’t all bad. It’s more evenhanded than a lot of WWIII stories, it being written as an alternate history with decades of hindsight helps with some (but not all) technical accuracy issues, and it works at providing simple action scenes. It’s just I’ve read better, even in this very specific subgenre.