The newest DLC for Command: Modern Operations, Kashmir Fire, has been announced.
Not surprisingly, it centers around the Indo-Pakistan conflict.
The newest DLC for Command: Modern Operations, Kashmir Fire, has been announced.
Not surprisingly, it centers around the Indo-Pakistan conflict.
For my newest Sea Lion Press article, I turn to the subject of sports alternate history, a niche within a niche. The post talks about sports AH and how making an unusual and “weak” championship team is more interesting than just shuffling superstars around, as frequently happens.
It’s been a while, but I have a new Command: Modern Operations scenario up for testing, 2KW Sub Strike.
I’ve wanted to do a scenario set in a mid-70s Second Korean War where the north smells an opportunity in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam. After much thought, I settled on “do a submarine scenario”, which also plays to one of my favorite strengths of having the player be objectively outmatched and having to manage the best they can.
With a few diesel subs, you have to take on an aircraft carrier shielded by, among others, a hypothetical guided missile battleship and a brand-new Spruance destroyer. Are you up for it?
I’m proud to present another Sea Lion Press review, this one being of the once-infamous The Big One series of alternate history/aircraft novels. The review can be found here. It was a lot of fun to write.
So 2020 happened. The worth of this blog in getting me through a lot of stress this year cannot be overstated. It’s been an amazing experience. What’s also been an amazing experience is seeing just how me becoming more broad-minded about fiction has manifested. What might have been exactly the sort of thing I would dismiss with a firebreathing sneer. Now I read and enjoyed it. I’ve been reading and reviewing far more alternate history than I had in the past as well.
I also feel comfortable with how I stopped the Creative Corner. That blog was becoming nothing but filler posts for the sake of a perceived obligation, and I found that once I made the conclusion post, it just felt right to concentrate entirely here.
There’s two book series I read this year that really stand out. The first is John Gilstrap’s Jonathan Grave series, which happened at the right time. I was having what I call the “D-Day Effect” where something big and covered you’ve previously dismissed becomes novel simply because you haven’t experienced it. This has happened to me and “grocery store books”, and this series was proof that some mainstream successes are deserved.
Of course, the second and much bigger series is Kirov. This is weird. Not just in its “three mediocre Final Countdown/Axis of Time knockoffs turning into a combination of wargame lets play and time travel soap opera” content, but in how I enjoy it without necessarily recommending it for others to read. But I enjoy it nonetheless, and love how I took so much to a series with a ton of jumping Steel Panthers Characters, wargaming lets plays, and World War IIIs (plural). Knowing that I embraced a series that, before the beginning of this blog, I would have done nothing but sneer at has warmed my heart.
However, there’s also been a bittersweet side to this blog, and that’s in seeing a lot the distant vistas close. Seeing the conventional World War III subgenre at its limits and piecing together what happened to the “Men’s Adventure” fiction that seemingly disappeared after 1990 can be fun, but it can also evoke a feeling of “that’s it”? Then there’s also seeing that some pieces of fiction are just easier and more interesting to actually review than others, even if they’re both equally fun to read. If the blog goes in the direction of those, so be it, but I feel obligated to bring that up. While I obviously haven’t completely dropped them, a “51%” thriller just isn’t as good to review or analyze as an ambitious, conceptually interesting work.
This brings me to the announcement. My answer to “what do you do if you’ve seen all there is of conventional World War III?” is “Write your own take on it.” So I’ve started writing my own supernatural/weird-tinged conventional 1980s World War III novel.
This concludes my 2020 posts on Fuldapocalypse.
Merry Christmas from Fuldapocalypse Fiction!
Sea Lion Press just released the Alternate Australias anthology of short stories. I’m a contributor to that, despite not really having any personal ties to that country. Oh well. My entry was a short story entitled “The Savannah War Dispute”, dealing with an alternate war in East Africa that Australia intervened in.
I was interviewed on Sea Lion Press about this blog. You can see the interview here.
For the 400th post on Fuldapocalypse, I decided to use this occasion to finally get around to something I’ve been wanting to do for a while-links to the ebooks that I’ve written.
You can see all my ebooks, from the early novelties to my Sea Lion Press novels, on the My Books page on the top of the blog. Enjoy!
I like the concept of NaNoWriMo. It’s just a shame that it happens at the worst possible month for me.