Category: Review

Review: Hell to Pay

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Hell To Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan

With the atomic bombing in the news thanks to the Oppenheimer movie, I figured I’d had to take a look at D.M. Giangreco’s Hell to Pay, an analysis of what would likely happen if the dreaded invasion of Japan was likely launched. Spoiler alert: Hundreds of thousands of Americans and over ten million Japanese would have almost certainly been killed.

With clear and concise arguments that cite primary sources from both sides, Giangreco makes the case very convincingly. With their backs to the wall and years of experience and preparation, the Japanese would face a strung-out American fleet. This book certainly gives credibility to the statement that the atomic bomb was actually the most humane choice.

Those interested in WWII or alternate history should definitely read this book.

Review: Vortex (Catherine Coulter)

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Vortex (Catherine Coulter)

This is the third book with the title of Vortex I’ve reviewed at Fuldapocalypse, after Jon Land’s and Larry Bond’s. It doesn’t exactly measure up to either of them. I got it in a grocery store, which was probably a bad omen because this is a perfect “grocery store thriller” mushy book. It’s not 51%, it’s 49%, which makes more of a difference than you might think.

About the only thing that makes this tale of a female agent stand out is an extremely bizarre narrative device at the beginning. She’s recovering in a hospital after a hairy field mission in Iran. Instead of actually describing the mission in a third-person narrative, the author instead has the character watching film footage of it and narrating what goes on in first person for the entire chapter. It’s strange.

But it’s the only strange part of a dull book.

A Thousand Words: Action PC Football

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Action PC Football

From the same company as Action PC Baseball comes [American] Football. It’s a season simulator that can offer both historical and (my favorite) draft seasons. It has a similar minimal visual interface (that can be enhanced by the player if they add more stuff into the folders) and a similar statistical crunchiness. This later part makes it more interesting than Baseball.

See, in baseball, each plate appearance is basically its own thing. It’s a high variance sport where even having a great shortstop and centerfielder on the other team just makes getting hits a little less likely. But in football, if you have two excellent safeties, a good pass is a lot less likely. Both Action PC games simulate this well.

So Action PC Baseball is more a relaxing “see what happens” game. Action PC Football is a more cerebral and demanding game. They’re apples and oranges, but both are tasty.

Review: Aircraft Projects of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation

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Aircraft Projects of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation

I’m a sucker for big historical reference books, so I got Aircraft Projects of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation, a detailed look at Australia’s aviation company from WWII to its buyout postwar. Everything from the semi-improvised military aircraft of the war to their license-built airplanes designed by other firms (ie Sabres and Mirages) to their ambitious designs is covered.

The last segment includes some pretty crazy things like a trainer/low-end ground attacker that’s swing-winged and an interceptor powered by four very small engines. The latter is a good example of how much the designs had to fit the parts rather than the other way around. This book is a well written, well-laid out treat and I highly recommend it.

Review: Nixon’s War

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Nixon’s War

Rick Kester’s Nixon’s War is one in an “alternate presidents” series of alternate history novels. How is it? Well, uh, not very good.

This alternate Cuban Missile Crisis gone hot starts in a conference room. And continues in a conference room. I can sympathize trying to balance exposition with storytelling (after all I’ve had to do it myself many times). This doesn’t really strike a balance. Especially as it jumps to everyone from Lee Harvey Oswald to Elvis Presley to random civilians. All of whom talk like they were in a conference room.

(There’s a lot of exposition, ok?)

Anyway, the B-59 goes ahead with the nuclear torpedo launch that it avoided in real life, and World War III begins. This is at least a slight improvement over the conference room mania, simply because you can’t make a nuclear war completely boring. However, the exposition continues apace. Worse, it’s not even accurate as constant references to “5.7mm” bullets are made, a caliber that didn’t come into being until decades after the events of the book. And apparently the US Army is adopting the Browning Hi-Power (I guess the author likes FN weapons?)

The last third of the story propery after the (realistically) skewed war is mostly just people bumbling around in an uninteresting fashion. The reader is treated to philisophical debates and infodumps on everything from child care policy to plutonium reactors. In fact, the final section of the book is nothing but historical exposition. And this isn’t a small afterward-it’s about a quarter of the whole thing!

I don’t want to be too hard on this book. It does sincerely try to have a wide variety of characters reacting to World War III, does have a large number of battles, and tries to be a good “big war thriller”. It just doesn’t really succeed, which is a shame.

Review: Duped

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Duped: Slave Of The New Confederacy

I’ve read a lot of alternate history in my life. But not until Lena White’s Duped: Slave of the New Confederacy did I read a certain alternate history subgenre. In this case, alternate history fetish fiction. Now, there’s nothing wrong with fetish fiction. But this is a particularly shallow example of it.

Here’s the actual alternate history summarized: The South won the Civil War and became an independent country with slavery and still has it in the present in this book. (I will give Duped legitimate credit for not buying or promoting the Lost Cause mythology of the CSA’s secession and values not being slavery related.) During the Great Depression, slavery in its traditional form collapsed for economic reasons. But then in the 60s, it returned and reversed. Slaves became objects of ‘love’, mostly white females, and the slavers became mostly black males.

You can probably see where this is going. Anyway, the protagonists go south for what they think is just some harmless play acting as slaves. Spoiler alert: It’s not, and the book ends with basically just a sequel hook. It’s basically just a very strange footnote in how alternate history can fit into more or less any type of story.

Review: The Hardest Ride

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The Hardest Ride

Having loved Gordon Rottman’s nonfiction books, I figured I’d give his fiction novels a try, starting with The Hardest Ride. Even though westerns aren’t really my genre, I felt “why not? I know this guy can write.” So I opened this story of a cowboy and a mute Mexican woman.

It’s written in first person, which is a little awkward, and is full of “darn tootin” slang, which is even more awkward. Yes, you can make a realism argument for it, but it’s like phonetically spelling out every character with a non-English accent. The whole thing just makes it less readable more than it makes it more immersive. The first half of the book is a mere slog as the characters stumble around from town to town.

Thankfully, the pace picks up after said mute woman is kidnapped and the remaining half is devoted to her rescue. It’s well written but falls into the small pit of “too realistic for its own good” (where the author knows firsthand human limitations but still wants to have the main character accomplish something spectacular). Still, at least it’s a plot, and it’s not poorly written.

This is an iffy book, but it’s a good kind of iffy and I’m looking forward to see if Rottman can improve in later installments.

Review: For Whom The Bell Tolls

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For Whom The Bell Tolls

It’s not often that Fuldapocalypse reviews a genuine classic, but today it does with Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls. There’s pretty good reasons for this. Classics are either deserved legends or overhyped clunkers in my eyes. Guess which one this is.

This story of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, is a slow, dull, and most of all pretentious slog. And get used to seeing “Robert Jordan”, because Hemingway spells his full name out in basically every single mention. He also has Spaniards talk like the King James Bible or Silver Age Thor. I was basically going “Ok, that bridge that ROBERT JORDAN is sent to destroy had better have the whole fate of the war hinging on it” not long into the book.

Maybe this would work for someone else. But it didn’t for me.

Review: North Korea’s Hidden Assets

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North Korea’s Hidden Assets

H. John Poole returns to Fuldapocalypse with North Korea’s Hidden Assets, a warning about how North Korea may be stronger than anticipated. Or rather, that’s a central message in a meandering book. The content here ranges from loooong descriptions of Iwo Jima fortifications (because as a country occupied by Japan, they were undeniably influenced by its doctrine. Legit link, but not worth the obsession he shows) to constant tirades against the clunky, idiotic American doctrine and how the North Koreans have so much better military culture and small unit tactics.

Some of the book’s arguments are good. Poole spends a lot of time legitimately arguing against mirror-imaging a Second Korean War as being a repeat of the mechanized charge to take the entire peninsula that was the first. He argues and reasonably so that the north would be more likely to bite, hold, and wear the Americans and southerners down to win at the peace table. And the fortifications and tactics from the first Korean War are at least more relevant. So are the surprisingly few times he looks at contemporary North Korea (the nominal point of the whole thing)

But this book is mostly axe-grinding. It’s also hypocritical in that Poole portrays it as some kind of secret hidden source when almost all of its analysis comes from official US government documents-showing at least someone else already there knows of a worst-case perspective on North Korea. There are much better serious studies of that opponent out there.

A Thousand Words: Soylent Green

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Soylent Green

Soylent Green is perhaps the most early 70s movie of all time. Set in the dark far off future of 2022, the film is a documentary about life in a Warhammer 40k hive city, cautionary tale of overpopulation and societal breakdown as well as a grand mystery. The problem looking back on it in hindsight is that everyone now knows the big twist about what the titular food is made out of (human corpses). But there’s more to it than just that.

See, the movie is very early 1970s in that the characters dress and talk so similarly that sometimes I had trouble telling them apart. But it also takes the most ridiculous set pieces and expects the viewer to treat them with utmost somber seriousness-and I don’t just mean “ridiculous” as in later shown to be inaccurate ie the prison Manhattan in “1999” in Escape from New York. It shows a wildlife sanctuary consisting of one tree in a greenhouse bubble and a long scene where rioters are literally scooped up in bulldozers and expects both to be serious.

The movie isn’t badly made and you could do a lot worse than watching it. But it is ridiculously dated and belongs to the pretentious pre-Star Wars school of 1970s sci-fi.