Category: Review

Review: Final Target

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Final Target

John Gilstrap’s Final Target is a Jonathan Grave retread. “Grave gets in a tussle down south of the Rio Grande” is basically the plot of the book. Which he’s done before. Oh, and he helps rescue a group of kids/teenagers as well. Look, cheap thrillers don’t exactly have the most intricate plots.

Being a retread, this is a 51% book. There’s little in it that hasn’t already been done in previous Grave novels. But this is a 51% book in the best possible way. It’s comfortingly familiar, and all the fundamentals are sound. The writing is good and so is the action. There are worse things to read than a book in a series you like that demonstrates all the qualities that made you enjoy the series in the first place.

Review: Journey’s End

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Journey’s End

Amazingly, surprisingly, the Kirov series has gotten a formal conclusion with Journey’s End. I’d predicted that there was no way for the series to end gracefully after 64 clunky volumes. And my prediction turned out to be accurate. A lot of this is de facto flashbacks to each ill-developed member of the crew. The final battle is just a wargamed clash like the hundreds before it. The hanging threats of Volkov and the aliens are dealt with hurriedly and contrivedly.

The conclusion is “a generally happy ending is stuffed in at the last second due to yet more time travel technobabble.” Schettler was clearly desperate to finish Kirov so he could write a fantasy novel series (which are no stranger to giant, bloated, sagas), and it shows. Still, that a 64 book epic with millions of words was completed at all is no small accomplishment.

A Thousand Words: Alien3 The Gun

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Alien3: The Gun

Based off the ugly duckling of the Alien franchise (infamous for killing off the beloved non-Ripley cast of Aliens, for starters), Sega’s Alien3: The Gun was an arcade lightgun shooter a la Revolution X. Unlike that “how do you do fellow kids” game, this actually manages to be atmospheric. The visuals match the movie’s themes well, and the music is excellent.

In fact, this is the rare game that manages to have its cake and eat it too. Alien properties, following in the wake of the second movie, have this tendency to turn xenomorphs into uglier Koopa Troopas, being generic expendable enemies. (The game Alien: Isolation was a deliberate reaction to this trope). Naturally, a light gun arcade game can only do that… but it still manages to be chilling and foreboding too.

Then there’s how the action is jury-rigged into the movie plot. The player controls an anonymous marine who somehow ended up on the doomed Sulaco and goes through all the parts of the actual movie. There are robots, including a giant tank. Despite there being hordes of xenomorphs, the real one from the actual movie is inexplicably more durable as a boss. And finally, the last boss, in a game full of hideous monsters is….. a human with a flamethrower. It would be annoying in other contexts, but here it’s endearing.

This is the rare quarter-muncher with class and poise, and a pleasant surprise from a genre with low expectations.

Review: Siege

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Siege

Edwin Corley’s Siege is a 1968 thriller with a bizarre premise. In many ways it’s like the ahead-of-its-time version of Mike Lunnon-Wood’s Dark Rose. Except everything the much later Dark Rose does right, this does wrong.

The premise here is that Black Power militants are holding Manhattan hostage so that the American government will give them New Jersey as a new homeland for African Americans. As a New Yorker, I am obligated to bash Jersey, but I will suppresses the urges here. This makes it seem like the book would be wacky. But it’s actually not. It’s very dreary and sometimes even ugly.

First, the obvious issue. You might think a cheap thriller from 1968 would not be the most progressive or racially sensitive novel. And you would be right. But even by those low standards, the racial content becomes outright uncomfortable too many times here. Second, even leaving that aside, the book is terribly paced. Like Richard Rohmer, it’s just mostly meetings and plans, and the competence of the characters changes on a dime. Skip this book. It’s not worth it.

Review: American Secret Projects: Bombers

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American Secret Projects: Bombers, Attack, and Anti-Submarine Aircraft

One of the American Secret Projects series, this book looks at air-to-surface planes from the end of World War II to Vietnam. Covering everything from mammoth strategic bombers to light propeller planes, it’s an ideal aviation niche history book. With lots of illustrations, the obscure become visible.

With this book you can see all the bizarre and erratic 1950s designs. You can see how the AX project that became the A-10 started off as just a rich man’s Skyraider. This is an excellent book for any aviation enthusiast.

A Thousand Words: Streets of SimCity

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Streets of SimCity

When I was young, one of my favorite games to play was Streets of SimCity, a car action game that could take place in actual SimCity 2000 maps. Unfortunately, my frustrations with it were there even then. And now? Looking back without rose-tinted glasses, I can say: It sucks.

Here’s the first thing that illustrates why it sucks: You have no turrets and have to turn your entire car to aim like it’s some kind of wheeled StuG. Second thing. You can’t run anyone over. Because Maxis didn’t want to be too violent, Sims are just these weird bald sprites that you can’t really interact with (a contrast to SimCopter, where you can land on or push people out of your helicopter). Even the story hedges, with you being a stunt driver and all the action taking place in-universe on shows-within-a-game.

That it’s a blatant ripoff of the far better Interstate 76 is another blow against it. Combine this with terrible performance and worse physics, and you get a spinoff that spins off the road.

Review: Blood Brothers (Dallas Barnes)

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Blood Brothers (Dallas Barnes)

Not to be confused with the Black Eagle Force book of the same name I reviewed previously, Dallas Barnes’ Blood Brothers is the tale of Native Americans, casinos, and underworld intrigue. It’s also the book that, because of its subject matter, has highlighted the inherent differences between me as a writer and me as a critic.

Now the book itself is a 51% potboiler in a genre I’m not the most interested in. Yes, it’s full of cliches and doesn’t make the best use of them, but it’s also competently written. That’s what a 51% book is, basically. What separates it is the element that makes up the bulk of the plot, beyond the opening “publicity stunt gone wrong” incident that drives it.

See, it’s about the struggle to build a casino. Now the reader in me was thinking “is this really the best plot for a thriller? Something as low-stakes [no pun intended] and not really that economically beneficial as a casino?” But the writer in me went “Well, uh, you made an entire book where one of the main plots was about the establishment of an online casino. Clearly you thought it would be a a suitable plot point.”

I’ve said before that I don’t think being a critic has made me a better writer, but do think that being a writer has made me a better critic. This book is an interesting specific example of that. The critic part of me doesn’t think that highly, while the writer part of me can understand.

Review: Parting Shot

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Parting Shot

Written by nuclear expert James Kunetka, Parting Shot promised a more grounded, realistic look at the infamous “The Germans have a nuclear bomb” World War II alternate history. When I saw the Sea Lion Press review, I knew I had to get it. So I did.

It’s indeed the most plausible “WWII German nukes” AH out there. In fact, it’s arguably too much so. This is a rare example of the kind of book that’s possibly too realistic for its own good. The Germans go with a gun-type device, because that’s the easiest to build. Although that arguably just shifts the bottleneck from the physics package itself to uranium enrichment-it’s why I’m certain that’s the reason the Iraqis went with a more complex but less U235-hungry implosion design. But then again, having a cheap thriller drag you into plausibility arguments isn’t the best itself.

And make no mistake-the final fight leaves no doubt that this is intended as a thriller. Only the contrivances of that (and other scenes) mixed with the intent to be more realistic leads to an awkward stumble. The very nature of a program that wasn’t even close becoming unrealistically successful is jarring in and of itself. And even the bomb proper didn’t really work for me, being a cheap thriller cliche just short of “HITLER LIVED!”

Finally, the structure of the book works against it being a good thriller. Having stuff told in the past tense and jumping between past and (then) present takes away a lot of the drama. This is still an ambitious book, but it kind of falls apart from that very quality. If it’s too realistic for its own good, it’s also too scattered.

Review: British Cruisers

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British Cruisers

Norman Friedman turns his knowledgeable eye to one of the most arbitrary ship classes in British Cruisers. Going from the early 20th Century to the Cold War, he covers the enigmatic ship type that can best be summed up as “bigger than a contemporary destroyer, but not too big”. From wartime workhorses to unusual goofy designs, Friedman leaves few Royal Navy stones unturned.

The final desperate attempts at large capital ships after 1945 are the most interesting to me. The large “escort cruisers” started off as ASW helicopter ships, then grew into the famed de facto light carriers they became and were later used as. Everything else was rightly shelved. But this is a typically excellent technical history of cruisers in all eras.

A Thousand Words: Doom

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Doom

For the 666th post on Fuldapocalypse, I figure I’d do a “suitable” piece. It was either than or something on the SS-18 missile, whose NATO designation cannot be a coincidence (18=6+6+6=designation name “Satan”.) But I digress.

The id Software masterpiece that popularized the First Person Shooter genre, Doom is the deep, complex story of a sole surviving spacesuit burly man against a giant horde of demons. Ok I kid. But it is still one of the most successful and influential games of all time, ported to a degree that it’s become a meme/security/programming challenge to see if a certain device can be made to run Doom.

What makes Doom interesting and effective even decades after its initial release is that it’s a movement game. The “Doomguy” can run around at massively high speeds, and most of the enemy projectiles can be dodged. Thus it’s about player movement skill. Later cover-shooters are more about player timing skill. And the awkward turn-of-the-millenium games that took place after hitscan and slow characters but before cover mechanics were mastered-

-Well, the only “skill” involved is knowing the layout and how many powerups are there. It’s a kind of deterministic rut that stands as one of those things that doesn’t bring nostalgia. But the rapid movement of Doom is one that definitely does. This is a classic for a reason.