Category: Review

Review: The Peace of Amiens

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Drake’s Drum: The Peace Of Amiens

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A fresh Sea Lion Press Release and the first book in an intended series, Drake’s Drum: The Peace Of Amiens is classic “crunchy” alternate history. Starting with flaws in British naval shells being fixed in World War I and a more decisive British victory at Jutland, the “butterflies” spiral off until a bankrupt Britain throws in the towel in World War II, the Caucasus is overrun and the Soviet economy collapses, and the stage is set for a German-American confrontation (the cover depicts Amerika Bombers striking New York, with the book ending on a cliffhanger).

The book cuts between character vignettes and “pseduo-history”. I didn’t get the most out of the character scenes, as well intended as they were, save for one chilling scene depicting the Madagascar Plan in “action”. Thus like a lot of alternate history, it leans a lot on plausibility.

And here, it does better than many others. I’ll also admit to not being the biggest fan of this kind of genre, but this is how to do it right. First, there’s very clearly a lot of research being done, and it being done in a good way. Second, there’s a sense that a lot of it feels right. There are handwaves like the war outcomes and stumbles like my pet peeve of the pool of American political candidates being too small. But there’s more things that sound right and plausible, especially compared to other alternate histories.

For people who like detailed alternate history, The Peace of Amiens is a treat.

 

Review: Reflexive Fire

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Reflexive Fire

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Special Forces veteran Jack Murphy’s Reflexive Fire is a very strange kind of thriller. The low-level action is very well done, gritty and gory with almost the right amount of “semi-plausibility” and “exaggeration” (I learned about Murphy’s books from Peter Nealen’s posts on them, and could see the similarities in the action immediately). The high-level plot is this huge mega-stakes mix of ancient conspiracy theories, and to say it doesn’t fit the best with the low-level action is a huge understatement. It’s like a video game with ARMA’s mechanics but Metal Gear Solid’s plot. There are Blaine McCrackens that have less ridiculous plots and MacGuffins than this.

The pacing is very jumpy, with lots of viewpoint characters (it’s a rare instance of “just a name and nationality” Steel Panthers Characterization in a small-unit action book) and a very long “Herman Melville’s Guide To Building And Training Your Dream Army With The Help Of A Super-Conspiracy” section. There’s some hamfisted politics that don’t really add anything and are ruined by the presence of the super-conspiracy.

That being said, this was Murphy’s first novel in the series, and he demonstrated enough legitimate strengths for me to be forgiving of its many weaknesses. Plus, if I have to choose between a bland middling book that doesn’t stand out from the pack or a zigzagging, “really good in one way, bad in others, and quirky to boot” book that does, I’m choosing the latter instantly.

Special First Anniversary Review: The Sum Of All Fears

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SPECIAL FIRST ANNIVERSARY REVIEW: THE SUM OF ALL FEARS

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This is it. For the first anniversary of Fuldapocalypse, I felt I had to review something big by a big-name author. And The Sum Of All Fears was not exactly a difficult choice. I felt it had to be Clancy, and I wanted to pick what’s often regarded as his absolute height.

Now, I’m not and have never been that much of a Tom Clancy fan. Even in his Hunt For Red October/Red Storm Rising-era “early, lean” period, I’ve felt he was never more than decent, and that his rise was more about circumstance and being able to tap a national mood than actual standout writing. And his later period (at least from Executive Orders onward) is just bad.

Enter The Sum Of All Fears, between them. It’s 1991, right before the Soviet Union collapses. How does it hold up? Well, that’s a tough question. What bizarrely helps is that judging it by the standards of something like Executive Orders, as opposed to The Hunt For Red October (to say nothing of books by other authors), means that any improvement over that clunker makes it look better. Also beneficial is that The Sum Of All Fears is over 100,000 (!) words shorter.

Comparing the two, they have a very similar structure. There’s a bunch of plot threads and they move forward for hundreds of pages with all the speed and gracefulness of a NASA Crawler making its way through the aftermath of the Boston Molasses Disaster. Then in the final couple hundred of pages or so, the plot becomes vastly more focused, moving fast and much, much more smoothly.

And here’s where The Sum Of All Fears beats out Executive Orders dramatically. The latter’s final act was nothing but a dull, triumphalist stomp. This is a far more somber and unflashy piece with the goal being to stop a war rather than fight one. If I had to pick out a strange analogy, it’s the “peaceful resolution” paths of Undertale or a Fallout game. Jack Ryan being Pacifrisk or a speech-maxed protagonist is more conceptually interesting than him as a cook-shooting action hero or as a president.  Here’s the sharp-tongued analyst doing sharp-tongued analyst things in a way that takes advantage of a character built as a sharp-tongued analyst.

This also has the best villain(ess) I’ve read in a Tom Clancy book, in the form of national security advisor/presidential girlfriend Elizabeth Elliot. In a strange way, I liked that she was just petty, shallow, and wrong in a world of blindly ideological supervillains. She’s also one of the few fictional characters that I could instantly pick an ideal actress for-in this case, Amy Poehler (aka Regina’s mother from Mean Girls).

So was The Sum Of All Fears a Team Yankee-style pleasant surprise for me?

Not really. First, there’s still the rest of the book. The plot threads aren’t as tangled as in Executive Orders, and they fold back into the final climax better (there’s nothing like EO’s useless “rednecks with a bomb” subplot in Fears), but they’re still there and clunking along. The setup portion of the book has its share of out-there plots (The “Swiss Guards For Middle Eastern Peace” is very zombie sorceress ) and axe-grinding political figures. Not to the extent of Executive Orders, but still there.

Second, the book is plagued by what felt to me like what can only be described as self-indulgence, even in the conclusion. There’s the infamous chapter (actually, chapters) devoted entirely to a nuclear bomb exploding, but the descriptions of actually building the stupid thing get a much larger word count than they deserve. The adventures of various submarines, aircraft, and electronics get giant infodumps. That’s to be expected, but what really pushed me over the line to “Ok, you’re going ‘Look how much I know’ constantly ” was talking about the vice presidency, from its initial “loser gets in” to the post Twelfth Amendment ticket system.

In the first act, this contributes to the bad pacing. In the climax, it neuters some of the punch (there’s nothing like going from Denver being nuked to a rote description of something far away). This would have been a good finale to the Jack Ryan series. But it had to go on, and some of the elements that weren’t so bad here move on to devour it in later books (which are set up here in plot points that do nothing but slow down the main plot of the current book even more).

If The Sum Of All Fears was four hundred pages long, focused completely on the nuclear bombing and subsequent near-World War III, and written as something completely self-contained by a writer who expected no further success, it would be a good technothriller, if a little clumsy. But it’s over a thousand and clearly written by someone who (accurately) saw nothing but new books, dollar signs, and ever-lighter editing ahead of him.

So, for my conclusions on The Sum Of All Fears, I’d say that the people who argued that this book marked when Clancy jumped the shark were right. It has most of what made his post-USSR books as bad as they were, and the redeeming part is its conclusion. Had it gone with something different (like more direct action, which Clancy never was the best at), I would have viewed it as just a slightly better Executive Orders. But it has that well-done, appropriate climax.

That leaves The Sum Of All Fears as a deeply flawed novel that still has a good conclusion and can serve as an ideal stopping point for Jack Ryan-if not for the writer, then for the reader.

 

Review: Homecoming

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Homecoming

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John Schettler’s Homecoming is two things. The first is yet another entry in a ridiculously long soap opera Axis of Time knockoff with a Kirov battlecruiser sent back in time to World War II. While it’s been stated that this book could serve as a standalone beginning and people didn’t need to read the previous 40 (!) books to get it, I still felt a little lost.

The second is a contemporary World War III and a glorified let’s play/after action report of Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations (think a stiffer version of The War That Never Was). When I read the battle scenes, there was this suspicious part of me that went “ok, these are so rote and so exact that it looks like he was simming them through Command or Harpoon or some other wargame.” And it turns out that he was.

I was happy because of all my work with and use of Command. No matter what my feelings are regarding the literary quality of such a work, I felt happy and kind of proud of it being used in such a fashion.

As for leaning so heavily on wargaming itself, well, I’ve kind of adopted a more “glass half-full” approach to it. In the past, I’d have probably denounced it dramatically along the lines of “why should I read about a wargame when I can play it?”. Now, in no small part thanks to my horizons being broadened by many other books, I’ve softened somewhat.

I still can and will criticize books (like this) for being too much like a rigid let’s play/after action report. I still feel using wargaming as an exactly transcribed play-by-play (ie, 10 A-6 Intruders escorted by eight F-14 Tomcats launched to bomb ________…) rather than just to get a general feel for the situation (ie, “how much of a threat is ______’s air force to a carrier air wing? What’s a good figure for how many aircraft I should have the protagonist carrier lose?), isn’t the best way to go if one is making a literary story.

But at the same time, I’ve gotten a renewed appreciation for wargaming in fiction, even in cases like this. What I feel it does is add at least some more plausibility than would be the case in a less-researched book. And it simply isn’t the case that moving the “technical plausibility and detail” slider forward causes the “literary quality” slider to automatically go backward.

Leaving the battles aside, one of the biggest issues with Homecoming is the pacing, especially in matters of conversation. Let me just say that it’s easy to see why the Kirov series had 40 books before this one. It’s a shame, because a series that involves a time-traveling battlecruiser and properly wargamed-out divergences holds a lot of promise. It’s just the execution leaves something to be desired.

Review: Escalation

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Escalation

 

Escalation by Peter Nealen is meant as a kind of spiritual successor to his American Praetorians series. It starts in a dystopian future world where everything bad in current society is made dozens of times worse, and every taken-for-granted part of the international order is going to crumble. I was reminded of an old classic alternate history timeline called “For All Time” , where in place of the postwar western world, we get…. something else.

I have mixed feelings on all this. On one hand, most of the time, like a lot of the best political commentary, the exaggerations are close enough to be genuinely chilling. On the other, that every single shoe drops stretches my credibility a little too far, and some of the pushing that does go too far stretches it even more. Still, compared to his axe-grinding contemporaries, Nealen is both more intelligent with the political commentary and  better at making it more important and relevant to the main plot.

Said main plot is a struggle to fight through a war-torn Slovakia. Nealen’s action is, as always from him, top-notch. The soldiers of the Triarii (the protagonist organization) face everything from tanks to ordinary enemy footsoldiers in well-written action that balances well between “just grounded enough” and “just spectacular enough”. The biggest problem is an insistence on a big-world, big-battle story told through a first-person viewpoint. This doesn’t really work as well, and it’s a credit to Nealen’s skill that it’s not an even bigger problem.

I still prefer the breezier, less political and lower-scale Brannigan’s Blackhearts books from Peter Nealen, but a lot of this is just preferring apples to oranges. It’s good that he’s willing to push the limits, and for all its faults, I enjoyed Escalation.

Review: Out Of The Ashes

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Out Of The Ashes

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William W. Johnstone’s The Ashes series (not to be confused with the cricket series) is one of the worst long-running series ever. I might even be bold and say that it’s the single worst chronological series made by a mainstream commercial publisher that I’ve read. Even if it isn’t, it’s certainly up there. They, along with the The Big One novels, were some of my first exposure to “bad books” as I knew them.

In a fashion strangely typical of me, I read the later Ashes first, finding them via the ancient 2000s method of buying them in a bookstore. Somehow these monstrosities were successful enough to reissue after their initial publication date. So a curious thought came to me. Was there a chance, in spite of what I’d heard and read in other reviews, that the early Ashes might have been good, or at least not terribly bad? Could they have started as second-rate but readable Survivalist knockoffs and then devolved into the rambling political screeds and one-sided, toothless battles I knew them as? Did they have merit?

Well, now I’ve finished Out Of The Ashes, and I can confidently give an answer to that question. N-O-P-E.

  • The book starts with an introduction to paperback pulp author (hmm….) and former supermerc Ben Raines nobly turning down a chance to participate in a coup attempt against the EVIL LIBERAL GUN GRABBERS.
  • Then the General Jack Ripper-style conspirators, in an overlong “first act”, trigger the apocalyptic nuclear war everyone who saw the covers of the book knew would happen. It’s like if someone watched Dr. Strangelove and read the opening of a Larry Bond novel at the same time while glugging down bottle after bottle of whiskey, and then wrote something down while drunk.
  • Then Raines wakes up and experiences arguably the lamest and tamest Easy Mode Apocalypse ever, where he has no problem finding supplies (including weapons in a convenient arsenal) and bedding one beautiful woman after another while he battles and effortlessly kills all sorts of stereotypes. After this, any attempt to truly be considered post-apocalyptic stops. For what seems like the rest of the series.
  • Then the political tirades start getting even worse, with Raines starting his authoritarian Huey Long-on-steroids paradise utopia where unemployment is 0% and everyone is educated “properly”, and no one can be truly rich. But it’s not communism or socialism because of guns. Yes, he uses that exact argument in the book.
  • Then the strawman journalists, in a scene that seemed, and probably was longer than any of the actual battles, are taken to the Tri-State Glorious Peoples Democratic Republic Utopia for another exposition.
  • Then the federal EVIL LIBERAL GUN GRABBERS, in a scene that dials up the gore and squickiness (but not in a good way), slaughter the “paradise” and force Raines to return to guerilla warfare, setting up the rest of the series (don’t worry, he’ll be back commanding unrealistically huge armies and ruling Utopia 2.0 soon enough).
  • Finally, some of the Tri-States survivors and allies kill the EVIL LIBERAL GUN GRABBERS. The end, but not of the series, with its 34 (!) more installments.

Whew.

So what are the issues that plague this book and its XXXIV sequels? If I had to choose only three (and there are a lot more than those), I’d say these.

  1. Johnstone cannot write action well, and he cannot pace well, the two things cheap thriller writers need to be able to do. Pretty much every single fight amounts simply to “and then Raines shot them”, they almost never last more than a few paragraphs, and the tone of the book is such that removes the “well, they’re realistically short” justification. There are a very small number of exceptions, but it’s not worth digging through 34 books of slop when even a mediocre cheap thriller leaves Johnstone in its dust.
  2. The story frequently goes from “product of its time” to “ugly and creepy” in terms of offensiveness. The prose doesn’t help one bit, with it sounding clunky, creepy and oddly juvenile.
  3. Johnstone is not consistent or coherent in the slightest with his political tirades. Not only that, but they make the main character look pathetic, like a grumbler instead of Jerry Ahern’s stoic badass John Rourke.

This book, and this series, is one of the worst of all time.

 

Review: The Gamma Option

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The Gamma Option

The third Blaine McCracken book, The Gamma Option continues the crazy twists and turns, the crazier plot swerves, nonsensical politics, and surprisingly solid fundamentals that marked the previous two installments. It does yo-yo a little more into “amazingly stupid” (to give any detail on these moments and twists would be to spoil them, but rest assured-they are very, very, dumb)  but still has a lot of “stupidly amazing” moments. My favorite of these is Chekov’s Monster Truck.

See, Blaine McCracken notices a monster truck parked nearby when he goes to interview someone. I knew when I read the passage that the monster truck was not Jon Land’s attempt at some kind of weird literary metaphor, nor was it just a bit of background description. I knew that McCracken was going to end up driving it in a chase scene. And drive it he did.

This is everything I expected from a Blaine McCracken book, and it has all of the ridiculous appeal that makes reading them such a treat.

Review: Skeleton Coast

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Skeleton Coast

Arguably the very first “cheap thriller” I read was Fire Ice, in Clive Cussler’s NUMA Files. By this point (unbeknownst to me at the time), he had already entered his “Tom Clancy’s” phase, farming out a lot of spinoffs to different authors. One of my favorite and most enduring books of this time is Skeleton Coast.

The Oregon Files involves the titular super-ship disguised as a tramp freighter and its commander, Juan Cabrillo. Here it battles African rebels and a plot by an evil environmentalist to cause an environmental crisis (Trust me-do not expect the plots of Cussler books to make sense). There’s also the classic Cussler “Historical Flashback To The Present MacGuffin” scenes, which I was never the fondest of.

What makes Skeleton Coast succeed is its climactic battle. In many other books, the Oregon hasn’t really faced threats that are worthy of its armament and abilities. Here, it fights an army with all its firepower, and the result is very well done by cheap thriller standards. It feels a little more natural and a little less gimmicky than other Cussler books. For someone wanting to experience the huge “Cussler Franchise”, this book is one of the better entries.

Review: Strike Force Red

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Strike Force Red

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C. T. Glatte’s Strike Force Red is an alien World War II. The book might invite comparisons to Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar series, but is actually much different.

Aliens, wishing to take over the world to repair their damaged spaceship, land, kill Hitler, make Stalin into their pawn, and then proceed to form a League of Evil with everyone from Mao to Vorster on their side before sending a Soviet army to invade Alaska. Opposing them are, of course, the Americans with anachronistic P-51s (with even more anachronistic female pilots) and Sherman tanks.

So, I’ll get this out of the way. Historical war novels are generally not my thing. Especially not World War II novels. I’m just weird in how I judge them, and a lot of my feelings on the genre can be boiled down to “if I want to read about a historical conflict, I’ll read a history book”. So I’d be lying if I said this bias wasn’t slanting my review.

That being said, this book has a lot of wasted potential. High on the list are the aliens themselves. They’re mustache twirling puppy kickers who fail to be anything but the sort of “pop-up antagonists” usually reserved for spacesuit commandos. They’re not complex or developed or deep. Improving them would be easy as sincerely believing their rule to be ideal for humanity’s improvement (like XCOM’s Ethereals) or being able to be better than Stalin and thus inspire genuine loyalty among their subjects would make them more interesting. Or both-they clean up and improve in authoritarian and/or war-torn areas, earn the loyalty of the populace, and then find that wealthier, freer countries don’t take as kindly to them.

Barring that, they could at least be entertaining space opera megalomaniacs. They’re not. The aliens come across as being like washed-up actors who are desperate for a paycheck, so they put on the rubber alien suit and phone in their lines for the B-movie they hate but do anyway for the money.

But even higher is the technology, which seems very unimaginative. I don’t expect a deep examination of industrial capacity in the 1930s, but going straight to P-51s and Shermans in 1940 because those are the most famous is both inaccurate and dull. Likewise for T-34s and “MiGs”. The alien technology is rarely exploited and, in practice, amounts to just a way to get a Soviet army over to Alaska. It’s like a Fuldapocalyptic story where in 198X, a zombie sorceress full of magic explicitly appears and starts World War III-and all she does is torture animals for fun and move a motor rifle brigade to Iceland.

This book should have featured multi-turret tanks with deathrays against American Heroes in pulp science contraptions. Instead it’s just a rote war drama with all of the potential it had in its plot left unexploited.

Review: The Zone Hard Target

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The Zone: Hard Target

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In 1980, Hard Target was released. It was the first book in The Zone series of post-semi-apocalyptic World War III novels. Just that description alone gives the impression of the book being weirdly different. And in many ways, it is.

The background of this book is simple, contrived, and still somewhat novel. Basically, there’s a World War III, but now the fighting is limited to a contaminated zone in Europe, and the westerners have super-hovercraft for some science fiction flair. I was reminded of the Ogre board game/franchise, which has hovercraft and limited conventional nuclear war (it makes sense in context). That came out three years before this book did, and I don’t know how much influence, if any, it had over the writing.

This is a “have your cake and eat it too” kind of book. On one hand, the action is grittier and gorier compared to some other works in the genre, and the target MacGuffin is a tank repair unit and not some kind of superweapon. On the other, it’s still very much a cheap thriller with a premise, like Twilight 2000, that’s pretty much designed to be an adventure-friendly setting.

But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and Hard Target is a good book for what it is. It checks the boxes of what makes a cheap thriller passable, and as obviously contrived as they were, the setting and tone were novel enough to take things up a notch for me.

Another opinion on this book can be found on the excellent Books That Time Forgot blog.