Category: Review

Review: Agent Lavender

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Agent Lavender

I’m going to push my review system to the limit by reviewing a mostly nonviolent alternate history story set in 1970s Britain. But Agent Lavender deserves all the positive recognition it can get.

Icelands

The “Iceland Scale” is simply not suited for something like this. After all, World War III never happens here. And that’s a good thing, especially considering the genre. Alternate history tends to swing to two extremes. Either it appears (especially in mass market fiction) as an often clunky parallel of actual historical events, or (in niche fiction and online postings) as a bunch of events happening for the “thrill of it”, often descending into lurid darkness.

Agent Lavender manages to dodge both these extremes. Yes, in the tumult of Britain in 1970s, stuff happens. But it never spirals out of control or is clearly something contemporary pasted over the date.

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This “section” is one of the book’s weakest parts. It can get very “inside baseball for nerd aficionados of British political history” at points. Thankfully this doesn’t take the form of clunky infodumps.

Zombie Sorceresses

This is where it gets effective. There’s one implausible divergence, and that’s the main character, Harold Wilson himself. A lot of alternate history tries to make the divergence itself plausible. This shows that an implausible zombie-sorceress induced divergence can work as long as there’s care shown to the aftermath.

The “Wha?”

Agent Lavender probably boasts the best example in this section I’ve seen. The plot and pacing are very, very good. There’s only one small bump in the scenes with Wilson himself that descend into pure goofiness. Other than that, it flows well and avoids a lot of the mistakes.

First, it feels right. This kind of verisimilitude is what makes or breaks alternate history. Parallelism tends not to feel right because it’s easy to tell what event the author is making an analogy of at the expense of accuracy. Lists of events tend not to feel right because they feel very clunky and artificial. An integrated, grounded story like this may not be right (After all, it has the one big divergence and I’m not exactly the best expert on 1970s British politics), but it feels right, and that’s what matters.

Second, the research is done to benefit the story, rather than the story being done to show off the research. Which is to say, it’s integrated to aid the feel of the plot and only dwelled on when necessary rather than just being shoved out in infodumps. The most infodumpy parts are placed in a section at the end where they don’t interfere with the main novel.

The Only Score That Really Matters

Agent Lavender is probably the finest work of alternate history and one of the best political novels I’ve read. It’s not perfect, but what is? I highly recommend it.

Unstructured Review: The Survivalist

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Having completed the Herculean task of finishing the entire Survivalist series, I figured it would be ideal for my first unstructured review. The “formal” parts can be found in my reviews of Total War and Pursuit, and not that much has changed in terms of zombie sorceress contrivance or rivet-counting detail.

The first nine books are good fun for anyone who likes 80s cheap thrillers, and the overall arc provided the series with a natural stopping point. The Rourke family and friends ride out the fire wave around the world in suspended animation, and they wake up to await the return of the Eden Project, a similarly suspended group of people launched into space just before the nuclear war to return a long time later.

Ideally, they’d ensure the safe return (with Billy Thorpe’s “Children of the Sun” blaring? 😛 ) and that would be that.

_ _ _ _ _ _

Instead, after the tenth book, the series felt increasingly less post-apocalyptic and more self-indulgent. Ahern could finally write the sci-fi he wanted to, and the books felt like an author’s toy box. This is not a bad thing at all by itself-after all, more than two dozen books of Rourke flopping around in the wilderness would have felt monstrously dull and samey in its own right. However, the hearts of the books are still close combat with laboriously described pistols, bullets, and knives. It’s just occuring around a backdrop that by the end involves Nazi mad scientists, memory-implanted clones, and hypersonic fighter aircraft.

The soap-opera serial nature meant a clear-cut possible ending never emerged again after the ninth book (even the finale is kind of rushed). The characters almost never have to scavenge and can fish from convenient arsenals. The world has a “Fallout game” problem of everything working after sitting for centuries (and of course, everyone using either real or replica versions of centuries-old equipment). Convenient underground and underwater cities emerge when the plot calls for it. The series never was “plausible” and had ridiculous geology from the get-go, but the parade of gimmicks still felt contrived.

The rough and tumble charm of the first few books is gone and the sci-fi action stuff doesn’t quite rise to the level of replacing it. If I had to give a reason, it’s a sort of “have the cake and eat it too” effect where there’s all this supertech but still the good old familiar (and of course, exactly infodumped) weapons. The science fiction tone isn’t really that much of a problem, but I still liked the original postapocalyptic one better and have read better military science fiction than the weird hybrid Ahern made.

And then there are the fundamentals. They don’t get that much worse, but often they weren’t the best to start with. That Ahern wasn’t afraid to shake up the character relationships and kill an important character off is a good thing. That Ahern devoted a lot of time to characters pondering about their lives and continued a love triangle for muuuuch longer than he should have is not. For the action and prose, Ahern’s definitely not the worst, but he doesn’t really try to grow that much.

The later books are still readable and still have the action feel -if they didn’t, I wouldn’t have finished them-, but the series definitely goes past the point of diminishing returns after the ninth or tenth book and the lack of “compartmentalization” means they’re less enjoyable on their own.

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I’d only really recommend the first nine books to cheap thriller fans. I must emphasize I don’t want to be too hard on the later ones in spite of my critique. A much better author would still struggle with keeping quality up over a very, very long series. Ahern was clearly writing the way he liked and was making a sincere effort to be different. The books kept flowing well and did not devolve into total clunkers like say, later Tom Clancy ones.

But they’re still less interesting and unless one is really into Ahern’s writing or is determined to see the overall plot through to the end, I’d say that there’s better sci-fi or contemporary action novels out there than the later Survivalist novels. Still, nine fun goofy over the top cheap thrillers isn’t bad.

 

Review: Operation Arctic Storm

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World War 1990: Operation Arctic Storm

I have a little bit of queasiness towards reviewing self-published ebooks. Often they’re, even if well-intended, lacking in quality. I’ve felt I’ve made too many sneery reviews of internet fiction that wasn’t even commercialized, and want to move towards being fair.

That being said, I’d gotten William Stroock’s World War 1990: Operation Arctic Storm long before I started this blog, so it wasn’t like I’d just plucked it out. I should have known what I was getting into, because I’d read another book by the same author that was as dubiously written as it was one-sided.

So why review it? Well, because it’s organically bad, and that for all I want to review good fiction, I need something to compare it with. Plus there’s one scene that’s something I wanted to share because of its ridiculousness.

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This is a pretty “Icelandic” tale (Soviets start, conference room infodumps, etc…), not helped by the portrayal of the Soviets that somehow manages to make Tom Clancy at his worst look like Tolstoy.

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Stroock listed a long series of references and advisors at the beginning of the book. They did not help in making it accurate, and especially failed in making it un-stereotypical. There are technical inaccuracies that range from small nitpicks (elite paratroopers and SPF still using “AK-47s” instead of “74s” in 1990?) to massive ones (see the “Zombie Sorceresses” section below) and the dialogue is extra-clunky.

There isn’t that much “The T-64BV1K was hit by an M829A1 round”-style exact equipment specification infodumps, but that’s only a small silver lining.

Zombie Sorceresses

Besides keeping the war conventional, the zombie sorceresses also make the Soviet advance into Germany stopped at the Weser very quickly. This by itself isn’t that implausible. This is 1990, at the absolute height of NATO’s power.

What is more implausible, not to mention slanted (and then some) is the one-sidedness of how they were stopped. Apart from treating GSFG 1990 equipment like Iraqi export equipment, there’s things like a single fourteen-tank company of Abrams’ being able to hold off a whole operational maneuver group for half a day. Worse, in the highlight battle, Soviet paratroopers lose to armed civilian Alaskans.

The “Wha?”

The plot and pacing of this book is clunky. It’s about half tinny infodumping by stereotypes and about half poorly written battles. And they intersect, with the initial halt of the West German invasion being told via a Politburo infodump that is written with such “fervor” that I was nostalgic for the Politburo infodump at the beginning of Red Storm Rising.

But there’s one scene-one scene that pushes the book into the surreal, and was the tipping point for me writing this review.

That’s a scene where the Soviet paratroopers in Alaska find someone’s NES and play various video games, including Tecmo Super Bowl (which is mislabeled as Super Tecmo Bowl). It’s either a clunky effort at comic relief or just there to be there.

The Only Score That Really Matters

Ok, there’s no other way to say this. This book is to WWIII novels what Plan 9 From Outer Space and The Room are to movies. Something so bad it becomes slightly amusing, at least to gluttons for punishment like me.

I’m very reluctant to call something the “worst ever”-I’ve used that term in the past with far too much shortsighted hyperbole. But it’s definitely one of the worst World War III stories I’ve read. At least it gave us Soviet paratroopers playing Tecmo Super Bowl.

Review: Long Reach

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Long Reach

What do you get when you take the scrambling paradigm of the post-1991 technothriller, a country that was always on a lower ‘tier’ to start with, and an interesting prose style? This. Long Reach by Mike Lunnon-Wood tells the story of a Guatemalan invasion of Belize, one of the British Western Hemisphere flashpoints-a far cry from the goofball Libyan-Palestinian invasion of Ireland in Dark Rose.

It’s an example of a story I wasn’t the fondest of personally, but can still see as well done.

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Long Reach follows the formula of the ‘national-scale’ cheap thriller fairly well. Viewpoint hopping, crisis, the like. That it has to be a British-scaled cheap thriller means everything has to be toned down compared to an American-scaled one, so it handles it.

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This book does have a lot of rivet-counting, although it’s mostly a symptom of the overall prose. I’ll talk about that more in “The ‘Wha?'”.

Zombie Sorceresses

Except for a bit of logistical handwaving on both sides to help smooth things along, the zombie sorceresses actually don’t have much to do here. They needed a break after Dark Rose, and they got one, for which I’m sure they’re grateful.

The “Wha?”

The plot is what it is and the characters are mostly flat, but the prose has the same issues Dark Rose has-it’s this (to me) overly lush, overly detailed, overly Hemingway-esque writing style that feels a little iffy for the boom-boom cheap thriller it is.

Thankfully, it’s a lot better paced and cohesive than Dark Rose.

The Only Score That Really Matters

This is a somewhat tricky one. For all its issues, Long Reach is not badly written, and it manages to dodge a lot of issues that could have sunk it. The enemy is more plausible, the action detailed, and for all the prose gets clunky, it could have been worse. It’s readable and conceptually interesting. After all, if American post-1991 military thrillers had to struggle with scaling down their opponents, British ones with a smaller base had to go even lower.

I just didn’t find it the best myself, because of personal quibbles with his writing style. But it’s both more plausible and better-paced than Dark Rose, and you could do a lot worse if you wanted a military cheap thriller.

Review: Proud Legions

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Proud Legions

Proud Legions is a book featuring another Korean War, the second of two feared “major theater war” locations in the 1991-2001 period. Its author, John Antal, had written several “choose-your-own-COA” ones beforehand and composed extensively for Armor Magazine. That combined with his own tank experience in South Korea made me eager for the book. I instantly thought of comparisons to Tin Soldiers, another armor-veteran composed book that ranks as one of my favorite post-1991 thrillers. How would it stack up?

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We get the usual supervillain opponents and the usual equalizer gimmicks-in this case, super-EW that scrambles all the high-tech doodads and “S-300s”. The action also hops around between a lot of viewpoint characters, but no worse than other technothrillers.

Rivets

I was reminded a lot of Team Yankee here. Normally this would be a very good thing, as Team Yankee is one of my favorite cheap thrillers of all time. However, this reminded me of one of the weaker parts of Team Yankee. Namely, the “Herman Melville for tanks” part complete with long detailed descriptions of what a tank unit commander would do, followed by a map illustrating the action-to-come in case we missed it.

And while it can get overly detailed in places, it can also get vague and/or inaccurate. For instance, part of its explanation for the lack of air power is the North Koreans having a huge number of “S-300” missile systems, something they have only acquired recently in real life. The problem wasn’t that they got them earlier, it was that they were treated like tactical systems running with the field forces instead of the operational/strategic ones they are.

They come across as being treated like SA-6/11/17 style battlefield SAMs from their description. While not that big a deal, I still noticed it.

Zombie Sorceresses

For most of the book, the zombie sorceresses don’t need to work beyond the usual limits of the genre. Yes, the foes are abnormally belligerent, yes, their scramblers potentially work a little too well. But both of those are easily justifiable for literary reasons.

What I felt was the most contrived part of the book had to do with the protagonists. Antal seemed to be working harder than ever to make the hero and his unit supremely (and probably unrealistically) relevant. This was especially true of the climax, where plotnukes are the least of its problems.

The “Wha?”

The characters and plot are serviceable by cheap thriller standards. I didn’t get much of a feeling out of them, but I wasn’t expecting to. The action on the other hand, is both good and problematic.

The good part is that it’s fast-paced and visceral. There bad parts start with it possibly being a little too gory for its own good. This isn’t to deny that war is brutal and gory, it’s just that I found the contradictions between “gore, grime, and oh this is horrible” and “look at the Abrams go! It made a company of BMPs go boom boom!” a little jarring.

A bigger one is straining to make a battalion of M1A2s more relevant by itself to the conflict as a whole than it probably would be. Team Yankee, however (over?)effective its protagonists were, was not trying to have a single company win World War III on its own. In Tin Soldiers, the “it’s all we got” protagonist force felt at least somewhat more justified in being decisive. So they’re at the main junction to prevent a super-breakthrough.

And-they perform a leadership strike at the end. It’s not “they went all the way up to Pyongyang.” It’s “The marshal of the North Korean army, who’s staged the coup and started the war, has moved south to take personal command of the decisive battle, and they’re there to fight against him.”

What makes this still more problematic is the location. Tin Soldiers was in perfect tank country against a mechanized opponent that had just a bit of effects. This is in more closed terrain against a lesser-equipped enemy. Seeing them deal with constant masses of infantry and artillery in an asymmetric battle would be more interesting than the (realistic, if better-case) scenario in the actual book where they smash up an enemy tank brigade that has far inferior equipment, but then that one battalion wouldn’t be as decisive as Antal clearly wanted it to be.

Having spent four paragraphs criticizing the action, I want to end this section on a more positive note. When there is close-in-infantry action, as opposed to the plot-action or Abrams’ destroying everything, it’s written very well. I especially liked a scene where someone in command of dozens of the most powerful armored vehicles still has to fight with a pistol at one point. It’s actually realistic-one time the colonel commanding a “Thunder Run” into Baghdad in the 2003 Iraq War had to do just that.

The Only Score that Really Matters

I’m being harder on this book than it deserves. It’s still a good read for anyone who wants a tank-exploding cheap thriller. The problem is that my expectations were higher than they probably ought to have been. There was Antal’s pedigree as a nonfiction tank writer, and I think that both it and the effectiveness of other novels by people with similar-but-lesser credentials made me think it’d be better.

It’s still readable, good for a first prose novel, and by the standards of cheap thrillers overall is effective. But it has issues, and those issues aren’t just that Harold Coyle and Michael Farmer left some big shoes to fill.

 

Review: Flight of the Old Dog

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Flight of the Old Dog

Dale Brown has always put the “techno” in “technothriller”, and his first book, Flight of the Old Dog, sets the formula while being very enjoyable.

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This has the usual technothriller cliches of supervillain Soviets and clunky political wrangling. Where it’s slightly different is Brown’s willingness to take a small leap in terms of supertech and his focus largely on just the titular B-52 and its crew.

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The rivet-counting and super-detail I knew from Brown’s later work is there and in full bloom. But it doesn’t feel as bad in this installment, because Brown’s experience as a bomber crewman makes the descriptions feel smoother and creating a sense of immediacy.

Zombie Sorceresses

The big zombie sorceress intervention in this book is the technology. The super B-52, space station, and the Soviet superlaser it targets are all the biggest contrivances. There’s also the “have a small ragtag team of _________ to take it on” effect, but that’s handled pretty well.

The “Wha?”

The characters aren’t anything to write home about, but the plot, cliche as it is, is brisk and flows quickly. Flight of the Old Dog remains a good example of how to do a superweapon vs. superweapon story right.

The Only Score That Really Matters

Dale Brown’s first book is, in my opinion, his best. It has the super-aircraft action that’s his trademark, but it also avoids most of the excess that his later novels have. In terms of 80s action technothrillers, his debut remains a rightful classic of the genre.

Review: Line of Control

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I decided to go on a hunt for new thrillers. By chance when looking them up, I found Line of Control by Mainak Dhar, where after coups in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, they ally to reheat the conflict with India. This was an Indian technothriller. I was intrigued.

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Dhar has read his classics, and it shows. After a few chapters, the structure is very clear to anyone who’s read Clancy, Bond, or the like. I was reminded more of Larry Bond than anyone else. I think it was because Dhar, unlike more specialized authors, went all the way from infantry to air and naval crews to spies to leaders.

Although I will say this- in one very crucial way, Dhar manages better than Bond. Much better.

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Of course, with the classic inspiration comes the classic drawback. Sometimes, especially in air-to-air combat, the listing of exact numbers and ranges gets a little too high. It isn’t the absolute worst, and it didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the novel as a whole, but it’s there and it grated a little.

One silver lining is how the setting of the book allows for considerable novelty in terms of equipment without being contrived in the least. The protagonists are using largely Soviet/Russian systems, while the antagonists are using mainly American ones, with F-15s as their secret techno-weapons.

Zombie Sorceresses

I didn’t really feel that much “zombie sorceress” contrivance in the book. It existed, but never truly beyond the norm for the technothriller genre as a whole. When one of the biggest issues apart from the belligerency of the antagonists (which is part and parcel of the whole genre) is “they found enough irregulars to launch a corps-sized conventional attack”, it’s pretty good.

A lot of it I think has to do with the setting. When you have two real-world enemies that are much closer in power as-is, I don’t think you need nearly the amount of contrivances or “equalizers” that occur in a post-1991 technothriller with the US as the protagonist country.

And then there’s dealing with the nuclear weapons. But that’s done in a literary way that made me excuse anything.

The “Wha?”

On one hand, this has the usual thriller tropes. It has lots of viewpoint characters, perhaps a few too many. It has lots of subplots, bouncing around a little too much. The characters are stock thriller ones.

And yet, it never felt like Dhar put a character in without a purpose he intended for them. There may have been a few too many subplots, but there’s just enough characters to fill those plots without being excessive. Furthermore, Dhar handled a very, very difficult issue for technothrillers in an effective way.

Dhar takes the “stop the nukes” plot and makes it the final climax of the book. He doesn’t brush past them with a handwave. And he doesn’t do what Larry Bond did in Cauldron and just remove them with a super-counterforce strike early in the book. There’s the conventional battle and then the fear of escalation. While I could nitpick the plausiblity of how it played out, it worked in literary terms.

The Only Score That Really Matters

I liked this book. It has infodumps, conference room infodumps, a buildup to something you know is going to happen, and other faults of the genre. But it also has the strengths of it, handles some elements very well, and has a setting that’s novel to a filthy Yankee like me.

I recommend it.

Review: Pursuit

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Pursuit

Pursuit is the thirteenth(!) installment in Jerry Ahern’s Survivalist series, the first of which, Total War, I reviewed earlier on this very blog. The Survivalist changed dramatically from start to finish, and Pursuit is representative of this change.

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Well, on one hand, Pursuit has the series at a crossroads between the pure post-apocalyptic survival it was in the earliest books and the sci-fi action it would become in the latest ones, with the only constant being Rourke shooting lots of people with his beloved Detonics pistols. It has action novel cliches but little else. Certainly a story that starts with the main character piloting a high-tech one-crew “minitank” and ends with a visit to a geothermally fueled paradise colony doesn’t seem like it has much in common with Clancy or Bond…

-But on the other hand, most of it takes place in Iceland. And the Soviets invade Iceland! And it was published one year before Red Storm Rising to boot!

So it’s literally Icelandic. 😛

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The rivet-counting is reduced to sci-fi infodumps and the usual exact detailed descriptions of firearms anyone who read the series will know as routine by now.

Zombie Sorceresses

Now it gets crazy. Ahern, to achieve his dream of writing backdoor sci-fi with a publisher who wanted modern action adventure, set a massive chain of events in motion. An atmospheric fire-wave would destroy most life on the surface.

Rourke and his family/friends acquired a suspended animation serum and used it after entering his underground “retreat”, leading to a five hundred year time skip. Since then, survivors from other underground shelters (including in the Soviet Union) and from the Western “Eden Project” launched into outer space to return five hundred years later, have repopulated the world, giving Rourke more targets to shoot plot opportunities.

The result was a tech-boost and a supply boost.

The “Wha?”

Now this part isn’t really changed. It’s still ridiculous 80s action, and there’s still some survival there. However, the characters have solidified and so has the series financially. Since by Ahern’s own admission it was a “soap opera”, get ready for cliffhanger endings and long meta-arcs. And soap opera character drama, including things like Rourke’s selective use of the suspended animation process to age his children up to pair them off with fellow adventurers he wasn’t related to (and, conveniently, get them to action hero age), and his wife’s dislike of that.

What has changed, and it’s a gradual change that has progressed ever since Rourke found his way back to the “Retreat”, is that it becomes less and less about actual survival and especially scrounging.

The Only Score That Really Matters

If you’ve made it through the twelve previous books in the Survivalist series, you probably know what to expect. It’s 80s action, and it grows ever more fantastical and less directly post-apocalyptic with each installment.

It’s something, and in this case it was an Icelandic something.

 

 

Review: Apocalypse Dawn

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Apocalypse Dawn

Apocalypse Dawn is a military spin-off of the (in?)famous Left Behind series. It’s also one of the most blatant “this is a tie-in potboiler” books I’ve read. It’s been sitting on my shelf for years and I’m planning on giving it away (along with a lot of other books I don’t intend to take with me when I move) soon. So as it fits the theme, I figured I might as well reread and review it here before I do so.

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The plot is more “military thriller” than pure “technothriller”. So it’s less Tom Clancy and more well-John Wayne. When viewed from that perspective it and especially its characters are very, very cliche.

Rivets

What’s interesting about the description of military equipment isn’t the rivet-counting. That’s there but mostly mostly tame for someone who’s read a lot of military thrillers, with the only issues being annoying but forgivable things like caliber mistakes (the most common one is using Western calibers for Soviet equipment-like 105mm barrels on T-55s and 20mm ones on MiGs). No, what’s interesting is that it really feels like the work of someone who approached it with a paycheck attitude, took genre cliches, and researched juuuust enough.

There’s descriptions, infodumps about the weapons that clearly show “I read the reference material”, but enough discrepancies that show it’s a sort of “get the technical ingredients without the meal.”

It’s Army Rangers being deployed to take on a mechanized Syrian force that never attacks in any quantity bigger than what could serve as an action-hero set-piece. So M82 rifles and 40mm grenades have an awfully optimistic effect against enemy armored vehicles, you always get only a few tanks, and everything seems to be like a pop culture-friendly weapon (for instance, every single artillery rocket is a “Scud”.) And ASM hits from weapons light enough to be carried on “MiGs” cause Abrams tanks to not only be destroyed, but flip over. And the ranks and command structure are all wrong, etc…

Zombie Sorceresses

There really isn’t much point in arguing “plausibility” when the story explicitly takes place in the Book of Revelation. Or so it would seem. The issue isn’t with the Rapture, it’s with everything else.

The Rangers are in Turkey near the Syrian border doing what a brigade from the 82nd Airborne would normally do (out of pure rushed-in desperation) or what a cavalry force/motorized infantry unit would do (if given any time to prepare).

This sort of reminds me of an annotated version of the Far Side, one of my favorite comic strips. In it Larson explained with some bemusement that after making a comic with mosquitoes, he got letters explaining it was female mosquitoes that bite unlike the husband mosquito in the comic itself. Larson’s response was he knew that, but that they didn’t have a problem with the anthromorphic cartoon parts.

I think that readers can accept big implausible divergences as part of the story setup easily, but small ones get nitpicked. So thus it is with the apocalypse and the Ranger deployment.

The “Wha?”

So there’s two main plots. The first is the conflict in southeastern Turkey (With a lot of hindsight, it feels so weird having Syria as an intact, conventional threat of a state), and the second is the main character’s wife fighting charges (she was trying to keep a kid from falling, he fell off but was raptured before he hit the ground, and they think she kidnapped him even though every single young child in the whole world disappeared.) Pretty much everything with the main character’s wife feels dull and just gets in the way, with very little attempt to even establish a solid connection or link between her plot and the military one.

The military plot is kind of just an array of set pieces that fumble around between infodumps and what looks “cool.” The religious plot is both (obviously) prominent and feels like it was shoved in. They come to a head when the military protagonist is saved at the end through ridiculously obvious divine intervention.

About the only good bit of characterization is Odom’s writing of the main series villain, Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia. (As an aside, I hate that name, it’s like calling someone Saddam Euphrates). That character is written with an appropriate slimy slickness that suits him well, arguably better than in the original books.

The Only Score That Really Matters

This, by itself, is a mediocre tie-in. It avoids the controversy around the actual series simply by being nothing but a phoned-in cash grab to maybe, possibly, broaden the audience just a little bit.

What I think makes it slightly interesting is not how it’s an exercise in writing for a paycheck. There’s absolutely no shame in doing that, and it’s not exactly unique.

It’s how it have a “51%” approach to just checking off all the necessary boxes. Military action with Rangers and infodumped equipment-check. Family drama-check. Christian religious themes-check. Not really much of a need to tie them together or sharpen them as long as they’re there at all. I’ve read other tie-ins, and most of them aren’t as blatantly going through the motions as this. Some of what I’ve read (and even reviewed) has been leaders in a genre. This is a genre follower that deserved the obscurity it got.

 

Review: Executive Orders

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Executive Orders

I’ve never been that much a fan of Tom Clancy, though I admit a lot of my problem comes from a “seen so many imitators that the original doesn’t seem so original” effect. To me, The Hunt for Red October was just OK, and it’s very hard to judge Red Storm Rising because I’ve emerged in a totally different context (but if I had to give a rating, I’d say it’s OK as well).

Executive Orders is not “OK”.

So why did I read it? Genuine curiosity. Not snarky curiosity, but a sincere desire to both see if it was as iffy as I’d heard and see how far the apple fell from the tree. This is a long review, and not just because the book has lots of problems. I figured a big book by a big author deserved a big review.

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So, take a post-1991 technothriller, with the tropes of crisis overload and limited force. Then take a political thriller. Then take a medical thriller. Then add a second draft of a technothriller. Then shuffle all the notes together and call it a book. It’s several stock thrillers all stuffed into one book.

The tangled plotlines all take a long time to spool up. Sometimes it feels like a filler episode of a shonen anime where Ryan and the antagonist Daryaei spend half an hour yelling at each other and glowing so the manga writer can maintain a head start on the proper chapters.

Rivets

Clancy (and/or whatever ghostwriters assisted him) has to describe everything. When he gets a description wrong, it feels bad. And stuff gets described wrong. Predators, a workman basic drone, are treated like they’re RQ-whatever stealth aircraft that can just fly slowly at 10,000 feet above a heavy mechanized army without a care of being shot down, and tanks specifically designated as T-80s die as easily as early export T-72s did in the Gulf War.

Zombie Sorceresses

Coming on the heels of Debt of Honor’s Japanese-American War, this brings about a United Islamic Republic. So about par for the course in 90s technothrillers concerning the opponents. A lot of other stuff ranges from “implausible” to “very implausible”, but to be honest, my mind was either accepting it as part of a (supposedly) dramatic story or just not wanting to nitpick details that I’d handwave aside anyway when the literary fundamentals were that bad.

But I think the biggest zombie sorceress handwave is the series as a whole. Because it’s gone from Jack Ryan, everyman analyst who fights an evil cook, to Jack Ryan, President Mary Sue of the United States with a clean slate to remake the federal government. Now that’s a zombie sorceress plot.

“The Wha?”

As mentioned in the “Iceland” section, this is a very jumbled book. It’s the story of a new inexperienced president and his family getting the hang of the job and a political rant tract and a bioattack and a “normal” terror attack and a conventional war in the Middle East and a crisis in the Taiwan Strait and the story of rednecks with a bomb. All weaving in and out of focus, diluting what few plotlines could have had some potential. Then when they are resolved, it’s often done very, very quickly and sometimes anticlimactically.

It does get a little more focused at the end of the story, but the tame battle in the desert only served to remind me of how much better Michael Farmer did something similar in Tin Soldiers. There’s one late-war, late-book scene in Tin Soldiers where the American missiles and aircraft maul an Iraqi division but don’t stop it, it’s followed by a scare where enemy Hinds with guided missiles of their own do some damage, and is followed still by a ferocious close-quarters battle where one of the main characters loses his tank.

In a similar scene near the end of Executive Orders, a similar UIR force is just walloped by gee-whiz superweapons and finished off by those good ol’ Americans in an almost nonchalant way.

And then Jack Ryan drops a smart bomb on the UIR leader’s home on live television. The end.

I found only two real plotlines that actually seemed like they could be effective.

  • The bioattack. While the most effective on its own terms, it shimmies around the various plotlines in a way that loses its punch, it’s wrapped up far too neatly once the quarantine is established, and in a way it serves as an excuse for a smaller force to face the UIR invaders in…
  • The conventional conflict in the desert. The pacing and flow does improve significantly once it finally revs up. Except it feels like Clancy put in the minimum effort to create theoretical dramatic tension before going back to the stomp he was comfortable with.

As for the characters, not only are they stock thriller characters, they’re overexposed thanks to the long plot. They’re also the subject of many infodumps that characterize them by telling rather than showing (and which makes the book even longer and less coherent).

The Only Score That Really Matters

Executive Orders doesn’t work. It has the one thing that dooms a cheap thriller more than anything else-bad pacing. There’s the “slowly ramp up to something you know is going to happen” problem made worse by there being several plotlines that get in each others way and stop whatever momentum does develop. When action does happen, it feels second-rate. So I found it as bad as I heard it to be.

On top of that, it just feels exaggerated. A lot of the Ryan-as-president scenes are there simply to allow Clancy to rant about domestic politics. Instead of Iraq or Iran, it’s a union of both, turning individually plausible opponents into an implausible one. The American triumphalism that was always in his books reaches even greater heights. I think my “favorite” example is how Clancy mentions the rightfully successful NTC OPFOR in a way that gives as little credit as possible to the actual Soviet/Russian tactics they’ve trained to imitate.

Clancy was the author at the very top, the king of the technothriller, the writer who stayed at the top of the bestseller lists while other technothriller authors faded or changed genres entirely. If he had become like this, does that mean the imitators would go from mediocre to bad, or from bad to worse?

I actually don’t think so. I believe Clancy to be a victim of his own success. Certainly most of the negative trends I could find before in other thrillers written before Executive Orders’ publication date in 1996. I think he simply was so popular that there was no perceived need to make his work “tighter”, and thus all the flaws compounded each other.

It’s just that the end result of a self-published writer working without strict editors and the superstar author having the editors lighten up on their strictness is mostly the same-a big, aimless tale. Clancy faced the same pressures everyone else in the genre he played no small part in creating did. He also faced the fall of the USSR and maintaining novelty in a large series.

About the only thing I can safely say Executive Orders did was help popularize, even before 9/11, the Middle Eastern Coalition antagonist set, but even with that I don’t want to credit it too much. After all, the 90s scramble for new villains would likely have turned up something similar.

I felt no schadenfreude at this book, and felt legitimately disappointed that I considered it as bad as I’ve heard. It’s sad to see the face of a genre decline so noticeably, but decline he did. Thankfully, there are better post-1991 technothrillers out there.