Review: Worm

On By coilerxiiIn Review, Unstructured Review2 Comments

Worm

This is a weird story to be reviewing on Fuldapocalypse, and it’s a weird context. But Worm has been so crazy on Spacebattles to the point where the mods had to make a separate forum specifically for Worm fanfics.

Worm is a story about a teenage girl in a rough and tumble city who, after being shoved into a filthy locker by bullies, develops superpowers. Much, much, much more happens after that.

Worm has a lot going for it. It’s a superhero story that keeps the basic archetypes everyone knows and loves while shedding every last piece of baggage the big two comics have dragged over decades. The powers are interesting and distinct-for instance, the closest prominent figure you can find to the main character’s power set of insect control is a boss in Metal Gear Solid 3. There aren’t lazy “Superman” or “Batman” figures made with the minimum distinction. The characters are well developed and sympathetic in a truly dark world. It sounds very good……

 

……until it’s actually read. The fundamentals are ‘iffy’ enough that it becomes a slog. Especially early on, events happen and pass very quickly, not helped by the prose. But on the other side of the coin, the story as a whole is over one and a half million words long-longer than War and Peace and Atlas Shrugged combined. And I’ve found the prose to be simply dull.

In no small part because of this, every flaw in the worldbuilding comes up in a way that it wouldn’t in a better story. The biggest issue I’ve found is trying to have its cake and eat it too. Worm goes into a huge amount of in-universe detail to try and justify its common superhero-vs-supervillain tropes. To me the amount of raw effort required has the effect of making it seem less, rather than more plausible.

But I don’t want to be too hard on Worm-I can see its appeal, and consider it “not for me” rather than outright “bad”. It just didn’t really “click” for me, and I don’t want to read a million+ words of something that didn’t do that.

 

Review: Terror Descending

On By coilerxiiIn Review1 Comment

Terror Descending

terrordescending

When I browsed the Stony Man Executioner spinoffs on mackbolan.com , I followed one of my personal rules-when in doubt, go for the most ridiculous. Upon seeing the ridiculous commentary about Terror Descending, I went “go for it” and got it.

A 1960s relic left-wing terror group is using B-52s disguised as 707s to hit targets around the world with the aid of Cray supercomputer-launched cyberwarfare, and the Stony Man Farm team must stop them. This zombie sorceress-licious premise made me get the book. One reviewer compared it to a Mack Maloney book-this especially made me want to get it.

Terror Descending has the problem of “going into big technical detail and getting it wrong” with a vengeance. “F-17 Eagles”, F-22s staging from aircraft carriers, B-52s being “common” with thousands built, B-52s being disguisable as 707s, “Chinese-made Stingers”, and “MiG-8” fighters. And that’s without the “interesting” aircraft procurement this world has made (Austria uses F-14s). Oh, and despite the book being released in 2009, “Yugoslavia” still exists. This would have been more of a problem if I had the slightest expectation of genuine realism out of this book. Fortunately, I did not. The Mack Maloney comparison is very apt indeed.

Terror Descending, like the previous Gold Eagle Bolan Season of Slaughter, is rather overstuffed. There’s everything from skinhead gangs to airstrikes to a dogfight over Chad to every single flashpoint in the world from the Aegean to the Korean DMZ flaring up to South American prisons. And that’s just the villains. Having to use both Able Team and Phoenix Force as the heroes doesn’t help matters. While workable, the action isn’t good enough to really compensate for all of these flaws.

Still, I’d rather have “fun/crazy bad” than “dull bad”, and Terror Descending is definitely the former.

A new tagline

On By coilerxiiIn Blog Stuff, EssayLeave a comment

You may notice this blog has a new tagline. It used to be “Reviewing the Third World War on the page and screen.” That was made way back in last August when I thought it’d be a very narrow review site. Of course, now it’s anything but narrow. So I felt a new tagline was appropriate. Now it’s the more appropriate “Reviewing the Third World War and much, much more.”

Review: Technokill

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Technokill

The novel Technokill is easily the worst Starfist novel I’ve personally read. Back a few Thanksgivings ago, I had to pass the time and chose this book, which had been sitting unread on my shelf until then. Welp.

Who and What

This is the story of MARINES, bird-aliens, and criminals selling forbidden weapons to the bird-aliens. It’s long. It’s dull. It has weaving, tangled subplots. It has descriptions of twisted fetishes of various characters that feel like they’re as long as the few “battles”.

DEEP HISTORY OF TEM

This isn’t that much worse than the rest of Starfist, at least.

Zombie Sorceresses

At least nothing beyond the normal Starfist MARINES in Space Vietnam with a few gadgets contrivances.

Tank Booms

Ok, so at the height of this book, the MARINES face the challenge of (hold on to your seat belts) bird-aliens with these. And not some futuristic equivalent, the description is very close to the actual takedown .22 survival rifle. Even the (literal) tank army in Steel Gauntlet was better and more intimidating. The battle isn’t even that well-written and has no gimmick to make it better than it would seem. Then there’s an afterthought (literal) spacesuit commando scene that’s equally underwhelming, even by the series’ standards.

The Only Score That Really Matters

This is the low point of the Starfist series for me. It’s mostly just dull, and not in a good way. The low-powered opponent is only slightly amusing and doesn’t make up for the bad fundamentals.

 

Review: Cody’s Army

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Cody’s Army

Earlier on this blog, I reviewed a later Cody’s Army book, DC Firestrike. Now I got the chance to read the first installment.

Who and What

Cody’s Army tells the story of former CIA super-agent John Cody, who mutinies after one dirty job too many , only to be roped back into the “game” and teamed up with Texan “Hawkeye” Hawkins, Brit Richard Caine, and pilot Rufe Murphy to create a top-secret 80s action super-team. Their first mission-save hostages on a plane that’s been taken to Lebanon.

It’s mostly the 80s action stuff known well (perhaps fitting, the characters are ‘B-List’ versions of creator Stephen Mertz’s other big hit, the MIA Hunter novels), although I had to smile a bit at the series title-an “Army” of only four people. This reminded me of the World War II joke about how the “[single digit number] Tank Army” was called that because it had only [a single digit number] of tanks in it”.

DEEP HISTORY OF TEM

Regrettably, I could see the trend here (and it’s a trend that by and large did not exist in the first wave of action adventure books in the 1970s) of going into huge detail on some existing piece of military hardware-and getting it wrong. Seeing the names of real rifles being applied in a weird way and worse, seeing a UH-1 with “40mm cannons” in turrets. (I could assume they meant grenade launchers, it’s the only way I can make sense of it)

Zombie Sorceresses

While this is full of 80s action novel stuff and some eyebrow-raisers like the protagonists using a B-52 as a normal transport, what was the most zombie sorceress about it to me involved characterization. John Cody goes from being a war-weary recluse to an eager fighter in the course of a single chapter.

Tank Booms

From the opening to the ending, the action is as ridiculously gory and over the top 80s as you might expect. It’s good enough for this kind of novel, especially as it ends with a particularly satisfying and spectacular helicopter dogfight.

The Only Score That Really Matters

This is still the start to a B-list 80s action series. But it’s a fun start to a B-list 80s action series, and works for anyone who likes the genre.

Unstructured Review: The Valor Series

On By coilerxiiIn Review, Unstructured Review1 Comment

Valor Series

One of my first “get me through a vacation” books was an omnibus containing the first two volumes of Tanya Huff’s Valor series of military sci-fi. At the time, I was impressed by how an author who was clearly new to the genre could write something well. Now, some time later, I’m even more impressed. Other authors of either fantasy or (surprisingly) contemporary action have stumbled, in my opinion, when they turned to the difficult genre of military science fiction. Huff, for the most part, did not.

Oh, it has its pitfalls. Some of the prose is a little “flowery fantasy”-esque, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s a line in one of the later books that about how drones were obsolete compared to a “good pair of eyes” because they kept getting shot down (when the alternative is losing those eyes). But those are tiny compared to the advantages.

Heroine Torin Kerr is a good enough protagonist, especially by the standards of the genre. Huff tends to keep her in smaller, fantasy adventure party sized engagements that she’s comfortable with and work very well. And the series takes out a lot of the “brown M&Ms” that plague the ‘spacesuit commando’ subgenre (that I groan at but still somehow read and like anyway). For instance, while other, worse military sci-fi books have the main character promoted ridiculously high ridiculously fast, Kerr starts as a staff sergeant and ends the series as a… gunnery sergeant.

For these reasons I recommend the Valor book. Sure they’re lightweight, but they’re lightweight in a good, solid way.

 

Unstructured Review: Blood and Tacos

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Blood and Tacos

The “Blood and Tacos” book series is a playful mockery of and love letter to the classic action-adventure series. Something as big and pulpy as the Mack Bolan-style adventure fiction genre is both easy and hard to make fun of. Easy because it has a lot of obvious “flaws”, hard because it was so prolific that it frequently fell into the “Poe’s Law” pit of being an unintentional self-parody.

For instance, I can give a personal anecdote. I was flipping through Mack Bolan store pages and finding one where he was fighting genetically modified super-soldiers. Given the series started as a somewhat grounded tale of fighting mobsters, I went “a-ha, this must be an ‘Arkansas vs. The Blimps’ moment of craziness.” When I looked back, I found multiple ones where this happened.

The four ebooks in the Blood and Tacos series have a list of short stories and parodies/homages to classic adventure fiction, tales by obscure (made-up) authors that were later “discovered by” the actual ones. There’s also spotlights of either the most ridiculous or the most creepy real adventure novels.

Some of the stories are too forced in their humor, but others manage to hit the spot perfectly. My favorite is “Battleground U.S.S.A., Texasgrad”, for not only managing to spoof adventure novels, but technothrillers and invasion novels as well.

Review: Fortunes of War

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Fortunes of War

While Stephen Coonts is one of the classic technothriller writers, I’d actually never read any one of his books in full until now. Picking Fortunes of War, a late 1990s technothriller after his sales had peaked, is kind of like wanting to start listening to Yes with Big Generator.

Now that that shoved-in prog rock reference is out of the way, I was interested in this because of its depiction of a second Russo-Japanese War. One of my Command Live scenarios deals with such a thing itself, so I was curious to see how a spectacularly successful author handled it.

Who and What

Let’s see, an unconventional opponent (Japan) with some sort of super-gimmick weapon (Super fighter aircraft),  attacks a helpless Russia for zombie-sorceress induced reasons. This is very 1990s technothriller. In fact, this is one of the most 1990s technothrillers that ever technothrilled in the 1990s, even more so than poster child Cauldron. The 90s contrivances are there, and the technothriller “snapshot and superweapons” model, going from aircraft to submarines to dogfights to knife/fistfights is there.

Apart from that, it’s a little iffy with characterization (even by the standards of the genre). The American “Volunteer” F-22 pilots are too numerous and the book too short to really examine in depth. One final bit of serendipity happens in this novel. The villainous Japanese Prime Minister is named “Abe“-I was reminded of The Hunt For Red October having a “Putin” in it as well.

DEEP HISTORY OF TEM

This is slightly less infodumpy than the absolute worst the genre has to offer, although it’s still very, very description-heavy. One interesting part is that Coonts can leverage two pieces of genuine but “new enough to be exotic and techno-thrillery” technology-the F-22 and JDAM-style munitions.

Zombie Sorceresses

Ok. Apart from the geopolitics (Belligerent Japan, Russia being worse than it was even at its 1990s nadir), and the technology, the big zombie sorceress contrivance is in nuclear weapons. Russia has disarmed (almost) all of its nuclear weapons as a foreign aid condition so that the conventional invasion of Siberia, but kept a few for the plotnuke climax. Japan has developed a few in secret, also for the plotnuke climax.

Tank Booms

There are two types of action scenes in this book. The first are the aerial combat scenes, something which the Distinguished Flying Cross recipient Coonts knows very well. The second are the technothriller/action scenes like fistfights or anti-submarine warfare that he doesn’t have as much firsthand experience with. And it shows.

Even the former are let down a little by a few too many exact-detailed “and the missile exploded in exactly 2,003 fragments, turning the enemy plane into 1,200 fragements and its pilot into 320 fragements” scenes.

The Only Score That Really Matters

By the standards of 1990s technothrillers, this is very good for what it is. It’s technically competent and has its authors expertise in his subject matter carry it above the pack. But in some ways it feels more artificially stilted, like its creator’s most vigorously creative days are behind it. So, suspiciously like 1980s Yes (to swing back to progressive rock).

Still, it makes me want to check out Coonts’ earlier books, and that’s endorsement enough for me.

Review: Houdini vs. Rasputin

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Houdini vs. Rasputin

I was in the mood for a change of pace, and upon seeing Houdini vs. Rasputin I felt I had to give it a shot. I was not disappointed.

Who and What

Harry Houdini makes an ahistorical second trip to Russia in 1911, brought over by the head of the secret police to try and deal with the mystic Rasputin. What follows is a book-long adventure as the mystic and the escape artist match wits and trade blows. Pitting the two larger-than-life figures against each other is brilliant.

DEEP HISTORY OF TEM

Almost all the descriptions are for something actually important to either the plot or scene at hand. Imagine that!

Zombie Sorceresses

This just isn’t the kind of book where this category is important or even viable. I could argue “not even memetic Houdini could escape from that” but this isn’t the kind of book for that. I could argue “is it a coincidence he runs into everyone from Stolypin to Lenin?” but this isn’t the kind of book for that. This is the kind of book where you just run with it.

Tank Booms

After dozens of books of red-blooded Mack Bolan wannabes, tanks booming, clinical technothriller battles, and spacesuit commandos, the earnest old-fashioned adventure here, beautifully written, is highly refreshing. I could almost imagine a John Williams score in the background for some of the scenes.

The Only Score That Really Matters

Houdini vs. Rasputin is a fresh, earnest, amazing tale. Not since the first few volumes of Jerry Ahern’s Survivalist have I read with such  totally along-for-the-roller-coaster-ride enthusiasm. I highly recommend it.