Review: Blue Masquerade

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Blue Masquerade

T. K. Blackwood’s Blue Masquerade is a treat I knew I had to read. First, it’s one of those beasts that are as rare as left-handed baseball catchers or male calico cats-the conventional World War III novel that takes place as an alternate history after the Vietnam War. That its premise involves two of my personal tropes I wish got used more often made it even more appealing.

The first premise is that instead of the USSR backsliding after a successful August Coup or something like it, it reforms enough to avert such a thing. This happens here. Don’t expect to see MiG 1.42s or robot-turret supertanks here-it’s just the classic tanks and BTRs/BMPs. Still, it’s heartening to see this gimmick after wanting to for so long. The second is Yugoslavia, the tinderbox of Europe, being the catalyst for the war. This is a lot more plausible than some other World War III novels you may have heard about.

As for the substance of the book, I would call it a “51% World War III big war thriller”. It gets enough of the basics right and never comes across as truly “bad” in any way. That being said, I have seen everything it does being done better in other books. However, I’ll adjust for context, since this subgenre is extremely hard to do well. In that case, a 51% book is quite the accomplishment, like a baseball pitcher having a positive win-loss record while playing for an otherwise bad team.

If you like alternate history, conventional World War IIIs, or both, check this out. For another opinion, see Alexander Wallace at Sea Lion Press.

Review: Building The Tatmadaw

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Building The Tatmadaw

Likely because it’s lacked the direct confrontation with a major western power that North Korea or Middle Eastern states have had, Myanmar is one of the more forgotten and undercovered of the militarized pariah states. That military dictatorships are not exactly known for their openness and transparency doesn’t help things. Thankfully, Maung Auyng Myoe has risen to the challenge with Building The Tatmadaw.

The often murky and convoluted history of the military, as well as the brutal but often underreported internal wars, is shown in depth. As is the Tatmadaw’s force structure and conventional paper doctrine. For the former, it follows (at least as of the writing of the book) a common in Southeast Asia pattern of having “regional forces” tied to a certain area and mobile reaction forces (known here as “light infantry divisions”) that can travel where needed. Regarding the latter, Myoe’s description comes across as basically a Light OPFOR right out of Central Casting. The picture is that of an infantry-heavy force where advanced and heavy equipment is present but not dominant, and where the strategy against an external opponent consists of fortifications and irregular tactics to counter the material disadvantage.

Published in 2009, this is bound to be outdated, especially given the massive tumult that has happened since then (the “thaw”, the anti-Rohingya campaign, and the military re-takeover). But as always, that’s not the author’s fault. I did notice a few slip-ups and a bit of clunkiness when talking about specific military issues, but none of those are very big or bad. If you want to learn about the Tatmadaw, this book is an excellent resource.

Review: The Day After Tomorrow

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The Day After Tomorrow

Allan Folsom’s debut novel, The Day After Tomorrow (no relation to the 2000s movie) is-something. It’s definitely one of the best worst novels I’ve read recently. The prose is as blocky as it is purple (including, yes, the love scenes), and most importantly, much of the book is just people traveling. It’s supposed to be an unwinding conspiracy thriller…

…But it has an anti-Goldilocks effect. It’s too unrealistic and bombastic to be a cloak-and-dagger story, too dull and clumsily written to be an action novel, too narrow in scope to be a pop epic, and too shallow to be a character novel. And then there’s the big twist.

See, this book is basically a novelization of They Saved Hitler’s Brain, down to his actual head playing a role in the plot (although this one is not yet alive). It boils down to using convoluted superscience to clone/revive Hitler, for….. uh….. Anyway, the biggest part of the plot is foiled by someone other than the doctor and detective who serve as the protagonists, leaving a reasonable assumption of “what’s the point”?

Well, the point is that I learned of this book from a bad review. And while I don’t recommend it to anyone “normal”, I had a blast reading it.

Megafood

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As the kind of person who likes reading dry academic papers for fun, I occasionally find something that brings a huge smile to my face. In this case, it was the work of the Alliance To Feed The Earth in Disasters (ALLFED). Especially their proposed megaprojects of building a ridiculous number of greenhouses, seaweed farms, “coal butter” plants, and so on. A way to ensure that eight billion people can still eat well after a major catastrophe (nuclear war, Yellowstone-esque eruption, etc…) that massively disrupts conventional agriculture.

It honestly reads like something you’d expect from a popular science magazine in 1958. And that is not meant to be an insult in the slightest. Having lived through the COVID pandemic, having seen both a genuine societal disruption and a massive ramp-up of special production, I can say that while one is right to be skeptical about the smoothness of such an endeavor… something like it is still possible in broad strokes.

Weird Wargaming: The Soviet-Romanian War

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If you want to use small-unit wargames in my never-was draft percolating of a futuristic USSR deciding to finish off a surviving Ceausescu, some basic guidelines. Obviously, it’ll depend on the exact ruleset, but here’s the basics:

Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics

The USSR, under a Sovereign Union that in real life got scuttled by the August Coup, follows the 1990s GENFORCE “Mobile Forces” concept. Which is to say a multi-tier force. The “Basic Forces” divisions resemble slightly better late Cold War ones. The Mobile Forces ones have more futuristic equipment, better body armor/night vision, and substantially better training.

Mobile Forces battalions are organically combined arms mixed. APCs/IFVs are three to a platoon with each squad having a magazine LMG and rocket launcher. Company weapons platoons have lighter ATGMs and belt/tripod GPMGs. All Mobile Forces mechanized battalions have a large number of organic 2S31s (or Nonas for less-equipped formations).

Given the terrain, mountain formations have been plucked and sent in. GENFORCE mountain brigades are a four-infantry-one-tank battalion setup with supporting equipment suited for high altitudes (ie, lighter and higher-angle artillery). They also have a separate APC battalion that can be used to motorize if the terrain is appropriate. The one historical Soviet mountain brigade was inherited by Kyrgyzstan and consisted of two BMP and two soft-skin battalions with some attached cavalry and pack animal units.

Soviet Allies

The main contributors to the Soviet effort are Bulgaria and the stabilized Afghanistan. The former mobilizes to its full ability, which means it runs the gauntlet from “1980s NSWP” to “T-34s and World War I heavy artillery” (hey, if it can shoot and make a big explosion, it’s still worth something). The latter contribute a fairly standard BTR-equipped motor rifle division and numerous commando units.

Romania

Romania has a regular army with a degree of military modernization that it lacked. While select units have SRBMs based on foreign civilian sounding rockets, bespoke grenade launchers, and more (comparably) advanced tanks like the bizarrely shaped TAA, others are bottom of the barrel. All units should be mostly low quality, but some (particularly Securitat irregulars) will have better morale than others if applicable.

Organizationally, most should resemble lower-tier eastern forces.

Review: A Pius Legacy

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A Pius Legacy

If A Pius Man was weird, this is weirder. With the pope kidnapped and put on trial, a “thriller” ensues. This book suffers from a research failure comparable to that of a “Clive Cussler’s” novel where a random Brazilian spoke Spanish. Only that was a one-off not really central to the plot, and this concerns the main element. It has The Hague listed as being in Belgium. Repeatedly.

The same weird thriller elements continue in this installment. The political defenses of Catholicism turn into everything short of digging up the corpse of John XXIII for Cadaver Synod 2, Traditionalist Boogaloo. There are subplots reminding me of Lunnon-Wood’s Dark Rose where seemingly everyone both armed and Catholic turns into defenders of the Vatican.

This is a very quirky book. But I like quirky.

Review: Invasion Chronicles

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Invasion: Chronicles

DC Alden’s “epic” ends with less than a bang in the last two installments, gathered with the previously reviewed two in the Chronicles omnibus. The politics do take an interesting turn, and that’s that the Evil Continental Caliphate is actually too feminist. It has women in its military in exactly the same places as its opponents (including such non-nurse/clerk roles as AWACS radar operator and explosives technician). And of course the evil collaborator ex-lawyer turned butcher governor (and not a figurehead one either) is a British woman. This all felt deliberate on the author’s part. It wasn’t a redeeming quality or the act of adapting something else. It made “sense” given how more of the vitriol was aimed at the “traitorious British” than the actual invaders, but adds to the creepiness of the books.

The last two entries, Frontline and Deliverance, have all the same issues of their predecessors. The camera is either jumping around various viewpoints or focusing on big arcs involving unsympathetic characters. Having to combine these together leads to plot contrivances clearly designed to make them tied when they shouldn’t have been. Sending a super-secret stealth aircraft to rescue several AWOL squaddies on an ill-conceived raid into Birmingham is the biggest example of this.

The conclusive battle involves a clumsy attempt at Fortress London that’s designed to try to fit a square peg into a round hole. Having to tie the high and low level parts together means it couldn’t just focus on individual danger, and having the previous war be so one-sided means a broad-scope view doesn’t work. There’s more contrived, artificial drama and a very strange series ending that’s at best a sappy dream sequence and at worst implying that the whole thing was just a nightmare (that would explain the military inaccuracies at least…)

So yes, having read this entire series, I can say that it deserves the infamy and scorn it’s gotten. Even accepting its premise as an invasion novel with all the inherent baggage, this could have been executed a lot better. As it stands, it was not.

Another Missing World War III Tale

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There’s another type of story that seemingly just doesn’t appear in the conventional World War III niche (as far as I can tell): Stories centered around those with neither political or military capability. And by that I don’t mean the opponents in later Tom Clancy novels. The poor innocents caught up in the heat of war are often used in historical wartime fiction, but seem at best only in parts of conventional Fuldapocalypses (ie, Bannon’s wife in Team Yankee).

I think the biggest reason is well, no real incentive to do so. I don’t really have the best knowledge, but I can speculate that historical fiction writers don’t need to use an inherently contrived “Cold War hot but not that hot” setup to tell such a story. There’s plenty of historical conflicts that readers will understand better, and if a fictional one is needed/wanted, making it small, contemporary, or both can offer more of a hook.

So it’s a catch-22. The subgenre would benefit immensely from outsiders bringing their perspective. But most outsiders, even cheap thriller writers, don’t have much motive to write such a thing.

A Thousand Words: Tucker The Man And His Dream

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Tucker: The Man And His Dream

Imagine a movie that depicted the infamous Juicero in a romantic and fluffy way. Why, its founders were plucky little upstarts who wanted to save the world and make a buck but they got ground down by the evil monolithic force of Big Juice Squeezer. You know, instead of being an obviously doomed-from-the-start project.

Replace “juice squeezers” with “cars” and you have the big problem with Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man And His Dream. A biopic about entrepreneur Preston Tucker and his attempt to start a car company, the actual movie is well-acted and well-made. Its just that it romanticizes an inevitable failure.

Henry Kaiser’s car company with far more resources only succeeded in the gargantuan seller’s market that was the immediate postwar period (when there was a ridiculous amount of pent-up demand). Then it became the second of four Jeep Zombies. And Kaiser knew a thing or two about supply chains, which let him take advantage of that boom. Meanwhile, Tucker’s project would have rammed right into a righted market and the Korean War-if it made it that far. It was less that suppliers and financiers were crushed by the Evil Establishment and more that they were rightfully reluctant to work with such a ramshackle operation.

No one said historical films had to be 100% accurate. But the message here is so whiny and maudlin, and Tucker’s saga so misinterpreted that it squanders the production. The Tucker Tiger, a would-be scout car in World War II, is mentioned as being rejected because “gosh, it was too fast”. The reality was that it had absolutely no off-road capability, a rather serious problem with a scout car.

Preston Tucker was not a martyr, and the film tries to make him one. The walls and furniture of this movie are good, but they can’t make up for a talc foundation.