Tag: 2000s

Review: Resplendent

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Resplendent

A collection of previously published short stories, Resplendent is Stephen Baxter at both his best and worst. It covers the Xeelee universe from start to finish, in every time and every era. The good news is that Baxter gets to show off his worldbuilding. The bad news is that Baxter gets… to…. show… off… his… exposition.

Besides the infodumps, one big problem is that what the main characters do has to be ‘relevant’ somehow. You can’t just have Bill the monopole gunner getting killed, he has to fire the shot which changes the tide somehow. This Great Man-ism is at odds with the weaving larger than life scope of the settings.

Also Baxter is terrible at naming characters and keeps reusing names. So yeah, this book is a mixed bag.

Review: Bush vs. The Axis of Evil

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Bush vs. The Axis of Evil

Another former internet timeline turned book, Bush vs. The Axis of Evil amounts to “What if World War III broke out in the early 2000s”?

It starts with Hezbollah conducting 9/11 while thinking it’d just be a minor message-sender, which gets it off to a “good” start. All this is told in a long series of blocky exposition posts with the occasional in-universe “book excerpt” that mysteriously resembles a blocky exposition post. Anyway, this leads to a spiraling 200X WWIII against Iraq, Iran, and North Korea at once, with such amazing things as:

  • Millenium Challenge 02 being used as a serious reference for a Battle of Hormuz, which leads to a carrier (the Lincoln) being sunk. This is a “good” benchmark for how militarily plausible all of it is.
  • A copy-pasted Christmas Truce straight out of 1914 pop culture.
  • Divergences into music festivals and pro wrestling pay per views, since every contemporary internet AH timeline MUST have a “what about the thing?” pop culture segment.

There’s some potentially interesting divergences like the Unification Church converting ex-northerners en masse, but it squanders all of them. The bulk is just horrible gore-atrocity descriptions done with all the immediacy and intensity of the instruction manual for a 2009 Mitsubishi Lancer.

Stuff like this has made me a lot more respecting of Larry Bond, because he manages, however imperfectly, to combine storytelling competence with knowledge of military operations. Often you get one, or as in this case, neither.

A Thousand Words: Some Kind of Monster

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Some Kind of Monster

One of the best musical documentaries of all time, Some Kind of Monster covers Metallica in the early 2000s during the making of the St. Anger album. Given a surprising amount of access, including their arguments and therapy sessions (seriously), the filmmakers put together a tour de force. At times it’s like a ‘real’ Spinal Tap in its ridiculousness, but at other times it’s earnest.

Besides being a well made film, there’s a couple factors that help this along. The first is that it ultimately has a ‘happy’ ending: The band managed to overcome their difference, reunite, finish the album, and get a replacement bass player who has remained with them since. The second is that with hindsight it’s at just the right time. The band members are clearly past their absolute height and have grown with families and responsibilities. Yet at the same time, they aren’t in the pathetic, irrelevant “Fat Elvis” phase that every aging rocker inevitably falls into.

I think the best and most poignant part of the film comes when the album is finally done and the band members talk about the strange mixed feelings they have. As I’d just finished A Period of Cheating when I saw the movie, I understood completely that feeling.

Anyway, even if you don’t like Metallica (I’m not exactly a fan), this is a great film to watch.

Review: Stuck On The Drawing Board

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Stuck On The Drawing Board: Unbuilt British Commercial Aircraft Since 1945

Passenger planes made in Britain followed an almost exactly stereotypical British pattern: At first bold and trend-setting, then fell behind due to both luck and skill, finally becoming just an international cog. The could have beens and never weres of this are shown in Richard Payne’s Stuck on the Drawing Board.

This is a fun, if niche, book for aviation enthusiasts. The big problem from the nature of the planes it describes. For passenger planes that are all essentially just tubes with different capacities, VTOLs and odd shapes are the absolute most different you’re going to get.

But this isn’t the book’s fault, and you’re left with a fun look at what could have happened before the 707 and its successors crushed any hope of a full-scale British aviation industry.

Review: Nuclear Safeguards, Security, and Nonproliferation

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Nuclear Safeguards, Security, and Nonproliferation

Every so often I get a textbook that is not really the best to conventionally review at all, much less amongst cheap thrillers. Nuclear Safeguards, Security, and Nonproliferation is one of those books. I feel a little guilty reviewing it because the target audience is scientists and the like who know the math, physics, and engineering subject matter a loooooooooooooooooooooot more than an armchair enthusiast like myself. So yeah, a lot of this goes over my head. And that’s fine.

If the “Type 1 Academese” was understandable and inevitable, the “Type 2” is a legit point of criticism. Despite the fact that anyone who’s read a single piece on the modern history of South Africa would instantly grasp why the post-apartheid government gave up the nuclear weapons, the book explains this in a long and pretentious way. Where I think this is more than a stylistic issue is how it wouldn’t be easy to get its points across to a non-scientist, whereas other similarly dense works on the same topic are still more understandable.

A Thousand Words: Half Past Dead

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Half Past Dead

2002’s Half Past Dead was Steven Seagal’s final effort in mainstream cinema before he collapsed entirely into sus no-budget cheapies. Both a rip-off of the earlier and far better The Rock in the exact same setting (Alcatraz) and the general “Die Hard in a ______” trend that was several years out of date, it did not exactly breathe new life into his career.

A story of supervillains storming Alcatraz (see what I said about that other movie), the film is notable for two things besides just having a washed-up Seagal in it. The first is how desperately they tried to go for the “Edgy Extreme” trend of the late 90s and early 2000s, dragging in rappers and garish overcut camera angles to try (unsuccessfully) to put lipstick on the pig. The second is that this is one of the first appearances of the ubquituous Steven Seagal Stunt Double, used for as much as they could get away with. The “Stunt Double” would reach new heights in Seagal’s later films where it would be used not just for any mild exertion, but for things like walking peacefully.

Amazingly, one of the few highlights is “49er 6”, the femme fatale villain played by a 40 year old soap opera actress (Nia Peeples). She apparently relished doing her own stunts, and that is a far cry from Seagal the Double-Man.

As a time capsule/MST3K-style so bad its good, you could do worse than this movie. But I wouldn’t put it anywhere near the top of the cheap thriller pyramid.

Review: The Soul Drinkers Omnibus

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The Soul Drinkers Omnibus

Since I’ve just gotten (and am enjoying) the new Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader game, I figured I’d review a book (series) from that setting. An old set of Space Marine novels, the Soul Drinkers Omnibus covers the titular chapter. Is it good? Uh… not really.

The biggest problem is the characterization. It’s not that they’re one-dimensional bolter shooters. No, it’s that they’re worse. Namely, that these ancient super-warriors come across as ridiculously dumb and naive for people in their position. The plot involving the Soul Drinkers and their fall from grace involves a lot of contrivances and bad judgement to the point where I frankly felt they deserved to get wiped out.

There’s better 40k books around, so I don’t recommend these.

Review: After The Downfall

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After The Downfall

Harry Turtledove’s 2008 After The Downfall is not an alternate history per se. Rather it is an example of the dreaded “isekai” that started with Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court. A German soldier gets warped from the Battle of Berlin to a fantasy world and then stuff happens. A lot of stuff. A lot of predictable stuff.

This is not one of Turtledove’s better books. Take a ridiculously obvious and unsubtle plot/message, writing that can’t make up for it, and one of the fastest intro-to-sex-scene ratios I’ve ever read. And the “payoff” of that isn’t worth it, trust me.

The best I can say about this is that it’s a sincere attempt at something different and not a series installment stretched out over a long time to get more money. But that doesn’t make the actual book any better.

Weird Wargaming: The All Union US Military, Part 1: Army and USMC

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So the conventional forces of the United States in All Union, unlike its superpower counterparts, have not been the most central to any of my drafts (yet…). Therefore I figure I should infodump some of my musings on it right now.

Background

The reformation of the USSR brought about a period of aimlessness among the US Army. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the former Warsaw Pact states forming an independent de facto buffer, priorities became much lower. Going from all of Germany to the northern tip of Norway and Thrace is somewhat of a downgrade.

That being said, there has been a shift of forces to the south. The US 9th Infantry Division is in Turkish Thrace to, in the event of a Thraciapocalypse, serve as a mobile counterattack force. The lighter 51st Infantry is in Northeastern Greece near the triple border to make sure the rival NATO countries play nice serve as a tripwire for any Soviet-Bulgarian push south.

The need for “Americi-BTRs” that historically was filled by the Strykers came in the form of LAVs, both the LAV-25/Piranha of real life USMC fame for that branch and the unrelated but similarly named LAV-300/600 series for the Army.

The medium-ization of the Army came as followed: Two brigades in existing heavy divisions with their Bradley mech inf brigades replaced with LAV mech inf brigades ie BMP-BTR mixes, two “medium-heavy” divisions based around LAV-300s with a divisional tank battalion that would stay behind on lower-intensity deployments, and one “medium-light” division with the LAV-300 series, more uparmored HMMVs as the infantry carrier, and no organic tanks. For the USMC, the Seventh Marine Division came into being, along with Combined Arms Regiments (mixes of tanks and LAV-Bisons proposed in real life) for the three active USMC divisions.

More to come…

A Thousand Words: Action PC Football

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Action PC Football

From the same company as Action PC Baseball comes [American] Football. It’s a season simulator that can offer both historical and (my favorite) draft seasons. It has a similar minimal visual interface (that can be enhanced by the player if they add more stuff into the folders) and a similar statistical crunchiness. This later part makes it more interesting than Baseball.

See, in baseball, each plate appearance is basically its own thing. It’s a high variance sport where even having a great shortstop and centerfielder on the other team just makes getting hits a little less likely. But in football, if you have two excellent safeties, a good pass is a lot less likely. Both Action PC games simulate this well.

So Action PC Baseball is more a relaxing “see what happens” game. Action PC Football is a more cerebral and demanding game. They’re apples and oranges, but both are tasty.