Tag: 2020s

Review: Nixon’s War

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Nixon’s War

Rick Kester’s Nixon’s War is one in an “alternate presidents” series of alternate history novels. How is it? Well, uh, not very good.

This alternate Cuban Missile Crisis gone hot starts in a conference room. And continues in a conference room. I can sympathize trying to balance exposition with storytelling (after all I’ve had to do it myself many times). This doesn’t really strike a balance. Especially as it jumps to everyone from Lee Harvey Oswald to Elvis Presley to random civilians. All of whom talk like they were in a conference room.

(There’s a lot of exposition, ok?)

Anyway, the B-59 goes ahead with the nuclear torpedo launch that it avoided in real life, and World War III begins. This is at least a slight improvement over the conference room mania, simply because you can’t make a nuclear war completely boring. However, the exposition continues apace. Worse, it’s not even accurate as constant references to “5.7mm” bullets are made, a caliber that didn’t come into being until decades after the events of the book. And apparently the US Army is adopting the Browning Hi-Power (I guess the author likes FN weapons?)

The last third of the story propery after the (realistically) skewed war is mostly just people bumbling around in an uninteresting fashion. The reader is treated to philisophical debates and infodumps on everything from child care policy to plutonium reactors. In fact, the final section of the book is nothing but historical exposition. And this isn’t a small afterward-it’s about a quarter of the whole thing!

I don’t want to be too hard on this book. It does sincerely try to have a wide variety of characters reacting to World War III, does have a large number of battles, and tries to be a good “big war thriller”. It just doesn’t really succeed, which is a shame.

Review: Duped

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Duped: Slave Of The New Confederacy

I’ve read a lot of alternate history in my life. But not until Lena White’s Duped: Slave of the New Confederacy did I read a certain alternate history subgenre. In this case, alternate history fetish fiction. Now, there’s nothing wrong with fetish fiction. But this is a particularly shallow example of it.

Here’s the actual alternate history summarized: The South won the Civil War and became an independent country with slavery and still has it in the present in this book. (I will give Duped legitimate credit for not buying or promoting the Lost Cause mythology of the CSA’s secession and values not being slavery related.) During the Great Depression, slavery in its traditional form collapsed for economic reasons. But then in the 60s, it returned and reversed. Slaves became objects of ‘love’, mostly white females, and the slavers became mostly black males.

You can probably see where this is going. Anyway, the protagonists go south for what they think is just some harmless play acting as slaves. Spoiler alert: It’s not, and the book ends with basically just a sequel hook. It’s basically just a very strange footnote in how alternate history can fit into more or less any type of story.

A Thousand Words: Dave’s Redistricting

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Dave’s Redistricting

One of my internet hobbies has been using the Dave’s Redistricting site. It allows you to draw up hypothetical legislative districts and see their demographics. I’m currently using it to make hypothetical seats for a vastly expanded US House of Representatives. It’s both fun and illuminating to see how you have to balance various challenges.

It’s very illustrative of showing how it’s actually harder to make “fair” districts than you might think. You can get a nice sensitive block of counties-that are safe seats. Or you can take half of those counties, balance it with half of a large city, and then you can make an evenly bipartisan district-but how “representative” really is an obvious artificial creation like that?

If you like politics in any form, you have to check this out. It’s simple, easy, and is great for both counterfactuals and actual debate.

Review: The Bucharest Dossier

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The Bucharest Dossier

I knew I had to read a spy thriller when I saw the setting was Romania. So I eagerly snapped up William Maz’s The Bucharest Dossier. That the author actually grew up in said country during the bad old days made me want it even more. Sadly, what goes up must come down. Taking place in the obvious year of 1989, it uses this excellent setting and…. squanders it.

A clumsy moral equivalence between Ceausescu’s Romania and Reagan’s America and making many of the events of the 1989 revolution the actions of foreign intelligence makes this sour. The author to be fair labels it a work of fiction in the afterword, but I can still see how it leaves a bad taste. There’s also the characterization and love story not really doing it for me.

That leaves the main plot. Now I’ll admit I’m not the biggest fan of Le Carre-style grounded spy novels. So I may be biased in this regard. But it still amounted to little more than a 51% story that was dragged down by its other weaknesses. The book does portray its setting mostly well, which makes me think that Maz would have been better off writing a plain historical novel.

Oh well. This could have been a lot better than it was.

Review: Cody’s Return

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Cody’s Return

Stephen Mertz was the main man behind the “Jim Case” pen name adorning the front of the Cody’s Army books in the 1980s. Since he didn’t have the exact rights to the men’s adventure stories featuring John Cody, he made a new character named (brace yourself) – Jack Cody! Who also had thrilling action adventures! What a coincidence! The late Chet Cunningham did something similar with “SEAL Team Twenty”, and it predates self-publishing by quite a bit when authors worked for multiple firms. (In fact, there were times when the throwaway series couldn’t even keep the main character’s name consistent!)

Cody’s Return, in spite of what the name implies, is not the first book in the series. It is, however, the first book in a self-declared trilogy that centers around a crazed arms dealer and his even more crazed girlfriend/cult leader.

The thing about the original Cody’s Army was that, with some exceptions, it was very much a middle of the road series that had all the weaknesses of its format. Which is to say that something like a classic men’s adventure novel is extremely shallow even by cheap thriller standards. And this is the case here as well. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it does make it hard to pick one over another.

What makes this worse is that the book is aiming for a huge plot that it’s trying to stuff into too few pages. I get it’s the intended beginning of a trilogy where the author has complete control, but even in that circumstance it still feels too poorly done. Which is a shame. The plot of nukes, crazies, and colorful characters is something that almost needed a meatier book to do right.

Mertz is a champion of the genre, but he’s done better.

Review: The Death of Russia

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The Death of Russia

It’s uncommon but not unheard of for a book to have its premise done better by something else in more or less every single way possible. So is the case with The Death of Russia, an alternate history story told through exposition and snippets about Yeltsin dying in the early 1990s and the world sinking into chaos. AH enthusiasts will also know that Zhirinovsky’s Russian Empire was another alternate history story told through exposition and snippets about Yeltsin dying in the early 1990s and the world sinking into chaos. Both started off as forum timelines and then were commercialized.

The first issue one notices is the writing style. Namely, giant breathless blocks of text. The timeline tries to do the “snippets from in-universe books and the like”, but this falls flat because all the “sources” read exactly the same. The second issue is the relentless grimdarkness. While based on stuff that sadly did happen, this just feels gratuitous. There being no real characters or anything but pure exposition makes both problems all the worse.

Eventually things spiral into a nuclear World War III. However, it’s worth noting that a fake interview with Evangelion’s producer starts off the chapter in question. Since pop culture is an obsession of the online AH fandom, this is not exactly a good start. The strike itself is no Arc Light or Red Hammer 1994. I actually fell annoyed at how a (mostly) survivable nuclear war, a topic that fascinates me, was handled so badly. It’s handled with all the grace of a minor league sportsball game report. Namely, a minor league game report written by an basic computer program that saw the box score.

In fact, what’s honestly interesting about the final nuclear exchange, besides the teeth-gritting “it doesn’t work like that” inaccuracies, is how it demonstrates a critique I’ve had for a while now. In the footnotes, the author doesn’t cite those two novels, or any real study on a limited/counterforce-heavy big nuclear strike that would leave society survivable. No, it’s another timeline, an earlier one called Able Archer 83.

But for any normal reading, I’d just say “read Zhirinovsky’s Russian Empire instead”.

Review: The Cold Hand of Death

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The Cold Hand of Death

Brent Towns’ latest Team Reaper thriller as of this post is The Cold Hand of Death. It can basically be described as the technothriller equivalent of gulping down an energy drink in a distorted physics chamber where time moves faster. It’s like the book never goes more than two pages without a shot being fired or something blowing up. There’s the usual world-in-crisis technothriller plot, but even this is warped up to ludicrous speed.

I’ve mentioned the previous installments as being fast-paced, but this takes them to a totally different level. It’s like comparing a fast propeller plane to an SR-71.

It just feels excessive. The writing is not bad. It aces the action scenes, and that’s what a thriller needs to get right. But the best action writers of all time would struggle to keep any book interesting if it had as many battles as this one. This is like a deep fried gummy candy. It’s not inedible, but it’s just not the sort of thing you’d want to eat/read lots of.

Review: Fire and Maneuver

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Fire and Maneuver

The second entry in James Ronsone and Alex Aaronson’s 1981 World War III, Fire and Maneuver continues its predecessor’s excellent work. While it does not bring the most novelty to the subgenre in terms of its structure, in execution it does very well, hopping between viewpoints in a way that’s both smooth and fast. And it actually has an M47 Dragon being able to destroy something in a stretch of logic that works for story reasons.

Jokes about the Cold War’s worst ATGM aside, this is a good entry in a scarce genre. If I had to make one criticism, it’s that long, exact system designations are used a little more often than I found credible. But that’s a tiny nitpick and doesn’t detract from the experience.

Review: A Dream Of Empire

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A Dream Of Empire

A recent work of alternate history by someone with the pen name “Grey Wolf”, A Dream of Empire is about a war between 19th Century Britain and a surviving Byzantine/Eastern Roman Empire. There are lots of characters. And there are airships. Because this is an alternate history work set in the 1800s, there has to be airships.

This isn’t bad, but it feels a little overstuffed and shallow. It’s trying to be a “big war thriller” and a spy thriller, but that’s hard to do with something that’s one third the length of a normal book, much less a big and sweeping one. That’s the literary critique. The alternate history nerd critique is that a Byzantine Empire surviving, Victorian semi-steampunk, and airships are all genre archetypes, if not cliches.

You could do a lot worse for the very low purchase price than this book. But it could have also been a lot more and a lot better than what it actually was.

Review: Shanghaied on the Rio Grande

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Shanghaied on the Rio Grande: A Novel of World War Three

Just looking at the suffix of this book made me go “I had to review this.” Granted, William Joiner’s Shanghaied on the Rio Grande is more like a short story. But it’s still a World War III invasion story. I thought the length of this would mean there was some kind of publishing mistake or the story was unfinished, but no. It’s wrapped up within its few pages.

This reads like a teenager with little knowledge of the military or geopolitics who read far too many 1980s adventure novels writing a fanfic of those. I do not mean this in a negative term. The Chinese seize control of the American nuclear arsenal and walk in, dominating and trying to force Americans to become Buddhists (seriously). Opposing them are heroic Texans, one of whom is named Billy Bob (also, seriously). The story wraps up incredibly quickly (as in two pages) once the Americans get their nukes back and rout the Chinese.

Is this stupid and offensive to Texans and Chinese alike? Yes. But is it fun? Also yes.