Tag: American

Review: White Jacket

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White Jacket

So, the time has come to review someone I probably didn’t think I’d be reviewing when I started the blog-Herman Melville and his naval book White-Jacket.

Now, I’ve used the term “Herman Melville for _______” to describe fiction that is overly descriptive at the expense of other things , ie “Team Yankee occasionally devolves into Herman Melville for tanks”. Thus, White Jacket is Herman Melville for Herman Melville. To be fair a lot of 19th century novels are like that, it’s just the writing style of the time, but Melville particularly stands out.

Even at the time, Melville didn’t think very highly of this book, viewing it as something done purely for the money. Even a century and a half apart, I can see the reasoning “Ok, I need a book done, I’ll just slightly fictionalize my experience in the US Navy and send it to the printers.”

White-Jacket, in spite of its clunkiness, manages to stand out for two reasons. The first is its historical value in the life of a 19th century sailor and the operations of the US Navy at the time. The second is that yes, it’s realistic. You want a truly realistic military story, something like this with modern technology is what you’re going to get. I’ve said only part-jokingly that a truly realistic military video game wouldn’t be ARMA , it’d be Desert Bus. This is why I’m not a stickler for realism in literature.

Review: Return of The Starfighter

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Return Of the Starfighter

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It says something about how crazy the Black Eagle Force series is when a book with the premise of a Chinese catamaran supercarrier leading a would-be invasion of the west coast prompted in part by the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy is one of the tamer and more grounded entries. And yet, that is how Return Of The Starfighter felt. The BEF fights alongside restored and upgraded Cold War aircraft (like the F-104) to battle the invasion fleet.

The Black Eagle Force series is kind of like the literary equivalent of the Postal 2 video game. It’s rather “dubious”, makes no sense,  always teeters on and sometimes crosses the line from “tasteless” to “offensive”, and isn’t the best set up, but the pure spectacle is what makes it enjoyable.

Lose the spectacle and the series loses its appeal, turning into a too clunky, too descriptive, too infodump-heavy technothriller. Return of The Starfighter, coming on the heels of Sacred Mountain’s goofy-crazy ridiculousness, tones it down ever so slightly and ends up looking a little like an avant-garde band’s attempt to play “normal” music. That some of the plot and battle elements are inevitably repeating by the third installment also doesn’t help.

It’s still over the top and still has its sense of wonder. This series, thankfully, isn’t devolving into later-Clancy levels of over-seriousness and pretentiousness by any means. But for a series that runs on crazy, going closer to mundanity takes away the greatest fun. Even if the mundanity comes in the form of a two-hulled mega-aircraft-carrier.

Review: Strike Vector

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Strike Vector

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Strike Vector is the the second book in the Marine Force One series. Whereas the first book was a 51% book, this feels a little worse.

The plot deals with Marine Force One going on a mission to stop smuggled superweapon MacGuffins from reaching Saddam Hussein (this book was published in 2002). The opening part has a lot of badly written sexual sleaze to it (guess how much that adds to the novel), and the main action portion, as Maj. Saxon and his team fight their way through the Middle East, has such wonders as an AC-130 engaging MiG-29s in aerial combat and managing to destroy one of them before being shot down.

As for the main event, it has three problems. The first is the devolution of its main character. In the first book, Saxon was an ass. Here he’s an undeveloped trigger-puller who’s just there to fight and be present for the battles.

The second is that the battles themselves never really rise that high. The writing on them is still very much at the “51% level”, and the main characters are a little too capable for the tone. The character of Maj. Saxon may be toned down, but the fighting capability of Maj. Saxon is still very, very great. The third is that there are a few too many gimmicks in the action scenes, a few too many fights for the sake of fights.

The result is a slightly worse-than-normal entry in a middling series.

Review: Contract For Slaughter

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Contract For Slaughter

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The first book in the “Eagle Force” series, Contract For Slaughter was released in 1989 by Dan Schmidt, a veteran of the action-adventure genre who wrote literal dozens of Mack Bolan tales. Coming close to the tail end of the 80s action-novel boom, it provides a very, very good example of it.

It’s a team-centric book where a group of colorful mercenaries in the low single digits (in this case four people) form and fight. This is both a first installment (so it has a not insignificant space devoted to the “forming” part) and it’s short (so there’s less room for the final fight). Though to be fair, a lot of the “forming” segments involve fighting too. Lots and lots and lots of fighting. The action is solid for a book of this genre, even if not the absolute best, and Schmidt wasn’t afraid to throw a curveball in terms of the plot and enemies.

What stood out to me, at least a little, was how the weapons were basically 80s Action Novel Bingo. What felt like every single flashy and exotic writers toy showed up in the pages of this book. Ooh, big MM-1 grenade launchers! Ooh, super-advanced G11 rifles! And of course, the classic giant pistols (can’t forget them). Even Jerry Ahern’s beloved Detonics show up as well.

This was one of the cheapest of the cheap thrillers, but I had lots of fun with it nonetheless.

 

Review: Raptor Force

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Raptor Force

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Bill Yenne’s Raptor Force is a case of a book that dips into multiple action subgenres and seems determined to take the worst parts of each while being unable to grab the best. It’s the kind of commandos-vs-terrorists novel that might seem simply pedestrian if it didn’t have the premise it did.

See, the reason the task of hunting down bloodthirsty and effective terrorists is entrusted to this mega-top-secret band of off the grid commandos (based on the Flying Tigers in-universe) is because the US (along with most other countries) gave the UN veto power over its military power projection (!). This is the kind of thing that zombie sorceresses were made to do.

The heroes are all flat space-fillers, the villains are the most cliche terrorists straight out of Command and Conquer Generals, and the stock supporting characters are exactly who you’d expect them to be. This wouldn’t be a big problem if the fundamentals were good, but they’re not.

Raptor Force has the constant perspective and place-hopping of a technothriller but none of its technology or great power conflict. It has the focus of a small-unit book but none of the spectacle or “punch” that a good one has. The actual action scenes are decidedly underwhelming, the worst thing a cheap thriller can be.

This was not a good novel. Even the potentially over the top premise wasn’t run with, opting for the overly serious technothriller style instead of a shameless spectacle.

 

 

Review: Marine Force One

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Marine Force One

The book Marine Force One is an example of a “51% book” that is elevated by the context in which it stands.

The book tells the story of an elite commando force tasked with hunting SAMs in the Balkans, in a conflict that feels like a jumbled mix of historical recollections of Operation Allied Force (evasive SAMs! Stealth fighters lost!) and think-tank reports (Resurgent Red Russians!) all tossed together. The Cobra Force of our heroes has to hunt the SAMs while butting heads with a Spetsnaz force assisting their Slavic ally.

If there’s one thing distinctive besides being dated, it’s that the main character, Maj. David Saxon, is an ass. He’s a one-dimensional figure who gave up his material possessions and marriage to focus on being in the military (and doesn’t miss his ex or even his son at all), he punches someone for being annoying to him during a debriefing, and when (however briefly) off-duty, he just uses prostitutes as the sole “relationship”. Yet rather than have his seriously flawed character be taken advantage of, Saxon is otherwise treated as a Mary Sue who can do what the rest of the military can’t. Very few other characters, even the villains, enjoy such detail.

Other than that, everything is just good enough. The action is just good enough but not the best. The pacing is at least fast, if not the best. The exposition can be annoying but isn’t too annoying, and so on. So why did I feel better about this book than I ‘ought to’ have? Well , the first part is that sometimes a 51% book is what one needs.

The second part is that given the publication date of 2001, the beginning of a very, very dark decade for technothrillers, the “competition” is less serious. In a context full of overpriced, under-proofread self-published books, legacy series continuing on pure inertia, and the few remaining editor-proof super-authors, a nice light 51% book isn’t bad at all.

Review: Burmese Crossfire

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Burmese Crossfire

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One of the reasons why I sound more critical towards Peter Nealen than I actually am is because this particular book set the bar very high. From the moment I read it, I fell in love. The Brannigan’s Blackhearts series was meant to be a love letter to the classic action-adventure novels of the 1980s, and Burmese Crossfire delivers.

Colonel Brannigan, leader of a small mercenary band, gets a mission to go to the titular Southeast Asian country. Cue a “rumble in the jungle” (with apologies to Ali and Foreman) against many Burmese and North Koreans. This isn’t that much more than a classic simple action-adventure novel. But it takes that formula and with beautifully written, well-done action, hits a home run.

It’s in a well-researched, obscure part of the world that’s an ideal place for a book of its genre. One of my favorite small-unit action-adventure books of all time, this is well worth a read.

 

Review: Sacred Mountain

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Sacred Mountain

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The second book in the Black Eagle Force series, Sacred Mountain, takes a look at the over-the-top goofiness of the first and goes “all right, time to unleash the cheap thriller equivalent of the dubstep gun.”

The president is kidnapped by ninjas. Are the people of Black Eagle Force bad enough dudes to rescue her? That is the plot of the book, but the execution is something. See, the Mexican billionaire from the first book returns in his volcano-lair. And so does Osama bin Laden (see, it was his brother acting as a stand-in who died in Abbotabad). And so do a huge number of Russian mercenaries with their accompanying hardware. It’s like the opening scene of The Naked Gun, only stretched into a ridiculous, and ridiculously fun spectacle.

The book is still a little too long and clunky, it has a few typos including one of the character’s names being slightly inconsistent, and at times it got a little bit too tasteless. But it manages to be ridiculously goofy while taking the action just seriously enough, and I enjoyed it a lot for being “more Mack Maloney than Mack Maloney”.  It’s hard to go wrong where one of the protagonists is a dog in a suit of armor.

Review: The Guns Of The South

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The Guns of The South

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Harry Turtledove’s classic alternate history novel started when another author complained to him that the cover art on one of her books was as anachronistic as “Robert E. Lee holding an Uzi.” After that, writing a book about South African time travelers changing the fate of the American Civil War via a huge quantity of AK-47s was in order.

Guns of the South is a frustrating book, because it manages to be good, bad, and unnerving at the same time. The good part of the book is in its action and use of viewpoint characters. It has only two, Lee himself and low-ranking soldier Nathan Caudell, and the perspectives they can apply are well taken advantage of. As for the action, it keeps it well-written even when one side has muzzleloaders and the other AKs-and that’s not always the case.

The bad part is mainly in its ultimate antagonists, the time travelers themselves. These rank in my eyes as some of the worst villains I’ve ever seen in fiction. Besides the moral issues which I’ll discuss in a bit, they’re ultimately dumb and mysteriously stop taking advantage of their high technology and training at exactly the moment it’s convenient for the plot.

The unsettling part is that Guns of South has a disturbing feel of Confederate apologism to it. I think it’s just the result of unintended consequences, but still. Make Confederate protagonists who a modern audience will find relatable and sympathetic, and there’s going to be some (no pun intended) whitewashing. The two biggest problems are the Confederately ultimately phasing out slavery without much protest and the behavior of the time travelers. Said time travelers are stupidly and cartoonishly racist in ways that exist to make the CSA look better in comparison. It’s not only creepy, it’s lazy and annoying-and makes them even worse as antagonists.

This is still readable and it’s still one of Turtledove’s better books, lacking the bloat a lot of his later novels have. It’s just weighed down by its terrible villains.

Review: Sixth Fleet

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Sixth Fleet

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I look at the Sixth Fleet series by David Meadows. Looks like it could be to naval warfare in general what Tin Soldiers was to tanks and Raven One was to aviation. Then I look at the publication date-2001. I start to have a bad feeling. Still, I shouldn’t stereotype 2000s technothrillers, so I go ahead anyway. Then I read the book in full, and yipes.

It’s very much a 1990s technothriller at heart. Regional enemy (Libya) with a super-gimmick? Check. Hand-wringing over defense cuts? Check. COMPUTER DIGITAL WARFARE? Check. Even leaving all of that aside, the prose is just very, very clunky and any scene with a character who isn’t American is rather “dubious”.

Worse still is how the first book is meant as the opening act in a long series. This means the pacing goes from “bad” to “REALLY REALLY BAD”. I’ve seen better pacing in later Survivalist books than here, and instead of Ahern’s flights of fancy, there’s a generic “mustache twirlers with super-gimmicks” story with the usual technothriller viewpoint jumping.

I wanted to like Sixth Fleet but just couldn’t. The fundamentals are too iffy, the subject isn’t that conceptually interesting, and its pacing is just horrifically slow and uneven. In many way, it feels like the stereotypical late-1990s/2000s technothriller writ large.