Tag: American

Review: Chains of Command

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Chains of Command

Dale Brown is one of those authors who managed to remain firmly in a genre even as it declined. Which is to say, as the genre began to decline and other authors like Ralph Peters and Harold Coyle moved to different topics like the American Civil War, Brown and his super-planes just kept going and going and going and going and going and going like a technothriller Energizer Bunny. Somehow enough people bought the books that he kept getting publishing deals for more of them without being a super-big name like Tom Clancy.

He was also out-there from the get go, leaning on the “super-science-fiction” edge of technothrillers from the start of his first book, Flight of the Old Dog, which featured a super bomber against a super-laser. (That book I unreservedly recommend-it’s a fun cheap thriller). This and the melodramatic excess of his later novels has made him who he was.

How does Chains of Command, this Russo-American war novel, stack up?

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Dale Brown has been there from the start, so it’s no surprise that if you know the type and time period of this thriller, nothing will be surprising. It’s a Dale Brown thriller so you’ll get the Air Force saving everything, lots of nukes flying, and more than a few political rants. It’s a cheap thriller, so you get a cheap thriller plot. It’s post-1991, so the enemy is a regressed Russia.

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Like a lot of technothriller authors, Brown loves his rivet-counting, with lots of exact designations and detailed descriptions. The biggest problem isn’t so much the infodumps themselves as how they exist in this exaggerated fantasy world of super-planes. It’s like giving a detailed, technically exact description of a car’s engine and mechanics-in a cartoonish video game.

Zombie Sorceresses

Well, there’s the regression of Russia, for one. Then there’s the plot-nukes. Dale Brown loves nuking everything without going full Dr. Strangelove. Then there’s an infodumped past war that should crowd out the real Gulf War but doesn’t. The zombie sorceresses haven’t been the busiest here, but they’ve still had to work.

The “Wha?”

This is a cheap thriller plot, and it wildly zigzags. On one hand, Brown is a former navigator-bombardier in the Air Force, so he can show a feeling of immediacy in the battle scenes. On the other, they’re loaded with infodumps. On one hand, Brown’s plotnukes show he isn’t afraid to have the enemy do real damage. On the other, they make the world seem less real and more contrived.  On one hand, the heroine is an effective character by the standards of the genre. On the other, the action is too spread out…

You get the idea.

The Only Score That Really Matters

Chains of Command is not truly bad, but Brown has definitely written better. While he hadn’t yet sunk to the levels he would later on, this is not his best book, nor is it the best in the genre. It manages to deploy both general technothriller and Brown-specific cliches in bulk without having anything like prose or plot to make up for them.

I’d recommend reading Flight of the Old Dog first and seeing if you like his style before trying Chains of Command. It can work as a time-passing cheap thriller, but even in that easy genre there are better books.

Review: The Defense of Hill 781

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The Defense of Hill 781

Time to start off October by reviewing an unconventional favorite of mine. Like many stories in its genre, The Defense of Hill 781 is nothing but an excuse to show tanks exploding. Unlike many stories in its genre, it accepts and embraces this as a form of Duffer’s Drift style ‘edutainment’.

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The book diverges from the formula by going right to the action and doing so in a form of various “learn from failure as well as success” vignettes following the classic Duffer’s Drift style formula. It’s not a conventional thriller or even a conventional story, and this works in its favor exactly.

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The Defense of Hill 781 has a lot of detail. However, in its specific context, it’s understandable and forgivable. This is meant as an instructional piece, and thus it needs to be detailed. So while the detail can be clunky, it’s not “I know how many wheels are on a Scud TEL and what the proper name of that TEL is.” It’s relevant to what needs to be taught.

Zombie Sorceresses

This book has the humorously named protagonist A. Tack Always thrown into a ‘real’ purgatory of the National Training Center to fight the infamous Krasnovian OPFOR. It is completely artificial and makes absolutely no pretensions of being anything else.

The “Wha?”

So The Defense Of Hill 781 does not have a conventional plot, nor does it have conventional non-lecturing characterization. What it does have is detailed yet visceral battles that redeem the lack of this.

Instead of robotic “Fifty T-62s and ten M60s were destroyed” infodumpy battles, you have the main character running around trying to find a radio after each of his comm sources is either jammed or outright destroyed. This grit and pain is what lets author James McDonough play to his strengths and make the lack of “fluff” a strength rather than a weakness.

The Only Score That Really Matters

The Defense of Hill 781 is one of those “either you like it or you don’t” books. If you want any kind of plot or characterization whatsoever, it’s no good. But if you want to see well-written battle scenes in training aid-level detail, and I did, this is a good tale that is completely without any extraneous fluff. It doesn’t always work, but it does here. This stands out of the pack as a unique and varied contribution to the 1980s mechanized combat genre.

 

Review: Tin Soldiers

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Tin Soldiers

I’ve talked before about Michael Farmer’s Tin Soldiers on my main blog, and his debut thriller pictures a regional war quite different from a Fuldapocalypse. But it’s worthy of a detailed review for two reasons. One is that it, published in the early 2000s, remains a picture-perfect example of the tropes of post-USSR technothrillers. Another is that it, although hardly flawless, is by and large an example of how this can be done right.

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Tin Soldiers, sadly, manages to be both divergent and cliche at the same time. A rejuvenated Iraq is making another go at Kuwait, and the first line of defense is the main character’s comparably small unit.

What makes this interesting is how it follows the classic “balancer tropes” mentioned here almost to a t. The American forces present are small at first, and the Iraqis have sneaked-out satellite footage and, more importantly, advanced Abrams-busting ammunition for their tank guns. The “crisis overload” is also there to a degree with a small subplot about a rapprochement with Iran that goes nowhere and ultimately is handwaved away.

Political shenanigans are there and “make up” for being less important to the plot by being horribly written. So is a shoved-in “save the helicopter pilot damsel in distress” subplot that rivals even the capture scene in Chieftains for being out of place. Perhaps fitting for a genre on its last mainstream legs, Tin Soldiers manages to fit the formula exceedingly well.

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This isn’t too bad in terms of rivet-counting. There are mostly familiar platforms, so there’s less need to describe them, and I didn’t feel that bothered by the infodumps that did take place. It’s not perfect and it’s not vague, but somehow most of it flows.

Zombie Sorceresses

This is a book that has all of the usual technothriller contrivances, all the odds-equalizers, and all the stock characters to set up. And yet the final nuclear-chemical escalation was the only one where I went “come on”.

Somehow it felt like the zombie sorceresses didn’t need to intervene as much as they had in other books. Perhaps using a country that was already suited for a regional conflict as the antagonist made it feel better than say, Cauldron did. Perhaps using an “equalizer scenario” of a stronger enemy force in theater against a limited reinforcement that has been feared since the time of TF Smith works better than some of the goofier ones.

They’re still there, but the zombie sorceress hand isn’t as visible in Tin Soldiers, I found.

The “Wha?

The characters are mostly stock. The hero, the supporting hero, the generals, the slightly sympathetic villain, the inept weasel ally, and the politicians. The scenes with politicians on either side are cringeworthy. Farmer’s fictional American president comes across as a figure written as a “bad dude with bad taste” by someone whose cultural clock stopped in 1979.

The low-level characters, while less developed, are at least sufficient for the course of the book. But the real treat is the action itself. Barring the “look at the stealth fighter go” scenes, the final Dale Brown style WMD escalation, and the save-the-girl side-plot, the tank battles are well written. Yes, the book has its share of technological gee-whiz. But it also has more than its share of basic grit, where tanks are very vulnerable.

Also like Team Yankee, a limited theater means that the story becomes more focused and tight.

The Only Score That Really Matters

Tin Soldiers is the perfect example of this category. On paper, it’s got every flaw a military thriller in general and a post-1991 one in particular would have. Its digressions into romance and politics go from awkward to slightly disgusting and offensive. The prose and flow isn’t the smoothest. And yet, in spite of all that, I like this book.

When the tanks get to exploding, it’s at its perfect height. The tank battles themselves are, for the genre, well-done. It manages to maintain a decent scope in those parts, not feeling like it hops around too much and succeeding at the difficult task of making a viewpoint between either “squad in the dirt” or “big picture”. And while it may have just been a happy coincidence, the tank battles against the early T-72s with super-ammo have just the right level of threat, showing that there’s much more to a tank than just how strong the gun is and how thick the armor is.

Tin Soldiers is still a cheap thriller with more than its share of unforced flaws. But it does a lot right, and is one of the best post-1991 “regional war” thrillers I’ve read.

Review: Cauldron

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Cauldron

The 1990s were not a good decade for technothrillers in terms of popularity and sales, and in my opinion, no book illustrates the problems they faced more than Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin’s Cauldron. The question of who to fight a World War III against loomed greatly, and the usual suspects had lost all credibility in the immediate post-USSR, post-Gulf War period.

So it was the US against a-French/German nationalist alliance? Ok.

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While Cauldron obviously doesn’t fit the “Iceland Pattern” of a Russo-American WW3 in terms of direct events, it does follow the story structure greatly. Too greatly, and this is one of the problems that too many post-1991 technothrillers had. With the scope of conflict (usually) shrinking, too many of them decided to be scaled-down great-power thrillers rather than scaled-up adventure thrillers.

Cauldron is more a symptom than a cause of this decline. It has most of the same issues that Bond’s own Red Phoenix struggled with. That book was written during the Cold War and featured a far more realistic opponent, but they both shared a similar formulaic attitude and a “but we have to show battles at land, at sea, and in the air” attitude.

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It’s infodump city here. Lots of political infodumps, lots of military infodumps, you name it. Par for the course.

Zombie Sorceresses

After December 26, 1991, the zombie sorceresses were at work finding opponents. The problem of what the opponent would be between the fall of the USSR and 9/11 plagued factual researchers as well as fiction writers-one of the most notorious cases I’ve seen was a RAND study that featured a joint Syrian-Iraqi invasion of Turkey (!) as a contingency plan.

Still, the decision to include not just Western Europe, but a cherrypicked part of Western Europe is very zombie sorceress, made all the worse by Bond’s decision to have a lengthy political intro. This means the implausibility is dwelled on rather than handwaved past.

The “Wha”?

Ok, so Cauldron has a laundry list of issues that plague the genre. It’s as if Bond was trying deliberately to chain them.

  • Having the story be self-contained in one book. This is a valid stylistic choice, a necessity given traditional publishing, and most of the time is a better alternative to the bloated series where nothing happens (see my Axis of Evil review for an example of that). But it means space is at a premium. The later points show how the book wastes that precious space.
  • There’s a too-long opening act. There’s no surprise at the outcome (in a book about a war, a war starts), and the political maneuvering isn’t well written.
  • Even once the action starts, there’s a checklist to fit land, sea, and air clashes all in one book, getting in each other’s way.
  • The entire Russian subplot is both clunky and pointless, an example of too many plots for ones own good.
  • The prose, while not terrible, gets a little too clunky and rivet counter-esque for its own good.

Beyond that, very little can rise above that. There are some tales where massive flaws can be forgiven because the good things are equally spectacular. Cauldron goes from iffy to merely decent-in action and characters.

The Only Score That Really Matters

Completely in isolation, Cauldron is a middle of the road technothriller with all the faults and features of one. But in context, it serves as a picture-perfect example of a genre that was fading from its height, shifting from mainstream to enthusiast fiction. Most of this was due to political and cultural factors beyond its control. But Bond’s literary choices didn’t help.

The shift to being more niche would have consequences for later WWIII/army thrillers, but that’s a subject for another time.

Review: Dark War Revelation

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Dark War: Revelation

When I saw Mark Walker’s Dark War series, I knew I had to read it. This was something. This was a supernatural WW3-finally the zombie sorceresses were in their element! The first installment, Revelation, was a real interesting book, but fell slightly short.

Me and the Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviewer are both covering this book. It fit our tastes, and his review is here.

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This is a strange book. The story as a whole is a desperately needed reimagining of the genre, but some of its parts, if taken totally in isolation, would resemble a formulaic Fulda Gap tale. A gritty Red Army-level one rather than a Team Yankee style action-adventure one, but still not the most original, if it wasn’t for the monsters.

But the monsters make it stand out. Unfortunately, they don’t really stand out on their own-these are very much run of the mill daylight-vulnerable vampires and silver-vulnerable werewolves.

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Sadly, this has lots of rivet-counting details and the occasional inaccuracy. The conventional, non-supernatural WW3 battles are decently written, but suffer from the common problem of not being integrated into a cohesive whole that much. The whole story has a little too many rivets for its own good-too many tank gun descriptions and the like. Not too many, but still a little annoyingly.

Zombie Sorceresses

Come on. It’s a supernatural thriller. It feels off to argue “plausibility”.

The “Wha”?

Ok, the plot and characters are rather jumbled.  The prose is kind of clunky and a little too tell-not-showing. More importantly, the horror elements and the “World War III” elements aren’t mixed well. The horror parts are basically genre cliché and there isn’t really any lasting gimmick beyond “there’s vampires and werewolves in WW3 Germany”.

When the supernatural parts are mixed with the exploding tanks, they do well. But too often they aren’t mixed as much as they should be.

The Only Score That Really Matters

This achieves more than the sum of its parts by having the audacity to combine the two very, very different genres together. The pieces by themselves are not the best, though not unreadable either. It’s basically a decent but formulaic WW3 combat tale and a decent but formulaic monster horror tale smashed together like two armored divisions in a meeting engagement on the North German Plain.

But from the novelty factor alone, it becomes worthwhile. The genre needs all the shakeups it can get, and it’s an amusing, entertaining cheap thriller if nothing else.

Review: Team Yankee

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Team Yankee

It’s time to review a classic of the genre. In my opinion, it’s a deserved classic. It’s time to review Harold Coyle’s Team Yankee.

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Team Yankee is outright stated to use the backdrop of Hackett’s Third World War (although in practice the most important thing to come from it is the Birmingham-Minsk nuclear destruction). That of course was one of the genre definers. And the book itself remains mostly formulaic and dated in hindsight as a genre-definer itself. So yes, there’s a lot that’s familiar. Not just viewpoint characters but also the general gimmick.

But familiarity and even being too formulaic are not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, Team Yankee manages, likely unintentionally, to actually use this quality to its advantage.

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In my first impression, I stated that the book can get a little too “Herman Melville but for tanks”. I stand by the impression. At the time and/or for an audience that didn’t know as much about tanks or the way they they were used, it wouldn’t be as bad. So like with a lot of infodumpy fiction, I can forgive Team Yankee for that.

Zombie Sorceresses

Here’s where it gets weird, but not in a bad way. See, in theory it should have all the issues Hackett had with contrivances-plotnukes, the setup, and so on. But….

The “Wha?”

Ok, here’s how the book becomes more than the some of its parts. It manages to flip the zombie sorceress over her head in a judo throw, turning what might have been a weakness into a strength. The book moves very fast and starts very fast, using Hackett as a convenient plot-filler. The war starts at the end of the first chapter, a relief compared to some other tales with excessively long, ill-handled setup segments.

There’s bumps of course. The wife subplot gets in the way somewhat, there’s still a few too many viewpoint characters, and the Soviet characters exist to twirl their mustaches. But it manages to have something a lot of other thrillers don’t-coherence.

The Only Score That Really Matters

Coherence makes Team Yankee more than the sum of its parts. A lot of other stories feel like bowls of ingredients. This feels like a cohesive meal. A lot of the theoretical dislikes are still in place (viewpoint characters, etc…), but it feels like a steady, cohesive road as the tanks roll through Europe. That’s sadly something I can’t say for too many other stories in the genre. Team Yankee is still ultimately a cheap thriller with tanks exploding, but it’s a good cheap thriller with tanks exploding.

But Team Yankee is not just good on its own terms. It’s one of the two books, alongside Ralph Peters’ Red Army, that I’d recommend to any aspiring WW3 author. The two are night and day. Team Yankee is a triumphalist star-spangled American victory, Red Army a grittier Soviet win. They both give an idea of how to make an effective World War III story using two very different tones.

Review: Axis of Evil

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Axis of Evil

As much as I may like to review classic WW3 books, I cannot stay in Cold War Germany forever. So to avoid burnout, I decided to go full circle. The origins of the technothriller genre are in the “invasion novels” of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Anglo-American invasion novel has, given the logistical issues faced in crossing water, always had an air of unreality to it.

Besides taking the basic tone over, some tales had the invasion happen directly, with Red Dawn being the most famous example. Although mainstream invasion tales declined, independent writers were happy to fill the gap. Searching for a hidden gem amongst the-er, “mediocrity” (to be generous), I found Axis of Evil, the (supposed) story of an EMP-spearheaded invasion. I figured it’d be a good enough test case. As it turned out, the genre wasn’t quite what I’d thought, and it had quite a few problems.

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As this isn’t a “classic” World War III novel, the Iceland system doesn’t really apply here. However, the thriller parts are comparably formulaic by the standards of the genre, and I would have seen everything coming even if it wasn’t the first in a long series.

Rivets

This book is surprisingly rivet-light. There’s details but not too many details. Perhaps I’ve just read more rivet-company storage warehouse-level stories, but this isn’t too bad. It earnestly tries to be human, not mechanical.

Zombie Sorceresses

Seeing an EMP expert give the foreword made me suspicious. My suspicion was “it will be technically, nominally accurate for the main event, but everything else will be completely ridiculous.”

I was right. I don’t know enough about EMPs to question it, but I was willing to let any inaccuracy slide for the sake of the story. Everything else, though? Yeah. My suspicions were well-founded.

Granted, the Anglo-American invasion novel, as opposed to the continental invasion one where a legitimate threat is more plausible, as always needed some zombie sorceress intervention to get going.  Likely the sobering threat of real conflict in the Eurasian continent makes fanciful threats less likely and appealing, but that’s a topic for another time.

This has 20,000 North Korean commandos infiltrating into the US without the slightest suspicion through the Canadian border that the country foolishly neglected to wall off as well. (You can guess the politics of this book, if the genre wasn’t a clue enough.) But the zombie sorceress contrivances are compounded by a massive plot decision.

The “Wha?”

The zombie sorceress handwaves are best handled as a setup that is quickly moved past, and that even those who dispute it can recognize as vital to the setup. Yet the “I’m gonna make this a long series” effect means it’s dwelled on. And dwelled on. The pacing is execrable. The EMP itself doesn’t happen until the literal end of the book, as a cliffhanger.

It can be forgiven as setup for the action to come, at least if the setup was any good. There’s a fourth-rate “thriller plot” as American operators battle the Iranians and North Koreans, a huge quantity of political infodumps, and, most importantly, Texan bull riding. Oh yes, that bull riding. This is a very Texan novel. The bookends literally involve someone attempting to ride a particularly ferocious bull. The characters are either stereotypically Texan or stereotypically anti-Texan, if you know what I mean.

 

The Only Score That Really Matters

I don’t want to be a Sneering Internet Critic. The whole point of this blog is to be fair and evenhanded, not hyperbolic.  It’s just-I didn’t find this book to be that good even by cheap thriller standards. Some of it might be that it’s more of a “survival novel” than the “invasion novel” it initially came across as, but the problems go far deeper than a mislabeled genre. Even accepting that its politics would be what they were, the action is pedestrian, the infodumps annoying, and the characters still ill-developed author mouthpieces. But the worst part by far is the pacing, clearly designed to drag out the story over as many installments as possible.

A cheap thriller can be many things and still be enjoyable. But it cannot be slow-paced, and it cannot be dull. By failing here, Axis of Evil fails on a fundamental level.

Review: The Red Line

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The Red Line

The Red Line by Walt Gragg is a recent WWIII book that happens to have been one of the few in the timeframe released by a mainstream publisher, Penguin Random House. However much I may criticize the actual book itself, the perseverance of its author, continuing for decades until he finally achieved the all-too-rare dream of such a publication, deserves nothing but praise.

As for the book itself, it would have been a routine (by my standards) cold-war-hot thriller with a few ups and downs. However, one thing made it either worse or better. That would be the way it was modernized.

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The path of the war is mostly following the understandable formulas-infodumps, viewpoint characters, a few plot-nukes, NATO winning, the drill. However, the only real twist isn’t formulaic-in a bad way.

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There’s some rivet-counting, and it doesn’t quite match the smooth flow of Peters’ Red Army in terms of removing almost all exact designations, but it’s not quite that bad. And yes, there’s the Conference Room Infodumps, which are out of place in what’s generally a low-level story.

What the “rivet” descriptions illustrate is how dated a lot of it is. I don’t fault writers for writing what they’re familiar with. But this is supposed to be a modern story, and the way it’s handled, well, see below.

Zombie Sorceresses

Oh, oh, boy. This book was, by its author’s own admission, originally written just after the Cold War, and initially imagined during it. But, at some point it was decided to make it “modern”. In practice this means nothing but changing the names of a few platforms to things like “Su-35s”, “T-90s”, and “F-22s” in a very shoved-in way.

What really made even the zombie sorceresses go “we’re gonna do what?” was the political backstory, engineered to turn the clock back to 198X while keeping things “modern” (quotes deliberate). The well-run trope of Russia turning red again is used, but that isn’t the weirdest and craziest part of the backstory. That goes to Manfred Fromisch.

So, the restored Red Russia tries to reclaim East Germany using street provocations, then Fromisch, a neo-Nazi leader and, according to the text itself, “evil man of no more than five feet”, tosses the Communists out of East Germany with his followers and, as a result, becomes a shoo-in for chancellor in the next election with an 80% approval rating. This angers the Russian (or is it Soviet) premier, who then plots the invasion of Germany. Cue the tanks.

The backstory combines the worst “set up World War III” parts of Cold War technothrillers with the most ridiculous contrivances of post-USSR technothrillers. While it doesn’t dominate the book, it’s still there in an embarrassing way.

The “Wha?”

So, with this background and scotch-taped “modernity” in mind, how’s the substance beyond the ridiculous backstory?

It’s alright. The prose is a little too flat-certainly far from being the flattest or dullest I’ve seen, but still a little flat. The characters, beyond the red and brown supervillains, aren’t that well developed. As for the action, I’ve seen better but also seen worse. Likewise for the pacing, which has the “big story in one small self-contained book” problem I’ve seen too often with other technothrillers.

Gragg has repeatedly said in interviews that he wrote the book as an anti-war novel. While I can definitely see that intent in the story, I feel it doesn’t work in that sense. At best, it falls victim to the “Truffaut effect” of trying to balance a sincere message with exciting action and not succeeding. At worst, the whole goofy supervillain backstory sabotages the message big time.

I’m not the most qualified to judge the small-unit actions, because I’ve read so many of them, but they have the same “not too good, not too bad” issue. This, of course, puts them in the category of merely decent. But decent is better than bad. It’s not unreadable and has its moments.

The Only Score That Really Matters

If you want a somewhat gritty cheap thriller involving tanks exploding in WWIII and/or want to take in the so-bad-its-good backstory and “modernization”, you could do worse than this book. Just don’t think of it as a modern story, and treat the “modern” unit names as typos the zombie sorceresses manipulated into the page, and it can work as a good enough time-passer.

But that backstory…