Tag: American

Review: Executive Orders

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Executive Orders

I’ve never been that much a fan of Tom Clancy, though I admit a lot of my problem comes from a “seen so many imitators that the original doesn’t seem so original” effect. To me, The Hunt for Red October was just OK, and it’s very hard to judge Red Storm Rising because I’ve emerged in a totally different context (but if I had to give a rating, I’d say it’s OK as well).

Executive Orders is not “OK”.

So why did I read it? Genuine curiosity. Not snarky curiosity, but a sincere desire to both see if it was as iffy as I’d heard and see how far the apple fell from the tree. This is a long review, and not just because the book has lots of problems. I figured a big book by a big author deserved a big review.

Icelands

So, take a post-1991 technothriller, with the tropes of crisis overload and limited force. Then take a political thriller. Then take a medical thriller. Then add a second draft of a technothriller. Then shuffle all the notes together and call it a book. It’s several stock thrillers all stuffed into one book.

The tangled plotlines all take a long time to spool up. Sometimes it feels like a filler episode of a shonen anime where Ryan and the antagonist Daryaei spend half an hour yelling at each other and glowing so the manga writer can maintain a head start on the proper chapters.

Rivets

Clancy (and/or whatever ghostwriters assisted him) has to describe everything. When he gets a description wrong, it feels bad. And stuff gets described wrong. Predators, a workman basic drone, are treated like they’re RQ-whatever stealth aircraft that can just fly slowly at 10,000 feet above a heavy mechanized army without a care of being shot down, and tanks specifically designated as T-80s die as easily as early export T-72s did in the Gulf War.

Zombie Sorceresses

Coming on the heels of Debt of Honor’s Japanese-American War, this brings about a United Islamic Republic. So about par for the course in 90s technothrillers concerning the opponents. A lot of other stuff ranges from “implausible” to “very implausible”, but to be honest, my mind was either accepting it as part of a (supposedly) dramatic story or just not wanting to nitpick details that I’d handwave aside anyway when the literary fundamentals were that bad.

But I think the biggest zombie sorceress handwave is the series as a whole. Because it’s gone from Jack Ryan, everyman analyst who fights an evil cook, to Jack Ryan, President Mary Sue of the United States with a clean slate to remake the federal government. Now that’s a zombie sorceress plot.

“The Wha?”

As mentioned in the “Iceland” section, this is a very jumbled book. It’s the story of a new inexperienced president and his family getting the hang of the job and a political rant tract and a bioattack and a “normal” terror attack and a conventional war in the Middle East and a crisis in the Taiwan Strait and the story of rednecks with a bomb. All weaving in and out of focus, diluting what few plotlines could have had some potential. Then when they are resolved, it’s often done very, very quickly and sometimes anticlimactically.

It does get a little more focused at the end of the story, but the tame battle in the desert only served to remind me of how much better Michael Farmer did something similar in Tin Soldiers. There’s one late-war, late-book scene in Tin Soldiers where the American missiles and aircraft maul an Iraqi division but don’t stop it, it’s followed by a scare where enemy Hinds with guided missiles of their own do some damage, and is followed still by a ferocious close-quarters battle where one of the main characters loses his tank.

In a similar scene near the end of Executive Orders, a similar UIR force is just walloped by gee-whiz superweapons and finished off by those good ol’ Americans in an almost nonchalant way.

And then Jack Ryan drops a smart bomb on the UIR leader’s home on live television. The end.

I found only two real plotlines that actually seemed like they could be effective.

  • The bioattack. While the most effective on its own terms, it shimmies around the various plotlines in a way that loses its punch, it’s wrapped up far too neatly once the quarantine is established, and in a way it serves as an excuse for a smaller force to face the UIR invaders in…
  • The conventional conflict in the desert. The pacing and flow does improve significantly once it finally revs up. Except it feels like Clancy put in the minimum effort to create theoretical dramatic tension before going back to the stomp he was comfortable with.

As for the characters, not only are they stock thriller characters, they’re overexposed thanks to the long plot. They’re also the subject of many infodumps that characterize them by telling rather than showing (and which makes the book even longer and less coherent).

The Only Score That Really Matters

Executive Orders doesn’t work. It has the one thing that dooms a cheap thriller more than anything else-bad pacing. There’s the “slowly ramp up to something you know is going to happen” problem made worse by there being several plotlines that get in each others way and stop whatever momentum does develop. When action does happen, it feels second-rate. So I found it as bad as I heard it to be.

On top of that, it just feels exaggerated. A lot of the Ryan-as-president scenes are there simply to allow Clancy to rant about domestic politics. Instead of Iraq or Iran, it’s a union of both, turning individually plausible opponents into an implausible one. The American triumphalism that was always in his books reaches even greater heights. I think my “favorite” example is how Clancy mentions the rightfully successful NTC OPFOR in a way that gives as little credit as possible to the actual Soviet/Russian tactics they’ve trained to imitate.

Clancy was the author at the very top, the king of the technothriller, the writer who stayed at the top of the bestseller lists while other technothriller authors faded or changed genres entirely. If he had become like this, does that mean the imitators would go from mediocre to bad, or from bad to worse?

I actually don’t think so. I believe Clancy to be a victim of his own success. Certainly most of the negative trends I could find before in other thrillers written before Executive Orders’ publication date in 1996. I think he simply was so popular that there was no perceived need to make his work “tighter”, and thus all the flaws compounded each other.

It’s just that the end result of a self-published writer working without strict editors and the superstar author having the editors lighten up on their strictness is mostly the same-a big, aimless tale. Clancy faced the same pressures everyone else in the genre he played no small part in creating did. He also faced the fall of the USSR and maintaining novelty in a large series.

About the only thing I can safely say Executive Orders did was help popularize, even before 9/11, the Middle Eastern Coalition antagonist set, but even with that I don’t want to credit it too much. After all, the 90s scramble for new villains would likely have turned up something similar.

I felt no schadenfreude at this book, and felt legitimately disappointed that I considered it as bad as I’ve heard. It’s sad to see the face of a genre decline so noticeably, but decline he did. Thankfully, there are better post-1991 technothrillers out there.

 

Review: Total War

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Total War

It does not take a PHD in literary theory to guess why interest in postapocalyptic stories rose as the Cold War heated up in the early 1980s. One of the most infamous is Jerry Ahern’s Survivalist series, starring the Detonics miniature 1911 pistol-and the man firing them, John Rourke. Reviewing Total War, the first book in the series, I found it very good for what it is.

Icelands

Ok, I want to take a second to argue that my original category of “Icelands” may be obsolete. I’d envisioned it as applying to a much narrower group of stories than I ended up reviewing on this blog. It was designed for a very short continuum between Hackett’s Third World War and Team Yankee. It was not designed for something like this, a pulp adventure thriller. So I may be doing a revamp of my whole post structure, and if I do, “Icelands” is the most likely category to be changed or revamped.

That being said, Total War is very much an 80s pulpy cheap thriller. Just those words should give you a hint of what to expect.

Rivets

This is one of those “it tells you exactly what kind of gun it is” books, be it a revolver or Detonics pistol. It has a lot of lists (including a description of Rourke’s survivalist lair), a lot of long descriptions of scrounged gizmos. Yet they don’t really get in the way of the fast-paced action.

Zombie Sorceresses

Pretty much what you’d expect from a post-apocalyptic thriller in terms of contrivances. The nuclear blasts are actually handled fairly reasonably, especially given the genre. They’re not the biggest issue. If I had to give one issue that’s the most contrived, it’s how waves of bandits for our hero to fight appear out of nowhere like it was a Bethesda Softworks video game.

The “Wha?”

This flows good for a first installment. We go from Rourke fighting in Pakistan to an infodump about his survivalist lair to the nuclear war, to him and his wife both fighting bandits.

One thing I was impressed by was how even-handed he was by action novel standards. For an American cheap thriller written in 1981, Ahern portrays some of the Soviet characters with surprising deftness and sympathy.

The Only Score That Really Matters

Ok, this is basically a western version of Fist of the North Star, except instead of going “ATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATA omae wa mou shindeiru”, Rourke simply shoots his opponents with his Detonics pistol. If you think that’s tacky, this book isn’t for you. If you like it even a tiny bit, it is.

Furthermore, Ahern is surprisingly good on some of the literary fundamentals. The book is short and moves quickly. The “clunky first setup part” only exists to a small degree here. And while Total War isn’t exactly Peters’ Red Army, its Soviets are considerably less supervillain-y than a lot of other novels in this time period.

Total War is worth a read if you like cheap 80s action.

Review: Arc Light

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Arc Light

Arc Light by Eric Harry is a good but uneven World War III tale. Even at its worst, it never dips below the genre median, and at its best it goes in a novel direction that takes a big concern head-on instead of sidestepping it. While this might seem (and is) praiseworthy, it left me wanting the whole story to be more consistently good.

Icelands

Arc Light has two “parts”. One is bold, the other cliche.

The first part is the nuclear war. This, for all my small quibbles, handles the defining weapon of the Cold War excellently. The initial strikes are described in massive detail, and the threat hangs uneasily for the rest of the book. Instead of either handwaving nukes aside altogether or, worse, dropping a few contrived “plotnukes” (Hackett’s Birmingham-Minsk exchange is a picture-pefect example), it launches a big but survivable nuclear “counterforce” strike while keeping the unease of follow-up strikes there.

The second part is a totally conventional military cheap thriller. It’s not outright bad or unreadable, but it has most of the genre tropes there. Multiple viewpoint characters (though, I will say, not too many), and worse, contrived, tinny political scenes that only serve to set up the action that everyone knew was coming anyway.

Rivets

The rivet-counting concerning the nukes is present and annoying. Annoying in the sense that they alternate between well-described horror of nuclear war and clinical, dull infodumps. A lot of the nuclear infodumps have the “I know what the formal name of a Scud TEL is” feeling, where it sounds like the author using the story to demonstrate what he knows instead of using what he knows to help make the story better. But, in an excample of how conflicted this book can be, they’re interspersed with genuinely gripping descriptions.

The rivet-counting concerning everything else is just irritating, especially when large battles and plot-progressing moments are told in nothing but infodumps.

Zombie Sorceresses

While I’m sure the zombie sorceresses were at work with the setup, the important part was that it didn’t feel as contrived as it had been. It has Russia as the opponent and its nuclear exchange dominates the book without being too big.

I’d say the biggest zombie sorceress intervention came in politics and the Americans invading Russia. But even that I forgave, for it was more novel.

The “Wha?”

This kind of wobbles a lot. The low-level soldiers are handled very well. The noncombatants are handled decently, at least in a well-intended way. Anything political turns into either infodumps or Larry Bond-wannabe “they set up what you knew what would happen” scenes.

Arc Light feels like it’s trying to tell a big Red Storm Rising-style story while using a fairly small number of viewpoint characters. The former is acceptable, and the latter to me is laudable. But what this means in practice is that a lot of the story is told in either infodumps or maps. It either needed more characters (which are not necessarily bad if handled well) or a smaller scope.

The Only Score That Really Matters

This takes the eccentricities of 90s techno-thrillers and manages to use them well. But it still could have been more. At times it feels like a gritty genre-amplifier and at times it feels like a routine Larry Bond knockoff.

It’s kind of befuddling. Arc Light will have a gritty infantry battle that has down and dirty bleeding and confusion, and then it will have a classic conference room infodump. It will show something with great skill-and then tell anyway. A giant tank battle is explained in an infodump.

But it still tries to move outside the narrow genre limits and mostly succeeds. In particular, it handles WMDs without them ever feeling like “plotnukes” there to just add a bit of cheap drama. It just could have used a little more focus and a lot less tinny politics.

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?

Icelands

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.

Rivets

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’.

Icelands

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.

Rivets

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.

Icelands

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.

Rivets

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.

Icelands

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.

Rivets

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.

Icelands

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.

Rivets

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.

Icelands

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.

Rivets

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

On By coilerxiiIn Review2 Comments

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.

Icelands

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.