Reviewing the Third World War and much, much more
So I’ve made a few updates to this blog in light of it becoming my sole focus after halting new posts on the Creative Corner.
First and biggest is: Fuldapocalypse now has a proper domain.
Second and considerably smaller is that I’ve enlarged the tag cloud yet again. Hey, I’m reviewing a lot of authors and branching out into ever-more genres, so I felt it appropriate at this time. I might be making a few more changes, so don’t be surprised if the blog looks different.
So, Command: Modern Operations is now released. I was more than just an eagerly waiting enthusiast or even a beta tester. I had the privilege of writing the manual for it.
I have a celebratory post on the Creative Corner, but I wanted to talk on this blog about something a little more important to it. See, it’s almost guaranteed that without my interest in the original Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations and thus without the subsequent leap into military history/fiction that followed from that, this blog, Fuldapocalypse, would not exist.
Many World War III books are tied to wargaming. Red Storm Rising was famously assisted by Harpoon. The War That Never Was is more or less a novelization of a Newport wargame. More recently, Northern Fury H Hour started off as part of a Command scenario set before becoming a solid novel. And so it makes sense that wargaming would lead me to this blog.
For my 150th post on Fuldapocalypse, I’ve decided to make a few announcements. First, I made the tag cloud bigger again (It kind of needed to be). Second, I decided to break away from one of the most-used tags.
The “Infantry” category is perhaps the most awkward one on Fuldapocalypse. I first used it for a technothriller that did include infantry. Then it expanded to not only include special forces and sci-fi infantry, but also vigilantes and secret agents. The result was that, even though infantry “grunt fiction” isn’t exactly one of my favorite subgenres, “infantry” became one of the biggest and most used tags in Fuldapocalypse.
So while I’m not trying to edit existing posts, I’ve decided to specialize rather than generalize for “infantry”. So on the occasions that I do review ordinary infantry, I can keep the normal tag. Otherwise, stuff like “Secret agent” or “Special Forces” or “Vigilante” can work.
There’s obviously going to be tricky choices, but I think I can handle those on a case by case basis.
It has now been a full year since I made the introductory post on this blog. Looking back at it, well, I think this line hasn’t aged well at all-and thankfully so.
“The lines will be a little blurry, but stuff like special forces or otherwise [sic] irregular thrillers probably won’t make the cut.”
I’ve said this many times before, but broadening the scope of this blog has been great for it and great for me. It’s even had a salutary effect on the nominal subject-because I’ve been reading so many other non-WW3/”big picture war” stories, when I do read them, I can look at them in a proper context I didn’t feel I had when the blog started. Not feeling any burnout at all also helps. So, happy birthday, Fuldapocalypse. You’ve earned it.
With the anniversary of Fuldapocalypse coming up, I figured a special review was in order, and it couldn’t just be a routine book. So I decided to choose The Sum Of All Fears by Tom Clancy. I look forward to reading it, to recording my opinions on it, and, when the time comes to mark the anniversary of this blog, sharing those opinions.
Over at my other blog, I have a piece explaining it in more detail, but I’ll say it here as well. I’m slowing down Fuldapocalypse and putting it on semi-hiatus, not total by any means, but not at the pace I have now.
That being said, I have no regrets about doing what I’ve been doing at Fuldapocalypse. It’s given me a lot of enjoyable books to read and share, and I’ve had a lot of fun making the reviews.
I have a few mostly finished reviews I can post to help it along a little longer, but just thought I’d give the heads-up.
So Fuldapocalypse has reached a hundred posts. What a ride.
As I’ve said many times before, I went in to Fuldapocalypse expecting a very narrow spectrum where Red Army was on one end and Hackett’s The Third World War was on the other. The formal scale was in part to get me to be more rigorous in my reviewing and in part because I thought the works would be so inherently similar that I needed to highlight their differences.
Almost immediately, though, I became burned out. As I branched out, my scale gradually faded away. “Zombie Sorceresses” aren’t really relevant in outright supernatural stories, and don’t work when the story is implausible and ridiculous from the get-go. Eventually, I just resorted to an inherently “unstructured” review system-and it’s worked out very well. If I want to mention a story is “rivet-countery” or has a huge “zombie sorceress” contrivance, I can just say so in the review without having a formal section.
So, what I have learned from Fuldapocalypse? A lot, but the biggest is…
There’s a lot fewer “World War III” stories than I thought.
Blame my weird tendency to read the imitators first. Take my wargaming background and looking on only a few places at first, and a narrow tendency emerges. After all, if all I see is infodumpy Hackett xeroxed fifty-times stories, it’s like someone only reading fanfics and concluding that Pokemon is about betrayal. Understandable given the narrow perspective, but not really accurate.
Even at the height of the 1980s boom, there were still were a lot more books about stopping World War III than fighting it. And frankly, to me it’s a lot more fun to see the different, the strange, and the classic-but-unread. If I have to choose between either:
I’m definitely going with Option 1.
Even “cheap thrillers” can vary to the point where depending on the era, the prevalent cliches are going to be almost the exact opposite of an earlier/later time. Or there’s an individual work that stands out from that time period.
Reviewing good books is more fun than reviewing bad books.
I’ll review bad books on Fuldapocalypse. But I’ll be honest, I feel a lot better about going “this is an obscure book almost no one has read, and it’s really good” vs. “this is an obscure book almost no one has read, and it’s really bad.”
Part of it is that if I had more fun reading a book, I’ll have more fun reviewing it. Part of it is a feeling that I’m (consciously or not) just selecting easy targets to smash, especially more obscure authors, and an increasing feeling that it sometimes isn’t really fair to do something like that. Well-established authors are another story-I had zero hangups about ripping Executive Orders to pieces.
But part of it is that I think I’ve outgrown my old “deliberately look at something I know is bad to see just how bad” (to a degree), and have come to love sharing hidden gems. I think it may be me being more of a writer (or Command LIVE scenario creator) myself and thus being on the other side of the critic/author divide, so I’m no longer the fire-breather I’ve been in the past.
That being said, as a writer/content creator, you will get criticism. You will get unfair criticism. You will get unreasonable criticism. That’s just how it goes.
The worst titles to review are the uninteresting ones
Uninteresting does not necessarily mean “bad”. In fact, many books I personally enjoyed I struggled to review. Thus the paradox emerges. A solid title in a series I’ve reviewed a past installment in leaves me having to work hard to write something other than “Like Book X in Series Y, Book Z in Series Y is good to read”.
Meanwhile, a book I didn’t like and could think of a very solid, distinct reason why I didn’t like it can easily get a review.
The most and least-reviewed decades are…
At least according to the tags, and as of this post, the number of books reviewed by decade are…
So the “technothriller heyday” of the 1980s is actually the middle of the road.
Reading obscure books is more fun.
I’ve noticed obscure [e]books come a lot more easily to me than big-name thrillers. It obviously depends on the individual book, but I’d think the biggest reason is they’re too long for their own good. I’d rather, all other things being equal, read two 300-page books than one 600-page one. Or three 200-page books. If only because it gives me a chance to review and ever so slightly widen the exposure of an author if that 200-300 page book happened to be good. This isn’t to say there aren’t good long books or bad short books, but it’s a matter of overall taste.
The second biggest reason is there are only so many real big time authors, and I don’t want to read too many books by the same wri-wait a second….
Somehow I read Jerry Ahern’s entire Survivalist series. I might be crazy.
Yeah, I don’t really know how this happened. Maybe blame the season and the fact that the books acted as a valuable time-filler. Maybe blame Ahern writing it as a serial and me going “ok, what’s happening next?” Maybe blame Ahern being surprisingly good with the literary fundamentals, so that even the worse books didn’t feel bad to read and I could always get through them quickly.
I also think reading the entire ‘epic’ has made me less judgemental. Let me put it this way- reading and enjoying dozens of ridiculous pulp tales is a pretty glass-filled house to be throwing stones from.
I’m torn on when to try and read more Jerry Ahern books. On one hand, he could write and some of the premises look good. On the other, well, aren’t two dozen books by one author more than enough. I mean, the Casca series has around the same number, and I’ve liked many-but not enough to want to go “Yep, I want to read every last one of them”.
And finally…
Fuldapocalypse has been a fun experience.
I’ve really loved how Fuldapocalypse has turned out. It’s legitimately broadened my scope of literature I’ve read, given me the chance to write lots of reviews, and given me a lot of fun.
If I had to list the best author I’ve discovered after I started Fuldapocalypse, it’d be Mack Maloney. Maloney has managed two things. The first is providing a scope that’s (for the most part) between the small-unit thrillers and the giant worldwide technothrillers/army books. The second is having a sense of fun and imagination.
But I’ve found many more good writers after starting this blog. And I’ve had many fun experiences with writing about what I’ve reviewed here, good and bad books alike.
You may notice this blog has a new tagline. It used to be “Reviewing the Third World War on the page and screen.” That was made way back in last August when I thought it’d be a very narrow review site. Of course, now it’s anything but narrow. So I felt a new tagline was appropriate. Now it’s the more appropriate “Reviewing the Third World War and much, much more.”
So I’ve done a bit of expansion on Fuldapocalypse. First, I made the tag cloud a lot bigger-I was using enough tags to justify it. Second, I expanded the blogroll to add links to the Paperback Warrior and Glorious Trash blogs, two of my favorite pulp/action adventure/cheap thriller review blogs.
I’m proud to say that my first “Boom Boom Goes The Tank” column has been published on Sea Lion Press. The debut column is a “brief, opinionated chronology of the [technothriller] genre”.
