Tag: Essay

Invasion Fiction

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So, the World War III Blog series on Red Dawn has gotten me to write a piece on invasion literature, especially Anglo-American invasion literature. Now a part of my thoughts on invasion fiction, specifically Anglo-American invasion fiction, stretched back to Jerry Ahern’s Survivalist. There the Americans get the worse of a nuclear exchange and the Soviets invade. Now a part of me was thinking this:

“The 1981 book, not far removed from the infamous ‘Malaise Era’, might illustrate how even in the most star-spangled genre, a sense of American pessimism was still present.”

But another part of me was thinking this:

“You’re overthinking this to a huge degree. All it is is a way to put Russians in the path of John Rourke without that pesky “Army” or “Atlantic Ocean” being in the way.”

The point is that, whatever it was, this was very different-about as different as could be-from Clancy/Bond-style war thrillers. To the point where it basically broke the narrow grading system I’d set up for the blog. And this was before the series turned into science fiction.

It was also a type of invasion novel, Bobby Akart’s Axis of Evil, that took the first step in moving Fuldapocalypse away from a narrowly focused review blog to a general one. And it was the best decision I could have made. So invasion novels are pretty rooted on Fuldapocalypse.

In my eyes and reading, there’s basically two types of invasion novel: Grim invasion (ie, Tomorrow series) and pulpy invasion (ie, early Survivalist). There’s of course overlap, but the categories seem a little clear. The classic pre-WWI invasion novels fall into “grim invasion” (“See the fate that will befall us if we don’t fund the army!”) while many later invasion stories aimed at pure entertainment fall into the latter. In fact, I’d argue that the biggest issue I had with the original Red Dawn was how it sat a little awkwardly between the two, not having the clearest tone.

Command Took Me To Fuldapocalypse

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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.

How Many World War IIIs Are There?

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So I diversified Fuldapocalypse because of a sense that I’d get burned out if I just tried to read Hackett/Red Storm Rising-style World War III novels. But there’s a bigger, much bigger issue. See, even if I had the endurance for reading them all, I’d face the issue of, no joke, outright running out of books in the genre to read.

Here’s the rough classification for what I meant.

  • The series must be a military action novel.
  • It must feature a large worldwide war, usually against Russia and/or China, that still stays (mostly) conventional.
  • It must be “big-picture”, have a lot of detail on units/formations and the like, often going from viewpoint character to viewpoint character.

I haven’t done (if it was even possible) a count. But going by a restrictive interpretation, I’d say I’d be running out of books, or at least scraping the bottom of the barrel pretty quickly. It’s a little surprising just how many books do not meet all three of those categories.

At least among traditional commercial presses, I’d be pretty comfortable saying there are probably less than 50 books of this type ever, and definitely less than a hundred. Even with indies, I’d have to amplify the numbers by reviewing every individual book in a series.

The Military Techno-Thriller: A History

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The Military Techno-Thriller: A History

I absolutely loved Nader Elhefnawy’s “The Rise And Fall Of The Military Techno-Thriller.” So when I found that he’d written a recent big-picture overview of the genre , I was delighted and eagerly snapped it up. Rather than starting with the classic ‘invasion novels’ of the late 1800s, Elhefnaway moved even further, beginning in the 1600s.

Thus begins a multi-century tour de force, deftly pointing out not only the books themselves but also the cultural context behind them. This book is both long enough to be comprehensive (mostly) and short enough to be easily readable, making it the best of both worlds.

The picture it paints of the “techno-thriller” per se is of a genre that could only really thrive at one very specific sort of time. It has to exist in a period of heightened military tension that can’t spill over into any sort of massive backlash and a period of novel technology at the same. Such a period existed around the turn of the 20th Century and in the 1980s. At least in the latter case, it was not sustainable even without “events”, and with the “events” (ironically consisting of a war in the first period and a peace in the second), both were doomed.

There are a lot of fascinating insights that made me go “a-ha”, for lack of a better term. Elhefnawy’s statement that “Full-scale great power war scenarios like Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, Coyle’s Team Yankee or Ralph Peters’ Red Army (1989) were in the minority” matches what I found after starting this blog-my “blind man touching the elephant” background in wargaming and alternate speculation made me think the ‘big-war’ subgenre of that sort was considerably larger than it actually was. Another insight I found intriguing was the notion that Red Army was as successful as it was because it was novel in large part compared to other Fuldapocalyptic tales. And the tone of the writing, being frequently critical but never sneeringly dismissive, works very well too.

I think my biggest substantive disagreement with Elhefnawy’s conclusions is his depiction of the technothriller now. He mentions the “rise-of-China/return-of-Russia” change in geopolitics, but argues that “Nonetheless, the cultural trends evident in the 1990s proved quite robust”. I think that shift gave the the technothriller a bigger bump in popularity than he gives it credit for, especially given the headwinds it’s had to work against (the fragmentation of publishing and pop culture).

And while I don’t want to nitpick the omission of certain areas in something that’s meant to be a general overview, there’s a few I where thought more detail could have been warranted. In particular are what he calls the “vigilante novels” (ie, Mack Bolan). These are interesting in that they provide a parallel track of pop culture that both stood apart from and moved closer to the technothriller across the length of time. That phenomenon gets a segment but deserved more. There’s also the long-term “squeezing” of the mainstream publishing industry, and a deeper look at how that and the push for big, higher-margin books both helped and hurt the technothriller would have been nice. (It’s mentioned several times, but never in too much depth).

Still, these are just very small critiques for an excellent book that examines an overlooked genre through a variety of interesting perspectives in a highly readable way. I cannot recommend The Military Techno-Thriller: A History enough for fans of the genre.

Guns of Cheap Thrillers

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I’ve found there are three main categories of firearms writers use in cheap thrillers. I want to note that all three can be done well or done badly, and that even them being chosen poorly is almost never a story-breaker on its own.

Category A: Generic

Common to people with little knowledge of the subject matter, Category A firearms tend to be fallbacks on the most generic, widely used, and widely known boomsticks. Stuff like “M-16s, AR-15s, AK-47s, Glocks”, and “RPGs”.

Done Well: Common weapons are common for a reason. In many, arguably even most cases, you don’t really need to know the exact details. Just “the guard had a Glock” or something along those lines can do in many cases. Or even less.

Done Poorly: When it’s clear the author wasn’t doing much research and just took what they heard. This is clear when it’s accompanied by an incorrect caliber or some other fairly obvious detail, ie, one thriller with a “.25 Glock”. Often this is a “brown M&M” (from an infamous Van Halen contract that had a request for a bowl of M&Ms but no brown ones to make sure the contractors were reading it closely) that shows something else is off.

Category B: Specific

This ranges from knowing the specific kind of what a certain country/organization uses to the kind of exact descriptions [certain obscure AR-15 variant by certain obscure company] in [certain obscure caliber] with [certain obscure accessories] firing [exact weight of the bullet].

Done Well: In many cases, it’s more accurate to have someone who, for whatever reason, doesn’t use the most common firearm. It can add legitimate flavor and be a “bowl without brown M&Ms” in a good way.

Done Poorly: Besides the inherent issues with overly detailed exposition, this can be jarring if its combined with bad research in regard to something else. That something can even be other weapons-I’ve found super gun-exposition and terrible detail in anything bigger than a belt-fed MG. It’s like a sports story where the car used to drive the characters to the stadium is overly detailed (“A 1999 Ford Crown Victoria LX with a 4.6 liter V8…”), but then once they get there, says “And then they watched the Yankees win the Stanley Cup with twenty dunks.”

Category C: Exotic

There’s a lot of overlap with the first two categories here, but I feel it’s worth mentioning. Basically, “exotic” weapons that are very big (Desert Eagles! .44s! .44 Desert Eagles!), operate on a very unconventional system (The infamous G-11), or both are a staple of classic action-adventure fiction.

Done Well: I don’t fault an author for wanting to throw in their favorite obscure “pieces”, I do the same in a lot of my CMANO scenarios with aircraft and ships, and especially if they know what they’re doing, it can be fun. Like knowing the impractically of a Desert Eagle but giving it to a Ziggy Sobotka-esque dummy as a sign of his style-over-substance personality, or knowing the legitimate advantages/capabilities of an exotic and using it.

Done Poorly: This can have the flaws of either category, amplified by the nature of the weapons themselves. The “common exotics” lean more to Category A, while ones the author has a specific liking to move more to Category B.

 

Tank Losses

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The Soviet calculations for tank losses in a World War III were incredibly high by the standards of “smaller” wars, around the level of each front losing 6-15% of its tanks every day (and even more when facing either nuclear or advanced smart weapons)[1]. Interestingly, their theorized APC/BMP loss rates were substantially lower despite thinner armor. This probably has to do with tanks leading the attack and thus being more likely to hit minefields and the like, as well as being the first targets.

“Loss” does not necessarily mean “permanently destroyed”, and one of the crucial determinants is who holds the battlefield, since that can turn a knocked-out but repairable tank into a permanent loss.

Still, even the best-case scenario still involved more than a division worth of tanks being knocked out each day, and this in a period where the Soviet advantage over NATO was arguably never greater.

 

[1]See “Generic Enemy: Mobile Forces Part 1, Operational Art And Tactical Doctrine”, pg. 11-18, par. 1141, “The Front Offensive Operation, CIA/DO Intelligence Information Special Report, 15 June 1979“, pg. 316, and “Front Offensive Operations“, pg. 369”.

A new tagline

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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.”

RIP, W.E.B. Griffin

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Veteran and highly prolific author William “W. E. B. Griffin” Butterworth died on February 12 at 89. RIP. His legacy is over one hundred different books written over a decades-long career.

Perhaps as part of my gravitation towards the obscure and overlooked, I personally have not yet read any W.E.B. Griffin novels. But given his stature and success, I should, and I should review an appropriate one here on this blog at some point.