Tag: Review

Review: Dominion

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Dominion

CJ Sansom’s Dominion is a combination spy story and exploration of the classic Axis victory World War II alternate history. Britain is defeated but not “hard-conquered” in World War II, the Germans control the continent but continue to fight in the east, and with the Americans the only nuclear power, now everyone else wants the secret, with a man with nuclear knowledge trying to escape. And that’s basically about as much of a central plot there is in this novel.

It honestly reminded me a lot of Harry Turtledove’s In The Presence of Mine Enemies. Not the obvious divergence or setting, but rather the tone and pace. It’s a push through a dreary, dull, banality of evil world where evil triumphed over good. Which isn’t exactly the best to read about. Its biggest problem is that a lot of exposition is devoted to its background and worldbuilding, which just amounts to “the Germans won and a lot of bad stuff happened”. It’s a setting-first book in a setting that’s neither very pleasant nor interesting.

Plus while ‘plausibility’ is normally not the highest priority in alternate history, this just feels wrong. Britain becoming a satellite state of Germany without a military invasion and being able to not have its already eager-for-independence possessions secede? (Like India, which somehow hasn’t gone independent). I’d honestly accept a successful invasion over this.

The whole thing just feels unfocused, and when it does focus, it goes to the wrong thing. Not the best alternate history out there.

A Thousand Words: Emergency Call Ambulance

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Emergency: Call Ambulance

Sega’s 1999 Emergency Call Ambulance is a perfect footnote for what the arcade would become. Released alongside Crazy Taxi that same year, it has the same basic gameplay: Drive very fast under a time limit-in this case to get the patient to the hospital as quickly as possible. Looking at it and Crazy Taxi (which was reviewed much more positively) shows the obsolescence of arcade machines by this point: By now consoles could deliver effectively the same experience at home, so arcades had to sell elaborate experiences unrelated to the actual game.

This is something I’d still have spent money on to pass time. But it’s one of those ‘post-1945 propeller fighters’ that had the problem of simply being too late. Besides, it has a pet Dalmatian that accompanies one patient and gives a subtitled thank-you speech in dog. How can you not like that.

Review: Shopping for Bombs

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Shopping For Bombs

Gordon Corera’s Shopping for Bombs is a look at the then-recently busted AQ Khan nuclear network. It is very much an immediate-reaction book written in the close aftermath of an event aiming to capitalize on the media attention. Not surprisingly it has the strengths and weaknesses of such a thing. The strength is that it’s clear and understandable to a reader who isn’t a nuclear procurement nerd.

The weakness is that it feels a little shallow. Some of this isn’t Corera’s fault (how would he know at the time about the intricacies of Libya’s program). But it could have stood to have gone just a little deeper. And while being dated isn’t anything the writer can do anything about, it’s still an issue. Even for popular history about nuclear proliferation, there’s other stuff I would recommend more nearly twenty years on.

Review: Blood Trails

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Blood Trails

A novella of Texans hunting terrorists, Nicholas Orr’s Blood Trails is not very substantive. On one hand, it’s short and its plot is nothing that hasn’t been done many times before. That’s not an obstacle to a good book, and neither is the “Herman Melville’s Guide To Patrolling” exposition.

What is an obstacle is the fact that the final climactic battle also reads just as dryly as those infodumps. This is the one thing a thriller cannot be, and it’s what turns it from a possible 51% snack into a rejection in my eyes. Which is a shame, but oh well.

A Thousand Words: Initial D

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Initial D

One of the most famous car racing works of fiction and the biggest reason why people know the ‘eurobeat’ subgenre of electronic music, Initial D is the reason why there are so many memes of cars and “RUNNING IN THE NINETIES” and “GAS GAS GAS”. It’s the story of ‘touge’ racing through winding mountain roads, tofu deliveryman/prodigy driver Takumi Fujiwara, and the Toyota Corolla AE86, which thanks to it has gained popularity well beyond what a mid-80s Corolla would get.

Seriously, it’s like how in Red Storm Rising the Iceland invasion was a crazy jury-rigged gamble but so much else treats it like normal and standard. The whole point is that it’s an underestimated clunker. It’s like a tank novel with an M48 or T-54 or something with an ace crew and everyone thinks it’s the tank. But I digress.

This is basically an action show/manga with cars instead of glowing superheroes. The most famous “First Stage” initial (no pun intended) anime adaptation holds this to the core: With early CG and blaring music, characters dramatically take actions graaaaaduallly and somehow have the ability to hold huge monologues and conversations while roaring through perilous streets. It honestly sounds better than it actually is, with the pattern of ‘how is this ’86 winning’ being worn down even then.

But still, that music…

Review: Defence of Villages and Small Towns

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Defence of Villages and Small Towns

It was 1940 and Britain stood alone. Colonel G. A. Wade published the pamphlet/book Defence of Villages and Small Towns to give the massively mobilizing Home Guard a rapid lesson. It’s worth the cost and as more than a historical curiosity. In fact, a lot of its lessons would applicable in contemporary Ukraine or similar (like defending a theoretical desert village in the NTC from the Donovian hordes).

Basically it’s intended to be a casual plain-text tome with as little field-manualese as possible about area defense. It’s about using terrain and available resources, the importance of time, and other crucial things like coordinating unit boundaries to avoid friendly fire. Useful in both historical and understanding terms.

A Thousand Words: Mach Rider

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Mach Rider

Like many video games, Mach Rider was a minor hit for Nintendo in the mid-1980s and then languished forgotten until Smash Bros. revived it. The game is a pretty crude but impressive-for-the-time ride along a twisting track and dodge and destroy the evil giant tricycles until you eventually fail, but it has a couple of quirks.

The first is that it was one of the first games to have a level editor, even if it was only in Japan and very limited in practice there. The second is that it has a vague story (there’s minor justifications for you fighting back against an alien invasion in the various track missions) but no ending. The third and most interesting is that the titular rider has been alternately depicted as male and female (the former being in screens showing a helmeted but clearly male figure and the Smash Bros. Melee trophy using ‘he’ while the latter is a female biker in a piece of official art and a woman in the arcade version that’s implied to be a Mac Rider). I guess the different color riders are different people.

Of course, back in the day I remembered the Mach Rider theme as an alternate stage track in Smash Bros. that I loved and nothing else. Which can be said about a lot of things.

Review: Unclear Physics

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Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons

In Unclear Physics, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer takes a look at the ultimately unsuccessful nuclear weapons programs of Saddam’s Iraq and Libya. Instead of a technical perspective, she looks at them from a political/organizational one, showing how poor state structures (in the case of Iraq) and nonexistent ones (in the case of Libya) hampered them. From the outside, there aren’t any shocking revelations: Iraq could have had a bomb by the mid-late 1990s without the Gulf War or a similar catastrophe, while Libya’s was going nowhere by 2003.

But from the inside, it’s a detailed look at human failure,in terms of dealing with low technology, dictator paranoia, dictators not understanding, and disorganized factionalism. Some of it comes across as legitimately fun to read.

Unclear Physics has two big apparent weaknesses. The first is its academese tone. The second and worse one along the similar nature is that she writes in a kind of inside baseball tone as if this an argument among nonproliferation academics, saying “the conventional wisdom says ______” when she means the previous conventional wisdom among people in that very small niche. It’s arguments that I’ve never even heard, for better or worse, as someone who’s for an amateur read up a lot about nuclear proliferation.

But this is still a great book at showing the soft human side of an otherwise hard technical issue.

Review: Icebreaker

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Icebreaker

Perhaps Viktor Suvorov’s most infamous work is Icebreaker, a revisionist historical book that claims that Stalin was juuuuuust about to invade the rest of Europe from the east when the Germans launched a preemptive attack in 1941. What makes this not just wrong in the sense that his book on the hyper-Spetsnaz was inaccurate but outright disturbing is that someone else publicly stated such a claim repeatedly. Said someone else was famously portrayed in a movie by Bruno Ganz.

Thankfully, the book itself does not make the best case for this incredible claim. It’s not just that with hindsight and primary sources (that Suvorov inaccurately claimed were destroyed to cover them up) the image of the shambling wreck in peacetime formations that was the 1941 Red Army facing off against the bunched-up offensive force of the 1941 Wehrmacht. (Fun fact BTW: The Germans actually had a 3-2 numerical advantage in the early part of Barbarossa, and even more in practice if you account for the terrible logistics of the Soviets then).

The only evidence besides ‘trust me bro’ that Suvorov puts forward is basically “The Soviets had lots of ____ [such as fast tanks and/or paratroopers] that clearly meant they were meant for an offensive into western Europe.” It couldn’t just be that their doctrine was on mobile warfare and that they tried and failed to implement it defensively.

I knew about how bad its premise was, but I wasn’t expecting so weak an argument. Which is probably a good thing. Unlike this book.

A Thousand Words: BeamNG Drive

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BeamNG Drive

One reason why Fuldapocalypse hasn’t been updating much is BeamNG Drive. It is an automobile sandbox with realistic physics that allows someone to do so much. Now on its own the game does not look like much. You can drive around maps that range from tiny to several virtual square kilometers, do some challenges like races or time trials or seeing how far you can get on an almost empty fuel tank, etc…

But that is like saying like sports is just throwing/kicking a ball around. With just the stock game (and the mods for this are numerous and excellent), you can control everything from big truck fronts to tiny old cars. The seemingly mundane can turn into fun, like towing a trailer with cargo many times the weight of the car pulling it, and doing so on a dirt mountain road without mishaps (easier said than done).

You have to make your own fun in BeamNG, but there’s a lot of it.