Tag: Tank

Review: Advance To Contact

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Advance To Contact

advancetocontactcover

In the early stages of Fuldapocalypse, I reviewed Andy Farman’s Stand To, a World War III tale. Or rather, a sleazy spy tale that became a World War III tale that involved everything I thought I’d be seeing en masse on Fuldapocalypse, and then some. Lots of descriptions. Lots of viewpoint characters. Lots of meticulously described battles.

Now I’m in one of those full circle moods. I still had the remaining books in the series left unread, so I decided to return to that mostly untapped World War III vein and read the second Armageddon’s Song book, Advance to Contact.

Farman has had decades of legitimate expertise as a soldier and police officer, and indeed the infantry fighting scenes in this book sometimes actually work. The key word here is “sometimes”. Often they blur together (since the characters are so forgettable and interchangeable). Often Farman fills it with infodumps on the exact levels of equipment and/or author lectures on whatever topic is technically relevant. Often the viewpoints are yanked away and yanked back. Often they’re overdescribed to the point where it loses its focus. Still, I should give legitimate credit where credit is due. There’s one scene with doomed Belarusian soldiers where he actually writes well, doesn’t get too infodumpy, and keeps the ‘camera’ focused on them instead of jumping a continent away after a few paragraphs.

Another instance of deserved credit is that the plotting and pacing is a little better than in Stand To. The war is underway, so the goofy spy plot is less prominent and the viewpoint jumping merely at the level of “exaggerated technothriller” rather than the wrenching shifts of Stand To.

That being said, it still has most of the problems mentioned over a year ago in the review of Stand To. The times when details are gotten wrong (given the ridiculous amount of description) are annoying. Farman doesn’t focus on where he’s most skilled and comfortable but instead gives giant air/sea battles. There are bizarre events like B-2s being used as tankers and Tu-160s as special forces insertion craft. The dialogue for anyone not in the military is frequently awkward. And the pacing is just glacially slow.

Still, like with the first book, I couldn’t feel mad about this and frequently felt amused. This is an earnest series by a first-time fiction writer. It’s just that what could have been at least a rival to Chieftains with some more focus turned into this clunked-together technothriller kitchen sink.

Review: The Bear’s Claws

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The Bear’s Claws

(Full disclosure: I was a beta reader for this book and thus received an advance review copy)

Reading The Bear’s Claws was a pleasant surprise, the likes of which I hadn’t gotten from a WWIII book since Team Yankee. This tells the story of a Soviet mechanized infantry unit as it progresses through a World War III in 1982.

Now I could mention the book’s shortcomings-in particular, its character arcs are not exactly the most unpredictable. But given the small of World War III fiction in general, having a book with all the things it did right was delightful to experience.

  • The Soviets not only win, but win handily. This does make sense for 1982, but it’s still good to see that leap being taken in popular WWIII fiction. And to add to that, it’s not portrayed as a cakewalk for the people on the ground.
  • In great contrast to the stereotypical Red Storm Rising-style type of book where viewpoint characters hop around, the “camera” here stays tightly focused.
  • Finally, it has the kind of “plotnukes” that I would normally denounce. Yet they were handled in a way that didn’t have me going “oh, come on!”. The plotnukes featured a personal connection and just the right amount of explanation.

This sort of thing doesn’t come along often. So I’m very happy to give The Bear’s Claws my thumbs up.

Review: War Breaks Out

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War Breaks Out

When I got Martin Archer’s War Breaks Out, I was expecting a plodding Cold-War-Turned-Fuldapocalyptic-Hot story. The initial premise and the mediocre experience of the previous book I’d reviewed, Israel’s Next War, made me think that. Instead, I got one of the most crazy and just plain out-there examples of a World War III story I’ve ever read.

  • The timestream got scrambled. There are Eurofighter Typhoons and people who were injured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but at the same time there’s a 1980s WWIII and everyone is using M60s and T-62s. Oh and Belgium has F-15s for some reason.
  • We’re introduced to the main character (who frequently appears in a weird form of first-person similar to that present in Israel’s Next War) immediately. He’s a one-star general who gets a quick promotion worthy of spacesuit commandos. The president decides he’s just that good, and needs a fighter, not those deskbound bureaucrats! (To be fair, this is officially the third in a series with the same main character, but still).
  • Said main character promptly comes up with a bunch of gimmicky tricks and special ops to turn the tide of the impending war against the USSR. These range from tricking Soviet AWACS with mass transponder changes to landing troops with ferries in the Baltic. Naturally, they all work.
  • The actual battle scenes themselves are the least amusing and most clunky and repetitive. Except for something I haven’t seen in a while-the attempted Soviet invasion of Iceland! It’s been a while, Ísland. I missed you!
  • The book ends with one of the most ridiculously blatant examples of “Foreshadowing” for the next installment in the series that I’ve seen. It’s not foreshadowing so much as building a city of giant neon signs indicating the plot point, then causing it to be lit up in a giant fireworks display that’s internationally televised, telling the plot point in a Super Bowl commercial, and then carving the plot point into the moon for good measure.

 

This was an experience. It’s probably as bad as “World War 1990” in terms of pure writing quality, but I had a lot more fun reading (and reviewing) it. I guess a better example would be an even more rough version of Ian Slater.

Review: Red Storm Box Set

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The Red Storm Box Set

James Ronsone and Miranda Watson’s “Red Storm” series ran for six books. The omnibus box set I bought contained the first three- “Battlefield Ukraine, Battlefield Korea, and Battlefield Taiwan”.

This checks all the boxes. Lots of conference room infodumps with generals and leaders? Check. Huge descriptions of everything? Check. Characters whose sole characterization is at best an infodump and (more frequently) at worst a “Steel Panthers Characterization” where they’re just paper placeholders who crew military equipment? Check. Hopping around viewpoint characters around the world with what feels like no rhyme or reason? Check. And the cherry on top is the Hackett-style “city trade” plotnukes, as Oakland and Shenyang go boom.

This is what I thought I’d be reading en masse when starting Fuldapocalypse. Thankfully, it hasn’t been what I actually have been reading. Reading countless non-dry, non-World War III books has allowed me to view this in a better perspective than I had before. In the past, I’d have probably just denounced it with a combination of fire-breathing and eye-rolling.

I still view this as a subpar book-it’s in the awkward, neither fish-nor-fowl area of being too “literary”, gimmicky, and inaccurate in a rivet-county way to be a War That Never Was-style pure play by play while being too bland and disjointed to be an actual literary book. But now I can weirdly appreciate it for trying to scratch a specific itch. My mindset has gone from “this is bad” to “this has flaws and isn’t really my thing.”

If a sort of “Hackett but with some technothriller gimmicks” style book is your thing, you could do worse than this series.

Review: The Zone Hard Target

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The Zone: Hard Target

hardtarget

In 1980, Hard Target was released. It was the first book in The Zone series of post-semi-apocalyptic World War III novels. Just that description alone gives the impression of the book being weirdly different. And in many ways, it is.

The background of this book is simple, contrived, and still somewhat novel. Basically, there’s a World War III, but now the fighting is limited to a contaminated zone in Europe, and the westerners have super-hovercraft for some science fiction flair. I was reminded of the Ogre board game/franchise, which has hovercraft and limited conventional nuclear war (it makes sense in context). That came out three years before this book did, and I don’t know how much influence, if any, it had over the writing.

This is a “have your cake and eat it too” kind of book. On one hand, the action is grittier and gorier compared to some other works in the genre, and the target MacGuffin is a tank repair unit and not some kind of superweapon. On the other, it’s still very much a cheap thriller with a premise, like Twilight 2000, that’s pretty much designed to be an adventure-friendly setting.

But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and Hard Target is a good book for what it is. It checks the boxes of what makes a cheap thriller passable, and as obviously contrived as they were, the setting and tone were novel enough to take things up a notch for me.

Another opinion on this book can be found on the excellent Books That Time Forgot blog.

 

Review: Israel’s Next War

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Israel’s Next War

Martin Archer’s Israel’s Next War was… strange. I’ve read my share of “boom boom goes the tank” war “thrillers” where there are what feels like five million characters (very few of whom are interesting) and five billion weapon descriptions (very few of which are relevant). Thus I was bracing for the book to be like that, and I was not wrong. But it goes a lot deeper than those surface issues.

First, there’s the action itself between Israel and an alliance of its traditional enemies, where I went “No. No. This isn’t how it would go” on many occasions. I guess I just can’t help myself, being the avid wargamer and historian that I’ve been. Something unrealistic, flawed, or not the most well researched isn’t a deal-breaker (far from it). But given the quality of the rest of the book, it went from eyebrow-raising to  head-shaking. Some of it is good, if a little rote. But more of it isn’t, and it all feels like Archer’s sources were:

  • A half-remembered History Channel piece on the Yom Kippur War.
  • Various “Modern Military Equipment” coffee table books.
  • Command And Conquer Generals.

The technology is all over the place, and the equipment is neither consistent nor particularly accurate. Combined with a dull non-war plot, this would feel like a ramshackle technothriller, if not for the final icing on the cake. That would be the writing style.

Archer writes the book in first person, constantly shuffling back and forth between first-person viewpoints with a label preceding their section. The nadir of this is a character named only “The Iraqi Lieutenant Colonel”, but the others aren’t much better. The prose alternates between the “BBGTT” classic of “Infodumps-R-Us” and something that’s surprisingly (and jarringly) “bouncy”, for lack of a better word. It clashes, to put it mildly.

For all those flaws, it’s not the absolute worst, either in plausibility or or in drama. But the “quirks” noted above push Israel’s Next War from being potentially bad and dull to bad and slightly weird. At least I had fun making this review.

Review: The Blue Effect

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The Blue Effect

The final entry in Harvey Black’s Effect series is The Blue Effect. This book manages to be slightly better than its predecessors in some ways and a lot worse in another. There’s a sorta-kinda-semi-plot where the British face the Soviets in what could be the make-or-break battle near Hanover. But once again, it never really clicks into a whole that it could have been. If The Red Effect was just listing the ingredients before hurriedly pouring them into a bowl and The Black Effect was having them sit in the mixing bowl doing nothing, this at least turns them into batter-but not a finished dish.

The highlight of this book, besides more tanks exploding, is a very long scene in which a Vulcan bomber soars into action. A part of me was going “oh come on, this relic would probably be shot down, malfunction or just miss”, but another part of me, the part that likes unconventional units, was going “WOW NICE”. I mean, I’d love to read (or even write) a book of unconventional relic units flying into battle. This is not that book.

What really sours the The Blue Effect is not any of the action in the main book, but rather its anticlimax of an ending. Here was where going the Chieftains/Dr. Strangelove route and just nuking everything might very well have been better. Instead, it’s a have your cake and eat it too deal where after a few plotnukes and a few losses, the Warsaw Pact just gives up very abruptly. It’s a circumstance where either another full length tide-turning installment (with proper plotting) or trimming the entire three-book series into one could have been better. And there’s a lot of fat to trim.

Furthermore, all of the hindsight-driven greater “micro”- accuracy of the series (See the now-known durability of tanks with Kontakt-series reactive armor! See the proper tank mix in GSFG instead of just having everything be a T-72!) is squandered by this “macro”-level flop in the conclusion. Whatever issues there are with a clean NATO win in 1984, there are a lot more with it happening in this fashion. If the goal is realism, it’s implausible. If the goal is storytelling, it’s a contrivance and makes the victory seem unearned.

The result is something that could have risen higher than it did, both in this specific book and the overall series.

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”.

Review: The Black Effect

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The Black Effect

blackeffectcover

Harvey Black’s The Black Effect is the kind of book I thought I’d be reviewing en masse on this blog, at least in terms of basic plot. Namely, in 198_ World War III breaks out. Cue a lot of tanks exploding. This is the second book in Black’s _____ Effect series, and the first I reviewed at Sea Lion Press before this blog even started.

The Black Effect is what I feared Team Yankee would be before being pleasantly surprised.  It’s a mostly-conventional 198X WW3 book that happens to be a picture-perfect case for why a bowl of ingredients does not equal a meal.

Some of the individual ingredients (battle scenes) in the novel are good, if repetitive. Others are weighed down by things like Black constantly listing the full designations of every piece of equipment in overwhelming detail (fog of war? target fixation? Limited viewpoints? What are those?). But as a whole the book just amounts to a disorganized parade of various pieces of military equipment and graphene-thin Steel Panthers Characters differing only in what they’re crewing and how much ‘camera time’ that they get before being blown up.

There is an almost total lack of anything cohesive or coherent beyond “WW3 stuff happens”. It gets to the point where the intelligence photographers who were the high point of the previous installment turn into just another pace-breaking liability. This at least doesn’t have The Red Effect’s using up nearly all of its space on historical events with names badly changed (ie, Stanislav Petrov became “Perov”) before rushing to stuff a bunch of battles into the last thirty pages.

The Black Effect isn’t all bad. It’s more evenhanded than a lot of WWIII stories, it being written as an alternate history with decades of hindsight helps with some (but not all) technical accuracy issues, and it works at providing simple action scenes. It’s just I’ve read better, even in this very specific subgenre.

Review: Soldier of Gideon

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Soldier of Gideon

soldierofgideoncover

The Casca series takes its path to the Arab-Israeli wars hinted at in the first book. Soldier of Gideon is a “modern” Casca, as opposed to the ancient Cascas. Taking place in the Six Day War, it’s typical of later Cascas-formulaic but good.

The action-packed book is in this kind of particular subgenre of war story that’s more gory and grisly than a John Wayne-style sanitized work, but still far more over the top and spectacular than a truly grounded novel. This isn’t a bad thing, but it’s interesting.

(Sidenote: For whatever reason, historical war fiction isn’t usually my cup of tea. I’ve read good examples, but it just doesn’t grab me the way action-adventure or even technothrillers do. That being said, I have read enough to tell which slot Soldier of Gideon fell into)

The Arab armies seem to use primarily western equipment (to the extent that only Jordan did in the historical war)  with a few IS-3 tanks thrown in as level bosses challenging encounters. Casca and friends go to every theater of the war. In the process, Sadler demonstrated both his greatest strength and greatest weakness as the series dragged on.

The greatest strength is managing to maintain dramatic tension and fluid excitement in a story that features A: A historically decisive blowout victory, and B: An immortal protagonist. This is no easy task, and it’s a sign of Sadler’s proficiency that Casca never devolves into the “unironic One Punch Man” that it could have.

However, the other side of the coin is the almost complete lack of interest in using the immortal protagonist who’s lived for thousands of years, met every important Eurasian historical figure in that time, and is linked personally to Christianity as anything but a placeholder to build period pieces around. While cheap thrillers like these aren’t philosophical works, the wasted potential is still very high.

That said, as cheap thrillers, the Casca books still work, and work well.