Tag: World War III

Review: Stand To

On By coilerxiiIn Review2 Comments

Andy Farman’s Armageddon’s Song series starts with Stand-To, published in 2013. It’s-something. It tries to be a post-USSR thriller, but that description does not do it justice. It’s something. I’ll put it that way.

Icelands

The spy-novel intro is out-there, but then it manages to devolve into a sort of meta-WWIII against a Sino-Russian alliance, diverging from formula via pure spectacle and some very bizzare national alignments.

Rivets

Stand To might as well be the rivet capital of the world. It has, especially after the war starts, infodump after infodump after infodump after infodump after infodump after infodump after infodump after infodump after-you get the idea. I’ve seen outright pseudo-historical summaries that have fewer infodumps than this. Far fewer.

Infodumps on everything from artillery trajectories to squad tactics to equipment to chemical suits to chemical paper to radar types to training to repeated rants about how the British military is underfunded and underequipped are tossed clunkily onto the pages.

Zombie Sorceresses

This book opens with a ridiculous spy-novel plot involving femme fatales so tasteless and ridiculous they’d be rejected from an Austin Powers movie, and just incredible sleaze as tasteless as it is ridiculous. Then once the war actually starts, well, it has a Slavic ex-Soviet republic, deeply divided, with parts of it allying with the Russians but the bulk of it siding with the West.

It’s Belarus. That other big former SSR you might have thought was the culprit from the description is barely present, but the Czechs have flipped and are the spearhead of the enemy into Western Europe (so that the opening lines can still be in Germany).

Then there’s plot-nukes that open the war but don’t distract from the chemical-conventional clashes (and infodumps). The zombie sorceresses were very busy here.

The “Wha”?

First, the prose isn’t very good. There’s typos galore, everything is spelled out in amazing detail, and it makes gory deaths seem yawn-inducing. Second, the characters zig-zag from the raunchy spy novel caricatures of the opening to the flat infodumped “there to provide an anchor for the action and nothing else” ones of the proper war. Even when there’s a hint of personal struggle, it’s right back to more infodumps.

Second, the entire story takes a 180 turn from the bad spy novel tone to the infodumpalicious actual war.

The Only Score That Really Matters

And yet I felt amused by this. This is raw, unpolished, unfiltered-something. It earnestly combines infodumpy “boom boom goes the tank” action with sleazy spy novel stuff. It honestly felt a little novel in its excess. This kind of fiction at its worst tends to be either ultra-infodumped and over-researched or slapdash with stuff done for the fun of it. Stand To somehow manages to be both at the same time.

For normal readers, I wouldn’t recommend it. But for someone like me who enjoys such spectacles, it was amazing. It takes a lot of effort to shock me with too many infodumps, but this managed.

 

Review: Chieftains

On By coilerxiiIn Review2 Comments

Chieftains

Chieftains is an early WWIII novel (published in 1982, likely written before that) starring the titular tanks. I figured it’d be good for an initial review, as it falls nicely in the middle. It’s well-known but isn’t quite on the same level as some of the “classics” like Red Storm Rising itself. It’s also more in the middle literature-wise.

Icelands

Chieftains actually avoids many of the tropes that would make up the Iceland scale. It stays concentrated on the ground and ends in a nuclear blast. However, I believe this to more the result of its early publication, before the genre really gelled, than any degree of brilliance on Forrest-Webb’s part. It does have a lot of hopping viewpoints, mostly for the worse.

Rivets

The rivet-counting doesn’t (mostly) go into too much detail about which battalion went where, but it does go into heavy technical detail with unit designations and gun barrel sizes. Here’s where the sloppy, uneven quality of the book comes into being. The descriptions of British equipment are mostly accurate, but the American and Soviet equipment descriptions-aren’t. Especially with hindsight.

An East German Su-15 (an interceptor that served only in the specialized Soviet Air Defense Force, and which would never flown over foreign soil), fires an AA-8 missile (in reality a light air to air missile), at a ground target, to give one particularly egregious example. All sorts of prototypes and prototype names get to the front, and there’s even occasionally something like pure sloppiness, with a reference to a “T-60” tank. Including a lot of the detail and getting it wrong just seems pretty dubious-either do the research or be less “specific”.

Zombie Sorceresses

The zombie sorceresses are mostly in the background here. The war starting is glossed over, and the final nuclear blast is vague enough to not fall into my pet peeve of “plot-nukes”. To its credit, the explanation for the war starting is vague and contrived, (NATO will soon climb out of its pit and the Soviets must strike when they can) but still handwaved past quickly to get to the action. This is well-handled, and the low-level focus of the book keeps their hands from showing.

The “Wha?”

Like with the technical details, Chieftains is wildly inconsistent in literary terms. The same trend holds. British scenes and characters are mostly good, while the Americans are less so, to put it mildly. Given how Forrest-Webb portrays the Americans, I shudder to think at how he would have handled Soviet viewpoint characters. Thankfully, he doesn’t have them. The characters are serviceable by tank novel standards, and the disruptions are never that immense-the story still flows, and flows very well in spite of them. It does end too quickly even given the circumstances-its ending is like if Dr. Strangelove stopped right after the guy rode the bomb down.

The entire American segment could be cut without hurting anything. The occasional cut away from the British tank unit could be cut without hurting anything. And, finally, the “capture scene” could definitely be cut.

The action is gritting, bloody, and effective-except for the “capture scene” where the tank regiment’s commander is captured, has a flashback to sleeping with a colleague’s wife after being told of it by his interrogators, gets shot, gets up, and then shoots up the camp like an action hero, killing his torturer in a cinematic way with grenades. It’s out of place. Very out of place.

A small issue is the tone. A lot of the time it has an implicit anti-war tone simply by showing the brutality and gore first-hand, but it has a clashing explicit “this is why we need more money for the Army the politicians starved” message sometimes that also gets in the way. Bigger than that by far is the prose. Forrest-Webb’s writing is kind of clunky and he loves his exclamation points a little too much.

The Only Score That Really Matters

I liked this book. It’s a good tale of tanks exploding, and it’s got a degree of real grit to it that a lot of otherwise well-written books don’t have. I would have loved it if it wasn’t for the unevenness and sloppiness. But the sloppiness is there, and while some of the unevenness is forgivable, more of it is not.

This is a good tale, but it could have been a great one with some polish that it simply doesn’t have.