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Coiler's Alternate History Reviews

The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad.

This novel's premise is "What if Hitler became a sci-fi writer instead of a politician?" The in-universe AH part consists of just an implausible infodump about a "Greater Soviet Union" that took over all of Europe, and of course, Hitler's career as a writer. The main part is a deliberately poor and melodramatic post-apocalyptic tale of "Feric Jaggar" leading the pure men of Heldon against the bestial mutants controlled by the evil manipulative Dominators. The point Spinrad is trying to make is very clear and still very telling-that a lot of sci-fi/fantasy can come across as fascist and racist.

Now it's a good point to make, and I'd agree with it. But the book has a few problems, some of its own making and some not of it. The first is that it's incredibly unsubtle and the joke/point wears out way too quickly. I basically went "Ok, I get it. I really get it" after the first few chapters, and then there's an in-universe review just to make sure the point is gotten. The first is forgivable, but everything from the initials of certain organizations to the plot (it even copies the plan of Case Blue) is so blatant that Spinrad probably could have toned it down a little bit.

The biggest problem that wasn't Spinrad's fault is that the book ends up dated. While the overall tone and message can hold true for much sci-fi/fantasy (just look at the stereotypical Baen book), it's really aiming at the pulp sword-and-sorcery genre that another critic dismissed as "Thud and Blunder". Compare it to say, Star Wars, which has a multi-species alliance including ugly aliens going against a human-dominated empire. Or how the prose it parodies is now viewed as a laughingstock rather than as par for the course. There's also, and this is my subjective opinion, that the argument can be and has been taken too far. It's fine to point out the issue, but not as fine to condemn the entire genre as being equal to the likes of Victoria.

However, this is still a good provocative book, and I recommend it.
 
Alex Richards said:
I must admit I've only read a couple of Clive Cusslers and had much the same feeling of 'oh god this is just trite.'
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Of course it is. Nearly every Cussler book follows the exact same wildly ludicrous and derivative plot. I know this; I roll my eyes every time I see it; it is so bad that if I had to rate it critically, I’d give Raise the Titanic 6/10 and every book since 3/10...

Yet why can’t I stop reading them?! How can I be so obsessed with such ridiculous books?!
 
Tales of World War III, 1985 by Brad Smith.
Harrier Air War, 1985, by Brad Smith

This is a lets play/after action report of wargames in printed form, with a tiny fig leaf of being a narrative of WW3 . A very "Icelandic" World War III to boot. There are three main stories in the book. The first is a dry narrative of the macro-scale war. To be fair, it has the Soviets winning. However, it was a little soured by the realization that the Soviet victory was not done for literary reasons, but rather simply because it was what the game showed.

I can't get too mad at the first installment-the author was clearly in his comfort zone, and the lack of any conventional characters actually helped slightly. For all its own problems, he was writing an honest, unashamed lines on a map wargame AAR without any pretensions of being anything else.

The second, Tactical Air, shifts the focus lower and in the process makes it worse. It's forgivable (to an extent) for a high-level story to be a little clunky and lines-on-the-map. For a low-level story to be that way makes it come across as "gamey" and artificial. One of the biggest issues taking wargaming too literally is that it can translate to a lack of "immediacy". There's not a sense of being there, and there especially isn't a sense of fog of war, because the writer clearly knows who's there with what. So this is basically just "a bunch of Tornadoes and Su-25s fly around bombing".

The third and final, "Air Assault" is where Smith is clearly the most out of his depth. The prose is bad and clunky, it shifts from first to third person and back in an awkward way (my hunch is that Smith wanted to show everything), and the highlight is a Ronald McDonald statue getting destroyed.

Now for Smith's next book, Harrier Air War. To my great delight, it's better. It's more focused and, as I was overjoyed to read in the afterword, he explictily stated he wanted the book to be more "pulpy." Yes, that has its own problems, but I'll take pulpy cheap thrillers over dry rivet-counting any day. The actual book itself is tales of Harriers and their crews flying around in the war, and even though Smith's writing is only somewhat improved from the nadir of "Air Assault", that he succeeded in becoming genuinely better, however modestly, is a good sign.
 
Operation Sealion by Richard Cox

This old book is two things, both related to the aquatic beast that tried and failed to swim the channel. The first is a novelization of the 1974 Sealion wargame at Sandhurst. The second is a collection of essays by then-prominent historians. As fiction,it (obviously) smacks of "Let's Play/AAR", and I've found that reading synopses that don't pretend to be anything else is somehow more refreshing than seeing a taped-on "narrative". The nonfiction essays are good but dated.

The game itself, as someone involved in wargaming, is interesting. The Germans get a big mulligan to let it happen at all by letting the first wave get across mostly intact. I'll admit I'm on the edge of Sealion-ness, in that I believe that while unlikely:

  1. The Germans might greenlight an invasion if the BOB looked to be going well. Bold gambles were just in their blood, especially if the "it'll just be like crossing a river" Heer bullied the other services aside.
  2. If the British dropped the ball enough times (if), the first wave could get through. Keeping it supplied while in constant grinding contact is something else.
A lot of the naval stuff is the most abstracted and artificial (Paddy Griffith himself never considered the game to be authoritative or totally realistic in the way a lot of later commentators did). The planners were obviously more interested in the ground battle, which amounted to a grind until the RN cut off the supply line and forced a desperate scramble.

If nothing else, the book is an interesting snapshot of an interesting experiment. I had fun reading it, at least.
 
Worm by John "Wildbow" McCrae

This is stretching things a lot. It's not meant as AH, and it's only "published" as a web-serial. But it does have ASB AH divergences in the story's past, and Spacebattles/Sufficient Velocity is absolutely obsessed with writing fanfiction of it. So, what do I think of it? It's very, very tough. On one hand, it's a superhero story written entirely by one person, and thus doesn't have the "five million cooks and a million overseers" of the actual big two. On the other, well, its fundamentals just aren't very good.

It's hard to describe the plot because it's so long and clunky (more on that below), but basically, in the past a super-being showed up (the alternate history element) and superpowered characters started appearing. One is the protagonist, a bullied girl who gains the ability to control bugs. A long, dark story follows. Did I mention it's long? Yeah. It's real long. As in, "2.5 times the length of War and Peace" long.

So it's tough for me to describe. I tend to nitpick plot and setting details in Worm that probably don't deserve them. But I'd say it's something where the sum of the parts is much bigger than the whole. Because there's a lot of interesting characters, powers, and events that could make up a perfectly good story all on their own (and munchkins with suspiciously plot-convenient powers, but oh well). It's just that I can't get into it. The prose is very dull, the tone has trouble shifting from the dark monotone, and worst yet, the pacing zig-zags between "far too fast" and "far too slow" with no just-right in between.

It's something you either get or you don't. I can understand why some people get it-unconventional superpowers, superheroes in a setting without too much of the baggage from the big two, or just a liking of the concepts. But I don't. It's not enough for me to overcome the flaws it has in the literary fundamentals.
 
I want to do a piece on WW3 fiction, and the ups and downs and path that (sub)genre took. It'll be more evenhanded than the snark of the Iceland Review Scale, but I'm not sure if I should do it as a post here or if it deserves its own thread somewhere else.
 
Coiler said:
I want to do a piece on WW3 fiction, and the ups and downs and path that (sub)genre took. It'll be more evenhanded than the snark of the Iceland Review Scale, but I'm not sure if I should do it as a post here or if it deserves its own thread somewhere else.
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I guess it depends on the size, was it going to be a summary like your reviews on this thread so far or a chapter-by-chapter work like some of your previous reviews?
 
The Red said:
I guess it depends on the size, was it going to be a summary like your reviews on this thread so far or a chapter-by-chapter work like some of your previous reviews?
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It's a summary involving multiple works.
 
Coiler said:
I want to do a piece on WW3 fiction, and the ups and downs and path that (sub)genre took. It'll be more evenhanded than the snark of the Iceland Review Scale, but I'm not sure if I should do it as a post here or if it deserves its own thread somewhere else.
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I would like to read it, i like WW3 fiction, maybe you review once i have not read yet.
 
Ok. Here it goes.

Red Storm Rising itself, the biggest inspiration (along with Hackett, which I haven't read, but which I've heard bad things about, and thus am very apprehensive towards), is-hard to judge. Not just because I've seen so many imitators, but because it just doesn't feel the same in a modern context-if it's back in the 80s and your vague memory is of flopping around in the Vietnamese jungle, and here's the tale of these new things called Abrams tanks and Tomahawk missiles, it's just not the same as what someone born after the Gulf War would feel. It has a few too many viewpoint characters and locations for its own good, it has a terrible excuse plot (which at least gets the war starting fairly quickly), and it has a "bit" of the "so many imitators the original doesn't seem original" effect.

I've mentioned Larry Bond earlier. My review of one of his books speaks for both his own quality and the path that technothrillers took. But I don't think it's that much of his own fault that his style got copied so much. I'd say it was simple inertia and trend-following. I also think that for someone who has a lot of technical but not as much narrative knowledge, a big broad-front approach with lots of characters everywhere is just easier to write, and that's why it's done. Which is a shame because a lot of the "cat-mustache" issues that caused the genre to decline could be at least mitigated by keeping the stories small-scale. Instead, all too often (but not always), if the protagonists are in any sort of vehicle more advanced than a jeep, it turns into a big-picture tale that it shouldn't be.

And the WW3 subgenre is even more niche overall than the technothriller. The more recent ones (see my review of The Red Effect on the main blog for a very good representative sample) tend to be niche enthusiast fiction using older mainstream fiction as a base in a way that amplifies the problems of both while minimizing the strengths. Granted, a lot of that is probably just Sturgeon's Law at work in books with no formal editors or quality control. But I've seen a lot in there that I don't see in even other "cheap thrillers".

At its worst its cargo-culted versions of the 80s classics (a big reason why so many take place in the 1980s) mixed with rivet-counting infodumps. A big problem in the action is a lack of real "immediacy" even in the stories that aren't just lines-on-a-map obvious wargame AARs. It's just too many authors think in terms of "And then the 39th Tank Division, acting as an exploitation force, slammed into the 20th Reserve Infantry Division dug in near Eiswald" rather than "The main characters have dug in rapidly, and then they see a giant group of enemy tanks approaching."

I'm actually more forgiving of the most honest ones that make no pretense at a narrative whatsoever, rather than filling the tale with paper-thin viewpoint characters meant to jump from a patrol aircraft in the Arctic to a tank crew near Munich to a fighter pilot in the UK.
 
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IIRC once of the few good points about Hackett is that, as a serving senior officer, he does bring a dose of realism to some of the plot rather than 'I am directly citing names from my copy of Janes' but otherwise it just gets very dreary
 
Why is it i like WWIII between the Americans and Soviets in books more than modern WWIII stories, could it be becuase we know who are the good guys and the bad guys.
 
@Coiler Coiler Out of interest, did you ever get any kind of notice/feedback like I did with Gabb and The Churchill Memorandum when you did your review of Victoria?
 
Skinny87 said:
@Coiler Coiler Out of interest, did you ever get any kind of notice/feedback like I did with Gabb and The Churchill Memorandum when you did your review of Victoria?
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Not really. Lind barely (but still does) use the internet, and for all his many other problems, is not an Internet Navy SEAL Tough Guy like Tom Kratman.
 
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