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.