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Coiler's Alternate History Reviews

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.

It's because it's fairly plausible as a setup as well and didn't the technothriller genre lose its marbles trying to find an ersatz-USSR.
 
It's because it's fairly plausible as a setup as well and didn't the technothriller genre lose its marbles trying to find an ersatz-USSR.
The decade between the fall of the USSR and 9/11 was a bad one for technothrillers. The Big Bad was gone, and they were scrambling to find a replacement. The low point was Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, which featured Japan launching an attack on the US.
 
The decade between the fall of the USSR and 9/11 was a bad one for technothrillers. The Big Bad was gone, and they were scrambling to find a replacement. The low point was Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, which featured Japan launching an attack on the US.

Yeah Clancy should've stayed in the cold war because his post CW stuff was off the wall. "United Islamic Republics" anyone? I wonder if there were any Soviet technothrillers?
 
So he's a more genteel Kratman or Day?

In some ways, yes. Lind and Kratman are both far-right authors who have giant-sized axes to grind with "cultural leftists" and the US military. In the specifics, they're different. Lind actually knows about this thing called "pacing" in terms of writing, while Kratman does not (his first Carrera book had to be broken into two volumes because it was too big to print.) Kratman is obsessed with minor tiny details, while Lind scoffs at them altogether. They've even butted heads over tactics too, with Lind being more Boyd than Boyd and more Liddell Hart than Liddell Hart when it comes to "maneuver warfare", while Kratman digs in and launches an attritional Grand Plan in every written battle.

And of course, Lind has a very strange and half-hearted "I'm not a Nazi honest even though I like Germany and brutality" scene, while Kratman just plain slobbers over the SS.

The decade between the fall of the USSR and 9/11 was a bad one for technothrillers. The Big Bad was gone, and they were scrambling to find a replacement. The low point was Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, which featured Japan launching an attack on the US.

What exacerbated this was that so many of them were sticking with a "big-scope, big-picture" model. Small scale books where you only need to threaten the individual characters have a lot more viable options for enemies.
 
The decade between the fall of the USSR and 9/11 was a bad one for technothrillers. The Big Bad was gone, and they were scrambling to find a replacement. The low point was Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, which featured Japan launching an attack on the US.
There where also some Larry Bond books, one with a German-French versus United States, could that also count as WWIII.
 
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.

It's very clear that the entire book was written as an excuse to describe the naval scenario. It doesn't really even hold up properly as WWIII fiction because everything revolves around making the Russian naval threat as threatening as possible and the land element just a damsel in distress waiting for the Navy to save it.
 
TSR2: Britain's Lost Bomber by Damien Burke

This is a nonfiction reference book on the classic cancelled jet bomber, but it does contain a lot of speculation on what could have been, hence why I'm reviewing it here. First, for better or worse it's a technical aviation book. So it's dry, but very detailed. Its biggest strength is that it examines evenhandedly what the TSR2 was-a very capable design for the time, but also an expensive and almost certainly unreliable aircraft with many iffy requirements built for a 1950s "nuke everything" situation. Keeping it going would have shackled the RAF to such an aircraft, and with full hindsight, the best thing, the book argues, would have been for the RAF to just swallow its pride and take the Buccaneer from the start. While I don't have that much knowledge, it at least seems convincing.

For those who like what-ifs in military aviation, the TSR2, or technical aviation books in general, this is good.
 
Zhirinovsky's Russian Empire by D. F. Pellegrino

This started off as an AH.com TL, and was touched up and turned into a book. It's a very "cyclops in the land of the blind" story. While I'd prefer a normal narrative, this "tale by way of news snippets and vignettes" at least beats pure infodumps. While I have my share of plausibility issues with it, it at least avoids some of the genre pitfalls (especially military, where it goes for nuclear brinkmanship and small wars instead of a Hackett ripoff WW3). It's a little too dystopian for its own good, but manages to avoid going full "For All Time wannabe". The tone is also a little too zig-zaggy for my tastes.

However, some of the individual scenes are still good, and it at least tries to be different and imaginative. So I still recommend it with caveats.
 
Zhirinovsky's Russian Empire by D. F. Pellegrino

This started off as an AH.com TL, and was touched up and turned into a book. It's a very "cyclops in the land of the blind" story. While I'd prefer a normal narrative, this "tale by way of news snippets and vignettes" at least beats pure infodumps. While I have my share of plausibility issues with it, it at least avoids some of the genre pitfalls (especially military, where it goes for nuclear brinkmanship and small wars instead of a Hackett ripoff WW3). It's a little too dystopian for its own good, but manages to avoid going full "For All Time wannabe". The tone is also a little too zig-zaggy for my tastes.

However, some of the individual scenes are still good, and it at least tries to be different and imaginative. So I still recommend it with caveats.

Good to know, it's been on my shortlist for AH stuff for a while, but keeps getting knocked back by newer finds
 
The Defense of Hill 781 by James McDonough.

First, I must say that this is not a conventional novel, nor is it intended to be one. It's meant as Duffers Drift style "edutainment" for mechanized war in the late Cold War period, being inspired by the author's experience in the infamous Fort Irwin National Training Center. So, with that in mind, it's hard to truly rate. But I can say that I liked it nonetheless.

The first is its detailed and well-written description of 1980s mechanized battle. The second is a weird thing that might appeal to me in ways that it wouldn't to other readers-namely, that it's unapologetic about providing a battle and only a battle, without any shoehorned in plots or politicking. It's an artificial engagement against an artificial foe, and after seeing too many clunkily-done Larry Bond wannabe intros, it just felt refreshing to go for a big battle.

This is a niche work that knows it's a niche work and doesn't pretend or try to be anything else. I admire a writer who can focus like that.
 
Tiger Tracks and The Last Panther by "Wolfgang Faust".

Oh boy, these books. I feel comfortable calling them alternate history, because they have, among other things, ahistorically early Iosef Stalin tanks, implied by the descriptions to be IS-3s that didn't appear OTL until after the war. They're also not matched to any specific part of the war, at least in the first book, which goes out of its way to avoid giving any unit or location names. The second part at least has a historical event as its base, but still obfuscates in a way no actual memoir would.

(Yes, they're very dubiously sold as the "memoirs" of Wolfgang Faust, a former tank crewman, even though it's an obvious modern fake even without the historical inaccuracies.)

So, if these books were apolitical, they'd be just trashy and melodramatic action novels. However, they're so ridiculously infested with Wehrabooism that they're trashy, melodramatic, and creepy action novels. There's even a scene where the main character gets face to face with a genuine ASIATIC HORDESMAN, done without any irony whatsoever. Then again, for some guy looking through the vision ports on a tank, he can describe battles with ridiculous amounts of detail-down to exactly what shells hit where, or just how a vehicle that was destroyed met its end (invariably through a gigantic, dramatic fireball, where, depending on its size, either the whole thing or a piece of it flies through the air).

These are not good. They're so ridiculously over-the-top that it becomes expected, and the wehrabooism doesn't help much.
 
Oh geez @Coiler our likes are spookily similar at times - those clusterfucks have been on my radar for a while. Good to know they're as insane as I suspected they would be
 
The War That Never Was by Michael Palmer.

One of my pejorative terms, a sort of "pseudo-genre" that's only applied negatively, is "boom boom goes the tank." BBGTT by its very name implies some massive spectacle of tanks exploding and blasting massive shells out of their main guns. Counter-intuitively, I use it to refer to stories with a total lack of that kind of immediacy, with my image being some guy droning "this tank went boom boom. Then that tank went boom boom. Boom boom."

BBGTT is something I'll admit is vague and arbitrary, but The War That Never Was is a perfect example, quite possibly the single best commercially published one. It's about a third world war (how surprising), and is based on Naval War College wargames. Reading the direct AARs of the wargames themselves is better than this novel by far, which might also be arbitrary on my part. I think it's the expectations.

This book is BBGTT, which is ironic because it's a naval story with very few tanks to go boom boom. But the hallmarks of "BBGTT", if I had to describe it, are:

  • Immense detail to an incredible degree.
  • Being possibly more realistic and definitely more even-handed (at least in purely military terms) than popular fiction depicting the same topic.
  • Having little to nothing in the way of human characters or development, even by the standards of cheap thrillers.

Compare this to say, Red Storm Rising, and the way it "stands out" is clear, hitting all three of the BBGTT criteria. This makes it very good as a wargame scenario generator (quite fitting given its origins) but very bad as an actual narrative story. Because the AAR of the initial game had no pretentions of being a fictional narrative, I treat it to a different standard.

This is an interesting curiosity, but not a very good book otherwise.
 
The War That Never Was by Michael Palmer.

One of my pejorative terms, a sort of "pseudo-genre" that's only applied negatively, is "boom boom goes the tank." BBGTT by its very name implies some massive spectacle of tanks exploding and blasting massive shells out of their main guns. Counter-intuitively, I use it to refer to stories with a total lack of that kind of immediacy, with my image being some guy droning "this tank went boom boom. Then that tank went boom boom. Boom boom."

BBGTT is something I'll admit is vague and arbitrary, but The War That Never Was is a perfect example, quite possibly the single best commercially published one. It's about a third world war (how surprising), and is based on Naval War College wargames. Reading the direct AARs of the wargames themselves is better than this novel by far, which might also be arbitrary on my part. I think it's the expectations.

This book is BBGTT, which is ironic because it's a naval story with very few tanks to go boom boom. But the hallmarks of "BBGTT", if I had to describe it, are:

  • Immense detail to an incredible degree.
  • Being possibly more realistic and definitely more even-handed (at least in purely military terms) than popular fiction depicting the same topic.
  • Having little to nothing in the way of human characters or development, even by the standards of cheap thrillers.

Compare this to say, Red Storm Rising, and the way it "stands out" is clear, hitting all three of the BBGTT criteria. This makes it very good as a wargame scenario generator (quite fitting given its origins) but very bad as an actual narrative story. Because the AAR of the initial game had no pretentions of being a fictional narrative, I treat it to a different standard.

This is an interesting curiosity, but not a very good book otherwise.

I read the AAR you linked at it truly is an interesting narrative that sounds reasonably plausible, but there's no way you could make it into a coherent novel. Maybe a dry quasi-historical narrative like the Anglo-American Nazi War would work, but it would still have to be pretty big.
 
Also, perhaps unrelated to this thread, but I'm reading your Victoria readthrough right now and it's...something.

I've always had a policy of replacing "Cultural Marxist" with "Jew", and so the scene where the guys in Crusader costumes murder an auditorium full of cultural Marxists with swords to prevent their bacillus from spreading through Christian lands is quite a treat.
 
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