What World War III AH truly is:

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this Article by @Coiler here

 

[Coiler]

Thanks for posting this, @Gary Oswald .

It's been truly humbling (in a good way) to see how off my impressions of WW3 fiction turned out to be, and like I said in the article, one can't help but feel a little down once something's gone from one of "Tolkien's distant vistas" to something they know very well.

 

[Thande]

Clearly the only solution is to write your own conventional WW3 fiction to show them how it's done, @Coiler .

 

[Charles EP M.]

The Red Line, a mostly conventional WW3 story, it was clearly originally set in (and written in) the Cold War, yet to make it “contemporary” and appeal to a modern audience, a weird backstory had to be created to shift the borders back to their 1989 spots in the present.

Wow. I've seen some sci-fis push their "near futures" forward in reprints but this is a new one on me!

 

[Meadow]

Really interesting findings – I definitely would have assumed these are dime a dozen, perhaps even second only to WWII and, as you say, Confederate works.

The Red Line thing is truly bizarre – what kind of logic is deployed?

 

[Coiler]

The Red Line thing is truly bizarre – what kind of logic is deployed?

First it's the usual genre Red Russian Return. Then they effortlessly retake the ex-Warsaw Pact states like an unironic version of that Simpsons gag. They're on the verge of retaking East Germany when a Brown German Return happens, pushes them back for a time in street fighting with supporters (somehow East Germany was the one border Gragg didn't redraw exactly, not that it makes much practical difference in the story) and escalates things enough that it leads to the war.

The force structures themselves are very Cold War and only papered over by the author occasionally swapping in the name of some newer airplane or vehicle.

 

[M_Kresal]

I may have just bought Larry Bond's Cauldron as a result of it's being mentioned in the blog in passing. I don't know whether to thanks @Coiler for $3.99 well spent or blame him for my spending money on yet another Kindle book...