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is there anyone making these kinds of military thrillers who choose to use non standard nations as the big bads instead of the perfidious russians, perfidious chinese, perfidious unspecified middle easterners,etc ? Like has anyone made a thing where it turns out it was the perfidious British trying to reclaim America, or the perfidious Norwegians trying to spread western European style socialism?
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Apr 10, 2023 04:31
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Defenestrategy posted:is there anyone making these kinds of military thrillers who choose to use non standard nations as the big bads instead of the perfidious russians, perfidious chinese, perfidious unspecified middle easterners,etc ? Like has anyone made a thing where it turns out it was the perfidious British trying to reclaim America, or the perfidious Norwegians trying to spread western European style socialism? I mean in the aforementioned Ice Station it's the Brits and the French? I'm reading it again now and I do declare it to be enjoyable trash, but trash nonetheless They are currently engaged in a sick hovercraft chase which our hero wins by flicking his hovercraft around and driving backwards, maneuvering in front of the enemy, then hitting the brakes, and I don't mean that as an analogy he literally hits the brakes and kills all his forward momentum immediately then when they crash into him he guns them down. I feel like the author had to be having a laugh, it doesn't feel LOOK HOW HARDCORE so much as rule of cool.
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Apr 10, 2023 09:51
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If I remember correctly from the author's blurb on the back, Reilly's background was more in screenplays, particularly action-movie screenplays, which is why all of his set pieces are gloriously over the top. And probably why his books have illustrations and diagrams laying out what's going on.
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Apr 10, 2023 14:21
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That makes sense, and honestly as I say I'm OK with it. He writes fairly well.
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Apr 10, 2023 17:35
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I read this as "Texas Squid", which would be a good name for a Metal Gear character. Dammit you just reminded me I read the Nintendo Power Metal Gear book, probably in the late 80's/early 90's. And I did a report on it for school. I think we had to make something from our chosen book so I made the key cards that when you lineup next to each other have a map on the back. I wish I remembered more about it! Wonder how much it goes for on eBay...
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Apr 10, 2023 22:35
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Apparently the Texas Squad book is Red Sands, by Victor Milan, published in 1993, a book so unforgettable the only thing I can find on it is the same two-sentence blurb everywhere.
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Apr 11, 2023 00:34
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Wrong Theory posted:Dammit you just reminded me I read the Nintendo Power Metal Gear book, probably in the late 80's/early 90's. And I did a report on it for school. I think we had to make something from our chosen book so I made the key cards that when you lineup next to each other have a map on the back. I wish I remembered more about it! Wonder how much it goes for on eBay... https://www.amazon.com/Metal-Gear-Worlds-Power-Nine/dp/0590437771
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Apr 11, 2023 00:36
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Here's two. 1. Kiev Footprint, Carl Posey. Space Shuttle has a fatal accident in orbit which is bad because it's got an on-board nuclear reactor to pump an anti-satellite laser it was supposed to test and its orbital path takes it over Moscow. There's an evil shadow conspiracy to deliberately deorbit it onto Moscow because they want to force a public test of the Soviet ABM system to find out if it actually works or not, but there's a Soviet space mission to strap a deorbit booster to the Shuttle so that they can bring it down in the ocean without showing their hand with their ABM system. And *that* mission also goes wrong, with a cosmonaut left stranded and on the dead shuttle, where he dies. But before he launched he mailed a note containing some cryptic references to an American journalist friend, who then starts picking at it and trying to figure it out. I loved this one, it's first-person and noirish and you can pick the hardcover up for like $9 on Amazon. 2. Eagle Down, by William Johnstone writing as "William Mason." Gah, I don't remember much about this one at all aside from it being awful. Here, I'll just quote the cover blurb: quote:THE BRINK OF WAR I remember nothing about this plot. The main character and leader of the American mercenary team which is mainly a group of old guys who fought in the Congo is named Darby O'Neil Andrews (DOA, get it?) and they go somewhere and do some stuff and save the day but commit a bunch of crimes in whatever African country they're in and get captured and then executed...but then it turns out the execution is a sham to fake all their deaths so they can go back into hiding and live retired mercenary lives.
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Apr 11, 2023 14:58
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Moon Slayer posted:So something I always found kind of interesting is how Dale Brown and Tom Clancy went completely opposite ways on Russia. Where Brown has at least three or four books where Russia's government is overthrown by a radical nationalist general who brings back the good old days of fighting an evil empire, Clancy decided that Russia was going to be on the side of the angles, which leads us into The Bear and the Dragon. Very surprised Larry Bond hasn't been brought up yet. Bond's the guy who designed the Harpoon boardgame, and a lot of the stuff in Red Storm Rising was basically him and Clancy playing Harpoon and then fictionalizing it. Then he wrote a bunch of books without Tom Clancy and if anything they're even dryer than RSR. "Vortex" is set in Seth Efrica during the time when apartheid is coming to an end. The ANC assassinates a politician and a far-right movement Afrikaner group seizes control of the government and starts cracking down on the ANC. The SADF invades Namibia, and Cuban troops in Angola come to Namibia's aid. South Africa begins to disintegrate with armed insurgencies and secessionist movements springing up everywhere, and Cuba then decides to just flat-out invade South Africa and liberate it in the name of Communism. The SADF then nukes one of the Cuban columns, which prompts the US and the UK to get involved directly. There's a Ranger assault on the Pelindaba complex and an artillery duel between an Iowa battleship (I forget which one) and G5s emplaced on Table Mountain. "Red Phoenix" is Korean War 2.0. Don't remember barely anything about it. "Cauldron" has France and re-united Germany enter into an alliance and leave NATO and start acting pissy. Winds up with war between France and Germany on one side and Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary on the other side, with the US coming to the aid of the latter. France tries to nuke a CVBG and fails and lots of important stuff winds up being carpet-bombed by B-52s. These are all ridiculous. Vortex is probably the most fun, with Red Phoenix being completely unmemorable.
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Apr 11, 2023 15:29
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Not a book, but if you haven’t caught’s Netflix’s French take on Hunt for Red October, you owe it to yourself to check out Wolf’s Call.
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Apr 11, 2023 15:44
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Phanatic posted:Very surprised Larry Bond hasn't been brought up yet. I remember Red Phoenix had the SK air force having their own A-10s.
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Apr 11, 2023 17:48
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An annoying thing about Vortex is that it portrays the Cubans and black Africans in the story as evil too- with the Cubans being cunning evil and the black africans fighting the Seth Efricans as kinda dumb and not good at warfare.
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Apr 12, 2023 04:37
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Ok, so, Reilley has at least one, maybe a couple more books in his "Marine Recon" series. I don't remember very much about them, though, other than the fact that our hero gets put on a kill list for the world's most elite assassins and has to battle them one by one, and it's eventually revealed that he got tortured on some super secret mission in the past and the reason he always wears mirrored shades is because he's got gnarly scars on his corneas (that don't interfere with his sight at all). Oh and I think he blows up a French aircraft carrier at some point. But all of that is a prelude to the next series where we get into Indiana Jones combined with the Deus Ex "what if every conspiracy theory was true?" stuff. It's good fun. I don't exactly remember the exact order of events, but: - there's an ancient power hidden somewhere on Earth that will make whatever nation that owns it invincible. - it can only be unlocked by a special child born during a certain ritual. - its location will only be revealed to this child after they complete several puzzles/death traps that are also hidden all over the world. - our hero is a dual American/Australian citizen. His dad is a bigshot American general but also a huge jerk and our hero rebelled against him by joining the Australian army, eventually getting into the Australian SAS. At some point in the past he stole a private 747 from Saddam Hussain. Anyway, our hero and his archeologist professor friend try to disrupt the ritual where the chosen one is being born, which is taking place in a secret chamber under an erupting volcano. They fail and the kid is taken by a bunch of robed cultists who leave the mother on the alter to die. But then, she gives birth again! It's twins and the cultists don't know it. They leave with the boy but our heroes take the girl. The mom dies and the temple's death traps get activated and the only way out is for our hero to stick his hand through lava to hit a switch. It's okay he gets a badass prosthesis that's better than a real arm in every way. So now our hero forms the League of Tiny Neutral Nations to disrupt whoever is going to be trying to get The Power. They make a squad consisting of a bunch of people that I can't remember but also includes an Irish sniper lady and love interest, a couple African soldiers, and an Israeli commando who shows up out of the blue (Israel wasn't invited) and says "hey we know everything let me on your team or we'll go public." They all live on a ranch in Africa and train for like eight years while also raising this little girl which is pretty adorable to think about. But then it's time for The Mission which mostly involves navigating ancient obstacle courses, basically the challenge levels from the Tomb Raider reboot games. First one is an ancient Egyptian temple filled with crocodiles and spike pits. They're up against an American Delta Forces team and a Franco-Italian team led by the Jesuits who have the chosen one (boy edition). The American forces are, of course, led by our heroes father. Each time they complete a challenge they get hints as to where the next one is. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose and have to spy on the other teams to figure out where to go next. They end up in a bunch of exotic locations including a hidden canyon in North Africa with a Nazi U-boat wedged into it and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which is inside a mesa in the Iraqi desert. It's at this one the Israelis betray them and try to grab the clues for themselves but our hero's squad member has come to respect him to much and defects. They also end up deep in the Congo where they have to fight a hidden Neanderthal tribe that's a little problematic, but for all of the talk about how the British royal family is part of a secret conspiracy to run the world from the shadows with the Rothchilds and the like there's nothing too awful in these books. Also the Catholic Church is really a sun cult. At some point our hero is captured by the Americans who drop a big rock on him as his father watches (he ordered it) but he's saved by wedging his prosthesis between it and the ground. Anyway it all ends with our heroes beating everybody else and claiming the Power for themselves, meaning that Australia is now the most powerful state on Earth but doesn't know it because our heroes swear to keep it a secret. I'm not doing the sheer insanity of all of this anywhere close to justice and I'm forgetting a lot, but writing this up has made me remember that actually these books rule hard and I'm going to reread them at some point in the near future. Next time though our hero has to get the band back together and fight Planet X.
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Apr 13, 2023 16:23
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I'd play that video game.
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Apr 13, 2023 17:06
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Matthew Reilly should just write for CoD, just like how Dale Brown should write for Ace Combat.
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Apr 13, 2023 17:17
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Lemniscate Blue posted:I'd play that video game. It'd be pretty easy to do as he's helpfully already worked out the level design:  Pulling it up on my Kindle reminded me that all the death traps/obstacle courses/clues to The Power are in the seven ancient wonders of the world, too. Also forgot that they've got like a week to do all of this before The Power blows up the world or something.
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Apr 13, 2023 19:18
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There's bad trash fiction and good trash fiction, Matthew Reilly is firmly on the good side of that divide. Absolutely nothing better for reading on a crowded bus or a boring-rear end flight.
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Apr 15, 2023 09:15
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Hyena Dawn by Christopher Sherlock A star Rugby Player from Souf Effrica kills some rich kid in a match and flees to Rhodesia and joins the Rhodesian Light Infantry. He is an excellent soldier, kills a mountain of enemies, and fucks an American journalist better than anyone ever has and is recruited by the CIA to go blow up some fuel tanks in Mozambique. The team succeeds and uh... I think they get out alive, but not before the American woman is (almost?) raped by one of the Bad Black Antagonist. Who is also very ugly. Maybe there is also a subplot about a secretary for some white industrialist in SA who gets raped and filmed for some reason. Maybe to further the plot? Or perhaps I am getting my bad fiction books mixed up...
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Apr 15, 2023 13:56
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Alright, so the next Reilly series in this universe starts with our hero explaining that the 10-year project to raise this girl and get her to all Seven Wonders of the Ancient World was just a diversion for his archeology professor friend, who's real area of expertise is Nibiru, which turns out to be a small neutron star that sweeps through the solar system every 6,000 years or so and can only be turned away by some kind of ancient ritual, the instructions to which are naturally spread across the globe in death-trap filled crypts. This time the Chinese are the bad guys and the Americans are on the good guy squad. Or at least one American is. There are a few returning characters from the previous book as well. I don't remember much about what the Chinese are actually trying to do, probably end everything else on the world except them. "But Moon Slayer," you say, "didn't the last book end with Australia being granted the power of invincible soldiers? So isn't the hero of the book now a superhuman?" And you would be correct except for the fact that some shady cultists perform yet another ritual to undo this! So our new team is off to the races and fighting both the Chinese military and the various royal families of the world who are somehow tied up in all of this but I forgot how. It was the Japanese who undid the invincibility ritual and they're also trying to stop our heroes from stopping Nibiru from wiping out life on Earth for some reason. The temples are bigger, crazier, and trappier than ever and they abandon any pretense that they were built by ancient peoples and just admit that yeah this was probably some advanced pre-human civilization. One is under Diego Garcia and is a spiraling path down a pit littered with various militaries attempts to breach it going back to Napoleon. The series ends in a climactic showdown in a giant cavern under Easter Island when our hero bypasses all the traps by plowing his 747 through the whole thing to the end while the rest of the team fight two Chinese aircraft carriers. The day is saved, Planet X is sent on its way, and our hero finally is able to settle down with his Irish sniper love interest. Dang I need to reread these books.
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Apr 19, 2023 16:13
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Moon Slayer posted:
I dunno, I like your versions better.
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Apr 19, 2023 17:08
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There's a lot of rad stuff in there I'm forgetting and only sometimes going back and adding in, like an assault on a Chinese prison in the Himalayas that involves a helicopter/cable car fight.
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Apr 19, 2023 17:45
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"Oh neat," 12-year-old me says to nobody at the library, "a submarine chase book, just like Hunt for Red October!" It was not. I can't remember if this was a Stephen Coonts one or a Tom Clancy imprint one, but ... It's the launch ceremony of the USS Virginia. But this book was written well before the actual Virginia was even laid down, so the author went utterly ham on what awesome future gadgets this new class of boat must certainly have. For example, the bridge is one big AR wall. You know how The Mandalorian is filmed 90% in a sound stage with the actors walking in front of a big curved TV screen? It's like that except sonar returns are projected so that the crew has to look 360 degrees around the bridge to see where stuff is! It sounds incredibly dumb but what do I know, I've never published a #1 USA Today best seller. Anyway during the ceremony a bunch of terrorists disguised as dock workers rush onboard and steal the sub while everyone is standing around in their dress whites like chumps. They shoot their way out of Norfolk and vanish into the Atlantic before demanding ... something, I don't actually remember what their goal was. But the Virginia is armed with a bunch of new EMP Harpoons and to demonstrate how serious they are they chuck one at the White House. DC is plunged into darkness and the Residence is burned to the loving ground. But the West Wing was spared so it's tragic but not that big of a deal. Seriously, this incredibly traumatic visual is given just a few sentences. Anyway that's really all I remember, I'm pretty sure they eventually find and sink the Virginia, so ... that sucks I guess?
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Apr 24, 2023 15:15
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So which should I talk about: Weirdly racist and ultranationalist Japanese Manga Silent Service, with the hero declaring his nuke sub the "TRUE JAPAN"; or actually good pulpy sci-fi story Destroyermen, which has Bluto from Popeye as a major character.
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Apr 24, 2023 20:07
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Fivemarks posted:So which should I talk about : Weirdly racist and ultranationalist Japanese Manga Silent Service, with the hero declaring his nuke sub the "TRUE JAPAN"; or actually good pulpy sci-fi story Destroyermen, which has Bluto from Popeye as a major character. Is this thread really for bad thrillers, or just thrillers?
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Apr 24, 2023 20:58
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Anything and everything you remember reading at some point in your life.
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Apr 24, 2023 22:47
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Fivemarks posted:So which should I talk about : Weirdly racist and ultranationalist Japanese Manga Silent Service, with the hero declaring his nuke sub the "TRUE JAPAN"; or actually good pulpy sci-fi story Destroyermen, which has Bluto from Popeye as a major character. Both but do destryermen first please.
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Apr 25, 2023 00:46
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Fivemarks posted:Weirdly racist and ultranationalist Japanese Manga Silent Service, with the hero declaring his nuke sub the "TRUE JAPAN" Never heard of this and would like to hear about it, but it did make me think of Zipang, also a manga series but also with a one-season anime adaptation. It's 200X and a JMSDF destroyer sets out for Hawaii for joint exercises. They sail into a weird fog, their instruments go nuts and the satellite uplinks all shut down, and they have to swerve to avoid the Combined Fleet. It's June 1942, days before the Battle of Midway. After coming to grips with it all they watch the battle play out on radar and sonar. A Zero trailing smoke flies past and crashes into the sea next to them. They rescue the pilot, a Lt. Commander, despite having tentatively decided not to intervene with history. Big mistake, as he's a super-smart sociopath who quickly figures out they're from a future where Japan lost. But they need supplies and repairs so he guides them to Truk. From here things start spinning out of control as their ability to keep out of history's way gets harder and harder. The modern crew is determined to stick to the rules of engagement of the 21st century JSDF and refuse to get into combat in any circumstance other than immediate self defense. Random things I remember happening in no particular order: - they convince the Japanese to evacuate Guadalcanal before it turns into a huge defeat. To help with this they blow up American supplies with a cruise missile but also shoot down incoming Japanese naval artillery with their CIWS - more and more Imperial officials get let in on the secret, including the Emperor's chief of staff, who they fly out to the ship and show footage from Hiroshima - the Japanese decide to assassinate Hitler? Not really sure what the leap to that was - the Americans quickly catch on that something weird is going on and assemble an intelligence task group to figure out what the deal with this new mystery ship is - lots of scheming by the IJN to try and trick them into fighting by deliberately putting them in danger or to just seize the ship - at some point they're forced to put a Harpoon missile into the USS Wasp. - the officer they rescued goes totally rogue with all of the knowledge he could get from their library and goes about destabilizing everything in order to build some kind of super-strong Japanese Empire. He's complicated but unquestionably the antagonist of the narrative. - there are shenanigans in Manchuria that involve him killing Puyi. - the Kenpeitai kill the XO's grandfather in a hit and run right in front of him to see if it will make them disappear. Only about a half or 2/3rds of the series has been translated so I haven't read through to the end. I did read a summary of the ending once but that goes against the spirit of the thread so I'll stop here. Overall it's a pleasant surprise how light on the glorification the series is. The author is coming from a place of "Japan's empire was real bad, but so was Britain's and France's and Portugal's etc., and they divested themselves of it all without needing to be razed to the ground and occupied so maybe Japan could have managed it too?" The interactions between the regular crew and everyday citizens are really interesting in a "the past was a different country" kind of way, as well. The Americans are treated as just guys doing their jobs, not cruel ogres like you'd get in other Japanese historical fiction. I recommend tracking the series down for the novelty alone!
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Apr 27, 2023 19:07
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Same Author, actually. You also forgot the the part where the crew starts helping the Imperial Japanese build a nuke Edit: If you want my opinion on the crew of the Zipang, I'd argue that, at best, they're naive children who are only prolonging the new version of WW2 they find themselves in and ensuring a worse outcome, when they probably could've ensured a better future by helping the US smash Japan faster. And I'd definitely argue that the European Colonial powers had their own fair share of suffering and hardship in losing their empires. There's this kind of thing I dislike in a lot of nationalists/ultranationalist japanese stuff where Japan is the ultimate victim because they got nuked and that no-one else has suffered as much as they have, and I really do not like it. Fivemarks fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 19:25
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To Kill The Potemkin: This is set contemporary with and clearly inspired by the loss of the USS Scorpion. New USN nuclear sub on duty in the Med gets bumped/bumps into a brand-spanking new Soviet Alfa-class, due to it being commandeered by its idiot political officer, whose crew then mutinies to restore the actual captain to his post. Then there's some shore leave in Naples where we follow along with the American enlisted crew which smokes way more dope and buys way more hookers than any crew in a Clancy novel, before they return to sea. Meanwhile, the Alfa's received orders to flat-out kill the American sub so it doesn't make it home with details of some other secret acoustic-decoy technology on the Alfa (I think, might have been they were concerned about the US obtaining samples of hull metal left behind for the scrape but I think those were already cut out in the yard in Naples), and the two subs mutually destroy each other after the requisite amount of cat-and-mouse. Bonus: the US sub's weapon of choice for dispatching the Soviet sub is a Mark 45 with W34 warhead. Fun one. Gritty and dirty, like shore leave in Naples. 3 out of 5 public lice.
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Apr 27, 2023 20:32
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Okay, the entire Destroyermen franchise is like 15 books in the main series, which focuses on the crew of the USS Walker (DD-163) and their Lemurian Allies at first- there's also the prequel series, Artillerymen, which is about a different group of Americans who crossed over during the Mexican-American War. These books are very pulpy sci-fi and know it, so while they don't take themselves too seriously, they also come at things from a general perspective of "don't judge entire groups with generalities." So, the first book, Into The Storm . This one starts off with the Battle of the Java Sea, during the early years of the Pacific War. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Walker_%28DD-163%29 is an old Wickes class Destroyer- in our timeline, she was broken up for scrap, while in Destroyermen she got transferred to the Asiatic fleet. The ship is part of the ABDA(American British Dutch Australian) flotilla trying to hold off the Japanese and failing, and their objective is to retreat past the Malay Barrier to India or Australia. But the Battle goes badly and the Walker and one of her sister ships, the Mahan, is separated, and comes under attack by the HIMS Amagi, a Japanese battlecruiser- in our timeline, the Amagi was damaged during the Great Kanto Earthquake, but in this timeline she was finished as planned. A strange rainstorm, a squall, appears and the Walker and the heavily damaged Mahan try to duck into it to escape the Amagi, which is where everything goes weird. The Walker and Mahan find themselves in a weird, empty void with no gravity, before they suddenly reappear back in the water, where no-one wants to talk about what the gently caress just happened. Their Radios no longer work and they can't contact anyone, so they try to sail around to the planned rendezvous and find nothing. Meanwhile, Mahan vanishes and the Walker's crew don't know where she went. Freaked out more, they sail around and end up coming across a massive aircraft carrier sized wooden ship being attacked by a group of smaller ships built on the lines of East Indiamen. Without knowing what exactly is going on, the crew of the Walker move in to help, and it turns out that an out of date WW1 Destroyer is more than capable of kicking the poo poo out of some East Indiamen that doesn't even have canons. I'll pick things up in another post with a good summary of the characters who show up in the first book, and a further summary of the first book.
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May 2, 2023 01:48
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Starting in 2001 a wave of revolutions install fundamentalist islamist governments across north Africa and the middle east. The USA and Britain invade Iraq again, for old times' sake I guess? North Korea kicks off the second round of the Korean War, which they lose in record time. China invades Taiwan but their ships are wiped out by a secret hypersonic US bomber prototype. The communists launch a coup and eliminate the oligarchs before invading the Baltic states, which NATO forces rush to defend in a conventional war. The meat of the story begins with a German-born muslim who calls himself Saladin and unites all the Islamic states under one banner, which launches jihad against the West and Israel, with lots of homegrown attacks by local muslims in Europe (you can't trust any of them, see?). The muslims sink one or two of the big US carriers in a sneak attack of some sort. Israel is holding its own against the Islamic hordes but with difficulty (thanks to the Egyptians and Saudis having modern US hardware). Unknown to everyone else the Islamic alliance (I forget their name) has a single nuke, and they trick Israel into thinking they're idiots who can't fire rockets right by making one ballistic missile overshoot wildly in every nightly bombardment until the Israelis stop wasting Arrow missiles intercepting it, and then the next night they use that missile to detonate their nuke at high altitude and blanket Israel with an EMP. The Israelis eventually manage to manually open their nuclear silo doors and start glassing every major Islamic city they can reach until the US launches a nuclear strike on the Israeli silos to end the war. Total War 2006, written in 1999, and you get the feeling it was all done one-handed
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May 2, 2023 12:39
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Well he got the Second Gulf War thing right so that's something, I guess? (Except not really because I'm pretty sure the neocons were already banging the "invading Iraq will kick off waves of pro-US democratic revolutions across the Middle East" drum in the 90's)
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May 2, 2023 15:59
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It's the beginning of the US Civil War! Political unrest among the crew of USS Ouanee, a screw sloop-of-war, is causing the captain headaches as the crew's divided loyalties (many, including his XO, are Virginians) lead to fistfights and desertions as the specter of succession looms. With the attack on Fort Sumpter, Ouanee's first mission is to move supplies to the fort and evacuate any wounded or civilians. Bad weather and rebel artillery prevent most of this, and the captain does not have opportunity to rescue his fiancee from South Carolina. The fiancee is a woman of action and determination, however, and starts to extract herself on her own recognizance. There's some realistic, and by that I mean not terribly interesting, depictions of blockade duty as the ship attempts to hold things together in the "Shoestring Fleet" era of the first months of the war. This culminates in the evacuation and burning of the Norfolk Navy Yard, which Our Heroes barely escape while actively on fire. It's been some years, but I think the captain and his lady still haven't been reunited by the end of the book, though she's made her way to Union territory by then. It was clearly meant to be the beginning of a trilogy covering the whole war, but I never saw any more of them come out. Anyway, that's David Poyer's Fire On The Waters, and what I remember most about it is that it's written in period-correct style, like with each chapter subtitle being a summary of the chapter and the use of em-dashes to denote a line of dialogue instead of quotation marks. Madurai fucked around with this message at 21:08 on May 2, 2023 |
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May 2, 2023 17:37
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A little digging suggests that it was more of a thematic trilogy of "The Civil War at Sea" and the other two books don't follow the same characters.
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May 2, 2023 18:19
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Storming Intrepid - Payne Harrison (I bought this from a Phar-Mor in the very early 90s and haven’t read it in many many years, some of this may be wrong) The USSR launched its space shuttle into orbit, only for it to disintegrate on return. I think they manage to hide this fact from the West. The US decides to start launching SDI (Star Wars) components into space using the space shuttle. The USSR activates one of their super secret deep sleeper agents that just happens to be one of the best pilots in NASA who is assigned to the mission. He steals the shuttle and tries to take it back to the USSR. America counters with a B-2 air strike to destroy the shuttle as it lands. I remember there being a super secret laser communication device between the bombers. Good guys win, bad guys lose. There was another book that had terrorists attacking the only nuclear missile silo east of the Mississippi, somewhere around Maryland I think. Their goal was to break in and launch the missile to start WWIII. They kidnapped a safe cracker to help them break into the control room or safe with the codes. I’m sure there was some Everyman protagonist who stopped them, but I only read this one once, from the library.
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May 3, 2023 15:56
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I very distantly remember listening to payne harrison audiobook in 4th grade where the authors hardass mary sue self insert was a woman. neat twist on the genre, something something antarctica
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May 4, 2023 16:51
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Stephanie Roberts is a National Guard trooper in a recently stood-up division to repel the Chinese invasion currently underway in the continental US. How did we get here? Don't worry, there's loads of flashbacks exposition-dumping the future timeline. It's not challenging--just take the one from Red Dawn and substitute "China" for "USSR." Clarissa Leffler is a State Department wonk who is digging in to traces of collusion with China from within the government. Wu Zemin is a highly-connected Chinese infantry officer down in the dirt trying to make this whole conquest business work. There's a bunch of other people, too, it's a big sprawling cast. Our Heroine Stephie (author's nickname, not mine) is also POTUS' daughter, a fact the book tries to play coy with for a couple of chapters. She's determined to Do Her Duty despite obviously being a huge liability, and in severe danger as the war doesn't go all that well. Eventually, the tide turns, Stephie's unit mechanizes as US forces shift from defense to counterattack, and about 500 pages later, 'Murca triumphs, though obviously in ruins. That's Eric L. Harry's Invasion, and I cannot adequately explain why I've read this one at least three times. It's not a good book, but it's deeply satisfying in some guilty-pleasure way.
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May 4, 2023 21:49
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Madurai posted:Stephanie Roberts is a National Guard trooper in a recently stood-up division to repel the Chinese invasion currently underway in the continental US. How did we get here? Don't worry, there's loads of flashbacks exposition-dumping the future timeline. It's not challenging--just take the one from Red Dawn and substitute "China" for "USSR." Clarissa Leffler is a State Department wonk who is digging in to traces of collusion with China from within the government. Wu Zemin is a highly-connected Chinese infantry officer down in the dirt trying to make this whole conquest business work. Is that the one where the well-connected Chinese dude wants to personally participate in the fighting and after he does he realises the battle was staged using convicts firing back with non-lethal weapons?
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May 6, 2023 08:00
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GotLag posted:Is that the one where the well-connected Chinese dude wants to personally participate in the fighting and after he does he realises the battle was staged using convicts firing back with non-lethal weapons? I don't remember that specific bit, but it sounds like exactly the sort of thing that happens.
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May 7, 2023 06:39
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Madurai posted:Stephanie Roberts is a National Guard trooper in a recently stood-up division to repel the Chinese invasion currently underway in the continental US. How did we get here? Don't worry, there's loads of flashbacks exposition-dumping the future timeline. It's not challenging--just take the one from Red Dawn and substitute "China" for "USSR." Clarissa Leffler is a State Department wonk who is digging in to traces of collusion with China from within the government. Wu Zemin is a highly-connected Chinese infantry officer down in the dirt trying to make this whole conquest business work. Out of curiosity I looked the author up on Wikipedia and discovered that I read a similarly trashy guilty pleasure book by him: Arc Light. It's 199X and Russia and China are fighting a war in Siberia and Central Asia. Also Korea has gone hot but this is, at best, a footnote. Anyway the National Security Advisor gets a call from his Russian counterpart that says "hey just fyi we're going to deploy nukes against the Chinese." He tells the president who orders him to warn the Chinese. Not surprisingly, they use the forewarning to launch their own preemptive strike against the Russians. There's a series of miscommunications and coups and counter-coups on the Russian side but in the end it leads to a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, targeting each other's land-based ICBMs. The cities are mostly spared except for those downwind of the nuclear silos and NORAD so in this timeline I'm certainly dead because Minnesota is irradiated. Anyway DC is also irradiated so Congress reconvenes at Mt. Weather or possibly Greenbriar and impeaches the president who has spent the intervening time trying to deescalate. But now the VP goes all in on war with Russia so NATO invades from Poland, later opening up a second front in the Far East with an amphibious landing near Vladivostok. You don't see a war with Russia depicted this way so I remember thinking it was kinda interesting. The book ends with NATO forces taking Moscow and the fourth or fifth Russian coup of the book that negotiates peace.
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May 8, 2023 16:24
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