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Does Russia have a Tom Clancy analogue? Does China?
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May 9, 2023 00:33
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Almost certainly. I remember reading somewhere that the "modern badasses goes back in time to WWII and helps the Soviets beat the Nazis harder" genre is big is Russia.
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May 9, 2023 01:27
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Is there a book that combines alternate history where the Nazis won, with a time travel plot where people go back in time to fight the Nazis, with the goal of creating our current timeline? I feel like someone has to have done that, somewhere. A short story with the first part of that concept, which is not bad and is in fact pretty fun and worth reading, is Thor vs. Captain America by David Brin. It's set in an alternate history where the Nazis successfully harnessed occult powers (death magic fueled by their extermination camps) to summon Norse gods, who turned D-Day into a complete rout for the Nazis and led to them taking over most of the planet. There's still an allied resistance though, and the story covers a commando team deployed by submarine into occupied Europe, with the mission of sneaking an atomic bomb to a high value target. The team gets caught, captured, and brought before some Nazi goons and a few Aesir entities. The main character realizes that if fervent belief in ancient Norse gods brought these things into the world, then disbelief might be the key to kicking them back out. While the story ends with them being executed, there's a hopeful note that American determination and, uh, weaponized atheism will eventually prevail. According to the author's notes it was basically written as the result of a challenge to write a plausible alt history where the Nazis won, which Brin thought "they were such utter schmucks that it would have taken divine intervention".
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May 9, 2023 02:49
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drat that's an incredibly Brin plotline.
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May 9, 2023 03:15
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Wingnut Ninja posted:Is there a book that combines alternate history where the Nazis won, with a time travel plot where people go back in time to fight the Nazis, with the goal of creating our current timeline? I feel like someone has to have done that, somewhere. The Proteus Operation by James P Hogan. Haven't read it since the 90's but I remember it being decent.
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May 9, 2023 10:47
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The Soviets have invaded Iran! Not to worry though, as the USAF has a space station in orbit with a multimegawatt laser capable of torching targets on the surface. But wait! The Sovs have another trick up their collective sleeve--Elektron, an armed spaceplane! With Armstrong Station out of action and the Reds able to use the orbital advantage, there are serious reverses in the field. One of the technicians working on the laser has a father in the USN, whose ship is severely damaged by satellite-guided missiles as she looks on helplessly. Efforts to repair the station and get the laser operational again go through some ups and downs (at one point they launch missiles, called "Thor" but apparently having nothing to do with the actual IRBM of that name) but eventually vaporize their Soviet attackers and turn the beam back to plinking antiship missiles aimed at the US carrier group in the Red Sea. The actual end of hostilities isn't covered, but there's an epilogue years later as the ship damaged in the first act (the laser technician's father was captain of a CGN, USS California) is re-launched rebuilt into some kind of sea-to-orbit comms relay ship. This is presented in a much more triumphant tone than the event really seems. That's Dale Brown again, in one of his lesser known works, Silver Tower.
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May 10, 2023 19:12
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Madurai posted:The Soviets have invaded Iran! Not to worry though, as the USAF has a space station in orbit with a multimegawatt laser capable of torching targets on the surface. But wait! The Sovs have another trick up their collective sleeve--Elektron, an armed spaceplane! With Armstrong Station out of action and the Reds able to use the orbital advantage, there are serious reverses in the field. One of the technicians working on the laser has a father in the USN, whose ship is severely damaged by satellite-guided missiles as she looks on helplessly. Huh, sounds familiar  Time for some alternate history milfic. It's 1945 and the bombs have both been dropped. A group of military officers, desperate to stop the Emperor from surrendering, launch an attack on the Imperial Palace. In our timeline the general on the scene said he would fight them if they did so they committed suicide. In this story, he stands aside. With the Emperor jailed the new junta issues a declaration that they will continue to fight, so Operation Downfall is back on, baby. A massive troop buildup occurs on Okinawa, despite a typhoon rolling through and messing everything up. The troops land on Kyushu and it's every bit as bad as the planners expected. Months of scorched-earth fighting follows with the allies bogged down in southern Kyushu and the invasion of Kanto pushed back. A third nuke is dropped on a troop convoy moving south from Hokkaido; meanwhile a fluke kamikaze attack kills McArthur. The junta makes a mistake when they move the Emperor outside of Tokyo and an informant leaks his location to the Allies. A rescue/kidnapping operation using prototype helicopters nabs him and he gets on the radio and orders Japan to surrender, which they do after a counter-coup. The war ends but with the prospect of an even more-thoroughly trashed Japan with an active resistance against the occupation. The book is called 1945; I don't remember the author's name offhand but he's got a few novels that are just titled with the year it takes place. There's one set in the early 1900's where Germany invades the US that I haven't read but should get around to.
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May 15, 2023 15:42
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Robert Conroy. He likes writing about rape in his books.
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May 15, 2023 19:03
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Oof. Don't remember coming across anything like that but I may have blocked it out.
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May 15, 2023 19:22
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Flikken posted:He likes writing about rape in his books. Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down? I mean poo poo, even Clancy managed to squeeze in a rape scene between in depth descriptions of convoy warfare and stealth fighter specs.
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May 15, 2023 19:27
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Moon Slayer posted:
Is this the Drake's Drum guy? The "UK defeats Germany and Japan despite American and Soviet interference and remains the predominant world power forever" series?
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May 15, 2023 19:36
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Don't think so, but I did read a comic (by Alan Moore?) where the UK steals the German rocket scientists out from under the US' and Soviet's noses, bombing American troops at Peenemunde in the process, and also stealing a bunch of Holocaust gold to fund their new space program. As such Britain puts a man on the moon in the late 50's and on Mars in the 70's. By 2000 the UK has a massive space station while America is just launching Apollo, and then all their dirty laundry gets aired. It ends with the guy who did all this's pilot coming out of a "Coloured Officer's Wardroom" because space tech made them way less interested in social change.
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May 15, 2023 20:29
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Moon Slayer posted:Oof. Don't remember coming across anything like that but I may have blocked it out. You read the one of his books where it DOESNT happen. Read any of his others and the female protagonist got assaulted. If it's not the female protagonist it's a side character related to one of the main characters.
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May 15, 2023 22:58
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Speaking of alt history, "what if Japan but better," and gross sexual assault stuff: Harry Turtledove, of "what if aliens in WWII" fame, has a 2-book series where Japan sends a marine detachment along with the fleet that attacks Pearl Harbor and seizes Hawaii. It's mostly torture porn about how the Japanese treat the locals. The Doolittle Raid is on Pearl Harbor instead of Japan, there's some biological warfare conducted by both sides, and it ends pretty much as you would expect with the overextended Japanese force cut off from resupply and overwhelmed.
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May 17, 2023 14:28
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I read way too many of these trash books growing up in the early 90's. Glad I got rid of most of them. This might have been a fever dream I had of a book for all the luck I've had in finding it. Area 51, its where they keep the aliens right? No, its where the US holds a 24/7 war game between the red, green, and blue armies using the best in AV technology developed by not-Disney called zoots. The hero is a F-4 pilot that has to infiltrate one of the armies for reasons. He does this by taking on four F-15's in a dogfight and "shooting" them all down. He then get moved into the group and they go around making life miserable for every other pilot in the area. There is time travel shenanigans, maybe aliens, a hooker that loves the pilot, and an AI that has stolen all the gold from Fort Knox for reasons. The book is called Dreamland, I think. Sound familiar to anyone else?
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Jul 5, 2023 23:40
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That does not sound familiar but does sound utterly bonkers. Is it an 80's, 90's, or 00's book? I'm currently reading a series that seems to be 100% someone's Victoria 2 game converted into Hearts of Iron IV. It's set in a world where Washington was killed at the Battle of Long Island, and therefore the 13 colonies were reclaimed and the British Empire basically never fell. Now it's 1976 but the stagnant colonial empires only have only reached 1920's levels of technology. Except that the British have actually been secretly developing 1960's tech that nobody else has, like RADAR and early computers and cruise missiles and nuclear submarines! Oh and nuclear bombs, too. Anyway, this lets them beat first the Mexican-Cuban-Dominican alliance and take California, the Russians and take Alaska, and the Japanese and defend There's a tiny bit of self-awareness towards "hey maybe the British aren't the good guys" but then nah, let's put a cruise missile into the Mexican president's residence. The author is extremely excited about what kind of guns each ship has and wants to tell you all about them, and has also never met a run-on sentence that couldn't be made longer.
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Jul 7, 2023 22:04
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diremonk posted:I read way too many of these trash books growing up in the early 90's. Glad I got rid of most of them. I vaguely remember that series existing on bookstore shelves.
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Jul 7, 2023 22:30
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Area 51 was a series that went in forever; i read the first one but this doesn't quite sound like it. I could be misremembering too.
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Jul 8, 2023 00:21
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shame on an IGA posted: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 That's Thunder at Erebus where some rare earth element is found to be the key to laser weapons and a massive deposit is found in Antarctica. Russians take it by claiming Antarctica is Russian territory because of Bellinghausen, Americans take it back, then the Russians take it back again after sinking a bunch of carriers with ballstic anti-ship missiles. In the end, the US president gives orders to set of a nuclear demolition charge to deny the site to the Russians, Mount Erebus erupts and everyone dies. Out of all the crap I read (and I recognize way too much of what was mentioned already) Harrison feels like it was the most enjoyable to read. There are a lot of cool character moments from the books like when a Russian MiG pilot stumbles across a B-2 and when he radios HQ they think he's drunk as there is nothing on radar except him. Another I remember vaguely which was not mentioned was some book where the baddies are the Soviet expert team in the CIA. When a treaty is announced they want to sabotage it (because they only understand the Soviet mind) and they do it by killing opponents of the treaty in a way to make the Soviets think the US military wants the treaty to happen. Which will convince the Soviets to pull out of the treaty as it must be bad for them. And Forsyth's The Devil's Alternative from 1979 should be an interesting re-read. It features Ukrainian nationalists who take over a supertanker in the North Sea to get some prisoners released who had fled to West Berlin after assassinating the head of the KGB. The Soviet Union also had a massive crop failure due to Communism and wants to start WW3.
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Jul 21, 2023 11:03
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I am forgetting the title of this one. I think it's either The Apocalypse Brigade or the Apocalypse Agenda, but I think that latter's too close to a Ludlum novel so I'm leaning towards the former. It definitely has Apocalypse in the title. Anyway, literally the only thing I remember is that the some faction sends a bunch of C-130s over the oil fields in the Middle East, spraying them all down with basically diesel fuel heavily-laced with strontium-90. There's a Soviet MiG pilot who's trailing them wondering "What are they spraying" when he flies through the cloud and sees his cockpit dosimeter peg. I remember nothing else.
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Jul 21, 2023 21:53
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Anthony G. Williams is the author of a number of very handy histories and encyclopedias of automatic cannon and machine guns (seriously, if you have any interest in the topic, getting a copy of his Rapid Fire is doing yourself a service), but in addition to that, he tried his hand as a novelist, with 2004's The Foresight War. Don Erlang is a British military historian who goes to sleep in 2004 and wakes up, with no explanation immediately or eventually forthcoming, in 1934. He fortuitously retains all his immediate possessions, including a laptop, pocket calculator, and 21st century money, and uses these to prove his time travel bona fides to an academic, who puts him in touch with Top Men in His Majesty's government. Erlang's job, as he sees it, is to prevent WW2 from happening, or failing that, make it not as bad, or failing that, make sure it's not as bad for the UK. He's sequestered as a Most Hush state secret immediately, and immediately starts butting heads with his handlers on what is the best way to use his unique knowledge. With the start of the war only 5 years away, preventing it is quickly deemed out of the question, and most of his advice is put into correcting and streamlining British procurement choices in the years leading up to the war. Among his minders is what amounts to captivity is a "personal secretary" whom Erlang suspects of having been chosen on the basis of looks and willingness to share his bed in order to control him, but his suspicions don't seem able to dissuade him from loving and eventually marrying her. (Mary is the only named female character in the book.) There's quite a few descriptions of the ships, planes, tanks, and guns put into service as a result of Our Hero's advice before the book's only curveball: there's someone in Nazi Germany also come back from the future, doing much the same thing on their side. Then it's a guessing game of "do they know we know they know we know?" as both sides try to skew the course of events, but without doing so so much that their advantage is lost. After a lot of back-and-forth, the invasion of Western Europe happens a year early, but everything still looks deadlocked until the German time traveler (who was East German and was attempting to prevent the partition of Germany) has a change of heart and kills Hitler with a suicide vest. This is not a good novel, but it is an interesting thought experiment
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Jul 30, 2023 00:30
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I appreciate the unresistable time traveler urge to drop whatever you were doing and kill hitler.
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Jul 30, 2023 20:26
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Have we talked about the Belisarius books here?
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Jul 31, 2023 21:16
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I am absolutely sure they don't hold up, but young me really liked them.
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Jul 31, 2023 21:59
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Deptfordx posted:I am absolutely sure they don't hold up, but young me really liked them. I mean, "Hold Up" is a weird word. Are they "Real Literature" like Catcher in the Rye? No. Are they fun, enjoyable books? Hell yeah they are.
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Jul 31, 2023 22:01
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Fivemarks posted:Have we talked about the Belisarius books here? I read the first ... two? Three? He had gone to India and come back, that's where I dropped off. No idea how many more were beyond that.
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Aug 1, 2023 07:32
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Patrick Robinson is a wannabe Clancy, who really likes the Hunt for Red October, and we're in the 90s doldrums, no more Soviet boogeyman so authors have to find new bad guys. Presumably after a drug fueled writing binge we find ourselves in possession of Nimitz Class. In which a suave, crafty, Soviet Academy trained Iraqi submariner captains a clandestinely acquired Soviet Kilo class (gotta love that USSR collapse fire sale, one assumes it as purchased from Nick Cage) diesel electric sub to bushwack the USS Thomas Jefferson with a nuclear torpedo, sneaking up on the battlegroup through a mix of crafty tactics and the silent running superiority of electric drive. This was done to assuage Iraqi honor after GW1, or something, idk. The rest of the plot follows not-alec-baldwin trying to hunt down the perpetrators and their invisible sub, with a tense chase scene and a battle in the Falklands, iirc. Our plucky antagonist makes good on his escape and survives into the sequel, in which he fits a S300 system into the Kilo's tower and shoots down at least one world leader's jet over the Atlantic as the gripping, page turning game of cat and mouse continues. E: I have to admit that as a nerdy teen with no taste I liked the Net Force books. Arrath fucked around with this message at 08:49 on Aug 1, 2023 |
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Aug 1, 2023 08:28
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I remember Dreamland. I vividly recall reading it at my aunt and uncle’s place as a wee lad when were visiting one summer. I forget the specifics of the book but do recall that it featured the Aurora spy plane that went so fast it needed about a continent length to slow down and turn.
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Aug 2, 2023 19:00
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I've caught up on this thread, and the one book that jumped to mind that hasn't been mentioned here has a plot that goes something like this: Retired US fighter pilot (and his buddy maybe?) get hired by the plucky upstart Saudi government to modernize their air force to compete in the region, but they don't have much money to do it. The retired fighter jock decides that they should buy a bunch of the cheap F-5's (or maybe F-20's) and go all in training the country's pilots into a legitimate air force, and goes into battle against the all-powerful evil Israeli Air Force, and do so well against them that the book ends when the bad guys drop a nuke on the plucky upstart's airbase, and the main character sits on top of a building, watching the bomb fall and reflecting on his life before the bombs detonates and the book ends. I googled the plot after writing that up, and remembered it's called Warriors by Barrett Tillman, published in 1991. I probably read it in the late 90's, and oh boy does that plot not hold up well over the last two decades.
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Aug 2, 2023 22:42
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I've got a good one, though unfortunately I don't remember the name. Or fortunately, maybe. It was really bad. When I was a younger, dumber person browsing the shelves of my local library I found a book in the SciFi section billing itself as a realistic depiction of near future warfare. This was in the early 2010s, so what did the author of that time think would be the big geopolitical threat? Obviously, the Iranian nuclear program. The Iranians are working on building nukes, and this is a problem. I don't think the book ever says why explicitly, it's just assumed that they'll start a nuclear war as soon as they can. The facility is deep in Iran, though. It's totally within America's power to just stealth bomber it anyway, but then everyone would know it was us, and that would also be bad. The US government wants the nuke program exploded, but with smug plausible deniability. Luckily, the Air Force (this was written before Space Force, of course, or I'm sure it would have been them) has a solution: a top secret space plane. They send the protagonist, Generic Badass Pilot, who is so bland he hasn't actually mattered to the book until this point despite being the viewpoint character, up in the space plane and use it to do the Rods from God thing to the nuclear facility. Nothing goes wrong, he isn't challenged in any way, the Iranian nuclear facility explodes and the day is saved. Very boring, with no actual rising action or tension or anything. Except. The reason I remember this book more than a decade later: at one point, there's a cutaway to an entirely different plot, with a tenuous or non-existent relation to the main plot. A high ranking general is in a bespoke, expensive communications truck on the Israeli/Palestine border, with his hand picked team of movie stereotype hackers. I think maybe they were trying to hack the Iranian facilities, like Stuxnet, but for some reason this had to be done in theater? The team breaks into the Iranian systems, and congratulates themselves on a job well done. But, oh no! They're diverse, and dye their hair and have tattoos, and the general is a liberal! The "university-trained" Iranian computer team "had not drunk the heady wine of nonconformity" and yes that is a direct quote seared into my brain for years. They counter-hack the liberal general and his hacker college kids and find the location of their hacker truck without the US team's knowledge, which is promptly passed on to the evil Palestinians. A crack team of elite (evil) Palestinian commandos quickly ambushes the truck and drags the general, alive, back to their territory, where the US Government decides it would be too embarrassing to admit this ever happened and just leaves him to rot and presumably be a huge intelligence asset, not that that's ever touched on in this "realistic near-future." But don't worry, like I said earlier, the narrative makes it clear he's a liberal and deserves it.
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Sep 2, 2023 18:01
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Here's a quick rule: if the wunderwaffen in the book is a bomber, then its probably Dale Brown.
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Sep 2, 2023 20:30
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I'm stuck at work on Labor Day weekend watching an empty building continue to be empty so gently caress you, I'm gonna talk about Harry Turtledove's masterwork, the Worldwar series. It's 1942 and aliens invade Earth. They're lizards who call themselves The Race but are referred to 99% of the book as "the lizards." From the cover art they're basically velociraptors with thumbs, and are a super hierarchical Empire that has easily conquered a couple other planets over the last few thousand years and are ready to make Earth (which they call Tosev III in a neat little bit of reverse sci-fi naming that I kinda liked) the next one. Despite being an interstellar empire they don't have FTL technology and got here by spending hundreds of years in cryosleep. Their first recon probe swung by the planet a thousand years ago and photographed a bunch of knights in armor so they're feeling pretty cocky but uh oh they roll up on Earth and are shocked to find an industrialized society in the process of ripping into each other. The Race has been culturally and technologically stagnant for millennia and can't wrap their heads around how fast the natives have advanced. All the lizard bigwigs argue about what to do with some wanting to abort and turn around (because it would be humiliating for the head lizard and they can score political points) but in the end they decide to go for it. This is when we start getting introduced to our various human characters. They are, off the top of my head and not limited to: - everyman GI - everyman Wehrmacht soldier - Jewish community leader in Warsaw ghetto - American nuclear scientist who's a real piece of poo poo - his long-suffering wife - another everyman GI - Soviet Night Witch pilot - Vyacheslav Molotov - Chinese partisan lady and her male colleague who's a rapist And there's more and several members of The Race who are also POV characters. Anyway, The Race decides to proceed with the invasion and sets off a bunch on nukes in the upper atmosphere to EMP the planet. Turns out this doesn't do poo poo against vacuum tube-based technology, but the Jewish leader in Warsaw sees the lights as a sign from God. Then a bunch of big spaceships land at random points over the world and out comes The Race's army, wielding highly advanced tech from the 1990's. Seriously, they're using jets, helicopters (which the humans call "whirlybirds"), automatic-but-still-gunpowder rifles, RPGs, and internal combustion-engine vehicles. The humans are, of course, pretty shocked by all of this but quickly start fighting back because when you've been at war for years what's a few aliens joining the party, right? The Race immediately starts running into problems as their jets are too fast to deal with the piston-engine human aircraft, their homeworld is a desert planet so they don't really understand what a Navy even is, and they're so shackled by tradition that they're shocked when the humans pretty quickly start adapting to their tactics and using their captured weapons against them. World War II pretty much ends right then and there as the humans all stop fighting each other and band together to fight the aliens. There's a throwaway line about the Japanese Combined Fleet that was headed for Midway pulling a u-turn and heading back home, after which the Japanese disappear from the story entirely. In fact a lot of invading forces get driven back right away; the Race conquers China, the western USSR, and Poland quickly but then gets bogged down in Eastern Europe and North America. The everyman Wehrmacht soldier and Soviet pilot lady fall in love, the American scientist gets sent off to scout for new locations for the Manhattan Project's reactor after Chicago has to be evacuated to the relief of everyone who knows him and spends the rest of the series biking around the ravaged countryside, cheating on his wife, and getting STIs while everyone back on the project (which ends up in Washington State) assuming he’s dead. His wife moves on with everyman GI until he shows up in the last book of this initial series and has to be killed by everyman GI before he kills them both out of jealousy. The Race decide to start using nukes despite not wanting to wreck parts of the planet they planned to colonize. The Soviets get their hands on some fissile material from a crashed ship and nuke them back. There’s a coup attempt against Raceleader but he comes out on top with the loser admiral seeking asylum in the US. There’s a subplot about a Race scientist studying humans by experimenting on prisoners and lots of detailed paragraphs about the male Chinese partisan getting to gently caress a bunch of different women. Also the scientist starts raising a human baby as a member of the Race. More nukes go off, including in DC and Seattle killing Roosevelt and the VP, leaving Cordell Hull president. There’s a big battle in the US outside of Denver, the humans get better and better at using captured Race tech and reverse engineering it, it turns out that ginger acts as a narcotic for The Race and there’s a bunch of social problems with that, and finally there’s a cease fire agreement. The Race keeps basically the entire global south, China, and Eastern Europe while the US, Germany and German-occupied Western Europe, the Japanese Empire minus China,, and to a lesser extent the UK get to remain independent. The end! Until the next trilogy.
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Sep 3, 2023 15:34
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I've read the whole series and I barely remember the broad strokes. The things that sticks are details: - Ginger gets them really high. Except the females- it puts them in heat. Partisans literally use ginger aroma as a weapon against the lizards. - They never call them nuclear weapons. They are "explosive metal" weapons. - They do a timejump to decades later. Everyman ends up as ambassador to the Race. His son ends up hooking up (as a scientific experiment) with the Chinese girl the Race raised. Guess I'll spoiler the ending: We end up sending a slowship to their home planet to negotiate with their aristocracy. The lead negotiator, obviously Henry Kissinger although never named, dies in cryosleep. So Everyman takes over as negotiator. Negotiations go poorly until guess what- a human FTL ship pops in. During the slowship's journey, we figured out FTL travel. They roll over and surrender.
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Sep 3, 2023 15:55
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Some of that happened in the colonization trilogy; there were no female Race in the invasion fleet but when the colonization fleet arrived they discovered ginger's effect on them. The Marty Stu Everyman GI character also ends up raising a pair of Race hatchlings from captured eggs; that character was getting obnoxious by the end of the series.
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Sep 3, 2023 16:28
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I for one welcome our new buttraptor overlords
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Sep 3, 2023 17:00
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Beavis and Buttraptor
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Sep 3, 2023 17:38
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Moon Slayer posted:There's a throwaway line about the Japanese Combined Fleet that was headed for Midway pulling a u-turn and heading back home, after which the Japanese disappear from the story entirely. I forgot all about this. They really are just never mentioned again. Though in truth, I'm not sure if what these books needed was an additional viewpoint character or two.
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Sep 3, 2023 18:49
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Harry Harrison wrote a trilogy of books about Britain intervening in the Civil War and loving up tremendously. The first book is about the Trent Affair going wrong, and how this leads to the United Kingdom intervening on the side of the CSA. Prince Albert dies early, and a grief-stricken Queen Victoria decides that the stress of trying to reason with those upstart Yankees is what caused Albert's health to sharply decline in the leadup to his death, and orders the government to intervene militarily. However, the British are stereotypically British and don't tell the Confederates all of their plans. Moreover, they're so British that they refuse to admit to any mistakes, so a British commander attempting to join up with a Confederate force near Biloxi ends up attacking it instead. After then attacking the Confederates, the British commander lets his troops sack Biloxi, because he's basically a hack movie Nazi in a red coat, I guess. The Confederacy is so incensed by these actions that they team up with the Union to attack the British. The Monitor squares off against the Warrior at some point, and of course the Monitor handily wins because you can already tell what sort of book this is. American forces also overrun Canada and the Caribbean, with a bit of Free Quebec thrown in too. The second book I remember the least about, but it involves Victoria refusing to admit surrender and the Re-United States invading Ireland, which is then liberated as a united Republic of Ireland. The third book, though. Oh man. Victoria still refuses to yield to the Americans, and the British Government is still as British as ever, Britishly refusing to ever cede anything to the colonial rabble, Britishly. Lincoln, desperate to end the war, decides the only thing to do at this point is completely topple the British Empire. I want to say it's generals Sherman and Grant that personally go on an intelligence mission to Great Britain in order to draw up plans for an invasion, supported by some Russian duke who is eager to see Britain eat poo poo after the Crimean War. Sherman and Grant go on their tour, and return with their great intel prize: an up-to-date copy of Bradshaw's Guide, which they use to perfectly time the invasion to maximize their chances of seizing trains and rapidly advance across the country. At the same time, John Ericsson, inventor of the Monitor, teams up with Robert Parrott to invent a new weapon: the tank. Armed with tanks and copies of Bradshaw's Guide, America launches its invasion of Britain from Ireland. Tanks roll through Trafalgar Square, and Victoria finally surrenders. The entire British Empire is overthrown, and the trilogy ends with Benjamin Disraeli being elected first president of the British Republic.
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Sep 4, 2023 14:28
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I met Harry Harrison and had a drink with him about 20 years ago - His real interest seemed to be the Stainless Steel Rat books and I think he was phoning it for these later books and writing what sells...
Baconroll fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Sep 4, 2023 |
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Sep 4, 2023 15:09
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| # ? May 2, 2024 21:49 |
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quote:There's a throwaway line about the Japanese Combined Fleet that was headed for Midway pulling a u-turn and heading back home, after which the Japanese disappear from the story entirely. This isn't true at all. One of the Races' pilots crashes in Manchuria, is captured and tortured by the Japanese for information on Nuclear weapons. He eventually escapes and when he tells the Races higher-ups that the Japanese are trying to make nukes, the Race nukes Japan.
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Sep 4, 2023 15:54
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