Everything-and I mean everything is in the lens of “describe every gun in detail, describe every armored vehicle in detail, have everymen-turned-super-operators carry out their operations against the evil trenchcoat-men with TACTICAL PRECISION.” In another context, I might have found it annoying. When I said the book was “tacticool”, I meant it. The main character, with the book told in first person view, is caught up in the struggle against them. These “Deciders” reminded me nothing short of the enemies in a B-list first person shooter game from the 1990s or 2000s. So the son of a Secretary of State described as looking like a “rich preppie kid” leads a conspiracy/army of people in gray trenchcoats that takes over the US. J Thompsons Angels Of War: Veritas is a ridiculous tacticool fantasy. It’s been a great year for this blog and for me in terms of reading. Thus it makes a good benchmark for other “51% books”, especially action thrillers, that I’ve weirdly come back to time and again. It’s so mediocre, so “51%”, that it actually stands out somehow. The immortality gimmick is just a way to get the same dull character into whatever pop-history period the book demands.ĭavid Alexander’s Marine Force One is perhaps the single most middling piece of fiction I’ve read. The first two books will never be more than trashy cheap thrillers, but they’re still good trashy cheap thrillers.Įverything beyond that is incredibly formulaic and risk-averse, even by cheap thriller standards. It’s mostly just “the bad guys win” and “bizarro-America, a continent-sized superpower founded on tyranny” used as the (interesting) setup for middling sleazy pulp in a variety of genres.Īh yes, it’s one of those series where the background of “Guy who sang The Ballad Of The Green Beret makes a cheap thriller series about an immortal Roman soldier” is more interesting than the bulk of the books themselves. I’m left with the conclusion that, weirdly like the Spacebattles-favorite Worm, the Draka series became internet-famous for having a legitimately distinct setup and a variety of timing/circumstance-related things that had little to do with the prose itself. I had the suspicion that they were less than their reputation beforehand, but reading them confirmed it. Reading the actual books was something weirdly relieving, cutting through the decades-long telephone game to find. This has been an infamous series in internet alternate history for a long time. Jon Land tosses aside such frivolities as “plausibility” and “logic” in favor of ridiculous set-pieces. If the Survivalist was last year’s “binge read a long series”, McCracken was this years, with me devouring all eleven books in short order. This is how to use wargames well for writing. It managed to not fall into the pit of being just a thinly-veiled lets play, and flowed well. I knew very much of the Command scenarios this book started from, but was impressed by the novel itself. What were my favorite literary discoveries of 2019? It’s a little hard to figure out given how much I read, but here they are. While I did not read a 27-book series in one binge, I did read all eleven Blaine McCracken books and all seven Black Eagle Force books. As I’ve said before, I would have literally run out of books had I kept trying to do that. It’s definitely not a bad thing that Fuldapocalypse has become a general fiction review blog with an “analytics of World War III” side-section. Of course, my reviews became a lot more off the cuff and looser without that structure, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. After tinkering with the narrow scale a bit, I just tossed it aside entirely in March without any regret. Not only have I completed many reviews, and many diverse reviews, but the blog finally broke free of the shackles I’d initially imposed on it. This has been a great year for Fuldapocalypse.
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