Review: ignorant of military tech and american history
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 02 17, 2012
The editing is bad; verbs with wrong tense, sentences beginning with subordinate clauses, and so on. I don't think there was much re-writing. An example "In kilometers, that was one hundred and sixty to two thousand kilometers above the Earth's surface." Every time I read that sort of sentence, I am rudely yanked out of the story by the lack of craftsmanship. I liked the characters, but I didn't find the story believable and I couldn't bring myself to finish it. I grew up in Alaska and spent a lot of years in Homer and were I calling the shots I would not have done what the military did in the book. I found it unbelievable.So the chinse are teleported 30 years in the future and the US is moved back to 1990 in terms of technology. Recoiless rifles? A tandem charge anti-tank missile is king of the battlefield, and will be from now on. That was demonstrated in the recent loss of the Israelis against a bunch of agrarian peasants with semi-modern anti tank weapons. They got their hats handed to them.The author states that the Japanese damaged a US carrier in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Wrong...The author thinks that somehow an ice age could show up in 25 years. Not likely...The author belabors population pressure but seem to have forgotten about India. They will have a much larger population than China in the time frame being written about. Where are they in in the story?The technical information is not accurate. The book bites itself in the back (if you are mothballing carriers - you would have mothballed the Reagan). There is no consistency in time here.Using Russian names for Chinese tanks is just lazy. Why didn't the author take 5 minutes to learn the Chinese terminology for their own equipment? And frankly I'm amazed at how quick they can build aircraft carriers. We've been doing in the USA for almost 100 years and it still takes many years to build one. Without the tribal knowledge of operation, you would just wreck the carrier. Where did they pick up all that knowledge?All in all a terrible waste of my money. Do not buy this book. This author doesn't do basic research yet attempts to write science fiction, and the editing is poor. Nuclear winter is a fantasy dreamed up and popularized, but one that is not accurate. The author beats the concept to death. Message to the author, nobody who makes decisions about nuclear weapons thinks about nuclear winter. It is on par with Nuclear waste creating Godzilla.