Fire Emblem Three Houses Released

So, Fire Emblem Three Houses is now officially released for the Nintendo Switch.

What I’ve seen of it has been very good, I love the art-style, and from what I’ve heard, a lot of my biggest fears have been overtaken [without spoiling anything]. It feels like Intelligent Systems has been using the series new tent-pole status and the success of Heroes as a way to move outwards a little, not as a way to stay huddled on the track like some other successful franchises.

Plus, there’s a bit of guilty pleasure. I’d previously made the goofy thought exercise of “what if I stuffed the entire playable cast of every previous Fire Emblem game into a modern military battalion?” And now, guess what? There’s a “battalion system” to reinforce your fighters. Not since I anticipated “The Dentist” as being important to the Payday 2 plot have I been vindicated in such a fashion.

So, I read A Game of Thrones

I recently read A Game of Thrones. My impression was “not for me.” Not necessarily bad, but just not for me. GRRM isn’t quite the best at pacing or immediacy, and I’ m not the biggest fan of the premise.

It’s kind of how I feel about Worm as well-not hated by any means and I can understand why people like it, but just has a premise I personally don’t find the most interesting mixed with iffy pacing and fundamentals. That I’m not normally the biggest fan of fantasy makes it harder to progress through a megaseries too.

So, yeah, it’s not bad but not for me.

A genre I’d never write?

So, for the August 2018 #TheMerryWriter challenge started by Ari Meghlen and Rachel Poli, the second day’s question was “Is there a genre you would never write?”

It was a tough question to answer. My tastes are incredibly varied already and can change a lot. A desire to move away from fire-eating hyperbole on my part made it even harder. Finally, the vague nature of what constitutes certain “genres” at all makes it tougher.

I don’t want to say I’d never write a certain genre, but certain ones are lower on my priority list. The one I tweeted was “classic Westerns”. I’ve never been terribly interested in them past watching The Magnificent Seven as a child, and if I’m not into reading them, then writing them, well, yeah.

However, a lot of genres I would gladly write-the adventure genre, part of the “cheap thriller” genre I love, has been clearly inspired by classic Westerns. So genres are not easy to separate.

Other genres low on my list:

• Outright horror, especially cosmic horror. Not really for me, but I can see the appeal.
• Contemporary romance. For the most part I’m not in the demographic, so that’s pretty self-explanatory.
• Mysteries. Argh. The problem is a spectacular true crime book by The Wire creator David Simon called Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets. With that being as piercing as it is, traditional mysteries look especially formulaic and unrealistic. That being said, I do like the concept more.
• Zombies. At least shambler zombies. Too often they become a “theme park apocalypse”.
• Urban Fantasy. Fantasy overall is fairly low, but urban fantasy is even lower. I like it in theory, it’s just too often I see it falling. It might just be me seeing poor examples, but I think a lot of the time it tries to have its cake (modern relatable characters and the fantastic!) and eat it too (too neatly segmenting off the societies), and that annoys me.
• Legal thrillers. I’m not a lawyer, self-explanatory.

This is of course my personal taste and I have nothing against the genres or anyone who likes them. And my opinion could very well change again.

The Girl Who Held The Atom in her Hand

The Girl Who Held The Atom In Her Hand

Breakfast came early for her, and by now she knew the routine-eat as quick as possible, before the big blast came.

Gulping down the scrambled eggs and washing them down with some orange juice, she moved over to the couch and did what she normally did. That would be sitting blankly and waiting for the big smash. There were near-constant little smashes, ones that she knew she had to deal with, since after all, the young woman was overseeing a war.

And then it hit her again, a barrage of terror, pain and fear. Into her mind flowed the waves of hundreds if not thousands. This time it was at sea, on a warship near “Iceland”. It was always Iceland. No one would know the place names in another universe if it wasn’t their job, but she knew them better than any geographer.

Fulda. Iceland. Kola. Orkney. Norway. Berlin. Bonn. Kamchatka. Hokkaido. Sakhalin. Occasionally there was some variety, like “Long Island”, “Newfoundland” and once “Moscow”.

She grimaced and got to work, which was falling asleep and dealing with more of her battle nightmares. Whether or not they were better handled asleep than awake was an open question. There could be a dream of burning up in a tank, then waking up, thinking “oh, it’s a dream”, and then getting hit by a cluster bomb.

Besides, the child knew it was not a dream.

She was saving the world. Or the worlds.

Or was she?

Was she just being an enabler? The elders understood the mechanics of the “subconscious projection.” She did not. But what she felt and suspected was that if the true fear of nuclear combat was there, would it not keep them from sliding into the wars she felt every single day?

That would be nonsense-she was giving them a chance to be resolved without an apocalypse. But was it better off being held off altogether? She didn’t know how they started or how they happened, only that they happened.

And somehow, she didn’t want them to happen. But they kept going on nonetheless.

Another blast hit her, this time of a barracks being hit by a “B-52” (this had given her an experience in the education of weapons systems, too). There was a fire, and it seemed like it was spreading to her body, making her double over. The B-52 was shot down-that’s what it was, and it was making her hurt even more.

Eventually, panting, the girl sat up again.

Looking at the clock, she grimaced. Eighteen hours to go before another day of “atomic peace”.

_ _ _

This came about from the “nuclear handwave” common to World War III stories. I’ll admit the exact mechanism is reminiscent of Louis Lowry’s The Giver, but that was more about emotion in general.

I’ve wanted to write this for a while, and now have done the basic story. The reason why the hands are off the nuclear button is that someone is forcing them-and destroying their mind and life in the process.

The War That Never Was

More than a few Command scenarios have been based on a book entitled The War That Never Was by Michael Palmer. When I read the book myself, I developed the following opinions about it:

-The War That Never Was is very good as a “foundation” for Command scenarios, thanks to its extreme detail.

-However, the same details make it very bad as an actual novel.

Want long, encyclopedic details of various military units attacking each other? Then it has that. Want specific details of every ship? The book has that. But want that story told with any degree of personal immediacy, any amount of emotional, as opposed to mechanical detail? The book doesn’t have that. Want characterization-as in any characterization? Nope.

The book has a similar setup as Operation Sealion by Richard Cox, another  novelization of a wargame depicting the titular never-was “plan” by Germany to invade the British Isles in World War II.  (Spoilers: Germans lose big). Third-person omniscient, figures are given in extreme detail, but personalities aren’t.

It is just the published version of a dull, overly literal Let’s Play/After Action Report. Using it as a scenario reference can work, and many players have made good scenarios out of it. But as a book-it’s not very good at all.