Rereading Lion Resurgent

So I read a bad book again. This was rereading it, and I honestly had more fun looking at it again than I expected.

When I first read the book Lion Resurgent several years ago, my first thought was that it was dull even by the standards of The Big One series it belonged to. That it was unmockably bad, and in an Amazon review, I even called it “the flat-out worst book I’ve read”.

I decided to read it again. Why? I had nothing better to do.

I was “pleasantly” surprised.

• The book has, very early on, a briefing given to President Reagan. Not only are there a million “Look how much better he was than Carter” claims, but that it’s the Mary Sue Seer giving the briefing puts it over the top in terms of wish fulfillment. “See, I’m-I mean, the guy I know is giving briefings to Reagan and he’s liking them!”
• Then there’s the “plot”. Like watching a scene in an action movie where the hero has to try to act, this can be unintentionally funny. There’s a death scene that is, with apologies to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, extremely foretold. Then there’s a spy plot that’s about on the same level as the shoved-in footage in They Saved Hitler’s Brain where “agents” with bad post-Sergeant Pepper Beatles mustaches spent several minutes getting and out of cars before the ‘real’ story began.  The icing on the cake is a plot with South Africa whose sole contribution is-delivering armored vehicles.
• Then it was back to drudgery with the main story of the alternate Falklands War. Everything has to be explained, even something as simple to show and not tell like the missiles are missing their targets. 
• In my first reaction, I said the following about the battles. “The Americans get a “look we’re awesome” scene like they do in all the books, the British take more casualties but you have as much attachment to them as you do to CMANO units so it doesn’t have any emotion”. This was unfair to the units of Command.
• The most interesting part-Packard and Studebaker are still in the passenger car business. A part of me was going “Well, even with a different market their survival is dubious because they historically failed at the height of the domestic industry’s power.” That’s what I was thinking of. Cars.
• The whole thing has a sort of detachment to it-like Stuart’s trying to tell of naughty seductions, but it’s told through the filter of an old military encyclopedia, with exactly as much emotion.
• The plots don’t connect. Not just mechanically, but creatively. It’s like there’s a story of a conspiracy of long-lived “immortals” mixed with a military story. Like mixing some of the Assassin’s Creed plots together with The War That Never Was.

 

The book is still very bad, but I had fun with the reread.

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.