Fuldapocalypse’s first anniversary is this month. The planned reviews to celebrate that include the promised The Sum Of All Fears, plus some more actual World War III (imagine that) novels. However, I also felt that the best and most fitting place to start was at the very bottom.
So I thus reviewed William W. Johnstone’s Out Of The Ashes, the inaugural installment in what could quite possibly be the worst sustained series made by a mainstream author/publisher.
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’ve finally reviewed Clive Cussler’s Skeleton Coast on Fuldapocalypse.
Cussler was one of my favorite authors growing up, and the first real cheap thriller author I read in bulk. I read lots of Cussler’s (even if, by this point in his career, most of the actual work was done by other people), and a book review is long overdue. So why not choose one of the most memorable?
I’ve been on another MicroMark Army Lists binge recently, and the main subject was something that’s weirdly close to my heart-reservist formations. Why do I like them?
I guess my next big question is-when, barring an absolute last-ditch emergency total war, would it be worth the trouble to mobilize these units?
Cheap thriller protagonists can have very “action-hero” names. Perhaps the most archetypal are Mack Bolan and Jack Reacher. Sometimes they can become ridiculously exaggerated, like “Dusky MacMorgan“. In the “middle” are these.
But of all of these, my favorite character name has to be author Jon Land’s Blaine McCracken.
One of my latest musical obsessions has been Vangelis’ Alpha.
I like instrumental electronic music and have liked a lot of his past works. Apart from being well-written and catchy, this has one of my favorite musical trends-the slow start that gradually grows more and more lush. Alpha concludes with a massive triumphant blast of synths.
The cosmic theme of its original album fits perfectly with what feels like a journey through an increasingly beautiful landscape until the full wonders of the universe suddenly come into view.
So, for the most part I’ve just been reading books for fun and then reviewing them on Fuldapocalypse if they seem interesting enough. But its first anniversary is coming up, and I figure that just any routine book won’t do. No, it has to be a big book by a big author. And thus I chose……
I look forward to reading it, seeing how I feel, and writing the review.
A while ago, my specific cheap thriller itch was military sci-fi. Now, more recently, it seems to be “invasion novels” (Red Dawn, Tomorrow When The War Began, etc…). They’re not crowding out everything else, but still, I’m reading more of them than I used to. Don’t ask me why.
If I wrote a conventional WWIII story, it’d probably be in…. Southern Europe. In a comment on a post depicting said theater in the WWIII 1987 TL, I described it as “an uncomfortable sideshow in rough terrain”, similar to the Italian front in World War II.
It’s not in spite of but because of this that the setting appeals to me.
I decided that the best way to square the circle between “I want people to know about this obscure book” and “This book doesn’t seem like the type that can sustain a long review” is to just make the individual reviews shorter and bundle them in a “snippet review” collection.
The first such installment of reviews on Fuldapocalypse is here.
Coiler's Creative Corner 