Next year would have been the 20th anniversary of the founding of Yellow Press, which became D&S, which in both imprints published my early share house novels. Michael Duffy decided to get out of the publishing biz while the gettng was good, though. He was always much smarter than me. Because those books still sell, they needed a new home and I wasn't quite ready to self publish them.

So, they are now with Momentum, PanMac's indy/ebook outfit. To mark the move, each got a new cover.

Chapter One also got renamed, for the US market.

Short review.

I loved it. If you enjoyed the Tom Clancy school of the 1980s and would like to see them redone with modern and future technology, just go buy it.

Longer, more considered review.

It's lucky Tom Clancy wasn't able to put hyperlinks all the way through his books. Not in the early years, anyway. This is what they would look like. A military thriller in which every mention of weapons technology is hyperlinked to an explanatory source. But even more than that, there are hundreds of other inexplicable links which break up the experience of just letting the story carry you along. It's an artefact of the authors' deeper purpose — to spin a cautionary tale for policymakers as much as for readers. But seriously, I really didn't need the footnote explaining how Arnold Palmer had been commissioned to design that golf course on which Marine Corps Osprey's were setting down. Just land the damn aircraft and start blowing things up. Sheesh.

I bring this up before even getting to what Ghost Fleet is about because those footnotes are going to piss a lot of people off. I tried to turn them off on my Kobo but couldn't find the appropriate checkbox. Maybe it would be easier on a Kindle or an iPad.

That minor aggravation aside (I stopped noticing them the same way we train ourselves not to see banner ads online) and with all the usual caveats, I really did enjoy this book.

Ghost Fleet is very Red Storm Rising, one of my favourite Tom Clancy books. It's set in the near future, the exact date being left vague, but feeling like twenty years out to me. That's long enough to bring a lot of cutting edge technology into the mainstream, but not so far removed from our present concerns as to morph into science fiction. China is ascendant, but the Communist Party has been swept away. The emergent hyperpower is ruled by a nationalist cabal of billionaire tycoons and the military. The US is not just in relative decline; a series of foreign policy misadventures and economic travails find it in absolute decline. China's ruling clique, which styles itself as the Directorate, discovers vast reserves of natural gas on the floor of the Pacific in an area still controlled by America. They decide the time has come for Washington to learn a few ugly realities about the new blanace of power. Or what the old Sovs would have called 'the correlation of forces'.

And so we come to the point, or rather the first point of this novel, a tour de force of just how US could be driven out of the Pacific in our lifetimes. The Chinese plan is not far removed from scenarios being war gamed by all of the great powers right now. The guilty pleasure of Ghost Fleet is seeing the scenario-building worked out in narrative form.

Like Clancy, Singer and Cole deploy a broad canvas with a lot of storytellers. They do return to a couple of favourites however, a Navy captain who fights his LCS out of Pearl Harbor when the Pacific Fleet is attacked there, his old man, a retired Navy chief petty officer who is recalled to service with thousands of other old salts when the 7th Fleet is destroyed, a female Marine who turns insurgent when Hawaii is invaded, a Chinese-American scientist whose research holds the key to a counter-attack, and one of my particular favourites a British-Australian billionaire turned space pirate. (Seriously, this character is great fun and provides the only comic relief in an otherwise pretty serious endeavour). There are dozens of others.

No it's not Tolstoy. It doesn't even make a pretense at being fine writing. A lot of the secondary characters are just Lego pieces to click into place when building the story, and although the writers take some time with their favourite characters to fill out their back stories and emotional lives, it's largely a paint by numbers exercise.

So fucking what. You don't judge these books by the standards of Tolstoy. You judge them on their own merits, and I judged Ghost Fleet to be such enormous fun that I decided to take a day off work to finish reading it in one big, guilty binge. It helped that I had a bit of a hangover after the Melbourne Writers Festival. I was able to convince myself I would not have done any worthwhile work on my own books. Also, it made me think I should really write some more stuff like this.

A lot of the pacing, character, and formatting problems (those hyperlinks!) fall away as the story begins to accelerate under its own momentum. By the time the US has put together its counterstrike (the second real point of the book) most of the lumpiness of the early narrative has smoothed out and it's a fast run to a very satisfying conclusion.

I enjoyed it. I'm happy to recommend the purchase.

Amazon affiliate link. (Hardback. But go the ebook).

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

I've never seen Warren Ellis speak, but he does write great essays. I remember reading one of his at Vice.com, after Hurricane Sandy hit New York. It was about the slow, almost absent minded collapse of civilisation.

A team of researchers from Penn State have recently released work showing how they can compare rainfall records on stalagmites in Belize to Mayan political history. They found, in fact, that severe weather events contributed directly to the breakage of the Mayan political machine, and even the collapse of its greatest cities. Which would seem obvious, perhaps, but here we are. Looking at the marks left by rain on stone and mapping them to the end of cities.

I can imagine, in fact, walking through an Old New York, looking at the dark, greedy smears left by floodwaters at high tide on the fronts of brownstones and banks and divining from them the dates when Manhattan died by inches. Wondering which of these eroded tidal lines was the one where people realized that climate change wasn’t a joke or a trick, but the new future, a thousand miles wide and coming for them at a hundred miles an hour.

Every single one of the green, bloated bodies washed up on America’s shore was loved by someone, and cheated out of years by a broken machine.

I'm hoping to find it or something like it in Cunning Plans, a collection of his speeches, and an honest to goddamned steal for one lousy buck. It's ebook only. You can get it from the Beast of Bezos here.

Or here via Smashwords, my prefered choice even though I don't get a piece of the action from them.

With the US/UK publication of RESISTANCE this week, the reviews are starting to come in and two in particular caught my eye. My Bookish Ways followed up an insightful critique of EMERGENCE with an even more astute reading of Dave's character (or lack thereof) in the second installment.

"You already know that Dave isn’t stupid. In fact, he’s far from it, higher education and all. Except… there’s a self-loathing aspect that drives Dave to do stupid things, and once he starts, it’s awful hard for him to quit." (Emphasis added.)

I was really taken by MBW's reading of Dave in that way. If you've finished the whole series/season you'd know just accurate the self-loathing diagnosis is, but youd have to infer it from his behaviour before the revelations in New York.

The second review I really liked was in One Book Two, the work of a couple of women who read in tandem and them toss their reactions to the story back and forth. I've seen this a bit with reviews/recaps of TV shows like Game of Thrones, and of course it was the defining architecture the movie reviews by Siskel & Ebert, and Stratton & Pomeranz - but I haven't come across it in book reviewing before. (Perhaps I should get out less?)

The thing I really appreciated about it was the way the format allows the reviewers to push against each other. It address the main problem I've always had with reviews; they're entirely subjective exercises in pretending to be objective readings of a topic. 1B2's Dave review is that most rare of all things for a writer – useful. I took a lot away from it that I can apply in writing Season 2.

You can read the whole thing here. It's worth the jump just to bookmark the site for future reference.

At My Bookish Ways.

[Warning, for US and UK readers, this thread contains SPOILERS for all three Hooper books]

When we first met Dave he was a little the worse for wear. I often tell people we meet him on his hands and knees beside a helipad, throwing up corn chips and tequila for breakfast. But of course we don't. He's already in J2's chopper and his regurgitated breakfast is just a memory. It was an image so strong that even though I didn't write it, I recall it vividly.

Dave does his own misremembering, of course. He spends a good deal of the next 350 000 words misremembering his life and just who is responsible for it. If there is a point at which the story actually begins it's not with him on his hands and knees vomitting up the remains of an epic debauch. It's when he's strapped into the chopper and flying out to the rig. Trapped. Confined. Running on rails laid down by circumstance. It's where we learn that it's not morning in Dave Hooper's America. Life ain't all Doritos and Mescal.

As J2 flies out across the Gulf he imagines himself flying towards his boys, Toby and Jack, descending from the skies as an avenging hero. (Although WTF he'd be avenging besides his own inability/refusal to send an alimony cheque isn't mentioned.)

It's all foreshadowing.

From that moment on I knew where the series was going to end. On the edge of the Atlantic, far to the north, with Dave coming to the rescue of his family. Well, of his boys anyway. Annie's fate was always uncertain, and right up until I turned in the final draft, there was no garauntee she'd still be with us.

What was certain though – Dave is an unreliable narrator, and the ex-wife we meet through his recall is not necessarily a fair and accurate portrait of the woman herself. That's probably why, in the end, Annie O'Halloran is still with us. It seemed unfair to leave readers with only Dave's impression of her. Karin lets us know he hasn't been entirely truthful about their marriage, not even to himself, but that wasn't nearly enough to redress the balance. So Annie lives, and I'm happy with that. She, along with Karin, is more than a match for him.

As to the Scooby Gang, do they have a future? We lost a fan favourite in Zach. And I'll tell you now, he's not coming back. Igor is still drawing breath, but he's in bad shape. Heath and Emmeline have work to do in long and fruitful story arcs ahead of them.

But then so does Compton/Compt'n.

And what of Dave's lawyer, X Boylan? Well, it's not pure random coincidence that he happens to be stranded in the same city as Jellybean Johnson. And those other champions? Are there more of them? I do seem to recall Karin speculating on that very point. She thought there might be twelve of them, a champion for every Realm. It's gives a fellow to wondering just how a douchebag Messiah like Dave might bring these apostles togther.

I'm happy to let you know that I already have three longform novels planned and plotted for Season Two of The Dave. Stronghold, Citadel and Empire. With the world built in Season One, it's my intent to make each of the new novels stand alone titles, within a longer developing story arc. It should be possible to read them out of order and still make sense of the greater plot. Although, of course, you'll get a much better deal working through them as they're meant to be read.

I'll throw open the spoilers threads now, with a general forum below, and more specific topics through the week. If there is a topic you particularly wanted addressed, just say so.