Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

Enjoyable summer reading, silly war near-future fiction. Slightly better written than Tom Clancy, albeit with characters that are no more nuanced. Better plotting though, and a little better sci-fi. Fun read if you don't take it too seriously.

My frustration is this novel comes in the same sort jingoistic war porn that the TV show 24, the movie Red Dawn, or the Tom Clancy novels come from. The Chinese villains are even more two dimensional than the American heroes. It's 100% a story for ra-ra military excitement. I enjoy that kind of entertainment, but am conflicted about it. A guilty pleasure.

Unfortunately the book takes itself way too seriously. Particularly the presence of footnotes. While it's interesting that the authors tried to source some of their ideas it creates the false impression that this book is somehow a guide to what a future war would actually look like. And therefore what the US should do right now to prepare for the coming war with China.

The authors say their goal was to create a book "where you can read it at the beach, but with the research to show how real it all is". Taken at face value, that makes this book dangerous propaganda.

(Also a bunch of the plot events are not actually plausible. For instance, rare earth metals are not particularly rare, there's no way China could corner the world market on them. We know this because an attempt failed in 2012 for entirely predictable reasons. Or randomly elsewhere, the book has a pilot taking his plane in a slight descent "to become weightless", which gives him a big burst of speed because "acceleration is thrust times weight". Um, that's not how inertia works. I don't normally poke holes like this in a fiction book, why bother? But this book is pretending to have some sort of grounding in plausible truth, so the technical errors are relevant.)

Fun book, I just hate that people will take it seriously.