Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Excellent characterization of Hillary, from @JohnBirmingham's "Weapons of Choice"

So I recently read the first two books of John Birmingham's new series (Dave vs the Monsters), and I realized that I had never read the third book of his earlier Axis of Time trilogy. It's been so long since I read the first two that I decided to start from scratch. 

All that is a longish explanation for how I ended up re-discovering the excellent bit below - it's from the first book of the trilogy, Weapons of Choice (2004). The basic plot line, as described by Amazon:
A military experiment in the year 2021 has thrust an American-led multinational armada back to 1942, right into the middle of the U.S. naval task force speeding toward Midway Atoll—and what was to be the most spectacular U.S. triumph of the entire war.

Thousands died in the chaos, but the ripples had only begun. For these veterans of Pearl Harbor—led by Admirals Nimitz, Halsey, and Spruance—have never seen a helicopter, or a satellite link, or a nuclear weapon. And they’ve never encountered an African American colonel or a British naval commander who was a woman and half-Pakistani. While they embrace the armada’s awesome firepower, they may find the twenty-first century sailors themselves far from acceptable. 
Anyway... one of the ships that went back (from 2021 to 1942) was the USS Hillary Clinton, and at some point, reflecting on how well the ship had held up, her captain referred to her this way:
like her murdered namesake, the most uncompromising wartime president in the history of the United States, she was a hard-charging, life-taking bitch who’d crush anyone or anything that got in her way.
Pretty accurate, right? 

2 comments:

  1. I read the first book in the series, but couldn't continue. A destroyed America isn't something I want to spend a lot of time thinking about. It was a good book, though.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You may be thinking of his second trilogy, in which America pretty much disappears. You'd enjoy the Axis of Time series more, I think.

    ReplyDelete