The War in 2020

What better way to celebrate the 8000th day of the actual year 2020 than reading a vintage technothriller from 1990 about 2020? The War in 2020 holds up on the basis of solid character work and some decent futurism.

Peters imagines a future with a declining America and an ascendant Japan, using next generation electronic warfare and lasers to crush an ill-planned 2005 expeditionary force in Africa. In the first dozen or so pages our protagonist, Taylor, is shot down, escapes back to friendly lines over thousands of miles of plague ridden anarchy, and survives a bout with the fictional Runicman's Disease, a complex and deadly viral infection. The action skips forward in time, though quelling riots in Los Angeles and counter-insurgency in show more Mexico, before again finding solid ground.

It's 2020 in Central Asia, and things are bad. The Soviet Union is falling back before a vast Muslim army consisting of Iraqi Sunnis, Iranian Shiites, and people from the various -stans. The army is slaughtering refugees with nerve gas, and the whole thing is being masterminded by Japan, which is supplying weapons and senior leadership. The last, best hope of stability in Central Asia is Taylor and his 7th Cavalry, reconstituted with M-100 gunships. The M-100s are tiltrotor VTOLS along the line of the V-22, but armed with a miniature railgun. Taylor and his men have to deal with Russian obstructionism and the friction, of combat, but they launch a sweeping cavalry raid that destroys the Japanese depots, and then when there's retaliation by a secret terror weapon (which I'll not spoil, because it's pretty good), Taylor has to launch one more desperate raid to hack the Japanese command computer. As he puts it in one of the book's better lines, a lot of wars are lost by the first side to give up, because you know how bad you're hurting, but you have to guess at the enemy's circumstances, and they might be even worse off than you.

As I said, the characterization is solid. Taylor is a stoic, classic soldier, but the bonds between his command staff feels very real. Peters has a talent for pacing, and not getting lost in the technical pornography of violence. He knows how to make the victories feel earned, because winning hurts.

An author's note at the end places this book as a serious attempt to grapple with the possibility that America might lose it's military-technological edge, and how that might resolve. As such, the Japanese are the adversaries, but there's very little of the worst kinds of 90s yellow peril. It's also an attempt to grapple seriously with political fundamentalist Islam (good foresight there), but it leads him down some Islamophobic roads, As the Muslim characters are universally murderous fanatics incapable of dealing with modernity. Finally, as a military thriller, this book is heavy on male perspective, and two women featured as viewpoint characters see themselves primarily through sexual bargaining. They're whores, whether in Moscow or Washington DC. The inability to form real relationships with women is a key psychological subtext. It's not great, but about par for the genre.

I picked this book up at an outdoor booksale and carted it around with me for years. Not sure this battered paperback will survive another bookshelf purge, but it's been a fun read. show less

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