Will's Second Good Idea for 2022

We spent yesterday afternoon taking up the basement stairs carpet and removing carpet tacks. Fun. Next up: replacing the trim, sanding and staining. We think the stairs look fine as is, but Mrs. Stroock wants them stained so....

We've been thinking a lot about writing, deadlines, and publishing. Writers we came of age following like Tom Clancy, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Bond, Mack Malony*, would go years between publishing. It took Jerry Pournelle 30 years and death to wrap up his Janissaries series. George R.R. Martin is notorious for not finishing GoT. We've got a long way to go before we're in Martin's territory.

Still, the fact is we didn't get anything out in 2021. We're disappointed in ourselves. There's a good reason for this. The Great Nuclear War of 1975 grew and grew till it split in two. Sometime around October we realized we wouldn't get the MS done in time to put it out before the new year, at least not an MS with which we'd be satisfied.

We don't know if reader(s) are tired of the book updates, but we know we're tired of writing them. It's time to publish. So this week we're getting The Great Salvation of 1976 ready to go to the editor. The Weser will be ready to go by the end of this month. 

We realized we still have to write an intro and acknowledgment for The Great Nuclear War of 1975. We're tempted to write a long essay on our nuclear war and post nuclear war methodology. But no. Let people simmer. Let them wonder how and why we think what we think. We'll include an essay in volume three. Tomorrow we shall write the first 1,000 words of volume three. That's our good idea for the week of 1/9/22.

*Trashy and fun! If our parents knew what was in those books...We just wanted to mention Maloney. He generally put out a Wingman novel once a year.

Will's Good Idea for 2/7/21 Et al

We're supposed to get 6 inches of snow and it just started coming down. We ought to be able to get it cleared before the Super Bowl. We're dreading the commercials this year. We're really sick of the lectures. As noted before we think Tampa wins a close, high scoring game, but we're pretty meh about the whole thing. Maybe it's us.

The Stroock family Saturday night takeout treat: Wendy's (frosties!). We got a jalapeno burger. This is an experiment as much as anything. Mrs. Stroock found cherry extract pills we can add to the handful of medication we take at night. Gout sufferers swear by them. Fingers crossed.  

Inspired by Jerry Pournelle's Janissaries we had an interesting idea. A marine rifle company from 1945 is transported back to feudal Japan. They have to take sides, they have to fight, etc etc. There's a Nisei or two, maybe a commander who's really into Japanese stuff, maybe another guy who grew up in San Francisco, an officer who worked at the embassy in Tokyo. Don't worry, we're never gonna do it. The more we think about Mamelukes, the less satisfied we are with the ending. It really didn't wrap up the series. Maybe they're planning more? 

It has occurred to us that people might open a book called The Great Nuclear War of 1975 and expect to read about Looking Glass, bomber wings, nuclear silo crews, keys turned, bombs dropped etc etc. There's none of that in '75. We're far more interested in how one puts the pieces back together. We admit a novel about the actual nuclear exchange is a good idea.  

The Substack account is active and the page is up. There's no content yet. We're planning Cambodia month to begin with. We have three articles and are reading through them now. When ready we'll just throw them all up there. In the coming months we'll do an article a week and add something about another subject, maybe some non-military history stuff.

The last News Wrap of 2020

We don't do the New Years thing. We have no resolutions to make and we're not in the mood for predictions. In 2016 we predicted Rubio/Haley would win. Also we thought Hillary! would be dead by now. So that's what those are worth. Ok, we have one resolution: consume less news.

Colonel Schlichter predicts pain. We see nothing with which to disagree. Our best guess on Georgia is that the GOP loses. The party down there is a mess and neither candidate inspires. Some are hammering Jew hater Rafael Warnock's Jew hatred. That will just help turn out the black vote. It's a weird relationship, people. 

Over in Israel, the Blue and Whites are dying as six MK's have now left. Damn. We wanted a center-ish party that would hammer the palestinians and hammer the Haredi. Not next year. Benny Gantz thought he could make a deal with Bibi. Fool. Worse, Gantz thought he could stab the other two wings of the Blue and Whites in the back and command their loyalty afterwards. Idiot. Some strategy. This guy was the chief of staff? We shudder. Polls show an electorate that is center right and more right.  Peacenik Meretz is a fringe party and Ben Gurion's Labour, once Israel's natural governing party, is almost dead. Good. The other two major rightwing parties really hate Bibi. It's personal. We suspect Israel will have another deadlock after the March elections. 

The Critical Drinker really doesn't like Wonder Woman 1984. The film is a Woke mess, he says. Which is fine. But WW84 was written and directed by Patty Jenkins, who is doing Star Wars: Rogue Squadron. Can't you see it? A fresh, spunky female X-wing pilot shows all the jocks how it's done. Will it be Woke? Is this a Kennedy project or a Favreau project? Favreau is running the TV side of things so....

We're re-reading Jerry Pournelle's Janissaries trilogy. After 34+ years we can still recall reading Janissaries on the way home from the book store and reading the Roman battle in SSR at school, which certainly  says something for Pournelle. We've finished the first book and it's a tight, well written masterpiece. We're shocked at how much we like Janissaries and how easy it was to read. Well done Mr. Pournelle, and thank you. Can't wait to get to the fourth and final volume, Mamelukes.

We're writing what we believe is the final chapter for the main narrative of The Great Nuclear War of 1975. This chapter deals with election and congressional issues. The last shows Rockefeller giving the State of the Union at The Greenbrier. It's a wish list of what needs to be done. Overall 40 states returned electors, congressman and senators. Bobby Byrd survived and he's undisputed master of the senate. We still only got Matt to the Indiana border and still don't know if he finds Stacey and the boys. What do you guys think? 

Thirty Years, Literally

Some time ago some grognard took to this blog's updates page and criticized our not writing a third Israel Strikes novel to wrap up the saga.

[It's a saga now, is it?-Ed]

We are People of the Book, after all...Anyway we told this tosser to sod off and noted that we've been waiting 30 years for Jerry Pournelle to finish Janisarries and then he died.

Well, well, well...lookie here...Pournelle's estate finally finished up the concluding novel. People, we give you Mamelukes.

Briefly, in 1979 aliens kidnap a bunch of CIA Mercs in Angola and drop them on a Medieval planet so they can grow drugs for them. It's basically Game of Thrones meets a bunch of guys running around Game of Thrones with rifles and machineguns.

We'll have to root around our book boxes and find the original novels. This gives us the excuse we need to purge our old sci fi and fantasy collection. 

No, we're not writing a third Israel Strikes novel.

Pournelle is Baaaaaack!

OMG! OMG!

After thirty(30) thirty(!) years it's finally here!

Nut graph, as the J-school losers say, aliens kidnap CIA mercs and dump them on a medieval planet. The result is fun high-adventure.

Jerry Pournelle died a few years ago, we talked about him here. Do click over and read the Steve Sailer link.

We read him and his partner Larry Niven in high school and college. Lets just say he had a big influence on us. The Janisaries series was among the first real books we ever read. Now we're going to have to dig them out of the basement and re-read them. It's been a long time.

Ave! Ave Pournelle Imperator!

Over at Taki's, the indispensable Steve Sailer eulogizes the great Jerry Pournelle.

Pournelle, let us say, led an interesting life to say the least. Author, politico, philospher, Cold War strategist. We'll get to that in another post.

Sailer talks about my three favorite Pournelle novels: Lucifer's Hammer, Footfall, and The Mote in God's Eye.

We loved the universe Pournelle created with Larry Niven in Mote. It is a universe a thousand years in the future where man still hasn't found intelligent alien life. It is a world of the Second Empire of Man, of King and Parliament, kilted soldiers, dominion planets...That world is turned upside down when space-faring aliens are discovered. The aliens, or Moties as they're called, are brilliantly conceived as is the problem with their civilization and why man wants to keep them locked up in their star system.

Via Chronology.orghttp://www.chronology.org/grafix/jp-emblem2.gif here's the flag of Pournelle's Empire of man.

Ave! Ave! Pournelle Imperator!

With the passing of Jerry Pournelle we find ourselves thinking about his books. In our youth we found greta comfort in them.

First among these is the Janissaries saga. Here aliens rescue CIA mercs from Angola and plop them down on a planet full of medieval humans. The mercs quickly become embroiled in the local power struggle.

Did I mention that these 50 or so mercs have all their weapons and ammo?

Needless to say the 'starmen' as the locals call them quickly set themselves up as lords.

We were always intrigued by the notion of modern soldiers armed with modern weapons going up against larger medieval armies.

There's lots of subplots in Janissaries and if the reader is curious they should just buy the damn books.

Now the aliens have been transporting humans to this planet for millennia so they can grow drugs for them. Pournelle cleverly uses this to give us a world with Romans, Mycenaean Greeks, Franks, Mongols, etc.

Lest the new starman overlords get too comfy, every few hundred years the aliens nuke the planet to keep the humans from advancing, so we have glass fields, large craters and legends about dragons melting castles and whatnot. Once our mercs realize this they concoct a plan to preserve themselves once the aliens inevitably attack. One of the sub themes of Janissaries is the mercs efforts to spread human knowledge; hygiene, printing presses, paper, etc.

Well done Mr. Pournelle and thank you.

Ave! Ave! Pournelle Imperator!

Jerry Pournelle has died. He was 84.

At 13 years of age we picked up Jerry Pournelle's Janissaries a brilliant novel about aliens rescuing CIA mercenaries from Angola and bringing them to a world inhabited by medieval humans. This was high adventure of the first order.

From there we moved on to Falkenburg's Legion, about mercs fighting on far off planets. We found some truly inspiring writing in the battles for Sparta, 'God may have mercy on them but we shall not!' In college we took a risk and read The Mote in God's Eye. Mote is set in the same universe, though a thousand years apart. Mote brilliantly reverses the old science fiction equation. This time, we're the aliens arriving at a new world.

Pournelle wrote Mote in collaboration with Larry Niven. He also wrote Footfall with Niven, a book we give great credit to in our To Defend the Earth. Footfall showed us what alien invasion could be like. Militarily we just wanted to take the idea to the next level, as if Tom Clancy wrote an alien invasion novel.

Let us not forget Lucifer's Hammer, about a comet slamming into Earth. We read it in two days and its always stuck with us.

Needless to say Jerry Pournelle was a great inspiration to us. Thank you, Mr, Pournelle.

Rest in Peace.