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A review by jonathanpalfrey
Weapons of Choice by John Birmingham
4.0
After several rereadings, I decided to uprate this book from 3 to 4 stars. Although I have some serious criticisms of it (see below), much of it is pretty good, and overall I like it well enough to reread it periodically.
The story is mostly about soldiers in wartime (although some civilians also get involved). If that doesn’t appeal to you, move on and read something else instead. The wealth of details about military operations and about past and near-future military technology is most impressive and seems well researched, although I’m not qualified to assess it.
Being a reader of sf, I appreciated the time-travel element and the clash of different cultures and technologies, which is well imagined. Sometimes I felt that people could have reacted more sensibly to the situations they found themselves in, but this is arguably realistic: people are often not sensible.
I have some criticisms:
1. The situation is interesting, but it’s contrived. Unlikely things happen without explanation in order to produce the plot that the author wanted to write about. It’s acceptable to have one such event in this kind of book, but to have more than one is inelegant and reduces credibility. The event that sets everything off, the collision of two fleets, is ridiculously implausible when you consider the likelihood of a randomly time-travelling fleet happening to smack down on top of another major naval fleet in the vast expanse of the sea and the vaster expanse of time. The fact that most of the ships remain together in one place but some of them get scattered randomly around the world is another implausibility, added purely because the author wanted it for his own purpose of making the war drag on longer.
2. The characters are varied, but numerous, so the reader’s involvement with any individual character is limited.
3. The story is plausible enough in general, but I’m sceptical about some of the details.
4. The mission to rescue prisoners of the Japanese is a noble gesture and a tactical success, but (as some people comment in the book) it seems a gross blunder to spend time and irreplaceable war-winning military assets on a mission of no strategical importance. The time-travellers should have concentrated on hitting the Axis powers hard and fast: sinking all the main Japanese warships, for a start. The faster you win the war, the more lives you save. That seems clear to me as a civilian, and I really think it would have been even clearer to the very experienced military time-travellers. I’m so disgusted with this very implausible blunder that on my latest reread I decided to skip Part 4 of the book completely (in which the blunder is made). I already decided earlier not to buy or read the sequels, because the plot has made a wrong turning and I’m not interested in following it any further.
Clearly, John Birmingham wanted to write a trilogy about war, and an early win would have deprived him of that, so he deliberately loaded the dice to avoid it. I’m not that keen on war myself: I’d have preferred an early win followed by the alternative history of how the postwar world sorts itself out.
Note that this is an unusually long novel, in four parts. Even without Part 4, it’s still quite a long novel, although without Part 4 it lacks a proper ending.
Turtledove’s [b:The Guns of the South|101599|The Guns of the South|Harry Turtledove|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1664902764l/101599._SY75_.jpg|554749] describes a roughly similar time-travel situation, but set in the American Civil War (and the time-travellers are Confederate supporters). It includes warfare but also contains many non-warfare scenes.
Hogan’s [b:The Proteus Operation|849493|The Proteus Operation|James P. Hogan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1178892317l/849493._SY75_.jpg|906055] is set mostly in the Second World War period, but the time-travel elements are more complicated and interesting. The story deals with intrigue and special operations rather than conventional warfare, and there’s more civilian involvement.
The story is mostly about soldiers in wartime (although some civilians also get involved). If that doesn’t appeal to you, move on and read something else instead. The wealth of details about military operations and about past and near-future military technology is most impressive and seems well researched, although I’m not qualified to assess it.
Being a reader of sf, I appreciated the time-travel element and the clash of different cultures and technologies, which is well imagined. Sometimes I felt that people could have reacted more sensibly to the situations they found themselves in, but this is arguably realistic: people are often not sensible.
I have some criticisms:
1. The situation is interesting, but it’s contrived. Unlikely things happen without explanation in order to produce the plot that the author wanted to write about. It’s acceptable to have one such event in this kind of book, but to have more than one is inelegant and reduces credibility. The event that sets everything off, the collision of two fleets, is ridiculously implausible when you consider the likelihood of a randomly time-travelling fleet happening to smack down on top of another major naval fleet in the vast expanse of the sea and the vaster expanse of time. The fact that most of the ships remain together in one place but some of them get scattered randomly around the world is another implausibility, added purely because the author wanted it for his own purpose of making the war drag on longer.
2. The characters are varied, but numerous, so the reader’s involvement with any individual character is limited.
3. The story is plausible enough in general, but I’m sceptical about some of the details.
4. The mission to rescue prisoners of the Japanese is a noble gesture and a tactical success, but (as some people comment in the book) it seems a gross blunder to spend time and irreplaceable war-winning military assets on a mission of no strategical importance. The time-travellers should have concentrated on hitting the Axis powers hard and fast: sinking all the main Japanese warships, for a start. The faster you win the war, the more lives you save. That seems clear to me as a civilian, and I really think it would have been even clearer to the very experienced military time-travellers. I’m so disgusted with this very implausible blunder that on my latest reread I decided to skip Part 4 of the book completely (in which the blunder is made). I already decided earlier not to buy or read the sequels, because the plot has made a wrong turning and I’m not interested in following it any further.
Clearly, John Birmingham wanted to write a trilogy about war, and an early win would have deprived him of that, so he deliberately loaded the dice to avoid it. I’m not that keen on war myself: I’d have preferred an early win followed by the alternative history of how the postwar world sorts itself out.
Note that this is an unusually long novel, in four parts. Even without Part 4, it’s still quite a long novel, although without Part 4 it lacks a proper ending.
Turtledove’s [b:The Guns of the South|101599|The Guns of the South|Harry Turtledove|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1664902764l/101599._SY75_.jpg|554749] describes a roughly similar time-travel situation, but set in the American Civil War (and the time-travellers are Confederate supporters). It includes warfare but also contains many non-warfare scenes.
Hogan’s [b:The Proteus Operation|849493|The Proteus Operation|James P. Hogan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1178892317l/849493._SY75_.jpg|906055] is set mostly in the Second World War period, but the time-travel elements are more complicated and interesting. The story deals with intrigue and special operations rather than conventional warfare, and there’s more civilian involvement.