

The forerunner of the genre was General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War August 1985: A Future History (1978) not a novel at all, it has little in the way of narrative and the whole thing is set up as a history book from the future, including photographs. Ralph Peters’ Red Army is one of several “let’s imagine superpower conflict” books published in the 1980s. Ralph Peters has written a superbly original account of a war that never was.

Red Army side-steps both of these elephant traps with ease.

And we are wary when such books -as sometimes-are more political manifesto than readable fiction. We are not into military stuff per se endless eye-glazing pages about high-tech weaponry, artillery placement, and military tactics. Russia in Fiction approaches such books with a couple of specific prejudices. Over the coming months this blog will review several. Future war books are a distinct sub-genre in Russia-in-fiction novels.
