A Real War of the Worlds?
Nuke 'em 'til they glow, then shoot 'em in the dark.
One of the thing you do when you're selling a book is research keywords. You need them for posting the book to Amazon (the other stores figure it out themselves), for ads, and related activities in our algorithm-driven landscape.
I play around with keywords at the day job, too. We help tech businesses with organic marketing, and a big part of that is helping identify topics for their blogs. The tools you use for that differ from the ones you use for a book, though. They don't look at book sales, their web metrics aren't an exact fit, and they're more expensive.
But I couldn't resist, so I poked around a bit using terms appropriate for Shadows of the Past, went down a bit of a rabbit hole and ended up reading about the plans the United States military has for alien invasions.
…America's most likely plan is to make the invasion so costly for the aliens in terms of manpower and resources, that they won't be able to complete a total invasion. The United States would make the best use of its own manpower and weapons to bleed the aliens before the invaders inevitably destroy us.
That's right, they're not just ready. They're ready for a war of attrition.
The funny (and sad) part is how "Our longtime allies for earthly combat are equally unprepared."
They're worried about boring stuff like feeding people and not making the planet uninhabitable, when they should be figuring out how to make the Klingons pay before they take Chicago.
The good news is, we can count on the Russians to set aside their differences and help defend the planet.
That always works out.
How seriously should we take this? I have no idea. I don't know how trustworthy Military.com or The National Interest are. The first article starts out talking about what people "believe" the Pentagon has prepared, and this story doesn't seem to have a lot of coverage elsewhere.
How would an alien invasion look in the 21st century? Any alien civilization that could take us by surprise made it past all the stuff we have looking out into space. So, they'd probably be using some kind of faster-than-light, wormhole, or stealth technology. That would make them so far advanced the invasion would be over before it started.
If they approach using technology on par with ours, it would be a very different story. There's a good chance we'd have time to prepare. Would it make a difference?
That's what speculative fiction is for.
Godzilla Minus One Follow Up
Godzilla Minus One followed a Kamikaze pilot who survives the war. We witness the shame he feels for not "succeeding" in his mission as he navigates a devastated post-war Japan, finds a family, and struggles with PTSD. The story was interesting enough that the giant radioactive dinosaur was more of a subplot than the main story.
I did some research into the men who made it through these suicide units and found out about Tangen Harada. He volunteered to fly in a kamikaze unit, was saved by the emperor's surrender, spent a year in a prison camp, and eventually became a Buddhist monk.
I'll start reading his story this weekend. Much of his story is told via Zen talks, but I'm fine with that.
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Eric Goebelbecker
Trick of the Tale LLC
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Bergenfield, NJ 07621-9998