Customer Reviews

War in 2080.

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Pros:

The author is a physicist, and so provides a solid analysis of the physical possibilities of tomorrow's wars.

The cons:

The author is a physicist, and can't write his way out of a paper bag.

There is some interesting material in here, but the painful writing style makes it hardly worth the effort. Frequent digressions and asides (like this one!) make the text difficult to follow. Key points are skipped over while others that to me seem obvious are covered in excessive detail.

Worse, I think, is that the analysis is just not very imaginative or insightful. The technological possibilities are explored adequately, but the political consequences of those possibilites are handled clumsily, if at all.

I found this book frustrating. The author obviously knows his stuff, and I kept thinking "this SHOULD be interesting".

But it's not.

After a small, but very detailed history of warfare Mr. David Langford dives right into the military technology of the future, the many ideas from science fiction and if they would really work. He looks at lasers and other energy weapons, nuclear wars, missiles and space weapons, biological and chemical weapons, fuel air explosives, space stations and spaceships, mass drivers and wars between planets (and even solar systems). He even talks about black holes and knocking planets into the sun!

He not only examines how something might or might not work, but how much it might cost. Even if it could work, would we want to pay the funds, the man hours or the energy to build or work such a weapon? And what happens when we start running into aliens? I think a lot of later science authors took some of his ideas too.
Great for fans of science fiction, future studies or military studies. He even asks if we can live with some of the choices that we might be forced to make!