Mike Massa, former SEAL and action/sci-fi author joins the stream tonight. Mike wrote a story for the Maelstrom Rising SPOTREPS anthology. We’ll be talking the military, writing, action and science fiction, along with anything else that comes up. If you’ve watched any of these streams, you’ll know that things get real freeform, real quick. Come and join us.
This collection came together thanks to a couple of things. One goes way back to the beginning of my writing career. In a way, it could even be said that this entire book is Dave Reeder’s fault. I sent Dave a copy of Task Force Desperate, in the hopes that he’d review it on Breach-Bang-Clear. He did, and the review was pretty glowing. Over the next couple of years, as the American Praetorians series advanced, his enthusiasm didn’t wane. In many ways, I’m indebted to Dave as a perpetual source of encouragement as an action thriller writer. He also brought up the possibility of writing in one or another of my series. When the idea for the Maelstrom Rising series came to me, I initially worked up a little promotional graphic, a black and white photo of a raging fire on a street, with the following text: Most of the pundits are calling it World War Three, though a friend of mine says it’s really more like Five or Six. Others are calling it the Great Global Breakdown, or the War of All Against All. We Triarii? We just call it work. Dave immediately wanted to know what
This video came across my radar a week or so ago. It’s a long listen, but well worth it. Dr. Peter Zeihan goes into some of the economics and demographics of the collapse of the post-war world order. Some of these trends have gone into the background to the Maelstrom Rising series already. Zeihan’s talk has further fleshed some of them out. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with his entire forecast. I think he’s overlooking a number of, shall we say, violent variables. His outlook is almost entirely economic and demographic, leaving aside some of the potential impacts of violent ideology, desperation politics, terrorism, and “hybrid” Fourth Generation Warfare. Many of these variables have the potential to derail the economics he’s talking about. The demographics can also lead into some of these problems. As was mentioned in a discussion of this video, the solution to demographic problems has occasionally been “foreign adventures.” All of that said, the Maelstrom Rising series is predicated on the trends that Zeihan outlines. The difference is, the crisis brought about by these trends leads to desperation. And desperate governments can do things that, in the long run, are extremely destructive and stupid. Maelstrom Rising is about the