Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

Book Overview

On the eve of America's greatest victory in the Pacific, a catastrophic event disrupts the course of World War II, forever changing the rules of combat. . . .

The impossible has spawned the unthinkable. A military experiment in the year 2021 has thrust an American-led multinational armada back to 1942, right into the middle of the U.S. naval task force speeding toward Midway Atoll--and what was to be the most spectacular U.S...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345457129
• ISBN13: 9780345457127
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Random House Worlds
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Old Meets Really, Really New

If you like Tom Clancy, then you will like this. Ever wondered how WWII would end with modern weapons? I didn't until I read this. A great book.

A great read

This is the first of a series of three books. It is an original take on an alternate World War 2. Birmingham has everything under control in these three books. Characters are unique, real and very human. No superheroes here. His vision of an Alternate World War 2 is very well articulated and flawless in detail. I would highly recommend giving these books a read.

Fantastic, gripping, and epic time travel story!

_Weapons of Choice_ was an excellent alternate history/time travel book, so well written, paced, and conceived that I believe it was the best of that type that I have ever read (and I've read a few). Genre fans may remember the 1980s movie _Final Countdown_, where a modern _Nimitz_ class aircraft carrier accidentally time travels back to just days before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Though we did get to see F-14s deal with a few Zeros if memory serves, the movie didn't fully explore what could have happened had modern equipment and personnel suddenly appeared during that conflict._Weapons of Choice_ does that and more. The book opens in the year 2021. An international fleet of warships - largely American but importantly including British, Japanese, Australian, and Indonesian vessels - are on a mission to Indonesia. This multinational armada is tasked with defeating the Caliphate, a revolutionary Islamist regime that has taken over the government of Indonesia, threatening to spread the revolution violently to neighboring nations such as Malaysia and is massacring Christians and ethnic Chinese within the country. The impressive force sent to stop the Caliphate includes a variety of warships, aircraft, and weapon systems that don't exist yet, such as the F-22 fighter, the amphibious warship _USS Kandahar_, the super carrier _USS Hillary Clinton_, and a great deal of futuristic technology including ceramic armament, intelligent battle computers, and biochip implants. Also present is the Joint Research Vessel _Nagoya_, an impressive scientific research vessel that was originally stationed off the Australian coast to do high energy physics experiments. When its assigned warship escort was recalled to the multinational task force, it was ordered to accompany it to Indonesia. Resentful over the delay in experimentations, the scientists and crew on the _Nagoya_ continue their projects. Something goes horribly wrong, an artificial wormhole is created, and most if not all of the international task force is sent backward in time, ending up near Midway in the middle of the Pacific, days before the fateful Battle of Midway in 1942. To say much more than that would spoil the book and that would be a shame. One might think that such an impressive fleet would rule the Earth and quickly defeat the Axis powers; that however as the reader will discover is not at all the case. If anything the accidental arrival of the task force may make things better for the Axis nations, at least in the short term. In a tightly written, page-turning narrative Birmingham shows the interaction between the international task force and the soldiers, sailors, military leaders, and politicians of the era and the course of the war after their arrival. The author explores how the people of 1942 view an integrated fleet, possessing many sailors, marines, and officers that are non-white and/or female. The people from the future have the benefit of hindsight, knowing how t

An Alt History More About Our Future than the Past!

Birmingham studiously avoids temptations throughout the riveting and realistic storytelling so it's full of confusion, egos, accidents, disasters, setbacks, limitations, personal concerns of each character (I thought they were more multi-dimensional than most reviewers, they just didn't wallow in their grief and isolation page after page)...it's far more realistic than most novels. The author seems to have a much richer and in-depth understanding of real military psychology, especially now and as it's quite likely to develop over the near term with current trends. By taking the task force from 2021 after 20 years of an asymmetric world wide war on terrorism, the way conflicts shaped people up until the comparatively short wars of the 19th & 20th century, Birmingham is really writing brilliant speculative fiction about the next 20 years (Hillary Clinton as the assassinated toughest President since Truman and TR, Condoleeza Rice as a VP, emerging weapon systems in full deployment, the accumulated trauma of both major terror attacks and continual wars, police actions, Wahhabi terrorists, UN actions, suicide bombings, a high tolerance diversity force as a reflection of not only society but also recruiting challenges and techno-war's skillsets...it's brilliantly realized stuff about the road the whole world is on. The sensibilities of the future task force based on their own experience (they have a war crimes forensics unit onsite and document for it continually) so they're far more concerned with the death camps, POW's, and civilians than the WWII folks which unfortunately fits as more continues to come to light about how early WWII leadership knew about the atrocities, scale, and locations but mostly ignored them in terms of tactical resources. The racism and dumbness of the 1942 military (they hadn't been getting or keeping the cream of the crop in the 20's and 30's so the officers and senior enlisted aren't the ones we think of later in the war when over 50% of U.S. men were serving in the armed forces...if it wasn't for rich wives, MacArthur, Patton, and Eisenhower all would have left the service long before the war.) George C. Marshall is oddly absent-he'd have been far more likely than Eisenhower and even King to be dealing with this (I recommend Forrest Pogue's outstanding biography to the author) and Vinegar Joe Stilwell assigned to Chiang Kai Shek's campaigns should make a strong appearance in the sequel. I'd also expect the Soviet influencing of U.S. policy through it's 350 agents in the FDR administration, revealed by the Signal Corps' Venona transcripts from the Soviet Embassy and confirmed in the 1990's from the Soviet archives, to have a major impact particularly for Undersecretary of Treasury Harry Dexter White, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, and others feeding direct intel to Stalin's war and negotiating efforts. The gradual revelation of U.S. business interest ties with the Nazis up through the war would a

Lets get serious.

There is no doubt that the Australian writer John Birmingham can write. He has a glittering track record in a number of fields and his previous work has made him something of a cult hero in his home country. When I first heard that he was turning his attention the thriller genre I had no doubt that he would produce something of note. However he has done more than this. Book One of the Axis of Time Trilogy, Weapons of Choice, has reached beyond airport schlock into the realms of the "thinking person's thriller" and to Mr Birmingham's credit he has done it so skilfully he hasn't risked alienating the more traditional fan base that consumes this genre.John Birmingham has presented us with not only a ripping thriller, but has encapsulated within it a stinging critique of both past and future cultures. In doing so he holds the mirror up to the reader and offers a chance to examine the slippery slope down which we appear to be joyfully skateboarding.Whereas a lesser writer might have lapsed into lecturing us with his own views, Birmingham has stepped back far enough to allow us to make our own judgments. Be in no doubt about the seriousness of the questions the marvellously drawn characters raise. As we in the real world watch the unfolding war on terror and allow our own moral positions to be manipulated by spin and counter spin, uncertainty and fear, this novel gives us a glimpse of the continuum we are on. What we make of it is up to each individual reader.And as a pure thriller? Wonderfully imagined, brilliantly executed and peopled by characters that leap off the page fully formed, no matter how brief their existence and painful their demise.I do have one major concern with this novel. As the author of seven published thrillers, I have to confess that John Birmingham is extremely serious competition. I await the next book with some trepidation.