A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

It's 1990. The Cold War is over, and Communism is being rejected by most of the dying Soviet Union's former vassals. Only a handful of die-hard regimes still hangs on to Marxism-Leninism, grasping at power with the grip of those who are about to die.  One of these nations is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which rules the northern half of the Korean peninsula with uncommonly fanatical dedication to socialism and the discredited theories now being discarded by Eastern Europe and even the cradle of World Revolution, the USSR. With a population of less than 20 million, North Korea has the largest per capita standing army in the world, with some 784,000 men under arms. It is also a poor country, has little contact with the outside world, is heavily into the "personality cult" of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung and his succesor, Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader. Now, with South Korea once again embroiled in a cycle of student riots and apparent political inst...

(C) 1994 Warner Books The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a blessing in disguise not only for the Pentagon but for writers of military fiction. Just as the armed services have had to develop new doctrines, strategies, tactics, and weapons systems to contend with new enemies (potential and real), authors such as Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts, Harold Coyle, and Larry Bond have had to look at the world situation, read the proverbial "tea leaves," and write plausible scenarios pitting American soldiers against foes that are very different from the by-now all-too-familiar Soviet "Ivan." The writing team of Bond and Patrick Larkin ( Red Phoenix, Vortex ) was one of the earliest practitioners of "the-Cold-War-is-ending, let's-look-at-other-story-possibilities" idea. Although the Soviet Union was still in existence when their first two novels were published in the early 1990s, its role in Red Phoenix (about a second ...