Designated Targets [Mass Market Paperback]

_Designated Targets_ by John Birmingham is the excellent follow up to his earlier alternate history science fiction novel, _Weapons of Choice_, a novel that began with the basic premise that a U.S.-led multinational naval task force from the 21st century is accidentally and suddenly transported to the Pacific right in the middle of the Battle of Midway.

As most of this fleet came into the possession of the Allied countries (basically the United States), one might think that the advanced weaponry, ships, and trained personnel from the year 2021 would enable the Allied powers to quickly defeat the Axis, as certainly anything they had could outclass anything Germany and Japan possessed in 1942. Quite the opposite occurs, as the Axis, at the heights of its power at the time the future fleet arrived (an event now referred to as the Transition), redoubles its efforts to conquer the world, benefiting from it own captured weapons, ships, and personnel from the future as well as the wealth of information in the computer databases of those ships, decades of analysis and detailed histories of the Second World War and its aftermath, revealing the results of battles, the identities of spies and traitors, failed weapon systems, successful weapon systems that should have been better supported, etc. The Soviet Union and Germany quickly declare a ceasefire with one another (Stalin thankful for the break from the Nazi onslaught and eager to begin work to avoid being the target of later German aggression as well as seeking to avoid eventual Soviet defeat in the Cold War by the United States) and both Germany and Japan rapidly develop and execute radically different plans from what they did in our timeline.

The conflict in the book is not just military in nature, as the officers, sailors, marines, and others of the multinational task force continually come into conflict with the culture and politics of the era. Admiral Phillip Kolhammer, as Task Force Commander, is forced into politics and administration in areas and on a scale he never dreamed possible as he became the governor of a new district set up in California to house the men and women of his task force, the Special Administrative Zone (or just the "Zone"), an area that not only allowed Kolhammer's people to train contemporary personnel and set up factories to rapidly accelerate the advance of contemporary technology, gearing up to provide everything from modern medicine and medical techniques to assault rifles to missiles to jet aircraft but also to be a region of the country that was under 2021 law, not 1942 law. The latter point became particularly important in the book as while political allies, personal friendships, and romantic relationships developed between "twenty-firsts" (people from the future) and "'temps" (contemporary people; twenty-first term for people not from the future), enmities developed too. Some saw political threats with the rising importance of Kolhammer and his other officers in the Roosevelt Administration, his clashes with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, or the threat posed to some corporations that were now producing suddenly woefully obsolete items, like piston-engine fighters. Others regarded the culture of the Zone as a threat, seeing it as morally degenerate and reprehensible due to their contemporary views on homosexuality and premarital sex (or at least with their assumptions about what a twenty-first did in the bedroom). Still others didn't like the mix of races and genders in the fleet, nor Kolhammer's and others refusal to recognize segregation as well as obvious and not so obvious aid to support equality for African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, nor his vehement opposition to Japanese internment (or of internment for those Japanese and German soldiers serving in the fleet, seen by opponents to Kolhammer instead as dangerous "enemy aliens"). While Kolhammer and others became heroes to some, leading several outside the Zone to begin tenuous steps towards ending racial segregation and gender bias, others saw him as a great threat. According to one of the characters in the book, these enemies saw the future (in the Zone) and it scared them.

The action in the book is worldwide, with considerable parts of the book taking place in the United Kingdom, Germany, Hawaii, and Australia as well as the mainland United States.

I found the many ideas explored along the way very interesting, such as the nature of copyright and patent protection for material from the future for instance. Who owns the rights to books, music, and movies say from the 1980s or the 2010s; if the company exists in 1942 that is one thing, but what if no identifiable ancestor to the copyright or patent holder exists? What happens to famous couples, fated in the other timeline to meet, now reading about how they met; do they meet at all now? Or political chances for people reading that one day they will become president?

I also enjoyed the large cast of major and minor characters that were celebrities, some pretty obvious choices, like General MacArthur, while others quite surprising.

I have no real complaints about the book, though I felt some scenes were a bit gory, the description of the deaths of some individuals a bit too graphic for my tastes. Overall I found the pace quite brisk and the story engaging and exciting; it kept me up the last several nights ("just ten more pages" I would say to myself, again and again before going to bed quite late). I look forward to the next book.

As an avid fan of the first volume of the "Axis of Time" series, I was among the many fans looking forward eagerly to the release of the next installment. For me this book was well worth the wait, as John Birmingham avoids the middle-volume slump all too typical of trilogies. Picking up the action four months after the end of the first book, he shows how the impact of the accidental travelers from the future has dramatically changed the course of history - the Japanese have invaded Australia, the Germans and the Soviets have signed a cease-fire, and a vast industrial park is blossoming on the outskirts of Los Angeles as the Allies begin to leapfrog their technological development.

What makes this book so enjoyable for me is Birmingham's imaginativeness. After reading the first volume, I wondered where he would take events from there. The answer is in surprising directions. On one level, it involves posing intriguing questions: What would the Japanese fighting World War II do with knowledge from the future? The Germans? The Americans? Birmingham's answers break away from the predominantly military focus of the first volume to areas that might be unexpected but entirely plausible. The result makes for an enormously entertaining read and one that kept me enthralled to the last page. The only problem I had when I finished was the same that many others have expressed - the prospect of having to wait for the final volume of the series to be written. As frustrating as it may be, I'm willing to wait as long as it takes for Birmingham to produce a conclusion so satisfying.

John Birmingham is a bastard.

I spotted Designated Targets just before its official release at a bookshop in Brisbane airport, appropriately enough on my way to a meeting in the Forgan Smith building at the University of Queensland (the building features prominently about mid-way through). I had thoroughly enjoyed Weapons of Choice: World War 2.1 (as it's subtitled down under), and had hoped for another good read - airport style - to keep me entertained in the downtime that you inevitably get in a busy week spent away from home on business.

Well, what happened was that 2.2 redefined my downtime over the next couple of days - 'downtime' was suddenly comprised of the compact slices of time where I tried to do all the trivial things not related to avidly reading this gripping yarn - work, sleep, drive, ablute, etc.

This wretched, brilliant book completely ruined that week, and for that I am deeply grateful to its stupidly talented author.

Designated Targets is absolutely great stuff - all of what we love and a bit more besides. Clever narrative, suspenseful design, well controlled scenario, thorough research, insightful invention, perceptive psychology, great dialogue, and terrific action. All in all, accursedly unputfckendownable.

Birmingham handles the action genre as an adept - he obviously reads widely in it, and has paid attention to a range of movie genres as well (westerns, war flicks, Hong Kong martial arts, gangster movies, Arnie, straight out action, etc.). Clearly he has also taken a lot of inspiration from the different strands of alternate history, speculative SF and psychodrama that populate contemporary culture, both written and cinematic.

There are amusing and perceptive commentaries on the past. Australian readers will enjoy the mischief of seeing the Brisbane Line become realised in policy, and Prime Minister John Curtin's relationship with MacArthur is well drawn, particularly read against John Edwards's recent book on the Labor war-time PM, as well as David Day's excellent biography. J. Edgar Hoover camping it up in a kimono is hilarious, but also a sobering embodiment of the righteous hypocrisy of censorious autocrats everywhere.

Much more chilling is the cool precision with which Birmingham imagines the treatment handed out by the totalitarian dictators to those that history has exposed as less-than-impeccably loyal to their doomed regimes. There is perhaps room for more serious contemplation about how the Allied powers would respond to the same phenomenon (what might be the fate of the teenaged Che Guevara, for instance?), although the angle about how a JFK handles his sudden advance celebrity is illuminating.

As for the warriors from the future, the speculations about their hardness and brutal pragmatism is clearly a reflection upon current trends and where they are taking us (the people from 2021 are, after all, either us or our children). Particularly poignant is the scene in which the post-postmodern rules of engagement make even the hard-ass Douglas MacArthur blanche.

On the upside, our 21C cousins have impeccable aesthetic sensibilities and wondrous design skills, manifest most droolingly in Birmingham's loving description of an achingly cool apartment conversion in Manhattan. I strongly suspect that he covets this sort of place somewhere deep in his soul, and why wouldn't you? I would not be surprised to read one day that - on the proceeds of the richly deserved film rights - he has found for his famous brown couch a gorgeous pad much like this one.

Birmingham has a lot more fun deploying names familiar to us from the allegedly real world, sometimes in apt ways - the spectacle of a soldier named Albrechtson going up against an SAS platoon consisting of the rest of the Australian conservatariat (think Bolt, Akerman, et al.) is hilarious.

Some characteristic Birmingham turns of phrase pop up - I'm thinking 'the horse they rode in on' from the epilogue of Leviathan. But his novel formulations are even better. Birmingham's baroque talent for gruesome description - utterly appropriate for this totally over-the-top genre - is at its best here: 'a blizzard of offal' is one of the choicest images I've come across in a good long while, although 'one of them flew apart into half-a-dozen flaming chunks of road kill' gives it a run for its money. Lovely stuff.

And in amongst all this blokey carnage and gee-wizz technoporn is a keenly observed conjecture about how clashes of time and culture might play out; how different kinds of people will respond to the same existential provocation; how contortions of narrative fabric reveal the ways in which we construct our world around ourselves; and how different people are differentially equipped to adapt to radical change.

No doubt Birmingham would deny putting this much thought into the things that fill the interstices between the main narrative elements, but it's all there regardless - this sort of sub-dramatic contemplation is unavoidable in a longish character-driven narrative of this quality. You just can't write this well and be this smart without getting into the more subtle stuff. Birmingham's people think about their situation, they react and respond, they cope or freak out, they take advantage or take responsibility, they keep their heads down or they step up. Designated Targets is an airport blockbuster, to be sure, and it is fabulously successful on that level. But there's plenty more there for the taking if you want it, although none of it gets in the way of the central driving narrative. What more can a reader want?

This follow-up to a highly original and entertaining first instalment is a bloody good job. Of course it's a mid-stream book - I cannot understand people whingeing that book 2 in a trilogy turns out to be, um, book 2 in a trilogy, or that it might prove useful to have read 2.1 before reading 2.2 (I mean, they're numbered and everything, to help us out). But that only means that we have a fabulous crunching crescendo to look forward to in the next instalment. And won't the movie be cool!

In summary, get your head into it. It's a great yarn built on a brilliant premise that provokes some intriguing ideas. You can't ask for more than that.

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