Stolen from Sean Eric Fagan

[james_davis_nicoll]

Guess the publisher! No googling!

Bailouts and ambitious plans for recovery have failed to rescue the United States’ crumbling economy. The president takes a desperate gamble and strikes a bargain with China to write off America’s debt. It seems a brilliant move, until the Supreme Court is destroyed by a cruise missile in a shocking attack and Manhattan is invaded. China has come to claim what’s theirs. With American captives executed daily in national broadcasts by the attackers, the government in disarray, and US military forces shattered into local militias, all seems lost. Deep in the heart of Texas the American spirit lives on. John David Drury, a young, untried, but highly qualified “four-star general” of a scrappy militia, along with Molly Spitz, a highly-ranked graduate of the Air Force Academy, prepares to lead a strike against New York City.

Comments

[matgb]

Baen is the obvious and easy response, so I'm guessing you're pulling a fast one and it's a house not renowned for this sort of thing.

Tor.

[matgb]

*googles*

Too easy

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

Hmm. Starts with a B, right on the tip of my tongue...

Edit: Seems I was wrong. Not a sub-genre I am very familiar with.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

I'm a little dubious about the infantry leadership skills of an AF 2LT, regardless of how high she was in her class at the Academy.

[redxcrosse.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I would have guessed based on this description it was self-published by a recent AF grad...

[seawasp]

Speaking professionally I would guess that this must be a Baen book.

[seawasp]

Well well well, color me surprised.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Hmm... Bel Rey? Bace Books? BAW? BESFA Press?

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

"Deep in the heart of Texas the American spirit lives on."

And that ain't all that lives on. Unless you include "tolerance for the execution of the innocent" as "the American spirit".

Surely destroying the Supreme Court is irrelevant? Assuming there's still a Congress and President, there's a deep bench of Federal justices you can promote. If I wanted to strike at the heart of America and provoke fear, the Supremes aren't where I'd start.

[ckd]

Maybe that's what triggered this response. "American captives executed daily in national broadcasts by the attackers" might lead to "Hey, that's our job! Also, why didn't we think of televising them?"

[jsburbidge.livejournal.com]

Slytherin! Oops, I mean Baen!

My alternative reaction was along the lines of What is all this, I can't even --

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

Setting that stirring passage to banjo music would be undignified - for the banjo.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Baen, right? [googles] Oh, that's unexpected ...

[andrew barton (from livejournal.com)]

That is a shock, indeed.

WOLVERIIIIIIIIIIIINES

[jayblanc.livejournal.com]

You're just trolling to get me to post this again aren't you...

[jamoche]

Yup. Before clicking the comments link, my thought was "Where's that Baen image from yesterday?"

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

You wouldn't be asking if it were Baen, so I'm gonna go with Tor. They've been sliding to shit for a good long while now.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

*shakes head* When your plot's so out-o-whack that Clancy wouldn't touch it...

-- Steve's wondering if there really is a Deepinnaharta, TX, or if folks missed Bugs Bunny's softball.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

This isn't particularly more insane that Clancy's "And then Japanese fascist businessmen take over the government and use the JSDF to conquer a bunch of Pacific islands without any outcry from the Japanese public" novel.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Baen?

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Oh. It read SO like a Baen book.

[(Anonymous)]

Tor, because James Nicoll is setting up the assumption that it's Baen.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Well color me surprised!

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

Well, my second thought was right. (I discounted the first as being too obvious.)

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Imma gonna say the publisher that has become smug, hypocritical and superior to everything, while behaving more like a cult every year. It has three letters rather than four, but does not start with D, though the letter it does start with rhymes with both D and B.

It's probably the destruction of NYC -- i.e. meaning Manhattan -- that suggests that one to me and that according to the blurb the writer understands money and finance and the relationships of war and gold. China has no need to start a war over debt. For one thing they hold the largest gold reserve on the planet -- and they pretty much own Africa -- which is where the war zone already is and will only get worse. The U.S. is getting ready to move in. China owns all of Africa's resources! We gotta get 'em back!

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

NYC isn't destroyed, it's occupied. If you're trying to collect the collateral on the big loan you made, you don't set it on fire.

[kuritzky.livejournal.com]

Is it OK to read other people's comments before guessing?

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Before looking: Baen is too obvious, while Tor does seem to do well with right wing paranoia sci-fi as well, so I'm going for them.

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

My first response was "Vox Day's mom?"

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the President in the story will be, a thinly disguised version of Barack Obama, or a thinly disguised version of Hillary Clinton.

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

BTW, the author, Ken Shufeldt, sounds like his writing is at bad fanfic levels of quality. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=la_B005VHWC0S_B005VHWC0S_sr?rh=i%3Abooks&field-author=Ken+Shufeldt&sort=relevance&ie=UTF8&qid=1401396075

[redbird]

That blurb suggests a really weird idea of the Supreme Court, if nothing else. On a year-by-year basis, yes, it has major influence; that doesn't mean missing a few weeks would matter to many people. I suspect that if all nine justices were killed in a single attack, the president would send the senate three or four senators as nominees and say "get this done quickly so the terrorists don't win, we can get back up to nine judges later."

The only good thing about being unable to keep up with the things I want to read is that there's no danger of picking up this sort of dreck.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

Yup. I'm pretty sure if Manhattan was occupied by a foreign power, the news that the Supreme Court was killed in a missile strike would be about page A4 at best.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

If it isn't Baen it ought to be...

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Farrar, Straus and Giroux?