It’s 1999, seven years since they dropped the nuclear bombs and devastated the world with chemical and biological warfare. The human race has known nothing but warfare ever since. The world’s population is in decline, all except for the nation of Israel where it continues to grow beyond sustainable means. Israeli mercenaries hire themselves out to fight wars for the major countries. Some of those troops end up in the U.S.A. This is the situation in the misleadingly titled The Texas – Israeli War: 1999 by Jake Saunders and Howard Waldrop. It is a short novel with a provocative premise, but a shockingly ordinary plot.
Actually the premise is completely bonkers. It all starts when Ireland doses the British government with LSD, setting off a chain reaction. The U.K. then attacks China and South Africa with nuclear weapons, Russia and Canada step in to defend the British, and China launches chemical and biological attacks on both nations. The chemical agents used by China get carried by wind across the border into America and decimate all the vegetation, natural and agricultural. Meanwhile Texas secedes from the United States and kidnaps the American president while the dopey Vice President runs the country as a dictatorship. The CIA hire a team of Americans, Israeli mercenaries, and disgruntled Texan nationalists who want Texas to rejoin the Union. Their mission is to invade Texas and rescue the president from a prison fortress while America seizes Houston and the oil fields on the eastern coast with the aid of the Cuban navy attacking from the Gulf of Mexico the way America seized Normandy in World War II. I’m not sure how the Cubans got mixed up in all this. Certainly Fidel and Che wouldn’t be too happy about this, but that is the story as told by the two authors. In the real world, anyhow, by 1999 the Cuban military probably didn’t have enough force to attack anything bigger than a college campus. Rack this book up as another science-fiction prediction that never came true.
Aside from the post-apocalyptic premise and a few minor details like tanks that shoot lasers and cockroaches that grow to the size of small dogs, there isn’t much of anything that is otherwise science-fiction about this whole venture. The plot is an ordinary military combat operation story and would mostly be the same regardless of the setting and where it takes place.
But the characters are written with sufficient depth to humanize them and make them interesting and sympathetic. Sol is an aging military commander from Israel and he has made marriage and retirement plans with his hot military cohort Myra Kalan. Another commander named Brown is a war weary African – American segeant who wants all the combat to end so he can experience the peace that he has never known. The Texan Mistra accompanies the tank platoon because, being a former member of the fascistic militant group the Sons of the Alamo, he has an intimate knowledge of the fortress layout where they hold the president captive.
On a technical level, this book is quite good. Although the plot is pedestrian, the suspense and narrative tension are done effectively. The action scenes are fast-paced and exciting. The characters are realistic and easy to relate to. The pacing is good and in terms of descriptiveness, there is a lot of imagery and world-building that works quite well; it reminds me of the bleak and desolate landscapes of J.G. Ballard novels. The biggest problem is the overbearing arbitrariness of it all. Why are the Israelis cast as the mercenaries? Soldiers from just about any nation would have worked just as well. My guess is that one of the two authors is Jewish, but that wouldn’t account for much in terms of the story. The novel over all doesn’t appear to be commenting on anything specific. The troops are diverse and multi-ethnic which is good; there is even a strong female character in Myra Kalan. The catastrophic environmental destruction and hellacious nature of the war make sense for a novel written during the Cold War and the Vietnam War era, a time when environmentalism was taking root in American society. The oil companies are greedy and evil while the Texan nationalists are vicious and Nazi-like. The authors have a definite Liberal streak. But these are small details of the story, not the main point of it all. And the way that Cuba comes to fight on the side of the U.S. federation gets no explanation either. This novel just doesn’t have any definite meaning when it seems like some kind of statement should be there.
The Texas – Israeli War: 1999 is an interesting and well-written book, but it lacks something substantial to make it truly great. It is an interesting precursor to the post-apocalyptic movie and fiction trend of the 1980s; think of the Mad Max cycle of movies and all the imitations it spawned. If you want to read this for fun, than go for it. If you are looking for something meaningful, don’t bother.
And regarding the Israeli soldiers fighting in Texas, that leaves only one question in my mind: what would Kinky Friedman think of all this?
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