I’m a sucker for hypothetical future war books. I don’t know why I find them so fun. Obviously I would not find it so fun if this actually happened.

From Amazon:

What will the next global conflict look like? Find out in this ripping, near-futuristic thriller.

The United States, China, and Russia eye each other across a twenty-first century version of the Cold War, which suddenly heats up at sea, on land, in the air, in outer space, and in cyberspace. The fighting involves everything from stealthy robotic–drone strikes to old warships from the navy’s “ghost fleet.” Fighter pilots unleash a Pearl Harbor–style attack; American veterans become low-tech insurgents; teenage hackers battle in digital playgrounds; Silicon Valley billionaires mobilize for cyber-war; and a serial killer carries out her own vendetta. Ultimately, victory will depend on blending the lessons of the past with the weapons of the future.

Ghost Fleet is a page-turning speculative thriller in the spirit of The Hunt for Red October. The debut novel by two leading experts on the cutting edge of national security, it is unique in that every trend and technology featured in the novel — no matter how sci-fi it may seem — is real, or could be soon.

The gold standard, for me, will always be Clancy’s 1986 Red Storm Rising, which was about a hypothetical U.S.-Soviet Union War. He tried to pull an encore of sorts in 2001 with The Bear and the Dragon, but it just wasn’t that great. A similar hypothetical U.S.-China war novel is 1999’s Dragon Strike, by Humphrey Hawksley, which was a little better than the Clancy version even though Clancy invented the genre (and you wonder if Clancy read Dragon Strike before he published his novel, or maybe had already written the novel and was annoyed someone beat him to the punch with similar subject matter).

One more future war novel I found interesting and thought provoking was Deep Sound Channel by Joe Buff. In that one, yet another German-led axis of evil arises. The novel focuses on the hypothetical use of nuclear weapons in fairly limited and tactical ways in naval and submarine warfare.

Maybe I like these books for the chance to put my petty everyday concerns and irritations in perspective.