P W Singer and August Cole's Reading List

"Cole: It was a game-changing book. It came out when I was about 12. I liked how it told the story from so many points of view, it felt like you were experiencing it firsthand. It had great technical information. It wasn’t literature but it was a hell of a good story – it inspired me and showed how you could make explaining real-world military technology a central part of the tale. It was definitely fiction that people in the government could read on Sunday and take to work on Monday. Singer: Tom Clancy was the master and Red Storm Rising was written at the height of his game. The reading experience was addictive – we both remember reading it on our summer vacations. I was reading it on the way to the beach in the back of a station wagon and later on, on a sunny day, I stayed inside to finish the book. You talk to generals now who were junior officers then who had that same experience. We wanted to recreate that for people – that addictive summer beach read. “It was fiction that people in the government could read on Sunday and take to work on Monday.” It’s the definition of a techno-thriller. You feel like you’re learning about things that felt super exciting. He was talking about the stealth fighter two years before the US admitted it had them. We tried to do the same – pulling from DARPA reports, contract announcements–to give insight into what’s coming next. Yet, in Clancy’s book, all the technology, all the weapons work as planned. That was its biggest failing in terms of realism. We wanted to play with that and have fragile technology for Ghost Fleet."

"Singer: Sir John Hackett was a general at the time. His 1982 novel [ The Third World War: The Untold Story ], looked at what would happen if the NATO and Soviet war plans interacted. It was incredibly influential in the military at the time. In Team Yankee, Coyle takes one of the battles within this overall fictionalized war [and uses it as a starting point,] playing it out at the company level: what would happen for his small unit of soldiers. It was a more realistic version of what Tom Clancy was doing. Cole: You’re getting this deep dive into the life of this armoured officer. In the 1980s, units in M1 Abrams tanks were in the vanguard, holding back [Russian-led] Warsaw Pact forces. It had details that only someone with the personal experience of Coyle would have. It also talked about family life, an aspect often overlooked in this genre."

"Singer: It’s the quintessential Cold War story. It’s utterly haunting. It captures so well the madness of MAD: mutually assured destruction. By not playing it out at the level of the generals and the White House Situation Room, but instead [focusing on] one submarine crew and the civilians they interact with, it brings it down to the personal level. It shows the craziness of this mutual suicide pact that the entire world willingly or unwillingly signed up to. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Cole: The question of the human experience after the nuclear holocaust is really hard to write about. It was an emotional window into mass extinction, particularly on the dual loyalties of family and nation. What makes it relevant today is that it is such a powerful meditation on dying."

"Cole: In World War Z , you have this idea of resiliency and not submitting to something incomprehensible; humanity trying to figure out how to do something really hard together. Telling this story from so many points of view reinforces Brooks’ desire to say that this modern society we experience is really fragile. It’s really about something more than a zombie takeover, it’s about questions of what it means to live together in a prosperous and stable world. “He offers a fresh look at the zombie genre by knitting it into our real world.” Singer: He offered a fresh look at this zombie genre by knitting it into our real world. His characters react as we think they would. He uses the multiple perspectives format, which is challenging to write but as a reader I really enjoy it as you get to experience the war [through the eyes of] multiple characters. Because it’s so realistic, it fits into the category of a ‘useful’ read; I love the way he plays with how bureaucracies are resistant to change and bad information. This is significant not just when dealing with zombie outbreaks but, for example, in how the US military and government handled the early years of the Iraq war. Also, the audiobook is just great. An amazing listen."

"Cole: Kevin Costner was in a bad movie version of this… The themes that underlie the book are reasonably positive: the way the characters deal with their duty to each other, at a community level – in the story of post-apocalyptic survivors eking out a civilised existence – and what technology means to us. It explores questions of how much faith we should put in computers. It has a lot of value for the decades ahead. Singer: I will defend the film! For whatever reason, it’s constantly on cable TV and – for whatever reason – I can’t help myself. “It’s not just war, but how people react to it that determines the fate of society.” But the book is different in lots of ways. It’s not just the war, but how people react to it that determines the fate of society, whether we stick together or collapse. It also puts its finger on something we’re experiencing right now, the danger of some people who welcome the chaos. People who claim to be patriotic, but want to tear everything down. Yet this is a book written in 1982. One of the other powerful messages in it – is that what keeps us together is an idea. What is the US? It’s our belief and faith in it. This is a system that is getting challenged today. Like all great fiction and science fiction, it has the underlying themes that make you think and retain its relevance decades after it was written."