Even though Donald Knox died before completion of this volume, Alfred Coppel did an excellent job in ever way of finishing it. In spite of the fact that the war became fairly static by the spring of 1951, it remains as compelling as the first 6 months of the conflict. If you read Vol.I you will want to read Vol.II.

This book, as its name implies, continues the groundpounding saga of the Korean War that started a year earlier. Many of the original cast of characters are back...Norman Allen's caustic letters to his mom, old soldiers from the Inchon landings and Pusan Perimeter in new terrain and with new regiments or companies...and the story line remains the same, too: climb hills, get killed, get pushed off, get killed, get hills back.
Unique Features of this book include:

.... the chapter on Korean War flying aces, and the air war in general. One can still feel the chill that must have gone down the spines of officials in Washington when Soviet MiGs first appeared in the skies over Korea; but it doesn't seem to have bothered John Bolt, the War's only Marine Ace, very much.

.... the chapter on Korean War vets who returned home to their hometowns; some to a hero's welcome, others to a country that had begun to change. I once heard a Korean War vet tell me he left to ragtime and came home to rock and roll. In any case, sometimes the publicity was a mixed blessing for the men, who just wanted to get back to their private and family lives.

A well-written alternative history by a science-fiction writer, this is the best of the fictionalized accounts of Operation Downfall. It skips over Operation Olympic (the invasion of Kyushu)and concentrates upon Operation Coronet (the invasion of the main island of Honshu). The emphasis upon a somewhat limited cast of characters, while necessary for dramatic effect, in a sense glosses over the horrific cost of the planned invasion of Japan. Potential American casualties were estimated at about a million, with four to ten million Japanese deaths. It is all too easy to forget that the estimated 180,000 deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki literally saved the lives of millions. This book paints a gory portrait of what might have been, and the horrors that the atomic bombs actually prevented.

What if the atomic bomb was not built in time? How would WWII in Japan have ended? How would Japan have reacted to landings on their home islands?

These questions are answered in this well-written novel by Alfred Coppel. The characters (both Allied and Japanese) are fully developed, and the story places them in rather interesting situations.

The story is extremely depressing, however, and leaves the reader wishing for a happier ending.

Great story for a movie.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many different people from various walks of life have found cause for celebration. Many, that is, except for those writers who saw in the demise of communism a loss of a worthy mine for stories that pitted the democratic West against the tyrannical communist bear. The grinning villains of the KGB and the sadistic officers of the GRU can now be found only in novels like THE DRAGON. Alfred Coppel's 1977 novel is typical of the military, techno-thriller genre so popular of that time. THE DRAGON is better than most of its ilk in that it has a full rogue's gallery of believable bad guys, many of whom battle each other as much as they do the hated democracies.
The introductory chapter is quite effective in setting the stage for later developments. One of the KGB's top operatives, Colonel Choy Balsan, is alone on horseback in Red China, seeking to find information about a supersecret laser cannon, the dragon of the title, so that he may destroy it. He fails in his mission, but he manages to radio its location to his superiors in Moscow before he is captured by Red Chinese soldiers. When Balsan runs out of bullets, Coppel's writing style effectively sets a manly prose style so lacking in others who try but fail to capture the essence of a man buying time with his life: 'It was then that he knelt, and drew the double-reflex horn bow of his ancestors. Five young soldiers of the People's Liberation Army fell with Mongol arrows in them, dying an archaic death as the armored vehicle, spitting machine-gun fire like some mythic Asian monster, rolled over Choy Balsan.'
Fully half of the book is from the perspective of the top leadership of the communist party. The First Secretary of the Soviet Union, Valentin Kirov, the absolute ruler of all the Russias, is a sick and dying man, but he knows not only of the danger posed by the Dragon but also suspects that his top soldier, Defense Minister Leonov, is plotting a coup. Yet, he does not see a connection between the two. Leonov plans to destroy the Dragon using nuclear missiles at his command from his base, thus presenting his boss with a fait accompli: follow up the limited strike on the Dragon with a general full strike on all of China's nuclear bases. The plot then involves the working out of his hopes. Along the way, the reader finds the expected sex scenes with full-breasted female Russian military officers seducing those who stand as a threat to Leonov. Further, the reader learns of the inner workings of the top leadership of the Chinese communist Politburo. There is plot, counterplot, assasination, and last minute strategies that will determine the fate of the world. Coppel manages to convince the reader that if history did not actually turn out the way that he says it might have, then the reader will easily accept the result of the last few chapters. Coppel is such a talent that when I finished his book, I felt that I knew his alternate reality better than I did the actual one, and that, I think, is the hallmark of any top-notch writer of fiction.

Glory, the first novel in the Goldenwing cycle, reads as though it had been written by one of the luminaries of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, such as Codrwainer Smith or Robert Heinlein. The book begins the story of a space-faring merchant sailing ship and its crew of humans and cyber-enhanced monkeys and cats. Mixing elements both antique and futuristic, the author weaves a tale of delightful technical wonder and familiarly human failures.

Although the title focuses attention on the ship itslef, Glory is really the tale of a young girl and her autistic-savant companion bth of whom will be recruited to the greatest adventure available to any human being: to become crew members of the light-sail ship Gloria Coelius. Set against the background of a stunted and regressive Afrikaner society isolated on a lonely, far-flung planet, the novel resonates with interwoven themes of cruelty, sadness, repression, wisdom and, finally, joy.

As the crew of Glory search for an ailing member of their crew, the Black Clavius, they become enmeshed in the family turmoil of young Broni and her friend, the deceptively slow-witted Bruele. As the crew of Glory struggles to understand a society inexplicably hostile to them, they lose one member of their crew and another is critically injured in a flare-up of local factional disputes. In the end, the two youngsters, each possessed of a staggering potential unsuspected by the population with whom they have lived their entire lives, render aid to the crew and are subswequently added as new members of the ship's company.

Underappreciated at the time of its release, Glory is an unsuspected gem of a read. Highly recommended!

This far-future novel is about the descendants of two groups of colonists from Russia on Old Earth. The first group, looking for religious freedom, spent ten years in cold sleep before arriving on one of two planets orbiting each other in the Ross 248 star system. They liked what they saw on Nineveh, and sent word home for another group of colonists. The ship carrying them was destroyed in a meteor storm in the Ross system, and the sleep capsules were launched into space, mostly landing on Nimrud, the second planet. They built a society of sorts on the desolate, barren hunk of rock, and after some years, asked to move to some unoccupied land on Nineveh. The Ninevites said No over and over; eventually Nimrud went to war over moving to Nimrud. Recurring every few years, the war has gone on for over a century. That is the situation facing Goldenwing Glory, the last of the great interstellar sailing ships. Sister to the ships that brought both sets of colonists, it is delivering an equipment order placed 200 years previously. Glory is aksed to be the venue for peace talks, but, of course, both sides have other plans for the ship. Coppel does an excellent job wih the society building in this novel, which is also a very good space opera. It's not a very fast-moving story, but it is very much worth the read.

Having never cognizantly lived through the cold war itself, I relished reading the novels of my father's time, which included Thirty-Four East as well as Dark December (which Amazon does not list). Coppel's very plausible storyline brings the reader into the heart of international conflict, giving you characters that might expect to meet yourself on the streets. This realism is what gives credibility to his writing.

Coppel's writings are essential for anyone that can remember East vs. West, political upheavels, and the secrecy of international intrigues.

Or wants to...

America's power has been humbled by a global tidal wave of terrorism. Its economic system is held hostage by a triumphant army of fanatics. Its leaders are paralyzed by indecision. Only one force remains to save the country and the world from total disaster. The Apocalypse Brigade.

Coppel's attempt to develop some suspense around the ticking of the Russian bomb planted in Canada fell short of the explosion that was planned. Very few of the book's characters (with the exception of the leading man and woman John Morgan and Anna Neville) had any depth or created any connection with the reader. The majority of the plot was predictable, and the wordy descriptions of unrelated events and happenings only dragged out the process of getting to the end. On top of clumsy dialogue and unneccessary quotations starting each chapter, Coppel has written a very uninteresting post-Cold War US/Russia thriller. The only thrill I had was finishing it.