_The Square Deal_ by David Drake
Subtitled (or maybe supertitled) "Car Warriors #1", and based heavily on Steve Jackson Games' "Car Wars" game. The novel is set somewhere in the midwest, but more broadly the setting is Car Wars' "Autoduel America": A global and suspiciously simultaneous grain blight destroyed a huge part of the world's food supply in 2012 (note that the original game and its chronology were written in 1981), resulting in widespread famine and (due to the suspicions that someone did it on purpose) a limited nuclear exchange. Not a nuked-back-to-the-stone-age kind of exchange, but of course even a "limited" use of nuclear weapons is going to kill a lot of people and render a lot of land uninhabitable. To say nothing of the people who died in the famine.
By the time we get to the time period of the story -- the 2030's -- the vast majority of the US has come to resemble the wild west, if the wild west had 20mm gatling guns and armor-plated cars to mount them on. What there is of the federal government has become entirely incapable of enforcing law on any meaningful scale, so towns and cities have largely become fortresses, and you're really only as safe as you're able to keep yourself. As a result, armor plating and weapons are now available from the factory on most cars, and nobody who isn't in one of the *very* few truly safe areas would dream of going on the road unarmed.
(Yes, this setting is a little bit absurd. But, as its main purpose is to give a setting where people spend a lot of time in heavily-armed cars trying to blow each other to pieces, it does its job pretty well.)
The actual novel ... isn't so bad. And I think it does a really impressive job of capturing what Car Wars feels like -- little bits of plot spread out through lots and lots of frenetic automotive combat. And, as in Car Wars, most of the fights are brutish and short. Car Wars runs on a five-phase-per-second time scale, so even though the game might take two hours, the actual *combat* it's simulating is generally over in under 30 seconds. The fights in the book aren't quite *that* quick, but not a one of them is what you might be tempted to call a drawn-out affair. And that's fairly impressive, given that the author wasn't a Car Wars player and, indeed, doesn't have a lot good to say about the game or the people who made it.
So, in short, I guess I'd recommend this book -- slightly -- to people who played (or play) Car Wars and would enjoy seeing it in prose. Or if you're looking for a plain old, knock-down, drag-out, damned-near-everybody-dies-ugly combat book.
By the time we get to the time period of the story -- the 2030's -- the vast majority of the US has come to resemble the wild west, if the wild west had 20mm gatling guns and armor-plated cars to mount them on. What there is of the federal government has become entirely incapable of enforcing law on any meaningful scale, so towns and cities have largely become fortresses, and you're really only as safe as you're able to keep yourself. As a result, armor plating and weapons are now available from the factory on most cars, and nobody who isn't in one of the *very* few truly safe areas would dream of going on the road unarmed.
(Yes, this setting is a little bit absurd. But, as its main purpose is to give a setting where people spend a lot of time in heavily-armed cars trying to blow each other to pieces, it does its job pretty well.)
The actual novel ... isn't so bad. And I think it does a really impressive job of capturing what Car Wars feels like -- little bits of plot spread out through lots and lots of frenetic automotive combat. And, as in Car Wars, most of the fights are brutish and short. Car Wars runs on a five-phase-per-second time scale, so even though the game might take two hours, the actual *combat* it's simulating is generally over in under 30 seconds. The fights in the book aren't quite *that* quick, but not a one of them is what you might be tempted to call a drawn-out affair. And that's fairly impressive, given that the author wasn't a Car Wars player and, indeed, doesn't have a lot good to say about the game or the people who made it.
So, in short, I guess I'd recommend this book -- slightly -- to people who played (or play) Car Wars and would enjoy seeing it in prose. Or if you're looking for a plain old, knock-down, drag-out, damned-near-everybody-dies-ugly combat book.