Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #377509 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-29
• Released on: 2003-07-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 377 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This brisk, if conventional, entry in Brown and DeFelice's jargon-filled series of military thrillers (Dale Brown's Dreamland: Nerve Center, etc.) takes a team of high-tech pilots from Dreamland, an aerospace weapons-testing facility, to sea. Piranha, an underwater robot capable of surveillance and attack, opens its career by outmaneuvering a Naval carrier. It quickly graduates from the testing phase, however, when a crisis in the China sea erupts and a Dreamland team-including Col. Dog Bastian, his daughter Capt. Breanna Stockard and her husband, wheelchair-bound Zen Stockard-is assigned to keep an eye on the goings-on between India and China. The simple mission heats up when the Dreamlanders get into a fray with the Chinese, who are anxious to test some secret machinery of their own. The authors describe each advanced weapon in such detail that readers, had they the tools, could conceivably build their own arsenal. Though these details bog down the narrative at times, the story thankfully slams into overdrive midway through. All in all, the book's overwhelming number of acronyms may discourage new readers, but fans of the series should have no complaints.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Worth a read
I tried three times to get back into this novel. The early pages didn't really have much punch and consisted of too many characters, jargon and acronyms. Near the middle my persistence paid off and I couldn't put the book down. The flights were exciting and the combats (too few) were realistic.

The technology was quite believable and and always seen to work better than expected. You got the feeling that Dreamland really does exist!

One of the best Dreamland books I've read
India and China are getting ready to rumble. They have two fleets heading for each other. The Indian navy has a new weapon called Kali--a cruise missile that can be fired like a torpedoe thus hiding the attacking submarine.

However, a joint air force / navy group is testing an advanced underwater imaging system called Piranha. Naturally Dreamland and 3 Megafortresses are tagged to run the initial tests. WHen things heat up in the Pacific, they deploy Piranha to keep track of the opposing fleets and prevent the conflagration.

The story is set in 1997, and some of the technology described here might have already made its way from the drawing board to implementation. Clearly, recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq demostrate US technically superiority over everyone else.

This book is tightly written and real joy to read. There is absolutely nothing described here that isn't possible and that's what makes it so great.