Dreamland is a book in the "technothriller" genre, where recent technical development let people do unexpected things in a geopolitical environment. I guess it somewhat touches on science fiction, but it is typically more based on secret military weapons than breakthroughs in physics knowledge.
In a way it is a successor, or spin-off to the Patrick McLanahan series, where the last book at the time had all the main characters fired for letting a spy in. Now the research centre, Dreamland, is also threatened as the end of the cold war has people talking about downsizing the military expenditures.
It is important to see the political landscape where this was written. It was published in June 2001, just months before the attack on the World Trade Center, and with the US in peace (except for "war on drugs"). Publishing a novel about a clash with Islamists might have seen like an eerie prediction but it is clear from the book that the author actually knew absolutely nothing about Islamists beyond what Fox News or the year 2000 equivalent of news entertainment and scaremongering told him.
It is easy twenty years later to point out all the errors, but I get the distinct feeling that the author either was intentionally ignorant or did not mind treating his readers as they are ignorant morons that will swallow anything. While I don’t mind books simplifying reality a bit, there are limits to what I find acceptable and this is way past those limits.
For instance, did the author not have access to maps? Having airplanes with a combat range of 700 km or so take off from Libya and fight over Somalia, 1,500 – 2,500 km away from the Libyan border, is just silly.
I would also like to know how the pilots in a falling plane with no engines experienced 4g. Normally in free fall the effective acceleration is zero g. Rotation of some kind? More likely the author again decided to treat his readers as ignorant morons. Especially since a weak limbed civilian technician walked around doing things in those 4g.
Then there is how the book describes women. "She said with her beautiful mouth", about one of the star scientists. It’s that super model nuclear physicist in the 1999 James Bond movie "The World is not Enough" again, isn’t it? I would have liked to see the author use the same adjectives about some male characters. It would be obviously laughable, but now it’s just sad.
And did I mention geopolitics? I.e. the politics controlling relations between states and state entities. In this book Iran is the bad boy, and the author takes the chance to put everyone annoyed with the US as partners or potential partners with Iran, a theocracy that is more of a threat to their countries than the US was. That is not how the world works!
Hmm, now I wonder if George W. Bush read this before the Iraq war. Or maybe he shared the same ignorant world view as the author.
I did read the whole Patrick McLanahan series up to this point even though it annoyed me at the end. I should have held on to that feeling rather than giving the author a second, or third, chance. It’s just that there are so few good techno thrillers around and I like the genre, but it has to be done at least reasonably well.