The Zone: Hard Target by James Rouch

The Zone 1
Hard Target
by James Rouch

The Zone is a then-future war series set during World War III in the Zone, a stretch of Europe blighted by chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Interestingly it's not exactly post-apocalyptical, maybe more mid-apocalyptical.

A brief novel, we open with a tank battle, the middle has half the cast reconnoitering a refugee whorehouse while the others hang around, and ending with a raid on an underground tank garage.

The crew are a combined force of American and British troops fighting Russians in a hovertank called the Iron Cow. It's presumably written from the British point of view, or at least by a Brit, what with the US Armoured Infantry Division.

Like historical exploitation fiction, a lot of war fiction uses real life historical atrocities as a cover - "war is hell" and "that's the way it really was". Some of the more vicious stuff you get the feeling that the author, or the intended audience, have more of an attitude of "I wish I was in a war so I could do atrocities." The Zone is that kind of book.

The characters are similar to the Piccadilly Cowboy characters, ranging from amoral to psychopathic. They all have disdain for non-combatants and refugees and bemoan the fact that they can't mow them down. A good chunk of the text takes place in a whorehouse with descriptions of how diseased and disgusting the women are taking as much space as how horny the men get. I wonder if that's a particular British thing. I saw it in the Commander Amanda series, where they felt the need to counterbalance the sex scenes with shame and STDs.

When the series was reissued around 2012 it was marketed as alternate history

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