Fiction gets real . . .

. . .  in the South China Sea:

On June 21st Vietnam’s parliament passed a maritime law that reasserted the country’s claims to the Spratly and Paracel Islands. China called this a “serious violation” of its sovereignty. It responded by declaring that a county-level government which supposedly governs the two archipelagoes and much of the rest of the South China Sea from one of the Paracel Islands, had been upgraded to the administrative level of a prefecture. Chinese media described this notional jurisdiction, Sansha, as by far the biggest prefecture in the country 

The quote is from the Economist, which details tensions between Vietnam and China, mostly over oil.

One thing: The author says that neither county "wants this to escalate," a kind of standard journalist line that means nothing, especially in a story where he's spent most of his time giving indications to the contrary. What both countries want is for the other to back down. They probably don't want a victory in the dispute to cost them much in money or lives (not much of a guess), but I think it's safe to say that they're willing to push quite a bit more before they back down themselves.

Larry Bond and I describe one way this could go in Red Dragon Rising, our four-part series on an American proxy war with China -- where Vietnam is the proxy. The books are fiction, of course, but the Asian depression and the effects of climate change on the region we started writing about three years ago are already upon us.

Book Three, Shock of War, came out in hardcover earlier this year; the first paperbacks, in the large bonus size, will be out this December. We've just about wrapped up work on the final book, which should be published either at the very end of the year or beginning of next. (I'd post that cover, but we're still fiddling.)