Field Dispatches
Research notes on EMP science, Cold War history, and the craft of military fiction, from the desk of P.S. Parsonson.
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June 22, 2026 • 7 min read
Every novel about service is a kind of promise. The writer promises the respect is real, the research is honest, and the people on the page are people, not action figures.
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Bored. With explosions. That sentence taught me more about pacing than any craft book ever did. Nonstop tension isn't tension. It's noise, and the reader stops hearing it.
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The cosplay can tell you the muzzle velocity and the radar designation. What it can't tell you is what any of that does to a human being. Readers feel the difference.
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The research I'm proudest of is the kind you'll never notice, because it dissolved into the story and left nothing behind but the feeling that this is how it would actually go.
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A report tells you a transformer can fail. A story makes you stand in the dark next to your kid and understand what that failure costs. That difference is the whole game.
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The easy version is the one you've seen in a dozen movies: a flash, a hum, and nothing works ever again. That's not what happens. The truth is faster, and worse.
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The night the streetlights died on Oahu, nobody knew why. The physics behind that 1962 test is real, it's in the public record, and it became the spine of the book.
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