July 15, 2027, 2:14 a.m. Taipei time. The siren sounds for the first time since 1996.
What Beijing has spent eighteen months preparing?banking on American exhaustion in the Gulf of Oman, on the hesitation of an isolationist president, on the vulnerability of an island that produces sixty percent of the world's advanced semiconductors?unfolds in forty-two simultaneous launches.
The Unleashed Dragon follows in real time the intertwined fates of those who wage this war and those who endure it: Captain Grace Y. Lin, firing her final coastal missiles three kilometers from the bunker where her son sleeps; General Zhang Rui-feng, advancing through the rice fields of Taoyuan while thinking of his son, killed on the first day; Jade Lin, an engineer at TSMC, smashing with a hammer what she spent ten years building; Huang Wei, resisting in the forests of Alishan long after the official surrender.
From Washington to Beijing, from Okinawa to the depths of the strait, this sweeping choral novel examines modern warfare in its technical, human, and moral dimensions.
And it poses a question with no easy answer: what remains of a victory when the island refuses to be subdued?
