12-18-2025, 12:33 AM
Day 17: Young and Reckless
“New in Print: Manu Zhu’s Game”
The following article is reprinted with permission from La Sentinelle.
Perhaps due to the academic pressures felt by Laeralian students during their formative years, the micro-genre of the exam thriller is a regular current of Laeralian literature. Consider The One Percent Finisher, later adapted into a 2007 film, about an impoverished, scrappy schoolgirl who against all odds becomes one of the university entrance exam’s top scorers nationwide thanks to the lessons she’s internalized from the inhabitants of her tight-knit housing block. Fu Jianping’s I Am The King follows a sensitive, gifted schoolboy pushed nearly beyond his limits by a demanding tutor, while the 2019 thriller Suspicion depicts the faceoff between a student cheating ring and a vigilant exam proctor during an exam, with horrifying consequences.
With Manu Zhu’s Game (Aster Books, 2025), author Christophe Laine adapts this trope to the history world, telling the story of Vice Admiral Emmanuel “Manu” Yin through the lens of a little-known two-week wargame at a Carellon beach resort in 1953. Vice Admiral Zhu himself is a rather marginal figure among the pantheon of Great War heroes in Laeralian historical memory. Apart from a Laeralian Navy submarine and a high school in Enara, little is named after him. He has no great victories at sea associated with his name.
In fact, his greatest victory in battle, the one which turned the course of the Great War, involved no casualties at all.
June 1953: in the twilight of the Laeralian Republic, officers of the Laeralian Navy gathered at the Val-André Resort in Carellon for an exercise which would determine the branch’s future during what was fully understood to be the nation’s first great foreign war. Military shipbuilding is an exercise in long-termism—the timeline for design and construction of a new warship class is measured in decades. Amidst rising global tensions, military planners expected a war within ten years, likely one in which the navy would take center stage. Laine deftly describes the tensions within the Laeralian military establishment at this time, when growing global militarism raised the specter of a major war, but the nature and nationality of the enemy threat were largely uncertain.
Enter Emmanuel Zhu, a naval officer turned Defense Ministry official. In the late 1940s, Zhu, then a junior analyst at the Naval Bureau, had helped update classified plans for war with a variety of foreign adversaries. While undeniably talented, Zhu’s outspokenness and disregard for the consensus-based decisionmaking within the Bureau had made him something of a black sheep among his colleagues. In his work on Plan Marigold, envisioning a war with Juan Costa’s Slokais Islands, Zhu drew the ire of his superiors for suggesting that the existing plan was overconfident and based on faulty assumptions. His confidential paper “Marigold Revisited: In Favor of Drawing Down Wartime Projections for War with Slokais,” circulated through the Naval Board’s internal dissent channel, causing a significant stir.
In the aftermath of the furor, Zhu was transferred away from planning duties and placed in reserve. His career appeared permanently stalled, but in 1952 the aftermath of Hong Kuo-shu’s failed coup attempt led to over one in five naval officers being dismissed for suspected disloyalty. Zhu was returned to active duty, but with a permanent place on the enemies list of his Navy superiors. When in 1953, the Laeralian Navy began planning a major wargame to assess its readiness for a major war at sea, the unpopular Vice Admiral Zhu, marooned on the losing side of the Navy’s internal politics, was a natural choice to take on the role of the enemy side.
A wargame is a military simulation meant to model the course and outcome of a hypothetical conflict. The Navy’s June 1953 wargame at Val-André, as author Christophe Laine reveals, was anything but a fair-minded simulation. Instead, it was an immense trap intended to discredit Zhu and fatally damage his military career.
For two weeks, the Val-André resort would be taken over by teams of naval officers, who would simulate Laeral and an enemy nation carrying out a war at sea in the early 1960s, ten years hence. The officers representing each nation’s naval leadership would first determine which vessels they had constructed over the past decade, and then simulate a war by submitting written orders, aided by a team of impartial moderators responsible for adjudicating the outcome of each battle. Zhu was placed in charge of the team playing the fictional nation of Dahlia, a thinly-veiled stand-in for Darya; the remainder of the Dahlian team was composed of inexperienced junior officers and other political black sheep.
Against him, playing Laeral, were many of the Laeralian Navy’s best and brightest. Representing naval orthodoxy, many of the officers on the Laeralian team were affiliated with the so-called “Battleship Syndicate”—the dominant faction in pre-Great War naval thought, believing that any future naval war would be determined by the clash of large battleships with heavy guns, capable of dominating the ocean’s surface. The stakes of this wargame were high. Not only would the results shape the course of Laeral’s preparations for the Great War, but defeat in the game would likely doom Zhu’s own career.
As Laine charts out in Manu Zhu’s Game, Zhu’s team—mostly young officers and those who had drawn the ire of the influential Battleship Syndicate—came together under Zhu’s egalitarian style of leadership. Over planning sessions in resort guest rooms and in late-night walks on the beach, Zhu became known by the nickname “Manu” to his subordinates, and charted out a strategy that would allow them to evade professional doom. As the Dahlian Navy, superior in number and manufacturing capacity to Laeral’s, they concentrated on building up naval aviation and adopting a defensive “turtle” strategy rather than engaging the Laeralian fleet directly. Over the course of the simulation, “Dahlia” fought the Laeralian force to a draw, as the simulated Laeralian fleet took heavy losses but ultimately won out. Zhu’s critics in the Syndicate were in a triumphant mood, having shown how their favored super-battleships could fight a larger navy to a draw.
And then, for the latter half of the Val-André wargame, the two sides switched. Now in charge of the outnumbered and outgunned Laeralian force, Zhu’s team took on a different strategy. Slashing the production of large surface ships, their Laeralian team instead diverted resources to build a fleet of swift, stealthy submarines. Their goal: to inflict enough losses on the Dahlians’ powerful battleships to allow the smaller Laeralian Navy to triumph. As the simulated war played out over several days, it became apparent that the strategy had borne fruit. Multiple Dahlian dreadnoughts were sunk by well-placed torpedoes, some before they had even left harbor. When the smoke cleared, Manu Zhu’s Laeralian force had defied expectations and been crowned as the simulation’s victors.
The fallout from Val-André was swift. Despite political maneuvering by the Battleship Syndicate to insist that the wargame’s outcome was a fluke, Zhu’s “Submarine School” had burst onto the field with a bang. Over the course of the following years, Zhu and his allies successfully lobbied for a buildup in submarine and naval air forces, largely at the expense of planned battleships. When the long-dreaded Great War broke out in 1961, Laeral entered the conflict with perhaps the world’s most advanced submarine force, one which sent numerous large Pact warships to the bottom of the Albarine Sea, the Promethean Sea, and numerous other bodies besides.
Although Emmanuel Zhu would never again see the command deck of a warship, being confined to planning duties for the duration of the conflict, he had the satisfaction of the principles which he had laid out at the Val-André wargame a decade before being fully vindicated in the crucible of battle. In Manu Zhu’s Game, Christophe Laine charts out how exactly how this secluded simulation by the shores of Lake Xueyan—and in particular, one reckless, unpopular young commander—had laid the stage for victory at sea in the Great War.
“New in Print: Manu Zhu’s Game”
The following article is reprinted with permission from La Sentinelle.
Perhaps due to the academic pressures felt by Laeralian students during their formative years, the micro-genre of the exam thriller is a regular current of Laeralian literature. Consider The One Percent Finisher, later adapted into a 2007 film, about an impoverished, scrappy schoolgirl who against all odds becomes one of the university entrance exam’s top scorers nationwide thanks to the lessons she’s internalized from the inhabitants of her tight-knit housing block. Fu Jianping’s I Am The King follows a sensitive, gifted schoolboy pushed nearly beyond his limits by a demanding tutor, while the 2019 thriller Suspicion depicts the faceoff between a student cheating ring and a vigilant exam proctor during an exam, with horrifying consequences.
With Manu Zhu’s Game (Aster Books, 2025), author Christophe Laine adapts this trope to the history world, telling the story of Vice Admiral Emmanuel “Manu” Yin through the lens of a little-known two-week wargame at a Carellon beach resort in 1953. Vice Admiral Zhu himself is a rather marginal figure among the pantheon of Great War heroes in Laeralian historical memory. Apart from a Laeralian Navy submarine and a high school in Enara, little is named after him. He has no great victories at sea associated with his name.
In fact, his greatest victory in battle, the one which turned the course of the Great War, involved no casualties at all.
June 1953: in the twilight of the Laeralian Republic, officers of the Laeralian Navy gathered at the Val-André Resort in Carellon for an exercise which would determine the branch’s future during what was fully understood to be the nation’s first great foreign war. Military shipbuilding is an exercise in long-termism—the timeline for design and construction of a new warship class is measured in decades. Amidst rising global tensions, military planners expected a war within ten years, likely one in which the navy would take center stage. Laine deftly describes the tensions within the Laeralian military establishment at this time, when growing global militarism raised the specter of a major war, but the nature and nationality of the enemy threat were largely uncertain.
Enter Emmanuel Zhu, a naval officer turned Defense Ministry official. In the late 1940s, Zhu, then a junior analyst at the Naval Bureau, had helped update classified plans for war with a variety of foreign adversaries. While undeniably talented, Zhu’s outspokenness and disregard for the consensus-based decisionmaking within the Bureau had made him something of a black sheep among his colleagues. In his work on Plan Marigold, envisioning a war with Juan Costa’s Slokais Islands, Zhu drew the ire of his superiors for suggesting that the existing plan was overconfident and based on faulty assumptions. His confidential paper “Marigold Revisited: In Favor of Drawing Down Wartime Projections for War with Slokais,” circulated through the Naval Board’s internal dissent channel, causing a significant stir.
In the aftermath of the furor, Zhu was transferred away from planning duties and placed in reserve. His career appeared permanently stalled, but in 1952 the aftermath of Hong Kuo-shu’s failed coup attempt led to over one in five naval officers being dismissed for suspected disloyalty. Zhu was returned to active duty, but with a permanent place on the enemies list of his Navy superiors. When in 1953, the Laeralian Navy began planning a major wargame to assess its readiness for a major war at sea, the unpopular Vice Admiral Zhu, marooned on the losing side of the Navy’s internal politics, was a natural choice to take on the role of the enemy side.
A wargame is a military simulation meant to model the course and outcome of a hypothetical conflict. The Navy’s June 1953 wargame at Val-André, as author Christophe Laine reveals, was anything but a fair-minded simulation. Instead, it was an immense trap intended to discredit Zhu and fatally damage his military career.
For two weeks, the Val-André resort would be taken over by teams of naval officers, who would simulate Laeral and an enemy nation carrying out a war at sea in the early 1960s, ten years hence. The officers representing each nation’s naval leadership would first determine which vessels they had constructed over the past decade, and then simulate a war by submitting written orders, aided by a team of impartial moderators responsible for adjudicating the outcome of each battle. Zhu was placed in charge of the team playing the fictional nation of Dahlia, a thinly-veiled stand-in for Darya; the remainder of the Dahlian team was composed of inexperienced junior officers and other political black sheep.
Against him, playing Laeral, were many of the Laeralian Navy’s best and brightest. Representing naval orthodoxy, many of the officers on the Laeralian team were affiliated with the so-called “Battleship Syndicate”—the dominant faction in pre-Great War naval thought, believing that any future naval war would be determined by the clash of large battleships with heavy guns, capable of dominating the ocean’s surface. The stakes of this wargame were high. Not only would the results shape the course of Laeral’s preparations for the Great War, but defeat in the game would likely doom Zhu’s own career.
As Laine charts out in Manu Zhu’s Game, Zhu’s team—mostly young officers and those who had drawn the ire of the influential Battleship Syndicate—came together under Zhu’s egalitarian style of leadership. Over planning sessions in resort guest rooms and in late-night walks on the beach, Zhu became known by the nickname “Manu” to his subordinates, and charted out a strategy that would allow them to evade professional doom. As the Dahlian Navy, superior in number and manufacturing capacity to Laeral’s, they concentrated on building up naval aviation and adopting a defensive “turtle” strategy rather than engaging the Laeralian fleet directly. Over the course of the simulation, “Dahlia” fought the Laeralian force to a draw, as the simulated Laeralian fleet took heavy losses but ultimately won out. Zhu’s critics in the Syndicate were in a triumphant mood, having shown how their favored super-battleships could fight a larger navy to a draw.
And then, for the latter half of the Val-André wargame, the two sides switched. Now in charge of the outnumbered and outgunned Laeralian force, Zhu’s team took on a different strategy. Slashing the production of large surface ships, their Laeralian team instead diverted resources to build a fleet of swift, stealthy submarines. Their goal: to inflict enough losses on the Dahlians’ powerful battleships to allow the smaller Laeralian Navy to triumph. As the simulated war played out over several days, it became apparent that the strategy had borne fruit. Multiple Dahlian dreadnoughts were sunk by well-placed torpedoes, some before they had even left harbor. When the smoke cleared, Manu Zhu’s Laeralian force had defied expectations and been crowned as the simulation’s victors.
The fallout from Val-André was swift. Despite political maneuvering by the Battleship Syndicate to insist that the wargame’s outcome was a fluke, Zhu’s “Submarine School” had burst onto the field with a bang. Over the course of the following years, Zhu and his allies successfully lobbied for a buildup in submarine and naval air forces, largely at the expense of planned battleships. When the long-dreaded Great War broke out in 1961, Laeral entered the conflict with perhaps the world’s most advanced submarine force, one which sent numerous large Pact warships to the bottom of the Albarine Sea, the Promethean Sea, and numerous other bodies besides.
Although Emmanuel Zhu would never again see the command deck of a warship, being confined to planning duties for the duration of the conflict, he had the satisfaction of the principles which he had laid out at the Val-André wargame a decade before being fully vindicated in the crucible of battle. In Manu Zhu’s Game, Christophe Laine charts out how exactly how this secluded simulation by the shores of Lake Xueyan—and in particular, one reckless, unpopular young commander—had laid the stage for victory at sea in the Great War.