I just finished the new Harry Turtledove book, The Man with the Iron Heart. It was very disappointing. His speciality is alternative history. In this book, he imagines that Reinhard Heydrich survives the assassination that happened in real time and lives to set up a guerrilla operation in the "Alpine Redoubt." That was the big fear of Allied high command at the end of the war. So there are terrorist attacks, suicide bombings, car bombings and a lot of obvious parallels to Iraq. A peace movement springs up in America to protest the deaths in occupied Germany that parallels current events as well.
What originally attached me to Turtledove was his book "How Few Remain" which dealt with the world in which the Confederates won the Civil War. That was a great book that used real life figures in American History like General Custer and Teddy Roosevelt in interesting new ways. He expanded that time line into a series of about ten or twelve books that got progressively less interesting. I read them all, but it got to be a chore after a while. I think he has run out of inspiration. You can't stretch it out so long that you can't bring the spark to it.
This new book just tries too hard to move the alternative history time line to echo current events. It just doesn't ring true. It was fine to read on the subway, but not anywhere near his best work. He's starting to repeat himself. That's a problem a lot of authors have after a while. Or any artist for that matter. So don't pick this up as your introduction to alternative history or Harry Turtledove.
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That's a good point, vis a vis alternative history: The author really has to sell you on it.
I mean, 'cause, really, it's all preposterous. Post-apocalyptic stuff is hard enough, but imagining civilization goes forward with one element changed? Yow. The amount of work you'd have to do and your ability to mix probabilities that arise from certain social situations against what powerful individuals do--it'd be easy to get lazy, is all.
If the North loses the Civil War, industrialism proceeds apace, with Edison and Bell and all those guys, e.g., I would think, but no George Washington Carver.
A world without peanut butter! Can you imagine!
Implausible to say the least that an anti-war movement would have sprung up at the end of WWII to protest the U.S. continued prosecution of the war against a Nazi alpine redoubt.
After all, the Left in America, which did and does all the protesting and did and does determine the "news," then as now, were and are gungho for unconditional war so long as the enemy is fascist. by their lights all other wars the U.S. engages in are unjustified.
But ricpic, the liberals in this book were all for the US pulling out so the Soviets could move into the rest of Germany. It as though Julius and Ethel had control of our foriegn policy. Like I said, the book wasn't plausible.
He did much better with his World at War where the Americans and the Nazi's had to ally because they were fighting an invasion of lizards from outer space.
The idea of alternative history is to use historical characters performing in the way we think they would in changed circumstances. For example, during the eqivalent to WWI portion of Turtledove's epic, Therodore Roosevelt was president of the North and Wordrow Wilson was president of the South. George Patton was the main Confederate general while other big names fought on the North's side. As an avid student of history, I happen to find such things very interesting.
Yeah, I know. It sounds like fun. I don't think I've read one for several...decades...though.
I'll look up some of his stuff when I'm done with the Genghis books you recommended.
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