The Harry Turtledove alternate history series continues while I work on new stuff.

Raw Feed (2003): American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold, Harry Turtledove, 2002.

This book exhibits the usual strengths and weaknesses of what has been termed Turtledove’s “worm’s eye view” of history. Through sheer volume, he fully develops several of his characters and creates a sense of realism about his alternate world.

What this technique often lacks is high drama. We never get long descriptions of important events. For instance, Sam Carsten is present when the war between Japan and the United States break out. But, just as it gets interesting, we cut away and see Colonel Morrell discussing the naval battle with his wife.

Some of the stories seem to continue on the basis of sheer inertia and because they involve characters from earlier books. For instance, not much is revealed about the world by continuing to follow Lucien Galtier in the Republic of Quebec, not even after his wife dies. The same holds mostly true for continuing to follow Nellie Jacobs, her husband, and children — though Turtledove does an effective scene where some Confederate officers visiting Washington DC calmly declare their attention to avenge themselves on the USA. He also has a rather gratuitous scene where Hal Jacobs and his son-in-law fail to make the connection between tobacco and its bad effects. (I say gratuitous because I’ve heard Turtledove say that several people have actually complained about the prevalent use of tobacco in his stories.)

In fact, there are several bits where Turtledove can’t resist winking at his audience and breaking the mood a bit by alluding to our contemporary world: a character thinking climate is just too complex to say that the massive artillery barrages have changed the climate, calling Jake Featherston’s radio network the “wireless web” (perhaps a way of reminding us that the Internet is not the first communication media to change lives drastically), complaints about Congress trying to ban a solvent as dangerous, and, of course, many references to rampant speculation which is entirely consistent with including a version of the Great Depression and preceding stock market crash.

A curious lapse — I suspect an editor’s influence — is that the romantic relationship between Anne Colleton and Clarence Potter is not depicted. The first we hear of it, it’s already over.

As with his Basil Agroyos stories, you can complain that Turtledove too often insists on repeating history. Would a stock market crash really have happened around 1929 if Socialist policies would have been in effect in the USA? Calvin Coolidge conveniently drops dead after being elected, and Herbert Hoover is inaugurated as President Blackford’s successor. (Part of me suspects Blackford comes from Dakota because Turtledove suspects no one knows the history of their senators. He also gets Dakota’s weather a bit wrong in claiming its humid in the summer.) On the other hand, Turtledove is less guilty of that in this book than others. The war in the thirties between Japan and the USA has no analog in our history. He also has no Dust Bowl. It is also interesting to see the USA contemplate war not only with the Confederate States of America but also Kaiser Germany and Japan. (Japan came be a much greater power in this world because, since there was no Spanish-American War, and the US never developed a Pacific empire.) There is also no Panama Canal. Russia has not gone communist, and France and England and the CSA have thriving fascist parties. And, of course, the all too plausible Mormon unrest in Utah continues.

This is a grim book. Jake Featherston long ago ceased to be a sympathetic character, but his rise to power is completed by novel’s end when he is inaugurated CSA president. Anne Colleton, already arrogant and unlikeable, sells her soul to the Freedom Party. Other characters loose our sympathy. Hipolito Rodriguez becomes a Freedom Party thug as does Jefferson Pinkard. We genuinely begin to fear for Scipio’s life and that of Clarence Potter. The former because he’s black in the CSA, and the latter because he has publically opposed the Freedom Party and has even gone so far as to contemplate assassinating Featherston.

Turtledove has some fun with some cameo appearances by disguised and barely disguised historical figures. The vitriolically anti-Semite sergeant who accompanies visiting German officer Heinz Guderian (one of the inventors of the blitzkrieg in our world) on a tour of occupied Canada seems to be Adolf Hitler. Ernest Hemmingway, here rendered impotent by a war wound on the Canadian front, helps Sylvia Enos write her memoirs. Robert Howard seems to be writing for the aviation pulps. Samuel Clemens’ daughter is a reporter, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt is an assistant secretary of war.

The books ends with fascism looming almost everywhere in the midst of a worldwide depression. (Turtledove effectively communicates the desperation of those trying to survive the Depression.) And the hints — and Turtledove’s authorial proclivities — point to Featherston initiating genocide against the CSA’s blacks.

More reviews of fantastic fiction are indexed by title and author/editor.

I continue looking at Harry Turtledove’s long Great War series.

Raw Feed (2002): American Empire: Blood and Iron, Harry Turtledove, 2001.

This novel exhibits the sometimes, by their repetition, annoying stylistic tics of Turtledove, especially when it comes to characterization. Tongues are frequently stuck out to express mock disdain, and there is too much intrafamily mock banter of a teasing sort — at least in the happy families.

The McGregor family, miserable over the execution of their son, Alexander, by American authorities is decidedly not given to banter. Arthur McGregor’s bitter quest for vengeance on war hero General George Armstrong Custer, is blackly comic given its repeated failures. Custer escapes his bombs by, once, breaking the plate of his denture and unexpectedly leaving a restaurant before McGregor’s timed charged goes off. Another time Custer, in his infuriating way of being right sometimes when no one else is (his aide, Abner Dowling finds this trait very annoying), suspects McGregor when intelligence experts do not and prepares for a confrontation with McGregor when travelling to the latter’s hometown on a farewell tour before his forced retirement. His preparation pays off and kills McGregor when his own bomb is literally thrown back at him.

The other character who dies off here is the unlikeable, but competent, Roger Kimball. After becoming a leading light in Jake Featherston’s Nazi-like Freedom Party, it is revealed that he is guilty of war crimes in deliberately, as a sub commander, sinking a US ship after an armistice was declared. Sylvia Enos, widow of one of the men on that ship, shoots him — after the unlikeable Anne Colleton, lover of Kimball, works him over after he tries to rape her. Continue reading →

I continue with reviews of Harry Turtledove’s Great War series.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, you can find plenty of information on Turtledove’s works at Steven H. Silver’s Harry Turtledove website.

Raw Feed (1999): The Great War: Walk in Hell, Harry Turtledove, 1999.

In this alternate history series and Turtledove’s Worldwar series, Turtledove’s narrative technique of giving a worm’s-eye view of events has certain advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, constantly viewing events in these alternate history series from the viewpoint of several characters not only is a copy of the large cast, multiple viewpoint, fast paced style of some bestsellers, but it also means each scene advances plot and, usually, characterization (especially since both series are heavily preoccupied with the changing racial attitudes of their characters). The negative aspect is that we never get epic, omniscient, godlike perspectives of the kind seen in so many disaster novels or in an alternate history like, say, Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (my favorite alternate history). Battles for cities and countries are cramped into the limited perspective of this technique; important, epic events are covered in a sentence frequently. For instance, we only find about out about the war between Argentina and Chile in a few sentences. In a previous novel of the series, we got a cramped perspective on the taking of Washington, DC (courtesy of Nellie Semproch). It would be nice, at times, to get the big, epic picture (the closest we come is US General Staff discussions).

This is a middle book in the series and little is resolved. Even the Red Rebellion in the South that began at the end of the previous book isn’t concluded here. Cassius, at novel’s end, is still conducting a last ditch guerilla campaign in the swamps for his Congaree Socialist Republic. The only character from the first novel that dies is Paul Mantarakis. I suspect Turtledove killed him off (after his viewpoint showed us the interesting suppression of the Mormon rebellion – Mormon uprisings being a believable and interesting part of this series) just to prove his characters are always in danger. Oddly enough, he switches to Gordon McSweeney (a fellow platoon member of Mantarakis) as a viewpoint character. McSeeney is a humorless, self-righteous, and rather frightening religious fanatic of the Presbyterian persuasion. (Presbyterians are usually not thought of as radical, and this may be Turtledove’s first use of a stock sf character – the religious fanatic. He usually treats religion matter-of-factly if not sympathetically.) Continue reading →

While I’m posting Harry Turtledove material, I might as well fill in some holes in my coverage of his long alternate history series that began with How Few Remain.

Incidentally, since this is entirely an alternate history of the Great War, it’s not going to be covered in my World War One in Fantastic Fiction posts.

Raw Feed (1999): The Great War: American Front, Harry Turtledove, 1998. 

Turtledove uses his usual technique of a multitude of characters to provide a variety of views in this novel about the American front of an alternate WWI. This technique, with its rapid alternation between viewpoint characters, makes this thick book read fast, but I had a few quibbles.

First, with the exception of Woodrow Wilson, George Armstrong Custer, Theodore Roosevelt (Wilson and Roosevelt are presidents of the Confederacy and USA, respectively), and Leonard Wood – all briefly glimpsed and none viewpoint characters – we see no historical characters, just fictional ones. Some of the internal dialogue of characters verges close, but doesn’t cross the line, of excessive folksiness. Also, we get few scenes of combat and then those scenes are not that detailed. Also, we get no viewpoint characters who are combatants from European powers.

Still, Turtledove uses his characters well to show most aspects of the war (including the scenes of Cherokees, solid members of the CSA, fighting with Confederate officers) and not just naval and land and air combat but the various ways civilians react including sabotage, espionage, and collaboration when conquered. But the most powerful and disturbing bits are the visions of a USA, under the influence of its German ally (it’s amusing to hear Roosevelt’s support of German culture given our history), become, since the Second War Between the States, a bureaucratic, paper-laden tyranny. Second is the influence of Marxism in both the US and CSA. In How Few Remain, Lincoln spread the word of Marx and, it’s revealed here, his actions ultimately led to the socialists splitting off from the Republicans. They have to decide, in typical Marxist fashion, that Britain and France are more reactionary than the Kaiser. In the CSA, slaves and Southern factory workers in the aristocratic South (the most dislikeable character is a rich Southern belle named Anne Colleton) understandably embrace Marxism, and the novel ends with the beginning of an armed black uprising.

More reviews of fantastic fiction are indexed by title and author/editor.

While I’m off reading weird fiction for LibraryThing discussion, reading magazines, making notes for new entries, and binge watching The Great War YouTube channel, here’s another entry for another book in Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar universe..

I’m sure tags will point you to other entries in this very long series.

Raw Feed (2000): Colonization: Down to Earth, Harry Turtledove, 2000.

The second and enjoyable installment in Turtledove’s Colonization series packed some surprises: the Germans foolishly provoking war against the Race (and getting nuked big time), the Race taking a cue from Islamic history and taxing those who won’t revere the Lizard Emperors (which, of course, they don’t see as superstition unlike human religions) and being surprised that humans would object, and Sam Yeager (though this is not explicitly stated, only darkly hinted) uncovering evidence that the US launched a surprise nuclear attack on the Race at the series’ beginning.

As with his Great War series, Turtledove adopts a worms-eye view of events. When war breaks out between the Germans and the Race, I wanted a big screen view of events. Instead, we just see how the various characters we’ve been following see the war and are affected by it. However, Turtledove’s characteristic style and method for these alternate history novels has its own advantages. Turtledove, amongst all the chunks of dialogue and internal monologues (which make his books so palatable and quick reading), manages to track the personal nature and consequences of his characters’ problems. Monique Dutourd is coerced into sexually servicing Nazi Dieter Kuhn and, perhaps, learning hard lessons about life from her smuggler brother; Johannes Drucker continues to be a loyal soldier despite almost having his beloved wife carted off to a death camp; Lia Han begins to question her fanatical communism; Rance Auerbach, however, doesn’t really question his attitude toward blacks even after being forcibly relocated to South Africa though he wonders about his girlfriend. It was also nice to see Goldfarb have a bit of luck (and the aid of his old comrades) and land in Canada’s high tech industries. Characters questioning their religious and racial prejudices is a big element in Turtledove’s Great War, Worldwar, and Colonization series.

I liked Moshie Eeuven ponder converting Lizards to, presumably, Judaism. I particularly liked cross-species friendship between Lizard pilot Nesseref and Jewish leader Mordechai Anielewicz and his son and also between Sam Yeager, who, against orders, is taking a personal interest in discovering who launched that sneak nuclear attack on the Lizards. Exiled Shipleader Straha realizes that he considers Yeager a friend when he ponders informing the Race that Yeager is covertly racing two Race hatchlings as humans. This is a counterpoint to Ttomalss’ raising of human Kassquit from infancy. The book derives some humor from Ttomalss trying to sort out the influence of genetics from culture. His relation with Kassquit is similar to a human father with a teenage daughter (and somewhat mirrored by Johnathan’s Yeager’s relationship with his parents), and he labors under the impression that surely a human child isn’t as ungrateful to its human parents. Continue reading →