Harry Turtledove is known as the Master of Alternative History fiction. Many of his book series look very interesting. This isn't one of them. While his Worldwar
series is about aliens invading during world War II, and would've made a neat addition to my book list, I picked this one instead, which is about the South winning the Civil War and how that plays out to WWII, and it really bore no interest or relevancy to my timeline readings.
This series seems to be loaded with political and social commentary, all wrapped into Turledove's trademark militarism. I can only imagine that the drama of the primary characters relationships couched into meaningful twists on real life issues such as race, which is then couched into a whole lot of talk about battle strategy and tanks makes this both a thrilling read for war strategy fans who also take pride in being just a little literate about their warfare porn.
Not that I'm knocking the genre (much). I get people who fawn over chess, Stratego and shooting toy soldiers with rubber bands. I'm sure that part of my indifference to games and story of strategy are a result of a lack of understanding or education. But I also was brought up to be just a bit of a hippie, so... like, peace, man. And my daddy didn't play chess. As entertainment I don't mind violence. I found the battle scenes in Avatar
to be very exciting (if mostly for the special effects) and I love Apocolypse Now 
(but again, more for the overall cinematography than pure army violence). Clearly, the difference for me is adding a twist, be it aliens or humor or outstanding filmography. 
In this case I thought that the alternative history aspect would really make things exciting. But it just made things... different. The narrative is really quite straightforward and actually a bit boring in my opinion. I really thought such a prolific writer would bring his own style, but it basically came down to "It's WWII, but the South won the Civil War, so that's an extra thing going on."
I attest in this blog to being a hardcore reader who finishes what he started, but this was one of those rare cases where the library told me I couldn't renew the book, and I said, "Hey, that's just fine", and returned it the next day. I think I will give HT another try sometime, but I'll be careful to do my research better before I devote myself to another nine book series about people firing guns at each other.
Actually, the Balance series from HT is quite good. That's the WW2/alien invasion series and I found it a decent read. Never hit the Civil War one though, sounds like I didn't miss anything. Videssos series isn't to bad either (Roman legion sucked to magic world, hilarity ensues).
ReplyDeleteGood tips, I'll check those series out at some point in the future; they sound much better. I think I just picked the wrong book up off the shelf.
ReplyDeleteI was big into HT for awhile, being both a history buff and scifi/fantasy fan he was right in my wheelhouse. But at some point during one of the magic WWII books a flip got switched (or a switch got flipped) and I felt like both he and I were just going through the motions of the reader and writer relationship. I did really enjoy the Videssos series, though, and a similar theme was used by one of my favorite fun-reading authors, Jim Butcher, in his "Codex Alera" series. Butcher says the series idea came from a writing lab where people had to pick two fiction tropes out of a hat and create a story. He ended up with "Lost Roman Legion" and "Pokemon". Claims he was as surprised as anyone that he was able to make a legit series out of it.
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