OK, first of all, it’s taken me almost two years to get around to writing this thread, so my memory of the book’s gotten a bit hazy. Forgiveness, please.
I’d seen Harry Turtledove’s name thrown around both on these boards and in other places online in quite a positive light. He was considered the master of alternative history and whatnot, which sounded kind of interesting, so I filed his name away in the back of my head in the “stuff I want to check out sometime when I get around to it” file.
Then one day I found myself in a used bookstore, looking at one of his books. Specifically, “Into the Darkness”. “Groovy,” I thought to myself. I checked to make sure it was book one of a series (it was) and read the back cover, which said it was the story of a world war in a world where magic still worked. “Nifty,” I thought, and bought it, took it home, and read it.
That was the mistake. With the notable exception of L. Ron Hubbard’s dung-pile Mission Earth, this was one of the worst books I’ve ever read.
Firstly, it was notably unimaginative. Yes, it’s a world war in a land with magic and monsters and whatnot. So instead of shooting each other with guns, they have some sort of sticks (I forget what he called them) that fire death rays. Instead of airplanes dropping bombs, they have dragons that drop exploding eggs. Instead of submarines, they have sea monsters and magic spells that allow the rider to breathe underwater. Instead of roads, they have ley lines. Instead of tanks, they have big land monsters that they ride, armed with REALLY BIG sticks. You get the idea.
Even the overall plot was, I thought, derivative and predictable. There was a racial group that began to be ostracized and persecuted. There was a group of scientists that were working on an ultimate weapon - but it’s MAGICAL! Don’t forget that.
I mean, yeah, OK, it’s supposed to be an alternate history, but that doesn’t mean you can’t throw in SOMETHING original and interesting.
Secondly, and more damningly, it was just very very poorly written, I thought. It was extremely pedantic. He apparently felt he had to explain even the most obvious joke. A typical exchange that I just made up, because I can’t be bothered to dig up a real one:
“You better leave before the lieutenant sees you lounging around and assigns you to clean the latrines,” said Person A.
“Yes, I suppose you’re right, although it’s almost worth it,” said Person B.
They both chuckled, because they both knew that as relaxing as it was to be sitting on this beach, cleaning latrines was so unpleasant that it wasn’t even close to being actually worth it, and person A knew that person B felt that way as well, since they had both had latrine duty in the past, so that he understood the joking nature of his comment…
GET ON WITH IT!!! It wasn’t even funny to begin with, and after the fourth paragraph of explanation, any sort of enjoyment it may have originally contained has long since been wrung out. And he didn’t do that just with jokes, no. He did it to comments, plot points, arguments, reminiscences, and basically just about every other line in the book. After four or five hundred pages of this, it was a physical effort for me to finish the dang thing, and this is coming from a person that has NEVER failed to finish a book he’s started. Needless to say, I decided against finishing the rest of the trilogy.
So what is it? Did I just happen to pick his all time worst book out of many much better quality choices? Or is this just one of those things we’ll have to chalk up to differing tastes?
Either way, it’s going to take a LOT of convincing to get me to make another attempt at one of his books.