Harry and me -- largely, parting of ways seen

Cafe Society
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I’ve been a longtime “love-hate semi-fan” of Harry Turtledove – concerning which thing I sometimes fear that I bore fellow-Straight Dope-participants, more than is welcome.

A poster on the Khadaji’s Whatcha reading thread for June this year, mentioned his being in the process of reading a new (2018) Turtledove novel, In Darkest Europe – not hitherto heard of by me. His description: “set in an alternative near present when North African and Middle Eastern Muslim nations are a progressive and relatively peaceful First World and Europe is backward, hyper-violent and fundamentalist”. Unheard-of till then, by me: interest piqued, I acquired a copy.

Having read the book: I spent some time composing a colossal-length essay on my thoughts about IDE and the author’s ways in general; then realised that as a post it would likely elicit from most readers, the tl/dr reaction.

Doing very best for brevity and succinctness: while the book was in itself an agreeable-enough read – it had me concluding as follows. Turtledove – aside from his lesser writing quirks, which drive some to fury / some can live with / some, perhaps, actually like – is, while a creative author of some talent, essentially a rather lazy one; casting doubt IMO, on his often-heard “modern master of alternate history” accolade. He can, and sometimes does, use his own imagination and come up with material of actual not-happened-before originality; but it would seem that the majority of the time, he takes the easy way of either straight re-telling of “this world” events, only under a different guise; or direct “flipping-over” of actual history – as with this latest (promising to him, I feel, a bunch of easy-to-write sequels), where “the post-Christian world is the Muslim world, and vice versa”.

Kudos to Harry for being able to churn out such a huge volume of stuff, and have a multitude of devotees of it, and laugh all the way to the bank; but at the risk of being regarded as an elitist snob: I have a bit of a feeling in this, of being “had for a mug” by him. Quite fun reading, if you can cope with his authorial traits; but: a tendency to reckon that, with the necessary swotting-up, one could do as well oneself… I feel, perhaps perversely, unwilling for the sake of the only moderate pleasure of reading his foreseen future “Darkest Europe” books (or anything else he might come up with), to contribute to his personal gravy train. Am figuring that I’m at a parting of the ways with any of Mr. Turtledove’s future writing.

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I have tried to read and like Turtledove, based on how many people like him and interesting storylines. Your statement here summarizes my feelings about his writing.

I’ll also add that he includes very few women, which I found unrealistic. I presume he didn’t find many when he was researching his topic.

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God yes. One of my step-brothers introduced me to the Videssos novels. He, like myself, is a long-time sf/fantasy fan and as an experienced reader he was a big fan of the apparent world-building in them. But then he’s a math/computer guy, not a history guy. I on the other hand, while sorta enjoying parts of the story, kept shaking my head. I mean it is the late Byzantine empire with magic. Blatantly. With every single faction and even the fucking geography being a straight/flipped copy( with magic! ).

I found it a little grating. They’re not bad books at all and if I hadn’t read a fuck-ton of Byzantine history I’m sure I’d have enjoyed them more. I’ll give him a modicum of credit for hitting on a winning formula. I mean how many readers have read a fuck-ton of Byzantine history? Probably not many.

So I would no means call him a hack - his books are entertaining enough. But he’s lazy as hell.

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This thread is like a heads-up warning for me. Thanks guys!

Just this week I discovered Turtledove at my library and started reading How Few Remain. I’m only about a hundred pages in, but so far I like that he does a “retelling” or “flipping over” of actual history. The fact that he is dropping in just about anybody who was anybody in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, like he is the Forrest Gump of authors, is a bit worrying.

The Videssos novels, which I found out about when googling Turtledove after coming home with How Few Remain, really had me intrigued as I really have read a “fuck-ton”, no - make that a metric fuck-ton, of Byzantine history. It looks like I will have to read a chapter or three before committing to the Videssos trilogy. I can deal with a suspension-of-belief setup, but fantasy/magic does nothing for me.

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Would you be referring here to In Darkest Europe, rather than Turtledove’s work more generally? I have the impression that overall, when he’s not writing about highly male-dominated societies, he features plenty of impressive female characters.

I’ve always greatly liked HFR – but yes, it is a bit like that. Much the same thing applies to George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books: but one recognises that those are basically satire and burlesque – strict credibility re “probable-ness” of who might have been where and when, are not what they’re about.

Re Videssos (per Tamerlane and Bayaker) – I’ve quite long been aware (though discovered the fact, after I’d read the Videssos novels) that the whole lot is “cribbed” from real-world Byzantine history. As it happens, I know almost nothing about real-world Byzantine history. I loved the novels; and I suspect that I’d have loved them almost as much anyway, even knowing that they were a rip-off from what really happened. (SDMB’s maxim notwithstanding; ignorance can be bliss !)

For me anyhow – I suspect that enjoying Videssos, is helped by the action supposedly taking place a couple of millennia ago: there isn’t all the modern technology which in certain other works of Turtledove’s, he has to strive mightily to replace with magic and / or trained giant beasts specific to the universe concerned. 1 A.D. technology, helped out a bit by magic (which in Videssos IIRC, is exhausting to practice, and can’t lightly be used as a short-cut), I was able to be happy with.

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I enjoyed his Worldwar series (WW2 is happening pretty much as we all recall it, until the aliens arrived) despite the one utter absurdity of the premise: the aliens had sent a probe to Earth a thousand or so years ago, seen that we would be no match for them, assumed human society would change as slowly as theirs did… and sent a slower-than-light invasion force to take over, not getting any additional intel along the way. Hella shock for the aliens, to see how much we’d evolved technologically speaking, that we were not much behind them, and that we were not gonna take it lying down.

I read a standalone (I hope!!!) tale a couple weeks ago, called Hail! Hail! Premise: the Marx brothers get zapped back into 1826 Texas at the beginning of the Fredonian Rebellion. Don’t waste your time.

I don’t mind that he includes real historical people: they would have been present in the world already at the point of diversion from our timeline, and if they were known in our history texts, they would probably be pretty active even after the POD.

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Thank you.
You cannot just file the serial numbers off history and present it as your own stories.

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Why not? If you were the one getting the checks would you turn them down?

I don’t like all of Turtledove but there are many I enjoy, especially the Videssos novels. And the shorter stories of Basil Argyos, in an alternate history of Byzantium, are fun. The mention’s of Basil’s favorite saint, St. Moamet. are intriguing. There is no God but the Lord, and Christ is his Son."

Ruled Brittania was moving, to me at least. My favorite moment was when Will Shakespeare stepped forward to deliver the closing lines of the play “No epilogue here unless you make it, If you want your freedom go an take it!”

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Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

Historical fiction and alternate histories are pretty much required to include real people and events, with the fictional part wrapped around them. Otherwise, it would be just plain old fiction, and lose most of its appeal.

What would Gore Vidal’s Burr be without the title character’s life being common knowledge? The way Vidal weaves a story around well-known facts is what makes it great.

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I mostly delighted in the Worldwar series (except for the utterly awful final volume Homeward Bound). Will confess to being weak on science – is the situation as you describe it, actually that absurd and super-unlikely? As Turtledove “writes” the Lizards, a hampering trait of theirs is that they’re not very imaginative: feel that I can accept their not seeing any need for additional up-to-date gen…

Not heard of this one, hitherto – it does indeed sound beyond-ghastly, and to be avoided !

And Bayaker writes: “…alternate histories are pretty much required to include real people and events…Otherwise it would be just plain old fiction, and lose most of its appeal.”

This tends to be a “thorny thicket” for alternate-history aficionados. I gather that the “purist” position here, is that no character born after the point of divergence, is admissible: because everything is liable to start changing, very rapidly – parents may well not meet each other, contrary to how things went in “Our Time-Line”, etc. According to this strict standpoint, Turtledove does a lot of cheating in his Southern Victory / TL191 series, which features a number of characters from OTL, in roles with varying degrees of similarity to their OTL ones. With TL191’s point of divergence being 1862: perhaps he could be “allowed”, those of such characters who were born in the 1870s, quite soon after the POD (Al Smith, Herbert Hoover, Winston Churchill, who is leader of enemy Britain in the series’s World War II); but such who were born later – say Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Patton, Douglas MacArthur (there is IIRC a “dead ringer” for him, in the series), all 1880s-born: he’s getting onto dodgy ground.

Of course – Bayaker’s point – alternate history taking place any appreciable time-distance beyond the POD can indeed, if the author adheres strictly to “no-one born after…”, lose its “alternate” quality, and become simply plain old fiction. The whole business is a bothersome one. I would say that I’ve come across claimed alternate-history novels / stories set at a time centuries after the POD; where the whole thing of the changes vis-a-vis our time-line, set off by the divergence: “worked” and made good reading, and re which offerings I’d say that the “alternate” designation was still valid – but this would seem not an easy thing to pull off.

I’ve long been aware of the Basil Argyos stories, but have never read them – Turtledove simply writes so damned much ! – and with my not being in the US, it can be a little harder to acquire stuff by him. They sound as though they could be worth investigating.

I greatly enjoyed Ruled Britannia. In my experience, his stand-alone novels and / or single-volume collaborations – or short-story works – often display more originality and less “bloat”, than his long series are apt to do: could name, as well as Ruled Britannia: Guns of the South, A World of Difference, Household Gods, A Different Flesh.

From posts in this thread: I feel perhaps it’s a bit soon for me to give up on anything by this author, which would be “fresh” to me. He can produce extremely good material; but when he’s crummy, as to various degrees he often is…

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What part of the premise seems utterly absurd to you?

IIRC, the Lizards have a hyper-conservative, hyper-centralized and hyper-authoritarian society. When a new technological innovation is created, they Powers-That-Be in charge of technological innovation spend literally generations experimenting, developing, and improving it before putting it into mass production, as well as planning out how and when to introduce, trying to foresee and account for all possible unintended consequences and knock-on effects.

After achieving spaceflight, they encountered two other “nearby” inhabited planets, both with pre-industrial civilizations, both similarly hidebound. They easily conquered both.

Then the Lizards sent a probe to Earth, which arrived c. 1000 CE and evaluated a Norman knight as the peak of Earth’s military capability. The Lizards carefully planned a planetary invasion based on this intel, and sent their invasion force with a follow-on colonization fleet. And all of this was taking place at sub-light speeds, and took place over the course of many centuries, which is almost hasty by their standards.

If you grant the premise of hyper-hidebound humanoid lizards which are biologically compatible with Earth conditions (which is, granted, a big ask), the rest seems to flow logically.

The Lizards have no reason to try to collect updated intel, since the entire historical experience of their species, including interactions with two other sapient species, is that a mere 1,000 years can’t possibly result in much significant technological development. And even if they wanted to, since all of their space travel technology is hyper-optimized sublight engines, it’s not at all clear that another probe would even get their before their invasion force. And even if it returned updated intel while the invasion force was en route, given the hyper-hidebound nature of the Lizards, it’s not at all clear the invasion force leaders would even be psychological able to properly process the information and adapt to it.

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I can’t speak for Mama Zappa, but the moment that lizards from outer space show up seems utterly absurd from any angle I look at it. It might make for a sci-fi story, but alternate history or historical fiction it ain’t. There needs to be a plausible change to real-life history that makes the further changes that grow out of it as the timeline inches toward the present seem believable.

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I’m glad to expand.
The last two Turtledove novels I read (The Man with the Iron Heart and In the Presence of My Enemies) were, respectively, our situation in Iraq and the fall of the Soviet Union set in alternate post WW2 Gemanies. With no insight or creativity.

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Hell, I just looked at the WorldWar books as an exercise in asking “if you put the 1991-era Gulf War army (bigger, yes!) in the middle of WW2, gave the GWA severe resupply issues… could the Gulf War army beat the world?”

I like Harry. Talk to him often on Twitter, seems like a regular guy. I’ll link him this thread, but the odds of him reading it (because of the stupid Tapatalk prompt which kills most interest in this site) may be low.

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Ah, I thought that by “file the serial numbers off history and present it as your own stories”, you meant there was too much actual history(an impossibility!:)). But bad writing is is a whole 'nother issue.

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I cannot help but feel that this is an overly restrictive and constrictive definition of alternate history – though, Bayaker, you may well tell me that the cognoscenti in these subjects are unanimous in holding this opinion; and I’d have nothing learned to cite in opposition, just my non-expert sentiments. I’m put rather in mind of the long-ago thing from scholars of classical drama, about the “unities”: a play must take place in one location; in one highly-circumscribed period of time; and must be about a single sequence of actions (no sub-plots). Smacks to me a little, of choosing to limit life and reduce its potential fun-content, “just because”.

For sure, a good deal of Turtledove’s stuff is – no error – fantasy, and could not be classed in any sense-making way, as alternate history. But –pace JohnT’s thoughts below, elaborating on the issue (on which thoughts, I’m not enough of a military-matters buff to have a valid opinion): I cannot but feel, “whyever should a recounting of Earth history following on from an invasion of the planet by beings from outer space, not qualify as alternate history?”

As said upthread, in the main I loved Worldwar – it was via that series that I first discovered Turtledove. Bayaker – if I’m right, you don’t necessarily consider that Worldwar is in itself rubbish – though if you do, you have every right to your opinion ! – just that in your view, it is not alternate history. One thing which I like about Worldwar, is that Harry actually had to put his imagination to work for this series – there’s no obvious real-world template for a global conflict (all aspects), on not-far-from-equal terms re technology: between humans, and would-be invading-and-conquering beings with a highly different outlook on life.

“Tangent” from this thread – Googling re “things Turtledove”, I found in the Wiki article on him, mention of of something relatively new from him, of which I’d hitherto known nothing. Published in 2016, it seems – a few short stories: “State of Jefferson stories”. According to Wiki, these are “light alternate history tales set in a world where sasquatches and some related cryptids are real. However, unlike common popular descriptions of such creatures as less evolved primates, here they are essentially human beings, and have been integrated into society.” It would appear that the point of divergence here, is the secession in 1919 of several counties in northern California and southern Oregon, joining to form the new US state of Jefferson: one gathers that the sasquatches and other things became known to their human neighbours, post-1919.

I’ll admit to being a sucker for “yetis and bigfoots and suchlike critters”, and immediately felt ready to take a gamble on giving these stories a try. Seems that I may have problems there – in the UK, Amazon and Abe Books seem not to have heard of them.

Bayaker, I’d reckon that by your rigorous standards, this “State of Jefferson” stuff is in no way alternate history; but with my liking for cryptozoological nonsense, I fancy it anyhow.

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I’m not a military buff either, but Harry’s description of the Lizard’s technology sounded a hell of a lot like descriptions of (then) modern technology, even down to the CD-ROM’s the Lizards used. :smiley:

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In actual understanding of and coping with technology, I’m somewhere around 1319 AD – and in interest in the details of same, “nowhere ever”; however – boils down, likely, to my reaction to Worldwar quickly becoming, effectively, much like yours: “we’re restless, chaotic, and imaginative / inventive / imitative / guileful to the nth degree; they’re highly conservative and stick-in-the-mud-ish, and definitely not imaginative, and painfully straightforward and honest – and in time, their supply of their superior gear will irreplaceably run out – good luck with that, Lizards”. ( I have a bit of a sneaking fondness for the Lizards; in some ways, they’re better and more ethical folk, than we are .)

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Anyone also read Guy Gavriel Kay’s “real history inspired” novels? Such as Sailing to Sarantium or The Lions of Al-Rassan?

Not looking to derail, mind you, just curious how readers of both Kay and Turtledove would judge Turtledove in comparison.

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This kind of gets to the core of what bugged me about the Videssos novels. Because they aren’t specifically marketed or described as historical fiction or alternate history. Or at least they weren’t when they first came out in the late 1980’s. Rather they were marketed as fantasy, where a( historical )chunk of one of Caesar’s legions is magically transported to a fantasy world where magic exists. So the historicity of the Roman legion is acknowledged. But…

The cribbing( wholesale copying )from Byzantine history is not. All the names are changed and the geography is partially flip-flopped, but that is what it is. If you were unfamiliar with the period you would never know and it came off to me as not just lazy, but as disingenuous. Like he was passing off something as his own creation, when instead he just filed the serial numbers off history and presented it as his own story :). Oh and added magic.

It’s sort of a different today - Turtledove is now known for being that alternative history guy and the source material is widely known. Maybe these days it is marketed as such. But back then I found it irritating, because it wasn’t fantasy world-building in a creative sense but rather looked like a camouflaged re-write.

Again, they’re perfectly decent novels. If they had been nakedly ‘Roman legion is transported to an alternate Byzantine empire where magic exists’, I’d have been less critical. But from my perspective at the time he was cheating :p.