The “rigorous standards” problem with Alternative History as a genre is in my own mind. I’m a history buff, and read standard fiction(anything from Dickens to Hemingway to Christie) as a diversion. Occasionally I have found AH novels like Harris’ Fatherland, Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, etc.
Since first seeing this thread, and guided by other posters here, a little googling tells me that fantastical elements are quite common in AH, and I was simply unaware. I just wish there were different names for “tweak real history and imagine what else would change”, “history messed with by science fiction/future technology”, and “historical settings with fantastical critters/magic”.
Thoughts concerning the “Videssos Universe”, lead me on to the S.M. Stirling / David Drake collaborative The General / Raj Whitehall series; the first few volumes of which I read and enjoyed – “faded out” on it after that, with several more volumes not tackled – that contributed-to, by something of a falling-out on my part, with Mr. Stirling’s works in general: I should perhaps admit to being something of a hard-to-please so-and-so, myself.
For most of my reading of this series: I just reckoned it to be happening on a total “fantasy planet”. Closer-than-hitherto looking at the map included in the books, of the area concerned in books’ action, of the planet Bellevue: revealed to me that said map – possibly suspectable of being deliberately made less clear than it might be, as to what was sea and what land – was a “not-all-that-distorted distortion”, of the real-world Mediterranean basin. From my recollection, the books’ text fell in with the basic idea of: north and west of same, civilised and worthwhile people – south and east ditto, less so. And I seem dimly to recall having read years ago, a suggestion that the plots of the General / RW books, owe at least something to the exploits of the – Byzantine, I think – general Belisarius, in “our time-line / our world”.
It might not be altogether conspiracy-theory nutty stuff: to suspect that in this particular area of creative writing, “they’re all at it”.
How Few Remain is probably the best book in that particular series, largely because I expect it started off as one of his one-off stories, without an original intent to turn it into a series. He basically explores the what-if possibilities of a Confederate win in the US Civil War, and how the inevitable tensions between the two new countries would evolve over the first few decades. Thus, it really is an “alternative” history, and not just a “filed off serial numbers” re-telling of actual history.
But then it went and did really well, and he decided to cash in. The follow-on books are basically just “What if WWI and WWII happened in North America?”. By the time he gets to WWII, it’s just The Nazis all over again, with white Southerners replacing Hitler and the Germans, and African Americans replacing the Jews.
Kay is my favorite writer in the English language. His words make me cry. My absolute favorite of his is “Tigana”, which is set in a Renaissance Italy-cognate. A wizard sets out to conquer a country, and in the process, his son is killed in the war, and the wizard gets his revenge by conquering the enemy, wiping it off the face of the earth, and then putting a curse on the nation so that nobody remembers that the country ever existed, except for its former inhabitants. But the book goes further, in that the wizard is not an all-black villain, but has his moments. Even a girl from Tigana, who has set out to assassinate him, falls in love with him.
My sentiments concerning How Few Remain and the series which it spawned, match closely with yours – I find HFR head-and-shoulders above the endless stream of following-on books spanning mid-1910s to mid-1940s (I did “religiously” read the whole series, but doing so was at times a struggle). There is IMO a fair amount of good stuff in this “child of HFR” series; but it is, semi-quoting you as above, very largely “regurgitating of real history with the serial numbers filed off” – the lazy-and easy way to do it, which Turtledove often goes for.
IIRC, the “child series” starts with World War I breaking out in late summer 1914. exactly as in our time-line; the only difference being that in this alternate, the USA lines up immediately and automatically as it were, with the Central Powers, and the CSA with the Entente. John DiFool’s Trope Type 1, “Hard Alternate History” would – if I’ve got this right – have things in Europe likely having gone significantly differently from actual history, following on from an 1862 point of divergence (even if the “divergence” happened in the New World) – not Princip and the Archduke and June 28th 1914, exactly as in our time-line. And Turtledove goes on and on, just with a “flip-over” concerning basic line-ups in World Wars I and II – with, from the point of view of the USA (a not-all-that-nice place, but less nasty than the CSA) Germany and her allies being, relatively, the good guys. (In the series’s last book, after WWII’s end and with US forces occupying the Confederacy, he actually becomes inventive and original with the action which he recounts; and lo and behold, the series then finishes !)
I often experience wonder and, to be honest, some regret, that this series – IMO not his best series, to say nothing of “stand-alones” – seems to receive a great deal of attention, often at the expense of other works by HT. I’d hazard a guess, as a non-American, that the great popularity of this “WWI and II in North America” series has a lot to do with its striking a particular chord with that majority of Turtledove’s readership, who are US citizens. There at least used to be some years ago, a Yahoo! HT on-line discussion group, which I frequented on-and-off; most participants were folk from the US, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that likely 90% of the traffic on that board, was about this “WW’s in NA” series. I sometimes found this infuriating – this author, of all authors, has written so very much else – including a good deal of material which is different in all particulars.
My biggest single “beef” with this series, is the thing with the US military occupation of Canada, over – all-but – the three decades spanned by the series. If Turtledove has ever come up with something which sticks in my throat as highly implausible, it is this (with reptilian invaders from space, or navies which include trained sea-monsters with human pilots, it’s for me “a different question”). I know that there aren’t all that many people in Canada, except in the narrow-ish strip just north of the US border; but – even with the action taken, being on the part of a militaristic nation – the sheer amount of manpower / resources / money which would have been necessary for this job, for so long: destroys credibility for me.
One has to feel – dear Lord ! This guy pours material out in a constant torrent; he never, ever stops !
Heh! Then we’re even closer together in opinion than you thought! I thought his name for the last book, “In At The Death”, was just about perfect, because that’s how I felt: “I’ve gone this far through the horrors of war, now I just want to say I saw it through to the bitter end!”
Up there among possible good names for the last book in the series – alongside such as “Harry – please ! MAKE IT STOP !!”
I maybe exaggerated a little, as regards tedium ploughing through this lot – even in what were for me, the duller middle reaches of the series’s World War II; I always had a few favourite characters, from whose “viewpoint” turns when they came up, I always got pleasure. I’ll confess to having even a little bit of a soft spot for Jake Featherston: sure, he’s a genocidal maniac – but for me he has also, just a few admirable / likeable traits.
I’m in agreement with your take on later-born people in the alternate histories. In the Worldwar series, the first 4 at least, his use of real people as characters felt right. I don’t honestly recall how much he used OTL real people in the second series (the one set 25+ years later). Anything beyond that, well, as you say, Churchill may well have still been born, but he would not be the same person we learned about in history class.
This issue is why I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the Star Trek alternate-universe stories. As fun as the DS9 versions were in particular, the odds that EVERYONE had a parallel and they all wound up in the same place has always annoyed me.
This is, actually, the central ethical dilemma of the books.
Yes, yes, I know. They’re alien invaders. They’re trying to take over Earth. I think we all agree that’s bad.
But the fact is by any rational standard, the lizards are simply better people that most humans. They’re open, honest, trustworthy and capable of deciding to work together beyond their own interests to achieve a greater goal.
Contrast that with humans who are constantly portrayed as scheming, lying and unreliable - not just to the lizards but to each other - and continually do things against any form of greater good.
So beyond the military aspects - better win fast, scaly - the reader is also presented with the conundrum that the lizards we meet and see most often are much more decent beings than most of the humans we see. You can be antagonistic toward the lizard’s goals while still liking them as characters. Especially when some of the human protagonists are Molotov and von Ribbentrop and such.
I was the person quoted in the OP. I feel famous
As it turned out while I didn’t dislike In Darkest Europe, it didn’t feel like it lived up to its interesting premise.
I find HT very readable. I like his writing style where you get little vignettes that often jump perspective but he does sometimes get repetitive which can be frustrating for the reader.
To the person who started How Few Remain and is getting scared off, I would suggest you continue with the Great War books. They are good reads and WWI is an underutilized setting in any fiction these days.
If you want to try a HT book that is very different, I would suggest The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump.
P.S. It might be helpful to get more traffic to this thread to mention Turtledove in the subject. That way people who read his fiction would know it is something they may be interested in.
If you mean me, I won’t get ‘scared off’, I’ll just inquire a bit about other HT novels before snatching them off the shelf. I finished How Few Remain a few days ago, and look forward to the Great War books. Unless aliens or wizards show up I’ll probably enjoy them
I just read the Worldwar series and I’m currently reading the first Colonization book. While I love the premise and the overall story, HT’s style of writing is driving me crazy. There is a lot of repetitiveness there. The Worldwar series could have been three books instead of four if he didn’t feel the need to reintroduce each character every time he returned to them. I read How Few Remain years ago and enjoyed it. I started to read his Great War Trilogy but stopped because it felt like the story just became tedious and boring.
Indeed, the Lizards are horrified when they discover the Holocaust. Molotov’s bragging about the assassination of the Czar and his family also disgusts them.
I credit the Worldwar series for acquainting me with Mordechai Anielewicz, who I had never heard of before Turtledove made him a major character.
I, too, was unaware of Anielewicz prior to the WorldWar series. A little bonus of the Turtledove books is learning about real people.
Or as an easter egg spotting real people in the books. G Gordon Liddy is clearly in the Colonization books without ever being properly identified. There are others.
Yeah, the Lizards REALLY find humans problematic. I can’t blame them for being so horrified when they start to get a feel for some of our collective behavior.
I thought it was funny when, among other undesirable side effects, the lizards’ reaction to ginger caused their breeding behaviors to more closely mimic humans’ constant willingness - something that, IIRC, wasn’t realized until 20 years later when the females arrived (the effect was on the females).
When we read the first 4 books, I sent copies of them to my brother for Christmas, along with a box of ginger snaps :D.
I’m glad that others besides me, see positive qualities in the Lizards and experience inclinations toward liking them; while definitely not wanting them to conquer our planet, having them for all foreseeable time the rulers, and us relegated to the “ruled”.
I get the impression that many readers are 100% Lizard-loathers, with a totally black / white view of the whole matter. Have seen much heated opprobrium and hate directed at Sam Yeager for his part, in the Colonisation series, in having it be agreed, and happen: that the Race wreaks nuclear destruction on one US city, in retribution for the covert US attack which destroyed a number of ships of the colonisation fleet. These folk see Sam, for this, as purely and simply a vile traitor to his species and his planet. I feel more sympathy for him: his position can be seen as – while he’d rather not have the Lizards on Earth, and would prefer for us never to have heard of them: they’re here, and a force very much to be reckoned with. Plus, he has personally known Lizards, and on the whole liked them as individuals, ever since the first days of the invasion – he regards them as people, entitled to justice and to honourable treatment even in war. IIRC, he’s shown as doing much agonising over the alternatives available re the Lizards’ wrath over the colonisation-fleet attacks – finally doing as he does, on the basis that in his estimation, “Indianapolis for the fleet”, with the slate then wiped clean and normal relations resuming; looks like the least bad of assorted outcomes, all of them decidedly bad.
I found, especially among participants in the Turtledove Yahoo! group which I mentioned upthread, many readers highly ready with total condemnation and scorn, toward all three members of the Yeager family, for assorted perceivedly sub-optimal conduct on their part. These folk often seemed to couple this, with declaring what righteous characters they themselves were – they would never even dream of acting so basely. My reaction to this stuff tends to be, “Right, bully for you, chum – let’s move on to something more interesting.” Am apt to feel, as regards the Yeagers’ various sexual irregularities: humans do frequently depart from the full-on straight and narrow (fiction would be duller, if they never did), and a situation of a massive planetary invasion by highly powerful aliens, would be a situation – if ever there were one such – of everything feeling thrown into chaos and confusion, and prevalent sentiments of “let’s seize the moment – it looks as though the end of everything is upon us”.
I didn’t by any means dislike the novel itself – a pretty enjoyable read – just, my opinion of the premise is that it’s artificial and corny in an often-typical Turtledove way: he just does a “flip-over” of a real-world political / historical / whatever situation. I’m wondering, as per my OP, whether this is giving Harry a ready-made recipe for churning out novel after novel set in this alternate; the whole thing, as it went on, getting progressively more stale. (If he does indeed do further ones: even if the heroes continue to be [haven’t got my copy to hand] the Arab guy and his Jewish sidekick – I’d hope that at least he’d vary things by visiting other parts of Europe / Christendom, than just Italy: a different country for each book, would be nice.)
I titled the thread as I did, because I’ve occasionally felt uncomfortably, that few Dopers have any interest in Turtledove (from this thread, there seem more than I’d perhaps been imagining). Have imagined myself, here, an unusually keen, well, “semi-fan” – am acutely aware of the aspects of him that I don’t like. Feared that if I included the dreaded T-name in the title, there would arise a great chorus of, “Oh, no – it’s him again, blah-ing on about HIM !” – and little or no response.
I understand that part of the latter disgust, is over an emperor and his family being treated so – with the Lizards’ tremendous reverence for their own Emperor. But, it’s true, re “nobodies” as well: they are shocked by humans’ easy, casual and often large-scale bloodthirstiness toward each other.
Anielewicz was a new “real-world” character to me too, as of my reading the series. I haven’t re-read it for a good few years: have to admit to having needed just now to do a bit of pondering and looking-up, to distinguish clearly in my mind: Anielewicz, and the doctor Moishe Russie – another of the series’s Polish-Jewish characters, who I believe is Turtledove’s own creation.
I personally like Turtledove’s “history taken to a chop shop and stripped for parts” approach most of the time. “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” worked for me. “The Man with the Iron Heart” didn’t; either he or I was too deeply touched by the war in Iraq at the time and couldn’t disconnect ourselves from the modern parallels enough to enjoy it. I liked “Joe Steele” too, though that was less filing off the serial number of the rise of Stalin and just a straight up repainting.
I also like his work that’s less based off true history. “The War That Came Early” and “Hot War” series were both pretty good, and don’t have any serial numbers scratched off that I know of. I read “Alpha and Omega” and enjoyed it too.
And alien invasion in the middle of WWII is completely disconnected from the other types, but it’s fun.
However, what I like most about Turtledove is his skill at writing big world altering events through the point of view of anonymous people at the bottom. I don’t mind having Robert E. Lee as a viewpoint character, but I really enjoy following grunts and civilians through the wars (even if he does feel the need to constantly remind us that the redheaded guy in the US navy sunburns easily - I get that he does it to recenter us on the character, it just can become a bit much). War is hell for his characters, both on the front lines and at home, and I appreciate that he humanizes them (even the invading aliens).
He also really shines in short stories. Behind that link is one from the Sasquatches in the PNW series, but I really personally love “The Eighth-Grade History Class Visits the Hebrew Home for the Aging”; it’s personally one of my all time favorites.
I started the Supervolcano books earlier this summer, and I’m enjoying that it’s not a big war that’s just a retelling of the fall of the Aztec empire. Just a scattered family doing their best (I’m one book down, so don’t tell me if it becomes the fall of the Aztecs in book 2).
I wouldn’t say was a fun but I have read 15+ of his books, and started quite a few others. I tend to read first volumes of series when they come out but lose the urge to continue by the time v2 appears…
My favourite series of his, though, is the Supervolcano trilogy. As Darth says, it’s all about the people actually affected, with nothing set in the corridors of power, except maybe the local mayor’s office! And a couple of the officers running a displaced persons camp, iirc. To me, it wasd a welcome change from his books where every second character was an analog of a historical figure…
I made notes on all three volumes - v1 can be found here, and includes links to the other two…
