Turtledove: The Victorious Opposition (Spoilers Akimbo)

Cafe Society
1

Let’s dissect it, children.

Again, like the last book The Center Cannot Hold this one seems less than a novel and more of a history that’s role is to set up the upcoming WWII series. I found that an immense lack in TCCH but less so here.

And Turtledove is doing his patented ‘Kill Off The Lead Characters’ thing here. He does that more than any author I know.

And some guest appearances:

I’ll spoiler this in case someone wasn’t paying attention up there:

[spoiler]When Cincinnatus is listening to a football game (in Iowa) the announcer is ‘Dutch’. Even before they dropped the hints about ‘The Great Communicator’ I knew that was Ronald Reagan.

Also, Marion Morrison is an actor mentioned as playing Teddy Roosevelt in a movie. That’s none other than our own John Wayne under his real name.

Also, Mordechai ‘3 finger’ Brown makes more appearances. This one is obscure to all but hardcore baseball fans but he was one of the great pitchers in the 1900-era baseball. In The Great War series baseball never took off so I guess he needed to find a different line of work.[/spoiler]

Any others I missed? Half the fun of Turtledove’s writing is spotting the guest appearances.

I’m about 2/3’s of the way through the book so far. Anyone else?

2

Well, there’s, and I don’t know if you’ve gotten to them yet:

A fiesty aggressive Democratic senator from New Mexico named Barry Goldwater, and later, during the presidential elections, when one of the characters is trying to decide who to vote for, he quickly dismisses the Republican candidate, some politician from the midwest named Wilkie

3

Right at the end . . .

there’s a US Army specialist in gas warfare named Max Litvinoff.

4

I think you got all the guest appearances…I loved the book immensely. Nothing too special happening yet. It’s kind of like watching a REALLY long train wreck. I was really angry about Ernie dying, thought Turtledove could have made him the Journalist like he did Sam Clemens in How Few Remain, or maybe bring in John Steinbeck.

that’s my two cents.

5

I am really mad about having to wait another year for WWII to start! Damn cliffhangers!

6

I really want this book but I’m broke. Somebody send me theirs! Please? Pretty please? :frowning:

(Thanks for the spoiler boxes. My curiosity got the better of me and I finally opened this thread despite not having even seen the book yet)

7

Finally got it (I could Pit my local post office and mail carrier, but why bother) and finally finished it.

As far as killing off lead characters, I did Pit Barnes and Noble for putting a spoiler-laden review on their site, so I knew all along not only who was going to die, but how. :mad:

[spoiler]Nellie Semphroch/Jacobs and Lucien Galtier are, so far, the only people to die non-violently.

Someone scoffed at me in my Pit thread for being upset at knowing ahead of time that Mary Pomeroy’s bomb was going to kill Laura Secord/Moss and her daughter. I’m still upset about that, because for a while, I think I was supposed to entertain the possibility that someone else would kill them before she could, and she would either kick herself for not doing it first, have second thoughts about whether she really wants to be a terrorist, or even get indicted for something she didn’t do. Irrelevant now, of course, the way it did happen. But I still don’t like having things spoiled for me!!

Of course, knowing this, I had time to wonder who would take up Jacobs, Enos, and Galtier’s storylines. Thanks to the review, I already knew George Jr. would take over for his mom, but I probably would have figured that out anyway. I am, however, somewhat proud that I called Armstrong Grimes and Leonard O’Doull. I’ll be particularly interested to see the war from O’Doull’s POV. If you want to know the true horror of war, ask the medical corps.[/spoiler]

As far as the CSA, [spoiler]Featherston makes Hitler look like Ned Flanders.

I hope like hell Scipio manages to survive all this. He is far and away my favorite character.

And it’s verrrry interesting how Clarence Potter seems to be being corrupted.[/spoiler]

I did a total :eek: during

[spoiler]Jefferson Pinkard’s last sequence. As soon as Koenig told him “You’ll have time to prepare [for the new prisoners],” I knew. Yes, I realize it’s a no-brainer, but you can’t read something like that and not do an :eek:.

And I wonder if Cincinnatus will turn up there. Very probably. Why else would he be stranded in the CSA?[/spoiler]

I loved the guest appearances! Governor LaGuardia! And I’d give a lot to have been with Scipio and Bathsheba when they went out to the “Ten of Clubs”. And,, did anyone notice the Democratic Congressman who held the crowd’s rapt attention at the Remembrance Day gathering? If that’s not who I think it is, I will eat my hat, shoes and purse.

Something Mr. Rilch wonders about (he hasn’t read it yet):

Who will get the bomb first?

And for that matter, who is Max Litvinoff? I know I should know that name, but I don’t. Creeped me right out, anyway.

And,

will we see Dolphie again? That was him on the wireless, right—Kaiser Friedrich’s “mouthpiece”?

And what is all this noise about Chester Martin and unions? Normally, labor concerns are a source of great interest to me, but in this case, I can’t see what that storyline has to do with the price of butter. Unless Martin is going to unionize workers right into the munitions plants…That’s how we got out of the Depression IRL, after all.

8

Oh, and here’s something that may knock you for a loop; it did me.

Last night, I was doing a search in Google Groups (long story) and stumbled across some old posts from alt.fan.ceciladams. Decided to look for some more stuff I’d posted back in the day, and came across a thread I’d started in late 1999, when there were, I think, only two Great War books. I’d wanted to know if Featherston had any options other than bitching and moaning about the fact that he was never going to be promoted above sergeant. (I’d suggested that he resign his commission and was told that he couldn’t, because a sergeant is a NCO.) Someone posted to say,

9

Oh, and there are also two roads-not-taken, both mentioned in passing.

The Bolsheivik (sp?) Revolution did not happen! Which means no Soviet Union, no Comrade Stalin, no Cold War after WWII. Amazing.

And Japan holds Indochina (Vietnam).[/spoiler]

10

Preview…preview…preview…

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Japan also has the Phillipines, which they ganked from Spain. Russia also still owns Alaska, whether that will play in to the story or not i do not know.[/spoiler]I missed some of the cameos mentioned above, but [spoiler] Why did i miss the 3 finger Brown? I’ve seen the Simpsons episode where they mention him 100 times at least. I’m not happy they jumped to Lucien’s son in law, i would have prefered some relative that would be fighting with the Quebec troops, but i guess they will just be guarding Canada during this conflict. Was that jewish kid Armstrong was friends with a cameo? Herb Rosen was his name, but i have no clue if he’s some real dude. I think Germany will get the bomb first, they have Einstein and the other German jews who had no reason to flee. I do want to say this world sucks, the USA is about to get creamed, thank God they have radar otherwise they’d be dead in 10 mins. I read up on Al Smith, he seems to be the poor man’s FDR, maybe he’ll grow some balls or someone new will step up.

And John Wayne would make a terrible TR, but since he was Genghis Khan…

12

Is that what was being installed on the Remembrance? I meant to ask.

13

The singer at the jazz club was Louis Armstrong.

Amazon posted either the same review or a similar one. I too was annoyed when they revealed plotpoints that were hundreds of pages into the book.

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I do think

[spoiler]That it’s too damn cute for Featherston to start WWII on the exact day the Germans betrayed Russia in our world. Sometimes Turtledove gets too specific and blows my suspension of disbelief straight out of the water.

Also, at the end when Morrell and Dowling are discussing the USA’s plans to fend off a CSA offensive Morrell presents something and Dowling says “There? You really think they’ll go there? No one else has prepared for that.” or somesuch…

$10 says Morrell is predicting an all out confederate assault on Chicago. Given the geography of the situation if you take Chicago you cut the USA in half and prevent reinforcement of the west from the industrial east. No railroads…no resupply.

This could get ugly.

And I thought Hitler had a cameo in ‘The Centre Cannot Hold’. There was a German official visiting Morrell in remote Canada and he had a military adjutant that hated Jews (this came out because Morrell’s adjutant was Jewish). I can’t remember how he was identified. “Corporal Shicklegruber”, anyone?[/spoiler]

15

[spoiler]I think Featherstone will attack in the west where that Arizona/New Mexico state is (i can’t remember which one it is), since it has a good chunk of former CSA in it, and going north from it will allow the USA to be cut in half. that is the battle plan i devised from looking at the map in the book, and from the last series it didn’t seem like there was much fighting there. If he goes north far enough, he can hook up with Utah, and maybe the mormons will rebel again.
and, yes, that was Hitler, but he wasn’t named. I was expecting him to show up as “famous artist Adolph Hitler”, but ah, well…
[/quote]

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Mother @#%^&#$^#@#%@#@%@!!!

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I stopped after the Great War series (I just couldn’t handle Turtledove’s writing anymore), but I have gathered that he is planning on “recreating” WWII. Obviously, the CSA will play the role of Germany. Who do you think will play the other roles? The best candidate for Poland seems to be Mexico (perhaps on the pretext of mistreatment of Anglos in Mexico?). The USA will probably be France (although it’ll be a stretch to believe that the CSA would be able to defeat the USA). Will Canada will be Spain or Belgium? I don’t see any good candidates for England. Cuba would be my first guess, but it’s in the hands of the CSA. I also don’t see a good candidate for Russia, and that’s a crucial role. Without a third major power, it becomes very difficult to believe that Germany/CSA would be allowed to rearm. (The Cold War didn’t start after WWII, it just resumed).

The “no one has prepared for that” sounds like a Ardennes-type reference to me. I’m not sure what the American version of the Ardennes would be.

As for Hitler, wasn’t his antisemitism rather mild prior to the end of WWI?

BTW, I apologize for being the grammer police, but I think that I should point out that pronouns don’t take the posessive " 's ". (“Again, like the last book The Center Cannot Hold this one seems less than a novel and more of a history that’s role is to set up the upcoming WWII series.”)

18

Since the whole thread is a spoiler, forget the boxes from now on. You’ve been warned!

Spoilers…

I agree with J.C that Chicago makes perfect sense, because it will give Turtledove a chance to re-enact Stalingrad in America. No way will he pass that up. Oh, and I expect Featherstone to invade Mexico too, although it will be disasterous strategically. The only problem with that is we haven’t been introduced to a character from the Empire of Mexico…maybe the Sonoran thread will deal with the Confederacy vs. Mexico.

One thing I’d like is a world map, not just a NA map. Ireland is independent, Germany is powerful, Poland exists, Russia is still Tsarist, Austria-Hungary still exists, the Ottoman empire still exists, Japan has essentially acheived her real-timeline imperial goals.

Hitler did have a cameo in the last book as an anti-semitic adjutant, but a loyal servant of Kaiser Bill. And as soon as Pinkard was assigned to guard POWs in the Mexican civil war, I knew he’d end up in charge of extermination camps.

The broad historical thrust is that the substantive lack of American influence on the European theater of WWI left them in essentially status quo…no real change, no dynasties collapsing, the monarchies still in place.

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On characters who died non-violently

So did Hosea Blackford

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Nemo: Well, I meant POV characters. Custer and TR expired quietly offscreen, while Hal Jacobs and Marie Galtier both succumbed to cancer. But none of those had their own storyline.

Jacob Colleton died a brutal death; Cassius and Cherry were run to earth by Anne Colleton; Alexander McGregor was executed by American soldiers (offscreen); Nicholas Kinkaid was killed in a bombing; and, of course, Nellie Semphroch/Jacobs killed Bill Reach! In case you didn’t hear it the first twenty times! But they were also not POV characters.

Before VO, every main character who died was either a war casualty or a murder victim: Stephen Ramsay (remember him? That whole storyline was superfluous, IMO), Paul Mantarakis (sob), Gordon McSweeney, George Enos, Roger Kimball, Arthur McGregor, and Reggie Bartlett.

Actually, I’m not sure how to classify McGregor. You can’t say Custer “murdered” him; he was just foiling McGregor’s attempt on his own (Custer’s) life. But it was a violent death, to be sure.