Roc, 2005. 520p

Once more from the sublime (Lavinia) to the ridiculous. This book covers what might be termed the natural twentieth century US Altered History scenario but which I don’€™t believe anyone else has tackled. What if Japan had not just raided Pearl Harbor but actually invaded and taken Hawaii?

Days Of Infamy has the usual Turtledove modus operandi familiar from his Great War, American Empire, Settling Accounts, World War and Colonisation series which all had multi-stranded narratives, each thread from a different viewpoint character. The twist this time is we get a few Japanese to follow.

The format has the usual faults, too. The cuts between viewpoints make the flow jumpy, some characters are merely irritating and others appear solely in order to push the story on. Some of them indeed are more or less the same cardboard people from those other series (Fletch Armitage for instance is only a transplanted Sam Carsten) and too often they repeat thoughts they’ve had previously.

Offstage, the Japanese still over-run Malaya and Burma – though surely that would have been a serious overstretch (which arguably was the case in reality, even without Hawaii) – but Turtledove has of course rearranged some things to suit his narrative. Here, for example, General Yamashita is on Hawaii and not at Singapore. He gets to say similar things at the US surrender of Hawaii as he did in the real 1942, though. There is too, a nice twist on the Doolittle Raid, now launched on Hawaii and not the Japanese home islands.

Most of the viewpoint characters are actually rather uninteresting but the beach surfer type is an unusual choice of voice. In the Great War series I remember Turtledove killing off at least one of his narrators. A major fault with Days Of Infamy is you never feel any of the narrators are in real jeopardy. Only incidental characters die.

There’€™s only one more in this series though.

At least so far.

Del Rey, 1993. 352p.

This is a collection of short stories varying considerably in length. All are divertissements, some much more light-heartedly intended than others.

While some are future based SF, many are historically rooted (in the counterfactual sense) but some are fantasy rather than SF -€“ one features a werewolf, another the Devil. Two have scenarios involving baseball; one of these -€“ a Ring Lardner pastiche apparently -€“ is almost incomprehensible to someone not au fait with the game’€™s idiosyncrasies, or indeed Ring Lardner’€™s oeuvre.

The most intriguing premise has a certain religion’€™s main prophet becoming instead a Christian monk and (whisper it) Islam failing to be born. This was a universe Turtledove mined extensively for his Agent Of Byzantium stories the seventh of which, Pillar Of Cloud, Pillar Of Fire (otherwise uncollected?) appears here.

In passing it’€™s nice to know that the Lizards from Turtledove‘€™s World War:Balance and Colonisation books were actually inspired by ancient Persians (see Potsherds, the first story in this book.)

Departures is light reading only-€“ which I need at this time of year.

Hodder and Stoughton, 2005, 597p.

This is really Colonisation:4. Many of the “characters”€ from the Colonisation series reappear here.

This is the book, though, where we finally get to see the Lizards’ original world, Home. A US starship, with the aid of cold sleep technology adapted from that of the Lizards’€™ has been sent there to try to negotiate a basis of equality with them.

There are some sly asides about the US Ambassador to Home, referred to solely as the Doctor, who can only be meant to be Henry Kissinger. Unfortunately he does not wake up from the cold sleep necessary for the transit so one of our previous Colonisation acquaintances is pitched into the ambassadorial role. Also a character named Nicole Nichols is surely a nod to the communications officer of the original Star Trek.

There was one typo I thought was brilliant. “€œBuildings gradually got farther and father apart.”

Homeward Bound is an effortless, light read. Turtledove’€™s narrative goes down smoothly, as it always does, but the characterisation is still weak and repetition of information and attitudes far too frequent. He leaves open the possibility of yet more sequels.

Tor, 2003

At this time of the year I’€™m knackered and not up to reading anything demanding. I wasn’€™t going to post about this one as I only read it to see how Turtledove dealt with a juvenile. However, I was amused to note that he gets rid of the parents by the end of chapter four. Classic children’€™s tale scenario.

It isn’€™t quite an Altered History story. The book’€™s young heroes are part of a culture that can travel to parallel worlds (known as Crosstime Traffic) to exchange trade goods slightly technologically advanced of those in the market world in return for grain which their own society processes into oil substitutes. They of course find themselves stranded in one of these worlds -€“ a heavily bureaucratised descendant of an altered Roman Empire -€“ and caught up in a siege. Turtledove is careful not to place them in too great danger, however.

In many ways Turtledove’€™s style is ideally suited to this sort of book as the prose is functional and undemanding but to my mind, even taking account of the target market, information is still repeated too often and his elaborations of the differences between the cultures are heavy handed. There was, though, a delightful explanation of the declension of nouns in Classical Latin plus a mention of the Ablative Absolute.

Though set in the late 21st century, the Crosstime Traffic culture appears not all that different from the present US -€“ it still has Home Depots and WalMarts, for example – with no hint of other countries in its world. Despite knowledge of resource depletion in its own timeline its attitude to the other worlds is merely exploitative – although the characters do think they’€™re lucky they haven’t yet met a parallel world more advanced than their own.

I hope Turtledove’€™s young readers aren’€™t superstitious. The book has thirteen chapters.

NEL, 2001

After Living Next Door To The God Of Love I thought I’d better try something a bit lighter. But Colonisation 3 still took me a while to read (mainly because I’m knackered at this time of year.)

It was business as usual. Two dimensional characters doing things purely for plot purposes and this time it became even more obvious there are far too many arbitrary connections between them for plausibility. Plus my suspicions as to where the plot was going were confirmed. Yet it all does slide down so easily. However, the book didn’t so much end as stop suddenly. Plenty of loose ends left flapping around. Another Lizards series to come? (Yes, I know there’€™s Homeward Bound, which for the sake of completeness I will read sometime.)

Still, for those who know Turtledove’s background he did slip in a rather surprising joke about the utter uselessness of the study of the history of Byzantium. It was almost worth the time investment in reading the book. Almost.

Baen, 2005

I’m a sucker for this sort of stuff. Alternate History, as it’s called, is where historical events are re-imagined as they might have been, but weren’t. Here the focus, as in Alternate Generals I and II, is on military matters.

The main interest in tales like these is on the speculation. In this volume we get; Joan of Arc not burned, but re-tried, and inadvertently starting her own religion; Mark Antony winning at Actium but suffering ever more attempts to restore the Republic, MacArthur captured on Corregidor and, in a different story, it is Eisenhower who is charged with defending the Philippines; Gengis Khan converts to Judaism and instead of a Pleasure Dome is building a new Great Temple to hold The Ark Of The Covenant; Robert E Lee, victor at Gettysburg, is ambassador to Britain when a second existential crisis hits the Confederacy; a US Special Forces team is sent outside the chain of command by President Nelson Rockefeller to assassinate Ho Chi Minh in his cave hideout near the Chinese border.

Enjoyment of a story is not necessarily related to how much background knowledge of the situation the reader already has. In The Burning Spear At Twilight Mike Resnick has Jomo Kenyatta use propagandistic methods to gain Kenya independence. I’m afraid I didn’t know enough about the Mau-Mau “emergency” to be sure where all the speculation lay but the story succeeded on its own terms.

Harry Turtledove’s Shock And Awe needs some comment. He has Jesus of Nazareth – biblical quotations and all – as a rebel leader (of “ragheads”, to their opponents) against the Romans (who are “western imperialists”.) The conceit of using modern day language like this, and in the Roman soldiers’ mouths, in order to point out the parallels quickly wears thin and is a rather heavy handed way of eliciting sympathy for the underdog. And did Turtledove really intend to invite comparisons of Saddam Hussein with Christ? At one point we could have had an “I am Spartacus” moment but in the end Turtledove sticks too closely to biblical outcomes for the story to be satisfying.

Brad Linaweaver’s A Good Bag features the theosophist Madame Blavatsky but is extremely lightweight and really no more than drivel.

Coming from this side of the Atlantic I always find it amusing when the British are the enemy. In Roland J Green’s It Isn’t Every Day Of The Week the war of 1812 follows a different course. The story culminates in a British invasion of Georgia. Due to the tale’s epistolary nature we are told the events rather than shown them and as a result the story doesn’t quite cohere. In this history the British don’t seem to burn the White House.

As a Scot, I found Lillian Stewart Carl’s Over The Sea From Skye more interesting. A defeated Duke of Cumberland flees Bonnie Prince Charlie’s followers and ends up on Skye where he encounters Flora MacDonald. The story itself is superfluously topped and tailed by extracts from Boswell’s journal which seem to be there only to shoehorn in a reference to the still loyal American colonies, and also has an unnecessary afterword. The author also suggests the original Union Jack incorporated bits to represent all four constituent nations of the union. This would have been highly unlikely. In reality the Irish cross of St Patrick was only incorporated in 1801 and the gold and black Welsh cross of St David (whose colours would clash with the red, white and blue) never has been.

Esther Friesner’s First Catch Your Elephant, about the reasons for Hannibal abandoning the Alps crossing, is meant to be humorous but is tonally askew, psychologically unconvincing and, in the end, succeeds only in being annoying.

Not so much a good bag as a mixed bag, then. Too many of the stories strove for relevance in the actual world, but on the whole the book was diverting. Don’t pick up Alternate Generals III if you’re looking for literary excellence, though.

New English Library, 2000

I found this one a bit of a slog. A move from the sublime (The Execution Channel) to the cor blimey.
The set up is that extraterrestrial lizards interrupted World War 2 in 1941/2 and 18 years or so later are established across the warmer parts of the Earth and also occupy China, Australia and Poland. See my review of the previous volume in this series, Colonisation: Second Contact, for further details of this background.

I know new entrants to Turtledove’s scenario require some infill from previous volumes but we surely don’t need so many reminders of lizard (and human characters’) behaviour – or is it just the author keeping track? It’s as if Turtledove relies on cue cards for each of his dramatis personae (et saura) and so (forgetting we know this stuff already?) reminds us of that character’s particular tic each time we encounter them again. This gets wearing after a while. And would new readers start here? Surely they would go to Colonisation: Second Contact first; or even World War:In The Balance.

The new slants to the story arc in Down To Earth are the introduction to Earth, from the lizard’s world, of crops and both domestic and food varieties of animals, with the likelihood this presents of concomitant destructive effects on Earth’s ecosystems, and the attempt by humans to raise two lizard hatchlings from eggs to adulthood. But not much actually happens. There is a real sense of marking time here. Relationships are extended or made but the plot doesn’t advance far, if at all. It is the second in a trilogy after all.

I was trying to work out why the Colonisation series doesn’t work even in the limited way that Turtledove’s World War/Balance books did. It’s not just that the lizards appear too thick, too hidebound, to be technological spacefarers. It’s also that the war aspects are largely missing; until nearly the end of Down To Earth there is no actual combat in the Colonisation series, and even then we only get two scenes of fighting from the latest war (between the Third Reich and the lizards) with the earlier humans’ rebellion in China not described in terms of fire fights. As a result there is little by way of tension.

Turtledove’s writing remains functional but rarely rises above it. The breaks between chapters appear to be placed arbitrarily or maybe just come after a set number of words – there is no structuring to the chaptering as such. The characters are there only to string the story along. They rarely if ever come to life, resolutely refusing to fill anything other than plot functions.

Also in Down To Earth the emphasis on Jewish experiences finally does come over too strongly.

Though the prose reads smoothly enough there is no real meat to it. I realise Turtledove’s concerns are elsewhere but this is a missed opportunity to speculate on what such an alien invasion could have meant for mid, and late, 20th century Earth.

However there were still enough teasers for me to want to know where the story is going, especially as I wish my suspicions to be confirmed.

Part 3 of Colonisation over Easter, then.

New English Library, 2000

After The Fanatic I felt like reading something lighter. Colonisation: Second Contact is certainly that but I ought first to have checked the page count (694!!!) and saved it up for a holiday.

The book is set 17 years after the events of Turtledove’s World War In The Balance series (WWIB) where an invasion of Earth by lizard-like creatures – expecting opposition only from leather clad horsemen – interrupted Earth’s internal squabblings in the Second World War. Not a serious premise, then, but diverting enough.

In this first of a new series, the lizard colonisation fleet has arrived to follow up the invasion and the equilibrium established between the lizards and what remains of Earth’s 1940s power structure stands to be disturbed. The major players are a strong USA and USSR, plus a still-Nazi Germany which dominates mainland Europe, with Britain and Japan much lesser powers. The stimulus the lizards have provided for humans in this scenario has led to space flight and Moon landings much earlier than in the real world.

The novel is episodic, with each segment told from the viewpoint of one of the many characters Turtledove uses to illustrate this world – some of whom are familiar from WWIB. This device, as in other Turtledove books, does tend to lend the story a disjointed feel, though given the world-wide scope involved here this is perhaps inevitable. It did, however, work much better in his Great War, American Empire and Settling Accounts series where the focus was much more narrowly American.

Given the setting and Turtledove’s background it is not surprising that he gives a lot of space to Jewish protagonists and affairs. However this does not unbalance the book as a whole even if it sometimes seems Turtledove is ticking off all the possible variations one by one.

Like a lot of Americans Turtledove’€™s feel for British idiom is uncertain but he does recognise there is a different UK dimension. One of his Jewish characters is accosted on the streets of Belfast with the question, “€œProtestant or Catholic?”€ His potential attackers are thrown by his laughter, only mutter darkly, and he escapes harm. (Yet in this scenario perhaps the follow up would more likely have been the question, “€œBut are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew?”€)

The lizards, who, for members of a technological society, are a bit too bemused by human behaviour, are nevertheless treated sympathetically, several being granted viewpoint status.

There are some moments of low comedy when lizard females – none of whom were part of the earlier invasion fleet – are sent into heat by ingesting the Earth spice, ginger, which is also addictive to the males. All the lizards are apparently disgusted by the permanent nature of human sexuality but succumb to incontrollable – and indiscriminate – sexual urges under the influence of the pheromones which abound when their females come into heat. There is a bit of a logical flaw with this aspect of the novel as some of the lizards begin to show human sexual aptitudes, and vices, far too rapidly. The humans are of course not above using the lizards’ susceptibility to ginger to their advantage.

A bigger failing is that the plot, involving the building of a US space station which may be something more, fails to motor up until well past the halfway stage.

Yet while the writing rarely gets above the functional there is enough in the setting and the treatment to keep the reader going; especially those with an interest in history.

I will be reading the next in the series; but I’€™ll save it for the Christmas fortnight or something similar.