Baen Books, 2012, 343 p.

I spotted this when the good lady was returning Irène Némirovsky’s Jezebel to the local library. As a sucker for altered histories I thought I’d give it a whirl.

The set up here is that Japan won the Battle of Midway. Hawaii is withering on the vine, Japanese forces have invaded Alaska, raided the Panama Canal and occasionally bombard the US west coast. The sole substantial US aircraft carrier remaining is the Saratoga.

The novel focuses mainly on US Navy officer Tim Dane (who speaks and reads Japanese as a result of a pre-war visit there) though other characters – particularly his nurse girlfriend, Amanda Mallard – are given viewpoint scenes. The plot involves the lack of knowledge the Japanese have of the Saratoga’s whereabouts. A sub-plot involving a German saboteur, Wilhelm Braun, a former official in their embassy in Mexico, folds into the main narrative towards the end. We are given two token sympathetic Japanese characters (one belatedly sympathetic) and one German, Johann Klaas; but neither are all the USians in the book noble, good and true.

The scenario doesn’t really tell us anything new about the Pacific War nor illuminate history to any great degree. Effectively we spend the book waiting on the inevitable (given the author’s nationality and the publisher’s address) US victory.

I must say that for me Japanese Admiral Yamamoto’s tactics in the final battle of the book did not quite ring true; but had it been otherwise the novel would have had to continue well beyond its 343 pages.

This is the sort of thing that Harry Turtledove seems to perform effortlessly. Conroy’s prose is as efficient and his characterisation may (I would put it no higher) be slightly better but the immersion in the milieu feels less deep. I doubt I’ll read any more by him.

Pedant’s corner:-
There are several instances of omitted or repeated words. Britain is named as “England” (though the adjective used for the UK’s forces is “British.”) In a scene involving Johann Klaas, his name is mistakenly given as Braun in one sentence.

Hodder, 2010, 496 p.

The usual fare from Turtledove. This time the altered history is that World War 2 starts in 1938 – though the actual Jonbar Point seems to be when Spanish General Sanjurjo survives his aeroplane flight from Portugal to Burgos to head up the Nationalist army in the Spanish Civil War which continues long after it did in our history as, after a failure of the talks in Munich two years later Hitler declares war on and invades Czechoslovakia. Major differences are that Poland then becomes a German ally, the invasion of France is not swift enough (apparently due to the early German panzers not being quite as effective as their later 1940 counterparts would be) and Japan eventually attacks the already war-embroiled USSR in Siberia.

The viewpoints are many, but hardly varied as the characters are as cardboard (or as functional) as always, or there simply to outline the war’€™s progress. The writing is as annoying as ever with its repetitions of information we already know. Particularly irritating was the observation that someone or other didn’t like some aspect of warfare “one bit” occurring again and again.

The reading is easy though; something I felt I needed after Gardens of the Sun. I don’t think I’€™ll be following the rest of The War That Came Early series though. There’€™s now another four of the beggars!

Gollancz, 2008, 321 p.

Unlike the previous volumes in Baxter’s “Time’s Tapestry” series which were spread over several centuries and as a result had a disjointed feel, the action in this one is spread over only a few years in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The tale is tighter and more cohesive as a consequence.

The prologue features an Irishman called O’Malley who at MIT has invented a machine he calls a “loom” with which – with the contribution of the dreams of an Austrian Jew called Ben Kamen – he has managed to send a message back to pre-Roman Britain. It isn’t long before both the loom and Kamen have been snatched by the Nazis and incorporated into their greater plan of altering history to ensure the triumph of the Reich.

The meat of the book is set in and after the invasion of Southern England by German forces once the BEF had been destroyed on the shore at Dunkirk. A hasty (and to my mind unlikely) deal by Churchill with the US sees them given military bases – US sovereign territory – south of London. As Hitler is seeking to avoid war with the US the German advance halts when they encounter these. This struck me as more of a sop to possible US readers of the book than something that would have occurred in such a scenario. The presence of a female US newspaper correspondent and her son in the cast of characters also points in this direction. A demarcation line cutting off South-East England is where the war situation settles down.

Off-stage Churchill falls as Prime Minister, to be succeeded by Lord Halifax who nevertheless continues the war – which goes on more or less as in our timeline; Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, El Alamein all get a mention, Japan’s invasion of Australia is new though. Again it may be more likely that Halifax would have sued for peace, but perhaps that would have been unthinkable with a substantial part of the UK – not just the Channel Islands – under German rule.

While Weaver can be read as a one-off with no detriment to the reading experience there are several nice touches where Baxter has his characters travel to locations which appeared in earlier books in the series; places like Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall and Richborough in Kent (Roman Rutupiae.)

This is the sort of thing that Harry Turtledove essays so frequently. Baxter’s characters are more rounded than Turtledove’s generally are and the extra twist of the loom makes for an added commentary on the contingency of historical events.

New American Library, 2003, 454 p.

Germany won the Second World War and twenty years later a Third. In 2009, the US, like most of Europe, is a vassal state, paying reparations to avoid the panzers rolling out from their bases in US cities. The British Union of Fascists holds sway in a Britain also in thrall to Germany.

In Berlin, the Gimpel family lets its eldest daughter into a secret. They are Jews, and must keep their origins hidden, speaking of it only to those in their immediate circle. Meanwhile the old Führer, a character whose real world model is only thinly disguised by the name Kurt Haldweim, has died and the new one, Heinz Buckliger, starts to loosen the strings of dictatorship. This strand of the plot hinges on textual differences between the first and subsequent editions of Mein Kampf, a subject on which I have to take Turtledove on trust.

Parallels with our world are one of the delights of altered histories. Nice touches here are a stage production featuring the baddies Churchill and Stalin which is so awful that it’s a smash hit and a delegation from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, asking for autonomy for the region, being led by a grey-haired Czech playwright.

(Slight spoiler alert:-

The thousand year Reich (had it survived World War II) would no doubt have collapsed under its internal contradictions at some point long before a millennium had passed but perhaps not quite so quickly and easily as portrayed here. The parallel with the Soviet Union of our own world which Turtledove implicitly outlines by having the Gauleiter of Berlin face down SS tanks in front of his residence does not really hold. In the world of the novel there was no Cold War to sap and counter its ideology – Japan is not presented as too great a rival to Germany – and hence any decay would likely have been much slower.)

This may be the story Turtledove always wanted to tell – Jewishness has unsurprisingly featured prominently in his altered worlds and this is the ultimate scenario to deploy in order to explore it. I’m afraid his writing does not do this particular theme justice, though. It has his usual multiple viewpoints, but all are Jewish here. Other familiar traits are too prevalent; the tendency to reiterate characters’ thoughts or peccadilloes, to labour a point, and here he doesn’t so much foreshadow future events as telegraph them. Plus he is too kind to his viewpoint characters and the book’s Nazis are cardboard – all the really evil deeds are in the novel’s past – which is a shame because this could have been a powerful indictment of man’s inhumanity to man.

The idea for In The Presence Of Mine Enemies worked much better at the short story length in which it first appeared in 1992.

ROC, 2005. 519p

A Churchill reference for the title this time rather than a Roosevelt one but it remains the same Turtledove.

The inhabitants of Hawaii are still coming to terms with the Japanese occupation which occurred in Days Of Infamy. Food is scarce, much of Hawaii’s land is now given over to growing rice, but for the US POWs it is less than scarce; plus they are being worked to death. Despite the harassment by submarine of the supply shipping from their home islands – at one point Turtledove alludes to the US breaking of Japanese codes which makes this easier – the Japanese forces are confident of holding off any further US attempts to retake the islands. On all sides, Japanese, native Hawaiians and US citizens alike, there is a sense of marking time – or holding on – until the inevitable renewed US attack. Meanwhile in the US there is a steely determination to regain the islands.

The lack of jeopardy to the characters which seemed to pervade Days Of Infamy is more than made up for here. In retrospect that may have been because the former book was an exercise in setting up this one, characters needed to be in place. End Of The Beginning explores the earlier book’s ramifications, one of which is that the fate you always felt Turtledove had in store for Jane Armitage (which was not so much foreshadowed as put up in lights) indeed comes to pass.

The US onslaught, when it comes, is of course overwhelming. (Admiral Yamamoto’s knowledge – and fear – of US industrial might and Japan’s relative lack of preparedness to withstand it is discussed more than once.)

The naval battle scenes are reasonably convincing and seem to pass quickly. The treatment of the Japanese resistance on Oahu feels a bit perfunctory, though. We hear about it but don’t witness much of it.

SPOILER ALERT.
Turtledove is undoubtedly correct in not ignoring the Japanese enslavement of “comfort women.” Also reflecting the nineteen forties there is an element of misogyny – and maybe racism too – in the post-liberation treatment of the woman of Chinese origin who kept house in their brothel in Wahiawa. While two males suspected of being guilty of collaboration escape relatively freely, she does not.

Overall the book is curiously readable. Whether it was more familiarity with the characters and scenario or due to more incident it seemed to flow more freely than Days Of Infamy. But both books are marshmallow reading, very little thought is required.

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. “Buildings 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.