- Location
- Albany, NY
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The short story was amazing though.
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Least favorite alt-history story?
- Thread starter Resurgam
- Start date
napoleon IV
Sheer Animal Cunning of the Groundhog
- Location
- Washington, Douglass Commonwealth
- Pronouns
- he/him
Agreed, which is part of why the novel is so bad. Turtledove needs to stop expanding his works. His short stories don't work as novels, and his novels don't work as series. Really, the best thing would be for Turtledove to do anthologies of short stories, with a connecting theme or something.
- Location
- Over the rainbow
Turtledove generally gets worse the further he gets from a PoD, the more words he writes, and the further he gets into a series. Guns of the South, How Few Remain, Ruled Britannia and the short story version of In The Presence of Mine Enemies had their flaws, but on the whole were pretty good.
The later TL-191, Worldwar Colonisation and the novel version of In The Presence of Mine Enemies were abysmal. Especially the last. What wasn't awkward seduction was even more awkward description of bridge games.
The later TL-191, Worldwar Colonisation and the novel version of In The Presence of Mine Enemies were abysmal. Especially the last. What wasn't awkward seduction was even more awkward description of bridge games.
I liked Colonisation. I felt Homeward Bound didn't do enough to reflect on the rest of the series, 'how far we've come', etc., it felt too standalone.
- Location
- Auckland via London
- Pronouns
- He/him
I thought he was talking about the movie with the dogs.
Liking that is not controversial.
The Race-German War didn't make any sense but it was an enjoyable spectacle to read about and the way that Britain was slowly moving towards the Nazi orbit was genuinely creepy to read about at the time. The Race seemed to become a bit less moronic but the sex scenes became even more gratuitous and I found myself skimming PoVs to get to Molotov on more than one occasion. Homeward Bound was better.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The Red Level: Stalingrad Tractor Factory
Artaxerxes
Senshi sautés seashells by the seashore
- Location
- #VALUE!
Plague Dogs.
Tovarich
a sinking dumpling. He/Him.
- Location
- Norwich North, UK
Did you ever read 'Rover Red Charlie', Dom?
A post-Apocalyptic sort of 'Homeward Bound', very feel-good & upbeat (after the initial scene-setting) as well as just plain lol funny for anybody with a dog (especially how it's revealed that Red had never been to the vet for a certain little operation.)
Here's the first part, the other five are clickable from there.
http://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Rover-Red-Charlie/Issue-1?id=63664
- Location
- Auckland via London
- Pronouns
- He/him
I have not but I will have a look
I'd say Declan Finn's Pius Trilogy is another really bad one. It's not intended as a "100% undeniable" alternate history, but it has enough divergences (like say, a vastly different pope) that I feel OK including it here.
The books are written by an archtraditionalist Catholic with a gigantic axe to grind. The writing was started during the Da Vinci Code craze, which does nothing but date them horribly. It's like criticizing 80s hair bands in a piece not released until 1999. Anyway, onto the books themselves. The first is about researchers of Pius XII being killed and the heroes fighting to stop them. In practice, it's 1/3 clunky action novel, 1/3 the author diving into the historical controversy surrounding him (and taking his side to a huge extent), and 1/3 author rants on stuff like how most American Catholics are too liberal and how John XXIII was a Red. And it takes itself so seriously that a scene where the pope in his super-body-armor fights off assassins who were trained from childhood in secret KGB camps is handled utterly matter-of-factly.
It only gets worse from there. Enter the North Korean-Russian-Chinese-French-Sudanese (yes, really) anti-Catholic conspiracy. In the second book,they kidnap the Pope and put him inan excuse for more authorial rants to argue with strawman opponents a trial, in a The Hague that has mysteriously moved from The Netherlands to Belgium (this is not alternate history, it's bad research). And then of course, there's the "action", which is really clunky and researched in all the wrong ways.
The third book takes the cake, for becoming silly in the worst way possible. The conspiracy gathers an army of everything from Russian paratroopers to Sudanese machete-swingers to invade the Vatican, only to be foiled by goofy booby traps. Along with more bitterly serious author rants and infodumps. When it does change tone, it's the worst kind of tone change, where the characters in-universe don't take the threat seriously, implying the reader shouldn't either. (I didn't). The setup for the "battle" is way too ridiculous to be treated at face value, especially compared to the earlier books, but the rants are there. It just has one of the most inconsistent tones I've ever seen in any work of fiction, not even the first two books.
The books are written by an archtraditionalist Catholic with a gigantic axe to grind. The writing was started during the Da Vinci Code craze, which does nothing but date them horribly. It's like criticizing 80s hair bands in a piece not released until 1999. Anyway, onto the books themselves. The first is about researchers of Pius XII being killed and the heroes fighting to stop them. In practice, it's 1/3 clunky action novel, 1/3 the author diving into the historical controversy surrounding him (and taking his side to a huge extent), and 1/3 author rants on stuff like how most American Catholics are too liberal and how John XXIII was a Red. And it takes itself so seriously that a scene where the pope in his super-body-armor fights off assassins who were trained from childhood in secret KGB camps is handled utterly matter-of-factly.
It only gets worse from there. Enter the North Korean-Russian-Chinese-French-Sudanese (yes, really) anti-Catholic conspiracy. In the second book,they kidnap the Pope and put him in
The third book takes the cake, for becoming silly in the worst way possible. The conspiracy gathers an army of everything from Russian paratroopers to Sudanese machete-swingers to invade the Vatican, only to be foiled by goofy booby traps. Along with more bitterly serious author rants and infodumps. When it does change tone, it's the worst kind of tone change, where the characters in-universe don't take the threat seriously, implying the reader shouldn't either. (I didn't). The setup for the "battle" is way too ridiculous to be treated at face value, especially compared to the earlier books, but the rants are there. It just has one of the most inconsistent tones I've ever seen in any work of fiction, not even the first two books.
I would like to stress that I am not the author of this.
- Location
- Colwyn Bay/Manchester
- Pronouns
- He/him
I genuinely don't remember sex scenes in Colonization, whereas the Worldwar ones left scars I'm not sure aren't still present.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
One of the major PoV characters is a human woman who was kidnapped by the race as a baby and has subsequently been brought up as an experiment to see if humans could become loyal subjects. Her plot largely revolves around her getting urges that are obviously alien to her handlers and as such they offer her various humans which she turns down in favour of Sam Yeager's son, who agrees to go along with it only for the Race-German war to break out just before they get down to it, which leads to them both joking about getting it over with before they get blown up by Nazis. As if this wasn't already the AH version of Barbarella. There are a lot of "self-help" sessions as well that are just incredibly unsettling to read.
Heh, Rome Alone.
That was my exact thought when I first read it.