Arthur_Phuxache
I do occasionally experiment with editing
- Location
- Greater Doncastrian Empire
I've never read a Turtledove novel (short stories yes), nor an S M Stirling novel. I gather I'm not missing a great deal.
A handful of Turtledove standalone novels are worth looking at if you can get them (especially from a library or cheap secondhand bookstore), such as Ruled Britannia and Guns of the South. Although In the Presence of Mine Enemies is only useful for kindling.I've never read a Turtledove novel (short stories yes), nor an S M Stirling novel. I gather I'm not missing a great deal.
Guns of the South
For SM Stirling novels, the Island in the Sea of Time series is worth a look.
Understandable.I tried reading it, but bounced off it after several chapters. I think I'd have to believe the American Civil War was a pivotal conflict in world history to enjoy it, but I don't.
In one sense, ISOTs have never really been my thing. There's been nary a one I can get into, going all the way back to when they were a big craze on soc.history.what-if soon after the original series came out.It seems exceedingly dull. I'd sooner write my own ISOT, than read someone else's.
In one sense, ISOTs have never really been my thing.
Does anyone remember that one from AH.com, "WI: The State of Israel is ISOT'd to the Hadean era"?
Things would have been a bit impacty-melty, surely?
One suspects that was rather the idea.
I picked up two of these at heavily discounted prices in '95 and '96 and was sufficiently appalled that I've bought nothing else of his since.That seems one of the biggies for US AH fans, why is that? Just right-place-right-time for a generation?
I'd Turtledove's greatest period of output, visibility and relevance was in the 90s-2000s (I came of age at the tail end of it). I'd liken him to a band that remains popular enough to sell, but who used to be considerably more successful and more influential. I still think he was a gateway for many alternate history fans and that his books still can be one, but that he doesn't have the same cachet he used to.
Turtledove isn’t carried by ideas / characters so much as sunk by trying to subordinate them to a long-running (nonexistent) plot - his characters almost always get less interesting over the course of the series, which is why How Few Remain and The Guns of the South are the best of his civil war books and Worldwar / his fantasy WWII series, which didn’t even have interesting POVs to start with, get nearly unreadable over time.
The flipside of course is that his short stories, as has been pointed out by quite a few people, are actually pretty damn good - Lee at the Alamo blows The Guns of the South out of the water and (I will keep repeating this until someone actually reads it) Vilcabamba is his best work and read in one sitting is fairly stunning.
I remember the first Turtledove story I read. It was called The Gladiator and was part of his Crosstime Traffic series. The concept was a world where Communism had won the Cold War and the whole world was Communist. That was the first AH story that I'd read I'd previously read those What If? books, but they're not really stories).
Yeah there were a bunch of different scenarios:I remember that one. Those books were kinda neat.
There was a Disunited States one, and a post-nuclear war one and I think some Roman Empire forever one?
Of course Elvis won't go into politics. Being the King is better than being the President.Elvis will become president of the United States despite he never wanted to go into politics
From what I can recall the main problem with the original ISOT is Stirling's apparent inability to write villains who aren't caricatures in one way or another, including the ones who had something of a point, thus neatly avoiding actual argument. For all 1632's faults, I think Flint is a bit better at that (probably helped by his and Weber's instincts generally being to caricature in opposed directions).A handful of Turtledove standalone novels are worth looking at if you can get them (especially from a library or cheap secondhand bookstore), such as Ruled Britannia and Guns of the South. Although In the Presence of Mine Enemies is only useful for kindling.
For SM Stirling novels, the Island in the Sea of Time series is worth a look, if only from a historical sense to see what kicked off the ISOT craze. The Emberverse should be entirely avoided, though, and the Draka haven't held up well over time.
I only read the first (which was decent enough IIRC) but I suspect the fact it's different characters each time probably helps Turtledove avoid his mentioned usual problems with series a bit.Yeah there were a bunch of different scenarios:
Gunpowder Empire: the Roman Empire never collapses
Curious Notions: Imperial Germany wins WWI and conquers the world
In High Places: Black death kills 4/5ths of Europeans
The Disunited States of America: Constitutional Convention fails, resulting in a US that is broken into numerous states
The Valley-Westside War: Nuclear war occurs in the 1960s, leading to a post-apocalyptic world where Los Angeles is broken into several different nations.
For those who never read the series, the central premise is that our world has discovered a way to travel to alternate universes. Because resources on our planet have become scarce the government sets up shops in alternate worlds to buy their resources and ship them back to our timeline. I should note that these are young adult novels (probably the only ones by Turtledove), which was great for me because I started reading them at 10 or 11. I suspect they don't hold up quite as well as I remember, but I'm not going to check and ruin my memories.