• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Least favorite alt-history story?

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.

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.
 
Guns of the South

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.

For SM Stirling novels, the Island in the Sea of Time series is worth a look.

It seems exceedingly dull. I'd sooner write my own ISOT, than read someone else's.
 
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.
Understandable.

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. 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.

In another sense, I do think that there's value in seeing how they all started. But obviously if that's not your thing, then don't bother with it.
 
Though not intended as such, Hackett's The Third World War was likely my intro to AH, back in the late eighties.

That seems one of the biggies for US AH fans, why is that? Just right-place-right-time for a generation?
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.
 
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.

So Turtledove’s the Metallica of AH?

I must admit I’m one of those who read his stuff after already becoming obsessive with AH, particularly on The Other Place but I do appreciate the gateway effect. I wouldn’t defend his stuff purely because of this, he’s done a lot of genuinely good work and can be defended on that basis.
 
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.
 
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.

Yeah, I have the link to Lee at the Alamo saved in my mobile bookmarks because it's so damn good - not only is there some great action writing, but the clash between Lee and the Texans (and their attitudes) is a wonderful example of characterisation.
 
Perhaps it's not just a question of what was available before the internet, but also if you were in more... provincial places.

Maybe the other Kiwis here have different experiences, but as a high schooler in the early 2000s, the scifi/fantasy section of Christchurch Public Library (for example) had very little in the way of AH. You had Turtledove, maybe a little Sterling (who even fourteen year old me was suspicious of) and that was largely it.

So it was quite easy, in retrospect, to identify him so strongly with the genre even when I later began to read more widely.
 
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).
 
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).

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?
 
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?
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.
 
Re Turtledove, I think the best (or worst) dichotomy between his short stories and his novels is In the Presence of Mine Enemies. The former is a gut-punch of a concise tale. The latter is a meandering mess with a nonsense notion of a declining Third Reich holding elections (that would happen after it collapsed, not before).
 
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.
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).
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.
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.
 
Back
Top