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Least favorite alt-history story?

There's so much that could be said about Worldwar and Worldwar: Colonisation that honestly I don't know where to start. Despite its obvious flaws, it was the series that got me into alternate history along with The Guns of the South and the Southern Victory huge-ology.

Something to ruminate on, but one thing that always stuck out to me was the distinct lack of sea-based scenes in Worldwar especially as it seemed like every other scene in Southern Victory was on an aircraft carrier. I know we had the whole 'The Race comes from a desert planet without bodies of water' and 'it takes centuries for them to consider something heretical like using a different kind of screw' but IIRC there are constantly scenes, especially in the latter books when the push towards Chicago takes place, where ships can just transfer supplies over the water because it confuses The Race or something. That always stood out to me - I mean, they weren't stupid, and after a few weeks of 'what's this wet stuff' you'd think they'd be bombing anything that floats.
 
Yeah, I'm currently dying internally after this. Sorry for wasting your time.

I wouldn't worry too much, Josh - certainly to me it's oddly fascinating to find someone in an AH forum who didn't grow up reading Worldwar, and I think this is another valuable addition you make to the forum. Turtledove's contributions to the genre are so epoch-making and yuge that it's completely disorientating for me to see someone younger go 'Oh, yeah, saw a video on it' when I could have literally built a smaller bedroom within my bedroom in the early 2000s with all of my Turtledove books.

I think it says something about how dominant Turtledove was in the genre in the 90s and early 2000s but has now rather been superseded as other authors have come into the genre
 
Plus I will always love Worldwar for actually including the UK in the conflict and not just having occasional political scenes and the old 'Brits do special forces only lol' trope. The UK gets hit hard in the later books, and I still get goosebumps remembering the scenes where the landing ground gets hit by Home Guard mortars and strafed by a Spitfire, or when Churchill has the whole country liberally dosed with mustard gas after warning The Race about it.
 
Random Remembrances of Worldwar

Actually, as I'd rather do anything other than work at the moment, I thought I'd see what I remember about Worldwar and what stands out even now, literal decades after I last read them

  • Turtledove must surely have fuelled the odd fascination in AH and historical fiction with Otto Skorzeny. I seem to remember that he had plot armour even before I understood that term - Turtledove seemed to have a rule that every other German PoV scene had to have the loveable scamp in it, mortaring a chemical factory or stealing plutonium or fighting in Albania (?) with partisans or something.
  • That American pilot in China - Bobby? - and his Chinese girlfriend. She was a partisan, I think? Anyway he just dies randomly, I think, and I was never much fussed with his viewpoints.
  • Japan gets fucking flattened with nukes IIRC after they try and make one of their own
  • Wondering if the 'Jews in Warsaw cooperate with The Race because they don't try and exterminate them like the Nazis' still stands up or comes across as Rather Dubious Now
  • Something I can guarantee not standing up well are the weird creepy chapters where The Race scientist raises a female baby to a teenager. Even when I was at my most naïve and isolated I thought they had a creepily-obsessive focus on her, uh, biology
  • Those lizard soldiers in Siberia getting stoned out of their minds on ginger always cracked me up for some reason - Turtledove's version of US troops in West Germany, I suppose
  • Ginger being the drug The Race are affected by - always struck me as a weird choice by Turtledove, for some reason I could never quite explain
  • The insanely long bike ride by that nuclear scientist from coast to coast to Los Alamos or wherever. Chapter after chapter, and one of the most disturbing and mind-scarring scenes I've ever read around the effects of a venereal disease on a penis
  • The utter gall Turtledove had in having LITERALLY THE SAME FUCKING OPENING CHAPTER for every book, where The Race commander watches a holovid of the ancient cavalryman humanity was supposed to be represented by when they arrived, and then the panzer creeping around the ruined wall after the last anti-tank round had been expended
  • Did the Italians feature at all? Literally can't remember anything
  • The 1337 panzer commander may well have fuelled my obsession with tanks
  • Being outraged by the first book in Worldwar: Colonisation suggesting that the UK had cosied up to Nazi Germany in the Cold War period and literally boycotting the series despite having all of them on my shelf after going to the US on holiday
 
  • Wondering if the 'Jews in Warsaw cooperate with The Race because they don't try and exterminate them like the Nazis' still stands up or comes across as Rather Dubious Now
I remember Moishe as being one of the most sympathetic POVs, and it's not like he and Mordecai actually like the Race much (indeed, they work against them too later on).
  • Did the Italians feature at all? Literally can't remember anything
I think Mussolini is mentioned at different points as both the Race's highest-ranked quisling and a staunch defender of humanity. Which is very Turtledove.
 
I've read a bit of Worldwar. To me it was a classic Turtledove "good idea and opening, but he dragged it on too long because he can't write long series" kind of thing.

I mean, he could write long series

Whether he should have written them is the question, I think. Dude never saw an idea he couldn't stretch into approximately a billion-word wordcount - George RR Martin has nothing on him
 
Hell, Worldwar is a concise summation compared to the bloat in Southern Victory

Hey kids, want to follow the multi-book journey of the Union Sergeant Bible-Thumper who literally dies randomly moments before the Great War ends? Or the multi-book saga of the Canadian family fighting the American occupiers with, like, dynamite and shit? Or the saga of USS Aircraft Carrier when it sailed around the world repeatedly and everyone got suntans?

Well then do I have the books for you!
 
  • That American pilot in China - Bobby? - and his Chinese girlfriend. She was a partisan, I think? Anyway he just dies randomly, I think, and I was never much fussed with his viewpoints.

The partisan girlfriend was the actually interesting POV of the two, and her getting dropped along with any focus on China was one of the biggest turnoffs for Colonisation.
 
I would never be the one to defend Turtledove's execrable bloated series, but to be fair, even his good short stories and novellas share the theme of "average people caught up by the surge of history".

Yeah, but there were so many of them

To the point where they all sort of blended together unless they had a really unique USP, like Custer being bug-fuck crazy
 
Yeah, but there were so many of them

To the point where they all sort of blended together unless they had a really unique USP, like Custer being bug-fuck crazy

I've always wanted to do Custer going full Colonel Kurtz and the cavalry being forced to send in an assassin.
 
Wasn't she around in at least the first book?

Now that I think about it the Chinese rebellion is in Colonisation, not Worldwar. As one of the few good bits, it ended unsatisfactorily and none of the characters rate a mention in Homeward Bound, which is where I can remember the irritation coming from.
 
Harrison's Stars and Stripes trilogy is definitely one of my least favorites, mainly because it took a great idea (the Trent Affair leading to a USA-GB war) and made it so implausible and filled with hammy dialogue, extremely one-dimensional characters all around, and ridiculous steampunk-like tech that I only read to the end of the series because I hate leaving even bad books unfinished. I haven't always been able to keep this rule; anything by Robert Conroy is automatically suspect to me, after trying and failing to finish 1901 (US and Wilhelmine Germany go to war over territorial claims in the Caribbean and the Pacific, for some reason). I no longer have the latter, but kept the former as a warning of how bad AH writing can turn out. Daniel Easterman's K is for Killing bombed, too, due to several glaring historical errors (Lindbergh too young to be president in 1932, to name the biggest) and a really soapy, poorly-thought-out plot in general (a shame, since I've found few good AH stories based on the President Lindbergh premise).

Apacheria had another interesting idea (an independent Native American nation lasting into the 20th century), but ultimately crashed and burned for me as well, and likewise holds a spot in the "warning" pantheon. Robert Skimin's Custer's Luck started from a similarly intriguing premise (Custer survives Little Bighorn, launching a meteoric military and political career), yet the dialogue, editing, and character personality problems nagged at me enough that I'm not sure whether to keep it, and I'm shying away from his Gray Victory.
 
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At the risk of drawing fire, I will say that Turtledove's works (his earlier material, at any rate) are some of the better AH I've read. Some of this is likely nostalgia (I was first introduced to him around 13, when I found the Worldwar series while browsing for new Star Trek, Star Wars, and other scifi :), and was also reading everything WWII-related I could find), but a fair amount is respect for his (admittedly sometimes muddled) multi-perspective narratives, that don't always require the background of war or some other conflict to flesh them out, as is the case with a lot of AH, even my own. This is especially true in his Southern Victory works; I've been a Civil War fan for most of my life (even going for a history doctorate centered on the period!), and I enjoy(ed) this series quite a bit thanks to that passion, warts, errors and all. For simplicity's sake, I'll list the ones I've read/own as I see them according to Good, Decent, and Poor categories:

Good
Ruled Britannia
The Daimon
(Short Story)
Joe Steele (the Short Story; NOT the novel, which felt like a seriously unnecessary expansion)
Agent of Byzantium
The Guns of the South


Decent
The Two Georges (despite Harry Harrison's involvement, which Turtledove notes in the acknowledgements :))
In The Presence of Mine Enemies
Days of Infamy
duology
Southern Victory series (some scenes and dialogue do get annoyingly repetitive, but the overall story makes up for this)
Worldwar/ Colonization series (on an individual book basis; some were okay, while others--especially Homeward Bound--just slouched along)
A World of Difference (Felt more scifi than AH, so I was willing to overlook or forgive some issues)
Crosstime Traffic (Seemed better when I read it as a teenager, though I couldn't make it through and thus don't own Valley-Westside War)

Poor
The Man With the Iron Heart (good POD, REALLY hammy plot and characters, with too many unsubtle links to the Iraq War)
The War That Came Early series (Barely made it through the first book, and didn't have the patience to get past the first few chapters of the 2nd)

In short, IMO, Turtledove's written good and crappy AH, mostly the latter in recent years. Everyone's got their own tastes, so I understand if people don't like his material; just please don't trash me for liking some of it.
 
I wouldn't worry too much, Josh - certainly to me it's oddly fascinating to find someone in an AH forum who didn't grow up reading Worldwar, and I think this is another valuable addition you make to the forum. Turtledove's contributions to the genre are so epoch-making and yuge that it's completely disorientating for me to see someone younger go 'Oh, yeah, saw a video on it' when I could have literally built a smaller bedroom within my bedroom in the early 2000s with all of my Turtledove books.

I think it says something about how dominant Turtledove was in the genre in the 90s and early 2000s but has now rather been superseded as other authors have come into the genre
To be fair to Josh, I don't think she'll ever actually see a physical copy of it here, and indeed I've never read it physically.

I mean it's selling on Kindle now (which is where I've read it), but it is very much a "stumble on the third book in the used bookshop" series now.
 
Yeah, but there were so many of them

To the point where they all sort of blended together unless they had a really unique USP, like Custer being bug-fuck crazy
All I remember is that Sam Carson got sunburned really easily. It's been a decade since I read those books, but since Turtledove mentioned it 50 billion times it stuck with me.
 
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