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Coiler's Alternate History Reviews

C

Coiler

Connoisseur of the Miscellaneous
Published by SLP
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I debated separate threads for each work, but figured that just putting them all in one thread, one post at a time, would be less cluttered.

Anyway, I've read a lot of books. A lot of these are alternate history books. And, Sturgeon's Law being a thing, a lot of these are bad.

I'll start off with an easy target:

Walt Gragg's The Red Line.

It's something. The alternate history part isn't. It's basically bland military "thriller" mush with prose and structure that just doesn't grab me. About the only thing even slightly interesting that isn't directly tied to the AH part in some fashion is that some reviewers have slammed it for featuring clunk-headed Soviets against too-strong Americans and some have slammed it for featuring clunk-headed Americans against too-strong Soviets. (I have no comment, just that it was a little hard to get me to get into the action, so I couldn't really judge in that regard-it's kind of blurry).

Now for the darkly amusing part: The alternate history part. This does not disappoint. See, the book was obviously written as a conventional Red Storm Rising wannabe taking place during the Cold War. But at some point, it was decided that it had to be "modern". The sole effect this has on the action is that the tanks are called "T-90s" in the text instead of T-72s. Otherwise it looks and feels like a Cold War piece, which to be fair was when the author had his military experience.

The real "amusing" part is the political setup. So we get a restored Red supervillain Russia that can mysteriously rewind the clock back to 198X (complete with a restored Warsaw Pact) in terms of force ratios and positions. The "supervillain Soviets" are part and parcel of the genre, as much as I may dislike it, I'm letting it slide. Normally I'd let the war setup excuse slide too, except this is incredibly stupid. It involves the Soviets Russians villains attempting to regain East Germany, a neo-Nazi named Manfred Fromisch ousting them in street battles, getting an 80% (!) approval rating and being a shoo-in for the next chancellor, and Comrade Chairman Strawmannov getting angry enough at this to start the war.

Yeah. It's the only standout part of this story. This is not a very good book, either as alternate history or just as a thriller.
 
This is great! Please keep these coming.
 
Now I can't just keep grabbing the low-hanging fruit forever, so I'd go straight to one of the classics now.

The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove

Turtledove is one of the most prominent mainstream alternate history writers. He's also a very firm "pop-AH" writer, as his books go for allegories far more than actual plausibility. They also feature (for the most part) mainstream-friendly topics, because Germans and Confederates are known and sell to more people than a different outcome in the Gran Chaco War. Despite such a popular view, or perhaps because of it (after all, more than a few sci-fi fans got their start with flashy pulp like Star Wars before moving into deeper and more serious settings), he remains influential on alternate history.

However, he also has his issues. Even a book like this, published as a standalone novel and without a big, obvious, hamfisted allegory, has some issues. But it also does some things right and avoids trip-ups. What it does well, it does very well. What it does badly, it does very badly. The plot is what this crowd would consider "ASB", in that it involves something totally fantastical. Instead of the South managing to flip the border states or turtle until a peace candidate wins in 1864, they have time-traveling South African racists giving them AK-47s. The first part deals with the South's victory, the second deals with internal politics and mellows down, and the third is what happens when they and the time travelers turn on each other.

First, what it does wrong. The book has a very uncomfortable feeling of southern apologism.I do not think Turtledove was deliberately aiming for what it ended up being like, and it was not enough for me to stop reading the book, but it still feels kind of icky. That they're convinced to phase out slavery at the end is rather incredulous to me. It feels like he wanted to be well-intentioned and make the characters more sympathetic to a modern audience, but that doing so led to them exemplifying the Noble Confederate myth.

Then there's the antagonists. The South Africans are some of the worst villains I've seen in any work of fiction. Not only are they horrifically, blatantly terrible to make the Confederates look better in racial terms, but they conveniently slip up and use their advanced technology in some of the dumbest possible ways when the plot calls for it. There's also a bit of what I call "no-butterflies" syndrome, where the politically important figures are the most recognizable rather than the most likely. Being pop-AH in this case actually helps it, because at least there it's understandable.

So if it does so much wrong and has creepy feelings, what does it do right? Well, it does some things right. It moves well enough, certainly better than some of Turtledove's later clunktastic books. And it manages to do two things right that so many other books-not just alternate history books- have done wrong. Viewpoint characters and power disparity. Too many other books and stories (including some of Turtledove's later ones) go overboard with viewpoint characters. They get in each other's way and keep the narrative from flowing smoothly. Not so here. You have two viewpoint characters, each being there for a truly distinct perspective, and they fit together nicely. The second is power disparity. Turtledove manages to make the AKs vs muskets actually work by a combination of factors. One is being vivid enough in the battle scenes that a sense of immediacy and individual danger is there even in the lopsided battles at start. The second is the middle act's peace where such things are irrelevant. The third is when the Confederates find that their AKs suddenly don't look so impressive compared to belt-fed machine guns. While the narrative setup is there, it feels natural and not as contrived as too many other examples.

So, Guns of the South is a very mixed work. Its fundamentals are largely good, certainly better than many of Turtledove's later books, and there are enough plot points it hits firmly where countless other authors missed. But it also has some really bad parts and suffers for it. Still, I think it's worth reading, if only as a pop-fiction page turner (which is, after all, what it was written as).
 
The Big One by Stuart Slade

Ok. This book has a lot of baggage. Like its author's "antics" online, or how the later series becomes a zig-zagging mess of the most pointlessly detailed rivet counting, the outright supernatural, and so much effort put into neutralizing any potential American adversary that it feels like an unironic One Punch Man. But I'll just go to the original book, which is, to its credit, the strongest in the series. Even it has some very serious issues.

The first is that it has three priorities, none of which work well for a conventional story. The first was simply to show a Dropshot-sized nuclear blast on Germany in WWII (spoiler alert-it does not fare well). The second is to debunk what would now be called "wehraboos" by showing that as long as the US is in the war, Germany will end up nuked even with artificial advantages. The third is to show the fleets of B-36s in action. So, the background has to be rigged. Britain doesn't just withdraw from the war but gets taken over by the Germans in a Crimea-style sneak attack(!), while on the Eastern Front the Americans join en masse along with the Russians. Yes, not the Soviets, the Russians, who decommunize instantly and turn into nice politically docile teddy bears. The Germans advance to the Volga in its entirety and manage to stay there for five years while the Russo-American armies grind on.

There's political shenigans in South Asia as a clunky, disconnected subplot that only exists to set up the equally clunky and disconnected subplots of the later books, and a naval battle as an American carrier gets sunk in a plot that's at least slightly connected to the main bomber one. Oh yes, and there is the main bomber plot, which I can describe in one sentence. A bunch of B-36s fly over and nuke Germany. That's it. They encounter very little credible resistance. There's little immediacy and a lot of infodumps, and no real characterization to speak of. Although that last part isn't quite true, there's one bit of national characterization and that's "the Americans are awesome." Which is to say that you cannot go one inch in this book without either the narrator or a character going either "the Americans are awesome" or "The Americans are tough and don't let up [and therefore are awesome]". It's not quite as bad as the later books with the Easy Mode Cold War against Communist Imperial Chipan (that is not a misspelling), but it's still there, and more blatantly so than even other star-spangled thrillers.

Besides that, this book is dated in that its main argument is no longer (if it ever was) controversial. This makes its inaccuracies (ie, the politics, the nice neat carefully arranged B-36 attack, the war dragging on as a stalemate to the time when David Glantz theorized the Soviets would have finished the Germans off without Western Allied help) all the more jarring.

So it's a product of an earlier time with major issues that leave it no more than a curiosity, and unless you're a glutton for punishment like me, I'd strongly recommend avoiding the later books in the series. I also think a story by another author makes the same point better.

That would be RM Meluch's short story Vati, where a surviving Werner Moelders gets fleets of wunderwaffe planes up, they halt the invasion-and then the last part is Germany facing nuclear destruction. It's head and shoulders above in literary terms, and while its historical/technical inaccuracies are there, they feel less jarring.
 
My full reviews of his works will be posted here for the main SLP blog, but I highly recommend Mark Ciccone

He's quite new to AH, it seems, but his writing is good, his PoDs interesting if a little conventional, and he's got a flair for counterfactual background writing that doesn't fall into info dump territory

My review of his first full novel, Red Delta is here on my blog; it's a great story that basically transplants the Vietnam War into a timeline where the CSA won the War of Secession, and is full of political intriguing, action and some darkly amusing cameos

I'm now reviewing the trio of AH novellas he wrote before Red Delta - the first is Dillinger in Charleston, another political intrigue between a divided North and South, but he also has a novella about Lee fighting for the Union, and a third about a different result in the case of Cortez v Aztecs
 
Cauldron by Larry Bond

Larry Bond has been extraordinarily influential on wargaming. However, as a prose writer he's not nearly as good, and his influence has been almost completely negative. Had Bond been a follower rather than a leader, he'd be a middle-of-the-pack technothriller writer-good gramatically, but overbloated and stepped in cliches. Instead, as a leader, his books I've read have been overbloated and pioneered the cliches.

It's not uncommon to have the feeling, when one looks back at enormously influential works, to have seen/read/played/watched so many imitators that the original doesn't seem so original. In Bond's case, this is true to a great extreme. Perhaps it's the writing style at work-a lot of times, the original is done with more thought than the rushed copycats. This is not the case with Bond's novels, including Cauldron. They just slam out what would become the genre-busting cliches, so that if they were written five years later, I would probably just snort at how formulaic it is.

The time of Cauldron's publication is when the technothriller jumped the shark. Both the outsider factors (fall of the USSR) and inside ones (The genre having the "cat mustache"[1] issue of grinding itself down on its own tropes) can be seen here. In the immediate post-USSR, post-Gulf War scramble, authors of cheap thrillers reached desperately for a foe that could try and take Papa Bear's place while still seeming "credible" on a large scale. In Cauldron's case, it was an alliance of Germany and France. There's a Russia subplot that ultimately comes to nothing, and also one of Bond's biggest failings-his tendency to write very long, pointless first acts of political maneuvering before the battles start. In fact, a lot of the imitators have been better than him at pacing. I say pointless not (just) because the political writing is dull and one-sided, but because all it does it "set up" the conflict that the book says will happen and that everyone knows will happen.

Once it does happen, it does little to stand out. If you've read one chapter of one technothriller before, be it a classic or Z-list Kindle ripoff, you know what to expect. And the prose is just "ok" when it needs to be great. About the only things to make it stand out are the opponents and that the French nuclear arsenal is handwaved aside in an obvious fashion (through a too-successful counterforce strike).

The path taken by technothrillers in terms of popularity and evolution fascinates me in a way far beyond the "cheap thriller" nature of their contents. And this is one at the beginning of the vicious cycle that would rip the whole genre apart by the end of the decade. Stories meant for a Cold War setup faced an awkward paradigm shift. Too many tried to keep the same basic story structure intact, using ever more blatant gimmicks to do so.

As a story, Cauldron is just one thriller among many. As a perfect sample of a genre that was clearly starting to fail, it's interesting in that sense.


[1]"Cat mustache" comes from an old article called "The Death of Adventure games", as an example of the puzzles growing so ridiculously hard and unintuitive that players gave up on the entire genre. This puzzle involved using cat fur to make a fake mustache.
 
I must admit I've only read a couple of Clive Cusslers and had much the same feeling of 'oh god this is just trite.'
 
Oh man

Oh man, Larry Bond

I love his early stuff and always will - Cauldron, Red Phoenix, that one with Germany and France invading Poland

Huge nostalgia hit
 
Skinny87 said:
Oh man

Oh man, Larry Bond

I love his early stuff and always will - Cauldron, Red Phoenix, that one with Germany and France invading Poland

Huge nostalgia hit
Click to expand...

So we disagree.

Besides just us having different literary tastes, I might have had a better opinion of Bond had I read his books when I was younger and as my first exposure to technothrillers. Instead, I, for a variety of reasons, got to experience the triple-xeroxed imitators first , and thus had the "original doesn't seem original" effect hit with a vengeance.

If there's one pleasant surprise I've found, it's Coyle's Team Yankee. I'm not going to pretend it's anything more than a star-spangled popcorn tank novel, but it moves a lot better and stays a lot more focused than many, many other works in its genre.

Incidentally, the first technothriller author I read in large amounts was Dale Brown, and he always erred more on the sci-fi end of things with his ridiculous aircraft.
 
Coiler said:
So we disagree.

Besides just us having different literary tastes, I might have had a better opinion of Bond had I read his books when I was younger and as my first exposure to technothrillers. Instead, I, for a variety of reasons, got to experience the triple-xeroxed imitators first , and thus had the "original doesn't seem original" effect hit with a vengeance.

If there's one pleasant surprise I've found, it's Coyle's Team Yankee. I'm not going to pretend it's anything more than a star-spangled popcorn tank novel, but it moves a lot better and stays a lot more focused than many, many other works in its genre.

Incidentally, the first technothriller author I read in large amounts was Dale Brown, and he always erred more on the sci-fi end of things with his ridiculous aircraft.
Click to expand...

You

You also like Harold Coyle?

Yeah, we're gonna get on just fine

Have tou read all of Coyle's stuff or just Team Yankee?
 
Also Dale Brown: His early stuff was fine, like The Flight of the Old Dog, but his current books are basically just alt-right power fantasies and have been heading that way since Tin Man
 
In The Presence of Mine Enemies by Harry Turtledove

If Guns of the South was a very conflicted book, this is not. This is bad Turtledove. This is taking a cliche "Nazis win" scenario, applying an incredibly clunky analogy to it (in this case the fall of the USSR, complete with an "August Coup"), and then padding out the small substance with filler. Lots and lots of filler.

In this case, the filler consists of games of bridge and an attempted seduction. Yeah, not exactly grand intrigue or manuevering. It's really hard to go into detail about this book because it failed so much at the fundamentals-its POD and alternate history is neither novel nor done well, its characters are bland and boring, and its plot is slow-moving and predictable.

I would firmly recommend against reading this book.
 
Agree with your review of the novelised version (just how clunky is the analogy? Buckliger - the name of the reformist fuhrer - is a direct German translation of Gorbachev, both mean "hunchback"). It should be pointed out that the original short story is one of Turtledove's better works - taut, focussed and with a reveal that is a genuine gut punch - and is well worth re-reading. He really hould have left well alone.
 
Didn't Joe Steele suffer from the same thing as In The Presence of Mine Enemies in that it was a decent short story turned into an overstuffed novel? I mean it even took Stalin's USSR changed it a little bit around to fit FDR's America.
 
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Creekmench said:
Didn't Joe Steele suffer from the same thing as In The Presence of Mine Enemies in that it was a decent short story turned into an overstuffed novel? I mean it even took Stalin's USSR changed it a little bit around to fit FDR's America.
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Pretty much. In general, the shorter Turtledove is the better. His short stories work quite well, his stand-alone books are okay, and his series are bad. And whenever he tries to expand one into the other he fails.
 
Alexander's Generals by Stuart Slade

So, why am I reviewing a second book by an author when I already reviewed his first and best book? It's because this is a totally different time frame, and at least theoretically a totally different subject matter. Now there is a weird connection in that this is the chronological first appearance of the immortal manipulators that serve as recurring characters/plot devices in his other stories. But this is a flimsy one and by and large it stands on its own.

Which is to say, not very well. There's two parts of the book, repeated over 400 pages that are about 200 pages too many. The first part is the battles. These are told in depth, in too-exact details, with too much infodumping and too little immediacy, and feel like the TBO battles only with spears and horses instead of tanks and aircraft. It's just battle after battle after battle after battle. And reading one reads the rest.

Between the battles is the intrigue. This is the most interesting because the author earnestly tried to do it well, but utterly lacked the skill to match his drive and confidence. So you have cloak and dagger manipulations and spying written in the same tone as the owners manual for a tractor. And everything is dragged down by the attempt at being historical fiction with some Ra's Al-Ghul types flung in rather than alternate history per se. This means that if you know anything about Hellenistic history, you know what the outcomes will be overall.

I can't be too hard on this book. It was an earnest attempt to break out of a genre rut and try something totally new and different, and that is praiseworthy in and of itself. But it's also let down by a lack of skill and pacing, and doesn't really do much to take advantage of its different time period and genre.
 
Twilight 2000: Kidnapped! by Timothy Brown and Loren Wiseman.

Twilight 2000 is an odd beast that was definitely a product of its time. Incredibly 80s both mechanically and culturally and possessing the single biggest "Grounded romance" of WW3 fiction, it manages to provide a balancing act that leaves it viable-which is to say that it can, with just enough background, let an adventuring party go where they want while still providing military hardware to go boom boom. Or at least the original Eastern European setting did. The series definitely jumped the shark when it shifted back to North America. The places grew both (more) tasteless and ridiculous, and the more subtle version of what TVTropes calls an "Adventure Friendly World" gave way to a blatantly contrived version. The nadir of the nadir was Kidnapped!, which not only brings up all the problems and contradictions of the setting to the forefront, but fails utterly on its own terms as well.

So, the first big plot point of Kidnapped is that the US is facing a megadrought that will possibly finish off what remains of its post-nuclear strike civilization, and thus everyone is heading to where the water is. In "Watsonian" in-universe terms, the megadrought is forgivable, but in "Doylist" author's intent ones terms it's there to make the setting even darker and more of a "classic" post-apocalyptic one. Then comes the big problem-with the megadrought on the horizon, the PCs are tasked with....

...Kidnapping Carl Hughes, the leader of the fascist New America in his supervillain's lair in the Shenandoah.

Yeah. The starving, war-weary veterans of irradiated Poland are taking on something better suited to Sam Fisher or Agent 47. On the way, they have the possibility of fighting stereotypical Native American marauders. Sadly, this was par for the course in sourcebooks at the time.

There are two massive problems with this module even without the metaplot. The first is that the PCs are given a task that would not normally be possible under the game mechanics, so the deck is stacked with monstrous and obvious contrivances to make it possible. These range from convenient broken cameras to conveniently easy disguises to Hughes conveniently staying in the most vulnerable parts of the lair.

The second is the raw sloppiness of it. The Native American marauders and various other people the PCs aren't even supposed to encounter (at least while remaining alive afterwards) get stats and official portraits, but Hughes himself, the very reason for the adventure, does not. Besides the detailed map of Hughes' lair (beyond the parts the rest of the book says he will actually go to even under attack) there's a second detailed map of an abandoned building that only exists to show a few clues as to the location of the real lair.

Yeah. This is one of the worst sourcebooks I've read, and most Twilight 2000 fans have nothing but contempt for Kidnapped. It's a sign that even before the fall of the USSR, Twilight 2000 was running on fumes.
 
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