Review - Stalingrad Run: A Snapshot Universe Novel, by Dale Cozort

[AndyC]

Discuss @Skinny87 's latest review here

 

[Skinny87]

I have to run to a meeting in a minute, but this of course is by @DaleCoz and is a fantastic and hugely imaginative original take on the parallel worlds/realities concept.

 

[Coiler]

I have to run to a meeting in a minute, but this of course is by @DaleCoz and is a fantastic and hugely imaginative original take on the parallel worlds/realities concept.

Since it also relies on the parallel worlds/time displacement concept, I might have to do a review of a (gulp) Kirov book to give an example of how not to handle that.

 

[Charles EP M.]

It sounds a bit like Doctor Who: The War Games, minus the Doctor and everyone aware what's happened (and fighting Nazis)

 

[Omund the Wooden-Leg]

Firstly, a critique of the cover: the colour of the font should be grey to make it blend in better.
Secondly, didn't Arthur Clarke and Stephen Baxter write a book series wherein a transcended extraterrestrial species takes random periods of Earth history and knit them together to form a whole other planet, Mir? Characters involved is late nineteenth-century Chicago, a late nineteenth-century British fort in northwest Raj India, the armies of Chinggiz Khan Temujin, the armies of Alexander the Great, ancient Babylon, and a U.N. peacekeeping helicopter crew.

 

[DaleCoz]

Firstly, a critique of the cover: the colour of the font should be grey to make it blend in better.

I hate the cover. It needs redoing. That's on my schedule, hopefully by the time I get the sequel done.

Secondly, didn't Arthur Clarke and Stephen Baxter write a book series wherein a transcended extraterrestrial species takes random periods of Earth history and knit them together to form a whole other planet, Mir? Characters involved is late nineteenth-century Chicago, a late nineteenth-century British fort in northwest Raj India, the armies of Chinggiz Khan Temujin, the armies of Alexander the Great, ancient Babylon, and a U.N. peacekeeping helicopter crew.

I'm not familiar with the Arthur Clarke/Steven Baxter book(s), but I'll admit that I built on a couple Philip Jose Farmer series: Riverworld, which puts every human who has ever lived on a strange planet where a giant river winds from pole to pole, and World of the Tiers, where people with godlike powers create pocket universes to their specs. Put the two together and add a few twists and you've got the bulk of the idea behind the Snapshot Universe. I take that idea in a very different direction in that only technological (as in can fly an airplane to thirty thousand feet) civilizations can contact each other--with some exceptions and all of the Snapshots start out as replicas of an Earth continent or other geographic feature as of a time and place.

The Snapshot idea attracts me partly because you can do things with it that are very difficult with traditional point of divergence Alternate History. Want an independent Conquistador-run Mexico? Not a problem. Just have a 1518 Snapshot. Want to see what American Indians would accomplish from 1492 to now with no contact with Europe, Asia or Africa. Hard to do otherwise. Easy with a Snapshot. I love writing fiction, but playing with the history has always been my passion and I exclusively did that for a decade or two before I started writing novels.

 

[DaleCoz]

I looked up the Arthur Clark/Stephen Baxter stuff. It's a series called Time Odyssey. Based on the descriptions, it goes in a very different direction than I do in the Snapshot series, but does go directly where I was planning to go with a short story in a different universe.