American Empire: Blood & Iron [Hardcover]

Harry Turtledove (Author)

Book Description

Series: American Empire | Publication Date: July 31, 2001

AMERICAN EMPIRE: BOOK ONE

Twice in the last century, brutal war erupted between the United States and the Confederacy. Then, after a generation of relative peace, The Great War exploded worldwide. As the conflict engulfed Europe, the C.S.A. backed the Allies, while the U.S. found its own ally in Imperial Germany. The Confederate States, France, and England all fell. Russia self-destructed, and the Japanese, seeing that the cause was lost, retired to fight another day.

The Great War has ended, and an uneasy peace reigns around most of the world. But nowhere is the peace more fragile than on the continent of North America, where bitter enemies share a single landmass and two long, bloody borders.

In the North, proud Canadian nationalists try to resist the colonial power of the United States. In the South, the once-mighty Confederate States have been pounded into poverty and merciless inflation. U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt refuses to return to pre-war borders. The scars of the past will not soon be healed. The time is right for madmen, demagogues, and terrorists.

At this crucial moment in history, with Socialists rising to power in the U.S. under the leadership of presidential candidate Upton Sinclair, a dangerous fanatic is on the rise in the Confederacy, preaching a message of hate. And in Canada another man--a simple farmer--has a nefarious plan: to assassinate the greatest U.S. war hero, General George Armstrong Custer.

With tension on the seas high, and an army of Marxist Negroes lurking in the swamplands of the Deep South, more than enough people are eager to return the world to war. Harry Turtledove sends his sprawling cast of men and women--wielding their own faiths, persuasions, and private demons--into the troubled times between the wars.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nobody plays the what-if game of alternative history better than Turtledove, especially when he has a large-scale subject and when he's working close enough to the present for readers to appreciate his detailed analyses of how familiar events might have turned out differently. His massive trilogy, The Great War, described how WWI might have been fought on an Earth where the Confederacy was still an independent nation. This follow-up novel begins by showing postwar life. Teddy Roosevelt is president; however, the Socialist Party gives the establishment serious competition, as veterans question the society they fought to save, and Upton Sinclair challenges TR in the election of 1920. Meanwhile, in the humiliated and bankrupt Confederate states, an angry racist with a gift of demagoguery whips up violent mobs and aims them at his enemies. Readers will recognize some of the names, but watching historical processes in action is the novel's real attraction. Knowing what happened in our timeline, readers will want to imagine the results of different choices. Sometimes, luck and willingness to compromise can resolve conflicts. On the other hand, the Southern Hitler may have his way. It depends on how well people make sense of the situations facing them. Turtledove's introduction carries over a cast of 16 varied characters from The Great War. Not all survive, but readers will be curious to see how the rest go on to cope with new challenges. This book begins a panoramic story, a new trilogy at least, that promises to be immensely fascinating. 5-city author tour; on-sale date July 31.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Turtledove's Great War series morphs into the American Empire series. The U.S and imperial Germany have imposed a "blood and iron" peace on Britain, France, Russia, and the Confederacy. On the western front, the Confederacy struggles to overcome defeat, dissension, and Weimar-level inflation, and the U.S. labors to stay on top of things and prepare for the next round of combat. Indomitable, muddleheaded General Custer has his sails trimmed by the election of Socialist Upton Sinclair as president in 1920, which also makes Turtledove's creation, Flora Hamburger, the wife of the vice-president. In the Confederacy, former artillery sergeant Jake Featherstone founds the Freedom Party. His road to power turns rocky after the crackbrained assassination of President Wade Hampton V, but Ann Colleton escapes the subsequent Freedom Party debacle only slightly damaged and loses her stormy lover when the widow of one of his victims shoots him. Cincinnatus Driver leaves Ohio for the better racial climate of Iowa, and Scipio, married and now named Xerxes, learns that no matter which whites win in the Confederacy, the black man almost always loses. Turtledove's skill at dramatizing historical forces proves magisterial once more. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey; 1 edition (July 31, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 034540565X
• ISBN-13: 978-0345405654
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (82 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #308,868 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Harry Turtledove is the award-winning author of the alternate-history works The Man with the Iron Heart; The Guns of the South; How Few Remain (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Novel); the Worldwar saga: In the Balance, Tilting the Balance, Upsetting the Balance, and Striking the Balance; the Colonization books: Second Contact, Down to Earth, and Aftershocks; the Great War epics: American Front, Walk in Hell, and Breakthroughs; the American Empire novels: Blood & Iron, The Center Cannot Hold, and Victorious Opposition; and the Settling Accounts series: Return Engagement, Drive to the East, The Grapple, and In at the Death. Turtledove is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos. They have three daughters: Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Stage Is Set For WWII!!!!!, August 2, 2001

By 

Greg Hopper (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Empire: Blood & Iron (Hardcover)

Harry Turtledove continues his sprawling saga of the Confederate Nation in the aftermath of defeat. Prices are rising as the currency devalues, the old way of life is fading fast as the CSA must pay reparations to the USA. All of our characters return, as they try and rebuild their lives following the war; Jake Featherston builds his Freedom Party to restore the CSA, along with the help of Anne Colleton and Roger Kimball in an eerie parrallel of Nazism. While the Confederates try to rebuild, Flora Hamburger and the Socialists try and wrest power away from Teddy Roosevelt and the Democrats to salvage a USA wracked with labor strife, while the soldiers of the war desperately try and hang on to the strength that helped them win. There is little war in this novel, but Turtledove sets the stage for a WWII pitting CSA vs USA in a most interesting way. As we end the book, Featherston is considering ways to spread his message of hatred via radio broadcast, and there are tantalizing hints of former Confederates fighting in various wars in South America (think Spain in the early 30's) who are bringing information about barrels (tanks) and other techniques of war home for future use. That Turtledove will make Featherston his Confederate Hitler is a foregone conclusion, but it remains to be seen how the next war will play out as there is little info in this book as the state of the Confederacie's allies, England, France and Japan, and there are hints that the USA doesn't exactly trust the German allies that helped them win. I said it after Breakthroughs, and I'll say it again, DAMN! I wish he would write faster!!!!! One year plus is a looooong time to wait between books when they are this well written!

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Huge dip in quality in this great series, April 11, 2002

By 

David Roy (Vancouver, BC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Empire: Blood & Iron (Hardcover)

I have to qualify my non-recommendation here. If you are a fan of alternate history, you may like this book. Turtledove is the master of alternate history, and this entire series is a very interesting one. If you don't mind Turtledove's writing, then you may enjoy it as well. It can take great effort to get past his writing sometimes, but usually the plot makes up for it. This time, it doesn't, not unless you've already invested some time in the series. If this is your first Turtledove, stay away. It's not hard to understand what's going on without reading the previous books, but this book could very well turn you away from his books if you begin with it.

American Empire: Blood & Iron, is yet another chapter in the ongoing alternate history saga by Harry Turtledove. In this series, the Confederates won the Civil War, they faced off again with the United States in the 1880s, and they fought again during World War I. The United States was allied with Germany, while the Confederates were allied with Britain, France, and Canada.

Blood & Iron is the first book after the war, detailing what's happening in both countries in the post-war era. The Confederacy is going through a situation similar to what Germany went through in the real world: massive inflation, unemployment, great poverty, reparations payments. A Hitler-like figure, Jake Featherston, is gaining popularity with his anti-black and anti-government party. He speaks out about how the Confederacy was stabbed in the back by its politicians and that's how they lost the war. Meanwhile, in the North, the Socialist party has come to power, very much like post-war Britain. The North has suffered a bit of war-weariness, and that enabled the Socialists to take over.

This brings to mind the first of this books many missteps. Unlike the previous books in the series, this one is a little too much like what really happened. It's alternate history by numbers, and Turtledove is better than that. Replace black people with Jews and you all of a sudden have the real-world Germany. Replace United States with Britain and you've got what really happened as well. The subject matter of Jake's speeches is slightly different, but the parallel to the rise of Hitler is just too on the nose. There's too few differences. During the previous books, when he was detailing the war itself, this wasn't so much of a problem. The idea of a war on North American soil was so different, that Turtledove couldn't help but be unique. Unfortunately, he's falling away from that with this book. Perhaps where all of this leads will ultimately be different, but not when you take this book on its own.

The second problem is the characters. During the war, everybody was involved with the war effort in one way or another, so they were able to do interesting things, even if the character itself wasn't that interesting. Unfortunately, Turtledove doesn't have that luxury this time, and the characters suffer for it. Some of them are just completely useless, and their story isn't interesting enough to compensate. Nellie Semproch, to name one example, is just plain dull. During the war, she spied on the Confederates at her café in an occupied Washington DC. Now, she's newly married, still dealing with a headstrong daughter and her issues with men in general, but she's dull. Again, plot wins over character, and when the plot is unimportant, the character becomes lifeless. There are many other examples of this, too many to mention here.

There are also too many main characters. The book is written so that each character gets a chapter, so we end up seeing vignettes in their lives. There's no real flow, as the narrative jumps from one character to another. I've never seen a book where you can skip so much of it if you want to and not lose any of the main story. Occasionally, the main characters interact with each other, but not often. This vignette method of telling the story also makes the book very disjointed. The previous three books carried the story of the war from 1914 to 1917. This book alone goes from 1917 to 1924. It's almost like you're reading a bunch of short stories collected in a book, with some of the stories having the same characters.

Finally, Turtledove's writing is horrible in this book. I think that, in the past, it's been covered by the interesting ideas and plot. This time, though, it's very noticeable. He's constantly repeating himself, emphasizing things. Yes, Harry, we get that inflation is going up and up, so that $1 billion dollars will now buy you lunch, we get the fact that Nellie Semproch really dislikes men, etc. You don't need to introduce the characters every time we see them. Introducing them the first time we see them is good enough. Also, Turtledove can not write a sex scene to save his life. Please, Harry, please do the "fade to black" method.

Ultimately, this book is only for people who want to continue the series. Even then, I'd suggest you check it out from the library instead of buying it, unless you're a die-hard completist.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great page-turner, but I fear it could become predictable, August 6, 2001

By 

Ben Margulies (Dallas, Texas (thankfully, really in the USA)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Empire: Blood & Iron (Hardcover)

I've enjoyed Dr. Trutledove's Worldwar series thus far, and really enjoyed this installment. Here we see the political and economic consequences of the war, which I find more interesting than the actual battle scenes. But I must echo some of the complaints other reviewers have made. First, Turtledove once again largely ignores Europe, leaving us little idea as to what is going on there. How large is the German Empire now? What happened to Belgium, and, more importantly, to Russia. (You would think that American Socialists like Flora Hamburger would be more interested in the Bolshevik Revolution, if indeed that is what has occurred). What about the French and British empires overseas? A world map would be useful, and some election figures (so the Socialists have a majority- of how much?) Second, a few of the characters were rather boring. Lucien Galtier and Morrell had very little to do (and Galtier never speaks of his new country; is Quebec really that unintersting?). The book needed more politics. Third, I am concerned that Turtledove may simply be repeating our own history in an alternate setting, a fear raised by other critics which I find most distressing. If this is true, than the rise of Featherston and the Freedom Party is inevitable; a new War, almost exactly like our WWII, will occur. Turtledove should take more liberties with his timeline. For example, he could have Featherston assume power in a coup, a la Mussolini, rather than a long series of accumulated electoral victories. He could have a new European crisis (the Austro-Hungarian Empire could collapse, for example; even victory wouldn't help it much- and the same could easily go for the Ottomans). He could even pit the U.S. and Germany against each other, a concept he himself suggested in the last chapter of Blood and Iron- a shift in alliances like the 18th-century Diplomatic Revolution. OF course, whatever he does, I'll be sure to buy his next book.