Customer Reviews

The Disunited States of America (Crosstime Traffic)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

In a way, the Crosstime Traffic books are some of Turtledove's finest creations.

Not only are the histories he creates truly unique, but I've always felt that Turtledove is a much stronger writer when he limits the scope of the story to a minimum of characters. I can read his Guns of the South or In The Presence of Mine Enemies repeatedly while his sprawling epics tend to feel muddled. In these books, we have a loosely connected series of self-contained novels that focus on two or three characters at most with enough time to easily explain the difference in histories with a minimum of fuss. I've enjoyed the series so far despite being a decade or so older than the target audience.

Unfortunately, I found this installment to be a direly weak book that leaves me reluctant to see what he does next.

In the first place, this book does not explore the inner workings of the true locals. We don't see the inner workings of a character who was born and bred in an independent, Virginia with institutional racism. Instead, we are given two characters that are essentially tourists, who are quick to judge what's going on around them without considering the society as a whole. I'm not saying that there's much to admire in the Virginian society, but I felt like I was being bludgeoned by a steady stream of conversations and monologues decrying the way things were, something that I didn't feel needed to be spelled out so blatantly.

Second, I was bothered by the lack of use of obscene language, especially in the middle of a war zone. Admittedly, this is a book for young adults and I wouldn't want to see it peppered throughout with foul language just for the sake of verisimilitude, but Turtledove is too coy with it here. It would be one thing if the course language of the soldiers wasn't addressed, like a John Wayne WWII film where the characters were reduced to "darn", "shucks" and "heck". It's another thing to be told in a roundabout fashion what words were really at play, like the pet owner who spells out "V-E-T" around Fido.

From the book: "'We can sort out all this stuff' -- he used a word something like stuff, anyway..."

It's sloppy writing and it was a distraction every time I came across a passage that came explicitly sanitized for my protection.

I was left with a really interesting scenario being played out be reasonably interesting characters (must every book in the series involve some sort of crosstime infatuation?) in a fascinating history marred by exceptionally pedestrian writing that jarred the plot like a mistimed watch.

I'm hesitant to read the next one, but I'll probably give it a whirl anyway.

Here is the fourth of Harry Turtledove's exciting Crosstime Traffic series. Its alternative history with a twist: Crosstime Traffic is a giant corporation in the late 21st century US which controls the secret of traveling to parallel worlds through transposition chambers. The science is a bit woolly and largely goes unexplained by Turtledove, but it doesn't really matter.

Each of the Crosstime Traffic books thus far has had teenage protagonists who deal with difficult ethical situations in different timelines. The Disunited States of America is set in a world where the US Constitution was never written and the Articles of Confederation failed to work, meaning that North America is split into dozens of sometimes warring nations.

Justin and his mother are Crosstime Traffic workers who do business in the independent nation of Virginia. Unfortunately, while they are at work Ohio goes to war against Virginia and unleashes a manmade plague that sickens and kills nearly everyone exposed. The other major character is Becky, a native of California who is caught by the war on a visit to Virginia with her crotchety grandmother. The two teenagers become friends (but no more) during the weeks they spend dealing with war and illness.

All of the Crosstime Traffic series are well written with plots aimed at high school and younger readers. The stories are imaginative and thought provoking and (I hope) will inspire an interest in history within their target audience. I've enjoyed all four Crosstime Traffic books thus far and hope Turtledove will continue the series indefinitely. I only wish that I could get a job at Crosstime Traffic myself!

The Disunited States (2006) is the fourth Alternate History novel in the Crosstime Traffic series, following In High Places. In the previous volume, Annette Klein manages to escape from slavery and returns to her home timeline. Crosstime Traffic undergoes a harsh public scrutiny.

In this novel, Beckie Royer and her grandmother are visiting relatives in Ohio and they are en route to Virginia to visit still more. Beckie is getting tired of the differences between her native country of California and these eastern states. Her anxiety level has just shot up as she realizes that the odd-shaped things in the floorboards are assault rifles.

Just then her Uncle Luke drives the car up to the Virginia border station and states that he has nothing to declare. The Virginia border guards take their passports and are surprised when Beckie and her grandmother hand over California papers. After a short discussion of their visits to family members in both states, the guards wave them through the station.

The next stop is Elizabeth, Virginia, population 1316. Uncle Luke drops them off in front of the courthouse and pulls out headed for Charleston, Virginia. Beckie is not sorry to see the white Honda leave, particularly since the rifles are going with it. Beckie briefly mentions the rifles to her grandmother, but nothing gets through Gran's fixation on the inconveniences of life.

Justin Monroe and his mother are coming to this timeline for a standard tour of duty. Randolph Brooks is their local contact. The natives believe that Justin's mother is Randolph's sister.

When they arrive at the Charleston Coin and Stamp Company, Justin notices a white Honda parking in front of the donut house and the driver carries a blanket wrapped bundle into the shop. When he comes out, two passing policemen cause him to almost jump out of his skin. As the police walk by, the man jumps onto his car and drives away.

Later, Randolph takes Justin with him to visit a client in Elizabeth. There Justin meets Beckie, who is staying with the Snodgrasses. Ethel Snodgrass is Gran's cousin and Ted Snodgrass is Randolph's client. As Ted and Randolph settle in for some old-fashioned haggling, Justin and Beckie take a couple of fizzes out back and talk.

As the haggling goes on, a TV announcer reports that a strange illness has broken out in several locations in the state and all travel has been suspended until further notice. Justin and Randolph are now stranded in Elizabeth. Even worse, Beckie cannot return to California until the disease is identified and a treatment discovered. Then starts the shooting war between Ohio and Virginia.

This story is about a United States that could not agree on a constitution; apparently a bicameral legislature was never considered. The Articles of Confederation were ignored more and more until they became part of the past. The various states began to separate until each was an autonomous nation; they even had wars among themselves.

Some of the states merged with each other -- for example, the Carolinas -- but mostly they went their own ways. Of course, neighboring states traded with each other, but disjointed transportation and communications systems didn't make long distance trading very profitable. Some states -- such as California and Texas -- were Great Nations, worldwide leaders in science and technology; California had even sent men to Mars. But there were not any Super Powers.

One consequence of these disunited states was the continuance of racial tensions and black uprisings in the South. The twenty year cycle of racial wars continued on into the late twenty-first century, with no end in sight. Neither the whites or blacks considered tolerance as an option; the hatreds were just too widespread.

In the state of Mississippi, the usual status was reversed; blacks dominated whites. This inversion was enough to keep white intolerance at a fever pitch throughout the South. Anyone -- white or black -- who tried to express other views was shouted down by his neighbors and lucky to survive the incident.

Highly recommended for Turtledove fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of exotic cultures out of our own past and the inhumanity of war.

-Arthur W. Jordin

Fourth in the "Crosstime Traffic" series of books about a company which trades between parallel universes.

This series is obviously aimed at teenagers. The hero or heroine is always a teenager, all swear words and strongly offensive comments are censored and referred to indirectly - e.g. after a quote Turtledove will often add something like "except that the hateful word he used was not 'people'." There is usually a romance between the central character and a person of the opposite sex but it is always extremely chaste and the books never directly refer to it going beyond a kiss.

Nevertheless it would not be entirely fair to characterise this series as "Paratime-Lite." It's not afraid to cover complex or difficult issues such as how you deal with racism or intractable hatred between races, the steps that a universe which had discovered travel between worlds would almost certainly take to keep it secret from other universes, and fact that war is not glamorous when the person next to you gets shot or, worse, you get shot or you have to shoot someone yourself. It is quite possible for an adult to enjoy these books.

Stories about travel between parallel universes are a rapidly growing genre. The closest examples to this are H. Beam Piper's "Paratime" books, and Keith Laumer's "Worlds of the Imperium" series. The "Crosstime Traffic" books are another take on the same sort of idea, and if you enjoyed them you will probably enjoy this one.

When I saw the title of this book I wrongly assumed that the alternative history world in which it was set would be yet another example of a universe where the South won the United States Civil War/War between the States. No: the divergence goes back further than that. Most of the action of this book takes place in a world where the United States constitution was never ratified, and the original confederation between the thirteen colonies which successfully rebelled against British rule in the 18th century fell apart a few decades later. So the states of North America are nations, which are completely independent and frequently go to war against one another. Almost all the Southern States are openly racist, including the one state no longer run by whites, Mississipi, which has simply replaced white oppression of african-american people with african-american oppression of white people.

The story revolves around Beckie Royer, a girl from California in that timeline, and Justin, a boy from the Crosstime Traffic homeworld who is pretending to come the local Virginia. Both of them are trapped in a small Virginia town, when a war starts between Ohio and Virginia. First Ohio attacks Virginia with bioweapons causing a plague and forcing a quarantine, then incites an african-american revolt.

The Crosstime series is:

Gunpower Empire
Curious Notions
In High Places
The Disunited States
The Gladiator
The Valley-Westside War

This is not an objective review. I'm an avid reader of just about everything Harry Turtledove writes. I enjoy the Crosstime Traffic series, both for it's speculations about travel to alternate dimensions as well as the view it gives us of life in bygone eras or imagined alternative worlds. The time I spend reading his books is a welcome escape to an alternate universe that I love to visit.

In the "home timeline," Justin and his mom quietly travel through crosstime to take things back to their own civilisation. In one alternate timeline where the American states are their own countries and have never been United, Beckie is travelling to backward, racist Virginia with her grandmother. In the alternate timeline, inter-state wars are the norm and each state likes to accuse the others of terrorism. Beckie is dealing with her total boredom and Justin is undercover, doing his Time Trader investigating, but both of them are headed for serious trouble when another war breaks out.

I didn't outright dislike this novel, but I didn't find much to enjoy, either. To me, the big problem of racism in Beckie's timeline was too simplistic. It's like this blatant racism issue is the easiest way to make sure the reader knows that these Virginian folks are backward and beneath the people from Justin's timeline. It just feels heavy-handed to assign one pandemic vice to an entire timeline, like in Star Trek where an entire alien species will all have the same personality, like the warlike Klingons, greedy Ferengi, or emotionless Vulcans. It makes Justin's timeline sound very judgemental, when the people from it keep putting down the residents of the alternate. Yeah the alternate people are wrong, but the home timeline's policy of Crosstime traffic seems really creepy, too--stealing stuff from other realities? How is that kosher? There's some hypocrisy at work, here.

Justin and Beckie's hyper-perceptiveness of their current environments in relation to their old environments is unusual. Justin's always making metal comparisons between his surroundings and what he knows "back home". He's a smart, observant guy, but it seems surprising that he can make these constant comparisons, like noting the ratio of brown jeans to blue jeans in the different times, or the comparative shapes of refrigerators across timeliness. Fitting in during different times is his job, so maybe the mile-a-minute comparisons are excusable for Justin, but Beckie does the same exact thing, except she's comparing Virgina to her home in California.

Also, both characters have lengthy expository thoughts that don't sound at all like ideas that teenagers in their respective positions would be dwelling on, Beckie in particular. While in Virginia, the book says Beckie "wondered if she'd see a passenger pigeon. Three hundred years ago, just before 1800, they'd probably been the most common birds in the world. By two hundred years ago, they were hunted almost to extinction. But a lot of states banned going after them and they pulled through. They would never form such huge flocks as they had once upon a time, but they were still around" (pg 29). This is not bad writing--in fact, it's a very interesting bit of information. But I can't see why Beckie would have this thought passing through her mind unless she's a complete history buff or else cares a lot about the ebb and flow of species populations. It's like the book just can't resist telling us about history, both real and alternate, so it forces these facts on the reader through characters who probably would not know this stuff.

Finally, I don't know what Justin's personality is like, beyond inquisitiveness and a bright mind. And I don't know what Beckie's hopes and dreams are. She finds it boring to listen to her grandma make speeches about things that happened 50 years ago, which anyone would find boring. These two characters are very moral teens who know their right from wrong, but I don't want to hang out with either of them.

Now, I do not mean to insult the author at all. Harry Turtledove is a well-beloved, totally respected science fiction author who is known for writing great alternate histories. The author rocks, but the book does not appeal to me.

Harry Turtledove has done some really excellent alternate history novels. I found this one entertaining, if not entirely innovative. It will be a good read for younger people in their teens, and for some of us oldsters. Not greatly challenging, but also not bad. Not bad at all...

Whether you like it or not, Turtledove is the master of American "alternate history." While this isn't to the epic par of his Timeline-191 series, it's worth a read, and even if you're not a teenager (I'm 24,) as a paperback, it's a fun weekend diversion. It's fast paced, like the rest of this series (unlike Timeline-191 or Guns of the South,) and pretty straightforward. Crosstime Traffic kid meets local kid, and goes through a local snapshot of another "what could have been." If you want Turtledove at his best, start with How Few Remain and Great War: American Front. If you want a easy way to happily kill a weekend, the less than $10 for this book will do.

Time Traders laterally travel from our realm to other timelines to sell slightly better products than the locals make. Each Time Trader knows that when one is a Crosstime Traffic trader they must never display too much technological superiority as blending in with the more backwoods natives is the key to success.

Recent high school graduate Justin Monroe comes from a family of Time Traders. Currently he and Time Trader Randolph Brooks are in a version of the United States that is not united and in which states constantly are at war with one another. He looks forward to going home to start college as his gut tells him this trip seems more dangerous than any he has been on.

From Southern California, Beckie Royer accompanies her Gran and "Uncle" Luke as they head to Elizabeth, Virginia to sell assault rifles to African-American rebels. With the country of Virginia on the brink of a racial civil war, neighboring country to the north Ohio sends a deadly virus into their nation that could only come from a Crosstime Traveler. As they are quarantined while people die from the deadly biological attack Beckie meets Justin and Randolph

The fourth Crosstime Traffic book is a superb alternate history science fiction tale that grips the young adult audience from the moment that Justin is trapped and never let's go until the final confrontation. The story line is fast-paced, but makes a strong condemnation of racism and war with the fractured disunited States. Beckie is a terrific protagonist who provides insight into her world with little interwoven tidbits like no one in Ohio or Virginia messes with someone carrying a passport from the superpower California. Justin is also a fine character as he tries to hide his origin while wondering who from his timeline broke the law. THE DISUNITED STATES OF AMERICA is another winner from Harry Turtledove.

Harriet Klausner

In the unlikely event that scholars decide to study Harry Turtledove's fiction, they will certainly note the frequent mismatch between the author's inventive ideas and failures in execution. As with so many other recent Turtledove books, The Disunited States of America is a virtual primer on those deficits.

This book, obviously intended for a younger reader but not so labelled, is part of Turtledove's "Crosstime Traffic" series. The premise is that by the end of the 21st centry, the world has solved few problems -- most have gotten worst -- but does know how to travel to "crosstime" alternate realities. These parallel universes are exploited for their resources in a merchantilistic way, while the authorities at Crosstime Traffic make sure that the more advanced of these worlds do not stumble upon crosstime travel themselves.

In this volume, the alternate world is a very high tech version of the United States that never stayed united. The action, such as it is, centers around two older teenagers, Beckie, a politically correct native of the powerful nation of California, and crosstime traveler Justin. Both have been stranded in a tiny town in the racist nation of Virginia, which is under attack by aggressive Ohio. Ohio, for what we are told are generally economic reasons, has gone so far as to unleash a deadly plague on its neighbor, while cynically stirring up a doomed insurrection by Virginia's oppressed blacks at the same time. From Ohio's over the top behavior, you would almost think that there was a football rivalry at stake. Either way, virtually none of Turtledove's largely passive characters react in a realistic way.

Leaving aside that very little of this hangs together, this book represents about the worst Turtledove writing I've seen in years. Here you will find all of the mind-numbing repetition, cliches, tepid pacing, bland characters and lack of satisfying resolution the made the World War series so painful to read.

Turtledove has written nice things in the past several years -- but not too many. Whatever is going on, and my bet would be overproduction, the "Master of Alternative History" may need to take a sabbatical.