Customer Reviews

The Foresight War

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

 

 

Firstly I'd like to `dip me lid' to Tony Williams for attempting to write an alternate history of the Second World War at all. The potential audience tend to be opinionated, critical and well informed so much kudos to him for the effort.

The premise is that a British historian goes to sleep in 2004 and wakes up in 1934. He convinces the powers that be that war is coming for which Britain will be inadequately prepared and in so doing initiates an altered and more thorough strategic purpose in British re-armament. The opening chapter is available to read on Tony Williams website www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/

I am a little bit wary of time travel scenarios but I found The Foresight War to be a satisfying read and a large and complicated plot is deftly handled, the narrative is well paced, there are surprising plot turns and the book is sufficiently gripping to be read at one sitting, there is also a great deal of detail and some laugh out loud humour.

Other reviewers have taken issue with a few of Mr Williams interpretations of historical events but with subject matter as contentious as the Second World War this is inevitable. It is often the case that a well informed historian can proceed from sound scholarship to a completely different conclusion about an event from another well informed historian also proceeding from sound scholarship on the same event.

The Foresight War works well, not least because Tony underlines the very prescient point that WW2 was a conflict between cultures as well as militaries and was won and lost not only by armed forces but by the systems which created them. I have no hesitation in recommending this book to anyone interested in the period.

A novel of an alternative World War 2 by Anthony G Williams

What if - you went to sleep as usual in 2004 - and woke up in 1934?
What if - you had vital knowledge about the forthcoming Second World War, and could prove that you came from the future?
What could you do to affect British policy, strategy, tactics and
equipment?
How might the course of the conflict be changed?
And what if there was another throwback from the future - and he was working for the enemy?
The novel follows the story of these two 'throwbacks' as they pit
their wits against each other. A very different Second World War rages across Europe, the Mediterranean, Russia, the North Atlantic and the Pacific, until its shocking conclusion.
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Not too awful. Not too good.

Some howlers ... the author has Barbarossa starting in May and repeats
the urban legend about how the Balkan campaign was the reason for the
delay, not the spring rains as we all know to be the case.

It seems as if he has also ignored the materiel and logistics
constraints of the pre-war German economy with special relevance to
what they could produce ... that is, he has some inkling, for example,
that they couldn't produce enough trucks for motorised supply but has
them creating 20 Panzer Divisions with APCs (not haltracks, either),
for example.

He also has them producing hundreds of U-Boats without the Brits
noticing ... not that it really makes any difference ...

And, for example, he has a British AEW warned USAAC decimate the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in P-40's.

And Chamberlain resigns in favour of Churchill on the say so of the
uptimer, but no hint that he resigned as much because he was dying of
stomach cancer.

Those are just some of the silly things that I recognise. Some of the
weapons development stuff (the author seems to something of a
specialist on this!) may be debatable, but I really don't know enough
to be entirely sure.

If I had to sum it up in a sentence ... "The Empire Strikes Back, or
The British Empire Wins WW2 Singlehandedly"

Detailed, yet completely plausible outcomes.
The author seems to have read Churchill's six-volume History of Second World war. As the author points out correctly, 1934 was the watershed year when Empire started losing its edge.
Small changes like Besal guns, sloped armour, etc. made a big change militarily.
So does political changes like defending Norway while abandoning France, shooting straight for Moscow, avoiding declaring war against USA, etc.

While different choices for World War II in strategy, tactics, armamemnts using hindsight's been played by everyone from War Departments, Generals, Admirals, Defense Contractors, Historians, etc. even before the war started (see H.G. Wells, and many military writers of the 20's & 30's), and it's the basis for both recent books like John Birmingham's "Axis of Time" trilogy, Harry Turtledoves' 4 series dealing with alternative WWII, Newt Gingrich & Bill Fortschen's on 1945 and 1941, Douglas Niles, and others...all of which exceed the standards of most historical or science fiction for that matter, this is an exceptional piece. While the author doesn't deeply develop the characters or describe the settings in lush detail, the story moves along with plenty of twists and surprises that still make sense. What's particularly impressive is how deeply thought out the changes are...these are the realistic, doable changes with what was available, what was known, who was choosing, etc.. The limit of the genre is also explored as Williams posits a PhD in the period's military history and shows even then how quickly the practical limits of that knowledge is reached in aeronautical engineering, naval architecture, metallurgy, electronics engineering, materials science, atomic physics, combat tactics, etc...something too many "straight" historians lose sight of with an assumed omniscient discussion of all relevant trends and facts when no one ever knows the whole story about anything. John Birmingham addresses it probably the most succinctly by having thousands of time travelers nearly all of whom have relevant and deep technical training/experience along with thousands of computers and references AND still struggling like hell to move a timetable up a few years in product development and field deployment. Anyone curious about World War II would enjoy the book, the more you know the more impressive and intriguing the book is.

The theme is what would have happened if a present day person founed himself in the recent past. The past is the years immediately prior to the second world war and the war years. The viewpoint is of an Englishman. What makes this story very different from the usual what if's is that the story revolves around the changes of (1) a modern historian, (2) changes that are relatively minor but significant (i.e defeat of the Germans during their attack on Norway) what could be done. (3) ultimately allied victory more than a year earlier with less losses and prevention of Stalin's post war expansion. It show how victory could happen without defeat causing losses and that is a significant difference from the current timeline.

This was a really different alternative history in that the focus was almost entirely on the Brits. It's sort of a British "fantasy version" of how WW2 might have turned out.

What I liked about this was it didn't get too focused on personalities, love interests, or that sort of thing. Also, it was almost non-stop action. If you like Tom Clancy's novels - the ones where the Russians invade the West, for example - you'd love this. It's really "techy." It takes an incredibly detailed look at how a little foresight would have led the Brits and Germans to develop a wide range of tanks, aircraft, infantry weapons, and naval vessels. Anthony G. Williams, the author, previously wrote what looks like some obscure books on armaments: the development of the assault weapon and a book on aircraft machine guns. But this sort of scholarship and detail have served him well in The Foresight War.

So the premise that a couple of guys go to sleep in 2004 and wake up in 1934 is cheesy. That's true. But that part is over in a page, and then you can just look at how a little foresight would have influenced the war - something any of us who study the war think about all the time. I like Williams' take on it. Is it unrealistic? Duh. But who cares? It's fun!

On a side note, though character development wasn't on a par with, say, Jane Austen, I did like the analysis of how key Nazi figures would have responded to some foresight. Wiliams' suggestion is that Hitlet, Goering, et al, were so messed up and the Nazi system was so corrupt that foresight in their case would have made little difference.

On his website, the author commented that an earlier review of this book which I had posted was simply a copy of one I had written for Amazon's UK website before the book was available here. It's a fair criticism, and one that deserves rectification by removing the earlier review and offering the one you are reading now.

Anthony Williams's book begins with a premise of two historians, one British, the other German, who find themselves sent back seventy years (exactly why or how is never explained) to 1934, where they use their knowledge of history to prepare for the upcoming war. This premise serves as a vehicle to allow Williams to re-wage the war with the lessons and weapons it would produce. His knowledge of military technology is considerable, and he uses it to make a number of plausible and thought-provoking conjectures about what direction such developments could take and their impact upon the battlefields of the 1940s.

Where his novel lacks verisimilitude, however, is in its presentation of the broader history of the period, as well as in the ramifications of his alterations. To achieve his wide-ranging restructuring of the British armed forces in the 1930s, the author completely ignores the financial and political constraints that the British government faced. Political leaders are in fact totally absent from such a dramatic shift, as a cabal of civil servants uses the advice of Williams's macguffin to completely restructure British policy - and all without so much as a question in Parliament. Even more disappointingly, Williams glosses over the ramifications of the changes he offers - how Britain's improved military, for example, might have been used to preserve the empire for longer than was the case. The possible implications are more than enough to sustain a much longer book, perhaps even a trilogy, yet are packed into a narrative too dense and rushed to allow them to develop properly.

This points to the unfortunate problem underlying the book - the writing itself. The interesting premise and superb research he presents to the reader is deserving of better writing than he provides here. Instead, Williams presents action scenes by telling rather than showing, and his characters do little more than make expository overviews of the developments taking place. In his defense, Williams states (though not within these pages) that his concept is meant to be his main character, with the characters within the novel there primarily to carry the plot forward. I appreciate his honesty in this regard, but an idea alone does not great (or even good) fiction make. As Joan Slonczewski has argued about science fiction writing, ideas are only one part of the experience that makes up a good story; it also is dependent on character development and gripping writing. If the purpose of Williams's book was to explore ideas about the Second World War, he should have chosen a better format for presenting them or done the work necessary to bring the novel together. It seems lazy not to have put as much effort into the storytelling as he evidently did into the story itself, which is why this book proves to be such a disappointment.

Readers who are primarily interested in the idea of a Second World War fought with more advanced weaponry will enjoy this book and the ideas Williams presents. But for anyone seeking a good novel of alternative history would do well to pass on this book and consider the works such as Lest Darkness Fall & Bring the Light or John Birmingham's "Axis of Time" trilogy, which have developed similar premises but engage readers with not just their ideas but their storytelling as well.

Just about perfect for a transatlantic flight. Half the fun was finding 'mistakes' (really differences of opinion with the author).

'Had I written this, I would have ...' It is fun to think what would you do if you woke up seventy years in the past.

Oddly, I find myself turning to this book's premise again and again. The author has done a lot of research, as well good hard-headed thinking about the scenario and comes up with some really interesting ideas.

Well worth your time.

This is what my buddies and I would talk about every time we'd play games, but done by an expert. It's educational too!