Customer Reviews

Gunpowder Empire (Tor Science Fiction)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

An alternate history where the Roman Empire survives into and past our own time would make for a fascinating read if researched and written well, and Harry Turtledove would be one author who could probably do it. If so, he needs to try again, and a little harder.

Nowhere on the book jacket or cover blurbs or inside this $25 book is there are warning/indication that this is a book for children and maybe (very) young teenagers, but what is what it is. Since it is sold as standard science fiction/alternative history, and the author is well-known for that kind of standard fare for adults, it strikes me as a little cynical to just let the adult reader find this out for himself after buying the book.

Unfortunately, even as a youth-oriented adventure story that happens to be set in another "timeline," it falls short. JK Rowling need not fear this entry into her market.

It seems a little churlish to quibble about details in a kids' story, but kids are smart enough to pick up on this stuff, and Turtledove is smart enough to know better. So here are some of my personal quibbles.

The thing is set in the 2090s, and science has made interdimensional travel possible. Here, it seems to be used primarily for plundering oil and foodstuffs from the other worlds and bringing the goods back home, in exchange for slum trinkets like Swiss army knives and gaudy Japanese watches. Despite the "current" year being some 80 to 90 years ahead of us, very little besides this inter-dimensional trick has changed. Kids are still obsessed with TV and CDs, they shop at WalMart and Home Depot, use a PowerBook computer, and all of the gadgets in common use were in use in our time, 2005. They also speak English. Given the speed at which current fashions and customs have changed in the last 100 years, this is ridiculous. Only one SERIOUS change has occurred, and that is implied by the comment, "Guys in Los Angeles usually weren't so crude." Now that would signify massive change!

Sadly, the kids are too perfect by half, being politically correct to a mind-numbing and eye-rolling extent. Their physical revulsion at the concept of slavery is mentioned dozens and dozens of times, they abhor the idea of personal valor and even question the morality of self-defense, and they also seem to have a very strange aversion, again regularly bringing them to the verge (and beyond) of vomiting, when confronted with the custom of people wearing furs. Most odd, coming from kids wearing and using leather all the time, and craving a good burger and lamb vindaloo. Their precious and unwavering moral rectitude almost had me reaching for the airsickness bag myself at times.

Turtledove presents the Roman Empire roughly as it was in AD 150, adds the invention though not perfection of early gunpowder weapons, and at that point stops all progress. This seems way overly simplistic (and way too easy on an ambitious author). The Byzantine (East Roman) Empire outlasted the Western Empire by 1000 years, and there was significant progress made in that time in every field of knowledge. Why nothing new in 2000 years in this timeline? Why use time-dates at all; it would have been easier to say that the children went back in time itself. They don't need an alternate world for this.

Finally, every sf and alt/hist reader will be familiar with various logical and time-honored conventions concerning the genre. These are either absent or unevenly applied in this case. For example, they are prevented from interfering with the civilization as they find it...but are permitted (and encouraged) to trade goods technologically far advanced. And ultimately they negotiate with an enemy's king, free a slave, etc. This is non-interference? Better to allow them to actively interfere and deal imaginatively with the fall-out. Even the idea of essentially looting all the available food from a culture only slightly above subsistence level is pretty questionable for people who consider themselves moral paragons.

I can't recommend this book to either juvenile adventure readers (it is fairly dull and overly simply plotted) nor to Turtledove fans (way below his form).

When Harry is on a roll, he produces some of the best alternate history yarns of recent years. When he's not paying attention, however, his stuff can be overwritten and under-thought, sloppily edited and thin in the plot line. More than that, this first volume in a series is obviously a Young Adult book but there's no indication of the target audience anywhere on it. The premise is that sometime in the next few decades, we will stumble across the technology (never explained or even theorized about) to cross into variant timelines: Worlds where Germany won World War II, where the Armada conquered England, where the Vikings stayed in New England and beat off later European settlers, etc. In other words, all the usual alternate history themes. Specifically, this one is set in an alternate Rome where Agrippa survived into old age, conquered Germania for Augustus, and established a 2,000-year empire which is now just beginning to develop cannon and flintlocks. Teenagers Jeremy and Amanda Solters accompany their mercantilist parents every summer to an alternate town in Romania (Dacia in that world), where they carry on a brisk business in pocket watches, glass mirrors, and Swiss Army knives. They have to be careful not to upset things in that world by talking too much -- just what effect all this alien technology is supposed to have is lightly passed over -- and they take grain in trade rather than silver because the Home Line needs the food. Then their mother develops appendicitis and has to be escorted back through the portal by their father. And then the portal malfunctions and the kids, naturally, have to fend for themselves -- possibly forever. And then the Lietuvans (Lithuanians) invade. And then, and then, and then. The author takes every opportunity to impress upon the reader just how dirty and disease-ridden and ignorant and generally unpleasant Agrippan Rome is. (Yeah, so are Ecuador and Bangladesh and the South Bronx in this world. . . .) But he does it by talking down to the reader, using short sentences, and repeating the didactic messages over and over. I got two-thirds of the way through and found I didn't much care *what* happened to Jeremy and Amanda, so I tossed aside this not-thick book (288 small-size pages) and went on to something else that wasn't a waste of my reading time. The notion that this is only the first installment of a new series does not excite me at all.

The title deliberately evokes the classic "Gunpowder God" by H Beam Piper. While it was not the first book to introduce the concept of travel to a backward parallel universe, it is widely considered to be the one of the best of its ilk. Turtledove has made his name specialising in science fiction about alternate history. So this is a natural and slight shift in emphasis, where travel is permitted between the universes. None of his other books depict this, if I recall.

Certainly, the cover raises high hopes of a similarly swashbuckling tale of war, akin to Piper's classic. Alas, it falls short. The book is not military science fiction. Rather, you might consider it as a fitting sequel to "Household Gods" that Turtledove wrote with Judith Tarr. Granted that was pure fantasy, while this is hard SF. But the bulk of both books are thematically similar. Household Gods shows life in ancient Rome. This book depicts it in a Roman Empire in about 2100 CE, but at the technological level of our 17th century. In both are the gritty details of everyday life that most novels set in those eras omit. It is quite well done for that. Turtledove shows his scholarship in his attention for historical detail.

The plot is quiet. The war is just a backdrop. This may disappoint some readers.

He does introduce some deliberate cognitive dissonance, by having his American characters loathe the touch of furs. He uses that to place some separation between us and them, since they are depicted as being from the late 21st century. But therein is my biggest problem with this book. His depiction of that is far too similar to ours. Apart from the ability to travel between dimensions, he posits very little change. And in one paragraph, one of the characters uses a Powerbook?! In case you didn't know, that is a computer made by Apple now, in the early 21st century. What are the chances that anyone eighty years from now will use that piece of junk? Turtledove goofed on that one, sadly. But the rest of the book is ok.

The closing paragraphs are the most promising. They allude to the possibility that other technologically advanced dimensions might also develop this capability. The problem is that several of these are quite loathsome and would be a mortal peril to us. Which is why we have to keep an eye on them...

Does this suggest sequels of a more warlike nature?

In this short novel (novella?) Turtledove uses the ideal of parallel worlds and thus alternative histories. In this case, a world where the Roman Empire never fell and primitive muskets and cannons are state of the art. The twist is that living in this world are people from our own future, where they have found a way to travel to these parallel worlds and exploit their resources. As resources run low on our world, "traders" go to parallel worlds and get the stuff we need.

Conceptually this is very interesting stuff, and Turtledove does a reasonable job explaining how and why history would be different, as well as how these people would have developed socially etc. He is a little sketchy on how exactly this kind of parallel world travel works (he is no Michael Crichton).

The main problem with this book is that once this is all established, and the characters (Traders from our world) are set up, not much happens. The Characters seem to get into some sticky situations, but then sort of just get out of trouble, setting a pattern of non-events for the whole book. Not to give things away, but the characters are never in any "real" danger, there is no compelling narrative drive.

Perhaps a worthwhile paperback or library book but save your money otherwise.

This book is, first and foremost, a teenage coming-of-age novel. You know the kind: teenagers meet challenges that would bother adults, overcome them and prove that the young make better adults than the adults themselves. Trite, but can be entertaining. If you take it in that spirit, as a coming of age novel that happens to be SF, it's 4-star.

The second thing that this book is, is an homage to H. Beam Piper. If you haven't already read Piper's _Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen_ and the Paratime stories, I'll go ahead and wait while you check those out and read them. OK, done that? Little bit on the sexist side for 2004's taste, but consider when they were written; for their time (the fifties), having Hadron Dalla be as active a character as she is in a science fiction novel was quite unusual, so Piper was doing a good job of thinking outside the usual parameters. Now, with Verkan Vall and Hadron Dalla in mind, you can see why Turtledove chose to have both a boy and a girl protagonist, and to have the girl chafe at restrictions.

You should also go ahead and read Turtledove and Tarr's _Household Gods_ to get an incredibly deep feel for daily life in ancient Rome. That one's definitely not a juvenile. It's a time travel story, rather than an alternate history. In that book, our protagonist has a son and daughter, younger than the teenagers in this book. So we have a pair of brackets - the children in Household Gods, and the adults in Piper's books. That gives us an understanding about why Turtledove would choose to fill in the gap between those two.

All that said - and boy, it sounds like I'm doing a book report, compare and contrast, doesn't it? - this IS still a juvie, and adult readers are still going to find it a bit lightweight. Since it's being sold as alt-history, not as a juvie, I would give it a 3-star rating: it's not bad, but it's not as good as I was expecting, or what I was expecting. I didn't really want to spend that much time reading about adolescents emailing each other from different histories.

If you're a teenager, though, or an adult who wants just a light read, maybe something you can share with your teenagers to get them more into SF, or even to assign to a class, both for reading purposes and for discussions of real Roman history, and of Latin. For those purposes it would be a five-star. Hence my four-star average.

The homage to Piper shows in the title, the characters, and details. Cross-time secret instead of Paratime secret, but the same secrecy. The disguise of traders as a way to get in and out of a more primitive culture. I expect we'll see more details that echo Piper in the future volumes of this series. I will be reading them - it's good enough for that - although I might opt for the paperbacks. In any event, it's good to see Turtledove do something besides his interminable alt-Civil-War, alt-WW2 series, which have been dragged out way too long if you're not someone who likes endless battle strategy scenes. This book has a few of those, but it's a different kind of war.

In short? Buy it for a teen interested in SF, or for someone who particularly has an interest in the Roman Empire; read it yourself too, and enjoy it as long as you don't expect great depth.

I like juvenile sci fi. This was poorly done. It reminded me of watching a Magic School Bus episode on tv, except without any plot. Turtledove seems to have wanted to talk about the Roman Empire. He stuck a couple kids in his discussion of an alternate Roman Empire. Hmmmn -- here's a better comparison. Remember those kids books where a kid would go back in time to watch Paul Revere's ride, or some other historic event? Well, this is kind of like that, except without the event.

These kids are in a siege where it is only luck that they haven't been killed and where there is every chance that they will wind up conquered and turned into slaves. In a normal kids book, the kids would use the knowledge they have from their home world to aid the city, thus saving them from this fate. That's what most fun fiction is about -- there's a hero and the hero accomplishes things. The hero doesn't sit around selling trinkets while his world is falling apart -- especially not when we know very well the hero might be able to prevent the world from falling apart. Instead they contemplate how horrible it will be if they have to stay forever in this world and consider how they might become slaves or die. And do nothing.

I also think Turtledove must have done this all in one draft -- how many times did he start a section with something along the lines of "She liked to visit the town fountain from time to time, even though they didn't need the water. But that was where the women gossiped about what was going on in town -- women of all stations coming together to gossip. Now that I think of it -- why was that banker's wife picking up her own water, when surely that kind of heavy lifting should have been the work of her slave? And with all the complaining about grinding the flour, I found myself wondering why one couldn't simply pay someone to do it. Or buy some bread at a bakery with all that money they were getting selling beads to the natives...

Gunpowder Empire is a new entry for Harry Turtledove; it's a juvenile. That means the emotions are spelled out, the plot is straightforward, and moral ambiguity isn't dwelled upon. Our protaganists, 17 year old Jeremy and 16 year old Amanda, are put in danger's way but all is returned to as it was at the novel's start. This is a young person's introduction to the idea of alternative timelines.

The difficulty in reviewing this book is that Turtledove hasn't written juveniles before. Several reviewers have dug into this one expecting Turtledove's usual writing and were disappointed. But are their low ratings based on the novel's failure to entertain them (as adults), or the book's failure as a YA/SF tale?

I tried to keep the two audiences in mind when coming up with my rating. Certainly as an adult read, it deserves no more than two stars. But for a child between 10 and 14, this might be exactly what they'd want. Hence my four star rating; I'd give it five were I 12 years old, but I'm not. But I can't give it two, because this book wasn't written for me. I would dearly love to give it three and half.

Another reviewer sees this as a sort of sequel to Household Gods. It's certainly similar, as far as evoking day to day life in the outskirts of the Roman Empire. Amanda's struggle with rigid gender roles are reminescent of Nicole's frustrations in Carnuntum. But Gods took place in the year 170. GE occurs in an alternate Roman empire (equivalent of our 22nd century) where Dacia (Romania) was conquered, but the Lietuvans (Lithuania) still attempt to win it back every generation. The technology is at the cannons and muskets stage of development, and isn't moving along very quickly. Jeremy, Amanda, and their parents are there not only to purchase needed grain for a hungry and crowded world of their own, but to gently nudge this world more toward scientific thinking.

I see this book as more of a Turtledove Pastiche; I found references and lietmotifs of so many of his works I lost count. Early in the book, when Jeremy is in his turn of the century (22nd century) high school history class, his teacher refers to several alternate worlds that evoke Turtledove's novels. There is the mandatory phrase "I thank you" which has worked its way into every one of his novels since The Race attacked in the first WorldWar novel. The description of Jeremy's father reminds me of HT himself, especially with the bad puns. The dual point of view harkens back to Ruled Brittania, which also only had two POV characters. The introduction to society via classroom lessons is straight out of In the Presence of Mine Enemies (one of the alternate worlds alluded to in that very section).

So, is it good pastiche, and is it a good juvenile yarn? The latter, yes. The teenaged siblings must handle a city siege, do business with locals while not losing the upper hand, handle obstinate government martinets, and do their best to blend into a very different culture than their own. Oh yes, all this while their parents are stuck back in their original timeline with all communications cut off. Turtledove doesn't really explain how crosstime works, so this book isn't pure SF. Crosstime is a deus ex machina, but showing its results in forestalling climate and governmental collapse is interesting enough. (Not enough food? Buy it from an alternate world! Problem solved! Drill for oil in people-free worlds, too!)

As to the former, only the most rabid HT fan would even catch the references. And there are several places where it seems a section got moved into the flow, because the characters would violate their own rules they were determined to follow to the letter. If the entire city is full of snoops, then they can't speak of their life in the 22nd century at all, or ever use English, yet a page later they would do just that. There is a section where Jeremy and Amanda becoming not-very-willing informal truce carriers to the invading King, yet it doesn't really change anything; all it did was show Jeremy's disgust toward animal skins. I didn't take this as moralizing, as other reviewers did; cultural norms do shift. More of them should have shifted with this one, though. Too often Jeremy's reactions to Polisso remind him of his classmates' actions at Canoga Park High School. (And about that 22nd Century PowerBook....) Surely something would differentiate them other than an unwillingness to spit pickle seeds on the public square. Amanda, the more emotionally observant sibling, notices more, especially the entire concept of slavery and how it affects almost every relationship around her.

Remember: this is a juvenile. Buy it for a young person who might enjoy Turtledove in another 5-10 years.

As others have said, this really should be marketed as a Young Adult books. As a YA book it's a good introduction to Alternate History, and an enjoyable read. But if you put it next to the rest of his books and other Alternate History, there are two many holes for it to float on it's own.

And as a aside, the most annoying thing to me was why in the world were they trading trinkets to the psuedo-romans in exchange for a few wagonloads of poor quality wheat when they could have just as easily grown millions of tons on it in robotic factory farms on one of the empty worlds that they used to get oil and minerals from?

Being a fan of Harry Turtledove, I regret needing to rate this book so low. In fact, because I was able to finish the book I decided not rate it one star.

This book has been compared to the juvenile stories and books by Robert Heinlein. I must disagree. I started reading science fiction as a teenager in about 1950. My first Heinlein book was either Between Planets or The Puppet Masters, I can't remember for sure. I read his books through my teen years and on into my adult years. Many of his books I have read several times, enjoying even his juvenile stories as an adult.

I find that the book Gunpowder Empire fails on two levels: a weak premise and an attempt to simplify the basic story. The basic premise presents us with our future where we are exploiting less developed alternatives in a manner reminiscent of the European empires of the 17th and 18th centauries. By requiring that the characters in the stories not reveal that they are from a more developed alternative, they can't fully interact with the indigenous natives of the alternative and we are presented with a story that is more an observation rather than interaction.

The second flaw is execution. The main story is reminiscent of Household Gods. The difference here is that the story appears to be simplified in part to fit the no interaction premise and to write it at a juvenile level. Neither work. Simply put, this book lacks a strong story line.

If you are looking for good juvenile science fiction, try some Heinlein or Asimov. Yes, the stories are dated but they are good reads. In many cases the basic themes transcend the science in the stories.

Roy Laudenslager
Eugene, OR

As I read this book, I kept checking to spine to see if it had "T" for teen or "YA" for Young Adult on it. It reads like a slightly long "Magic Tree House" book--no character development, fairly boring & predictable plot, and glaringly obvious references that no 12-year-old could miss.

The Solter family spends their summers in an alternate Earth timeline... one where the Roman Empire was never defeated. Life in this timeline is much as it was 2000 years ago, although gunpowder (and, therefore, cannons and such) has recently been invented.

The Solters are very careful about fitting in with the natives and not disturbing the timeline (can anyone say "Prime Directive"?) When Mom develops appendicitis, the parents suddenly have to return to their Home Line, leaving the teens behind. How the teens handle the situation, in the midst of a brewing war, makes up most of the story.

The premise of this book is promising, and it could be a great read... but it's not. Turtledove never truly develops the characters into people you might care about. Dad just cracks awful puns, Mom puts up with it, son Jeremy is appalled by the custom of wearing furs, and daughter Amanda abhors the practice of keeping slaves. The kids miss the comforts of home, but they deal with the situation. And that's about it!

When the kids are left alone to fend for themselves, I found that I really didn't care what happened to them. A cannonball falls through the roof? Oh well. The officials try to investigate them, possibly discovering their real origins? So what.

Overall, this book is truly aimed at a junior high audience. In that light, it might be interesting for your average 13-year-old. For adults, though, this book falls far short of the mark. If your young teen is interested in this sort of thing, tell him/her to check out the local library. Don't waste your money on this one.