Customer Reviews

Into the Darkness

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

It's hard to imagine history and fantasy working together, but Harry Turtledove pulls it off. Fantasy provides the setting, history provides the action. At first, this book did not excite me as much as Turtledove's other works. It sounded a little to weird. But once I started reading, I knew I had nothing to fear. I have come to recognise Turtledove as one of the most reliably entertaining novelists out there, and this one is no exception. As you might have picked up from the earlier reviews, this novel is a very faithful retelling of World War II with a "spells and dragons" fantasy world for a setting. Although the plot, by definition, isn't very original, the world is quite fascinating. It's interesting to see all the creative ways in which the presence of magic makes up for the absence of technology. Many previous reviewers have speculated on who represents who. Here are my guesses, along with the reasoning behind them:

Algarve is Germany. This is fairly obvious. It is the large, powerful country which everyone is afraid of. The Behemoth Blitzkrieg is another big tip-off.

Unkerlant is the USSR. Again, fairly obvious. It is another large, frightening empire. Even Algarve tries to avoid them (at first), just as Hitler avoided Stalin until he had the rest of continental Europe pacified. There is also a cruel Stalin analogue in charge.

Forthweg is Poland. It is the first country to fall, and ends up being divided between Algarve and Unkerlant.

The Duchy of Bari is Austria. The Algarvians march in to a hero's welcome.

Yanina might be Italy, but is more likely one of the Balkan countries. It is a much smaller but still potentially significant ally to Algarve. They also serve as a buffer against Unkerlant (which suggests the Balkans).

I can't be sure, but I think Sibiu is the Netherlands. Just as the Dutch were caught off-guard by paratroopers, the Sibians are caught off-guard by a carefully-organized sea attack.

Jelgava and Valmiera are France and Belgium. They fight bravely against Algarve, but are defeated fairly easily. I am not sure which is which, but am inclined to say that Valmiera is France, due to Krasta's aristocratic snobbery.

Zuwayza is Finland. It puts up effective resistance against Unkerlant, but is overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. They also negotiate a revenge alliance with Algarve, just as finland did with Hitler.

Lagoas is Britain. As an island nation, it is the only anti-Algarvian country able to escape invasion.

Kuusamo is the United States. They have remained out of the war with Algarve so far, and seem to be on the brink of discovering a magical A-bomb (M-bomb?).

Gyongyos is Japan. They are fighting an island war against Kuusamo, and are constantly referred to as "Gongs".

The Land of the Ice People is Africa. The rest of the world considers it very unpleasant, but builds colonies there for economic reasons (sure to offend the heck out of Afrocentrists).

Siaulia hasn't really been introduced to the story yet, but I'll bet it's Australia. The map makes it out to be a large but sparsely populated (no major cities) land mass.

Ortah has likewise not been introduced, but would appear to be Switzeland. It's small, mountainous, neutral, and in the middle of the continent.

As a general rule I Read the Amazon reviews starting with the lowest rating before making a purchase. Somehow I glean a lot more out of people advising me against reading a book. Into the Darkness had plenty 1 and 2 stars reviews but it had intrigued me so much I've decided to give it a shot anyway. I'm glad I did and I'll use this stage to answer some of the bad reviewers main points.
The main argument against this book and series was weak predictable characters with no development. Another common complaint was about the sheer number of them (about 15 viewpoint characters) which was confusing and didn't allow any of them to arise as a major character. I think anyone using this argument is missing the point entirely. This book focus is on EVENTS not on people. Turtledove is telling his version of imagined history. Read the rise and the fall of the third Reich (Shirer) or Stalingrad (Beevor) for comparison of historical text. Turtledove uses his characters eyes to describe events, for that matter he could have used a hundred different characters. The story would have been as good as his story telling is excellent. If you want character development during wartime read one of the masters (War and peace, Doctor Zhivago), this book style and pace is entirely different. Another point raised was that the similarity with the 2nd world war made it too predictable and boring. That is like saying that "every novel based on historical events is boring due to predetermined ending". A book doesn't have to be entirely fictional to be good. Another common complaint dismissed the feasibility of the magical and the social system. Hey guys, this is after all a Fantasy genre. I bet none of you said anything when Gandalf used his tricks.
So why only three stars?
* Turtledove sees the Soviet Union through western eyes. Stalin was in no way the idiot buffoon bent on whimsical decisions as depicted in the story. Cruel, Shrewd and paranoid, yes, but not an idiot.
* Turtledove somewhat removed the sting and humanized the Algarvians (The parallels to the WWII Nazis). As a Jew that is always hard for me to accept.
* The teeth breaking names Turtledove chose for his countries and characters were tough to remember which caused me a lot of annoying browsing to the legend pages.
Summery: Great military fantasy, I recommend reading it.

I am a fan of Turtledove's formula of alternate scenarios, and this isn't the first time he has written on the theme of societies where magic does the job of technology. I think this worked better in 'The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump' and 'Thessalonica' than it does here. In these other two books Turtledove treated the idea with humour and it worked. In this book he takes the idea altogether too seriously, and it just gets to the point where you are left wondering what difference it makes? This book might as well have been a tale of World War Two, and nothing more has really been added to the story by making it on a different world and using magic instead of technology. What difference does it make if you are flying on a dragon having dogfights and dropping bombs, or flying an aircraft? The only thing that I found interesting about this story was trying to place who was who (eg which state is Russia, which is Germany etc.) and I'm afraid it wasn't all that hard to spot. If you are going to write allegory, it ought to be a bit more subtle than this. There was, for example a small state which fought a war with the alternate 'USSR' and it was a desert nation, but it was pretty obvious that it was supposed to be Finland. There is even a minority people all set up to play the role of the Jews...

I've just been rereading Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' and I think Turtledove would do well to read his comments in the preface about the role of allegory in writing a story, and how he expressly denies trying to parallel it to the war, despite writing much of it during those years. 'Lord of the Rings' works better for it, and if Turtledove is going to write of fictional worlds I wish he would really do that. This was just too close to WWII, and he's already treated the WWII theme pretty thoroughly in his 4 books series of alien invasion.

Alternative history author Harry Turtledove turns his considerable powers of story-telling toward a fantasy world where magic allows people to have more "modern" type weapons (ie. - guns and bombs)and more complex national relations. In a story that roughly paralells the events of World War II, Turtledove's magical world is plunged into war after the death of a duke allows one of the major powers to take back land that was taken from them after the last war.

It is certainly entertaining trying to discern which of Turtledove's countries are meant to parrallel the acutal countries involved. Turtledove does a decent job of making the events of WWII work within a magical setting. As always, his storytelling is up to par.

Turtledove's story does suffer from too many characters. Each country involved is represented by a host of characters that soon leaves the reader bewildered and flipping back to the beginning of the book to see who is who. The number of characters portrayed as soldiers also bogs down the book with mulitple points of view on the same event. Turtledove also never offers any kind of explination behind the magic involved - he offers a partial explanation at some points but never enough to truly understand how these magical weapons work and more importantly how their scientific laws operate with each other (I have a feeling this is going to be more important in later books). Further Turtledove doesn't bother to discuss how an entire mobile armies are supplied with the magic they need to operate. While it is certainly interesting to see the events of WWII from a fantasy perspective, I was left with a so-what feeling? Besides having creative ways to parallel the events of WWII into a fantasy setting what difference is there between this book and any other detailing the events of WWII. Truly, there isn't. It would have made for a more interesting read if the events in Turtledove's fantasy world mirrored the events of our own - perhaps the nations involved in Turtledove's war don't make the mistakes of our own. What would have happened if Turtledove's "Germany" decided not to attack "Russia" before it had finished off "England?" This would have taken the story beyond merely another WWII story.

In the end, I would still recommend Turtledove's fantasy WWII. While certain changes would have certainly made the book more enjoyable, it still has a lively, readable story line and some of the usual engaging Turtledove characters. It just could have been so much better.

One of the masters of the alternate universe brings us the "Darkness" series, a six book journey that takes us through six years of the world of Derlavai at war. There are multiple plotlines and points of view, characters too numerous to mention, triumphs and tragedies, drama, suspense, and surprise. Magic is a physical law on Derlavai, and is the subject of study and experimentation much like physics is on Earth - anyone can "perform" magic, as long as you are properly instructed. Magic is the primary source of energy, used for transportation, heating, lighting, and also for weaponry.

It didn't take long for me to realize that this entire series is an analog for the Second World War. Rather than guns and cannons, soldiers fight with magically-charged "sticks" and "heavy sticks". Dragons take the place of fighters and bombers, equipped with heavy sticks and dropping magically-charged explosive eggs. "Behemoths" (think a cross between an elephant and a rhinocerous) take the place of tanks. Rather than artillery, heavy sticks are mounted on wheels and pulled by horses or mules. Leviathans (large sea creatures roughly the size of a killer whale) are controlled by a rider and ply the seas in the place of submarines and destroyers. Mass transit vehicles travel on a magical grid of "ley lines" that provide locomotion, while individual carriages are still horse-drawn.

At the beginning of the series, Algarve (the analog of Germany) "reclaims" the Duchy Of Grelz under the pretext of "liberating" its largely Algarvic population. Forthweg (the analog of Poland) declares war on Algarve, who then conquer the much smaller Forthwegian army and procede to invade Forthweg. Unkerlant (the analog of the USSR) doesn't want an Algarvian presence on its border (which they share with Forthweg), so they invade Forthweg from the west, essentially splitting Forthweg in half. A large percentage of the Forthwegian population happen to be Kaunians, descendants of the original, ancient inhabitants of Derlavai, displaced from much of their land and culture when Algarvian tribes invaded Derlavai in ancient times. Kaunians continue to be a persecuted people the countries inhabited by descendants of Algarvian stock, and when modern Algarve invades modern Forthweg that persecution is taken to extreme, and thus begins the Kaunian Holocaust.

One by one, most other countries enter the fray - Gyongyos is the Japanese analog, Kuusamo is the analog of the United States (and is also the home of a secret superweapon project), Valmiera and Jelgava are countries of Kaunian rather than Algarvian stock, and are roughly analogous to France and Spain. Lagoas plays the part of Great Britain, while Yanina is roughly equivalent to Italy.

Many Turtledove fans find this to be a weak series, but I thoroughly enjoyed it the two times I read it. Lots of action, romance, espionage, and traitorous activity for any fan. I recommend it.

I read some of the other reviews, and at first I DID have some trouble keeping track of the different characters, but slowly I realized all you have to do is just remember which kingdom they're fighting for and everything slides into place.

This book is VERY cool, showing how the war is fought and taking different prespectives on the battle from the warrior to the dragon-flyer attacking the warrior's regiment.

I'm really interested to see if Algarve (the Kingdom that is flattening all of the others) is going to win, but there's another Kingdom called Kuusamo that has just developed the equivalent of our 'Splitting of the Atom', basically they've figured out how to manipulate magic from the bottom up or something, I don't know it's pretty detailed, but you get the drift?

If they get involved in the war the whole place could sink into the ocean and end with this all being a story about Atlantis. lol So you see it can go any-which-way! VERY good writer and book series!

I'm not a fan of historical fiction so maybe that's why I like this.

This book furthers Harry Turtledove's reputation as an historically knowledgeable and consistent writer. Where his previous well known works have focused on alternate history, this novel takes a different spin on World War II by insinuating magic in place of technology. An engrossing and entertaining read with intersting characters and intrigue.

"Into the Darkness" is the first part of Harry Turtledove's six-volume reworking of the World War Two story set on a planet where technology is based on magic rather than machines.

Dragon riders replace aircraft, Behemoths replace tanks, East and West have been transposed, Eurasia has been moved to the Southern hemisphere so that Scandinavia becomes equatorial, and names and superficial national characteristics have all been changed. But this is real history, not alternative history. Again and again the terrible events of the book are based on real historical incidents.

Some of the changes to racial characteristics are impishly amusing, such as the fact that the people who correspond to the Finns live in an equatorial climate and look like Zulus, while the Saraha Desert becomes "the land of the Ice people," the Gyongyosian people who correspond to the Japanese are physically large, and the Kuusamans who correspond to Americans have epicanthic folds.

Other changes are rather more biting - the "Kaunians" who correspond to Jews are tall, blue-eyed, and blonde.

What Turtledove appears to be trying to do with this series is to study how different people responded to a time of great evil. Some people were sucked into taking part in that evil, some fought against it, others just tried to live through it. The changes to the names and characteristics of the participants seem to be intended to give the reader an opportunity to leave behind some of our emotional baggage about the holocaust so that we can try, not to justify the wrongs which people did in terrible times, but to understand how it could have happened.

All but two or three of the characters in the first few books books are fictional - Hitler is King Mezentio of Algarve, Stalin is King Swemmel of Unkerlant, and Marshal Rathar gradually morphs into Zhukov. This actually makes the story more exiting, as the characters are presented well enough that you care about them: we all know how World War II turned out but the readers has no such certainty about the fate of the fictional characters.

The six books of the series each corresponds very roughly indeed to about a year's real historical events. The first book, "Into the Darkness", mostly covers events corresponding to those between the start of the fighting when Hitler invaded Poland to the fall of France in 1940: the last few pages of the book are mostly filler taking the story up to set the scene for Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's attack on Russia in 1941, which is covered in the second book, "Darkness Descending."

The series is best read in the correct sequence. All the books of this series have the word "Darkness" in the title, but the publishers refer to it as the "Derlavi" series, this being the name given in the books for the great continent which corresponds to Eurasia. It is sometimes also described as the "World at War" sequence. The full set of six books in their correct order is:

"Into the Darkness"
"Darkness Descending"
"Through the Darkness"
"Rulers of the Darkness"
"Jaws of Darkness"
"Out of the Darkness".

Bottom line: the mood is as black as the titles indicate, but the series is a very exciting read.

This is the first Harry Turtledove book that I managed to finish. Once I got into the flow of the story the book reads very well. Turtledove shows remarkable ability to write a complex story without losing the reader.

The book follows the exploits of about 15 to 20 (I lost count at about seven) mostly unconnected characters during the beginning of a fatasy war based on WWII. The book spends the first hundred pages or so introducing characters, and then it turns up the pace, this story may many things but it is never dull.

The glaring problem with this very entertaining book is that it is missing a purpose for its existance. The book doesn't have anything important or insightfull to say about WWII or its characters for that manner. What is the point of writing an alternate history novel if not to try to put at least some insight into the history. As it is the book just plagerises from history books to create a storyline for the author to sell. I'm sure there is a much better story to be told by a book such as this one, but this one isn't it.

I've always been a fan of Turtledove's more "realistic" fiction (The Two Georges, How Few Remain, Great War, even Guns of the South) as opposed to fantasy. This book won me over, though. Turtledove replays World War Two (sort of) in an alternate universe, where magic holds the place of technology but human nature remains very much the same. He is not bound by the original analogy; his Kaunians are more akin to Romans than Jews, for example, and actually run two of the warring states. Most exotic names, however difficult to pronounce, are actually real - lifted from maps of Portugal, Jordan, Finland, Rumania. Neither is this exotic and elaborate stage wasted on sub-standard characters. Quite to the contrary, Turtledove's Derlavaians are a splendid cast of warriors, farmers, nobles, mages, refugees and statesmen, who help bring war and its horrors to life. As always, Turtledove's work is highly addictive. Even if you're not a history buff, Into the Darkness (and its sequels) are definitely worth a read.