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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Pales in comparison with his other novels, July 24, 2008
This review is from: The Man with the Iron Heart (Hardcover)
For the past decade, the summer has been the occasion of another entry in Harry Turtledove's "Southern Victory" alternate history series. In it, he explored the eighty years after a Civil War in which the South had won its independence, his last volume, In at the Death (Settling Accounts, Book 4), saw the Confederacy defeated and dissolved after their version of the Second World War. Having apparently finished with the series, Turtledove has moved on to this book. In it, he takes the "Werewolf" resistance movement devised by the Nazis before the demise of the Third Reich and puts it in the hands of Reinhard Heydrich, whom is spared his assassination by Czech partisans during the war.
Benefiting from better planning and more ruthless leadership, the Werewolves unleash a fearsome terrorist campaign against the Allied occupation forces. Soldiers are murdered and mutilated, truck bombs explode, and leading commanders targeted by rocket launcher-equipped fanatics. Readers of Turtledove's earlier series will find his depiction of this similar to that in his earlier novels, when he envisioned disaffected Mormons becoming suicide bombers and conquered Confederates waging a diehard resistance against occupying U.S. forces. But whereas in the earlier novels these elements were only part of the storyline, here they take center stage and form the basis of the action.
When reading the book, it soon becomes apparent that Turtledove draws many of his ideas from the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, both in terms of the occupation and the reaction to it on the home front. Much of it comes across as a metaphor that serves as commentary on modern-day events, one that is much less subtle than in earlier novels. Yet as I read this, I couldn't help but think how much more interesting his premise would have been in a new volume of his "Southern Victory" series, which ended in a place similar to where this novel begins. Perhaps he could not have done what he wanted as easily had he stuck with his earlier series, but this book suffers by comparison from the much more interesting world that he spent so many years cultivating. Longtime Turtledove readers will find much that is familiar and enjoyable within the pages of this book, but in many ways it seems a poor substitute for what he had entertained his fans with in the past.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The Sad Truth About Harry Turtledove, January 15, 2010
Harry Turtledove is a master at creating fascinating counterfactual scenarios, scenarios so compelling that they have often hidden certain unfortunate truths, namely:
1) Turtledove constantly creates scenarios which his writing talent can't match. His writing is intelligent, but his creativity writes checks which his writing talent can't cover. Beating around the bush, let me expose a related sad truth;
2) Turtledove is not a good writer. Oh, he's an intelligent writer, but I find that:
a) He creates lousy characters;
b) Never uses a chisel when he can find a piledriver; and
c) Always has actions in his books which defy logic or reason.
3) He is determined to tell the story he wants to tell, and will hit points A, B, and C, and won't let logic, reasoning, human nature, historical reality, or the laws of the universe of his own literary creation get in the way of the political point he is determined to make.
None of his books are character driven. He has a lot of characters, which tends to obscure that we really don't know much about these characters. They only exist to move the story forward without any real character development. None of Turtledove's characters have ever felt real to me. I don't like his characters, and I've realized why: He often creates interesting characters, but there's always an artificiality about them that wouldn't be tolerated in less intelligent books. I like characters who resonate with reality, and none of Turtledove's characters manage that trick. No, his books are plot driven, with the characters inevitably smashed up by the inevitability of Turtledove's agenda.
Suicide bombings are not a part of Western culture. Even today, decades after the publicity of suicide bombers from the middle east, it has not crossed over into Western culture. The Japanese were prepared to die for the Emperor out of religious obligation; there was no such paralell in Germany. There were German fanatics, to be sure, but Turtledove wants to comment on recent political history by placing it in the past, and nothing like logic, reasoning, reality, history or human nature will ever stand in his way! Fanatics come in different variations, and what Turtledove ignores is what suiciders have in common is that suicide = heaven.
Turtledove is undeniably intelligent, but he's gotten to the point where he's simply doing intelligent versions of the old SNL skit of "What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?" His intelligence can't hide his inadequacies as a writer.
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18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Polemical and par for course, August 2, 2008
This review is from: The Man with the Iron Heart (Hardcover)
The analysis of the American political scene that Turtledove provides in this book seems accurate: The GOP of 1945-1948 seemed hellbent on opposing Truman's policies no matter how sensical they proved to be. A reading of Cherney's excellent (real) history Candy Bombers shows this. Still, much of the rest of the book was problematic:
1. I have a hard time believing Heydrich could have squirreled away so many weapons, munitions, slave laborers, and built up a huge underground infrastructure without Himmler et alia catching on to it and executing him for defeatism.
2. I also have a hard time believing the Germans would have adopted kamikaze tactics on such a widespread basis, especially when they were not being funded by Heydrich as Al Qaeda has been doing with its followers.
3. By 1948, Truman resoundedly won over the American public on his very unpopular foreign policy. Would the same have happened in Turtledove's Germany? Perhaps.
4. The overt comparisons with Iraq were annoying. Germany had a tradition of parliamentary government, though, and Iraq didn't. This led to huge differences in what did/would happen to both countries post war. Another big diff: Hitler declared war on us (if he hadn't, the GOP probably would have just approved the fight against Japan), while Iraq was a war we started. The differences between post "mission accomplished" Iraq and postwar Germany make the comparisons interesting, but Turtledove overplays them.
I was disappointed with Turtledove's closing comment about that nutty California Senator who made a nutty statement. Yeah, you can find nuts who say nutty things all the time. I hope T was not suggesting that this guy's words were typical of Democratic thought in the post "mission accompished" era in Iraq. I don't know why he put that in.
Finally, the writing: more or less as good or bad as everything else T does. I like a one-series book like this because it's not as repetitive as the books in his series, where he seems to feel the need to remind his prematurely senile readers that, for example, every time Sam Carsten comes along, he tends to sunburn.
All this said, I've read everything T has written for years, but I'm now looking forward more to the works of Robert Conroy and John Birmingham than I am to the works of Mr. T.
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