Customer Reviews

Second Contact (Colonization, Book 1)

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(33)
3 star:		(23)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I enjoy explorations of alien races' cultures, so these books have been highly enjoyable in that respect.

However, one thing has marred my appreciation of the "Colonization" series: either Harry Turtledove thinks his readers have the short-term memory of an avocado, or he places a higher priority on wordcount than on good writing. How many times must we be told that Mordechai Anilewicz has pains in his leg muscles because he breathed Nazi poison gas twenty years ago? Every time he appears in the story, apparently. How frequently must we be reminded that Earth years are twice the length of the Race's years? Why, every time a member of the Race mentions years, or whenever a human mentions years to a member of the Race. How often must it be recounted that the Race prefers temperatures higher than those which humans find comfortable? Any time someone enters or exits a building inhabited by the Race! How many times must we be told that Sam Yeager's wife would disapprove of common-usage English? Every time her husband or son speaks or thinks in the vernacular, of course! If you come away from this book (and its sequels) without knowing the effect ginger has on females of the Race, then you clearly read only the first and last pages, because (as with many more things) it's described at great length more times than you'll be able to count.

Characters explain the same things over and over again, sometimes even to the same people. When nobody else is around, they'll sometimes think the explanations to themselves! Further padding out the wordcount is the all-too-common SF cliche that intelligent aliens seem unable to grasp the concept of contractions when speaking English.

I loved the tale, but the telling of it could have been vastly improved by an editor who'd had the fortitude to tell Harry Turtledove to trim the fat.

Ok, for starters, yes I am hooked. I read the Worldwar series voraciously, especially the 2nd and 3rd were actually exciting and hard to put down. I couldn't wait a year for the next. The last Worldwar though was a bit disappointing, and so was "How Few Remain" because they dragged and dragged and were generally listless. As if a trend, so did this. The story lines were slow, and really not till the end did they amount to anything , and even the Muslim revolt was little more than table setting to hook you into the next book. I sincerely hoped for better because I loved the WorldWar books so much and thought this to be a very intriguing situation - the colonization fleet lands, upsetting the status quo since the peace declaration. There are always interesting tidbits in every book, such as the way that the lizard females react to ginger, but as I saw the pages to yet to be read dwindle, I was happy rather than disappointed that it was almost done. Best I can say is, I hope the future volumes will pick the pace up, get more interesting sub-stories and have more action.

In general I would recommend beginning with the first in this series, called _Worldwar: In The Balance_. While this book does move the timeframe forward a generation, it is substantially a continuation of the _Worldwar_ series.

What Turtledove does really well here is to surprise the reader with some interesting events (which I won't spoil). The criticism that his Lizards's military technology is so coincidentally similar to 2000-era US military tech is a valid one, and I'd like to see Turtledove account for it at some point.

Not as strong as the earlier books in the series, but still quite good.

It is 15 years after the end of an alternative WORLDWAR II, with the Axis and Allies having combined forces to help force a stalemate against an invading conquering fleet consisting of male reptilian aliens with advanced technology but limited resources; and with a 2nd wave of aliens arriving as part of a colonization fleet of 80-100 million males and females, who expected to find a subdued planet, but end up finding it is anything else but.

Most of the characters who lived thru the first set of 4 books return in sometimes surprisingly different roles.

This book takes on a more "cold war" flavor, with spying, insurgencies, drug-trading, and other underhanded tactics taking the place of the all-out war described in the previous books.

I noticed the three COLONIZATION SERIES books are slightly larger than the four WORLDWAR SERIES books - about 600 paperback pages vs. 580. However, the same format is followed, with 20 chapters, containing about 6 passages each... it is this consistant format that allows Mr. Turtledove to tirelessly crank out the text to fill these series. It is a true gift that allows him to do this, and still keep things different and interesting enough to keep our attention through this marathon series.

Actually, I'd give this one three and a half stars. Since I can't do that, I'll bump it up to four. The research involved in this series had to be near-obsessive (like a Gary Jennings book), but Turtledove makes it look easy. Quite an achievement when you have the US/Germany/Russia space race, a fascist England, Lizards all over the world, ginger addicts, the Moishe Russie Medical Academy, guerilla warfare, and the status of Straha, exiled shiplord and traitor to the Race. These are the details of the world, and don't even include the human stories. When Liu Han finally met Sam Yeager it put a capstone on twenty years of false history and I felt that that's how things could have really happened in this world. Plus, I laughed out loud when someone played the Spike Jones record 'The Fleetlord's Face'. Bravo, Dr. Turtledove!

This second series taking place soon after Turtledove's well received "WorldWar" saga is a good read that kept me entertained. But it is also a disappointment in that it's pretty clear that the author padded the book enough so that he can make what could probably be written in 2 books into a 4 book story.

What's particularly unfortunate is that Turtledove pads the book with largely irrelevant character building that makes the book feel like "Winds of War" with lizards.

A book such as this has so many opportunities to go into detail on how this alternative past is different than our own. The technology changes, the general life of the average American, Japanese, Russian, German, etc could be fleshed out more. In this alternative history, the US apparently goes to Mars. This is just mentioned in passing. What other types of technology do they have?

Another surprising thing is how little detail is given on human military technology. I know in our time line what 1960 era jets, tanks, and ships could do, what is different in this alternative timeline?

One of the most surprising things is how little mention the United States gets in the book from a governmental point of view. The reader gets no real inkling to where the US stands when compared to Nazi Germany or Russia from an economic or military balance other than a vague understanding that the US is "on par" with Germany in military technology.

Some things just don't make historical sense. In this alternative history, Great Britain slowly moves closer to Nazi Germany in behavior. I don't think many historians would agree that such a thing was even possible in a Churchill controlled Britain.

Even some of the character behavior seems senseless. The Race seems too ignorant to be as advanced as they are (not knowing how to deal with Snow? Even their home world would have to have polar icecaps and you'd think they would have been briefed).

But overall, my main disappointment with the book is that it's basically a 150 page book stretched into a nearly 400 page book.

But I would still recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed the original series. The original series suffered largely from these same things, especially the later ones). It's a good book but one that could have been so much better.

"Repetition works, David. Repetition works, David" - Wayne Gale

Story: Very little happens. After having read the Worldwar series, I am thrust into the 1960s, and the Colonization fleet has arrived. The Lizards of the Colonization fleet are confused and stubborn and disillusioned that Earth hasn't been completely pacified for them. Then several of their ships are destroyed by an unmarked Human satellite with nuclear weapons, and there's suspicion as to whether it is the United States, the Soviet Union, or the Greater German Reich. No one finds out.

A coup-de-tat occurs in Russia in which the NKVD head Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria attempts to take power and oust Vyacheslav Molotov, only to be thwarted by the still-perhaps-loyal General Georgi Zhukov, who kills Beria and re-installs Molotov after David Nussboym betrays the NKVD and rescues Molotov. This all happens in the space of maybe 5 pages max, so you can see how much we're supposed to care about this turn of events.

Ginger is bad for the Race, but worst for Females, as it sends them into their mating season early, and causes lots of havoc as Males are forced to have sex with them.

Then there's the United States with a highly secret space project which gets as much security as the Nuclear Research project had 20 years earlier. Of course at the end, we're shown what the project's surface intent is, but not it's ulterior motive.

Now then, repetition. Now then, repetition.

This is a 200-300 page story, tops. Turtledove makes it 590+ pages by the grace of repeating the exact same effing crap every time he can. He leaves absolutely nothing to figuring it out by ourselves. Even the truly stupid among us would have figured out "OKAY, SO BREATHING IN NERVE GAS IS BAD AND CAN CAUSE BODY PROBLEMS MANY YEARS LATER!"

Some examples of Turtledove's unnecessary repetition:

- Molotov: He has a stone wall of a face that shows no emotion
- Mordechai Anielewicz: It hurts his body to go biking because of that nerve gas he breathed in 20 years ago when Otto Skorzeny gassed him to try and stop them from stopping him igniting a nuclear bomb in Lodz
- Ludmila Jager: She walks with a severe limp and has lots of pain because of that nerve gas she breathed in 20 years ago when Otto Skorzeny gassed him to try and stop them from stopping him igniting a nuclear bomb in Lodz
- David Nussboym: He is whiny about being shipped to the gulag by the Jews of Lodz, and having to snitch on people while there
- Barbara Yeager: Is still a stickler for proper grammar
- Liu Han: Was once a peasant woman who had her family killed by the Japanese before becoming a communist warrior
- Liu Mei: Doesn't smile at all
- The Muslims: Don't like the Lizards, and tend to try and fight them in Basra, while chanting "Allahu Akbar"
- Rance Auerbach: Is gritty and bitter at having been shot at by the Lizards and crippling him in the War
- Penny Summers: Has problems with ginger smugglers, and is still rather pretty
- General Curtis LeMay: Is angry and screams a lot
- Basil Roundbush: Is upper-crust British who is rather handsome
- Humans: Advance very fast
- Ginger: It's bad for the race
- Straha: Wishes he'd ousted Atvar as fleetlord, doesn't fit in with humans
- The Race: All problems they've ever had happened in ancient history

That's pretty much the big ones. Now take everything listed above, and repeat it every single time the character or place or group of people appear in the book, and you'll see how Turtledove has made a 200 or at most 300 page story into a 590+ page trainwreck piece of crap that goes nowhere slowly. For god's sake, the book even begins exactly the same as every book of the Worldwar series: Atvar sighs and brings up an image of a Medieval-era Crusader on horseback while wondering how the Tosevites advanced so quickly.

Two more issues:

One, Turtledove pretty much beats us over the head every chance he gets with how slowly the Race advances. It gets to a point of being utterly stupidly ridiculous, where Lizards say "By the Emperor" Lizard casts his eyes down at mention of sovereign, "It will take us THOUSANDS of years studying the Tosevites to figure out how they advanced so quickly" This is usually followed up very quickly by an INSTANTANEOUS hypothesis that it may have happened because the Tosevites have been warring factions with each other for so long. That's right, THOUUUUUUUUUUUSAAAAAAANDS of years to figure out what one Lizard did in a few seconds. Any alien species that takes THOUSANDS of years to figure out such trivial, banal things that could easily be hypothesized in a matter of minutes, and solved in a few days, tops, simply suffers from a disease called "TSTL", which means "Too Stupid To Live"


Two, a part which is beyond belief. These Lizards in the Worldwar series killed MILLIONS of people... brutally slaughtered them with nuclear weapons. They destroyed dozens of major cities. They tried to enslave the entire human race. They destroyed all the remaining empires of the world, and tooks control of HALF OF THE WORLD'S LAND MASS.

And kids around the world are shaving their heads and wearing Lizard-style body paint, licking ginger and pretending to be high, talking and acting like Lizards.

Now imagine... it is 1960s Israel, and a gang of Jewish kids come goosestepping down the streets in authentic Nazi uniforms, screaming "SIEG HEIL!" and "HEIL HITLER!" Now tell me with a straight face they will make it home alive and unharmed, and I will call you a liar or stupid.

That's a little unfair, as Nazi Germany didn't exist in the 1960s in real life. Let me try a more accurate one.

It is 1960s America, and a gang of kids comes marching down the streets in Red Army uniforms, talking in Russian, screaming praises to Stalin and glorious Mother Russia, and singing the Soviet national anthem. Tell me with a straight face that they will make it home unharmed, alive, or unarrested, and I will call you a liar.

The Soviet Union was in a Cold War with America. Soviet troops never killed American troops on a large scale. And still they were our enemies, they were strong, and the US would not, or would barely tolerate communists sympathizers in America.

Now imagine if the Soviet Union had attacked America during World War II, exchanged nuclear missiles with one another, and destroyed city after city after city. Now imagine 20 years later, kids dressing like communists and walking down the street hailing Joseph Stalin.


THIS IS NOT SPECULATIVE OR ALTERNATE HISTORY: THIS IS COMPLETE AND UTTER FANTASY!

The thought that ANYONE in the US could ever tolerate kids acting like Lizards---THE VERY SAME LIZARDS WHO MURDERED MILLIONS OF AMERICANS, and nuked Washington D.C.---is the equivalent of believing that the Jewish people would THANK the Nazis for murdering them in the Holocaust.

It is sheer insanity.

I can't curse on Amazon reviews, so I'll have to replace "screw" with a four-letter F word; For god's sake, Turtledove, screw you. Screw you for being so nonchalant and random with your alternate history. Screw you for being so stupid with your speculation, and for thinking that anyone would tolerate kids idolizing mass murderers.

If you've finished the World War Series (4 books) this is the first book of the series that is the follow up, starting roughly 20 years later. Although you can enjoy the story if you simply start with Colonization, you will enjoy it more if you start from the beginning, with the book, World War-In the Balance. Very interesting writing. If you like sci-fi + history, this is the author for you!

Now, I've read all the four books of the original series (though I see no point in talking about _two_ series, this is as direct a continuation as they come) and so I knew I'd had to read this one too.

With a sigh I went to a book store and opened the book to its first page. Sure enough, it began with Atvar calling up the knight one more time. Every blasted book of this series has begun with this same old tired scene. Unfortunately this is typical of how the books in the series are connected. Every book has to introduce the billion characters Turtledove believes are necessary to carry on the story. Then, when all the old fellows have been reintroduced you're halfway through with the book and soon have to start reading the same reintroductions in the next book...

Even the Lizards, whose viewpoints have usually been the most interesting ones, are getting tired. All they talk about is how the Big Uglies are hopeless and how they would like to be back on Home and how the weather's miserable... Nobody likes hearing a child nag and to read through hundreds of pages of it is too much.

STOP REPEATING YOURSELF! MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN!

Ever since I read Guns of the South, I've been a Harry Turtledove fan, and this book has only stregntend my love of his work. The references to 60's pop culture and history were great. The only problem I had with the book was that, as another reader said, there were not enough reference as to human military technology.