Harry Turtledove-Your opinion

[Evil Opus]

What is your opinion on Harry Turtledove, one of the most widely known AH authors? How would you rate his writing?

[Evil Opus]

Damn "High Speed Internet." I just got it installed and now it ate my poll.

[Johnestauffer]

Most of his single volume works are very good.
The Worldwar/Colonization series was entertaining.
The post civil war series has been a bit tedious and predicatable but still an interesting read - not necessarily great for the dedicated FH fan.
His books seem to generate either love or hate, not too much middle ground.
But they have introduced a lot of people to the FH genere who would never have read FH books before.

[Evil Opus]

I agree with you

[SionEwig]

I enjoy his writing, most of it. Yes, his earlier stuff is, at least to me, generally better than much of his latter writing, but he is still overall a good writer. And as has been said, a lot of people have been introduced to AH due to him.

[WhatIsAUserName]

I would put him as a rather mediocre writer. Not quite bad, but not the best either.

His works are too long though.

[Diamond]

I liked a lot of his earlier stuff - the Videssos books, A World of Difference, etc. Worldwar was great in concept, but poor in execution. And. It. Never. Ends. His CSA mega-series is just bad IMHO. The AH is suspect, the characters are irritating and/or boring - and there's just too damn many of them.

I think my favorite Turtledove books are probably Guns of the South and The Two Georges, as well as (most of) the Videssos books. Everything else - meh.

[Flocculencio]

I've said it before and I'll say it again

Originally Posted by Flocculencio

He's your bog standard sci-fi/fantasy hack like so many others. This is not derogatory. Pulp hacks can turn out excellent work if they're properly edited.

At his best he can turn out good, pulpy fun like Agent of Byzantium, the Videssos books, the wonderful Tales of the Fox (which I've re-read many times) which are nice popcorn reads. Unfortunately, like David Eddings or Kevin J. Anderson, he got delusions of grandeur and decided that he could attempt to write epic-scale fiction. He failed miserably but people still buy his books.

As I said earlier, the main problem with his work is the lack of editing and the fault must lie with his publishers. His early work was all at Baen. Baen maintains a stable of hacks (Eric Flint, David Drake et al) and knows how to manage them. After all, they're the best pulp sci-fi/fantasy publishers in the business. Baen made sure to edit Turtledove properly. His later stuff, however, is published by Roc. Roc is obviously interested only in squeezing as much profit out of him as possible so they don't bother to keep a tight editorial leash on him. Thus, they let him spew the poorly-written, poorly thought-out and poorly-edited crap that passes as his "writing" onto perfectly good paper. Likely the only editing they do is to translate the crude glyphs he presumably hacks into chunks of driftwood into standard English.

As I've said before, I refuse to contribute to putting his kids through college- in the unlikely event that I want to buy any of Turtledove's future excretions I'll buy 'em from a second-hand bookshop or borrow them from a library. The same will go for anything Roc publishes.

[Dave Howery]

I don't find him to be the best of the best, but I generally enjoy his books...

[BGMan]

I've read the whole Lizard timeline (except for two of the "Colonization" series) and several of the South-winning-Civil-War timeline books. Right now I'm starting on the Darkness series.

They're run to read and I am always tempted to come back to them. The only downsides to them is that he's the opposite of Tolkien when it comes to detail. I mean sure, Tolkien's long-winded description of every scene may be tedious, but I'd like to have some idea of what things look like.

Also, they tend to get rather repititious after a while. It's either:
A) Scrappy soldiers and officers making wisecracks, coming under fire making them turn to swearing and black humor, and they usually come through but sometimes get killed (hehe)
B) Following a person's hard-luck life from one place to another, sometimes with the tension of war nearby or under occupation from a foreign, often brutal regime (if female, add being a forced sex slave to an odious foreigner)
C) There's a lot of emotional drama and sex scenes

[Othniel]

My general rule about Turtledove, the shorter the piece, the better it is...

[Jack_Straw]

Harry Turtledove introduced me to the world of AH. I will always be appreciative of that. I do, however agree with what most here are saying, as to his single stories being far superior to his extended histories. I thing the Southern Victory series started losing steam for me after the Great War, but I cannot say that I'm not enjoying the remainder of his vision. The only series of his I haven't had the time to check out is the "Darkness" series. Any opinions?

[TheGrandVizier]

I only read his CSA stuff and its not that good. its bad and read much better CSA AH than that. i dont understand why people like that series.

[sikitu]

There are good works by HT (e.g. How Few Remain, World War series, various short stories), mediocre ones (such as the the Great War series or the second WorldWar series) and rather bad ones (such as the Return Engagement and American Empire series).

My rating of the latter series as bad is mainly due to objections concerning the plausibility of the developments.

[wallwriter]

Well, much to his credit; Harry Turtledove was the author who got me interested in the AH genre in the first place.

I'm in agreement with the general sentiment that he somewhat excells at writing one-shot books or short pieces. In my opinion, he falters when writing series or extensions to a one-shots such as "How Few Remain", well, except for "In The Presence of My Enemies" which was the only extended piece I found alright.

My verdict for him? Only human.

[Thande]

Yeah, I have to concur with others that Turtledove is the writer who got me into AH in the first place, and that is important.

His works that I most enjoyed were: the first three Worldwar books (the fourth and Colonisation weren't so good), The Guns of the South, The Two Georges, and Ruled Britannia. ITPOME wasn't as good IMO as some others have said, though it was thought-provoking. Thessalonica is one of my favourite non-mainstream works of his, as are Agent of Byzantium and A Different Flesh.

I've only read a few of the Videssos books but I found them pretty readable, although he does suffer from what I think is the most awful flaw of any fantasy writer, i.e. "oh, and magic works too". It adds absolutely zero to the plot of those books. Frankly I would have found it more interesting if Aemilius Scaurus' legion had been sent to the OTL Byzantine Empire rather than Videssos: one only has to keep translating names in one's head to their OTL equivalents, much as with Darkness.

I do wonder how the man's managed to avoid having a fatwa declared on him, given that he turned Mohammed into a Christian for Agent of Byzantium and then portrayed Muslims as Satanists in the Videssos cycle

[Superdude]

I like him because I like the objective as opposed to the getting there aspect.

[Flocculencio]

Originally Posted by Thande

I do wonder how the man's managed to avoid having a fatwa declared on him, given that he turned Mohammed into a Christian for Agent of Byzantium and then portrayed Muslims as Satanists in the Videssos cycle

Well, the Ayatollahs would never stoop to reading decadent filthy non-literary Western fiction. Plus, Rushdie's writing style is convoluted enough that they probably got a collective headache and gave up after reading The Satanic Verses.

[Evilmittens]

Actually, I enjoyed most of his stuff until the past 2 years or so. Then he sort of fell apart. His most underrated stuff though is his Greek Series, Over the Wine Dark Sea and others. Thought that stuff was great. He seems almost uninterested in Great War, return Engagement, etc.

[Mike999]

Like most people here Harry Turtledove is the reason i got into AH.The very first Ah book i ever read was Guns of the South and i would have to say that was problay one of his better books.

I think the problem with most of his books is that he tends to focus on too many characters and in the end it`s hard to keep up.Plus a lot of times all we hear about the characters is the same thing over and over again.For example we all know Dowling is fat or that Sam Carsten burns easily because every time he updates their part in the story he feels the need to keep bringing it up.Despite his repititious nature i still find myself for the most part still looking forwards to his books.Maybe not as eagerly as once did but for the most part they are still a pretty good read.

Some people have mentioned the Colonization series and i don`t know whether he plans any more sequeals but i personally found the last book Homeward Bound extremely boring and drawen out.As for the return engagement series i really think with a little better editing that this should have been a 3 book series instead of a 4 book series,but i`ll reserve final judgement on that till i`ve read the last book.