From The Magazine of Fantascience, June 1994
The Bookateria by Charles Baird
Global War: Ride Through Hell by Harry Turtledove (Knapp & Co., NA£13.00, IBIC 27622-D-741)
A hundred pages into Harry Turtledove's Global War: Ride Through Hell, I had to stop, go back and reread Global War: North American Front, the first book in the series. There, I learned that, yes, Turtledove had mentioned that there was a cabal of Niederhofferian revolutionaries in the C.N.A. Thus, the kidnapping of Roxana King, fictional daughter of the fictional arms manufacturer Cyrus King, did not quite come out of nowhere. Roxana's kidnapping is by no means the only instance where Turtledove introduced an unexpected twist into his fictional North American front of the Global War. There is also Serjeant Carter Monaghan's liberation from a Mexican slave labor camp by Philip Harrison, who drafts him into his own Mexican revolutionary movement. There is Governor-General Herbert Lee's ouster by his Minister of War, Hugh Devenny, followed by his arrest and execution. All of it foreshadowed, albeit quietly, in North American Front.
The course of the war itself is equally unexpected. Rather than seeing a North American version of the quick-moving Global War that took place in actual history in Europe and Asia, Ride Through Hell depicts the two sides locked in a costly war of attrition along mostly static fronts. A spring offensive by the C.N.A. aimed at liberating New Orleans quickly grinds to a bloody halt (and leads to Lee's removal from power). The Mexican siege of Tory Novidessa continues throughout the novel, with the Mexicans unable to take the city, and the North Americans unable to break the siege. The privations suffered by the people of Novidessa form some of the novel's most harrowing scenes.
With its vivid characterization, rigorously thought-out extrapolations, and riveting narrative, Ride Through Hell is easily Turtledove's best novel in years. Readers who wonder what happened to the author of such well-regarded early works as Prime Directive and Agent of Change need wonder no longer. Harry Turtledove is back.
From the Burgoyne Sunday Times-Journal, 26 June 1994
Harry Turtledove and the Alternate History Revival by David Egremont
One of the least expected trends in popular literature of the 1990s has been the revival of the alternate history novel. A literary genre that was little more than a curiosity since the publication in 1826 of Louis Geoffrey’s History of the Universal Monarchy: Louis XVI and the Conquest of the World, alternate history emerged as a subgenre of fantascience during the heyday of the Mexican pulps between the Hundred Day War and the Global War. The end of the pulp era in the 1940s also meant the end of the alternate history genre, except for occasional oddities such as Robert Sobel’s 1974 faux-history For All Time.
The fantascience revival of the 1970s was accompanied by the occasional alternate history story, but it was not until the appearance of Harry Turtledove that alternate history became a major publishing genre. Turtledove was a professor of Byzantine history at Brant University, and also a follower of the old Mexican fantascience pulps, so it was perhaps inevitable that when he began submitting stories to New Worlds of Fantascience in 1979, works of alternate history would be included among the more standard fare.
Thanks to his professional background in history, Turtledove’s alternate history stories tended to be more varied than the standard tropes of a rebel victory in the North American Rebellion and a German defeat in the Global War, and with a greater degree of verisimilitude and realism. Probably his best-known work to date is the 1990 time-travel novel The Guns of the North, in which a vengeful group of Southern Vandalian extremists travels back to the Rocky Mountain War to arm Herbert Williamhouse’s men with modern automatic weapons.
Although others writers have made names for themselves in the alternate history genre, Turtledove remains the acknowledged master. Any alternate history novel by him is a major event, and so it proved when he followed up The Guns of the North with a more standard alternate history novel, 1992’s Northern Exposure, in which Thomas Kronmiller succeeds in ousting Ezra Gallivan in 1899 and leads the C.N.A. to war with Mexico. Northern Exposure proved to be the first of a new series of alternate history novels, continuing with last year’s Global War: North American Front, in which the Global War breaks out in America rather than the Middle East.
The four decades separating Northern Exposure from the Global War books was a time of great change, and Turtledove spent much of North American Front showing the reader how a C.N.A. under the influence of the Moral Imperative differed from our own. It is a credit to Turtledove’s imagination that his alternate C.N.A. generated so much controversy. On the one hand, Councilman Ryan Creighton-Young of Manitoba denounced the novel as a work of imperialist propaganda. On the other hand, Creighton-Young’s bête noire, Theodore Worden of the Southern Confederation, threatened Turtledove with a lawsuit, claiming that his portrayal of Hugh Devenny was a thinly-disguised attack on Worden himself.
If Turtledove’s Devenny is meant as a stand-in for Worden, then he has clearly not been intimidated by the real man’s threat. In the latest volume in the series, Global War: Ride Through Hell (Knapp & Co., NA£13.00, IBIC 27622-D-741), Devenny’s seizure of power is likely to provoke even greater controversy. Already, Worden has issued a press release denouncing the book, and threatened to introduce legislation in the Grand Council strengthening the country’s libel laws. Meanwhile, Creighton-Young finds himself in the peculiar position of defending a man he was vigorously attacking only a year ago.
Far from shying away from the controversy, Turtledove’s publisher, Knapp & Co., has responded with its own press releases defending Turtledove and denouncing Worden’s actions. The result has been a surge of public interest in Turtledove’s works, with three of them now appearing in the New York Herald’s bestseller list. Turtledove himself has remained silent on the controversy. According to Knapp & Co., Turtledove is currently at work on a third book in the Global War series that is due to be published next summer.
The Bookateria by Charles Baird
Global War: Ride Through Hell by Harry Turtledove (Knapp & Co., NA£13.00, IBIC 27622-D-741)
A hundred pages into Harry Turtledove's Global War: Ride Through Hell, I had to stop, go back and reread Global War: North American Front, the first book in the series. There, I learned that, yes, Turtledove had mentioned that there was a cabal of Niederhofferian revolutionaries in the C.N.A. Thus, the kidnapping of Roxana King, fictional daughter of the fictional arms manufacturer Cyrus King, did not quite come out of nowhere. Roxana's kidnapping is by no means the only instance where Turtledove introduced an unexpected twist into his fictional North American front of the Global War. There is also Serjeant Carter Monaghan's liberation from a Mexican slave labor camp by Philip Harrison, who drafts him into his own Mexican revolutionary movement. There is Governor-General Herbert Lee's ouster by his Minister of War, Hugh Devenny, followed by his arrest and execution. All of it foreshadowed, albeit quietly, in North American Front.
The course of the war itself is equally unexpected. Rather than seeing a North American version of the quick-moving Global War that took place in actual history in Europe and Asia, Ride Through Hell depicts the two sides locked in a costly war of attrition along mostly static fronts. A spring offensive by the C.N.A. aimed at liberating New Orleans quickly grinds to a bloody halt (and leads to Lee's removal from power). The Mexican siege of Tory Novidessa continues throughout the novel, with the Mexicans unable to take the city, and the North Americans unable to break the siege. The privations suffered by the people of Novidessa form some of the novel's most harrowing scenes.
With its vivid characterization, rigorously thought-out extrapolations, and riveting narrative, Ride Through Hell is easily Turtledove's best novel in years. Readers who wonder what happened to the author of such well-regarded early works as Prime Directive and Agent of Change need wonder no longer. Harry Turtledove is back.
From the Burgoyne Sunday Times-Journal, 26 June 1994
Harry Turtledove and the Alternate History Revival by David Egremont
One of the least expected trends in popular literature of the 1990s has been the revival of the alternate history novel. A literary genre that was little more than a curiosity since the publication in 1826 of Louis Geoffrey’s History of the Universal Monarchy: Louis XVI and the Conquest of the World, alternate history emerged as a subgenre of fantascience during the heyday of the Mexican pulps between the Hundred Day War and the Global War. The end of the pulp era in the 1940s also meant the end of the alternate history genre, except for occasional oddities such as Robert Sobel’s 1974 faux-history For All Time.
The fantascience revival of the 1970s was accompanied by the occasional alternate history story, but it was not until the appearance of Harry Turtledove that alternate history became a major publishing genre. Turtledove was a professor of Byzantine history at Brant University, and also a follower of the old Mexican fantascience pulps, so it was perhaps inevitable that when he began submitting stories to New Worlds of Fantascience in 1979, works of alternate history would be included among the more standard fare.
Thanks to his professional background in history, Turtledove’s alternate history stories tended to be more varied than the standard tropes of a rebel victory in the North American Rebellion and a German defeat in the Global War, and with a greater degree of verisimilitude and realism. Probably his best-known work to date is the 1990 time-travel novel The Guns of the North, in which a vengeful group of Southern Vandalian extremists travels back to the Rocky Mountain War to arm Herbert Williamhouse’s men with modern automatic weapons.
Although others writers have made names for themselves in the alternate history genre, Turtledove remains the acknowledged master. Any alternate history novel by him is a major event, and so it proved when he followed up The Guns of the North with a more standard alternate history novel, 1992’s Northern Exposure, in which Thomas Kronmiller succeeds in ousting Ezra Gallivan in 1899 and leads the C.N.A. to war with Mexico. Northern Exposure proved to be the first of a new series of alternate history novels, continuing with last year’s Global War: North American Front, in which the Global War breaks out in America rather than the Middle East.
The four decades separating Northern Exposure from the Global War books was a time of great change, and Turtledove spent much of North American Front showing the reader how a C.N.A. under the influence of the Moral Imperative differed from our own. It is a credit to Turtledove’s imagination that his alternate C.N.A. generated so much controversy. On the one hand, Councilman Ryan Creighton-Young of Manitoba denounced the novel as a work of imperialist propaganda. On the other hand, Creighton-Young’s bête noire, Theodore Worden of the Southern Confederation, threatened Turtledove with a lawsuit, claiming that his portrayal of Hugh Devenny was a thinly-disguised attack on Worden himself.
If Turtledove’s Devenny is meant as a stand-in for Worden, then he has clearly not been intimidated by the real man’s threat. In the latest volume in the series, Global War: Ride Through Hell (Knapp & Co., NA£13.00, IBIC 27622-D-741), Devenny’s seizure of power is likely to provoke even greater controversy. Already, Worden has issued a press release denouncing the book, and threatened to introduce legislation in the Grand Council strengthening the country’s libel laws. Meanwhile, Creighton-Young finds himself in the peculiar position of defending a man he was vigorously attacking only a year ago.
Far from shying away from the controversy, Turtledove’s publisher, Knapp & Co., has responded with its own press releases defending Turtledove and denouncing Worden’s actions. The result has been a surge of public interest in Turtledove’s works, with three of them now appearing in the New York Herald’s bestseller list. Turtledove himself has remained silent on the controversy. According to Knapp & Co., Turtledove is currently at work on a third book in the Global War series that is due to be published next summer.
