Search results

Zoomar- for God's sake! Never come across Talbot Munday and George MacDonald Fraser? TM wrote KING OF THE KHYBER RIFLES and Ignatief turns up as the villain in two of the Flashman books. That's what pisses me off. TPL, good story, but continually I'm distracted by wondering what the next...

Thande- On the spur of the moment, A DANGEROUS ENERGY is the only one I'd go for. Certainly not THE PESHAWAR LANCERS which has an unstable balance between adventure story and literary joke and (I must confess) I've not yet read RULED BRITANNIA.

Zoomar- a strange list. THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (as I've said before) is more Dick's musings on reality than real AH. FOR WANT OF A NAIL I've never been able to decide whether it's better to describe it as "interesting in a boring sort of way" or "boring in an interesting sort of way." THE...

No. It's a pastiche of a 19th century novel with lots of in-jokes. A descendant of the executed Washington is building the tunnel which is essentially a Keynesian pump priming project of the British Government.

FATHERLAND is a passable thriller but (at best) mediocre AH.

Top three LEST DARKNESS FALL (De Camp) BRING THE JUBILEE (Moore) THE IRON DREAM (Spinrad) Contenders PAVANNE (Roberts) MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA (Stirling) ANNO DRACULA (Newman) A DANGEROUS ENERGY (Whitbourne)

Well, off the top of my head- the time the Japanese made a ghost prime minister, Vespasian's tax on the contents of pisspots.

Many years ago, on the anniversary of T E Lawrence's death, a newspaper had a contest to provide what the obituaries would have been had he lived to a normal age. They were all things like his leading a torpedo boat attack on the Tirpitz etc. I didn't bother sending my entry in. It had him...

Have a look at Martin's official website. He doesn't have a clue when it will be finished. And Amazon, also, I seem to remember, were offering special deals if you bought vols 4 and 5 at once.

Well tell George R R Martin!

Actually, though it's old (1969), William Shirer's massive COLLAPSE OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC would probably give you everything you want.

CB- it was a minor thing. If Christianity succeeds, it's a damn sight more to do with imperial politics (ie that little turd Constantine) than with Josephus.

What on earth do you mean by that?

I've attempted (without success) to read Disraeli's ALROY which strikes me as a tedious exercise in orientalism rather than AH. In English, as far as I'm concerned, the first true AH novel is Rolfe/Corvo's HUBERT'S ARTHUR published in 1935, twenty odd years after the author's death, which I...

If we had a "heaven of film-makers" where you could get any actor at the required age, on second thoughts I'd suggest the best Bombadil might have been Walter Huston. Ever seen THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER/ALL THAT MONEY CAN BUY?

Matt- that is, as you say, assuming there was a Korean War. And there's always the point that no MacArthur might equal no Chinese intervention. Burton- I don't know where you get the idea that Montgomery was a catholic. Thoroughly orthodox protestant background. His grandfather was Dean...

Actually my choice would have been a young John Hurt. And PB- though I quite agree with the omission of Bombadil from the film (he's irrelevant to the main plot), I find his sequences strange and compelling.

The war in the Pacific might have gone better for the Allies.

Maybe a question of tastes. To be brutal, I don't like any (very much) of your favourites. When I'm sober, I'll post at greater length.

Diamond- have you been at the Amazon reviews again? I'd have thought you'd known better by now. Among the writers I like- Stapledon, Wells, Tolkien, Eddison, early Heinlein, early Poul Anderson, Tom Disch, George R R Martin, Jack Vance, Alfred Bester, Algis Budrys, William Tenn, Pohl, Kornbluth...