I am a sucker for AH about the Great Wars in Europe, so I enjoyed this series quite a bit. Turtledove may not have the greatest handle on prose, but every once and a while something golden shines through.
That being said, the element that almost broke the story for me was his portrayal of the United States. It seems as if in this timeline, all the Confederates, blacks, and Mormons are just northern Americans with silly accents and tans. After the Confederacy goes down, it’s as if the entire South was wiped off the map, never to emerge again. The worst part is that the post-ACW occupation of the South seems to be a mixture of incompetence, grand larceny, and soiled idealism, and yet nothing happens. No rebellion, no wide-scale terrorist campaign beyond those guys in nightshirts, not even an angry revanchist novel by a cranky college professor. I know all AH is wish fulfillment on some level, but to throw out a century of American ethnic strife is pushing it.
As for the Nasis (sp?), I didn’t find them quite as improbable as everyone else here believes them to be. Right now I’ve been looking into some new studies on nationalism in pre-GW Europe for a paper, and the one thing that keeps coming up again and again is the need to “cleanse” and “purify” the nation, and in a lot of the French and Eastern European material the Jews keep reappearing as the source of the “contagion.” Seriously, this stuff will freak you right out. There’s actually quite a few German writers dealing with this material, and I would go so far as to say that this type of anti-Semitism was a part of the daily lexicon, if only in a supplementary role. Of course, I have to agree that Hitler’s rise to power parallels Featherstone’s too closely to really be plausible, but it’s pretty obvious that Turtledove wasn’t talking out of his ass here.
With the whole “commie Russia” thing, I think that Turtledove played a giant prank on all of us. In my opinion, the Soviet Union was about as “communist” as the German Reich. Once you look closely at it, the Union was nothing more that a caricatured tsarist state. We’ve got Stalin as the supreme leader with a personality cult, a massive state-run crash industrialization program, an agriculture reform program that recreates the peasant commune, and a assault on “wreckers” that resembles nothing so much as a giant pan-ethnic pogrom and makes about as much sense. There’s literally nothing that Stalin did or built in Men of Iron that Alexander III didn’t do in the 1880s or that Vasily Dyachenko didn’t built in the 1960s. The creepiest thing for me was the impression that, despite the industrialization, trials and war, life in Stalin’s Russia is actually a heck of a lot better than it was in our Russia in the late 1940s.
Finally, I know most of you are groaning about this, but I’m actually interested in seeing if Turtledove does anything with the post-war world. This idea of a capitalism-vs-communism conflict could bring an entirely new spin on international relations. I mean, in OTL we had the Americans and Germans staring at one another for five decades, but at the end of the day there was a lot they could both agree on. Imagine how gut-wrenching it would have been if, instead of just two military and economic powers squaring off, we had two wholly different ideological systems in mental conflict, each convinced that their system represents the end of history and will, nay must, emerge victorious over all things forever. Given how Turtledove has set up atomic weapons in his timeline to be these strange mystical devices of unfathomable power and annihilation, you could actually have these ideological wars spill over into the realm of state policy, as the ultimate weapon is used to defend and advance the ultimate ideal. Heck, if he doesn’t write this, I just might give it a shot. (Of course, in my version, I’d keep discourse criticism from being invented. It’s annoying enough in OTL as it is.)
Anyway, I’d like to close by mentioning my favorite scene. I know most of you love the Normandy sequence, but his Dresden scene is just horrifically wondrous, and I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the best things he’s ever written. I’m still not sure whether that Vonnegut (sp again?) guy Rob Jacobs meets is the most asinine character in alternate history, or the most tragic.
