Graceheart the Leopard
Resident Amur leopard
- Joined
- Sep 24, 2007
- Messages
- 3,476
THB World War II AHs are overrated.
What's some good alternate WW2 history books?
- Thread starter Suspiria
- Start date
I handled this exact althist scenario here on CFC a while back, actually. Even had Rommel broken through at El-Alamein - and he came reasonably close - he didn't have the fuel to even reach Cairo, let alone Palestine. The only way the Axis could supply him the fuel he needed, even had Malta been taken - and little side-offensives, such as the invasion of Crete, been ignored - in sufficient quantities would be to abandon the Eastern Front. And that wasn't happening. The Axis simply didn't have the raw materials necessary to win the war, and they never did.
Serutan
Eatibus Anythingibus
Not a great premise, IMHO. OTOH, one based on the premise of winning over residents of occupied Russia (esp. the Ukraine and the Baltic states) instead of enslaving/starving/{etc.-ing} them would be interesting.
sward4347s
Chieftain
- Joined
- Mar 27, 2012
- Messages
- 3
Thanks to SKILORD for the defense! "OPERATION HERKULES" is a NOVEL, not a scholarly treatment of historic events. I'm not aware that PHD's in AH are being awarded, and if they are I guess Turtledove would be the first recipient, so what does that say about plausibility of scenarios anyway? And no, I am not a robot, and yes, I'm trying to spark a little interest among AH fans in my book so that I can afford to write the sequel.
As an aside, I'd like to weigh in on the whole e-book world as it is developing now. IMHO,
the e-reader device technology ( the Kindles, Nooks and iPAD readers ) and the business model they support are in the process of SHATTERING traditional publishing. After decades ( if not centuries ) where publishers and agents held all the power, now readers and writers are in control. It's the best thing to happen to reading and writing since Guttenberg printed his Bible.
As an aside, I'd like to weigh in on the whole e-book world as it is developing now. IMHO,
the e-reader device technology ( the Kindles, Nooks and iPAD readers ) and the business model they support are in the process of SHATTERING traditional publishing. After decades ( if not centuries ) where publishers and agents held all the power, now readers and writers are in control. It's the best thing to happen to reading and writing since Guttenberg printed his Bible.
moo cow
Chieftain
I am currently working on a novel where germany wins WW1. And hitler never come's to power. And a communist revolution happen's in France. Though it does not happen in a world war II timeline. I thought it might be interesting to you and because i am a filthy capitalist pig who love's
spaming forums. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
.
Also i promise you their are no alien space bat's in my novel.
spaming forums. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
. Also i promise you their are no alien space bat's in my novel.
You just lost yourself a sale, pal.I am currently working on a novel where germany wins WW1. And hitler never come's to power. And a communist revolution happen's in France. Though it does not happen in a world war II timeline. I thought it might be interesting to you and because i am a filthy capitalist pig who love's
spaming forums. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Also i promise you their are no alien space bat's in my novel.
bugwar
Emperor
- Joined
- Sep 15, 2012
- Messages
- 1,246
Anyone read the 'Farthing' series?
Starts out as a murder mystery in England, then follows the life of the investigator as the British peace with Germany during WWII evolves through the years.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farthing_(novel)
Starts out as a murder mystery in England, then follows the life of the investigator as the British peace with Germany during WWII evolves through the years.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farthing_(novel)
Leifmk
Deity
Yes, and it is very fine (as is everything else by that author).
hobbsyoyo
Deity
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2012
- Messages
- 26,575
That's why I love him.
That's why I love him.
It's a matter of taste. I like HT's books
, others don't
.He also wrote Days of Infamy and End of the Beginning. The Japanese don't just attack Pearl Harbor, but invade and conquor the Hawiian islands.
It would be more fun, for me at least, if Turtledove picked some scenarios that theoretically could have happened without the intervention of supernatural beings. Magicking the IJN a large transport fleet and transforming the IJA's staff into a hive mind that agreed to disperse valuable divisions slated for Asia on a risky boondoggle in the face of the US Pacific Fleet is not one of those scenarios. Neither is converting a Confederate fighting retreat into a series of glorious victories culminating in a march on Washington. And neither is FREAKIN' ALIENS, MAN.
I mean, obviously there are plenty of other valid complaints about his books, e.g. their overall pulpiness, the author's refusal to abandon the trope of shoehorning well-known historical personalities into AMUSINGLY JUXTAPOSED alternate-historical roles, his inability to sustain a single narrative and failure at maintaining several small irrelevant ones, and his penchant for included badly-written gratuitous sex scenes multiple times in a given book. But as far as alternate history goes, they don't do a very good job at the history part, and that's what bugs me the most about them.
Dachs, I respect but disagree with your opinion. Some of your criticisms are certainly valid, but he also has his strengths (like shoehorning well-known historical personalities into AMUSINGLY JUXTAPOSED alternate-historical roles). I would simply point out that Turtledove is a best-selling author with numerous awards and a substantial fan base - always an affront to the more academically-minded among us.
It's overused and annoying. Sure, it was kind of interesting the first time or so, to see the likes of Martin Luther King standing up to the aliens and such. But he does it every single time. Abraham Lincoln makes Socialism viable in America. FDR becomes a government bureaucrat running the A-bomb project. Custer turns into Douglas Haig. And on, and on, and on.
What makes the whole thing worse is that in many of his timelines, these people almost certainly would not have been in a position to develop the way they did, or more frequently, they simply would not have existed. Turtledove's PoD for Timeline-191 was in 1862, right? FDR was born in OTL 1882. He would not have existed; the probability that his parents would have coupled in the exact same way, with the exact same sperm interacting with the exact same egg to produce a child that survived birth and was raised in the exact same way is so infinitesimally low as to beggar the imagination. The fact that this carbon-copy man had a slightly different political career after that is putting lipstick on a pig.
And don't get me started on the likelihood of the actual events concerned taking place. Aside from fundamentally misunderstanding the circumstances surrounding the Battle of Antietam, Turtledove also decided that global politics would work out exactly the same as historically, down to Friedrich III dying of cancer, Wilhelm II being a douchebag, and the exact same network of alliances and war outbreak in 1914 as happened historically. Japan also ends up fighting the US in the Pacific because reasons, and the British end up abandoning the key tenet of their prewar diplomacy - "don't piss the Americans off" - in order to save some Southern slavers who don't even sell anything that the British would want to buy.
"You don't like it because it's popular"? That's a pretty dumb canard to drag out. I really enjoyed Fatherland quite a lot, and that sold three million copies. That was the real standard-bearer of alternate-historical fiction. Didn't put in anything too particularly implausible, didn't try to deal with nitty-gritty historical topics the author wasn't prepared to deal with, went appropriately vague in many places, and focused on characterization instead of jumping around to eight zillion viewpoint characters, none of whom get much development at all. Quality book. "Popular" isn't a problem for me.Glassfan said:
When you're dealing with an alternate history book, one excellent objective measure of quality is the actual history in the book. If the history is repeatedly wrong, then the book must do a lot of the other things it does very well in order to make up for it. Turtledove's books do not do that, and so they are objectively bad. You can like objectively bad things, of course. Be my guest. I do it all the time. But don't try to deny that they suck in obvious and mutually agreed ways. You like what you like here in spite of its flaws, not because it doesn't have any flaws.
A very obvious reason why Turtledove at this point has something of a monopoly on alternate historical stuff - and, therefore, sales, name-brand recognition, and industry awards - is that it's a pretty small market unless you write a really awesome book (like the aforementioned Fatherland) and most authors either don't care or don't know enough about history to care. And of the authors who care, they have to also be interested in changing what actually happened, which requires a fair amount of imagination. There are considerable barriers to entry in alternate historical fiction, and not a lot of people willing or able to even try to produce it. At this point, Turtledove and a few other people, like Eric Flint, are the only althistorical writers with easily obtainable and recognized work. And Turtledove writes a ton, sort of saturates the market. So he really doesn't have much competition, and the competition he does have he buries under an avalanche of dreck.
'Canard' suggests a false or deliberately misleading argument. Academic jealousy of commercially successful authors is fairly well-known and not a canard.
Focussing on the actual history of a fictional work is pedantic. I was perhaps guilty of this myself last year when we had our discussion concerning the ending of Inception - taking the logic of the scene too seriously and ignoring the art and director's intent. We might as well fight over how historically accurate Frank Miller's 300 was.
In discussing fiction, the only real standard is popularity. If it's not to your taste, don't bother with it. Certainly don't hold it up to inapropriate standards of academic rigor.
Just because a work of ficton is popular does not mean that it is good. Look at Lost, or anything by Michael Bay. There are objective (or at the very least, shared subjective) means of determining the merit of a work of fiction - though, admittedly, it's not like I have Robert Heinlein's list sitting in front of me now - such as the plot making sense, no alien space bats, a natural progression of events, the characters acting in ways that make sense given their characters, etc..
As was written in the Writer's Bible for the cancelled television series Star Trek: Phase Two, "you can't have Captain Kirk beat a superintelligent alien with a ploy that wouldn't outsmart Kojak. You can't have a super-strong alien only to have Kirk beat it in a fist-fight." Things need to make sense for a work of fiction to be objectively good, and Turtledove has never succeeded in that basic criterion, to my knowledge. This is the same reason Lost is not a good television series, btw.
Leifmk
Deity
I find Turtledove pretty annoying because he's capable of writing much better books than he usually does, but instead turns out a large volume of formulaic hackwork. On the other hand I find it hard to blame the man for this since apparently it sells.
Symphony D.
Deity
Emphasis mine:
Your perspective perhaps makes sense from the position of the publisher in which the principle objective is the treatment of fiction as a commercial commodity to be bought and sold, with the final aim of making money. Even such a perspective (dismissive as it is of all other concerns) does not account for your blatant and hilarious disregard of artistic merit or craftwork.
If the focus of the work is to compare and contrast the flow of a fictional history with that of the real world, as the very subgenre name of "alternate history" suggests, then failing to actually take into account the vagaries of history and how its course would be altered by events is in fact a failure of research and of producing quality fiction. I must unfortunately inform you that historical fiction is in fact a thing, often rigorously researched and fact-checked and evaluated on such. It is no great leap of the imagination to apply similar expectations and standards to alternate history, especially when they concern the same body of material, just with different outputs. That there is an entire body of academia not only concerned with "literary" works but with "genre" as well puts paid to the notion that sales are the only measure of anything, as does the existence of a vast system of non-academic criticism, both professional and amateur. Your notion that this is "academic jealously" is also similarly foolish, and I say this as someone interested in writing genre military science-fiction.
Of course, the boundary between literary and genre is often really a matter of treatment of the subject and the quality of the writing (compare say, Margaret Atwood being welcomed with open arms into the literary camp with Oryx and Crake, as opposed to say, David Weber receiving nothing but scornful cries of "genre" for his pulpy crap, despite both of them being works of science-fiction), and Harry Turtledove exists very deep down within the sci-fi/fantasy ghetto (into which Alternate History is lumped for some reason) in no small part because his history is crap. Dachs has done an admirable job describing all the other ways in which his works are failures from an artistic standpoint, although I would not hesitate to add byzantine plots, poor and flat characterization and development, and ridiculous plot contrivances to the list. That he mangles history in the process is merely the sewage effluent on a layercake of excretion.
You are correct that Harry Turtledove is a commercial success. The reason his work sells is there is a demand, niche though it is, and he constitutes a supply. As the proliferation of internet fetishes demonstrates aptly, there is a market for everything, no matter how awful. It is not surprising that Turtledove sells, especially given that he has become heavily entrenched in his particular niche. I do not think it particularly necessary to continue demonstrating how this is no great measure of anything.
To summarize: academic standards can apply and are applied to all sorts of fiction; it is not unreasonable to level criticisms of bad history on work that is, given its total failure at all other aspects of writing, primarily focused on history and held up as notable for such; popularity and sales are not the only measure of success; it is not academic snootiness alone that compels such condemnation; and I sincerely hope you are never in any position of authority to judge the merits of fiction in any official capacity if your post is any indications of your mindset or perspective in so doing.
Graduate with a BA in Creative Writing here. You're objectively wrong. Sorry.
Your perspective perhaps makes sense from the position of the publisher in which the principle objective is the treatment of fiction as a commercial commodity to be bought and sold, with the final aim of making money. Even such a perspective (dismissive as it is of all other concerns) does not account for your blatant and hilarious disregard of artistic merit or craftwork.
If the focus of the work is to compare and contrast the flow of a fictional history with that of the real world, as the very subgenre name of "alternate history" suggests, then failing to actually take into account the vagaries of history and how its course would be altered by events is in fact a failure of research and of producing quality fiction. I must unfortunately inform you that historical fiction is in fact a thing, often rigorously researched and fact-checked and evaluated on such. It is no great leap of the imagination to apply similar expectations and standards to alternate history, especially when they concern the same body of material, just with different outputs. That there is an entire body of academia not only concerned with "literary" works but with "genre" as well puts paid to the notion that sales are the only measure of anything, as does the existence of a vast system of non-academic criticism, both professional and amateur. Your notion that this is "academic jealously" is also similarly foolish, and I say this as someone interested in writing genre military science-fiction.
Of course, the boundary between literary and genre is often really a matter of treatment of the subject and the quality of the writing (compare say, Margaret Atwood being welcomed with open arms into the literary camp with Oryx and Crake, as opposed to say, David Weber receiving nothing but scornful cries of "genre" for his pulpy crap, despite both of them being works of science-fiction), and Harry Turtledove exists very deep down within the sci-fi/fantasy ghetto (into which Alternate History is lumped for some reason) in no small part because his history is crap. Dachs has done an admirable job describing all the other ways in which his works are failures from an artistic standpoint, although I would not hesitate to add byzantine plots, poor and flat characterization and development, and ridiculous plot contrivances to the list. That he mangles history in the process is merely the sewage effluent on a layercake of excretion.
You are correct that Harry Turtledove is a commercial success. The reason his work sells is there is a demand, niche though it is, and he constitutes a supply. As the proliferation of internet fetishes demonstrates aptly, there is a market for everything, no matter how awful. It is not surprising that Turtledove sells, especially given that he has become heavily entrenched in his particular niche. I do not think it particularly necessary to continue demonstrating how this is no great measure of anything.
To summarize: academic standards can apply and are applied to all sorts of fiction; it is not unreasonable to level criticisms of bad history on work that is, given its total failure at all other aspects of writing, primarily focused on history and held up as notable for such; popularity and sales are not the only measure of success; it is not academic snootiness alone that compels such condemnation; and I sincerely hope you are never in any position of authority to judge the merits of fiction in any official capacity if your post is any indications of your mindset or perspective in so doing.
I can shed some light on this. Most sci-fi authors in the fifties and sixties preferred to use the term "speculative fiction" (coined by Robert Heinlein, I believe) to describe their genre. Isaac Asimov preferred the term "scientifiction," which I think sounds pretty cool, but instead of either term catching on, publishers bastardised Asimov's version into "science fiction." Speculative fiction was still a popular alternative name for sci-fi until the mid-seventies, however, especially since it obviously fitted fantasy titles much better than grouping them under science fiction. Fantasy titles used to be a much smaller, less marketable genre than today, and were always seen as sci-fi's little sister, unlike today where the situation is likely reversed.
Alternate history were grouped either under fantasy, which was itself grouped under science fiction, or grouped separately to both fantasy and sci-fi under speculative fiction. This results in the strange paradox of alternate history being a sub-genre of sci-fi to this day, decades after the term specualative fiction fell out of use exept among die-hards like myself, even though alternate history books seldom contain any science fiction elements.
Symphony D.
Deity
Yeah, it's not surprising given alternate history frequently appeared as a speculative "what if?" in the pulp pieces of the period, be they short stories or novels. I was more using the parenthetical to mock its modern genre placement than to question the causes behind it, but I do appreciate the earnest response.
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