American Empire: The Victorious Opposition

Rating:
Summary: One Part of a Strong Whole
Review: When reading Turtledove's alternate history series of the Great War and years thereafter, I sometimes wonder why I put up with wooden, sometimes annoying characters and shallow sub-plots in order to have my curiosity satisfied about what happens next in his world. It reminds me of a soap opera in which the audience is always left hanging with an excruciating path to any sense of resolution. With the Victorious Opposition I now understand the appeal of this series. Although few of these books stand up by themselves, the sum of the books is a great story that is hard to put down. What seemed shallow becomes substantial. In fact, "The Sum is Stronger than the Parts" could be the title of one of the installments. Victorious Opposition was the best of the post Great War series as it portrays a reticent U.S. unwilling to deal with an ascendant Confederacy led by an America style Fuehrer bent on revenge against those whom he believes stifled him, both inside and outside his own country. Such a close similarity to "you know who" and his henchman may be a cheap trick and a "paint by numbers" construction, but Turtledove pulled if off neatly. The book ended with quite a bang and promises of much more to come as it transitioned to a rematch between the U.S. and Confederacy. I also enjoyed the cameo appearances by people such as Mordecai "Three Fingers" Brown (no baseball hall of fame in this universe), New Mexico Congressman Barry Goldwater, and sportscaster Dutch Reagan. A couple of things I wish Turtledove would include are campaign maps and greater detail of what happens outside North America. Nevertheless, I am so eager to read the next installment that I purchased it in hardcover rather than waiting for the paperback.



Rating:
Summary: A Waste of Alternate Time and Energy
Review: With "Victorious Opposition," Harry Turtledove now extends his USA/CSA alternate history series to a seventh book, which concludes the middle trilogy of this saga. The first book, "How Few Remain," deals with the second North American War of the 1880s. Then came three bloated volumes relating events of Turtledove's alternate World War I. The middle trilogy has now carried events through the 1920s and on to the end of the 1930s. Another three books will apparently take us through the alternate Second World War. At least the books have gotten a little smaller in comparison to the WWI books, but this latest work stinks to high heaven just as much as its predecessors. What's wrong? Well, basically, it's that Turtledove is a lousy writer. All the books share the same format: Take a large ensemble cast, largely unrelated to each other, and spend four to ten pages to show an episode of one, then move on to the next, the next, and so on. It's a fast way for an untalented writer to compose a novel -- the short sketches are easy to type out, then you just collect enough to justify a book. Unfortunately, most of the characters are just simply uninteresting -- particularly the Canadian ones. Many of the episodes go nowhere and illuminate absolutely nothing about this alternate timeline or our own. The prose itself is awkward more often than not, and the characterizations are shallow and repetitive, on the level of a mediocre comic book. Many times Turtledove has the makings of a good scene or subtheme, but then blows it. For instance -- and I don't think this gives away anything big in the plot -- at one point Confederate dictator in the making Jake Featherston has to deal with Louisiana Governor Huey Long, who is a strongman in his own right, as in our timeline. This has the makings of an interesting episode, where each character could see a bit of himself in the other, consider whether he himself has taken a wrong turn, if the other is the real Man of the Hour, etc. But no, all that happens is that Featherston sends a messenger to Long, who refuses to bow down to Richmond and is therefore assassinated. That's it -- all just surface actions. No depth, period. I expect the same to apply to the Afro-American Holocaust that everyone expects in the next three volumes. To explore whether the industrialization of death in Germany is something that our society is capable of is a worthwhile question to pursue, but no doubt the author will do it with barely the insight of an ABC Afternoon Special. Turtledove is sloppy at times -- one character is named Maynard Fergusson, for instance, for no apparent reason, but it jars. Similarly, why name someone Flora Hamburger? In another vein, Turtledove is by now really straining credibility by including some people from our timeline such as Joseph Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover, Al Smith, (presumably) Ronald Reagan, and the aforementioned Governor Long. All these people were born well after the change-date (1862) of this series. People might have been born who had their names, but they would not be the same individuals. Turtledove is no doubt trying to create a connection to our own timeline, but this tactic hurts his believability. Alternate history is a wonderful subgenre; it's just too bad it's dominated by a verbose hack like Turtledove.
POSTSCRIPT: Let me respond to a comment by the 31 August '03 reviewer, who disagreed with my criticism of lack of depth in the Featherston-Long conflict. That reviewer both misses and states the point. He/she misses the point because adding greater depth of characterization does not turn a novel into a turgid philosophical tome with "lofty" discussions. We're talking here about getting into a character's head in a thoughtful, adult way -- not the shallow manner that Turtledove displays. The other reviewer is correct, however, in pointing out that such a textured, rich book is not the kind that Turtledove writes. That's the point -- he doesn't write books like that. In other words, he doesn't write good books. Let's be honest: How many people really just skim these volumes and try to pick out details about the timeline? Wouldn't everybody be happier if Turtledove just posted those historical details on the web and let it go at that? Does anyone agonize over Sam's sensitive skin? Does anyone savor the skillful depth to which Abner's weight problem is treated? The fact is that Turtledove's writing is just plain sappy. Non-sappy is not the same as pompous or "lofty." Non-sappy just means good, which in this case must mean non-Turtledove.