TurtleDove's Two Fronts War is out!
- Thread starter edvader
- Start date
RamscoopRaider
Donor
I'm not going to buy it but knowing the C.H. Booth Library always gets new Turtledove books fairly quick I'll just borrow it, it's probably not that good but I won't spend anything on it, not even gas as I've got to drop stuff off there anyways
Lycaon pictus
Donor
Just read the preview on Amazon. Intensely meh. Turtledove is a good writer when he's motivated, but he can churn out oatmeal by the barrel.
Abhakhazia
Banned
The War that Came Early series had a lot of unrecognized potential. If you look at the world as a whole, it's got a lot of great and interesting plotlines, but the writing itself is actually pretty low quality.
It was an interesting take on an alternate WWII that was often talked about but not written in novel form AFAIK. Unfortunately it jumped out of plausibility a couple books ago. I'll probably still buy this book and the next one, though (on Kindle) to see how it ends if nothing else. I mean, I'm already 4 books in...
(Jaw crashes to ground)
what?
(pause)
wait, is this the one where Churchill got thrown out (and killed!) and replaced with some aristo-fascistic swine who decide to fight the Russians or something like that?
Churchill wasn't PM to begin with, and he got acquainted with some drunk driver. Wilson took over the premiership from Chamberlain.
Chamberlain was still Prime Minister at this time and when his cancer developed to a point where he had to leave the government on grounds of health his chosen successor was Sir Horace Wilson who is quasi-fascist/right wing. And throughout mid 1940 to early 1941 the British and French fight the Soviets together (Germany leaves northern France which it had taken in 1938/1939 campaign but still occupies the Low Countries, Denmark and Norway) These books had potential and I already ordered Two Fronts months ago. I really like HT's books but i agree that this series is kinda bleh. Compared to his excellent Southern Victory/TL-191 series (my favorite) and the Worldwar/Colonization series this The War That Came Early is mediocre.
Maybe if the books in the series were an extra 150-200 pages with some better backstory/dialogue and such I think no one would really complain but he does seem to be lackluster about the series. I havent read two fronts yet so i wont rate it but this is how i rate the other books:
Hitler's War: 7/10 (interesting, good start)
West and East: 7.5/10 (series getting slightly better)
Big Switch: 7/10 (even though the Big Switch is plausible it's not very realistic and the British just kinda jump ship too quickly, i feel if the Big Switch was 150-200 pages longer with more detail etc it would have been better explained and fleshed out)
Coup D'Etat: 6/10 (idk, the book was good, but it wasn't that good and it didn't make up for the shortcomings in the Big Switch).
Harry Turledove is my second favorite author, next to George R.R. Martin, but he really should have made The War That Came Early series better in terms of length, story, characters are fine, and overall big picture needed improvement
sdrucker
Banned
Took a quick look at Two Fronts, and it's more turgid prose about characters that you don't care about, glacial action (but more of it than Coup d'Etat or West and East), and a weird meld of WW1/WWII political trends and the usual clichés trotted out to better effect in WorldWar and the TL-191 books. There's even a character who needs zinc oxide at some point, and at least one "alevai omain" thrown in gratuitously. Plus the Spanish Civil War is _still_ going on....honestly, a complete waste of electronic pixels or ink above and beyond the first book in the series, at best. And even his "original" plot twists are ridiculous, particularly two characters that get divorced at the end of this book.
I suppose he could write one more book to wrap things up, with at least one telegraphed hint that the US might be working on an atomic program and/or that there may be a "Munster Spring", but it's hard to care. And if I hear about Awful Arno one more time, or that Russians speak 'mat, I think I'll get physically ill.
In comparison the sendup of the US occupation of Iraq in The Man with the Iron Heart was much more entertaining and readable, not to mention the truly excellent Agent of Byzantium compilation. Pity he was replaced by a hack.
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Turtledove's real basic problem here is that he has too many pages to work with and not enough story. The same issue came up in Worldwar and TL-191, but not to the same extent. Also, some of his chosen viewpoint characters are really not all that interesting when they make the leap from concept to written word, when you get right down to it. And the interesting ones - and there are a lot of interesting viewpoint characters - get bogged down with the same written tics (that whole "Awful Arno" business, for one). The series is still worth reading IMO, though, and I'll be keeping an eye out for the new volume at my local B&N, but it's not his best by any means.
Two characters get divorced at the end, eh? I bet I can guess which ones they are; IIRC there was some foreshadowing in Coup d'Etat. I also hear that some Japanese "pottery bombs" get dropped on the U.S.; as remarked over on "How Silent Fall the Cherry Blossoms", our own Geon probably did it better.
Two characters get divorced at the end, eh? I bet I can guess which ones they are; IIRC there was some foreshadowing in Coup d'Etat. I also hear that some Japanese "pottery bombs" get dropped on the U.S.; as remarked over on "How Silent Fall the Cherry Blossoms", our own Geon probably did it better.
Nietzsche
Banned
Went to Barnes and Noble to get a glimpse of Turtledove's latest turd.It's Two Front Wars and ....B.O. is all I can say.I am not going to say any more about this crap.I may get an audio version to listen and laugh to.Just skimmed through the turgid prose.Wow!
I'm trying to figure out if you dislike the book, or if you just have some kind of unexplainable contempt for the man himself.
Rogue triple Agent
Banned
Can we just get a little summary of the tl? I don't want to read that crap.
I just finished it. I'll draw up a quick list of the parts I liked and disliked. Also, this will contain spoilers, but most of those have already appeared in this thread.
Things I liked:
Things I Didn't Like
I feel like I am forgetting some things, but those are my initial thoughts.
Things I liked:
- It's actually less repetitive than some of his other books. Don't get me wrong, it's still quite repetitive. But in TL-191, for example, every character in every scene made the same goddamn complaint about how lousy their tobacco was. Every scene with the American sailor guy had him talk about his need for more sunscreen, and every appearance of Dowling had him talk about how he was shaped like a desk. Here, the worst I can think of is that the Soviet pilot guy talks about how Russians drink too much every time he shows up. Things that are repeated often, like the similarity between NKVD and Gestapo men, are at least a bit more interesting. And he stopped talking about how Germans play a card game called skat, which came up in every German scene before.
- Some of the tech development is mildly interesting. The Tiger tank is released early here, and of course we see the use of more germ warfare. It fits the series, which has already seen the early development of the sub snorkel and the autocannon-armed Stuka, for example.
- There is less government stupidity here. The idea that the British and French sided with Germany, and then flipped back, really irked me in the last book. So did the idea that Italy would randomly "punish" the Brits for backing out of their agreement with Germany by starting a war in North Africa. I suppose maybe the Italians wanted to attack the Brits all along, but couldn't when they were allied with Germany? But why now? France hasn't been knocked out--aren't they afraid the French will attack Italy? At any rate, the governments don't do anything quite that stupid this time around.
- The viewpoint characters are spread around fairly well. In some of the Settling Accounts books, we had multiple viewpoint characters covering the same front, which was stupid and pointless. Also, I got really annoyed when the old guy in LA joined up--he was much more interesting as a viewpoint character on the Home Front. Here, we do have a character on the Home Front--Peggy Bruce. She is just a housewife, more or less, so she can't provide us as much info as, say, a worker in a war plant could. But still, it's nice to have one. We also have a homefront viewpoint character in Germany, which is one of the only characters I actually ended up caring about. Also, between the various viewpoint characters, we have a sub commander, a tank driver, a German pilot, a Russian pilot, and soldiers on every side. It's a fairly interesting mix, at least.
- The US has decided not to pursue the bomb. I'm not sure I buy the logic in that--even if the US is only in a war with Japan right now, they still must be afraid of the idea of a nuclear Germany. But it's more plausible than the French and British joining with the Germans, and it's an interesting change. His explanation for it--that it was simply seen as too expensive and not likely to pay off anytime soon--was believable enough, even if it would've been better if they had simply pretended they did the math wrong and thought it would take longer than it does, a la Germany.
Things I Didn't Like
- The writing is bad. It's just not as well-written as some of his earlier stuff. The action isn't written as well, so it's harder to get into the story. I honestly kept having to remind myself to read the whole passage, because my eyes would wander of their own accord to the next section. I found myself just skimming each section to see if there were any plot points, and them moving on. It's not Dan Brown bad, but still, it's irritating because I know he can do better.
- Walsh, the British guy, gets shifted from North Africa to France for no reason. That was incredibly stupid. He was the only viewpoint character there, and now we can't see that front at all. Instead, he is now in northern France, which was already covered by a French viewpoint character, and then later they added the German pilot, too. Madness.
- Fujita, our only Japanese viewpoint character, gets randomly promoted from a bomb loader in the Germ Warfare unit to an actual bombardier, and later a bombardier on a IJN base. When we were first introduced to him in this series, he was just a sergeant in the Army. He was sort of interesting when he was showing us the war against Russia. Then he randomly gets assigned to Unit 731, because that's where the Soviet PoWs go. Fair enough, I suppose. Then he gets roped into being a camp guard. I guess any sergeant can do that, and he was already there, so... OK. Then he gets demoted because some of his prisoners escape, and he is sent to another germ warfare camp. I guess he would already be involved in the program, why let more people in on the secret. I guess that makes sense. Then he becomes a bombardier on one of the planes dropping germ bombs on China. I guess he's involved in the program and he's there at the base, but it seems like even the ground crew of an air base should've had some specialized training. He hasn't. The idea that he can become a member of the actual flight crew with no training is even harder to swallow. Then he is posted to a Japanese naval base, again as a bombardier. No, just no. That's not even his branch of the service!
- Speaking of Fujita, I can't help feeling that he is a caricature. The Soviet characters, even the "dumb" one, are allowed to see how twisted and evil the Soviet Union is. All the German characters see how evil Naziism is. But the Japanese character is a happy Militarist. He buys totally into the concept of honor unto death, he feels no empathy for the people he kills, he is a Japanese racial supremacist, all of it. It's lazy writing. I read the Days of Infamy series. The books may not have had a realistic premise, but at least it had Japanese characters who felt like people. This guy stepped right out of a Why We Fight video.
- Fujita suggested in the last book (maybe even the one before that) that the Japanese use their germ bombs against India. That sort of makes sense. Parts of Indian cities have the same unsanitary conditions that allowed the Japanese germ bombs to be so effective in China. But his superiors tell him no, because they don't want the British to find out what they are doing. That makes complete sense. After all, historically the Militarists used gas and germs on the Chinese, but were smart enough to not use them anywhere else. And then in this book, they start dropping germ bombs on Hawaii. That makes no sense whatsoever. The conditions required to make the bomb effective probably aren't there in Hawaii, and it breaks their own (quite logical) rule against not using their illegal weapons against the West.
- When the germ bombs are dropped, our very next passage is about all of the Marines, soldiers, and sailors on the island lining up to get multiple vaccinations. Despite the fact that the Japanese dropped both regular bombs and germ bombs, apparently the US figured out instantly what had happened. Seems a bit unlikely, but OK. But I struggle to understand how the US apparently already had enough vaccines, of multiple drugs, for every person living on the Hawaiian islands. How do they even know what diseases to guard against? Are they just guessing?
- We hear two Marines talking about the use of germs, and one of them says "This isn't the sort of war I signed up for". And that's it that's all we hear. There doesn't seem to be any real outrage over this kind of attack, which seems unlikely to me. The character on the home front in the US never even talks about it. You'd think it would be big news.
- Lastly, it feels like not enough happens. It's hard to define, but it just seems like more happened in previous series. Lemp sinks a British carrier, but it doesn't seem to make a tactical difference. We are told that the Germans are falling back in the East, because they have had to withdraw units to guard their western border. But the Anglo-French can't advance into Belgium. At the beginning of the book, we are told the Germans are pushing towards a Russian city whose name escapes me (it starts with R), and at the end of the book, they are still there. It just feels like there was never a big battle, nothing to actually change the course of the war.
I feel like I am forgetting some things, but those are my initial thoughts.