TurtleDove's Two Fronts War is out!

[Faeelin]

I[*]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.
[/LIST]

This is dumb, and does not reflect why the US pursued the atomic bomb OTL.

 

[mattep74]

I think i will actually bought the books since i only got the first book and didnt want to continue when i discovered that the French fought for Paris

 

[mcdo]

This is dumb, and does not reflect why the US pursued the atomic bomb OTL.

Well, I said that, didn't I? I don't believe that the US wouldn't try for the bomb. They were too afraid another power would get it first. But I like it as a story device. Otherwise, not enough things in the war are truly different.

 

[sdrucker]

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.

I think the Russian city was Smolensk. AFAIK the Germans captured Minsk and hold most if not all of Belarus, but only part of the Western Ukraine and almost nothing in Russia proper. They don't have the tactical skill or troops, given the two front war, to make much advance on Leningrad or Moscow.

Repetition aside, what drives me nuts is that against any serious opponent, the Germans are using WWII weapons to refight WWI. I'm also unclear why the Russians aren't doing better than they are, since they've got T-34s and KV-1 and still have the Ukrainian and Western Russian factories that were relocated or captured by the Nazis in OTL. Even with the leaden hand of the NKVD, unless they're fighting with only a marginal degree of mobilization (and why would THAT be?), you'd think they'd be doing better than slow attrition, considering that it's now three or more years since the USSR and Reich went to war on the ground, and it's only towards the end of this book that the Germans get Tigers onto the battlefield.

OTOH, this world's Stalin may look at this war as a distraction to give the proletariat an "eternal enemy" to fight against, so he may not have much interest in actually winning the war if there's much risk involved.

It does seem that the Japanese are doing better than they did in OTL, though, relative to the US. But overall, a kind of incompetent WWII with random dice rolls got boring after maybe two books.

That didn't stop me from being a couple of Kindle (not this one, though), which I guess was the point.

 

[FickleCrossroad]

Is it worse than Liberating Atlantis?

Thankfully no. Then again, I only saw Liberating Atlantis in paperback, so the quality-per-price MAY be lower.

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.

This is one of the books in the barrel category.

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.

Exactly. I really was pulled in more by the POD than anything. (Though I'd have loved to see The War that Came Late, where the Germans, for *name your reason* decide not to push Poland after say, July 1939, and there's a sort of détente in Europe for a year or so, and Germany starts the war in April 1941 as their economy is overheating and they've passed their ideal time to start the war, but do it anyway because Hitler is Hitler.)

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.

I'll probably buy it in my forlorn hope that he flips the quality switch, but I'm sick of playing the game with HT known as, "Did he mail in a turd?"

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.

Yeah, the repetition is far less than TL-191, but I've heard enough remarks on mat, how quiet some people are, Awful Arno, how large/funny albatrosses are, how Beilartz(sp?) always worries about his head in the submarines, Sarah Bruck's complaints over the low-quality produce, etc. They mentioned skat once. Once per book repetition is fine. HT doesn't know that though.

• 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.

It's about at a realistic pace, considering the POV. The war started what? a year early? The Tiger came out in TTL's summer 1942, but the thing that stumped me is "Why no sloped armor?" They ran into the T-34's and KV-1's a few months to a year early (in dribs and drabs, sure, but anyway,) and is it really THAT hard to redesign the armor on the same chassis, considering the net weight will be no greater?

• 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.

Indeed. Killing off Montgomery was an interesting butterfly, though.

• 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.

Well, Peggy Bruce did more of the politicking in the last couple of books, this one, HT just mailed in her segments in particular. It's as if he saw the Bruces and thought, "I really don't care anymore, I'll write a surprise end to their marriage and get the male Bruce to kill off Oak Ridge/Manhattan Project on the way out for my own shits and giggles."

Sarah Goldman Bruck, OTOH, was HT realizing, "I have more fun with the dialogue between Sarah and her father, so let's kill off the inlaws straightaway!"

*facepalm* Seriously... When the dustjacket says, "The Master of Alternate History," I'm getting to the point where a few people here just need a professional editor and they could outpublish HT once they got their names out there.

• 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.

Yeah. One thing I'd understand is if they centralized the development into one location and slowed the pace down to save costs, but an outright cancellation seems just outside of ASB territory.

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.

Some of his current stuff isn't that bad either. I'm actually pretty happily hooked into his Supervolcano series, (which isn't Man With the Iron Heart territory but it's solid.)

It just doesn't seem like one can tell if a given book will be Turtledove's Turtlehead popping out or not.

• 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.

The reason was incredibly weak. "When in doubt, use Walsh's MP connections to develop the political plot of Britain!"

Yeah, having Rudel, Demange, and Walsh all on the same front seems bonkers to me. I was kind of hoping Rudel would get busted by the SS for trying something foolish with Sofia, and Walsh stayed in Egypt. Demange on that front? Absolutely.

• 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...No, just no. That's not even his branch of the service!

Yeah. Turtledove reminded me of someone trying to take a large sledgehammer to fit square pegs into round holes in this book. He plainly didn't care enough to think through his characters before writing, or he thinks very little of his readers.

• 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.

I must disagree here from a different direction. A sociopathic character would be fine, but that character needs developed. Fujita plainly isn't.

• 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.

Again, sledgehammers and square pegs here.

• 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?

Sledgehammers and square pegs, now with handwavium!

• 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.

Geon kicks HT's ass here with How Silent Fall the Cherry Blossoms.

• 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.

He wrote this on autopilot.

My verdict is I'm finishing the series of his I'm reading, and will trust the reviews here before purchasing any more HT. Turtledove either cares or he doesn't, and the quality delta between the two is massive.

If TWTCE books didn't come out so close to my birthday that I felt like I was buying myself a present, I'd just let my interest fade entirely on this series, but I know I'll buy the next on hardcover release date because of when they come out. I'm just hoping Supervolcano: All Fall Down comes out before I deploy.

 

[CT23]

One thing I liked about TL-191 is it had a mix of both "important" people (politicians, generals) and "grunts"/minor characters to give a mix of strategic and tactical perspectives.

I wish this series had been more like that. All it really has are common grunts/people so it can be hard to tell what's going on.

 

[michaelrbn]

I found myself wondering if the decision not to pursue the atomic bomb was actually a bit of disinformation, either by the Government to the efficiency expert or by him to his wife.

 

[Garrison]

One thing I liked about TL-191 is it had a mix of both "important" people (politicians, generals) and "grunts"/minor characters to give a mix of strategic and tactical perspectives.

I wish this series had been more like that. All it really has are common grunts/people so it can be hard to tell what's going on.

Its why I gave up after the first book; would it kill him to have one or two characters who can give some clue as to the bigger picture?

 

[CT23]

The book advertises itself as seen through the eyes of ordinary characters...that's not necessarily a good thing.

 

[ScrewySqrl]

I think the best description is the good Professor Turtledove has developed Protection From Editors, starting around Colonization

 

[RamscoopRaider]

Well just finished it today, meh was the best I could say about it, was a good time waster and I didn't have to pay for it

 

[The Kiat]

Well just finished it today, meh was the best I could say about it, was a good time waster and I didn't have to pay for it

You know, out of all the things you can waste, time is the one you'll never be able to recoup.

 

[Garrison]

I think the best description is the good Professor Turtledove has developed Protection From Editors, starting around Colonization

that I think is precisely the problem; he no longer has to listen to the opinions
of editors and others and can write just what he wants and that appears to be rather a bad thing at least with this series.

 

[The Kiat]

that I think is precisely the problem; he no longer has to listen to the opinions
of editors and others and can write just what he wants and that appears to be rather a bad thing at least with this series.

That's the advantage to playing the name card. He is apparently well known enough that people (even those that gripe about his style and such) will buy a book just because his name is on it. I wish I could pull that off (the fame thing, not the whole I-can-do-better-but-will-settle-for-good-enough deal).

 

[edvader]

Got the audio complete from library.Runs 18 hours!Should I attempt to read it?

 

[Astrodragon]

Just for shits and giggles, the 'Master of Alternative Histories' latest book is well behind the offerings of a number of the non-professionall-edited-and-published authors on this site on the 'top AH kindle books on Amazon.

His books should carry a warning - 'New Turtledovw book with added improved handwavium'...

 

[CT23]

I just finished reading this book. It wasn't 'horrible', but I was very underwhelmed let's say.


Like I said before, I wish there were some POV characters (politicians or generals) who give us a bigger perspective. It can be hard to see what has progressed.

 

[Darth Invictus]

I just finished reading this book. It wasn't 'horrible', but I was very underwhelmed let's say.


Like I said before, I wish there were some POV characters (politicians or generals) who give us a bigger perspective. It can be hard to see what has progressed.

Does Britain and France swapping sides have any real purpose beyond 'drag things out for a few more books'?

 

[The Kiat]

Does Britain and France swapping sides have any real purpose beyond 'drag things out for a few more books'?

Hey, if people will keep buying the things then what do you expect?

 

[CT23]

Does Britain and France swapping sides have any real purpose beyond 'drag things out for a few more books'?

Does their switching sides have any real purpose? Which time of switching sides do you mean?