Favorite Harry Turtledove Book or Series?

I've been enjoying "The War that came Early" but my personal favorite is "The Man with the Iron Heart."

Also really enjoyed the timeline-191(southern victory) series. Saw the "War that came early" series at the bookstore last weekend and was wondering if it would be worth picking up.

I've found that Turtledove's true strengths as a writer lie in his short stories, which have mostly been anthologized. Ruled Britannia is a jolly romp and great brain-candy. Justinian is a fantastic history-as-novel, but he wrote it under the H. N. Turteltaub pseudonym. Guns of the South is a wacky enough to be readable.

Timeline-191 isn't bad once you get over the glaring parallelisms and recognize it for the Confederate-wаnk it is.

The Tosev Saga is a pretty good take on a surreal situation, but I found Homeward Bound to be incredibly unsatisfying.

The Days of Infamy Duology isn't bad, either, and the ending is less disappointing than predictable.

As for the War that Came Early, I could barely make it through Hitler's War, and it was sheer loyalty that got me through the last 2/3s. Turtledove seems like he's just entirely phoning that series in, either that or what backbone his editor once had has totally disintegrated. I would encourage people to avoid that series, which threatens to yawn into, like, 6 or 7 books.

And while many express a near-hysteric hatred of Mr. Turtledove's ... scenes, I find them utterly unremarkable.

Guns of the South is an excellent standalone novel. I also like the Southern Victory series...I especially think the Jake Featherstone novels are underrated as teaching materials as to what makes for the sort of horrific genocide that happened in Nazi Germany. I'd be interested in knowing whether the culmination of the Southern Victory novels were intended when he first wrote the initial ones in the series. He does a really excellent job in drawing the parallels.

One of my favorite Turtledove standalones is "Marching Through Peachtree". This is a challenge book, I think, in which the reader is intended not so much as to figure out the connections as to understand the connection between the two terms.

For example, Richmond is called Nonsuch.

Why?

In order to know why, you have to know that there was once in England a Pale of Richmond (the term Pale references the fact that, with Cornwall, Lancaster and Chester, is one of the few titles which is Palatine, and from which the earls of the same derive their title) and that in that Pale there was a palace of Nonsuch. How about General Guildenstern in place of Rosecrans? Well, how about the G&S musical Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern?

This book was just so much fun to read; a whimsical journey on a highway of references, just thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyable.

I've also read The World War series, about how war breaks out between Nazi Germany and the Allies...only to be stopped by an alien invasion and the consequent unified attempt to expel the aliens, along with the Vietnam reference as the invaders fighting the guerilla wars find themselves addicted to a substance--ginger--which undermines their war effort...

But next to the Southern Victory, specifically the Jake Featherstone, novels, and in way tied with them, is Turtledove's "Into the Darkness" series, his retelling of WWII where dragons take the place of divebombers and genocide occurs as the blood of a race is used to create magic. All the players are there, in so many different retellings, I really think that, as the fruit of his imagination, this is Turtledove's best work.

Very few authors have had as much to offer as Turtledove. Most flame out after one or two good books. Over his career, however, Turtledove has produced quality work after quality work. The "Into the Darkness" series kept me enthralled for a couple of years, eagerly awaiting the new installments, as did the Featherstone books. If he's coasting now, and yes I think he is, so what. He is one of the few authors that has been with me a lifetime and for whom I have nothing but admiration for the fun he's given me.

A well deserved wiki.

Jake Featherston - Harry Turtledove Wiki - Historical fiction, Days of Infamy, Homeward Bound

Guns of the South is my favourite Turtledove novel. The Timeline 191 series is excellent as well. The Southern parallels with Nazi Germany are disturbing, and the moral decay of basically good men like Jeff Pinkard and Hip Rodriguez shows how easy it is to become a monster.

EmperorTigerstar said:

Yeah, the War That Came Early is the only series so far that I was disappointed in. What do you think of "In the Presence of Mine Enemies"?

Click to expand...

I think it's a good story and I liked it when I read it. That being said, I don't think Turtledove really understands fascism. His Nazi victory world is basically post-Brezhnev Russia with a spattering of swastikas and (slightly more) anti-Semitism. I think he fails to convey how energetically aggressive and totalitarian fascism was in everyday life. But then, I don't think even a victorious Nazi Germany could have survived into the next millennium without collapsing.

The only series wherein Turtledove offers a realistic treatment of fascism (and I include TL-191's Freedomism) is the Colonization Trilogy, where the Nazis are actually stupid enough to be ideologically consistent and start a war with the Race.

Rule Britannia, The Guns of the South, and the TL-191 were always my favorites.

I used to like the Lost Legion series, but then I started getting fed up with the parallels (especially in other books of the Videssos universe) and especially with the superpowered big bad. And The Bridge of the Separator even destroyed whatever badassitude and mystery that big bad had to brag about. There are only a few books that I have actually physically thrown against the wall, but that was one of them.

I did like Thessalonica, Ruled Britannia and The Guns of the South. I have not been able to start the Darkness series due to the fact that Turtledove unfortunately used a Finnish word of 'Republic' as the name of one of his kingdoms. The resulting cognitive dissonance meant that book is still in the box, but given the recommendations that people have made, perhaps I will dig it out after all and give it a go.

EmperorTigerstar said:

He meant it to be like the end of the USSR.

Click to expand...

I know; that's my quarrel. Things that are radical evil tend not to collapse in the same manner as things that are rational evil.

EmperorTigerstar said:

True. But if he made it realistic, there wouldn't be much to write about.

"Living in fear. Someone thinks I'm a Jew. *dies*"

Click to expand...

I disagree. A close scrape with the Gestapo is entertaining, and it could be even better set against the backdrop of a Grossdeutsches Reich that is beginning to violently consume itself. The story of some crypto-Jews trying to survive amidst the self-immolation of the Nazi hydra would be much more compelling than a book that spends an inordinate amount of time talking about cards and vindictively bored spouses.

Wolfpaw said:

I know; that's my quarrel. Things that are radical evil tend not to collapse in the same manner as things that are rational evil.

Click to expand...

The problem though is that you can't assume that Nazi Germany would remain a carbon copy of what it was under Hitler in later years. Had the Nazis won WWII, or it was avoided and the state survived, the fury that spawned it would eventually die out as their targets were either exterminated or forced to leave. In time things would change... either they'd find a new target or their fury would soften.

I actually enjoyed "Ruled Britannia" quite a lot.

I like In the Presence of Mine Enemies. I think Timeline-191 (i.e. Southern Victory) is horrendously flawed, but not quite for the reasons people say that it is.

Belgarion said:

Guns of the South is my favourite Turtledove novel. The Timeline 191 series is excellent as well. The Southern parallels with Nazi Germany are disturbing, and the moral decay of basically good men like Jeff Pinkard and Hip Rodriguez shows how easy it is to become a monster.

Click to expand...

The Confederacy in TL-191 has always to me seemed more of an unholy hybrid of Francisco Solano Lopez's Paraguay and Democratic Kampuchea. Jake Featherston is that rare fictional 'Hitler expy' who is actually *more* insane than Der Fuhrer, and I did not think such a thing was possible.

Wolfpaw said:

I've found that Turtledove's true strengths as a writer lie in his short stories, which have mostly been anthologized. Ruled Britannia is a jolly romp and great brain-candy. Justinian is a fantastic history-as-novel, but he wrote it under the H. N. Turteltaub pseudonym. Guns of the South is a wacky enough to be readable.

Timeline-191 isn't bad once you get over the glaring parallelisms and recognize it for the Confederate-wаnk it is.

Click to expand...

I actually think that TL-191's problems aren't quite parallelism, per se. While it is true that a general European war happens in 1914 because of an assassination in Sarajevo, I think there's some truth to the idea that a general European war might not be derailed by the rise of a militarized North America any more than the War of the Triple Alliance and the War of the Pacific accelerated European martial tendencies. The real issues with TL-191 are odd ideas of technological progress and the tendency to pretend that budgets and logistics are things that primarily happen to other people.

I also think that its portrayal of the Confederacy developing both rockets and nukes in the middle of a military-political disintegration is the most unforgivable aspect of the series, as at that point even suspension of disbelief died a cruel, merciless death.

EmperorTigerstar said:

That did take it a bit far. But Turtledove loves making parallels.

Click to expand...

That didn't merely take it a bit far, that took it completely out of one dimension and into Wonderland. Not even the USA managed to develop ballistic missiles and nukes at the same time. A Confederate atomic bomb project isn't out of the question (Japan had one historically), but having it produce an actual bomb is. Of course my view is that the series jumped the shark at the very beginning when it had McClellan fight a mirror of Antietam, neglecting that a general that cautious would see Hell freeze over before fighting on a river with one line of retreat that's easy for a competent general to interdict.