Alternate History Books - Page 3

Fatherland: A Novel (Mortalis)

Robert Harris

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Great premise, poor book 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

The story takes place in April 1964. Germany was victorious in its war against the West in WWII, but did less well in the East, where the war lingers to an unclear extent. Hitler is about to celebrate his 75th birthday, and Joe Kennedy, who is also 75, is President of the U.S.

How did anti-Semitic, Nazi appeaser Joe Kennedy come to power? Did Hitler help him do so after the war? Is he a puppet? What happened to Joseph Patrick Kennedy, whom Joe wanted to make the first in a line of Presidents? Did he still die on August 12, 1944 at the age of 29? Did Joe Kennedy, the old bootlegger who made much of his fortune dealing alcohol with the New York crime families during prohibition, still have a stroke on December 19, 1961? Did he still lose significant ability to move his right side, and was his speech still affected? If so, how did that affect his presidency? What happened to John? Was he still banging Marilyn and assorted floozies in the White House? Did the Mafia grease him? Did the U.S. send advisors to Vietnam? Was Bobby still trying to get Hoffa? Those are only a few of the questions that the author didn't address or even indirectly allude to concerning the Americans.

What of Hitler? Hitler is only a vague background figure. And what of Eva Braun? Did Hitler marry her? Is he still with her? She is never mentioned. Göring, Goebbels, Himmler? The book contains few references to them. Numerous other subjects that could have been explored are unmentioned.

The "conspiracy" that is the subject of the book is the conspiracy in Germany to squelch information concerning the holocaust. Significant information regarding the holocaust was known outside Germany by 1942 or 1943, but perhaps the author did not know this. In 1964, the relocation and murder of Jews in Europe is supposed to be a "revelation," as to which only very few Nazis have personal knowledge (although many Germans were willfully blind concerning the subject, according to the author).

Huh?

When you finish the book you will probably wonder: if the protaganist and his accomplice succeeded (which should not be assumed), what was the result? That is also never addressed.

Why was this book written?

If you were expecting an imaginative speculative novel that Ellroy might have written when he was at his peak (something similar to "American Tabloid"), forget it. This is a dull, unimaginative tome, a half-baked rehash of "1984," with a new slant. It's written by a hack who apparently wanted to re-write "1984" so that it concerned not left-wing totalitarianism, but what willfully ignorant University professors, and those they deceive, continue to incorrectly characterize as a "right-wing" ideology (national socialism).

Two stars, and that's generous.

Editorial Review:

Fatherland is set in an alternative world where Hitler has won the Second World War. It is April 1964 and one week before Hitler's 75th birthday. Xavier March, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei, is called out to investigate the discovery of a dead body in a lake near Berlin's most prestigious suburb.

As March discovers the identity of the body, he uncovers signs of a conspiracy that could go to the very top of the German Reich. And, with the Gestapo just one step behind, March, together with an American journalist, is caught up in a race to discover and reveal the truth -- a truth that has already killed, a truth that could topple governments, a truth that will change history.


From the Paperback edition.

Final Impact (The Axis of Time)

John Birmingham

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 47 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

“The action is nonstop, the characters very real–and very different from each other–and, to coin a phrase, it makes you think.”
–S. M. Stirling, author of Island in the Sea of Time

In the year 2021 a multinational fleet–experimenting with untested weapons technology–pitched through time, crash-landing in 1942. The world is thrown into chaos as Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, Tojo, and Stalin scramble to adapt to new, high-tech killing tools, and twenty-first-century ways of war.

For “uptimers” like Britain’s Prince Harry and the men and women who serve aboard the supercarrier USS Hillary Clinton, war is a constant struggle with their own downtime allies, who are mired in ignorance and bigotry.

As the Allies counter the Nazi assault and set off for the coast of France, Japan begins to buckle, soon every battle will be played out in a lethal dance of might and intelligence, unholy alliances and desperate gambles, and each clash will be fought with the ultimate weapon; knowledge from the future.

Thanks to the historical records, all sides know that two superpowers will emerge, while the losers will be pounded into submission. But time has shifted on its axis, so none know who will survive, or how peace will take hold in a world turned upside down. These are the questions that John Birmingham brilliantly answers in his critically acclaimed adventure of war and imagination.

Praise for John Birmingham’s Weapons of Choice

“Birmingham’s enthralling battleground mixes provocative historical fiction and socially conscious futurism.”
–Entertainment Weekly

“High-tech intrigue and suspense similar to the works of Tom Clancy.”
–Library Journal


From the Trade Paperback edition.

In at the Death (Settling Accounts, Book 4)

Harry Turtledove

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 63 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Franklin Roosevelt is the assistant secretary of defense. Thomas Dewey is running for president with a blunt-speaking Missourian named Harry Truman at his side. Britain holds onto its desperate alliance with the USA’s worst enemy, while a holocaust unfolds in Texas. In Harry Turtledove’s compelling, disturbing, and extraordinarily vivid reshaping of American history, a war of secession has triggered a generation of madness. The tipping point has come at last.

The third war in sixty years, this one yet unnamed: a grinding, horrifying series of hostilities and atrocities between two nations sharing the same continent and both calling themselves Americans. At the dawn of 1944, the United States has beaten back a daredevil blitzkrieg from the Confederate States–and a terrible new genie is out of history’s bottle: a bomb that may destroy on a scale never imagined before. In Europe, the new weapon has shattered a stalemate between Germany, England, and Russia. When the trigger is pulled in America, nothing will be the same again.

With visionary brilliance, Harry Turtledove brings to a climactic conclusion his monumental, acclaimed drama of a nation’s tragedy and the men and women who play their roles–with valor, fear, and folly–on history’s greatest stage.

Black Powder War (Temeraire, Book 3)

Naomi Novik

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 50 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

“A splendid series.”
–Anne McCaffrey

“Naomi Novik has done for the Napoleonic Wars what Anne McCaffrey did for science fiction: constructed an alternate reality in which dragons are real in a saga that is impressively original, fully developed, and peopled with characters you care about.”
–David Weber, author of the Honor Harrington series

After their fateful adventure in China, Capt. Will Laurence of His Majesty’s Aerial Corps and his extraordinary dragon, Temeraire, are waylaid by a mysterious envoy bearing urgent new orders from Britain. Three valuable dragon eggs have been purchased from the Ottoman Empire, and Laurence and Temeraire must detour to Istanbul to escort the precious cargo back to England. Time is of the essence if the eggs are to be borne home before hatching.

Yet disaster threatens the mission at every turn–thanks to the diabolical machinations of the Chinese dragon Lien, who blames Temeraire for her master’s death and vows to ally herself with Napoleon and take vengeance. Then, faced with shattering betrayal in an unexpected place, Laurence, Temeraire, and their squad must launch a daring offensive. But what chance do they have against the massed forces of Bonaparte’s implacable army?

Designated Targets

John Birmingham

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 55 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

It’s World War II and the A-bomb is here to stay.
The only question: Who’s going to drop it first?

The Battle of Midway takes on a whole new dimension with the sudden appearance of a U.S.-led naval task force from the twenty-first century, the result of a botched military experiment. State-of-the-art warships are scattered across the Pacific, armed to the teeth with the latest instruments of mass destruction.

Nuclear warheads, rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s, computer-guided missiles–all bets are off as the major powers of 1942 scramble to be the first to wield the weapons of tomorrow against their enemies. The whole world now knows of the Allied victory in 1945, and the collapse of communism decades later. But that was the first time around.

With the benefit of their newly acquired knowledge, Stalin and Hitler rapidly change strategies. A Russian-German ceasefire leaves the Führer free to bring the full weight of his vaunted Nazi war machine down on England, while in the Pacific, Japan launches an invasion of Australia, and Admiral Yamamoto schemes to seize an even greater prize . . . Hawaii.

Even in the United States the newcomers from the future are greeted with a combination of enthusiasm and fear. Suspicion leads to hatred and erupts into violence.

Suddenly it’s a whole new war, with high-tech, high-stakes international manipulations from Tokyo to D.C. to the Kremlin. As the world trembles on the brink of annihilation, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler, and Tojo confront extreme choices and a future rife with possibilities–all of them apocalyptic.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Weapons of Choice (The Axis of Time Trilogy, Book 1)

John Birmingham

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 134 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

On the eve of America’s greatest victory in the Pacific,
a catastrophic event disrupts the course of World War II, forever changing the rules of combat. . . .

The impossible has spawned the unthinkable. A military experiment in the year 2021 has thrust an American-led multinational armada back to 1942, right into the middle of the U.S. naval task force speeding toward Midway Atoll—and what was to be the most spectacular U.S. triumph of the entire war.

Thousands died in the chaos, but the ripples had only begun. For these veterans of Pearl Harbor—led by Admirals Nimitz, Halsey, and Spruance—have never seen a helicopter, or a satellite link, or a nuclear weapon. And they’ve never encountered an African American colonel or a British naval commander who was a woman and half-Pakistani. While they embrace the armada’s awesome firepower, they may find the twenty-first century sailors themselves far from acceptable.

Initial jubilation at news the Allies would win the war is quickly doused by the chilling realization that the time travelers themselves—by their very presence—have rendered history null and void. Celebration turns to dread when the possibility arises that other elements of the twenty-first century task force may have also made the trip—and might now be aiding Yamamoto and the Japanese.

What happens next is anybody’s guess—and everybody’s nightmare. . . .


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Ha'penny

Jo Walton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1949, eight years after the “Peace with Honor” was negotiated between Great Britain and Nazi Germany by the Farthing Set, England has completed its slide into fascist dicatorship. Then a bomb explodes in a London suburb.
 
The brilliant but politically compromised Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is assigned the case. What he finds leads him to a conspiracy of peers and communists, of staunch King-and- Country patriots and hardened IRA gunmen, to murder Britain’s Prime Minister and his new ally, Adolf Hitler.
 
Against a background of increasing domestic espionage and the suppression of Jews and homosexuals, an ad-hoc band of idealists and conservatives blackmail the one person they need to complete their plot, an actress who lives for her art and holds the key to the Fuhrer’s death. From the ha’penny seats in the theatre to the ha’pennies that cover dead men’s eyes, the conspiracy and the investigation swirl around one another, spinning beyond anyone’s control.
 
In this brilliant companion to Farthing, Welsh-born World Fantasy Award winner Jo Walton continues her alternate history of an England that could have been, with a novel that is both an homage of the classic detective novels of the thirties and forties, and an allegory of the world we live in today.

The Grapple (Settling Accounts, Book 3)

Harry Turtledove

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 60 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

“A profoundly thoughtful masterpiece of alternate history.”
–Booklist

It is 1943, the third summer of the new war between the Confederate States of America and the United States, a war that will turn on the deeds of ordinary soldiers, extraordinary heroes, and a colorful cast of spies, politicians, rebels, and everyday citizens. The CSA president, Jake Featherston, seems to have greatly miscalculated the North’s resilience. But as new demonic tools of killing are unleashed, secret wars are unfolding. The U.S. government in Philadelphia has proof that the tyrannical Featherston is murdering African Americans by the tens of thousands in a Texas gulag called Determination. And the leaders of both sides know full well that the world’s next great power will not be the one with the biggest army but the nation that wins the race against nature and science–and smashes open the power of the atom.

“Turtledove never tires of exploring the paths not taken, bringing to his storytelling a prodigious knowledge of his subject and a profound understanding of human sensibilities and motivations.”
–Library Journal

“One of the strongest books in the extended series.”
–sfsite.com

“Compelling.”
–Publishers Weekly

Opening Atlantis: A Novel of Alternate History

Harry Turtledove

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Are you Kidding? 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

It ended a little weak but over all this was a good read and I enjoyed the history much more than some of the more recent books in ongoing (dragged out)series.

Turtledove is Slipping 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

i think I have read almost all Harry's books, particularly his various serials. This one is at the lower end of the scale. It is hackneyed, filled with known extrapolations of our own history (substitute the Bretons for the earlier Irish), and a convienietly ignored Terranova, except with minimum coverage. Let's see, the forthcoming "United States," will show the colonies and their revolt from the UK and who knows whatever other stuff he might put in. Perhaps build Trerranova up some more. its too large to be ignored completely, even if "Atlantis" is in the way.

If you like a true bow (in retrospect) to Kenneth Roberts' classic settlers novel, then go for this one. otherwise, eh.

Editorial Review:

New York Times bestselling author Harry Turtledove has intrigued readers with such thought-provoking "what if..." scenarios as a conquered Elizabethan England in Ruled Britannia and a Japanese occupation of Hawaii in Days of Infamy and End of the Beginning. Now, in the first of a brand-new trilogy, he rewrites the history of the world with the existence of an eighth continent: Atlantis.

The Sky People

S.M. Stirling

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Marc Vitrac was born in Louisiana in the early 1960’s, about the time the first interplanetary probes delivered the news that Mars and Venus were teeming with life—even human life. At that point, the “Space Race” became the central preoccupation of the great powers of the world.

Now, in 1988, Marc has been assigned to Jamestown, the US-Commonwealth base on Venus, near the great Venusian city of Kartahown. Set in a countryside swarming with sabertooths and dinosaurs, Jamestown is home to a small band of American and allied scientist-adventurers.

But there are flies in this ointment – and not only the Venusian dragonflies, with their yard-wide wings. The biologists studying Venus’s life are puzzled by the way it not only resembles that on Earth, but is virtually identical to it. The EastBloc has its own base at Cosmograd, in the highlands to the south, and relations are frosty. And attractive young geologist Cynthia Whitlock seems impervious to Marc’s Cajun charm.

Meanwhile, at the western end of the continent, Teesa of the Cloud Mountain People leads her tribe in a conflict with the Neanderthal-like beastmen who have seized her folk’s sacred caves. Then an EastBloc shuttle crashes nearby, and the beastmen acquire new knowledge… and AK47’s.

Jamestown sends its long-range blimp to rescue the downed EastBloc cosmonauts, little suspecting that the answer to the jungle planet’s mysteries may lie there, among tribal conflicts and traces of a power that made Earth’s vaunted science seem as primitive as the tribesfolk’s blowguns. As if that weren’t enough, there’s an enemy agent on board the airship…

Extravagant and effervescent, The Sky People is alternate-history SF adventure at its best.