A River Runs Through It - Norman Maclean

Overall Rating : C-.

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73-year old Norman Maclean's debut novella was an instant hit. A semi-autobiographical (I love that term. It means, "I'm gonna write about my life, but I get to lie at times.") story about the family relationships, primarily between Norman, his dad and his younger brother. The setting is ...erm... fly-fishing. Pure and simple.

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Being only 104 pages long, ARRTI is bundled with two other Maclean stories - one about a summer he spent in a logging camp; the other about a year he worked for the US Forest Service.

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What's To Like...

Maclean has a nice, poetic style. If you like your storylines heavy on the drama and light on the action, you'll love ARRTI. I don't think anyone before Maclean ever thought to use fly-fishing as a metaphor for life.

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Personally, I liked the two "add on" stories better. They have a bit more plot, a bit more action, and best of all, give a glimpse into what being a logger and a ranger was like 90 years ago. Daily life was a lot different then, and it's enlightening to get insight into it. In that respect, it reminded me a lot of Isaac's Storm, which was reviewed here.

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What's Not To Like...

Did I mention it's light on action?

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In truth, ARRTI is devoid of action.Plot-wise (PWP), little brother is self-destructive, and the 30-something author can't figure out how to help him. He asks his Dad, he of zero parenting skills, who also has nothing to offer. A lazy bum of a brother-in-law shows up, who at least puts the "fun" back into "dysfunctional" by boinking the town whore and drinking everybody's beer. The Maclean women's sole activity is nagging the Maclean men.

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All-in-all, pretty uninspiring stuff. Alternatively, those who loved ARRTI call the book "dark". Oh, the book was made into a movie, starring Robert Redford, and my carpool partner (who has excellent movie tastes) says it's a yawner too.

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Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it...

Judging from other reviews, I am in the minority when it comes to ARRTI. They gush about the poetry, the philosophy, the metaphysics, and the key to life, the universe, and everything else. Here's one example :

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(ARRTI is) "detailed descriptions of fly-fishing and nature to engage with a number of profound metaphysical questions". Whoa! Way deep, huh?

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El toro poo-poo. Maclean wrote about fly-fishing cuz it's one of the few things he knew something about. Anything can be hyped into being a metaphor for life. For instance, here's a quote from yesterday at MSNBC.com, coinciding with the advent of the baseball season :

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"Bart Giamatti, the former commisioner of baseball, wrote eloquently about that journey that begins with the batter standing at home, trying first to leave it and then to get back - to be safe once again at home. For him, it was a grand metaphor of life, this circuituous journey that could be fraught with danger and obstacles, that could demand daring and bravery to complete."

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Wow! More way deep stuff, eh? IMHO, they're both ridiculous, unless you happen to be a baseball or fly-fishing fanatic.

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But I digress. For me ARRTI was a ploddingly slow read, lacking any plot and action, and saved only by the two add-on tales. I must admit it's well-written; now if Maclean could only have thought of some sort of storyline to drape his flowery philosophy around. If you want to see this sort of genre done much better, try The Thin Place, by Kathryn Davis, which we'll review in the near future.

The Ides of March - Thornton Wilder

Overall Rating : C+.

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Thornton Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He won Pulitzer Prizes for The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) and Our Town (1938).

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TIoM is one of his later works, and frankly was not a big seller. It deals with the 6 months or so leading up to Julius Caesar's assassination ("Et tu, Brute", and all that). At 191 pages, it was an opportunity to read something "high brow" for a change, without too much of an investment in time.

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This is not a historical novel - Wilder makes that clear from the beginning. He 'borrows' a number of things that actually occurred 5-15 years earlier, and time-shifts them to 45-44 B.C. for the sake of his book.

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What's To Like...

The style is wonderfully unique. There's a high-falutin' word for it : epistolary. Basically, the story here is written as a series of letters from/to the various characters - Caesar, his wife, a lady named Clodia, Cicero, Cleopatra, etc. You can read more about this style here. It works. I'd enjoy trying to write a story in this mode.

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Being a series of letters, there's always a convenient place to stop if you're a late night reader like I am. Overall, Wilder divides TIoM into 4 "books". They are not chronological; instead, they deal with different themes. Book 1 introduces the characters; Book 2 deals with Love; Book 3 focuses on Religion; and Book 4 details the events that lead up to Caesar being perforated 23 times.

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The book provides some delightful glimpses into the daily thoughts and activities of people living at the height of the Roman Empire. Okay, actually it's all just Wilder's opinions as to what these would have been, just like Shakespeare did in his play. But it's still quite interesting.

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The central theme of the book is the "human-ness" of us all. Slave or emperor; ancient Roman or modern reader; we all put our pants on one leg at a time. Inspiring? No. But can you relate? Absolutely.

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What's Not To Like...

PWP? For the acronymically-challenged, click here. If you're looking for an action-packed storyline, you're better off with Gene Wilder than with Thornton. Ditto for hoping for any humor and/or surprising plot twists. This book can drag at times, especially if you have to plod through a verbose diatribe by Cicero or some flowery prose by Catullus.

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What Makes Thronton Wilder Worthy of a Pulitzer Prize...

I've read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and will comment on it at some other time. And I've had to sit through Our Town at least once a long time ago, as it used to be the default choice for every High School Drama Club director who found himself with a limited budget and a dearth of talent.

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There are recurring themes in Wilder's works. First and foremost is the focus on our humanity. We may aspire to have the world revolve around us, but the truth is, God makes the rain fall on every man.

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Speaking of the Deity/Deities; Wilder doesn't seem to have a high regard for theism of any sort. At its best, the concept of God(s) serves to give us inner comfort and inspiration; at its worst, Religion exists to be manipulated for self-serving purposes.

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So what is important to Thornton Wilder? Love. Pure and simple; and in all of its aspects. We live; we die; and in a couple generations, no one remembers us. But to love, and be loved, makes it all worthwhile.

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Ah, but I digress. The Ides of March is a decent book, if you're in the mood for something philosophical, rather than a thrill-a-minute tale. We'll give it a C+ and snort condescendingly to indicate we've read something high-brow. We'll recommend it to others, but I don't think this will motivate me to pick up anything by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Elizabeth Browning.

Next - Michael Crichton

Overall Rating : C+.

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The latest offering from the author of Jurassic Park, Next is typical Crichton - exploring the potential, the perils, and the pitfalls of genetic engineering. From transgenic creatures to cures for diseases; from gene-snatching kidnappers to corporate in-fighting; there's a whole gamut of themes in the book.

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What's To Like...

The transgenic critters will most likely be your favorite threads in the book. There's an Sumatran orangutan that enjoys cussing in French and Dutch; a talking parrot that can do math in his head and carry on intelligent conversations with humans; and Dave the half-chimp/half-human who has trouble "fitting in" as a schoolboy.

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Despite its length, this is a quick read. Apparently Crichton has developed "James Patterson Symdrome" as there are 528 pages, divided into 95 chapters. So when you're ready to stop reading at night, you'll always be a page or two from the end of a chapter.

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The book has a reasonably good ending, with some of the storylines being skillfully (albeit, somewhat incredibly) brought together.

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What's Not To Like...

There are too many storyines, the majority of which you are going to have only a minimal interest in following. So there are some slow spots in the book. Indeed, one gets the feeling that Crichton had trouble deciding which of about two dozen plotlines to put into the book, so he included them all.

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Worse, as compared to Jurassic Park (and that comparison is inevitable), there's too much 'preaching' and technical warning, and not enough story-telling. Let's face it, while Crichton enlightens us as to the problems with cloning in JP, what we're really interested in is whether the velociraptors are going eat the good guys for lunch.

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Of course, in JP, you had only 3 or 4 plots to follow; here you have more than a dozen. If you do the math (528 pages; 25% 'preaching'; and let's say 12 plots, just to be on the conservative side), each storyline here is going to get about 35 pages to come to full resolution. That's a whole bunch a shallow tales.

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Life Is Like A Crash On The Freeway...

There was a forgettable movie a couple decades ago. IIRC, it had Robert "Wild Wild West" Conrad as a California motorcycle cop; it had Betty White (I think) as a middle-aged wife dying of cancer, and Buddy Ebsen as her husband trying to keep her from taking her own life. There were about a dozen other storylines-&-actors, none of which I remember.

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You spent the whole movie jumping around on these disparate stories, wondering how the heck they were going to tie in with each other. Surprise, surprise; they all were involved in a mega-car-crash on an L.A. freeway. Conrad goes flying through the air; Ebsen dies, leaving Betty White to try and carry on without him. And everybody else... well... like I said, it was a forgettable movie.

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That's the way Next comes across to me. Too many plots, and not enough story-telling. It would've been better to only deal with the transgenic animals, and leave the legalistic and corporate woes to a 20-page sermon at the end of the book.

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Despite its flaws, this is still Crichton, and he is still one of the better writers around. Heck, we named a genre after him. The transgenic animals are enough to make Next sufficiently engaging to read. So we'll give it a C+ and a lukewarm recommendation; and hope that the mouthy parrot, the foul-mouthed orangutan, and the monkey-boy show up in a sequel.

On the Oceans of Eternity - S.M. Stirling

Overall Rating : B.

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On The Oceans of Eternity is the third and final part of an Alternate History trilogy known informally as the Republic of Nantucket ("RoN") series. In RoN, the modern-day island of Nantucket is time-warped back to about 1250 B.C. and its inhabitants have to learn to survive. The first two books in this series have been reviewed here-(1) and here-(2) .

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OTOOE is primarily concerned with the marshaling of the forces of Nantucket and its allies (Babylon, Troy, England) as they try to out-flank and out-diplomacy the bad guys, who essentially control the entire Mediterranean Sea. There are a couple of side-plots (a 'Lewis & Clark' expedition to the Pacific by the good guys, and the courting and allying of Egypt by the bad guys); but those storylines are by-and-large peripheral.

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What's To Like...

As usual, there's lots of action; both diplomatic and warfare. Once again, the bad guys aren't Ultimate Evil personified - they're innovative, calculating, Machiavelian, and ambitious. That's still a nice change from the simplistic "white hats / black hats" dualism present in most sci-fi stories.

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OTOOE is a page-turner, and even comes to a dramatic conclusion; albeit enough 'loose strings' remain to where Stirling could've written a Volume 4 had he so desired.

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What's Not To Like...

The usual minor irritations mentioned previously (voiding, weapons sounds, and "Ayup") remain. In addition, the final resolution of the build-up between the two equally-powerful forces left many readers dissatisfied. There are charges of plagiarism (from the Michael Caine movie "Zulu"), which I frankly find to be much ado about nothing.

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Some feel that the character-development was shallow, but I find that rather petty. You have a choice - a fast-paced, action-packed trilology with moderate-to-minimal CD, or a 10-volume opus (a la Robert Jordan) with tons of CD. Personally, I like Stirling's choice.

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Finally, there's no action happening on the Island of Nantucket. So the pages dealing with the politics and lives on the mother island are boring.

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Do Publishers Dictate the Number of Pages in a Novel?

There's no doubt about it - the resolution of the conflict that's been growing for three books and 1800 pages is quite anti-climactic. A lot of readers feel Stirling lost interest and finished it up quickly and sloppily.

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Instead, I get a sense of haste. The plot(s) in OTOOE are proceeding along nicely, up until around page 500, when everything suddenly goes into overdrive. I'm not an author, so I wonder : do publishing companies ever (try to) dictate the length of novels? After all, every printed page is an expense for them.

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I imagine different authors would react in varying ways to such an edict. If James Patterson had to write a 400-page book, I think he'd let forth a loud moan, and divvy his book into 200 Chapters so as to have a lot of blank spaces on each chapter's first-page.

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OTOH, any attempt to limit Robert Jordan to less than 800 pages per book, would probably cause him to kill off a few characters, or else add a couple more volumes to Wheel of Time.

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So with OTOOE, I wonder if the deal was that it was to be 600 pages long, and Stirling looked up at Page 500 and freaked out. Maybe he called the publisher (ROC) and told them he couldn't possibly finish the story in the next hundred pages, so they told him, "Fine. You get 5% more pages. But not one page more." That would make 630 pages, which coincidentally is how long this is.

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But I digress. The RoN trilogy gets an overall A rating and a "highly recommended" endorsement from me. Lots of action, lots of different places to read about, and the whole thing gets wrapped up in only three books. Considering the way Eric Flint's 163x series has become bogged down, and the way Harry Turtledove has to take 12 novels to tell the "If The South Had Won The Civil War" alt-story; it's nice to only have to make only a 3-book reading investment to fully explore this alternate timeline.

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FWIW, many of the initial readers (back in 2000) felt that Stirling had left enough loose ends to write one more book in the series. But, as he hasn't done that in the last 8 years, I think in retrospect that was wishful thinking (which in a way, is a nice compliment re this storyline). Stirling did write a subsequent series ("Dies The Fire"), dealing with the changes wreaked upon the present-day world when Nantucket got zapped back to the Bronze Age. I haven't read any of those books yet, but they certainly look enticing. However, the next Stirling book on my TBR shelf is Conquistador. Stay tuned.

God Knows - Joseph Heller

Overall Rating : C.

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Joseph Heller's first work, Catch-22, brought him instant fame, but he never quite caught the magic thereafter. God Knows is his fourth novel, and is an autobiographical, Mel Brooksian look at the life of King David. Nearing his deathbed, David looks back on his life, giving his version of his encounters with Goliath, King Saul, Bathsheba, Absalom, Solomon, etc. Some have speculated that Heller is also reminiscing about his own life here, and that seems plausible to me.

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What's To Like...

If you like Mel Brooks' (who was a friend of Heller's) humor, you'll like God Knows. There is a witty humor here that will have you chuckling a number of times. And while the overall tone can only be called "irreverent", it is obvious that Heller studied the life of David comprehensively before writing this.

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There is a clever blending in of modern events into David's autobiography, and it works. All in all, this is a fresh, tongue-in-cheek way to present the life of Israel's second king.

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What's Not To Like...

There is a lot of repetition. This could easily have been pared down to a 250-page novel, and not have missed anything. Instead, the book drags in a bunch of places, and you'll find yourself skipping over the long paragraphs of commentary to get to the better, wittier dialogues.

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Along the same lines, if you are not crazy about Mel Brooks' style of humor, you may want to skip this book. Ditto, if you aren't keen on a non-linear timeline, a la Kurt Vonnegut (who also was a friend of Heller's).

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Finally, if you're a Fundie, and think things like Monty Python's The Life of Brian are blasphemous, stay away from God Knows.

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Political Correctness in Literature.

It's probable that Jews would join the Fundies in expressing outrage at this book, except that Joseph Heller is Jewish. Which makes me wonder - are there certain subjects/literary treatments that only those of a certain religious, political, national, and/or racial persuasion can write?

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What would've happened if Jospeh Heller hadn't been Jewish? Would there be cries of anti-semitism for presenting the likes of David, Yahweh, Moses, and Solomon (whom David calls "Shlomo") in such an unflattering, down-to-earth light? It's kinda like the N-word; blacks can use it, but it's taboo to everyone else.There's something just a bit discomforting about these double standards. As long as they exist; religious, political, international, and racial tensions will continue to be present, no matter how hard we try to cover them up and pretend they aren't here.

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But I digress. God Knows is an okay book, but it's plain to see why this isn't considered Joseph Heller's finest effort. It has some worthwhile moments, but you have to be ready for some dead spots in the book as well. If you can handle the latter, you will enjoy the former.

I Am Legend - Richard Matheson

Overall Rating : C.

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I Am Legend is a recent, heavily-promoted movie; so it was natural that the book be re-issued as well. The central character, Robert Neville, is the last human being left in L.A. He is beset by vampires and infected mutants at night (he has to hole up in his fortress-like house); but during the day, he is the hunter and they are his prey.

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The story chronicles his loneliness and personal loss, his crusade against the other creatures, his research into the cause of the plague, and his gradual accepting of his fate.

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What's To Like...

For a 1954 novel, this has an outside-the-box plot. None of this "I vant to bite your neck" tripe. Instead, there's a nice blend of science and sci-fi as Neville tries to figure out what anti-vampire methods work (garlic and wooden stakes do, and the Crucifix works some of the time) and don't work (mirrors don't); and more importantly why each does or doesn't.

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The book is a quick read. More on that later. Matheson's stories had a major influence on Stephen King. No less than three movies were made from this story - The Last Man On Earth; The Omega Man (with Charlton Heston), and the eponymous 2007 release.

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Finally, Matheson's treating of the characters themselves is complex. There are no "white hats" and "black hats" here. Humans, mutants, and vampires - each is someone else's bane. That's quite unusual for a McCarthyism-era atmosphere.

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What's Not To Like...

For an apocalyptic novel, there's not a lot of action. Neville has a couple close calls in getting back home before sundown, but that's about it. When he finally does meet another (Spoiler : (seemingly) human being, one expects some excitement to start as he "makes contact". However, such is not to be. The story fizzles out to a tepid, yet unpredictable, end.

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Worst - when you buy this book, you'll discover only half of it is I Am Legend. The rest of it is a collection of short sci-fi stories, presumably also by Matheson. Their quality ranges from mildly amusing to rather yawn-inducing. I don't fault Matheson for this deception, I fault Tor Books.

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"Shouting his name in a paroxysm of fury"...

I Am Legend may be influential, but it doesn't stand the test of time. The lack-of-action makes the reading of this story a chore. I've heard the movie is quite different from the book, and in this case, that's gotta be for the better. So we'll give it a C, mostly for its originality, and be happy that people like Stephen King and Anne Rice came along to improve upon a good-but-could-be-better style of writing.

Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson

Overall Rating : A-.

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This book came recommended to me by my cousin (Thanks, Janet!), and is subtitled, "A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History".

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The book tells the story of the 1900 Hurricane that ravaged the city of Galveston. This was before the Weather Service started assigning names to hurricanes, so it is only known as the "Great 1900 Hurricane" and several other monikers. To this day, it holds the record for the largest number of deaths in the USA by a storm. 6,000-12,000 people lost their lives.

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What's To Like...

Larson weaves several engaging storylines together here. There is the account of the storm itself, of course. But there is also the biography of Isaac Cline, the Weather Bureau's local man in Galveston in 1900 . In addition, Larson gives the technical science involved in the making of a hurricane. Finally, there is a narrative about bureaucratic incompetence and hubris.

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Isaac's Storm also offers a pleasant glimpse into life in American at the dawn of the 20th Century. Telephones? Not yet. Automobiles? Nope. Radio? Uh-uh. But you get to see the sights, and smell the smells (even if they are often horse manure) of America in 1900. Having recently had the opportunity to see some of my Grandfather's photos from as early as 1907, Larson's descriptions here were really a treat.

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What's Not To Like...

There are no pictures!! Larson recounts using a magnifying glass to look at a number of photos showing the storm's aftermath. Hey, Erik! Next time, put those pics in the book! Sheesh. Even the Wikipedia article on this hurricane, which can be found here, has some photographs.

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Larson paints an unflattering picture of Isaac Cline. Apparently, in Galveston today, a lot of people take exception to that.

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What Have We Learned in 100 Years?

Galveston got nailed in 1900 because it had a smug feeling that it could handle anything Mother Nature threw at her (they disdained building a seawall several years earlier); because the US Weather Bureau did a crappy job of predicting the storm's path (they thought it was heading up the Atlantic coast), because the bureaucrats in the Weather Service cared more about politicking than about putting out accurate forecasts (they jealously refused to listen to the Cuban forecasters' warnings); and because Science was used for political purposes (years earlier, Cline had written that it was meteorologically impossible for an Atlantic storm to ever hit Galveston).

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100+ years later, in light of Hurricane Katrina, what has changed? The levee system in New Orleans was in gross disrepair (it failed in 53 places); the Weather Service (again) predicted the storm would move up the east coast of the US; we had a stooge heading FEMA ("Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job!"); and a large segment of the dittoheaded US population still cannot grasp what the warming of the oceans (and the Gulf of Mexico) is doing to the strength of hurricanes (because, golly gee, Dubnutz, that might make it sound like Al Gore knows what he's talking about!).

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But I digress. I enjoyed Isaac's Storm, even though I'm not a big reader of (non-alternate) History. I liked the intermingling of the various storylines (others might not). This is recommended reading for anyone living in Texas, or indeed, anyone living in a hurricane zone. We'll give it an A-, only because this book screams to have some photographs included.

Fatherland - Robert Harris

Overall Rating : B+.

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What's To Like...What makes this book so unique is the underlying Alternate History involved. Fatherland is set in 1964, 20 years after Nazi Germany won World War 2, and on the eve of The Fuehrer's 75th birthday.

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England has been turned into a puppet state; and the US appears to be an implacable rival (in this timeline, the US still defeated Japan). The rest of western Europe (with the exception of Switzerland) is part of the greater German Empire., as is Poland and the European portion of Russia. The latter may have lost WW2 in 1943, but it still exists east of the Urals, and is engaged in a never-ending guerilla war there, supported by American arms. .
Robert Harris paints a believable picture of life as it would have been in a victorious Nazi world. It is a terrifying combination of George Orwell's 1984; and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The hero, Xavier March, runs into increasing resistance and ill-will from the authorities as he continues an investigation into a murder that nobody in the upper echelons of the Nazi government wants solved.

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The plot is good; the ending is somewhat unexpected; and there are no dull spots in the book. What more could you ask for?

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What's Not To Like...

Some feel that the characters are stereotyped, and I think that's a valid assertion.

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Others find it unbelievable that the "secret" that Xavier March uncovers (SPOILER ALERT : that the German government exterminated the Jews), would have stayed covered up for 20+ years. Personally, my read of the secret (in this story's timeline) is that the US knew about it, and had a wink-wink relationship with Germany to not reveal this truth.

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Oh Brave New World, That Has Such People In It...

Given the immense and lasting popularity of dystopic works like Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World, Ape And Essence (my personal favorite Aldous Huxley novel), and Fahrenheit 451; why is it that no new best-sellers in this genre have been written? All of those books are from when, the 1940's and maybe early 1950's?

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Yes, we have the Alt History genre now. But the works I've read in AH (Stirling, Turtledove, and Flint) are mostly action stories set in another timeline. The Dystopia genre seems to not have any major additions to it in more than half a century. Why? I can't believe that all the good 1984-ish ideas have been used up.

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But I digress. Fatherland is a good story, with a superbly intriguing setting. The characters may be stereotypical, but your focus will be on the Alt-Hist, with all of its horrors, and you'll keep turning the pages to gain more insight into that alternate dimension

The Great War : American Front - Harry Turtledove

Overall Rating : C.

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The Great War : American Front is the second book in an 11-volume opus by Harry Turtledove; covering a timeline that initially veered off with the South's winning the Civil War. Book One, How Few Remain, deals with a second conflict in the 1880's, also won by the South, and featuring "alternate lives" for a bunch of famous people such as Samuel Clemens, Teddy Roosevelt, James Longstreet, Frederick Douglass, etc.

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TGW:AF picks up the storyline with the outbreak of World War 1. The Confederacy sides with England and France; the USA with Germany. It is the first book of a WWI Alt-Hist trilogy and goes to about the end of the summer, 1915.

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What's To Like...

This is "pure" Alt-History. No shifts in the time-space continuum (such as Flint's 1632 series); no visits from extraterrestials to alter History (which technically wouldn't be Alt-Hist anyway).

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As usual, Turtledove tells his story from a dozen or so perspectives. Each "glimpse" lasts about 2-5 pages; then he jumps to another person's story. There's a good balance in the people he chooses - Yanks, Southerners, Canadians, men, women, blacks, whites, rich folks, poor folks.

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What's Not To Like...

Unlike as in How Few Remain, Turtledove chooses "unknowns" to follow in TGW:AF. That makes it tough to follow. Was Arthur MacGregor a Yank, a Reb or a Canuck? What front and what side was Reggie Bartlett fighting on? Teddy Roosevelt and George Custer carry over from HFR, but are no longer followed in detail. Following these unknowns is not nearly as interesting.

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The action is basically a clone of what historically happened in Europe in WW1. You have trench warfare; poisonous gas attacks; the evolution of of air fighting; and there even is the repeat of the "Christmas Truce", something that took place in Europe during the first year of the war (The History Channel has an excellent episode covering that). The trouble is, that ain't Alternate History; it's just transplanting the events from one continent to another. One expects more divergence in an Alt-Hist story.

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Finally, there isn't any climax to this book. The story sashays along from page 1 to page 560. In the last couple pages, the blacks of the South are seen to rise up in a coordinated worker-socialist revolution. No details are given; this is an obvious hook to get you to buy the next book. Since this is a trilogy, one can predict that the next book won't have a dramatic climax either.

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Robert Jordan Syndrome is alive and well...

This is the first book of a trilogy; but it is also Book Two in an 11-volume opus by Turtledove that starts in 1880 (in the storyline. Book 1, HFR, came out in 1995) and goes for another full century. Book 11, "In At The Death : Settling Accounts" just came out in hardcover last July. Reportedly, it is the end of the saga, but there are enough loose ends left over for Turtledove to pen Book 12 if he wants.

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This means you better be prepared to spend a lot of hours reading a lot of pages in a lot of books about this alternate timeline. Well, I did that with Jordan's "Dragon Reborn" series, and he up and died on me before finishing the final book (#12). I don't intend to get sucked into that again; not with Turtledove's North/South narrative; not with Eric Flint's 163x series.

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One wonders where this Robert Jordan Syndrome will end. Time was when a trilogy was considered the literary limit. An intriguing beginning; a tedious middle; and a thrilling end. Hey, it worked fine for Tolkien.

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Now we have someone ghost-writing Book 12 in Jordan's Wheel Of Time; and Turtledove one novel away from tying that mark. You just know some other author will make it his goal to write a 13-book epic. It's getting to the point where Tolstoy and Dostoevsky will be relegated to the "Short Story" section of your local library. Whoodathunkit?

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But I digress. TGW:AW is a decent book, but How Few Remain was better. The characters are not sufficiently engaging to warrant me committing to reading another nine books about them. We'll give it a C rating, cuz it isn't bad, and get our next Alt-Hist fix from one of S.M. Stirling's books.

Faceless Killers - Henning Mankell

Overall Rating : B-.

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Henning Mankell is a Swedish crime fiction author. Faceless Killers is the first in a series featuring Kurt Wallander, a burnt-out detective whose life's a mess, and who needs to solve several high-profile murders before anti-immigrant hysteria grips the area.

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Faceless Killers was written in Swedish in 1991, and translated into English in 1997. The Kurt Wallander books are Mankell's most popular series, but he also writes children's stories.

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What's To Like...

It's nice to have an anti-hero for a change. Wallander is recently-divorced, drinks too much, has lousy dietary habits, and has to cope with a father and a daughter who frankly don't like him. He makes a pass at the comely (and married) prosecutor, who rebuffs him; then has to worry about her filing a complaint.

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You also get a look at the "real" Sweden. Most of us think the essence of Sweden is ABBA, Volvo, prime ministers who get assassinated while walking home from the movies, and svelte blonde ski chicks who all have silicone implants.

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The Sweden that Mankell presents is a place overrun with immigrants, where everyone drinks too much, and the only change in the long winter months is whether or not you'll have to deal with snow in addition to the ever-present harsh, windy cold.

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Finally, Mankell strews a bunch of red herrings in amongst the "Cold Case Clichés". Wallander has to sort the false leads from the real clues, and this is mostly a matter of tracking them all down and seeing which ones pan out.

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What's Not To Like...

Although FK has the feel of "true" detective work in solving the murders, not everyone is going to like the unspectacular storyline. The gruesome murders of an elderly couple on a farm takes up the first 25 pages. The rest is plodding and dogged investigation.

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This isn't the kind of story where you try to guess the "who" of the whodunit. And the ending leaves a lot of loose ends dangling out there. Is this "real" detective life, or a sloppy ending to a novel?

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WTF is a Cold Case Cliché?

Cold Case is among the better TV series on today (when the writers aren't on strike), but it's very formulaic, and once you realize this, you can solve each case in the first 10 minutes.

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It always hinges on one seemingly irrelevant sidetrack (SIS) that usually occurs early in the story. The Cold Case team will spend the next hour interviewing all sorts of people and unearthing all sorts long covered-up dirty laundry. Then at the end, they rediscover the SIS, tie it to one of the suspects, and voila!, the case gets solved.

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Example #1. A girl gets murdered a long time ago. The case is re-opened; the chief briefs the CC team on the details, then adds parenthetically, "Oh yeah. Forensics found some black powder at the murder scene way back when. They couldn't identify it then. See if yooze can get somebody to analyze it again".

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Solution #1. After 50 minutes, the lab report comes back. The mysterious powder is ID'd as a friction-minimizer used by people in wheelchairs, and of course one of the suspects is a paraplegic.

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Example #2. Two young boys get murdered. While interviewing one of the suspects, a junk peddler; one of the detectives asks if she can buy a small bling dangling on the peddler's cart. "Oh no," says he, "that's my special key to happiness".

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Solution #2. The bling of course turns out to have belonged to one of the boys, thus tying the peddler to the crime.

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This happens in every Cold Case episode. Just look for that SIS written into the script, then match it up with one of the suspects. The writers only have 60 minutes (minus lots of commercials) to present an interesting, complex case. They don't have time for irrelevancies. Anything that looks like a tangent, isn't.

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But I digress. Faceless Killers is a good book. There may be a Cold Case Cliché in there, but you have to separate it from the other half-dozen false trails. The glimpse of the real Sweden, and a detective with all sorts of character flaws are the real strong points of the book. Alas, it feels sometimes like Mankell put more thought into the setting and Kurt Wallander, than into the plot itself. We'll give it a B-, and hope that the next seven books in the series have better storylines, and aren't just rehashes of Sweden's social problems and Wallander's personal ones.

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Overall Rating : A+.

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Slaughterhouse-5 is arguably Kurt Vonnegut's most-famous novel. It explores a variety of great themes - free will; the absurdity of war; fatalism; and one of my pastimes - time travel.

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Jason says I can call this a classic, since Vonnegut has now passed on. That's great, since "traditional" classical American Literature is the pits. We'll discuss that at a later date, probably when I review Thornton Wilder's The Bridge At San Luis Rey.

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What's To Like...

It was an easy read. I devoured this book in three evenings. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a likeable, ordinary bloke. The aforementioned themes are dealt with extensively, but in such a way that you don't feel like Vonnegut is preaching at you. Indeed, it's hard to say just what the author's personal viewpoint is on fatalism and free will.

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What's Not To Like...

The storyline jumps around a lot, time-wise. That's natural for a time-traveler, but it may take some getting used to if you've never read any Vonnegut before; and haven't come unstuck in time.

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Characters from previous Vonnegut novels (Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater) come into the story with little or no introduction. This is one of Vonnegut's recurring literary devices, and it drove me nuts some years ago when I trudged through his book on evolution, "Galapagos".

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Listen : Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time...

It should be noted that Slaughterhouse-Five consistently makes the yearly 100 most-challenged books by the self-righteous "let's keep our kids brainwashed" crowd. Ostensibly, this is because there are some cuss words in the book, and because God is not given sufficient reverence by Vonnegut. In reality, I think they fear the anti-war (and Dresden bombing) message in S-5. Vonnegut is qualified to write on this - he was being held as a POW in Dresden on the night the Allies decided to fire-bomb the city just for the heck of it. The consequence of our nastiness (there were no military targets in Dresden) was that 20,000-100,000 innocent civilians perished.

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Of course, the book-banning fundies have never wavered in their drive to tell others what to read, watch, and think. At present, Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (both the movie and the book) is the target of their wrath. It is claimed TGC will turn any reader/movie-goer into a Satanist. Of course, everyone who read/watched any of the Harry Potter series is already a witch. I wonder which is worse. I guess I'll find out, since I've just started to read TGC.

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But I digress. Slaughterhouse-Five is a fantastic book by a great American author. Read it today, just to tweak the book-burners. Then give it to one of your ditto-head friends as a Christmas present, and start to de-program him as well. It is worthy of an A+ rating. Poo-tee-weet!

The Bourne Identity - Robert Ludlum

Overall Rating : A-.

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Thanks to the Matt Damon movie, The Bourne Identity is undoubtedly Robert Ludlum's best-known novel. A bullet-riddled-yet-still-alive guy gets plucked out of the briny and discovers he's got a bad case of amnesia. He spends the rest of the book/movie trying to regain his memory; dodging bullets from (and then killing) a slew of professional assassins; and attempting to figure who is so all-fired anxious to kill him.

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What's To Like...

The book is radically different from the movie, so there's a totally new plot and ending. In fact, the only similarities between the two are :

.1.) Our hero has amnesia.
2.) The heroine pulls a "Patty Hearst", gradually morphing from unwilling kidnappee to active GF and confederate of Jason Bourne.
3.) There is an outfit called Treadstone.

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The plot is complex; the action is non-stop; and the book is a page-turner. There is both a good climax and a "door" left open for a sequel or two.

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What's Not To Like...

I'm still nonplussed about the amazing foresight of Jason Bourne to have the number of his Swiss bank account implanted in his hip. Sheesh, how convenient.

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The Treadstone in the book (which is very different from the movie's version) seems to be suicidally lax in security when it comes to high-level meetings.

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Lots of other people b*tched about the movie being so different from the book, and this is probably valid if you read the book first. I didn't, so this isn't an issue for me.

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Sequel, Threequel, Fourquel, Fivequel...

Ludlum of course mapped this out to be a trilogy, so one should expect some huge loose ends at the conclusion of Bourne-1. In addition to the Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum, a guy named Eric van Lustbader has penned another two books in the series (after Ludlum was so rude as to die), titled The Bourne Legacy and The Bourne Betrayal.

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So if you can't get enough of the saga, there's a couple thousands pages-worth of sequels out there. I'll take it one book at a time. Bourne-1 was a great read. We'll see if Bourne-2 can keep up the pace.

Prince of Fire - Daniel Silva

Overall Rating : D-.

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The bombing of the Israeli embassy in Rome puts Gabriel Allon, a reluctant operative for Tel Aviv, on the trail of an Arab terrorist. The path leads all over Europe and the Middle East.

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What's To Like...

It's easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. No gray areas here. The Arabs are evil killers; the Jews are noble killers. At 376 pages, this is a fast read.

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What's Not To Like...

The plot is hopelessly disjointed. The evil Arabs blow up the Israeli embassy in Rome. Somehow this leads to a raid in Milan, where a computer disc is found. Italian intelligence can't decode it, so they decide, "what the heck, let's give it to the Israelis". The Israelis magically decode it, and discover it lists, among other things, the personnel file of Gabriel Allon. Which somehow ties into the bombing. Allon assembles a think-tank team, and somehow they decide that the Ultimate Evil is an Arab named Khaled al-Khalifa. Meanwhile, the UE kidnaps Allon's vegetative wife in England, and instead of just killing her, has her smuggled into Paris so she can be blown up at a later date.

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Confused? Don't worry. The obviousness of the plot and the simplistic black-&-white characters (Arabs = bad; Israelis = good) will put you to sleep long before you feel any urge to try to make sense of anything.

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Born Under A Bad Zion...

The only way to comprehend this travesty is to recognize that it's merely a vehicle for the author to expound his Zionist viewpoint. This is really just a political diatribe with a sloppily-crafted plot thrown over it.

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Silva seems to feel the Arabs are entirely to blame for the Middle East crisis. The millions of Palestinian refugees are to blame because they didn't take a better deal when it was offered way back in the 40's/50's. The various Arab governments are also to blame because they haven't expended vast amounts of money to assimilate these refugees into their own country.

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Ultimately, Silva's philosophy can be summed up as, "the only good Arab is a dead Arab". Which is nice if you happen to be an Israeli, but not so nice if you're a Palestinian.

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In real life, the Silva scenario is inane. If anyone is to blame for the Middle East crisis, it's Britain (who promised the same land to both the Palestinians and the Israelis), and the United Nations (who felt so guilty about the Holocaust, they mandated a new country where (unfortunately) millions of people already lived).

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Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon are hardly wealthy nations. If anyone ought to throw large sums of money at the Palestinians, it's the UN. And the Palestinians can hardly be blamed for rejecting the earlier offer, since in essence it said they could keep a portion of Palestine provided they ceded a large part of it to Jewish immigrants. Is it surprising they turned down this deal?

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But I digress. This is a wretched novel - both as a literary work and as a Arab-hating smear-job. If you're into blatant stereotyping - all Arabs are evil; all Chinese are brain-washed; all French are traitors; all Israelis are noble, etc. - then this book will appeal to you. Otherwise, don't waste your time.

Watchers - Dean Koontz

Overall Rating : A-.

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Watchers is considered by most to be one of Koontz's better efforts. A depressed man comes across a remarkable Golden Retriever while hiking in the southern California wilds. The dog promptly saves the man from a menacing something, they bond, and thus begins a suspenseful book-long chase involving a monster, a psychotic hired hitman, and some duty-bound and therefore not-on-our-side NSA feds.

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Oh yeah, there is a love-story too, but we'll ignore that as best we can.

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What's To Like...

It's fast-paced. No 50 pages of introductory yawning here. By the time page 30 rolls around; you've already been introduced to the man, the woman, her erstwhile tormentor, the dog, the monster, and the hitman.

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The central character - the high-IQ dog - is a joy to follow. What if one of our canine companions was as intelligent as us? The dichotomy (wow, I always wanted an excuse to use that word) of a human-like mind in a dog's body is a fascinating study.

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Finally, ther are no slow spots. You'll find yourself staying up late to read more of Watchers.

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What's Not To Like...

The characters are fairly shallow. The good guys are completely good; the bad guys are completely bad. The romance is straightforward. The central cri-fi theme - DNA manipulation - has been done by others, and in a better-researched manner.

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The ending is hurried and tepid. After 450 pages of a great build-up, the evilnesses are disposed of with remarkable ease. You won't guess the ending, but that's simply cuz you'll be expecting more.

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Finally, Koontz leaves so many loose ends that you'll be tempted to roll 'em up into a ball of yarn. The hitman murders - unresolved. The sabotaging of a top-secret government research project - unresolved. The reason that the book is titled "Watchers" - unresolved. The consequences of genetic manipulation - unresolved.

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Genres? We've got genres coming out of our ears...

This book must be a librarian's nightmare when trying to think of where to file it. We could call it a Thriller, yet the monster's character is sadly under-developed. Indeed, his only purpose for most of the book is to do a random grisly killing about every 70 pages or so.

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Or maybe we'll file it under Romance, although the love story is obvious and trite. The girl has head problems; the guy magically cures her with his love; and she never has any relapses again.

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How 'bout Cri-Fi? Except that Koontz never really tries to make the science seem plausible. Maybe Mystery - but as mentioned before, half the killings are never resolved.

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Perhaps the best fit would be to call it a Boy-And-His-Dog story, and put it next to Lassie. But I don't think little Timmy ever had to deal with monsters that liked to gouge out eyeballs and decapitate its victims; nor hitmen that fantsized about bludgeoning pregnant women.

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But I digress. Watchers is a great read; yet I doubt I'll pick up any more Koontz novels. In his 3-page "Afterword", Koontz states, "I believe that we carry within us a divinely inspired moral imperative to love, and I explore that imperative in all my books". In other words, if you've read one Koontz story, you've read them all. I intend to stop at just one.

Against the Tide of Years - S.M. Stirling

Overall Rating : B+.

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ATTOY is the second part of Stirling's "Nantucket" trilogy, where that island gets zapped from present-day back to the 1250 B.C. Bronze Age. Volume One (Island In The Sea Of Time) was previously reviewed. ATTOY takes place 8-10 years after IITSOT. The bad guys have been building up an empire in the Mediterranean. The good guys have been sailing all over the globe, have turned the British Isles into an oasis of civilization, have started Lewis-&-Clarking the North American continent, and have decided it's time to have a showdown with the baddies.

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What's To Like...

Like IITSOT, this is a fast-paced, action-packed book. The good guys go courting the Babylonians as allies (well, the Akkadians, actually) in an out-flanking maneuver. After disposing of the nasty Assyrians, they also go wooing the Hittites and the Trojans. How's that for some non-stereotypical allies?

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Unlike Clive Cussler novels, bad things happen to the good guys. The Nantucket naval fleet runs smack-dab into a hurricane (with devastating results). The Babylonian venture is jeopardized by an outbreak of small-pox. The native priests blame it on the foreigners, and they might be right. It's never quite clear exactly how the outbreak started.

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Meanwhile, the bad guys are actually doing some smart (and good) things. They overrun Sicily, they set up a fortified city at the straits of Gibraltar, and they reward some of their slaves by freeing them after years of faithful service.In short, the two sides are very equally balanced.

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What's Not To Like...

The plot loses just a bit of steam in ATTOY, but that's inherent in the middle book of any trilogy, including Tolkien's The Two Towers.

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The same minor irritations from IITSOT carry over - Stirling's penchant for the emptying of the bowels as people die in battle, the excruciatingly tedious details about the science of sailing, etc. And now, about 25% of the political hero's vocabulary seems to consist of one word : "Ayup!"

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Finally, unlike Volume One, there isn't any great big climax to close out Volume Two. The tension builds, the two forces meet on the plains of Ilium, and... um... and it's time to buy Volume Three.

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Why Theology And Time-Travel Don't Mix...

Stirling isn't a big one to go into the theological implications of dropping a bunch of Yankee Christians back into 1250 B.C. The good guys allow the proselytizing of the Bronze Age England natives, and Stirling touches briefly on the fact that inroads are made. It's never clear if the natives comprehend the dogma, or if they merely accept the gods simply because they came with the conquering heroes.

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Which got me to thinking - just how would one go about preaching the Gospel? Do you ask the barbarians to accept Jesus as their Saviour, when He's not going to show up for another 12½ centuries? And if you die before He does show up (which is a certainty), exactly what happens to you? Do you get a "Get Into Heaven Early" pass? Do you get to sleep for 1250 years (putting Rip Van Winkle to shame)? And do you make a note to interfere with Biblical history in the future, to make the Gospel story come out different? Did God zap these blokes back 300 years as some sort of cosmic joke, or did He have a purpose? Or perhaps this is all better explained as being an example of the Butterfly Effect.

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But I digress. ATTOY is still a good read, albeit not quite up to the lofty standards of IITSOT. Despite being a bit anticlimactic, you'll still want to immediately start into the 630 pages of Volume Three, to make sure Good does triumph over Evil. This is still the best Alt-History I've read so far.

The Romanov Prophecy - Steve Berry

Overall Rating : B.

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My second Steve Berry novel (the first was The Third Secret); this one is less Cri-Fi, and more action. Set in modern-day Russia, where the people have decided they want to return to having a Czar as a ruler, Miles Lord, an American Afro-American lawyer on business in Moscow, stumbles onto a prophecy that implies that not all of the Romanovs were killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

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What's To Like...

Lots of action from the get-go. It's heavy on historical references, which suits me just fine. Rasputin becomes a prophet, and Youssopov is re-made as a good guy.

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The book is a page-turner, and Berry once again doesn't bore you with page after page of philosophical preaching. Take a note, Dan Brown.

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What's Not To Like...

If there's such a thing as TOO much action, this is it. Essentially, this is a 384-page chase scene. The bad guys, professional assassins all of them, can't seem to hit an elephant from 50 feet away (much like in the movie Miami Vice, but that's a subject for another post). The hero finds the bad guys repeatedly and incredibly picking up his trail, and never figures out that someone close to him might possibly be tipping them off.

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Finally, the plot pretty much plays itself out with no surprise twists. You gotta have surprises when you're reading Cri-Fi.

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Talk About Implausibility...

The most important parameter for any historical fiction is its believability. And TRP fails that in one key area.

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No, I'm not talking about some of the Czar's family surviving. That's been a romantic, albeit highly unlikely hypothesis for decades. Nor am I talking about the incredible shooting inaccuracy of the assassins. You can rationalize that away as being subject to the divinely-inspired prophecies of Rasputin.

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The unbelievable part is the opening premise that a majority of the Russian people would for some reason want to return to Czarist rule. Pigs will fly before that happens. Some Russians may want democracy; some may want a return to the Communist days; some may want some sort of uber-nationalism; and who knows, some may want Dubnutz to come stay with them after we throw his a$$ out of office next year. However, the one thing they can all agree on - no one wants the return of the Czar.

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The Romanov Prophecy is another solid effort by Steve Berry. If it isn't quite on the same level as The Da Vinci Code, it's still a good read while we wait for Brown to get off his butt and put out another novel.

Island in the Sea of Time - S.M. Stirling

Overall Rating : A.

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IITSOT is part one of an Alternate-History trilogy where the island of Nantucket (and a bit of the seas around it) gets transported back in time from present-day to the Bronze Age of 1250 B.C. The first order of business is simply to survive the oncoming winter, since very few of the Nantucketeers are skilled in hunting, gathering, fishing, and trapping.

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What's To Like...

This is the best Alt-Hist book I've read so far. The plot moves fast; there's lots of action; and the meticuous research by Stirling is obvious.

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Unlike Eric Flint's 163X series, the Good Guys actually make a few mistakes here. And the Bad Guy, believe it or not, is not Evil Incarnate. He's ambitious, he's Machiavallian, and he's inventive. He and his cohorts manage to spring a number of surprises on the Forces of Goodness, which is a pleasant change-of-pace.

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The good guys' fighting hero is a gay, female black; which is certainly not stereotypical. And lest you think the author is trying to foist his bleeding-heart liberal philosophy on you, he also takes some rather reactionary pokes at gun-control, whaling, and tree-hugging. Yet all this is woven neatly into the plot. No page-after-page "preaching" such as Flint and even Dan Brown are given to.

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Finally, there's actually a climactic ending to the book, even though it's just the first of three volumes. Robert Jordan could've taken some pointers here.

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What's Not To Like...

There's too much space devoted to the technical part of sailing. Good lord, I feel like I'm reading a Tom Clancy novel.

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Stirling gets fixated on a variety of things. To wit, the sounds effects of war; the fact that one's bowels 'void' as one dies in battle (and the consequent stench thereof); the 'down-hominess' of the Good Guys' political hero.

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He also seems to spend a lot of time on the erotic thoughts of the lesbian pair. There's nothing wrong with Stirling giving us his insight in this matter, but you'd think that nothing else enters the minds of these two when they're not fighting and killing. Then there's the Bad Lady's penchant for S&M. Although Stirling handles the sex scenes better than Harry Turtledove does, one still gets the feeling that they're primarily there to make teenage boys hot and sweaty.

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Finally, the Sierra-Clubbing, AmerIndian-saving Pamela Lisketter is just too stereotypical to be believed.

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We Are Yankees, Hear Us Roar...

It should be noted that, like Flint's 163X series, we once again have a small, intrepid group of Americans enlightening the rest of the non-American past-world with our superior technology, government, philosophy, and overall goodness. Just once, I'd like to see something like a modern-day Chinese army dropped into, say, 1700's America. Or maybe the entire nation of 21st-century France. Or the 20th-century British Imperial Navy. Let's reverse the roles for a change.

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It should also be noted that Nantucket Island had an inordinate number of world-renowned history and industrial specialists on the Island at the moment of the time-swap. And a nearby Coast Guard steel-plated windjammer conveniently gets zapped into the Bronze Age along with the island. (*)

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None of these "picked nits" detract from the story, including the fact that a 100-pound Ninja babe can kick any-and-all 200-pound male, barbarian a$$. In reality, the odds of the present-day Nantucket surviving a year in the Bronze Age would be extremely long. Stirling is fully allowed to follow in Flint's footsteps (or is it the other way around?) and "stack the deck" in order allow the story to go on more than one winter.

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This book was a real page-turner for me. And ultimately, that's what counts the most when I read a book for pleasure. We'll give it a solid "A", and see whether the other two books in the trilogy can keep up the pace.

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(*) : Update (11/03/09)...

S.M. Stirling stopped by soon after I posted this in 2007 to let me know that all the skills and technology described in IITSOT did indeed exist on Nantucket in 1998, which is when he visited the island to research this book. Including the Coast Guard's steel-plated windjammer, "The Eagle". You gotta love it when an author takes the time to visit, read, and comment on your book review. (**)

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(**) : Indeed, this humbled me and made me a bit less snarky when writing reviews of someone else's literary efforts.

The Galileo Affair - Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis

Overall Rating : D+.

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1634TGA is the first "1634" book in the 163x series to make it to paperback. This time, the USE (United States of Europe) sends a diplomatic mission to Venice to develop strategic political and commercial alliances. Coincidentally, Galileo is going on trial in Rome for his allegedly heretical teaching that the earth revolves around the sun, and not vice versa. The protagonists in the book get to be both the defense attorney for Galileo, and his potential jail-springers.

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What's To Like...

There's 667 pages to make you feel like you're getting your money's worth of reading material. There's a number of new characters to get to know. Most notably, the resident hippie-cum-chemist, Tom Stone ("Stoner") and his three raised-in-a-commune sons. By "new", we mean they didn't appear in 1632 or 1633. They are introduced in the Ring Of Fire - Grantville Gazette anthology, which we'll review some other time.

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You get to get up close and personal with 17th Century Venice. And if you're burnt out on all the fighting and killing in 1632/1633, you'll find this a much lighter-hearted book.

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What's Not To Like...

There's very little action. 600 pages into this book, you realize there's been a grand total of one botched assassination attempt, one street brawl, and one pointless murder. The rest is, how shall we say it, drama. Sheesh, if I want drama, I'll go read Wuthering Heights. We read Alternate History for the action, and of course, the advancement of a parallel history.

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And that brings up the second shortcoming of the book. It doesn't contribute one bit to the new timeline. Oh, relations are established with Venice. And Galileo goes on trial. But none of the dozens of loose ends from 1632/1633 are addressed, let alone tied up.

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Worst of all, the theme of this book, "The Galileo Affair" comes off as unbelievable and shoddily written. The Swiss Guards appear to be the 1600's equivalent of the Keystone Kops. And although Father Mazzare gives a brilliant defense of Galileo, the author(s) don't see fit to give us any details of it. Both sloppy and lazy.

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Where Does This Road Go, and Why Is It Paved with Good Intentions?

It's hard to know who to blame for this book. One suspects 99% of this was written by Andrew Dennis, with Flint's only contribution being to add legitimacy to it by putting his name on the cover, and to make sure AD doesn't write anything into the plot that might interfere with whichever way Flint intends to develop his particular 1634 sequel.

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Flint's approach to developing the 163x world is certainly well-intended. He's allowing a number of other writers to contribute whole volumes to it. In theory, that allows "other viewpoints" to come into play. In practice, however, it means you're going to be reading a lot of meaningless, tangential "fluff".

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Two other 1634 books are out in Hardcover. 1634 - The Bavarian Crisis, and 1634 - The Baltic War. And Flint is supposedly working on 1634 - Escape From The Tower. So it appears we will be stuck in 1634 for quite a few years. And we'll be paying $7.99 for each and every plot-advancement, with the occasional rip-off of no plot-progress at all. I suspect, therefore, that 1634TGA will be the last book I read in this series, at least until the paperback versions start showing up at the used book store.

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But I digress. 1634 - The Galileo Affair is a well-meaning but ultmately boring tome. If you just can't get enough of 163x, this may tide you over until Flint finishes his own 1634 contribution. But for everyone else, you won't be missing anything important if you skip this yawner

How Few Remain - Harry Turtledove

Overall Rating : C+.

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Harry Turtledove is a prolific author of Science Fiction and Alternate History books. This was my first Turtledove book.

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HFR is "pure" Alt-History in the sense that the timeline doesn't change due to some inscrutable cosmic event. Instead, McClellan's army doesn't intercept Lee's battle plans after Antietam. With the US army kept in the dark, Lee is victorious in the battlefield; England and France recognize the new nation; and the Confederate States of America gains independence. HFR is set in 1881, when the "second war of independence" erupts between the North and the South.

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What's To Like...

The book is a great "What-If" novel. Turtledove weaves a detailed alternate timeline by following a number of historical figures. Abraham Lincoln is doing the speech-giving circuit and contemplating becoming a socialist. Teddy Roosevelt is a bronco-bustin' cowboy in Montana. James Longstreet is the president of the CSA. Frederick Douglass is giving anti-slavery rallies. Samuel Clemens runs a newspaper in San Francisco and rails against the folly of war. George Custer, Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and even Geronimo are followed.

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Some of the good guys die. Some of the bad guys live. And, unlike many other works of fiction, you can't predict who lives/dies by the author's character development (or lack thereof).

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What's Not To Like...

Well, if the character-development is superb, the plot-advancement is non-existent. Mexico sells the states of Sonora and Chihuahua to the CSA, which for some unfathomable reason p*sses off the USA to the point of going to war. So far, so cool.

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Alas, the total events of the war consist of a few CSA minor victories in Arizona; some skirmishes between the US and Canadians/Brits in Montana, a British naval raid on San Francisco, and the USA for some reason trying to take (of all places) Louisville, Kentucky. That's it. Failing in those endeavors, the USA calls off the war. Talk about a lack of resolve.

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Turtledove tells the story from a pro-CSA POV, so the issue of slavery in the South is downplayed, almost to being ignored. James Blaine, the US President, is given short shrift. It would've been nice to understand the workings inside his head as to why he decided to quickly go to war, then just as quickly opted out.

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Oh yeah, and the couple of sex scenes are incredibly lame and completely pointless. Were they put in there to titillate teenage male readers? If so, it failed miserably.

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Why I've Been A Lifelong Alt-History Fanatic...

I read my first Alt-History book 45 years ago. It was titled "If The South Had Won The Civil War" (yep, same theme), and if you google that, you will find that it is by MacKinlay Kantor and was re-issued in the 1990's, and is still available from Amazon.

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Looking back, it was a rather tepid attempt at Alt-Hist. The South wins; Texas secedes from the CSA; slavery again gets downplayed; and the three countries remain best-of-buddies for a hundred years. After a century of group-hugs and bonding, they all schedule a joint news conference, and it's strongly implied that Reunification will occur.

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Okay, it was not a hard-hitting book. But I was in 5th or 6th grade at the time, and despite its lameness, I thoroughly enjoyed the "What If" scenario. That passion for Alternate History has stayed with me ever since. The genre is done much better nowadays, but I think it's fair to say that that's because science fiction & science fantasy as a whole are now being done so much better.

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But I digress. Your opinion of How Few Remain will hinge on how important a plot is to you. For me, this was a fun read, and I enjoyed "getting to know" the various historical characters. But the story didn't go anywhere. The war came, the war went, and nothing really changed and/or progressed. I came away with the feeling that Turtledove only wrote this to set up the characters in his World War One Alternate-History series. The first book of that series (second if you count HFR) is on my "to be read" bookshelf, albeit, along with a dozen other "must-read" books. So eventually, I'll find out whether this tangential timeline takes off or fizzles out.