Green Phoenix - 2022 in Review

HAPPY NEW YEARS!

2022 has been a year of massive transformative changes for me, primarily in my personal life. At the beginning of the year, I had officially moved out of my parents house and begun fully living on my own, which has been a fantastic adventure and a great challenge for my daily life and commitments to writing and video work. But I like to think that this year has been one where I have risen to meet that challenge.

Writing for Emerald Rangers has been a wonderful exercise in maintaining my analytical mind and improving my literary credentials. While I might not always be happy with every article I release (in fact, my perfectionist mind is rarely happy with anything I release or make) I do believe that everything I release is a genuinely good reflection of my own state of mind and how the films, shows, books and games discussed reflect on the world and myself at that moment. The art of criticism is often a deeply personal and self-reflective quest and it has been a genuine pleasure in continuing that adventure over the past year, despite some of my more domestic challenges.

Below is a list of the statistics and personal indication as to how my articles are performing and what changes, in any, may be needed as we move into 2023. This article, which I always release at the first of the year, is a chance for me to see the status of my contribution to the website and plot a trajectory for the coming year.

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Green Phoenix - Questionable Content Review

 

It's certainly been quite a long time since I released a review of some form of literary work, that being my 1634: The Bavarian Crisis review from September 10th, 2021. So with 2022 now well underway, I feel it is far passed time to look at yet another piece of literature, though today's work will be a little different than my usual fair.

After all, Webcomics aren't usually categorized, in my experience, along the same lines as other forms of literary media. Whether this is due to classism philosophies within literary circles or the tendency of webcomics to explore concepts in a much more free-form and subversive ways than paper and published comics is something that I will leave up to others to debate. What is not up for debate is that among all the webcomics I read, there is one particular series that I have adored for years for its willingness to explore complex topics and create long-form character and relationship driven plot lines that would make a daytime soap opera blush.

The fact that this series has also managed to continue on a routine schedule since 2003, in a genre that sees most comics go under after two or three years, only makes Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques all the more extraordinary and absolutely worth examining more closely to see just what it is about this webcomics that makes it so easy to be drawn in.

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Green Phoenix - 2021 in Review

HAPPY NEW YEARS!

And what a shit year we are leaving, huh? In some ways, it was much better than 2020 and yet...in other ways.

Anywho, I don't I really want to go into much detail about the ways in which this year was terrible. I'd much rather focus upon the supreme amounts of change and transformation that this year represented for myself and my body of work. Because 2021 was truly a transformative year for me. A year of many firsts and returns to normal.

I say this because as I write this article, I am in the process of moving my furniture and property into my very first apartment. From 2022 onward, I will be living on my own and dependent upon my own needs. I will speak further about my intentions for the new year in the conclusions segment but rest assured, I have many plans.

This year also saw the return of live meetups for conventions and the likes, at least in terms of my capacity to attend TrotCon in person, with hopes that next July will be in person as well. I can certainly hope so.

2021 saw a slow shift back into a world vaguely similar to our own pre-COVID, yet forever transformed by the experience. I know that the stresses of this past year have been shown in my writing and it is analyzing that writing that brings us to the main point of this beginning of year editorial.

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Green Phoenix - 1634: The Galileo Affair Review

 

I have covered several books in the 1632 series on this channel and made plans to review the rest of the series, even possibly including single reviews of the anthology stories found in the Grantville Gazettes. While I contend that the series is overall very good and remains my favorite series of all time, today's book stands as the first in the series that I'm not super crazy about. As I will explain in the review proper, this is the first book in the franchise that I don't go out of my way to read when the re-reading begins.

1634: The Galileo Affair was published in April 2004 as a collaborative work between lead series writer Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis. Narratively the book reintroduces characters established in "To Dye For", "Between the Armies" and "A Matter of Consultation" from the first Ring of Fire anthology book, as well as a few stories from the first Grantville Gazette, and begins the so-called Southern European thread of the 1632 series.

The story tells the tale of the Stone family, Americans from Grantville, who move to Venice in order to help teach the "modern" Europeans about American medical practices while also working to open up a trade route to the Middle East. Whilst in Venice, one of the younger Stone's gets involved with the daughter of a local political firebrand who has become a fan of American political philosophy and gets wrapped up in a plot to save Galileo from his religious trial in Rome, being presided over by the pope himself. Little do they know that an assassin is planning to use the scheme as a way of killing off the pope in the name of Protestantism, all while the pope is caught in a conundrum over the theological impact of modern Catholic doctrine coming through the Ring of Fire and how this should impact the future of the church.

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Green Phoenix - A Prophet Without Honor Review

 

I will be completely honest with all of you. This review was something of a surprise to me. It had not been on my schedule to review until I finished reading it.

While I am a fan of alternate history and will always be ready to sing the praises of a book that captures my attention, I usually find myself drawn to the works of well-known or famous alternate history writers. That is not the case with today's novel.

A Prophet Without Honor was written by Joseph Wurtenbaugh and is, as one might imagine, an alternate World War 2 story. These are almost dime a dozen in the alternate history genre and it takes a lot to impress me; but Wurtenbaugh's outing chooses not only to approach the subject from a new angle, directing the point of divergence to occur at the Reoccupation of the Rhinelands, an operation by the Nazis to reoccupy Germany's western borderlands with military forces in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, but by revealing that approach through a narrative structure that I've rarely seen before in any genre.

The book is deeply challenging once one can engage with the unique story structure and is very poignant to a modern American reader up to date with the comings and goings of our current political climate. The rise and poison of Nazism and totalitarianism is revealed in a way that few books manage to accomplish successfully and it accomplishes this goal without resorting to the "Great Man View of History".

A Prophet Without Honor is quite simply a book that once I finished it, I needed to spread it to everyone else.

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Green Phoenix - 2020 in Review

HAPPY NEW YEARS EVERYONE!

And good riddance to hot garbage, I say. This year was a trying time for all of us and it is my sincere hope that my articles might have done something to provide entertainment or education for my readership.

As we enter 2021 with, hopefully, brighter expectations than 2020, I would like to take a quick analytical look-back on 2020 in terms of my articles and viewership. Though this year was far from ordinary, perhaps there remains things that I can improve upon and aid in making 2021 a better year than the shit-show we were given in 2020.

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Green Phoenix - 1634: The Baltic War Review

 

 

 Looking at the analytics for my various articles, my book recommendation tend to be the least viewed of all of my article formats (though given the usual content of the Emerald Rangers, perhaps that isn't too surprising). In truth, these book recommendations are designed more along the lines as a passion project, where I get to promote some literary properties that I might not otherwise get to do.

The fact that my book recommendations also tend to be the easiest articles to write and be very brief and succinct is also not a bad reason to continue them, though I do hope that more people will check out some of the series I recommend and review and come to appreciate them as I do.

Which brings me to 1634: The Baltic War. I've made it no secret of my absolute adoration of Eric Flint's Ring of Fire series. The fantastically detailed of world-building built around countless well-grounded characters and a truly unique and strange point of divergence make it both inviting for new readers and very memorable in terms of its dedicated fans, with many people having favorite story threads, characters, and arcs.

In this particular field, 1634: The Baltic War is my favorite book in the entire series. It is the culmination of baseline trilogy that forms the narrative core of the every other book in the series. After 1634: The Baltic War, the 1632 series would begin to diverge into its countless varying story-lines and character arcs. As such, The Baltic War serves as a conclusion to the old model for the series and the introduction to how the succeeding books will work from thereon out.

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Green Phoenix - The Man with the Iron Heart Review

I have mentioned it several times before in my previous reviews of alternate history novels, but the genre as a whole has a fundamental issue at its heart. An author of alternate history must be able to balance an interesting and unique premise and point of divergence while at the same time not selecting a subject so esoteric that the general reading audience (which in America is woefully historically illiterate) won't be turned off or too bored.

For most alternate history authors, the solution is to pick a point of divergence and timeline that alters some event that is universally understood or known to American audiences, those two tending to be either the American Civil War or the Second World War. This results in these two time periods being the most discussed in the field of alternate history, almost to the point of parody. Even Harry Turtledove, the man widely considered the master of alternate history, has created dozens of stories based on these two time periods, immediately to great effect.

But today's review will cover one of Turtledove's more comparatively recent explorations into a WW2 point of divergence. In 2008's The Man with the Iron Heart, Turtledove explores not a Nazi victory in WW2,  but an altogether different, yet even more intriguing question. What if the survival of a single SS officer had enabled the creation of a more unified German resistance to the allied-occupation of Germany after World War 2? What would the impact be on Allied post-war sentiments at home?

These questions and their correlation to more modern wars like the Second Persian Gulf War form the thematic heart of The Man with the Iron Heart and it leaves this stand alone novel as easily one of Turtledove's most intriguing and underappreciated, in my opinion.

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Green Phoenix - 1633 Review

Last July, I released my review of Eric Flint's first novel in the Ring of Fire series, 1632. I expressed at the time how I wanted to review and show off all the books in the series, as it has long held the position of my favorite literary series of all time.

But for whatever reason, I never did get around to reviewing the sequels to 1632. Of course, the series is quite prodigious, with more than 2 dozen books and hundreds of associated short stories through the Grantville Gazettes. So going book by book like I often do with my reviews of film series would be rather ridiculous and completely dominate the majority of weeks that I have access to with the website.

But I do want to get through  and review each o f the series' main titles at some point or another. And it is with that spirit in mind, that I will take a look at the second book in the Ring of Fire series, published in 2002, 1633.

This is the book that truly lays the groundwork for the rest of how the Ring of Fire series is written. While 1632 might have introduced us to the world, it is 1633 that solidified and established the outside world with sufficient enough details for future arcs and story lines to be expanded upon.

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Green Phoenix - A More Perfect Union Review

Today's book recommendation is going to be quite different than usual. While most of the book's I review tend to be alternate history novels, which makes sense given my personal literary preferences (though I will try to expand my literary recommendations for future reviews), today's recommended story isn't a true novel in the sense of the word.

Today's recommended story is extensive and a long-form exploration of an alternate timeline, but presented on the AlternateHistory.com forum, comprised of dozens of individual blog posts. The author is a teenager, but their grasp of narrative flow and historical interconnectivity is surprisingly complex. A More Perfect Union is a truly fascinating thought experiment, borne out of a love of a famous Broadway musical, that has grown into one of AlternateHistory.com's most popular and extensive timelines of recent memory.

And the timeline isn't even finished yet. I have wanted to geek out about this timeline for a while now, and with the new year now wrapping up its first month, I've decided to expand my "book recommendations" to include this wonderful view of a better America.

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Green Phoenix - 2019 in Review

HAPPY NEW YEARS EVERYONE!

This week is going to be a little different. This won't be an article analyzing a piece of media, or an editorial giving my take on an element or change I would make to a cultural capstone. Instead, in the spirit of the new year, I will be taking a look back on the previous years articles and looking at the various statistics behind those articles and what that can tell me about what I can do more next year.

While this article may be a bit more dry than my usual editorial, I feel that, as my audience, it is very important you see the work I go into making these articles the very best they can be and as entertaining and informative as I can make them.

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Green Phoenix - The Silmarillion Review

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

The literary legacy of J.R.R. Tolkien has become legendary and an inspiration for almost all modern fantasy. But before either of these stories, Tolkien had a dream.

A desire to craft a mythology for Great Britain which didn't rely upon French influence (like the Arthurian legends did). To that end, from 1917 until his death in 1973, Tolkien slowly crafted a series of mythological stories that would, in time, be combined with The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to craft a single cohesive legendarium.

Though many of these stories would never be released into canon (eventually being compiled into the Unfinished Tales), Tolkien's son Christopher began the painstaking process of compiling and editing the largest and most cohesive stories into a single genesis story.

This would become The Silmarillion.

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Green Phoenix - 1632 Review

In the year 2000, Grantville is just your run-of-the-mill West Virginian coal mining town. Filled with good-natured and hardworking Americans, but otherwise unextraordinary. But when a strange alien artifact sends the entire town 300 years into the past - into the heart of Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years' War - the Grantvillians will find themselves in a world that is both alien and all to familiar.

A world of hatred and romance. Where people are still burned at the stake and Galileo yet lives. Where murder and rape are the laws of the land and mercenaries roam the countryside with impunity.

In such a world, these ordinary Americans will have to keep their wits sharp, their guns drawn, and their values exceptionally American in order to survive.

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Green Phoenix: Gray Tide in the East - Book Review

August 1914: On the eve of the German invasion of Belgium, Kaiser Wilhelm II receives a telegram promising British neutrality in Germany’s war with France if Belgium is left be. Over the objections of German High Command, Wilhelm send the German armies preparing for a Belgian invasion east to deal with Russian forces.

With Germany focusing on the east and British forces never joining the war, how will the world in this alternate Great War fair when the Gray Tide finally settles?