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 - Why I Enjoy Alternate History?

Hello everybody!

I hope that your June was as relaxing as mine. Actually, given everything that happened in June, I hope your month was even more relaxing than mine. I kept myself quite busy, between participating in protests, attending city government meetings, and a lot of fiction writing and reading, I've also been working quite hard on building a stockpile of articles for all of you to enjoy.

In the hopes of easing all of us back into the habit of reading my incredibly entertaining articles, I thought it would be quite fun for me to begin with a short editorial going over one of my favorite topics of all time and one that I wish got a lot more respect in this day and age.

And who knows, maybe my discussion on it may inspire you to look more into it and create even greater works in the field.

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