Woman with a Blue Pencil - Gordan McAlpine

 

I really enjoy the way Gordon McAlpine's mind works. McAlpine (who has also used the pen name Owen Fitzstephen) doesn't just write historical fiction, or crime fiction, or for that matter, any kind of novel that uses the usual kind of plot line to move it along. Instead, he adds his own special twist to those genres to create something a whole lot different. Woman with a Blue Pencil is a good example. On its face, Woman with a Blue Pencil is historical fiction covering that awful period in American history after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor when all West Coast Japanese Americans, suddenly viewed as potential spies and traitors to this country, were moved into internment camps for safekeeping and "their own good." 

Sam Sumida is an academic investigating the murder of his wife on the eve of Pearl Harbor only because authorities don't care enough about what happened to her to do a proper investigation themselves. But then Sam discovers that he has no memory of the last several weeks and that everyone he knows no longer recognizes him. Even worse, he learns that there is no public record of him ever having existed - or of his wife's murder. Unbeknownst to Sam, his investigation is about to lead him into a deadly confrontation with an anti-Japanese personal investigator who is somehow linked to Sam's murdered wife. But the real kicker in Sam's world is that he is unaware that he and his wife are merely fictional characters in a novel - and that what happened at Pearl Harbor necessitated them being stricken from that novel and replaced by characters with a more politically correct feel to them. So now if Sam is ever to figure out what happened to his wife, he is going to have to confront his fictional replacement. 

The "woman with a blue pencil" calling the shots is all-powerful, but the young Japanese author taking her advice is not ready to completely let go of Sam Sumida. 

This one is fun, and it has led me to another Gordon McAlpine novel, Holmes Unearthed, that I'll soon be reading. 

Gordon McAlpine jacket photo

Westwind - Ian Rankin

In 1990, when Westwind was first published, Ian Rankin had written only one of his now famous John Rebus novels and was working on the second. The book didn’t exactly make much of a splash. As Rankin puts it in his introduction to this 2019 edition, it may have been published but, “Not that anyone noticed. There was one hardcover printing, one paperback, and one in large format for readers with limited sight. It didn’t sell in the USA and no foreign-language publisher wanted it.” Even Rankin could not “muster” much enthusiasm for the book. Then, according to Rankin, someone on Twitter convinced him that the book was not as bad as he remembered it to be. After re-reading the novel for himself, Rankin realized that Westwind paralleled much of today’s geopolitical situation and, more importantly, that he had enjoyed reading it.

Thus was born last year’s slightly revised version of Westwind, of which Rankin says:

            “I’ve given the original printed text a polish, hopefully ridding it of those flawed sentences and scenes. A few words have been added here and there, while others have been removed or altered, but it is essentially the same book that it always was, just thirty years older and a little wiser…”

Westwind is set in an alternate reality 1990 in which the US has decided to remove its troops from Europe under the assumption that it’s time for Europe to take responsibility for its own defense. Some British citizens are thrilled to see the backside of American troops; others fear what might happen in their absence. As the end-date for the removal of the last troops approaches, tensions are high and protesters on both sides of the issue are determined to be heard. Communication satellites are circling the earth making life better for everyone – but that’s not all they are doing. Everyone and everything that happens on the ground is fair game. There are no more secrets.

Ian Rankin

In the midst of all the turmoil, an American space shuttle crashes upon its return to Earth, killing all of the American astronauts on board. The only survivor is the British astronaut who was only on the flight in the first place as a courtesy to the key American ally. Now the question is why rescuers had to pry the fingers of one of the dead Americans from around the Brit’s neck before they could remove him from the shuttle remains. Meanwhile, at a British ground-control center, Martin Hepton, whose job it is to monitor one of the most advanced communication satellites in Western Europe watches helplessly as the center completely loses contact with it. The satellite is unresponsive to ground-control operators for almost four minutes and only resumes contact just when everyone feared it was lost forever.

Nothing like this has ever happened before, and one of Hepton’s colleague’s has reason to believe that it was not an accident this time either. Unfortunately, the man only has time to hint to Hepton that something is very strange before he disappears. Now, Hepton, believing that his friend is in trouble, wants answer – and he starts asking the kind of questions that a whole lot of very dangerous people don’t want him asking.

Bottom Line: Westwind is an enjoyable spy-thriller right up until it reaches its final climax. The characters are likable, and it’s easy to root for them as they try to figure out what is going on before they are all killed by super-spies and assassins from around the world. The book’s big flaw is how much it begins to resemble a James Bond movie as it approaches the big-reveal part of its story. Just as in a typical Bond script, as soon as the villains seem to have custody of all the good guys, they can’t resist boasting in detail about their mad plot and how it all works. Rather than eliminating their rivals immediately, they prefer to explain what will happen (in great detail, mind you) after they kill them. The unfortunate effect of this approach is that it pushes Westwind from far-fetched thriller category into cartoon category, making it not so thrilling after all.

A Different Flesh - Harry Turtledove

I’ve read Harry Turtledove’s alternate history novels for years, and I consider him to be one of the masters of the genre – he’s certainly among the genre’s most prolific authors. Alternate history is defined by Wikipedia as “speculative fiction consisting of stories in which one or more historical events occur differently,” and I think that’s an accurate general description of the genre. The real fun in reading an alternate history comes from the “speculation” part of its definition, in tracking how one or two changes in historical fact can lead to massive changes in reality over the next decades or centuries.

Homo erectus

That’s exactly the approach that Turtledove takes in A Different Flesh, a collection of seven loosely connected short stories that chronologically span over 300 years of American history. Turtledove’s basic premise is that the ancestors of the American Indian population that the colonists found upon their arrival in the New World never make it across the Behring Strait. Instead, the continent remains so isolated until the 1600s that it is still dominated by saber-toothed tigers, wooly mammoths, and Homo erectus, an upright species said to be the ancestor of several more advanced human species. Poor Homo erectus gets to stand in for the real-life abuse suffered by both the  Native American population and most of what happened to the Africans who were imported to the colonies later on.

The first story, “Vilest Beast,” features the Jamestown colonists a few years after Captain John Smith has been killed and eaten by a group of wild “Sims” (the name universally applied to the Homo erectus species). By now, both the colonists and the Sims prefer to stay clear of each other, but after one bloody conflict, at least one of the colonists is starting to wonder just how “human” the Sims might be.

The next two stories, “And So to Bed” and “Around the Salt Lick” follow the evolving relationship between Sims and America’s settlers through the late 1600s, a period during which Sims are captured and sent back to Europe for study. The two species have even by now developed a sign language that allows them to communicate thoughts to each other, and in some cases they develop deeply binding friendships. Overall, however, Sims are still considered animals – and are treated as such.

“Though the Heavens Fall,” the book’s fourth story, is set on an 1804 plantation on which Sims are the slaves doing all the heavy field work and the few black slaves on the plantation are used inside the house. As portrayed in the story, there is a definite class hierarchy on the plantation, and the black slaves are very relieved not to be on the bottom of it. “The Iron Elephant,” set in 1781, is a fun story about the evolution of the steam locomotive and how it eventually would put out of business the wooly mammoth-pulled locomotives of the day.

Harry Turtledove

My personal favorite, though, is “Trapping Run,” a long story set in 1812 about a trapper who has gone farther west than any other explorer of his day. That means that the trapping is excellent, but it also means that when the trapper suffers a devastating injury from a Grizzly, he’s is almost certainly going to die there all alone. And he would have if not for the band of wild Sims who befriend him. This is a touching story, but it illustrates the difficulty of the two species ever truly understanding each other on anything resembling equal terms.

“Freedom,” the last story in the book is set in 1988 (the year that A Different Flesh was published), and it’s the saddest and most disturbing story in the book. By this point Sims are being used in research labs around the world, a practice justified in the minds of researchers by the assumption that the Sims are no more human than any other animal species.

One of the more awful covers

Bottom Line: Turtledove’s A Different Flesh is philosophically deeper than it might appear at first glance. The Sims are stand-ins for every racially dominated group in the history of the United States, and the author seamlessly slips his serious messages into the book’s seven stories. This one is probably underrated in part because of some of the awful covers the book has had over the decades. Don’t let that throw you off; this one is worth reading.

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick

This was not my first attempt at reading Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. That first attempt, several years ago, did not go very well, and I ended up abandoning this 1962 alternate history novel in a state of confusion about 25% of the way through it. And now, right up front, I’m going to confess that this second attempt was easier than the first one primarily because I watched all four seasons of Amazon Prime’s The Man in the High Castle (a 40-episode series loosely based on the novel) before trying to read it again.

It’s 1962, and World War II has been over for twenty years. The former United States has been split almost down the middle by the victors, Germany and Japan, with Germany occupying the eastern half of the country and Japan the western half. A buffer zone running through parts of Colorado is the only thing that keeps the former Axis allies from each other’s throat. A few “free” Americans manage to live in that zone. The rest are under the thumbs of the Germans and Japanese who treat them as second-class citizens, at best, and as enemies of the state, at worst.

The Germans have continued to exterminate what they consider to be inferior races across the globe, most recently via a botched attempt to do so in Africa. The Japanese are disturbed by the barbarity and aggressiveness of the German government, and they know that Germany must never be trusted. To the Japanese, it is obvious that Germany will settle for no less than total world domination – and that one day she will come for Japan and her North American territory.

Dick shows what this occupation of America is like through the eyes of several characters struggling to survive an America in which they have little hope for a better future. One character is a dealer in rare, historical artifacts, two others are involved in creating the forgeries that are sold to Japanese collectors as authentic artifacts, another is the estranged wife of an American Jew, and a fifth has written a novel of alternate history in which the United States wins World War II instead of the Axis powers. All of them, no matter what they do, live in more or less constant fear of their Japanese occupiers.

Philip K. Dick

The Man in the High Castle is a powerful book, one that demands the close attention of the reader if its full impact is to be felt. It is confusing at times, and its open-ended, ambiguous ending is not a particularly satisfying one. It is said that Dick purposely left the book open-ended because he intended one day to write its sequel. Unfortunately, the author found it so difficult to revisit Nazism that he never got the sequel written. Interestingly (and exactly as happens in the novel itself), Dick used the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, for assistance in plotting The Man in the High Castle. And in September 1963, The Man in the High Castle won the Hugo Award for best novel, the highest honor in all of Science Fiction.

Bottom Line: Seldom, if ever, have I recommended that a movie or television adaptation of a novel be watched prior to reading the book. But despite the huge differences between The Man in the High Castle and its film-version (a whole paper could be written on that subject), I’m going to do exactly that this time. If nothing else, the film leaves the viewer with a more easily imagined vision of America under occupation by its enemies, and it introduces all of the major characters from the novel. Admittedly, one or two of the novel’s characters (especially Juliana) are not much like their film versions, but that will not matter for long. This is one of those science fiction classics that every SF fanatic out there needs to read if they want to maintain their Sci Fi street creds.

The Black Hills - M J Trow

I was initially attracted to M.J. Trow’s The Black Hills because it features two of the more interesting figures from the post-Civil War period - U.S. Grant and George Armstrong Custer - and because historical fiction is one of my favored genres. It was only later, after I began the novel, that I realized it is the sixth book in Trow’s “Grand & Batchelor Victorian Mystery” series (the book is clearly marked this way on its cover but I read an e-book version and did not see an image of the cover until later). Thankfully, however, The Black Hills works well as a standalone – although I did wonder a time or two about  Grand and Batchelor and how two such different men ever became detective agency partners in London.

As it turns out, Grand is a Civil War veteran and West Point classmate of Custer’s and Batchelor is his English partner. Grand may have been a onetime classmate of Custer’s but the two of them were never really friends, and in fact, Grand really doesn’t think a whole lot of Custer’s military talents. That said, Grand finds it difficult enough to turn down a direct appeal from “an idiot I was at West Point with” that he and Batchelor agree in March 1875 to meet Custer in Washington D.C. where they will back him as he presents evidence at a Congressional Hearing. In Washington, the pair soon learns that Custer is not much changed from his West Point days. The man still has a high opinion of himself, a big mouth, and a knack for making dangerous enemies, but despite Custer’s self-destructive behavior, Grand and Batchelor manage to get him out of Washington alive. It’s when the detectives decide to visit Fort Abraham Lincoln, headquarters of Custer’s 7^thCavalry, before returning to London that things really get interesting.

M J Trow

Fort Abraham Lincoln is a political hotbed where wives compete over the accomplishments of their officer-husbands, Custer’s adjutants despise him, and the main means of entertainment consists of spreading rumors and gossip about rivals. Despite the monotony of everyday life in the Black Hills for civilians and soldiers alike, Grand and Bachelor are just beginning to enjoy themselves a bit when the body of a young soldier is discovered some distance from the fort. Grand and Bachelor, like everyone else, assume that the trooper was killed by the Lakota Sioux until they notice that the soldier had been riding Custer’s horse when ambushed. Have Custer’s enemies followed him all the way to the Dakota Territory and are they still trying to kill him?

Bottom Line: The Black Hills is a nice combination of historical fact and fiction that uses touches of alternate reality and lots of comedy to create a mystery with a light touch. While the reader is unlikely ever to feel that Custer will really be killed off by the author, it is still fun to watch Grand and Bachelor rescue the oblivious colonel time after time. Trow effortlessly blends real and fictional characters in a way that makes it easy to forget which is which (my personal favorite is Calamity Jane). And perhaps best of all, the solution to the mystery of who is after Custer, and why, is not one that many will see coming (well, at least I didn’t see it coming). 

Review Copy provided by Crème de la Crème an imprint of Severn House Publishers Ltd. 

Machines Like Me - Ian McEwan

Machines Like Me is Ian McEwan’s cautionary tale about a future that we just may not be ready for when it finally arrives. Synthetic humans (robots) are coming and they may be far smarter than we are when they get here. That may not sound like much of a problem, but what happens when the robots figure that out and become bored with us and our human limitations. Will they have the patience to put up with us or will they decide to take over for our own good?  

McEwan ventures into the alternate history genre here to explore some of the what-ifs of the accelerating pace at which we are introducing artificial intelligence and robotics into our everyday world. The novel is set in a 1980s version of the world very different from the one recorded by the history books. Margaret Thatcher is driven from office in disgrace after badly losing the Falklands War; John Lennon is alive and well and the Beatles are still a band; and the Brighton hotel bombing this time does manage to kill a British prime minister (Thatcher’s successor). Oh, and Jimmy Carter wins a second term, John Kennedy survives his trip to Dallas, and novelist Joseph Heller finds fame with a book he titles Catch-18. You get the idea.

Charlie Friend, thirty-two years old and single, takes great pride in the fact that he doesn’t have to answer to any boss. Charlie lives alone in a London apartment where he sits in front of his computer all day long buying and selling stocks, earning just enough to cover his day-to-day needs. He is not the most ambitious guy in the world, and when he learns that what he earns from day-trading stocks is just below the wage of the average Londoner, Charlie is proud that he is doing that well without having to answer to anyone. He is not the type to worry much about his future. Now, though, Charlie is falling in love with Miranda, the student who lives in the flat above his - even though she does not seem to feel the same way about him. But after blowing all the money his recently deceased mother left him on one of the world’s first synthetic humans, Charlie may have just stumbled onto a way of binding Miranda to him. He lets her help him design the personality of Adam, the near-perfect physical specimen who will now be sharing Charlie’s flat. 

Ian McEwan

Miranda, as it turns out, has secrets of her own, secrets that she can’t hide from someone like Adam who never sleeps and spends all of his spare time researching and learning about the world into which he has so suddenly been thrust. And after Adam warns Charlie that Miranda is not really who she seems to be, things begin to get tricky – especially after Adam declares his own love for Miranda.

Machines Like Me explores whether or not artificial intelligence can ever understand human emotions, motivations, and reasoning. Will it be possible for such a created consciousness to grow beyond the black and white rules it has initially been designed to follow? And if not, how will the inevitable conflict be resolved? What is to be done when our synthetic humans decide that they know what’s good for us better than we do. Which of us crosses the line first?

This quote (page 370 of the Large Print edition) should give all of us, researchers included, something to think about: “They couldn’t understand us, because we couldn’t understand ourselves. Their learning programs couldn’t accommodate us. If we didn’t know our own minds, how could we design theirs and expect them to be happy alongside us?”

Bottom Line: Machines Like Me is a bit frustrating at times because of the long, detailed digressions that McEwan strays into that do not always do much to advance the “discussion” of the potential conflict between artificial intelligence and human intelligence - but the patient reader will be well rewarded for his patience. I suppose that Machines Like Me will be most easily appreciated by science fiction and alternate reality fans, but it is a thought provoking philosophical novel as well.

The Mirage

I don’t care what you say.  This one will, at least at first, make you feel a bit uncomfortable.  In the tradition of the best alternate history fiction, Matt Ruff uses The Mirage to turn history on its head in a way that makes one think.  American readers, in particular, will be forced to do some soul searching as they make their way through the mad journey that Ruff has prepared for them.

The Mirage, you see, begins on 11/9/2001 just as a group of Christian fundamentalists highjack four Iraqi airliners.  Two of the jets crash into the World Trade Towers in Baghdad, one into the Arab Defense Ministry in Riyadh, and one heads for Mecca but, before it can reach its target there, passengers manage to crash it into the ground.  Soon, the United Arab States (UAS) are waging a payback war on terror and have invaded the East Coast.  Washington D.C. is turned into a Green Zone safe haven for the invaders who are ruthlessly attacked almost every time they venture outside its protected perimeter.  Eight years later, the invaders are still there, hoping to leave a stable government behind before they call the war done.

Ruff softens the shock of this jarring setup by creating several sympathetic Iraqi characters tasked with the mission of stopping further Christian terrorist attacks on Iraq and the rest of the UAS.  Mustafa al Baghdadi and his cohorts spend their days tracking threats and terrorist cells, hoping to stay one step ahead of the fundamentalists who want to bring more mayhem to the country.  So far, with a lot of luck, they have been successful.  But when Mustafa, during one of his arrests, finds an old newspaper that a suspect has hidden away, his world is shaken. 

This is not just any old newspaper.  It is a back issue of The New York Times dated 9/12/2001, and it tells a surreal story that Mustafa cannot comprehend.  Surely, it is a hoax; it has to be.  Then other captured terrorists begin to tell stories similar to what is in the newspaper, and Mustafa starts to doubt the world he lives in.  Is it all a mirage?  If it is, who is responsible and how did they do it?

Matt Ruff

Readers will enjoy the way that Ruff uses the main players from the 9/11 murders in The Mirage.  Most of them are there, but in entirely new roles – some of which are guaranteed to offend as many readers as they will please.  More intriguingly, others who had no actual connection with events following 9/11 participate here in key roles: David Koresh, Lee Atwater, Timothy McVeigh, and Terry Nichols, among them.  Although some will skip them, Ruff uses clever Wikipedia-like entries as chapter-breaks that should not be ignored because they fill in the narrative blanks, making it easier to understand this strange new world.

The ending Ruff chose for The Mirage, however, is weak.  His story, and his readers, deserve better.  Based upon the rest of the story, it is difficult to argue that the ending is too fantastic to be taken seriously (and the argument cannot be attempted without straying into “spoiler” territory).  But it is, and it lessens the impact that I belief Ruff was going for in The Mirage.  That said, do not miss this one because it is still one of the more intriguing novels you will encounter in 2012.

Rated at: 4.0

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

Alternate history, that literary genre in which an historical event is tweaked, removed, or reversed, can be interesting.  It is always great fun to play the “what if game” with the actual events of our shared past: “what if the South had won the Civil War,” “what if the Normandy invasion had failed,” or “what if John Kennedy had not been assassinated?”  Much fascinating fiction has originated from those and similar questions.  Jim Fergus plays a more subtle version of the game in One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd.”  He wonders what might have happened if, in 1875, President Grant and Little Wolf, chief of the Cheyenne nation, had agreed to exchange one thousand white women for an equal number of Indian horses.

Grant is at first shocked and disgusted by Little Wolf’s proposition, but he has to admit that the idea makes sense.  Since, in the Cheyenne culture, children belong to the tribes of their mothers, Little Wolf sees the “Brides for Indians” program as the best chance to assimilate his people peacefully into the white culture that seems destined to overwhelm his own.  Grant, on his part, hopes that the women can influence their husbands into accepting, or at least tolerating, white ways and religions to the point that open warfare with the tribe can be avoided.  Thus is born the secret “Brides for Indians” program, a program that will require Grant’s people to scour mental institutions, debtors’ prisons, and other jails and prisons in search of the one thousand women needed for Grant to meet his part of the bargain. 

May Dodd, resident of a Chicago mental institution, is one of the first women recruited to go west to meet her new Indian husband.  May has been institutionalized by her father for the unpardonable sin of bearing two children out of wedlock to a man beneath her social status.  To her father’s way of thinking, no woman in her right mind could do such a thing – his daughter has to be insane.  Rather than spend the rest of her life locked up, May, ever the adventurer, leaps at the chance to regain her freedom by becoming an Indian bride for the required two-year commitment. 

Author Jim Fergus

One Thousand White Women is told largely in the words of a series of journals May begins to record almost the moment she decides to make her break for a new life.  Through these journals, we meet May’s colorful traveling companions and learn of their adventures and hardships as they begin their new lives as wives of men with whom they have so little in common.  The women, although they will suffer the hardships of winter encampment, inter-tribal warfare, kidnappings, and one horrible night when their men succumb to the evils of alcohol, find that they are learning as much about what is good and proper in society as they are teaching.  But is it all too late to save the Cheyenne from what the army has planned for them?

The audio version of One Thousand White Women is read by Laura Hicks who does a remarkable job with the various accents and languages she has to deal with: two of the characters are Irish, one is Swiss, one is from the Deep South, one is an ex-slave, and some are French.  Hicks handles all of these accents well, in addition to voicing a believable version of the Cheyenne language.  This one should appeal to a variety of readers, among them: alternate history fans, western fans, and those who enjoy feminist novels with especially strong female characters.

Rated at: 5.0

The White Garden

Everyone knows that, one day in 1941, famed British author Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets with heavy rocks before stepping into the cold waters of the river Ouse. Perhaps because of the extra weight she carried into the water with her, Woolf’s body would not be found until three weeks later. Woolf’s family and friends, aware that she was often in a suicidal frame-of-mind, were not surprised by her end, so the official verdict of suicide was never challenged. Now, in an intriguing piece of alternate history, The White Garden, Stephanie Barron examines the possibilities of what may have happened during the three weeks between Woolf’s disappearance and the recovery of her body in the Ouse.

American Jo Bellamy has come to Kent’s Sissinghurst Castle to copy the layout of its famous White Garden for a wealthy client who wants to replicate it on the grounds of his Long Island home. Imogen Cantwell, the castle’s head gardener, has grudgingly agreed to allow Jo full access to the White Garden so that she can gather all the measurements and photos she will need to create a perfect copy of the grounds for her client. But, for Jo, this is not just a way to generate revenue for her business; it is an opportunity to visit the part of England in which her beloved grandfather, who killed himself just three weeks earlier, lived for the first two decades of his life.

After Jo discovers that her grandfather spent several months as an apprentice gardener at Sissinghurst (the home of Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West), her search for garden records from that period leads her to the discovery of what appears to be a partial diary written in the hand of Virginia Woolf herself. Oddly, however, the journal is bound with a note indicating that, when it was boxed for storage, it actually belonged to Jo’s grandfather. Even odder, the first entry in Woolf’s handwriting is dated the day after her supposed drowning in the river Ouse.

Already puzzled by her grandfather’s so out-of-character suicide, Jo now starts to wonder if her trip to Sissinghurst might have everything to do with the timing of his death. Her quest to have the first half of the journal authenticated, and to find its missing pages, draws the attention of others wanting to exploit the astounding journal for their own purposes. For Jo, it is all about understanding why her grandfather felt it necessary to end his life; others want a piece of the fame, and profit, which will result from proximity to a journal that might literally rewrite a significant portion of literary history.

The White Garden works because of the way Barron mixes her intriguing plot of alternate history with a large cast of interesting characters. Admittedly, some of the characters are a little too close to stereotypes to be completely effective but, in the context of the story, even those characters contribute to the fun. Fans of Virginia Woolf, and Anglophiles of all stripes, are likely to enjoy this one a great deal. I certainly did.

Rated at: 5.0

Resistance

Really good alternate history does more than simply speculate about one or two of the limitless “what if” possibilities offered by the past. In the best writing of this type those “what ifs” are just starting points for stories that go well beyond the big picture to consider what the historical changes would mean to ordinary people caught up in their wake. Resistance, Owen Sheens’ debut novel, does exactly that, and does it remarkably well.

What if the allied invasion of France had been repelled by a German army fully prepared to meet the invaders on the beaches of Normandy? What if that failed invasion resulted in such a devastating defeat for the Allies that Germany was almost immediately able to land her soldiers on England’s southern coast and begin a march to London?

The women of the isolated Olchon Valley of Wales did not even have time to wonder “what if” before they woke up one morning to find that every one of their husbands and sons had vanished, leaving behind nothing to indicate where they had gone or when they might return. But Maggie, oldest of the women, knew in her heart that the men would be gone for a long time when she saw that her husband William had left their cows un-milked, something he had never done in all their years together. She was able to convince the rest of the women that their husbands had joined the resistance, something they hardly dare speak of even among themselves, and that it is their duty to work the farms on their own while their men were away.

And that is exactly what they try to do until a small German patrol suddenly appears in the valley on a mission of its own. Despite the women’s efforts to disguise the absence of the valley’s men, Captain Albrecht Wolfram quickly reaches the correct conclusion that the women are alone and that their husbands are involved in fighting the German invasion. Albrecht knows that he should report the situation to his superiors but he realizes that, if he does so, everyone in the valley will be killed as an example of what will happen to the families of others who join the underground resistance. Albrecht has already seen the worst that war has to offer and he does not have the stomach to cause the deaths of these innocent women. He, in fact, realizes that his patrol has dropped through the cracks of the German command and decides to keep his men safely in the valley long after their initial mission has been completed.

When harsh winter weather sets in, making it impossible for the soldiers to leave the valley even if they want to, both the women and the soldiers come to realize that they must depend on each other for survival. The women grudgingly reach the conclusion that their resistance is no longer possible. Out of necessity the two groups learn to accommodate each other and over the long winter months personal relationships change to the point that both sides almost forget that they are at war with each other. What they have in common is more important than their differences.

But seasons change, and winter is always followed by spring. Warmer weather opens the valley to the outside world again and the realities of life under a ruthless occupying force. Are the women in more danger from German reprisal or from their neighbors who see them as collaborators? Should they have done more to resist the valley’s invaders? What will their husbands think of them? Those are just some of the questions that readers will ponder long after they turn the last page of Resistance.

This one is not to be missed.

Rated at: 5.0

The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970)

Written in 1970, this pessimistic time travel novel, a Hugo Award finalist, begins in 1978 when Brain Cheney is more or less drafted into a mysterious government project. Chaney is a Biblical scholar of sorts whose book debunking certain ancient scrolls has irritated many Christians around the country but he is also a professional demographer and has already produced one report for the government predicting how current trends will impact the near future. The government believes him to be perfect for this new project. Who better to send into the future in the new time machine invented by the Bureau of Weights and Measures than a man experienced in predicting that very future?

Interestingly, Brian Cheney and the two military officers drafted into the project with him travel only as far as twenty years into the future, to the turn of the new century, because government officials are so concerned with what they see as a dark future for the United States that they hope to learn enough from the time travel to change that future. Today’s readers, of course, have lived beyond the years visited by these time travelers so their adventurous trip into the future has become our past. As a result, The Year of the Quiet Sun reads as much like an alternate history novel at times as it does as a story of time travel.

Cheney, the only civilian time-traveler of the team, has little regard for politicians and resents the way that the President and his staff order that the first trip into the future be only to 1980 so that the President can determine whether or not he will be re-elected. The three travelers, who can go into the future only one-at-a-time due to the limitations of their vehicle, get that information for him but they also return to 1978 with news of the tremendous unrest and violence that is already impacting the future of America’s major cities, especially Chicago. It is when they are sent forward to 2000, and just beyond, to learn the effectiveness of the President’s attempt to save the country that the novel really takes off.

The second half of the book centers itself around realistic military skirmishes between government troops and the rebels who are intent on overthrowing the government with help from the Chinese, but it also details the evolving relationships of the three time- travelers and the head of their project, the beautiful Katherine with whom two of the men have become particularly smitten. Readers who may have found the pace of the book’s first half to be a bit slow in its set-up of the second half action will find themselves well-rewarded for staying with the book to the end. Tucker’s vision of the horrible future that could have resulted from the radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s is a horrifying one.

Tucker even saves a nice little surprise for his readers until near the end, one that more astute readers than me may figure out earlier, but one that made me laugh out loud at its cleverness.

Rated at: 4.0

The Man in the High Castle (1962)

The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s Hugo Award winning 1962 novel, is credited by many with the creation of the alternate history genre. It may not have been the first alternate history novel published but it does seem to be the one that jump-started the genre. And what an alternate history is tells.

Franklin Roosevelt was assassinated in the early years of the Great Depression and America’s contribution to the Allied efforts during World War II were limited by its delayed recovery from those disastrous years. In fact, Germany and Japan have won the war and have pretty much divided the globe between them, with Japan in control of Asia and Germany of Europe and Africa. Even the United States has been divided between the two: Japan has the western part of the country, Germany the eastern part and there is a buffer of “free states” between the two sections. Almost twenty years later, Germany, still determined to finish its extermination of the Jews, has decided to do the same to dark-skinned peoples and has turned Africa into a massive killing ground.

Japan, on the other hand, rules its territories under the rule of law and those living in the San Francisco area, where much of the novel takes place, are the lucky ones. Americans, especially white-skinned ones, are definitely second class citizens in the Pacific States of America, but they do not live in fear the way that residents of the German territory do. However, Germany is the more powerful of the two superpowers and is able to demand the handover of all Jews identified in the PSA.

The Man in the High Castle focuses on ordinary Americans, many of whom were children during the war and who do not remember much of pre-war life, as they try to make their way from day-to-day. Dick cleverly included one character, Hawthorn Abendsen, who has written an alternate history of his own, a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in which Germany and Japan lost the war (an alternate history within an alternate history). The world described in Abendsen’s book is very different from the real world and is an irritant to both the Germans and the Japanese. But, as usual, it is the Germans who want to take things to the extreme by exacting their revenge on the author and German authorities have sent someone to infiltrate Abendsen’s supposed fortress of a hideout.

Dick chose to end The Man in the High Castle in such an abrupt and ambiguous manner that most readers will be left scratching their heads and trying to reconcile 99% of the book’s content to what is disclosed on its last three pages. Readers usually enjoy surprise endings but this is not a very satisfying one and they are likely to find it more annoying than surprising, something that will ruin their overall perception of the novel. I found the core of Dick’s plot to be well crafted and enjoyable but the book’s ending is the reason I cannot rate it higher than I have.

Rated at: 3.0

Resurrection Day

October 1962 was a nerve-wracking time for most Americans but it was only much later that I learned that I probably should have been closer to “terrified” than to “nervous.” I remember well reading the headlines and short articles in my thin local newspaper about the confrontation between Khrushchev and Kennedy that was happening in Cuba. There was a sense of great danger in the articles but I don’t recall talking with anyone who really believed that Russia and the United States would actually fire nuclear missiles at each other over the incident. Of course, I was only 14 at the time and may have been spared the truth about what adults were really thinking, but subsequent release of details about the confrontation show how utterly naïve so many of us were. (I do remember one of the infamous nuclear bomb drills, the old “duck and cover” routine, at my school that week but even that didn’t really scare me since I had already experienced several of those silly things.)

Resurrection Day, by Brendan DuBois, starts with the Kennedy-Khrushchev stalemate over the nuclear-tipped missiles that Khrushchev was installing in Cuba at Castro’s “invitation.” But DuBois takes an alternate path, the path we came so close to actually following, and explores what might have happened if Khrushchev had not blinked at nearly the last possible moment and agreed to remove his nuclear weapons from Cuba.

Ten years later, 1972-America has still not recovered from the devastation of the short war with Russia. Washington D.C. is still a blank spot on the map, New York City is off limits and has been fenced in by the military, and the country is still partially dependent on food supplies from Great Britain in order to feed people in its major cities. Russia has been effectively wiped off the map and its survivors forced into primitive living conditions in which their long term survival is still in doubt. It seems that the Soviet arsenal was greatly overrated and contained far fewer missiles capable of reaching the U.S. than had been thought before the war.

Carl Landry, military veteran turned Boston newspaper reporter, opens up a can of worms when he refuses to end his investigation into the murder of an old man who had contacted him with promises of a huge story. Despite being warned off the story by his editor and the paper’s resident military censor, Landry keeps snooping around and begins to uncover, with the help of his new British girlfriend, secrets about the true condition of New York City, the upcoming presidential election, and a plot between British and American military forces.

Brendan DuBois has created an intriguing version of America struggling to recover from the loss of its major city and its capitol. It is an America in which many want to believe that Kennedy survived the destruction of Washington D.C. and will return to power with a plan to rebuild the country while others despise him and blame him for being so trigger happy that he started a war that resulted in the deaths of millions of Americans and Russians. It is a world in which most of America’s former allies seem to delight in the fact that she is on her knees and needs their help, a condition in which some wish her to remain forever more. It is a country filled with paranoid citizens who truly do have to worry about being watched, arrested, and sent to detoxification camps if they say the wrong things to the wrong people.

Resurrection Day is not perfect. It probably overstates the difficulty that America would have rebounding from the kind of limited nuclear war described, one she actually won, and some of the characters, particularly the chief villain of the piece, are a bit on the stereotypical side and the ending feels a little too formulaic, too much like the culmination of so many other “spy thrillers,” But fans of alternate history will appreciate the world that DuBois created for us to ponder and should take a look at Resurrection Day.

Rated at: 3.5