2005 alternate-history science fiction war story. The "uptimers" from
2021 are helping their Allied counterparts from 1942, but both sides
have future tech and people to exploit.
The book starts off slowly, reintroducing us to a bunch of
viewpoints from book one and adding plenty of new ones. But it picks
up soon enough, and keeps a balance between individual stories and the
big picture development of the war… nearly. So very nearly.
A side issue is that general knowledge from the future has got out,
and people are judged by their future histories. Hitler has purged
people, or not, based on their counterparts' performance at Nuremberg;
all of a sudden everyone's laughing at J. Edgar Hoover; Kim Philby is
only still around because he went into hiding faster than Burgess or
Maclean; and apparently only one person has thought of signing up
Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra (mostly as a legal fiction, to make
money on existing recordings brought from the future).
A continuing concern, also handled well, is that stocks of high-tech
ammunition (anything from bullets to missiles) are strictly limited
and irreplaceable, and it's reasonable for the enemy to send
just-barely-threatening attacks that still need be knocked down, in
order to reduce the future-Allies' supplies. Fair enough.
Where my disbelief ceased to be suspended and plummeted into the
depths, though, was the German invasion of England. Which is a good
excuse to link to the late Alison Brooks' analysis of Operation
Sealion. Yes, sure, the
Germans have made a very temporary peace with Russia and switched back
to bombing British airfields rather than cities, and have advanced
technology to help… but even without the expense of high-tech
weapons, the historical German forces just didn't have the transport
capacity to make an invasion work, nor the naval forces to defend that
transport capacity. (And there's some evidence that they knew it: much
of the invasion preparation of 1940 seems to have been hollow theatre
for the benefit of both the English and the lower-ranking Germans.)
Anyway, that's not where we're told the sexy new tech is going: it's
going into small numbers of ground-attack Me262s and anti-ship
missiles, and some hand-held anti-armour weapons for the infantry. But
as Brooks says, "[t]he difficulty facing the Germans was not beating
the British Army, but it was getting across the Channel in the face of
the RN and the RAF". But better transport boats don't go whoosh and
zoom.
So while some of the characterisation is pretty decent (though I'm
unconvinced by Hoover turning traitor just to try to cover his
embarrassment) I can't help feeling that Birmingham is losing his grip
on the bigger picture, the industrial economics that are a vital part
of a war at this scale – especially since militarily he really only
looks closely at the Japanese invasion of Australia, their attack on
Hawaii, and the German invasion of England.
There's a third volume dealing with the conclusion of the war, and a
second trilogy covering Stalin's invasion of Europe ten years later
(spoilers?), but after this (and seeing some suggestions that the
third volume is the weakest and most inconclusive of the trilogy) I
fear I feel no enthusiasm for them.
Indeed, I may be being harsher on this series than it deserves,
perhaps because it would only have taken fairly minor changes to make
it something I could really have enjoyed.
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