Harry Turtledove has caught a lot of flack lately among hardcore alternate history fans.  I’ve got to admit to having disappointed in some of his later offerings myself.  In Ruled Britannia, Turtledove shows why he became popular in the first place.  This an excellent book with one minor flaw.  I would highly recommended it both as a good read and as an example of how to do a good story.  It is also a good example of the amount of research that it takes to do truly excellent alternate history, and how to use that research to create a solid background rather than just doing an infodump.  There are several other reviews floating around so I won’t belabor the details of the setup.  Spanish Armada wins.  Spain puts a puppet king and queen on the English throne and keeps them there at the points of Spanish swords.  Nine years later elements in England are planning to rise against the Spaniards, with the impending death of the Spanish king as the point of opportunity.  Both the plotters and the Spaniard want to use Shakespeare and his company to further their political ends.

Turtledove does a very good job of building toward the climax.  Will the revolt happen as planned?  Will it succeed?  You feel the momentum building throughout the first three-quarters of the story.  That’s very well done.  The only flaw I saw in the book is that tying up the last few loose ends seems to take way too long.  This would have been a stronger book if the last say forty pages had been maybe half that many pages.  Other than that, as I said, Turtledove did a really excellent job on this one.