Book Reviews

Book Reviews

By: Dale Cozort

Fox On the Rhine

Alternate history fans may have missed this one because it has been marketed as mainstream fiction rather than as science fiction. It is definitely alternate history. A German officer needs to sneeze at a crucial time, and a result doesn’t push a certain briefcase back under a table. As a result, Hitler dies in July 1944. The German conspirators against Hitler are then mopped up by Himmler, who has a contingency plan laid out for just such an event. He has Goring assassinated, supposedly as part of the plot against Hitler. Himmler then uses a mixture of coercion and incentives to win the reluctant support of the German officer corp.

That’s probably enough to give you a handle on what the book is all about without spoiling too much of it for you. Is this a perfect book? No, but it is well enough written that it has kept me turning pages through well over 300 pages. One negative is that the authors probably overestimate the potential impact of a German mass-deployment of the ME-262 as a fighter by a factor of five or ten. Yes, the ME-262 was a good aircraft. No, it wasn’t capable of totally stopping the US bomber raids in late 1944, even if Hitler’s orders to make it a bomber were eliminated in July 1944.

In a situation less desperate than Germany’s, the ME-262 would have been considered a prototype until at least October of 1944. In the summer of 1944, engines had a life of around 10 hours before they needed to be replaced. The controls tended to freeze up in even relatively shallow dives, because the speed got high enough that the air flow around the plane created pockets of vacuum. Since the plane’s controls didn’t work in that vacuum, quite a few ME-262s crashed with their pilots frantically trying to pull out of a dive. Even once the worst of those problems were resolved, the plane required a great deal of new infrastructure: new longer runways, new tactics, retrained pilots, and an inventory of spare parts.

The ME-262 could have had an impact in late 1944, but the Allies would have quickly developed tactics to cope with it, just as they did in our time-line. Sure an American P51 couldn’t catch a Me-262 in level flight, but if the P51 climbed high enough and then went into a dive, it could catch a Me-262. If it didn’t succeed in that, it could try to lure the jet into a dogfight, where the more experienced US pilots would usually win. If that didn’t work, US fighters could lurk near the special runway where the ME-262 took off, and shoot down the jet when it slowed down to land. The US had enough fighters that they could even orbit around the field until a jet started to take off, then down it before it got up to speed from the takeoff. Of course the Germans countered that by creating long flak belts to protect the areas where ME-262’s went through on their way in or out, but the US could afford to lose planes at a far higher rate than the Germans.

Another problem: the book doesn’t deal with the implications of Ultra in terms of the ability of the Germans to pull off surprises. On the other hand, it does seem to get the ground combat down very well, and the politics are usually plausible, though they don’t always go the way I consider most likely.

I classify the problems as relative minor. This is not a bad book at all.

Oceans of Eternity By: Steve Stirling

This is the third book in the series that started with "Island in the Sea Of Time". I consider this the best book in a very good series. It does get a little more heavily into the military aspects of the emerging world than I would have really liked to see, but the war scenes are well done and very plausible. I’m not sure what to think about the way the conflict with Walker is resolved. It kind of comes out of left field, but at the same time, once I thought about it a while it seemed logical and to some extent fitting.

The interactions between the locals and the people from Nantucket are very believable, with a lot of very well thought-out touches like the way the various allied people take to Marine discipline and to Christianity. They bring their own cultural perspectives to the new situations, being changed by the institutions while at the same time subtly changing those institutions.

There was one small jarring note, a short scene that appears designed to provide a hook for future stories, but which doesn’t really seem to fit. Other than that, this is really good stuff--highly recommended. The author gets a lot of things right, ranging from culture to technology.

But What About The Prime Directive?

That, probably realistically, did not become a major theme of the ‘Island’ books. Contact happens, and is usually portrayed as having a positive impact on the cultures contacted—less so with Walker’s efforts, but almost uniformly when the contacts stem from the rest of the Islanders.

The “Prime Directive” type of thinking is diametrically opposed to the optimistic view of rapid change that is obvious in the Island series. What In a different universe, Stirling’s Islanders might have had to agonize over whether or not to have any contact with the less developed cultures around them. What are the issues, and which view of the world do I share?

“Prime Directive”-type thinking sees contact between cultures at radically different technological levels as inherently destructive to both cultures, physically and psychologically destructive to the less developed culture, and morally destructive to the more advanced one. It advocates leaving the less advanced culture alone until it has time to develop it’s own advanced culture. Unfortunately or fortunately, that’s not realistic on a single planet like ours, though there have been a few cases where technologically primitive people have been ‘protected’ from progress by one group or another, usually missionaries of some kind. It might be somewhat more realistic in the case of the Islanders where they have a monopoly of advanced technology at the start of the stories.

Would the Islanders have been in a superior position morally or practically if they had stayed on their island and left the rest of the world alone, assuming (unrealistically) that they could? In some ways, definitely. Rapid change, even when promoted by the nicest people for the most noble reasons, can be destructive to both cultures and the people in them. That’s a problem both morally and practically. The moral issues are frankly very slippery and emotional, so I’ll start with the practical ones.

Practically, rapid change that destroys cultures raises some issues. First, it restricts the options available for future development. For example, let’s say that shortly after the development of agriculture in the Middle East, a self-sustaining island of the culture surrounding that development had been transported to an appropriate area of the New World. The New World develops much more quickly, but with Old World crops and domestic animals. The development of corn to the point of being a staple crop was a matter of thousands of years of development. Given existing crops with their potential already developed, corn probably would never have become a food crop. Neither, in all likelihood would sunflowers, potatoes, and many other crops. Would the innovations from the transplanted colony outweigh the loss of those food crops? I suspect that the answer to that depends on when and where you ask the question.

That’s not a problem for the Islanders because they already have the benefit of the blending of most of the cultures of the world, but there is also a more subtle problem: Western civilization proved to be a workable way to create scientific and industrial revolutions. It was not necessarily a better way of organizing a society before those revolutions began, and it may not be superior in dealing with the next set of revolutions, whatever they may be. However, it is one of very few frameworks still available to us.

A second problem arises in the real world and in the world of ‘Islands’. The ‘Islands’ level of technology and organization is very good at people-control. If Nantucket itself doesn’t eventually become an exploitive dictatorship in a generation or two, one or more of its current friends certainly will, or some of their friends. In our world, the US and Britain hold their noses and support ‘their’ tin-pot dictators. The world of ‘Islands’ would certainly eventually face that same kind of choices.

The moral issues are even tougher. On the one hand, the idea of destroying a functioning human culture seems arrogant and repugnant, even if I don’t like some aspects of that culture. On the other hand, it is very true that letting cultures ‘develop their potential’ means condemning generation after generation of women to death in child-birth, or to the premature aging inherent in having and raising large families. It means condemning millions of people in hundreds of generations to a lifestyle that we would consider unacceptable in our country—short, hard lives that could be made easier by technology. It’s easy to forget that the people in these cultures are just as smart and human as we are, with just as much potential for producing an Einstein or a Hitler.

What do you think? Would the world of “Island" have been a better place with or without following the "Prime Directive"?

If you enjoyed these reviews, or if you are disappointed with them, please let me know. I always read and enjoy any feedback I can get.

Note: I'm still planning to start an 'e-mail to the editor' section soon. Please feel free to e-mail me. I'll only use your comments in the 'e-mail' section if you specify that it is okay to do so.