Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
World at War continues, 22 Oct 2002
This book, the fourth in the World at War series, has all the characters we have come to know (and love?) in the previous books. Their adventures continue apace, and the characters continue to develop in interest. For those who read swiftly through the first three books, this one holds the attention even more as the action see-saws between Algarve and Unkerlant. Our heroes are involved in skirmishes and full scale battles. An excellent holiday read...it will take an avid reader about a week to finish, or for those who enjoy a bedtime book, reading one section each evening, detailing the adventures of one of the key players, it will take several weeks to reach the end. An excellent continuation of the series.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Episode 4 of a fantasy World War II, 24 Jul 2006
The fourth volume of Turtledove's six-part parallel history of the second world war in a world where technology uses magic instead of engineering. Most of the books of the series covers about a year of the war's history: in terms of equivalent time this one is the shortest, corresponding roughly to Spring, Summer and Autumn 1943; it starts immediately after the Algarvian surrender at Sulingen (e.g. the German sixth army's surrender at Stalingrad) and the main thrust of the book describes the attack on the Durrwangen (Kursk) salient.
This series of novels all have "Darkness" in the title but they are sometimes referred to as the "Derlavi" series, that being the name given in the stories to the huge continent which is historically equivalent to Eurasia.
The full series is:
Into the Darkness
Darkness Descending
Through the Darkness
Rulers of the Darkness
Jaws of Darkness
Out of the Darkness
Most alternative history books are "what if" stories which begin with a situation exactly as in our real history, change one detail, and depict how things might have gone on from there. Turtledove's "Darkness" series, and a similar series he wrote about the American Civil war, beginning with "Sentry Peak" are quite different.
These novels describe how real events in our own world might have seemed to the people taking part in them. However, by mixing up details like North and South, skin colour, hair colour, etc, the author makes it easier for the reader to put aside the strong opinions which everyone holds about events like World War II. This helps you to identify with all the characters sufficiently, not to approve of what they did, but enough to begin to understand why they might have acted that way. As one person says in the following book, nobody is a villain in his own story.
Sometimes the parallels between the fantasy world of these book are impishly amusing, for instance that the role taken in our world by Finland is played by an hot equatorial country whose inhabitants are more like Zulus than Finns. The North African desert becomes the "Land of the Ice People". Sometimes the irony is a lot more biting - for instance the "Kaunians" corresponding to the Jews are tall, fair skinned, and blonde.
Both the strategic outline of the war and many local details of the books have been inspired by actual events. There are no major surprises in the main historical sequence of the story, although in a few places it has been simplified, and one or two of the countries in the story do not have a single precise analogue.
"Sibiu", for instance is an island nation in roughly the equivalent geographic location to Britain. However, in terms of the events of the war the country in this series whose history corresponds most closely to Britain is Lagoas, while for the first three books the history of Sibiu, which was conquered by the Algarvians early in the war, matches much more closely what happened in the real world to Norway or Holland.
From this book onward Sibiu has no precise real world analogue, although the events which happen to characters from Sibiu do bear some similarity to real events in many parts of occupied europe as the Nazis were driven back.
The main exitement in the books come from the uncertainty about what will happen to the large cast of "viewpoint characters," the vast majority of whom are fictional, and Turtledove makes you care enough about what happens to them to make the books compulsive reading. Turtledove is firm enough to allow the occasional sympathetic character to get killed so that the reader cannot take anything for granted. For example, one of the principal heroes of the series up to now who had survived great dangers is killed in tragically ironic circumstances in this book.
These novels may also inspire the reader to pick up a work of real history and find out which of these stories are based on fact. If you read Anthony Beevor's "Stalingrad" and "Berlin" or Simon Jenkins' "Armageddon" after reading the "Darkness" series you will appreciate that Turtledove is not exactly writing fiction.
Highly Recommended.
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by Harry Turtledove
by Harry Turtledove
by Harry Turtledove
by Harry Turtledove
by Raymond E. Feist
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