Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Episode 5 of a fantasy World War II, 12 Jul 2003
By A Customer
The fifth and penultimate volume of Turtledove's parallel history of the second world war in a world where technology uses magic instead of engineering. Like previous books in the series it covers about a year of the war's history, corresponding roughly to the period from late 1943 to late 1944, shortly after the liberation of Paris.
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 these 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 enought to begin to understand why they might have acted that way. As one person says in this 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 blond.
Both the strategic outline of the war and many local details of the books have been inspired by actual events. There are no surprises at all in the main historical sequence of events. However, there are a large cast of "viewpoint characters," and Turtledove makes you care enough about what happens to them to make the books compulsive reading. They may also inspire the reader to pick up a real history and find out which of these stories are based on fact. The answer is, most of them.
Highly Recommended.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The 5th out of 6 novels, read the rest 1st :), 23 Aug 2004
All in all I think this is probably my favourite out of this series, certainly out of the last 2 or 3.The same characters are used from the last series of novels, as we see the 2nd world war coming into its final plays. Algarve (Germany) is really starting to crack at the edges, Unkerlant (USSR) is starting to push in the summer as well as the winter. As well as other events that anyone aware of the history of WW2 will be rather familar with. These "main" characters continue to feel real, (often in multi view point novels I find the characters to be rather thin and flimsy). However I do feel that a lot of the supporting characters do feel rather like stage props now and then. What made me like this novel so much was that I feel Turtledove has strayed further from the given WW2 history in this novel than he has in previous novels. Not in ways that will change the outcome, but in ways that feel more natural (rather than "historicaly" accurate, like the shoe horning in of the sniper battles in Sulingen / Stalingrad.) The biggest nod in this has to come in the form of the secret magic research. To those of you who have started this series I highly recomened this book, to those who haven't I would recomend the World at War and Great series over these, I do think this is probably Turtledoves weakest series. However thats not to put these books down.
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by Harry Turtledove
by Harry Turtledove
by Harry Turtledove
by Raymond E. Feist
![Primeval Series 2 [DVD] [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51oGqd8Pj-L._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
DVD ~ Douglas Henshall
