Microreview [book]: Through Darkest Europe, by Harry Turtledove

Harry Turtledove's Through Darkest Europe tackles religious fundamentalism, prejudice and violence through his classic use of an alternate history world.

A pair of investigators visit a notorious backwater and corrupt portion of the world, a part of the world that resists coming into the modern era. The local autocrat is trying to hold down religious fundamentalists from running amok, women are expected to be seen (but covered up, of course) and not heard. Prejudice, racism, sexism and violence on the streets are a daily event. You probably already are imagining some place in the Middle East, or Central Asia, perhaps. You could likely see the investigators in your mind eye, maybe played by Chris Pratt and Tom Cruise. Americans abroad, helping democracy and freedom.

But since this is a Harry Turtledove alternate history novel, you would be wrong. The place is the Grand Duchy of Italy, in an alternate world where Europe is the backwater, and the investigators are from the civilized republic of the Maghreb of North Africa, in his latest novel, Through Darkest Europe.

The novel relies mainly on the setup, the world and the characters much more than a high throttle plot to propel the narrative. The two investigators come to Italy and get into trouble of all kinds, caught in the midst of secular and religious violence. Khalid, the Muslim, reaches across divides to find a relationship with a local woman,Annarita ,who struggles against the prejudices and backwater nature of her homeland. Dawud, is a Jew, and even in the modern world, still suffers prejudice there, and even more within the Grand Duchy. His is the older, mordantly funny observational type, a nice contrast to Khalid as lead. Turtledove carefully have Khalid note that in a more just world free of all prejudice, his partner would be the senior one.

In that line, too, this is not a “better” world by any means, although I have some unanswered questions about the world. With the center of civilization switched from Europe, history has rhymed if not repeated from our world, with devastating wars between Iran and Iraq mentioned. There is also mention of a Holocaust like genocide of millions of people, but it is not a Jewish Holocaust. His alternate world’s Dar Al Islam may be as advanced and modern as Europe and America in our world, but it is not and hasn’t always been peace and roses since the rise of Egypt, the Maghreb and the other nations.

And yes, friends, since this is a Harry Turtledove, there is a tuckerization, something I have spotted in his work since the days of realizing who a used car dealer in The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump was in our world. This time, the tuckerization I spotted was of a famous SF character, an alternate history character no less. I got a chuckle out of that. This novel is not quite like Matt Ruff’s The Mirage (one of the books that explores this novel’s theme in a different way)  in that regard which is replete with parallel versions of characters from our world. Turtledove can and does play with the net fairly high up. Ruff’s The Mirage doesn’t bother to try and figure out why the Middle East is civilized and America is a backwater, he just goes with it. Turtledove’s two small changes in the philosophy of a key scholar in Europe, and one from the Islamic World is enough to put things on a very different course.

And truthfully, some of the descriptions of what The Grand Duchy of Italy pulled at my heart in the same way that I felt when ISIS wrecked the ruins of the city of Palmyra. Italian heritage of their ancient sites is poor and the description of the neglect of those places in Rome, a couple of which I have seen for myself, was devastating. If the author meant to invoke the destruction of Palmyra explicitly, then for me, he succeeded.

I think, if anything, Turtledove could have been even sharper and more poignant in his flipped world and missed a couple of chances to do so. Since the novel almost exclusively takes place in peninsular Italy, I wonder if in Turtledove’s world that not only are the glorious remnants of the past falling down, but why haven’t they long since been sold off. Maybe a comment or two about Roman statues transplanted to Tunis or Alexandria. Heck, there is a mention of the obelisk in front of the (sadly very crumbling) Pantheon in this world. I’d think that if Egypt was a powerful country in the civilized world, they’d long since have put a lot of pressure on the Grand Duchy of Italy to give back the dozen or so obelisks the Romans carted off from Egypt two millennia ago. The very secularized North African nations of Turtledove’s world, I think, would have a higher appreciation for artifacts from before the time of the Prophet and seek their return. There is stated admiration for the Roman ruins at Leptis Magna, for example, showcases this.

All in all, however, some of the value of Turtledove’s alternate histories is to see our world, or an aspect of what our world once was, through the lens of a timeline that never was and never could be. The book shows just how senseless religious fundamentalism really is, by showing that with just a couple of changes,the center of civilization could have been elsewhere, and the world turned upside down, with those forces of intolerance hate taking root elsewhere.

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The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for an effective and believable alternate world

Penalties: -1 for unignorable weakness in plot and story.


Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws


Reference:  Turtledove, Harry Through Darkest Europe, Tor Books, 2018]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Review: Three Miles Down by Harry Turtledove

This latest novel from the master of alternate history is part amusing, part terrifying, and mostly frustrating

Let's begin with the events that are part of real life:

On March 8, 1968, the Soviet submarine K-129 sank with 98 crew members in the middle of the North Pacific. The Soviet Navy made several attempts to find it, without success. In August of the same year, the American submarine Halibut located the site of the wreck and took photographs of it. As a result, President Nixon authorized a secret CIA mission to bring the submarine to the United States in order to seize its nuclear weapons and cryptography manuals. For that purpose, a specially modified ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, was built to resemble a drilling ship, but it actually carried an extendable claw that would grab the K-129 and pull it up to the surface. In 1974, the ship was sent to the Pacific, while businessman Howard Hughes, under CIA instructions, gave the press the cover story that the operation was merely about mining manganese in the ocean floor. As it turned out, the hull of the submarine was broken and only a small part of it could be recovered. To this day, the exact location of the wreck and what was found in it are classified information. In fact, the heated controversy that erupted when the operation was made publicly known led the CIA to invent its trademark "can neither confirm nor deny" response.

And here's where alternate history writer Harry Turtledove inserts the fictional hook: What if the K-129 was sunk by aliens? What if the CIA mission wasn't so much interested in finding the submarine as in getting to the crashed spaceship before the Soviets did? And what would such a technological treasure trove in American hands mean for the course of the Cold War?

Turtledove's novel Three Miles Down is advertised as a first contact story, but, at the risk of spoiling the last sentence of the last chapter, I must warn the reader that that description depends on a generous definition of "contact." The bulk of the novel is concerned with a fictional marine biologist/aspiring science fiction writer, Jerry Stieglitz, who is suddenly recruited to participate in the submarine recovery mission as a junior scientific advisor. Although his rank in the mission is rather low, he becomes instrumental in figuring out the secrets of the alien spaceship and designing protocols for first contact.

However, what little we get of actual "contact" isn't enough to compensate for the interminable political discussions that fill the book. In real life, the secret mission coincided with the final weeks of the Watergate crisis, and Turtledove takes advantage of every available chance to tell the reader what each character thinks of Nixon. A disconnect in worldviews quickly becomes evident: Jerry is the poster image of the '70s liberal hippie, but his positions sound jarringly retrograde to the 21st-century reader. During his preparation for first contact, he reflects on human history and concludes that "The settlement of the New World seemed about as close to contact with aliens as people had ever really come."

Yikes.

Three Miles Down is written in a longwinded style, pausing on each step of each small movement to describe it in full, painstaking, laborious, minutiose, detail. Even the simple action of staying in place gets the circumlocutionary transmogrification: instead of writing "The ship kept its position," Turtledove writes "She got there and she stayed there and nowhere else." This habit gets even more irritating when added to the book's penchant for the unprompted digression. Two characters may be discussing the structural stability of a piece of machinery, and if the reader blinks, they'll have switched to movie awards for adaptations of conspiracy theory literature. Another conversation starts with the bodies of dead sailors found under the sea and somehow swerves to fun facts on genre fiction market trends.

With a more compelling protagonist, these authorial quirks might be more palatable. However, Jerry Stieglitz is not easy to get used to. He thinks almost entirely in terms of pop culture references that he's always proud to assume other people don't know. Too often, he jumps to think of a science fiction story he's read so he can compare it with the situation he's in, which only contributes tiny moments of flavor to the novel at the cost of hearing Turtledove discreetly coughing in the background, pointing at his personal library. Whenever Jerry has an original idea, the rest of the characters congratulate him on having the unconventional creativity of a science fiction writer, which, in a book written by a science fiction writer, can't help but sound cringeworthily self-serving. And when he's not thinking of science fiction, his mind goes to a less savory place: at one point he looks at the spaceship "with an avidity he hadn't known since the very first time he opened a Playboy to the centerfold." Between making off-color remarks about women, coming up with private inside jokes about everything, and playing petty power games with his fiancée, Jerry comes off as a status-obsessed patriarch wannabe.

More than the narration of an adventure, Three Miles Down can be taken as a portrait of a pivotal era in Cold War tensions, in gender relations, and in the science fiction scene. There's almost as much plot dedicated to Jerry's newlywed domestic hurdles as to his dip into international spy secrets. The big promised moment is delayed for so long that the story comes very close to not even counting as alternate history. The reader who expects to see how alien contact will change the world will be sorely disappointed by this book. Its actual focus is on how alien contact changes one guy. If you can stomach the guy's personality, then you'll find something to enjoy here.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +1 for a rigorous handling of its timeline.

Penalties: −1 for outdated gender politics, −1 because the ending leaves the reader feeling cheated.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Turtledove, Harry. Three Miles Down [Tor, 2022].

Book Review: City in Chains

A well-executed fantasy story that is fighting yesterday's battles

I am going to be up front with the reader here and now: I cannot ever be fully objective about the oeuvre of Harry Turtledove. When I was an impressionable fourteen year old, I learned of his WorldWar series. For the unaware, that is his eight book series about an alien invasion that happens to land in the particularly eventful year of 1942. I inhaled those books, and then the eleven books of his Southern Victory (also called ‘Timeline-191’ or ‘TL191’ among online alternate history fans due to its point of divergence revolving around special order 191) series beginning with How Few Remain. I have read over forty of his books, as of writing, and he is the writer that gave me my enduring love of the alternate history genre. He is in a sense what I aspire to be as a writer, with several different speculative genres coexisting with a solid historical bedrock under all of them. I would not be the writer or indeed the man I am today without the hours and hours I spent reading his books, getting lost in his worlds. Not for nothing, his books consistently come with the blurb calling him “the master of alternate history.”

In the alternate history circles I frequent, the man’s work has something of a mixed reception. They say he relies too much on historical parallelism, such as his Southern Victory series quite clearly reenacting European history in the first half of the twentieth century in an American setting, or his Atlantis trilogy reenacting the early history of the United States on a landmass that consists of our world’s Nova Scotia to Florida, having drifted off of the mainland in prehistory. The man has had some deeply bizarre sex scenes in his work, some involving real people (although I will argue that Robert Conroy’s sex scenes are leaps and bounds worse). His work at points has had some very repetitive characterization (such as how often Sam Carsten is sunburned), as well as a few stock turns of phrase (“he said it with inevitability, like the sun will rise tomorrow”). As I have grown from an impressionable fourteen year old to a jaded twenty-eight year old, his books from the 2000s come off to me like the Star Wars prequels; with hindsight, I can see all the myriad flaws that others have pointed out, and many things could have been done better, but I still find myself enjoying the experience, and in awe of the worlds they opened up to me.

Much of the weaknesses of his big series are often connected to the fact that he had to pay for the college educations of his three daughters in quick succession, and writing is his sole source of income. He had to churn a lot out, and quickly, to give his children a future, and I can’t be mad at him for that. His work since then has been leaner, less dependent on well-trod periods of history, and with less bizarre weirdness (but plenty of fascinating weirdness). His book Three Miles Down (reviewed on this site by Arturo Serrano) is easily his most personal book, being a look at the Los Angeles the man himself grew up in, with plenty of wistfulness and added aliens. His Alpha and Omega is delightfully weird. Now, dear reader, I shall get to the point: his most recent novel, City in Chains.

This is one of Turtledove’s straight fantasy novels, with no direct textual reference to our history. However, those with familiarity with the periods that he likes to write about will see the inspiration, as the novel is rather clearly a pastiche of occupied Paris during World War II. The city is Lutesse (no relation to certain peculiar characters in the Bioshock series) in the Kingdom of Quimper, a name which it shares with a city in Brittany (mention is also made of a battle at a place called Carentan, which is also real, and I learned from the mission in the original Company of Heroes). This city, and this kingdom, are under the occupation of the villainous Chleuh, and the quotidian cruelties have become part of the fabric of life.

The exact aesthetic of this whole shebang is a little bit confused, or so I thought. There are trains, but the occupying forces are primarily still using crossbows. As such, the novel feels like an odd mishmash of the Middle Ages and the 19th century with some tropes of World War II fiction thrown in. Of the latter, the most obvious of these is a sort of magically-infused crystal that occupies the role of radio in the historical fiction that inspired this novel. Nighttime bombing raids are in this world nighttime dragon raids; there is a brief plotline where a dragon rider, having been shot down, is secreted away in the basement of one of the main characters and later handed off to the organized resistance (a plotline which, sadly, is ultimately underdeveloped). The whole thing is a mishmash, one with a lot going for it, but overall Turtledove neglects to really describe what this city looks like, smells like, sounds like. The entire project feels more than a little threadbare, abstract even, rather than something concrete.

The book does shine, however, in its two main characters. One of them is Malk Malkovici, a junkman of the minority Old Faith sect who is a refugee from persecution in another country now occupied by the Chleuh. The Old Faith is the target of genocidal persecution by the occupiers, who are sending them to vaguely described but clearly ominous camps in the east, territory occupied by the Chleuh and conquered (albeit apparently temporarily) from a strange monarchy that believes that the gods have declared that wealth needs to be shared. It becomes clear quite early on that Malk is a member of the group that is this world’s analogue for Jewish people under Nazi occupation.

What makes life more complicated for Malk is that his services as a collector of junk, including various types of metal, is in high demand by the occupiers who hate him and, on an ideological level, want to kill him. He and his family are complicit in the occupation and from there the mass murder and the genocide. He has rapport with officers who come to buy his wares, as well as a collaborating policeman whose beat is his neighborhood, and tries not to advertise his religious beliefs. He is wracked by the knowledge that he is, however indirectly and however reluctantly, complicit in evil, but he knows there is a huge price to pay if he were to stand up for himself.

The other main character is Guisa Sachry, a rich man, a great actor, the head of his own theater troupe, and the greatest star of the Lutesse theater scene. He has a much younger wife (his third) and had planned to keep his head down throughout the occupation with inoffensive slice-of-life plays until an officer of the Chleuh military came knocking, ‘asking’ him to appear as one of the Lutesse luminaries at a parade honoring the city’s new rulers. Knowing he stands to lose a lot, perhaps even his life, if he says no, he goes along with it. He is then asked by the occupation to write a play glorifying the occupation and demonizing the resistance. He does so, reluctantly (and the solution he devises to this is a very clever one on Turtledove’s part, one that he is capable of creating because he knows how people interact with the historical and cultural context in which they live), and from there is pulled head first down the vortex of collaboration.

Guisa Sachry is not a good man, and the narrative correctly emphasizes that fact again and again. He hires a dancing girl from another company on the condition that she have sex with him. He is deeply and profoundly unpleasant to his wife, with whom it is clear he doesn’t really love, and the feeling is mutual. He is ruthless to his underlings and sycophantic to the men who pay him off. But it is with that sycophancy that the novel really furnishes its theme, that of complicitness.

Both Malk and Guisa are men who are constrained by structural factors from acting free of the occupation. Malk dislikes working with the Chleuh out of his religious beliefs and his own moral principles. Guisa, on the other hand, has no principles whatsoever, and his own naked self-interest is what compels him to comply; even if he is the ethnic majority in Lutesse, the Chleuh would still make an example if he were to fall out of line. Both don’t want to collaborate, but both are forced into collaboration, their distinct characters and distinct paths nevertheless reaching the same destination.

As a longtime reader of Turtledove’s work, Guisa Sachry as a character reminded me strongly of another one of his characters: William Shakespeare, as portrayed in his novel Ruled Britannia. That novel is set in a world where the Spanish Armada succeeds, and England is under the cruel yoke of Philip II. This version of Shakespeare is a covert sympathizer with the English resistance who is coerced by the Spanish to write a play glorifying Philip, while simultaneously writing a play about Boudica, the ancient queen of the Iceni people who lead a failed rebellion against the Romans, and a thinly-veiled diatribe against the Spanish. Shakespeare, as portrayed by Turtledove, is a man with a strong moral conscience who is forced into collaboration, but takes covert action to resist. Guisa Sachry, on the other hand, is a man with no moral conscience at all, and his arc is almost that of a foil to Shakespeare’s in the earlier novel.

At its core, City in Chains is about collaboration. Many Americans in recent months have been beating the drum against collaboration with the new Trump administration, filled to the brim with neo-Nazis, technofascists, and a rogues' gallery of some of the most unpleasant, most boorish, most malevolent, and most stupid people on the planet. We have, rightly, been infuriated with the spinelessness of Democratic Party leaders in not taking a harder line against the wrecking of the federal government or the evisceration of trans rights in this country, to name but two examples (but a part of me thinks that Ta-Nehisi Coates was right in saying that you can’t really expect a party that had no spine to stand up against the genocide in Gaza to have the spine to stand up for democracy). We are in a moment where the moral imperative is not to comply, but to resist. Releasing a book like City in Chains in a time like this is an interesting decision, and one that is revelatory.

Harry Turtledove is an outspoken liberal on his social media; before he decamped from Twitter, his pinned tweet was “I didn’t mean to be topical” repeated several times. He is consistently good and well intentioned, if not radical, on racial justice and LGBTQ+ rights, and is blisteringly critical of the current administration. I remember that, in his novel Alpha and Omega, a novel set mostly in Israel (and released a few years before the current genocide), he states frankly, but does not dwell on, the the second-class status of Palestinians in that country. I do remember one particular interaction I had with him on Bluesky where told upcoming writers to share their new works, and I shared Broken Olive Branches, the anthology in which I have a story raising money for refugee relief in Gaza (and discussed on this blog here). He liked and boosted the anthology, for which I am grateful to him. In terms of his historical interests, he has been blisteringly critical of neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates.

But the man is not without his blind spots. His portrayal of race is very much that of an older white liberal; his novel Guns of the South has been taken to task by multiple critics in recent years, such as by Monroe Templeton on the Sea Lion Press blog (which, for full disclosure, I have written many articles for in previous years). As an Asian-American (half Filipino through my mother), I was more than a little irritated by the fact that his Hot War trilogy, a series about World War III breaking out over Korea, has no Asian viewpoint character; the only Korean character is the plucky sidekick of a white American soldier.

Ultimately, I think the core of the issue is that Turtledove’s view of World War II is very much that of old war movies, where brave soldiers fight for justice, and innocent civilians bear the brunt of the ultimate evil. The conflict becomes a great moral drama between justice and injustice (in fairness to him, Turtledove has always been frank about American racism both in that period and in other periods). In that regard, he glorifies the resistance fighter and denounces the opportunist, but fundamentally casts the thing that they are resisting as a foreign force, an invader.

This is a view of fascism that has been superseded in the historical literature by a view that situates fascist regimes in the broader context of the imperial world of nineteenth-century Europe. Aimé Cesaire, in 1950, published Discourse on Colonialism, which made the argument that colonialism made Europe a savage continent, one that had come to accept racial hatred and mass murder as de rigueur, a formulation that culminated in Nazism deciding to do those things to other Europeans. Cesaire’s English translator called this a ‘boomerang effect,’ an abstract but effective translation of the original French phrase ‘choc en retour,’ literally ‘return shock.’ Not long after Cesaire, Hannah Arendt argued in her magnum opus Origins of Totalitarianism that Nazism was the confluence of millennia of European antisemitism and the race thinking of imperialism. Hitler himself openly stated that the Nazi plan for Eastern Europe was explicitly modeled on the United States.

Here I shall analyze City in Chains as a critical work, in the manner that Phoebe Wagner on this very blog discusses Andor. In attempting to critique modern fascism, he falls into myths of the original fascism. Contemporary American fascism is not something that was imported from Europe; Trump is not merely the achievement of Russian propaganda, but rather a culmination of centuries of American bigotry. A president who is promising ethnic cleansing cannot be considered a break from a country that systematically expelled its indigenous populations from their homelands. A movement that is backed in no small part by violent militias cannot be considered a break from a country that has enforced slavery, white supremacy, and indigenous dispossession with heavily armed mobs, some of which called themselves militias.

As a narrative device and as abstract philosophy, the theme of complicitness in this novel succeeds. As a description of complicitness in today’s injustices, it falls flat. This novel has a model of the theme that could work perhaps most perfectly for Ukrainians under the Russian jackboot (and Lord knows they need it), but not in America or Western Europe. For the latter, the complicitness we face is different and in some ways more totalizing. Does the company that makes our food give money to pay tribute to Donald Trump? Is the fast food place we go to supporting the IDF as they raze Gaza to the ground? Is our laptop made in a slave labor camp in Uyghurstan? The complicitness we face now is our own convenience, our survival on a very basic level. What we are complicit with is capitalism, and capitalism gives us no choice. This is the essence of the phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.”

That is the sort of question that City in Chains has no answer for, as it is uninterested in probing the broader systemic reasons for why this occupation, this war, this genocide are happening in the first place. We only get broad descriptions of the prewar status quo, and most of that is a pretty clear parallel to interwar Europe. If Quimper is France, as its name will show, there is no Algeria, no Senegal, no Indochina, and from there no equivalent to the American insistence that the first Allied troops to enter a liberated Paris be white. According to this novel, the enemy is foreign, alien even, and it requires of us no introspection, no questioning of basic assumptions. In valorizing resistance to complicitness with a foreign evil, it leaves open the door to complicitness with a domestic evil, letting us be comfortable in satisfaction while continuing to play our own little part in keeping evil alive, be it through our purchases, our tax dollars, our employment, our voting, or our own personal conduct. The parallelism that is one of Turtledove's standard tricks works to the detriment of the broader moral indignation, and as such cannot even really be said to critique contemporary fascism.

As such, the basic narrative scaffolding of City in Chains is perfectly entertaining as fantasy fiction, but as an answer to the current moment it feels woefully out of date. The novel on some level feels like it’s fighting previous battles, not the current battle. Its portrayal of the struggle against fascism is what America of previous decades wanted World War II to be, and what modern white liberals want the struggle against contemporary fascism to be. It is a book that is fascinated by abstract questions of morality in years gone by, while not having much to say about concrete questions of morality in the present. It has nothing whatsoever to say about how the current moment is the compounded result of previous historical moments, and how the problems of today are deeply structural. It is a book I enjoyed very much, and it has some very smart moments, but on the whole the novel reveals the weaknesses of Turtledove’s worldview in an age of resurgent fascism.

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Reference: Turtledove, Harry, City in Chains [Aetheon Books, 2025]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-il Kim (tr. Anton Hur)

Taking Down the Corpse-Empire

The fall of empires is dramatic, especially when it is fast and violent. Such is what happened to the Japanese Empire and the Third Reich, and long before them, the Khwarezmians who were foolish enough to kill a messenger from Genghis Khan. They are times of newness, of rebirth, although not always of indubitably good things. There is certainly a schadenfreude from those victimised by the empire when everything comes tumbling down - after, of course, several had made the decision to topple it. One such story of empire collapsing spectacularly is Blood of the Old Kings, a Korean fantasy novel published in Korean in 2016 and in English translation by Anton Hur in 2024 (the second volume of the trilogy is due in English translation in October of this year).

You start off the bat with three main characters who become your viewpoint characters: Loran, a woman who makes a deal with a dragon to fight the Empire ruling her home country and vows to become king, Arianne, a student at the imperial sorcerer’s academy who had made a deal with a voice that began manifesting in her head, and Cain, a petty thief who has made deals with many in his quarter of the imperial capital who gets tangled up in broader politics when he learns that a friend of his was killed. All of these characters have made deals with somebody, and more and more somebodys as the narrative goes on. All of this is juxtaposed with the profound lack of deals - of consensus, rather - of imperial rule that has been imposed on large swathes of the known world.

The Empire that is the larger antagonist of this narrative goes unnamed. Partially this reminds me of Jean d’Ormesson’s The Glory of the Empire, where the idea is to make the namesake state feel archetypical, foundational to the conception of its world that no other referent is necessary. Another part of me is reminded of the Race in Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar series, where the Race needs no modifiers in its culture as there is no other polity worth speaking of (until their armed forces happen to land on Earth smack dab in the middle of World War II). This is a world, or perhaps more accurately a corner of a world, where one polity’s tyrannical rule is so omnipresent that it needs no adjective to make clear who is being referred to. Like what d’Ormesson and Turtledove have done, Kim is forcefully using a generic term to overawe your interpretation of the world. There is the Empire, and that is all.

The Empire here feels archetypical and frankly many other things in this book feel archetypical. Reading this book felt like reading many other heroic fantasy novels of its type. Interestingly, the names of the characters (Arianne, Loran, Cain) and of regions (‘Arland’ in particular, a name mentioned a lot as it is the home region of all three main characters) sound very European. The sorcerer’s academy that features prominently at the beginning of the book takes its children from families and isolates them entirely in a way that I could not help but compare to the Jedi Order as depicted in the Star Wars prequels. I don’t know what Kim was thinking when he wrote this or Hur when he translated it, but the whole setup feels very familiar to someone experienced with the genre. It will not feel ‘exotic’ (a deeply problematic term, doubtlessly) to the Western reader, and those looking for ‘exoticism’ (a problematic urge) will be disappointed - but one must remember that those outside of the West, however you want to define that, can and do read and respond to Western texts, and more importantly are not obligated to write what we want them to.

None of the above is to say that the yarn Kim spins is a bad one; far from it. There’s a lot of very good character work here, and a lot of good displays of tensions between factions of a rebellion. The plot is one of resistance against tyranny, and this interacts in clever ways with the idea of a ‘chosen one,’ in our case Loran. She knows that she can conquer a kingdom from horseback but cannot rule from there, to quote what a Chinese advisor told Kublai Khan; parts of this are almost reminiscent of Andor, but never hugely so. Arianne fights to escape her situation, and Cain fights because he has fallen into it not unlike Han Solo.

There is one bit here that is strikingly original, and it is how this Empire sustains its power. Every sorcerer in imperial service (and, according to its laws, should be every sorcerer, but this is not easy to enforce in practice) is turned into a magical battery when they die, and these batteries are the lynchpin of their entire civilization. The implications of this system are especially stark on Arianne, who is rankled by what will eventually happen to her were she to complete her studies. There are a lot of interesting hints as to where this idea could go, and one particular character is intimately tied to it, but parts of it are clearly left for later in the series.

Kim, rendered through Hur, is very good at depicting action. Never at any point in this novel did the detailed descriptions of violence make me zone out. The whole thing is very clear, very visceral, and it keeps the plot moving forward. This pays off at the end when almost all of Chekhov’s guns you see on the wall in the first half are fired and you get a spectacular ending scene that works both as raw spectacle and as a culmination of the theme of making deals (in particular there is a small bit that feels like a commentary on the tendency of resistance movements to splinter into a variety of teeny tiny factions but that goes by quickly). Kim via Hur reminded me of Robert E. Howard at his absolute best, and fortunately without all the racism (it’s there in the Conan stories and incredibly obvious in the Solomon Kane stories).

As of now I am waiting eagerly for the next book in this series. I absolutely see why this story became a big thing in South Korea. It is perhaps not the most original heroic fantasy novel (although I give Kim major props for letting a woman be a king, which has all sorts of interesting undertones) but it does what it does very well. Those who want that sort of thing will be well served here and will likewise look forward to the next volume.

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Reference: Sung-il Kim, Blood of the Old Kings, [Little Brown Book Group, 2024], translated by Anton Hur

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: Idolfire by Grace Curtis

An engaging and entertaining novel that does most, but not quite everything, that it says on the tin

In a world of fallen empires, lost gods and the power to channel divinity, Kirby, a young woman from a dying village, sets off on a quest to find the stolen icon of goddess Iona. Kirby is convinced, with some solid evidence, that Iona’s absence is the reason why the community suffers under a curse that is slowly and steadily strangling it. Meantime, Aleya, the overachieving daughter of the current ruler of the powerful city of Ash, is finally given a quest (a Calling) to prove her worth, which sets her off on the road as well, to the same destination as Kirby: to a city that once ruled the vast and now fallen empire of Nivela.

This is the story of Grace Curtis’s Idolfire, a resolutely standalone fantasy novel.

I do want to lead off with that. In a world of trilogies, duologies (which appear to be especially popular these days) and other extended series, this is a story that wraps up everything in one volume. You will get a complete story here of the two (and then a third) main characters, complete and whole. Kudos to the author for managing that feat.

Idolfire is advertised and marketed as “A character-driven science-fantasy road trip book with sword fights and a slow-burn romance. An epic sapphic fantasy roadtrip inspired by the fall of Rome.” We do get most of that in this book.

First up, the characters. Our two main protagonists, Kirby and Aleya, do take their time to meet, and their sapphic romance is definitely a slow burn in the squabbling-squabbling-acceptance-sparks sort of affair. It should be said that this fantasy world is resolutely queernorm; their relationship is just an accepted part of human relations in this ’verse. And while Kirby may have been shy and barely kissed anyone before, Aleya definitely has had prior lovers (and we meet one while on the road). So the bones of all that are good, and a lot of the novel works on the engines of its characters, both when they are apart and then when they unite.

Their relationship and their natures are an excellent engine for drama and events that unfold during the course of the novel. While Kirby can’t fight her way out of a paper bag at the beginning (despite having what might be a magic sword she can barely swing), she has practical skills for living off of the land that Aleya does not. Aleya has trained as a fighter all her life (see the above mention of sword fights),  but also has diplomatic and administrative skills (after all, she does want to rule Ash, or thinks she does). Aleya is also the one that can use the titular Idolfire, using the belief and power of gods stored in relics and other items in which it resides. The power unleashed by this does degrade and use up the relic, and it is tied to the nature of the god/dess herself. If you use a statue consecrated to the God of War, you are going to get war and martial-based effects, not healing.

Let’s continue. It is definitely a road trip book of the first water, as they both are not only traversing the landscape; they are in many cases following the old straight-line implacable roads of the fallen prior civilization, the Nivelans. This is where the “Fall of Rome” inspiration comes in, as the Nivelans have built their roads in what many readers would recognize as a “Roman” mode: straight lines, and damn the geography that is in its way. Roads that most definitely do not harmonize and work with the landscape, but rather seek to dominate it. There are a couple of names and other things that also tag as Roman, but in the main, though, while the author was inspired by the fall of Rome (as she says in the acknowledgements/afterword), I saw a different model and inspiration that she does call out in the aforementioned back matter, but I think is a fairly more dominant influence overall in the book. You might have guessed it already with a city-state named Ur.

Yes, this book and its world very much run on lines inspired by Ancient Mesopotamia. We have a world that is mostly city-states (with a fallen empire for good measure). We have a world where there are a ton of local deities, and those deities and their worship are tied directly to the land, and can be, in fact, stolen. Curtis relays an incident in the back matter where this actually happened in real-life Ancient Mesopotamia, and that incident shapes Kirby’s life and story profoundly as a result. And Mesopotamia, with its palimpsest of prior civilizations, fallen cities, ruins, and more, is very much the model for the landscape of the road trips that Kirby and Aleya go on, separately and together. Even the realm that the city of Ash sits in is called Ur, after a famous Mesopotamian city state.

Mesopotamia, the Land Between the Rivers, is an inspiration and a model for fantasy that gets a lot less play than Greece or Rome or Egypt. The author is not unique here: Harry Turtledove’s Between the Rivers is very much in the mold of this book. That book uses a godly point of view, but the whole idea of this fractured Mesopotamian landscape of rising and falling civilizations, tons of deities, and a city-state-based mentality with the occasional and irresistible eruption (and then decline) of empires resonates between Curtis’s work and Turtledove’s. I can also find resonances in L Sprague De Camp’s Novaria novels and stories, and the Godserfs series by N. S. Dolkart. Also, Kirby’s home village of Wall’s End, at the edge of the huge ruined city of Balt, reminded me strongly of Pavis, a massive ruined city in the RPG world of Glorantha, which itself as a setting takes a lot of its notes from ancient Mesopotamia.

But in the main, Ancient Mesopotamia is a rich (and underused) setting for all this, and one that more authors could definitely take ideas from and claim as their own. Thus, Curtis takes advantage of that and uses it effectively and deeply to give a real richness to the road trip. A road trip across the fallen Roman Empire? Tired. A road trip across Ancient Mesopotamia? Wired.

Where the novel doesn’t do what it says on the tin, then, is the phrase “science fantasy.” For me, and I think, as is commonly accepted in the fields of genre, science fantasy is a fusion of the ideas, concepts, trappings and motifs of fantasy with science fiction. It is the original “peanut butter in my chocolate / chocolate in my peanut butter” subgenre, and discussing it in full detail might be beyond the remit of this review.. But while Idolfire has some excellent fantasy elements, as outlined above, there is no science fiction in this work whatsoever. There is, unusually, a moment of *science* that recalls a real-life remarkable event in ancient history, and it delighted me that Curtis slotted it in there. But that doesn’t make it science fantasy either.

Instead, a different subgenre of SFF fits this novel better. It’s a well-made and cromulent sword-and-sorcery novel, not a science fantasy novel. Sword and Sorcery fits as a much better label for this book. Swordswoman (and her companion), fighting, adventure, road trip, strange gods, weird magic, and the like. Could I see Kirby and Aleya and Nylophon (I’ll get to him in a moment) wandering around Hyperborea, or Lankhmar, or Ranke or, even more recently, and really on the mark, the sword-and-sorcery world of Howard Andrew Jones’s Hanuvar? Absolutely. I think the label “science fantasy” does this book a disservice, and “sword and sorcery” reflects more accurately what this world and its characters are like, and what the reader can expect as they navigate the book. Is Sword and Sorcery a limiting label? Possibly that is a subject beyond the remit of this review.

But enough of that. Let’s dig back into this book and what it does. So, aside from our two protagonists, we are given two additional characters and points of view. The first is a mysterious one, where Curtis uses a second-person point of view to inject mystery into this character, whose identity and nature is only slowly revealed in the course of the novel. That character provides some parallax to the events and backstory of the novel, and to reveal more would be spoilery.

The other character is Nylophon. Nylophon is a mercenary soldier from the mercantile realm of Carthe. It’s not quite Carthage, although that is clearly meant to be a bit of an inspiration; the Carthe hire themselves out as mercenary soldiers and make bank on it. Nylophon has clawed his way to a small command by luck and perseverance and making the right friend (lover, implied; Nylophon is queer as Kirby and Aleya) to basically save his life. After a disastrous encounter with our two main protagonists, he takes on a Javert-like role, and also his is a story of redeeming himself and coming to terms with who he is. Even if he is rather a prat for a lot of the novel, he does in the end get better.

Finally, a word about the writing, and especially the dialogue. The novel crackles when the characters engage with each other, and the descriptions of the world, their adventures and the landscapes come out well written and engaging. Combat and swordfighting, although present and a highlight in the book, isn’t as lingered over in the text as other things; the writing here is economical and to the point, much like Aleya’s own fighting style. Where the novel comes off the best of all is in the whole road trip, from sea voyages to the Nivelan road, to some of the truly strange things our protagonists encounter along the way. There is a great sense of atmosphere here.

Like I said at the start, the story is completed in one volume, with some fillips and twists as our two protagonists (and yes, Nylophon) make their way to the culmination of their quests, and find that the city of Nivela, their destination, is not quite what they expected at all. There are real moments of heroism and completion here, especially for Nylophon, who gets a “payoff scene” in the climax of the book that he clearly has been working toward ever since he was introduced in the narrative. The novel satisfies, in the end. The author promises more fantasy novels in the future, and I am quite reasonably happy to give them a go.

You can also read Roseanna's review of Grace Curtis’s Floating Hotel here at the NOAF blog.

Highlights:

• Interesting pair of primary characters on a road trip adventure

• Strongly imagined Mesopotamian-flavored fantasy setting

• Not a science fantasy after all, but very much worth reading

Reference: Curtis, Grace. Idolfire [DAW, 2025].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Book Review: The Glory of the Empire

Contingency springs eternal

One of the things that consistently provides me with a mild degree of amusement as an alternate history fan is how writers from other genres, and especially outside the speculative fiction scene, and especially outside of genre fiction, accidentally reinvent alternate history. Mystery and thriller writers doing it is one thing, as alternate histories can provide interesting new settings for such plots (some of the best writing in the genre is from authors from those traditions trying their hand at it; I can name The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, Fatherland by Robert Harris, and Dominion by C. J. Sansom as good examples thereof), but ‘literary’ types doing it is something else. Part of me finds it funny that writers from a tradition that derides science fiction and fantasy as focusing on setting to the detriment of character find their way to a subgenre whose setting is perhaps the defining feature. Of course, that doesn’t mean they always do it well—I found Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America to have an ending that would never be taken seriously in a genre space (although the HBO miniseries improved on that substantially), and I found Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham to not have a clear idea of what to do with the premise. It is with all this baggage I encountered Jean d’Ormesson’s 1971 novel The Glory of the Empire, originally published by Éditions Gallimard, with its English translation released in 2016 and published by the New York Review of Books.

Earlier than most, d’Ormesson invents textbook-style alternate history (a subgenre with pre-d’Ormesson antecedents in works such as H. G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come), almost contemporaneously with Robert Sobel’s For Want of a Nail, a book by an economist which set the stage for much of alternate history, professional and amateur, that followed it; you can feel its echoes still felt today if one knows where to look. Indeed, I kept thinking of Sobel as I read d’Ormesson, so similar are they in their conceits and yet so different in terms of subject matter. Sobel’s book is known for its commitment to paralleling, some would argue satirizing, academia with its in-universe scholarly debates and its pages upon pages of nonexistent sources in its bibliography. d’Ormesson does all of that, to my great surprise, but in some ways he goes further than Sobel.

On its face, The Glory of the Empire is simply a cipher, where history goes mostly the same as ours with one historical element replaced with a fictional element. Here, the Roman Empire never rises, and in its place rises a Mediterranean colossus that is only ever referred to as the Empire, which is governed from a capital only ever referred to as the City. d’Ormesson deliberately leaves the details vague, which in modern alternate history circles would either be tarred as lazy writing or understood as a sign that the work has another focus (it’s not alternate history, but see the hand wringing over the implausible politics of Alex Garland’s film Civil War vis-à-vis its narrative focus on the actual human experience of civil wars to get an idea). As my dear friend Gary Oswald has argued, if you don’t have a traditional narrative, your history has to be good to make up for it, but d’Ormesson, not confined by the arcane discussions of hobbyists, has taken a third option: a meditation on the meaning of history itself.

The book is written like a textbook, and one of a style that feels like something out of 1971 if not before; indeed, the earlier parts of the book read almost like an old chronicle. The text is awash in references to nonexistent historians that d’Ormesson’s alter ego has consulted; there are even footnotes! These historians are squabbling, deeply funny to history nerds like myself, but I wonder if it may come off as obtuse to general readers. He also invokes many real historians and other historical figures, such as Walt Whitman and Vladimir Lenin, to enliven the commentary, and provides cartons of Easter eggs to aforementioned history nerds.

The broad contours of the Empire’s history are essentially Roman history from the mythical foundation by Romulus and Remus to the fall of Constantinople put in a blender and made into a peculiar but surprisingly tasty nutrient shake. You have the ancient creation myths, the squabbling of cities and the eventual consolidation of the heartland, the conquest of the surrounding areas, the succession disputes and civil wars, the barbarians, and all that jazz. Admittedly, the religious aspect can be a bit confusing, and I’m not entirely sure where Christianity fits in. In any case, it’s something of a funhouse mirror of European history, and it gets stranger as you move East. The Empire, after a certain point in the book, begins to resemble the Mongols more than anything else, marching ever eastward, becoming the greatest power the world had ever known.

There are a number of figures that take center stage during the course of the book, fitting for a work whose scope spans several centuries. Some are clearly mythical, with a generous description of latter-day mythmaking served alongside the historiography. But the most compelling of these characters is by far Emperor Alexis, who would be given the mantle of ‘main character’ if one absolutely had to be chosen. His life seems mythical, and d’Ormesson deliberately doesn’t let you know what, exactly, is ‘real’ about him. He has a properly epic story, from a life of mind-dulling hedonism in Alexandria, to wandering ancient Asia learning and dispensing wisdom, to returning to the Empire as its savior à la King Arthur in the hour of its greatest need. Through Alexis, who in this world seems to be all the virtues said to be held by a constellation of Classical-age luminaries rolled into one, d’Ormesson is asking a rather big question: what is heroism without the scaffolding of circumstance behind it? What does that mean for a civilization which, through its great men, inspires civilizations beyond its own fall?

The decision to never name the Empire or its capital city, or even to provide a proper location of its heartland (although it is definitely along the Mediterranean somewhere, and I got the impression that it was at some undisclosed point on the Italian peninsula), reminded me of the Race, the invading aliens in Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar series (incidentally, the series that got me into alternate history). The Race has homogenized itself to the point that it needs no other signifiers for itself, nor for its government; before meeting humanity, there’s no ‘other’ to define themselves by. In d’Ormesson’s novel, the namelessness of the Empire is in in-universe terms murkier than in Turtledove’s work, but in a Doylist sense it is very clear: it is the Empire, and nobody would bother thinking of any other upon hearing that word. The West likes to define itself as the successor to Rome and Greece, as does Russia to the Kievan Rus (to Ukraine’s great chagrin), and China to the Qin, among many other examples. Even as history grinds all things beautiful and sordid into dust with the passage of time, people like to define themselves as the clear successors to some historical entity, not acknowledging that change renders a complete continuity of essence laughable, something like how the human body replaces almost all of its cells every seven years or so.

This all becomes more clever at the ending (spoilers for a fifty-year-old book incoming), where, through what is admittedly more than a little jerry-rigged, history returns to something we would recognize. So much of the alternate history genre is committed to questions of contingency and of inevitability, be it the course of wars or the course of empires. Doing enough of this sort of thinking, I found the truth in what Buddhists call ‘anatta,’ or ‘non-self,’ the idea that nothing has a fixed essence, as its constituent parts can be recombined in myriad ways. In other words, nothing is inevitable. Most alternate history does this by changing the past and seeing what other presents could happen; d’Ormesson does something I would have thought to be impossible to do in a compelling manner until I read this book: change the past that leads to our exact present. It’s a deeply weird way of going about things, but it throws the contingency of everything into stark relief.

I am mildly appalled that it took me wandering around my local library to learn of The Glory of the Empire. It’s the sort of book that alternate historians like me should love; indeed I love it for what it has done, although it confused me at times (but many great books do). History as a discipline is about asking ‘why?’ The speculative genres are about asking ‘what if?’ d’Ormesson has blended the two here in a way I’ve never seen before, and the end result feels very new, despite it being half a century old! It’s a book that hammered into me the point that everything could have been different. It is an unmooring experience in the best way possible.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Reference: d'Ormesson, Jean. The Glory of the Empire [Éditions Gallimard, 1971].

Second Look: Civilizations by Laurent Binet

 A second look at Civilizations by Laurent Binet. 

In October 2021, my colleague Arturo Serrano reviewed Laurent Binet’s alternate history novel Civilizations here on the blog.[http://www.nerds-feather.com/2021/10/review-civilizations-by-laurent-binet.html]. He did not find much favor with it. As I will be deeply engaging with that review, I recommend you read that review so you can get some details I am not going to repeat here and to get a general sense of context.

Back? Great. Let’s dig in.

Since Serrano’s piece, the novel has garnered some critical acclaim, including the Sidewise Award for best Alternate History, 2021, where it is that it came on my radar.  I decided, especially urged on by a colleague who was very interested in my opinion on the book, to give it a try and see for myself what I thought of it. And so here we are.

So this is not quite so much of a review as a reaction to the book, and thinking and interpolating the thoughts of friends and colleagues, and using them, and my own history, in coming to terms with the book, and ultimately where do I think it sits. 

Alternate History has been a power chord for me ever since coming across stories such as “Sidewise in Time”, Lest Darkness Fall (which is a time travel creating alternate history), “Delenda Est” ,and of course the works of Harry Turtledove. But the alternate history book I want to talk about here, because this work feels very much in conversation with it to the point that I think that, if you can find it,  you might want to read it before reading Civilizations is For Want of Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga, by Robert Sobel. ¹

Sobel’s book is not a novel, and does not even pretend to be, even though Civilizations has ambitions to be a novel or at least sits closer to the novel format. Sobel’s work is a sweeping look at an alternate history of North America and the world, with one change: the British win the battle of Saratoga and end the American Revolution. He then spins out two hundred years of alternate history. Hamilton and other failed leaders of the American Revolution wind up in Texas, and use that as a springboard to eventually take over all of Mexico and rule it Caudillo style. The story of the 19th and up to the mid 20th century is the rivalry between the British possessions in North America and Mexico. 

But the point is, there are no characters, there are no plots, it is really just a textbook of ideas, reflections, thoughts and historical review and analysis of the events being written about in the book. The historical author has opinions, and is clearly writing (until the “modern day”) from a historical perspective of hindsight, and a political and social point of view on those events.

So, thus, although with more narrative drama, runs Civilizations.  Civilizations, unlike Gaul, is divided into four parts, although dominated by one narrative, and three shorter ones. The major narrative is the most Sobelian in nature, being told much more like a history book than a straighforward narrative, and I will talk about it further in due course.

The first narrative comes across as an attempt to write a Viking Saga, in telling the story of an Viking expedition that winds up exploring down the coasts of North and Central America. This is Binet’s point of divergence, since this voyage solves three of the historical weaknesses that Native American civilizations had in facing the Europeans: the Columbian Exchange of diseases, ironworking, and horses. If you have read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, you will recognize that Binet is substituting horses for gunpowder in his formulation.². I do see Binet’s point here. Gunpowder and guns were initially far less impactful on the 16th century contact between Europeans and Native Americans than you might think. It was horses, and steel and a lot of luck that helped Pizarro and Cortez.3

The first second gives way to a shorter second section, however, and further to set up the pieces on the chessboard for his major third section, this section is a story of an alternate Christopher Columbus.  The aforementioned Viking saga and timeline divergence (the Vikings never returned) did not affect European history in the slightest, and so Columbus’ voyage happens on exactly the same time frame and starts off in exactly the same way.

The first portion of the novel was told as a Viking Saga and in the style of a Viking Saga. This second portion is found footage, pieces of the journal of Christmas Columbus.⁴. Binet is using the real journal as a model, as a guide as a framework for the reader.   It is when Columbus lands on the islands, that we see the changes between the texts, even given the more fragmentary nature of the journals produced within Binet’s book.  Without the Columbian exchange to quickly sicken the natives, and with iron, and being aware of horses, the local inhabitants are much more of a challenge for Columbus than in our own timeline. It is here that Binet plays the gunpowder card, but his point seems to be that gunpowder alone is NOT enough. The Native Americans do not have it, but it alone is not enough of a technological edge (especially given the size of Columbus’ force) to save him. Columbus fails and falls. 

One reason for this interlude, in addition to introducing the natives to gunpowder, is perhaps one of the thinnest reeds in the alternate history in setup for the third portion. Even given the Horses, Germs and Steel, and now the beginnings of firearms, one can see how he sets up his Native Americans to be on a footing much more equal with Europe. But for his true tour-de-force portion of the novel, the third, he needs a way to get the Inca TO Europe.  Columbus’ captured ship is the answer to that dilemma. I think it is the thinnest of reeds, but let’s continue for the moment and talk about it some more momentarily.

With Columbus’ fall, the third and the bulk of the novel is the Sobelian piece--the story of the Incan invasion of Europe. Without the Columbian Exchange, Binet has to invent a reason for , Huayna Cápac, the Incan Emperor, to die and have it fall to his two quarreling sons, but with this managed, Binet shows that with Steel and Horses, war in the Incan empire is a very different affair than in our timeline. Atahualpa, instead of grinding out a slow victory against his brother, instead, elects to flee with his supporters and followers. He eventually winds up in the Caribbean where a still seaworthy ship of Columbus is there to carry him east, away from his brother, to find a Fifth Quarter to rule as his own. 

As mentioned before, this is all told in a Sobelian manner, with events skipped over, dramatization sometimes strong and sometimes weak, and all with a looking backward approach to it. As for example:

"Later the scene would be immoritalised in a famous Titian painting: Athahualpa, young, handsome, imperial in his dignity, a parrot on his shoulder, his puma on a leash, surrounded by his wives...At the centre of the image, a Levantine, sitting cross-legged, naws at a bone, his lips drawn back, in front of a hrrified priestess of the Sun. Another, curious, reaches out to touch the ears of an impassive Inca Lord...of course Titian wasn't there to witness the scene and it didn't actually happen in precisely that way"

Once the Inca (Quitonians) are in Portugal, just after the Lisbon Earthquake of 1532⁵, they go through trial and tribulation in order to attain political and temporal power. There are resonances here with our own history, basically putting Charles V, Emperor of Spain, in the role of Athahualpa, winding up a prisoner, hostage and negotiating chip to Athahualpa in his bid for power. It’s a precarious climb to power, just as it was for Pizarro in South America, but with terrain and characters that will likely be much more familiar to the reader. This IS the part of the novel where the cameos and walk on roles from this time period fly by, and sometime become very plot relevant. 

Binet has a lot of fun with this. Pizarro winds up becoming the servant/man of Athahualpa. Machiavelli gets mentioned a couple of times. In the course of events, Athahualpa (who becomes Holy Roman Emperor) winds up encountering and alternatively working with and clashing with Martin Luther. Athahualpa’s political naivete comes off very weird here, not understanding the conflicts swirling around him.

The other thing that Binet decides to do is to have a religious conflict, having the Inca as being religious tolerants in a Europe that is starting to splinter over the ideas of Martin Luther and his contemporaries. The idea of Sun worship being such a tolerant belief feels a lot like wish fulfillment than anything from history, quite frankly. Athahualpa, too in his beliefs and approaches feels much less than being steeped in Empire and power as he doubtless was. The reforms and policies he puts out (including the aformentioned religious toleration) does feel like wish fulfillment on the author’s part. He does stir the pot with the arrival of the Aztecs on European shores, taking advantage of the political and social chaos by Athahualpa’s arrival to get a piece of the pie for themselves.⁶ The Incan and Aztecs do not, in the end get along anything but uneasily. Again, Binet is doing a thing here, reversing the European drive for Empire and influence over peoples and nations around the world by having the Europeans be the ones on the receiving end.  As Serrano notes in his review, the Aztecs (that is to say, the “Mexicans”) impose a ruler on France and the French, in a reversal of our own 19th century history.⁷

The last portion of the book ends on, for me a whimper. The Adventures of Cervantes tells an alternate story of the writer Don Quixote. In real life, he had amazing adventures that were not quite his literary creation’s, but close enough, winding up in battles, acting as a spy, sold as a slave, and even more. The Cervantes in this book goes through a number of the same events as the Cervantes of our timeline, but there is one fundamental fear and difference in this timeline that Cervantes fears to face--the Aztecs. In the main section, the Aztec use of human sacrifice is definitely not tempered down from our history, and anyone captured by the Aztecs or an ally of the Aztecs would rightly fear. But Cervantes crossing “the Ocean sea” is the inconclusive ending to a story that does feel like Don Quixote. The chapters have the old style sort of foreshadowing of events in their titles, which gives the chronicle an antique feel. Perhaps I know little about Cervantes as a person to really judge or connect with this final section of the book and after the Inca section, it feels like an unnecessary coda to the entire book, in my opinion. The book, in end, does not land on the strongest of notes. 

As such, given this essay, I do not think that a rating is warranted. I will let my thoughts above serve the reader in that regard.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Reference: Binet, Laurent [author], Taylor, Sam [translator]. Civilizations [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021].

¹The book is out of print, and out of print copies are expensive. I find myself, with my many books, wondering just where MY copy is (I bought it over 20 years ago. Did it survive my many moves??) 

² Charitably, Diamond’s work is problematic in many ways. 

³ I am reminded of Fred Saberhagen’s Mask of the Sun, where the protagonist winds up in the Incan Empire just before Pizarro and his merry gang show up, and his marching orders (and to stay alive) he needs to figure a way to defeat them. He is far more concerned with the Spanish Cavalry than their guns, and his focus in defeating the Spanish is to try and figure out how to handle them. 

⁴Which you can read at the Internet Archive.https://archive.org/details/cihm_05312  I remember reading some of this in Junior High in history class. Given this was the early 1980’s, it was not very critical of Columbus at the time.

⁵My suspicion is that Binet saw the temporal convergence of the Incan Civil War, and this earthquake and may have built the book so that the Inca would be in a position to take advantage of it. 

⁶Again in Mask of the Sun, the intertemporal timeline conflict eventually reveals itself to be between rival Aztec and Incan Empires.This does make me think that Binet read Mask of the Sun as one of the inspirations for this book.

⁷ A book I recently read on this is The Last Emperor of Mexico by Edward Shawcross.

Review: Other Covenants: Alternate Histories of the Jewish People

A selection of prominent Jewish writers imagine deviations in the course of history

After an uncertain couple of years, during which it seemed at times as if this project might not be completed, the anthology Other Covenants has finally, joyfully, seen the light of day. Spanning both the strictly historical and the fanciful, Other Covenants contains an enormously varied panorama of possible fates for the Jewish civilization. Compiling, producing and publishing this collection is the result of a monumental effort of perseverance, a worthy testimony to the heroic resilience of Jews in our real timeline.

As befits a proudly bookish people, almost all the stories in this anthology are themselves about storytelling. In the opening entry, To the Promised Land by Robert Silverberg (first publication, 1989), set in a world where the Exodus was a failure and the Jews never spread out of Egypt, a scholar is recruited to write a new, more ambitious Exodus for the space age. This text is perfectly paired with the one that closes the book, Shtetl Days by Harry Turtledove (first publication, 2011), in which the story of the Jewish people maintains Jewishness alive even beyond the people itself.

Some of the metastories are presented in the form of poetry. The Golden Horde, Psalm for the First Day of Space Travel and The Green Men Learn to Read by Jane Yolen (written for this anthology) constitute a saga of interstellar exploration that its protagonists immortalize in writing. Meanwhile, Another Son, Covenant and One by Seymour Mayne (first publication, 2018) alter key episodes of Genesis, resulting in new versions of Scripture. And Miryam the Prophetess by James Goldberg (first publication, 2018) suggests a much worse end for the Pharaoh.

The holy books are also revised in prose selections: The Holy Bible of the Free People of Hasmonea by Esther Alter (written for this anthology) is a sapphic retelling of the Tanakh that results in a more egalitarian set of laws for the Jews. A Tartan of Many Colors by Allan Weiss (written for this anthology) sends baby Moses to the shores of Scotland, where a very different nation becomes the Chosen People. And in this Corner...! by D. K. Latta (written for this anthology) proposes a gentler resolution to the fight between David and Goliath. And The Bat Mitzvah Problem by Patrick A. Beaulier (written for this anthology) makes the provocative and humorous suggestion that everyday life wouldn't be all that different if the Jews had continued to worship the golden calf.

Other entries resort to the time-tested device of the tale inside a tale. Why the Bridgemasters of York Don't Pay Taxes by Gillian Polack (written for this anthology) is written in the style of a devotional manual that explains the supernatural circumstances that led to a de facto reversal of the Edict of Expulsion of 1290. Yossel the Gunslinger by Max Sparber (written for this anthology) adopts the form of an oral narration, set in a version of the Old West where cowboys wore black suits and sidelocks.

In a not unexpected but very much original fashion, some stories ask about the possible outcomes of the 20th century. The Mall: A Providential Tale by Jack Dann (written for this anthology) describes a world where the Nazis prevailed, and their lies still have the power to warp lives. In White Roses in Their Eyes by Matthew Kressel (written for this anthology), an elderly, happy and famous Anne Frank experiences visions of another world where there's a museum with her name. In The Sea of Salt by Elana Gomel (first publication, 2018), revenge on the Nazis is suddenly made possible by a dangerous form of time travel. Both The Book of Raisa by Alex Shvartsman (written for this antology) and Kaddish for Stalin by Allan Dyen-Shapiro (written for this anthology) go down the road not taken by the Soviet Jews. And Ka-Ka-Ka by C. L. McDaniel (written for this anthology) makes an unnerving parallel between American and German racism.

At the same time, some stories dare imagine Jewish joy amid the worst circumstances: These Rebellious Hussies by Rivqa Rafael (written for this anthology) is a raw scream of passion set in the penal colony of Tasmania, while The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships by Milton Verskin (written for this anthology) gives philosopher Baruch Spinoza a happier ending.

A few selections went for a spy thriller vibe: The Golem with a Thousand Faces: A Chronicle of the Second Global War by Claude Lalumière (first publication in Italian, 2021) dramatizes the multiple competing claims to Jerusalem in the character of a secret triple agent who works to save the holy city for a fourth interested party. Meanwhile, The Time-Slip Detective by Lavie Tidhar (first publication, 2014) turns the metafictional lens on itself and dreams of a more prosperous Israel obtained at a more grievous price. And Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Airplanes' by Benjamin Rosenbaum by Benjamin Rosenbaum (first publication, 2004) is a pulp adventure set in a timeline where Judaism abandoned the hope to rebuild the Temple.

Curiously, a few participants in the collection coincided in imagining a different history of the film industry, with more participation from Jewish actors, directors and producers. Nights at the Crimea by Jessica Reisman (first publication, 2009) blurs the borders of reality with soft touches that demand rereading. The Premiere by Hunter C. Eden (written for this anthology) explores what happens to characters whose lives end up following the conventions of gangster cinema. And The Golem (1933) by Gwynne Garfinkle (written for this anthology) rewrites an acting career boosted by a film that our world never got to see.

There are also stories that jump right into the fertile territory of Jewish folklore. Three Stars by Isak Bloom (written for this anthology) is a stormy romance between a not-quite-human student and his not-quite-demonic boyfriend. Rise and Walk the Land by David Nurenberg (written for this anthology) is a moral dilemma about burial laws during the zombie apocalypse. And in Strength of my Salvation by Bogi Takács (written for this anthology), divine gifts prove key to saving an entire community.

At the other extreme, we get timelines that launch Jews into space: If the Righteous Wished, They Could Create a World by Jack Nicholls (written for this anthology) is an existential parable where the image of God replicates the image of God, while A Sky and a Heaven by Eric Choi (first publication, 2022) imagines a deeply moving struggle to save the shuttle Columbia.

As I said above, most of these alternate histories contain additional stories nested inside of them. Protagonists may be tasked with creating a story, or make a pivotal choice inspired by a story, or lead lives in accordance with the conventions of storytelling. Written in the style of letters, or newspaper pieces, or diary notes, or lost manuscripts, these selections speak of a civilization that conceives of itself as playing a role scripted from eternity. Reading Other Covenants is a fitting way of understanding the people that perfected the method of apophatic reasoning: it's a series of glimpses of what it is, obtained by traversing all the ways it wasn't.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Lobel, Andrea D. and Shainblum, Mark [editors]. Other Covenants: Alternate Histories of the Jewish People [Ben Yehuda Press, 2022].