THE HOUSE of DANIEL: A NOVEL of WILD MAGIC, the GREAT DEPRESSION, and SEMIPRO BALL by Harry Turtledove

Published in 2016 by Tom Doherty Associates (A Tor Book)

Harry Turtledove specializes in alternate histories. Usually, he has a big twist - what if the South won the Civil War? What if Atlantis were a real continent? What if the Colonies lost the Revolutionary War? What if MacArthur actually dropped atomic bombs during the Korean War?

The House of Daniel is a different kind of story, with a twist.

To be perfectly honest, I read the description of this book, with its references to The Great Depression, baseball, "hotshot wizards" and zombies and missed the fact that it was actually referring to actual wizards and zombies, not metaphorical wizards (the whiz kid experts that FDR hired) and zombies (the unemployed masses who are desperate for work). I really thought that Turtledove had just written a straight book about semipro baseball in the Great Depression.

And, basically he has. 85% of this story is about baseball.

Jack Spivey does odd jobs, plays semipro baseball for a few bucks a game and a little muscle work for a local mobster-type named Big Stu in Enid, Oklahoma. He is contracted to go to a neighboring town to give a beating to the sibling of a client that is behind on his payments. When the sibling turns out to be a beautiful young woman, Jack can't do it. Instead, he takes a position with a traveling semipro baseball team called "The House of Daniel" and hits the road.

If you don't like baseball, this book will bore you to tears. Jack tells about his life on the road and about dozens of baseball games - sometimes in great detail, with play by play and even pitch by pitch descriptions. 

But, the world that they live in is a little off from our world. Major League Baseball exists, but none of the names are recognizable. Magic exists - regular magic, dark magic and even religious magic. So do vampires. And zombies. And magic carpets. And mystery creatures like chupacabras. 

I really enjoyed this book, despite my original confusion. 

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE HOUSE of DANIEL: A NOVEL of WILD MAGIC, the GREAT DEPRESSION, and SEMIPRO BALL by Harry Turtledove.

FORT PILLOW: A NOVEL of the CIVIL WAR (audiobook) by Harry Turtledove

Audiobook Edition Published in 2009 by Tantor Audio
Published in hardback in 2006.
Read by John Allen Nelson
Duration: 11 hours, 13 minutes
Unabridged

The massacre at Fort Pillow truly stands out in a bloody Civil War in which hundreds of thousands of men and women died. Even though the American Civil War had so many casualties, the war itself was remarkable in that the two sides were often quite civil with one another off of the battlefield. There are numerous stories of local truces to trade coffee for tobacco and the like. My favorite is the story of Confederate and Union pickets (perimeter guards) who co-built a cabin in stages during the winter and agreed to share it in shifts as the day went along. Prisoners of War were generally cared for (there were exceptions, but they stick out as exceptions), the enemy wounded were treated by the doctors (the care was bad, but the best that was available), and so on.

Nathan Bedford Forrest
(1821-1877)

The battle at Fort Pillow in April of 1864, though, stands out as something different. It was much more like the Missouri Bushwhacker and Kansas Jayhawker fighting. It was more than just Union vs. Confederate. It had a personal side to it that resulted in a massacre. 

The positive side to Fort Pillow: A Novel of the Civil War is that Turtledove has clearly done an exceptional amount of research. He presents Nathan Bedford Forrest as a complicated man. An uneducated man who outsmarts most West Pointers he fights against and outshines most of his experienced and educated peers. He truly was one of the most talented officers of the war. But, he was also a slave trader and certainly could not approve of Black soldiers fighting against white men.

An advertisement
for Forrest's
slave-trading business.

Fort Pillow was garrisoned with white and black soldiers. The U.S. Colored Troops were roughly half of the soldiers, the balance were white soldiers, mostly  from Tennessee. Even though Tennessee was a Confederate state, these white soldiers had sat out of the war and then volunteered for the Union army when they could or had deserted the Confederate army to join the Union. Tennessee supplied 100,000 men to the Confederate cause, but it also supplied 50,000 Union soldiers. A lot of Forrest's men were from Tennessee and they looked at Tennessee men who became Union soldiers as traitors or worse. Forrest's men also believed that these Union soldiers had attacked pro-Confederate families, including unsanctioned raping and looting. Turtledove hints that even though these attacks were unsanctioned, they may very well have been unofficially approved of by the Union leadership at Fort Pillow. Clearly, the fighting in Tennessee was more than just about secession or slavery - it had a personal dimension as well.

The U.S. Colored Troops had a different set of problems. The Confederate government had pledged to enslave any black soldiers that they captured, on the premise that they were all escaped slaves. 

Forrest and his men launched a surprise, raid-style attack on Fort Pillow in an effort to pick up more arms and other supplies and in a non-stop effort to harass Yankee soldiers wherever they could be found. 

Fort Pillow was poorly designed and its officers did little to improve its viability. For example, fields of fire were not cleared around the fort, little thought had gone into what would happen if the defenders got in close (the artillery could not hit them due to the limited ability of the cannons to fire downward). 

After some hard fighting it became obvious to Forrest that he would eventually take the fort and he asked for a truce to discuss surrender terms. The original commander of the fort had been killed and his replacement refused to surrender, even though Forrest promised to not enslave the U.S. Colored Troops and that they would not seek reprisal against the white soldiers from Tennessee. He also threatened that if his men were forced to take the fort by force he could not ensure that he could stop them from committing these sorts of atrocities.

And, it turns out, Forrest was right...

Turtledove does so much right in this book. It is well-researched. He makes characters out of people in multiple levels of both armies so that he can give a very thorough view of the battle. He does not get bogged down in the technical details of each weapon, but his description of how to operate a Civil War cannon was detailed and extremely interesting.

What does he do wrong?

- He is repetitive. It is great that he gives multiple perspectives, but he gives long, long multiple perspectives on the same topic.

-He has an annoying habit of having the omniscient narrator tell the reader something and then have the characters note the same thing, think about the thing that they noted, tell another character about that thing and then they discuss whether or not to tell other people about it. Any single one of these devices would have been sufficient. Even worse, sometimes a soldier on the other side of the battle notices the same thing and the entire process is repeated.

-There is a long, rather boring chase of a single Union officer after the battle. He sneaks away from the fort, tries to get to Union lines, gets captured and eventually is executed. Way too long and no real pay off at the end.

In sum, the book is too repetitive. The good parts of the book are simply overwhelmed by the tedium of the slow parts. Easily 25% of the book could have been thrown out or condensed. Probably more.

The reader, John Allen Nelson, did some good work in his reading. He did not have enough unique voices to make each character stand out. But, he was great at adding emotion and drama to the story. He often yelled as he read about the men charging Fort Pillow or becoming wounded. 

But, no matter how well read this book was, the story was damaged by an author that does not seem to believe that his readers can follow along unless they are constantly told the same facts over and over again.

I rate this story 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon here: Fort Pillow: A Novel of the Civil War.

Atlantis and Other Places: Stories of Alternate History (audiobook) by Harry Turtledove

Published in 2010 by Tantor audio

Read by Todd McLaren

Duration: 14 hours, 4 minutes.
Unabridged.

Called a “Master of Alternate History” by Publishers Weekly, Harry Turtledove continues on that track in Atlantis and Other Places with a set of 12 short stories. Topics and eras range from pre-history to the Peloponnesian War to the Byzantine Empire to World War II and two stories set in modern times. All of these stories have appeared in other publications.

This collection begins and ends with two stories about Atlantis, a topic he has explored more deeply in a trilogy. “Audubon in Atlantis” is the first story that Turtledove published about Atlantis. The famed 19^th century naturalist John James Audubon has traveled to Atlantis to catalog some of its unique wildlife. Turtledove introduces his alternate world, including basics of the history of Atlantis and he introduces the House of Universal Devotion, a religion that is most analogous to the Mormon Church in regular history. Turtledove’s focus on laying down the ground rules for makes the first half of the story a bit tiresome. It does pick up once Audubon is in the field.

Harry Turtledove

The last story, “The Scarlet Band” is chronologically Turtledove’s last story about Atlantis. In the story, Athelstan Helms and Dr. James Walton, the world famous detective duo (modeled after Holmes and Watson), are summoned to Atlantis to investigate a series of murders of prominent citizens who have been openly critical of the House of Universal Devotion. It is a fine ending to the collection, even if the murder is a bit too easily solved.

As in any collection, the quality varies. “Bedfellows” is a tiresome story once the gimmick is understood in the first minute, but it goes on for another 10 minutes. “News From the Front” is an alternate history of World War II told through headlines and snippets of editorials.  Roosevelt is savaged in the press for failing to foresee the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s will to fight sags so low that it ends up suing for peace, much like the Japanese Empire had hoped in their original plans for the war in our timeline. The premise is interesting, but the headline/editorial format loses its punch and it tends to drag.

On the other hand, “Catcher in the Rhine” and “Someone is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy” are both quite fun. “Catcher” is a play on J.D. Salinger’s famed character Holden Caulfield. Caulfield is visiting Germany and he gets caught up in a bit of magical time travel. Turtledove captures Caulfield’s voice perfectly. “Throne Rooms” is a pure comic bit of science fiction (and the only story in the collection that is not alternate history – it is set in the future). A giant sentient hamster is sent by the Star Patrol to investigate a series of thefts of throne rooms (and their accompanying antechambers) providing plenty of laugh out loud moments.

“Farmers’ Law” and “The Genetics Lecture” are middle of the road stories. The former is a straightforward murder mystery set in a rural village in the Byzantine Empire and the latter is a Twilight Zone-esque very short story (about 6 minutes long) that, unfortunately, telegraphed its punch line.

“Uncle Alf” is set in France in 1929. But, in this world, the German Empire has won World War I and a 40-year-old Hitler is part of the German army occupying France. He is dedicated to rooting out socialism and in seducing his 21-year-old half-niece through a series of letters. The story is told through those letters. Although the incestual seduction aspect of the story is based on strong historical supposition, that fact does nothing to ease the creepy feeling that pervades the whole story.

Sokrates

The three strongest stories are all quite different from one another. “The Daimon” is set in the Peloponnesian War and the only difference is that Sokrates decides to participate in the invasion of Syracuse. In history, this campaign turned into a disaster, but Sokrates is able to offer advice to Alkibiades, the mercurial fair-haired young general who led the invasion. This advice causes Athens to win the entire war and, in the process lose their democracy to a tyrannical Alkibiades. Sokrates lives long enough to regret his advice as Alkibiades consolidates the Greek city states under his power in order to launch an invasion of Persia like Alexander the Great did nearly a century later. Those who are familiar with the Peloponnesian War will especially appreciate the ironic comments and situations that arise in this story.

“The Horse of Bronze” is a simple story of centaurs discovering men, but it is so much more. If you are a fan of Aristotle or enjoy thinking about the concepts behind his “Theory of Forms” (Turtledove introduces the theory in the earlier story “Daimon”) you will enjoy this story of the arrival of men in a world filled with Centaurs, Nuggies, Satyrs, Sirens and Sphinxes.

“Occupation Duty” is set in modern day Gaza. The story is about troops going on patrol in an armored personnel carrier in a hostile, conquered territory.  However, this is not about Israel and the Palestinians. Instead it is the “Philistinians” and the Moabites. In this history, Goliath beat David and Israel is nothing but a distant, ancient memory. The fight scenes are first rate and the irony of the same fighting going on in the same territory for the same reasons with different nations is quite good. Throw in a solid description of a world with no monotheistic religions and a tantalizing peek at this new world’s politics and I found myself wishing he had fleshed this story out into a novel.

Todd McLaren’s narration of these stories was exceptional. He delivers a variety of voices and tones – everything from American southern accents to a variety of British accents to Hitler’s German accent. He even catches Alkibiades’ famed lisp and you can hear the treachery in his voice as he crushes his opponents. Very impressive and enjoyable work throughout.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Atlantis and Other Places.

Reviewed March 21, 2011.

The Two Georges: The Novel of an Alternate America by Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove

So, what do you get when Oscar Award Winner and a Hugo Award Winner get together?

Published in 1996 by Tor Books

What you get is a pretty good book, actually.

The premise of The Two Georges is that the United States was never formed. The British government dealt fairly with the colonies in the 1760s and the independence movement was stillborn. Instead, what are now the USA and Canada is called the North American Union and are an integral part of the United Kingdom. The UK is a vast world-wide empire led by the King-Emperor. This union is symbolized by the painting "The Two Georges" which depicts colonial representative George Washington bowing before King George III before an assembly of British and American dignitaries. This moment encapsulates the agreements that kept the American colonies a part of the British Empire. At the beginning of the book the painting is stolen in 1996 by The Sons of Liberty, a North American pro-independence movement. The story follows two detectives and an art curator who are searching for the painting before the ransom deadline.

There were a lot of fascinating things about this book. I thoroughly enjoyed the historical premise and the maps of the world and North America that are at the front of the book. The authors conclude that if there were no USA, there would be few independent countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas, since there was no American example to inspire the dismantling of the vast world-wide European empires. Germany never coalesces since France never spawns a Napoleonic Empire (Napoleon was the first to unite most of Germany - before that it never really occurred to the Germans that they could create a powerful country if they untied themselves) since there was no French Revolution since there was no American Revolution to inspire it.

American history is different since the UK outlaws slavery in the 1830s - there was no Civil War. The American map has 2 mostly American Indian states - Iroquois and Cherokee, thanks to British restrictions on white incursions over the Appalachians (one of the reasons for rebellion mentioned in the Declaration of Independence).

Technology is far behind that of our world - American creativity is not challenged due to World Wars, Japan is practically a non-entity and Germany is a bunch of warring principalities.

Enjoyable book, decent mystery, good adventure.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Two Georges: The Novel of an Alternate America by Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove.

Reviewed in 2004.