Just Finished Reading: Settling Accounts – Return Engagement by Harry Turtledove (FP: 2004)

June 22, 1941. It’s time for the Confederate States to take their final revenge against the hated United States. Launching an unannounced and unprovoked attack President Jake Featherston, the South’s charismatic leader, has nothing more on his mind than total victory and total dominance of the whole continent. Reeling from the initial attack the United States falls back in disarray and is outflanked time and again by the new tactics of combined tank (known as barrels) and ground attack aircraft. Before long the integrity of the entire country is threatened as the Confederate forces approach the Great Lakes. Meanwhile the war expands into Europe, South East Asia and the Occupied Territory of Canada. Drawing new fighters who grew up in a world at peace and veterans who remember the First World War all too well this could be the Confederates finest hour.

I’ve been reluctant to read this for some time after slogging through the author’s previous work in this seemingly never ending series. After making it through the 623 pages in reasonable time I began to wonder if either I was getting used to his somewhat pedestrian style or if things had improved since his last book. Maybe it was a bit of both. Predictably he did spend a significant amount of time explaining each characters past and their particular identifying traits but he seemed to have eased off on the number of times he brought them up – or maybe I’d simply learnt to tune them out more successfully! Like family sagas everywhere it was interesting to catch up on the lives of characters I’d ‘known’ for the past 25 odd years. The author even managed to surprise me by even killing off at least one major character. The events themselves however where, by and large, an almost direct take from real events early in ‘our’ WW2 where the Confederacy is quite clearly Germany, the black population clearly representing the Jews and the Union quite clearly France (and maybe England too). As you might expect there are few surprises for anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the opening events of the real WW2.

Despite the many criticisms I could level at this book – indeed at the author himself – he still managed to produce something that kept me turning page after page and which kept me wanting to know what happened next and who lived and who died. In the final analysis the whole series up to this point could have been handled much better – especially with some radical editing – but this is still reasonably entertaining stuff and is reasonably well written. I doubt if it will win any prizes and there are much better authors of Alt-History out there – I’m looking at you John Birmingham and Taylor Anderson – but if you want a soft introduction to the genre that won’t require much effort or any great thought then this is the series of books for you. I will be reading the rest of the series at some point but I’m not in any great hurry to do so. Reasonable.