Posted on 10/12/2002 11:20:11 PM PDT by redrock
Yes, I have a copy of Guns of the South. It's his best novel, I think, and certainly his most well known. Besides being an interesting sci-fi concept, it approaches the question of the civil war and slavery from a different angle by contrasting the period characters with the modern racist extremist. My only gripe with Turtledove is a lot of his dialog ends up sounding the same. I've tried some of his other alternative stuff, like the Great War and American Front, but they read too much like Guns of the South and Worldwar. I think maybe he's cranking too much stuff out at the moment. Some of his earlier short stories have excellent mood and dialog. I stumbled across a short story he wrote in 1988 called "Gentlemen of the Shade" about vampires, and didn't even recognize it as being his writing. The dialog in the Worldwar series suffers a little bit from this, but I think it can be forgiven because overall it's a ambitious story with scope dealing with race, international politics, the impersonal brutality of mechanized war, and the personal brutality of the Maoists, Soviets, Nipponese and Nazis. It is a pretty depressing, I'll admit. There's little hope for a victory for the human race, only a stalemate. There's another three books called Colonization which advance the story into the 1960s when the colonization fleet is due to arrive. It's a little bit of an unsatisfying sequel, because there are tantalizing hints that the human race might be able to rid themselves of the Lizards, or at least corrupting them to the point that a distinction would be a moot. There's also the hint of attempting contact with the Lizard homeworld. However, none of these plotlines are developed and are so far off anyway as to be not within the scope of the existing novels. Supposedly, Turtledove has released a fouth and final book in the Colonization series this fall which I haven't read yet.
The one weak point in the Worldwar series I though was the Lizard's supply of nuclear missles. Truly, if they wanted to, they could push an asteroid ala Footfall to compensate for their dwindling supply of nukes. This capability is hinted at as a human tactic in the second series.
The End Of The World Part Two.
...kept me somewhat sane thru my time in Vietnam.
To this day...I re-read it every couple of years.
redrock
Something that too many forget...or never realized.
redrock
It SHOULD be required reading to graduate High School.
redrock
Two excellent books.
redrock
Thanks for posting this.
Oh yummy! Thanks for the Heinlein ping!
Hehehe.... some new things to think about starting to read to my Abby you know! :-)
Heartily agreed!
It was required reading for my kids anyway.
Nicely put. Thanks.
There has been one piece of advice that has helped me with great profit and any number of crisis.
It has resulted in a power that has taught the results of power carry responsibility.
The advise: "Rub her feet"
ahh how knowledge truly IS power.
you may also want to check out http://www.blackmask.org for free books.
I keep books on my PDA for those hurry up and wait times.
So much of his should be required reading.
(some of his books are even available in cliffs notes.)
BTTT for later read.
try "Stranger in a Stange Land" its about a Martian name Michael Valentine Smith. (there are even cliff's notes on it!)
Start her off with "The Probability Broach". Still Smith's best.
"Have Space Suit, Will Travel" is the first Heinlein book I did-and-didn't read.
Wait, let me explain...
Like you, I stumbled across it in the school library as a kid, in a fat large-type hardback edition. I started reading it, but didn't really get "into" it because it was just a kid tinkering in his garage on an old suit and stuff, and thus I hadn't gotten too far into it when the book was due to be returned.
*Years* later, when I was eighteen, my girlfriend at the time introduced me to what I thought was my "first" Heinlein book, "Stranger in a Strange Land". Like all of Heinlein's books, it had more mind-stretching ideas than a stack of most lesser works, so I began devouring all his books (I've now read every one of them, and own copies of most).
The last books of his I read were his so-called "juvenile" books (all still imminently readable for adults), and thus I came full circle -- one of the last ones I caught up on was "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel", and as I read the first few chapters it came flooding back to me that I had checked out and read this book *many* years ago as a young child.
The really funny part is that I remembered exactly where I had stopped out of youthful boredom -- it was HALF A PAGE before an alien space ship comes flying out of the sky and grabs the main character from his back yard and all hell breaks loose... (He was already standing in his backyard dressed in the spacesuit at the point I stopped reading.)
If I had read just one more page back when I was a kid, I'd have gotten to "the good parts", and read the rest of the book. Who knows how much sooner I'd have caught up on Heinlein's books at a much younger age, and what effect that might have had on my formative years.
Oh well, better late than never I suppose.
It stands alone, and is without doubt on any "must read" list of Heinlein's books.
Besides just being a wonderful read, it's also a great homage to the American Revolution.
Wow, I just noticed how old the posts are to which I'm responding, LOL! Who resurrected this dusty old thread? ;-)
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