Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-25626-20150324180019/@comment-21519-20150407020114

Happy Easter to you as well.

I continued to find TL-191 rewarding till much later than you did. I enjoyed every book up through RE. The poor quality of DttE came as quite a shock to me and I was sure it would be an aberration, that HT would rally with TG and get back to his old form. That one sucked too, and I didn't have much hope for IatD, but by then there was only one book left.

I did feel fairly early on that he was leaning too heavily on parallelism, and was missing some very intriguing possibilities as a result. For instance, I badly wanted Featherston's purge of Huey Long to backfire, with secessionist fervor sweeping through Louisiana. Confederate history would have made it very hard indeed for even a totalitarian like Featherston to reject a state's right of secession flat-out; while he pauses to consider his options, the US very quickly extends diplomatic recognition to Louisiana and sends a carrier and a handful of battleships to New Orleans as "a show of friendship." That's what starts the war, not I Can't Believe It's Not Munich.

My antipathy toward TWTPE is well known, no need to rehash it here; but yes, the POV characters were generic ciphers with whom we couldn't identify, and (with the exception of the German civil war at the end) intriguing AH opportunities were ignored in favor of an uninteresting regression to the mean. I never could figure out why the Spanish subplot was in there at all, given how very little of note ever actually happened with it; I had wondered whether HT had a SCW novel in mind and parsed it out among the installments of a WWII series, but if you boiled all of Weinberg's, Delgadillo's, and Jezek's scenes into one book, reading that book would be like watching paint dry. And the hell of it is, Weinberg was probably the one POV character who had enough of a personality to be consistently interesting in his own right. Wasted in the most monotonous and irrelevant storyline.

I'll still read BA even so, though I'm not getting my hopes up. Two bright spots I see with that project are that he's finally departing from the done-to-death WWII era (though not by very much, admittedly) and that HT's the one author I know of who can contemplate an all-out nuclear war without assuming it will automatically become the end of everything. So this project does play to one of his unique strengths.