Forum:One Last Look at The War That Prematurely Ejaculated

So now that TWTPE has ended, why don't we share any thoughts we may have had over how the series as a whole wound up.

Generally speaking I would say I like the ending. I like the idea of Hitler falling from internal pressures and a new German government reaching an honorable peace without being occupied, and the country being strong enough to resist getting bitched around by conquerors. I like that Central Europe seems to have at least a sliver of a hope of breaking the old cycle of having to make the awful choice between red and brown. I like the USA and USSR not going directly into a Cold War setup and the implication that the people of the world may get the chance to remember that there's more to life than a desperate, never-ending struggle just to survive for the sake of surviving.

It's a good end point. The problem is, it was such a long walk to get there, by such a circuitous route. The seeds of this conclusion were all there from the beginning of the series, but they fizzled and were then ignored in favor of other plot lines which ultimately went nowhere. Then all of a sudden they were revisited.

It's pretty clear HT went into this series without much of an idea of what he wanted to do with it. "Hmm, I wonder what would happen if WWII started a year early. It looks like it would pretty much go more or less the same.  Sure Poland's joined the Axis and France isn't folding at the first blow, but the broad strokes are all pretty much the same as OTL.  Hitler's reaching out for the same places on the map in the same order.  So is Stalin.  Now they both want the same thing, so they're fighting each other.  Germany's invading the USSR.  It's making massive gains.  Some of the people there are glad to see the Communist Party on the ropes and are supporting Germany.  Others are not.  Guerrilla war.  Hungary and Romania are coming along for the ride.  Mussolini's playing his own game, with Hitler's unenthusiastic support.  Now Germany's blitzing Denmark and Norway.  The US is keeping out of it but is rooting hard for the Western Allies from the sidelines.

"This is boring. Time for a shakeup.  Ooh!  I wonder what would happen if the UK and France switched sides and helped Hitler fight Stalin?

"Actually, I don't like this so much. I'm going to have them switch back right away.

"Oh look, now Italy's fighting Britain in North Africa, but losing. Maybe I can have Germans come in and turn the tables.  Now it's stabilizing . . . Japan jumped the US, it's taking Britain's colonies in Southeast Asia and pushing deeper out into the Pacific.  It's sucker-punching the US Navy.  The US will have to take some time to consolidate its forces and counterattack. . ..

"Damn, it's back to OTL again. I need another shakeup . . . Remember when I almost had the generals overthrow Hitler?  Why did I decide not to go with that?  Ah, hell, I'll start it up again."

Without all these pointless diversions and long periods of parallelism, the series could have wound up where it did in half the time. Yes, I know that both HT and Del Rey make more money off of six books than they do off of three, but I guess I somehow still cling to naive notions of artistic integrity trumping flagrant greed. I really should know better than that by now. And I don't want to accuse HT of flagrant greed in this case, but I'm just having such a hard time coming up with a purely creative reason for writing a series that's more than 50% filler.

It's even more apparent with the Spanish subplot. So in the end Jezek really did pot Sanjurjo, and that really did spell the end of Spanish Nationalism. (Though I'm sure the Republic will remain nationalist with a small n, communist governments almost always do.) But that wasn't a long walk to get there--it was a long period of standing still. TR spent several years predicting this outcome, with me responding "Nah, if that's what HT wanted to do he would have done it already. It will end in stalemate." Well it stayed static forever, till all of a sudden it wasn't. What the hell?

I really don't see why it was included in the series at all. With the exception of Jezek getting out of France when the Big Switch happened (and there must have been other ways to pull that off), what happened down there never had any bearing whatsoever on the rest of the story. It didn't even have any kind of thematic resonance, except perhaps "Oh, look, we've had a civil war in one country all this time, and now that it's over, we have another starting somewhere else." It seemed to be happening (or, far more often, not happening) in a vacuum.

Did HT want to write a SCW AH so badly, but didn't think anyone would go for it, so he folded it into another project? I guess I can see that happening. But if you take all the scenes set in Spain over a six-year period, you could surely make one full-length novel on the subject. Well the quantity's there, anyway; the lack of any developments in the story as he told it would preclude a proper novel. Though under those constraints he might have been forced to tell a story in which more than one event actually happened. That would be an improvement.

By the way, I can't help thinking what a contradictory tale it wound up being. In the beginning, the Nationalists don't win on the OTL schedule because Sanjurjo's still around, and he's such a jerk that his mere presence holds them back. In the end, you remove Sanjurjo and his side is fucked, because he was the only one holding them together. He's too useless to live and too important to die. How the hell can you have both in the same continuity?

Moving on from story, I want to talk about characters. I'm not going to say much about anyone in particular, but I really don't have terribly strong opinions of the cast generally. When HW came out I found some of them odious and the rest of them tedious. There was nothing apart from unlikeability to make any of them pop out.

Not at first, anyway. Over time most of them did eventually manage to develop a unique voice sooner or later (and most of those who didn't were killed off and replaced by someone who did). I couldn't stand Weinberg at first, but he really came to grow on me as time went by (which was the only real redeeming virtue to the unbroken monotony of the Spanish subplot).

I enjoyed Peggy's time in Europe, even though I complained about how she wasn't making the most of it to affect affairs over there. She got a lot more boring when she came home (though I still wanted her around because she offered such a unique perspective as a civilian, a citizen of a neutral country, and, less importantly, a woman). In Book 6 she sort of rallied over Book 5; but while her slice-of-life-on-the-home-front story was more interesting than focusing full time on her smoking career, it was still pretty thin stuff next to what she'd been when she started. There was one scene about halfway through LO where she was ruminating on how those earlier experiences had changed her outlook, and I actually found myself thinking "Oh yeah, that's right, she was trapped behind the lines for a while. Huh, feels like it happened to a whole different character."

I liked Walsh mainly because of his contacts with the people in power in his country. He should have spent a lot more time on that and less leading his squad. There's nothing wrong with the majority of his scenes where he's on the front lines, but they had so much less to offer than what he'd been doing elsewhere. More on that later.

Baatz was a jerk, Dernen should have shot him in the back when he had the chance. But he wasn't a really diabolical love-to-hate type character, just kind of a generalized "Oh, yeah, he's an asshole." The only thing you could say about him was that you looked forward to his death, and when it finally came it was incredibly underwhelming. But even if it had had a lot more oomph to it, again, you didn't hate him, you just disliked him, so there wouldn't have been much in the way of catharsis.

For the first two books I couldn't believe how useless McGill was; he could not have been less relevant to the story. Clearly HT was keeping him around till the Pacific War started, and when it did he served a role. . . for a while. But then he spent his last three scenes literally stranded on a desert island! At least when he was in Beijing and Shanghai, you had a chance of enjoying the sights and sounds of those cities through his eyes while you waited for the story to resume. But Midway! And to make matters even worse, during his quarantine, shit was actually happening in the Pacific, completely unseen and uncovered. Geez.

Adi Stoss taking over the last POV slot in the end. . . odd choice. Between Theo (who we all of a sudden learn at the very end is the son of a Roman history buff himself?) and Sarah, whose stories were already sharply converging when Adi joined the cast, we already had that little corner of the world well covered. Adding a third POV just made it claustrophobic.

And speaking of Sarah, she was a disappointment herself. There was no emotional punch to her story, not really; it was just a by-the-numbers account of falling into dreary routines in a tough old world. I was hoping there'd be some real tension and terror associated with her story, as there was with Ealstan's and Vanai's back in the day. The hardships and indignities she and her family endured were bad, to be sure, but those of us with knowledge of OTL know it could have been so much worse than it was. And then when she's at ground zero of the uprising that finally does Hitler in, she's barely got anything more to say about it than other characters who are hearing about it on the radio and through the rumor mill. I understand that she wasn't in a position to become deeply involved, but she must have been able to do something more than she did.

I actually found I said that about so many scenes in the series. There's just so much that was wasted! Everything in Spain, everything with Lemp, half of Peggy's scenes in Europe and all but a small handful after she got back, way too many of McGill's. ..

. . . and the front lines scenes! Good God they were all so monotonous. Whether it was combat or camp life, they rarely advanced the story, and they were all so repetitive. Not just repetitive of each other, either; it's the exact same stuff we got in GW, RE, Worldwar, even Derlavai. All the magical stuff in Derlavai had a 1:1 correspondent with an industrial element of mechanized warfare, and once the novelty wore off, it was the same old shit (though it wasn't quite as old then as it was in this series). HT had better not give us another mechanized war for a while.

But while very few of the characters really impressed me enough that I genuinely cared about them, I still would have preferred they get happy endings. But most of their sendoffs were either way too abrupt and inconclusive (To think the damned pussy was the last we'll ever see of Mouradian! And we took our leave of Rudel right before the crisis that would force the transformation he'd been building to all along) or very grim. Weinberg's last scene was, well. . . not very true to character: "I'm a communist, and I can't wait to take advantage of all the opportunities Wall Street generates!" Still, at least we know he'll land on his feet. (Also, I couldn't decide between amusement and irritation at one of the signs of a prosperous city being sidewalks that are just carpeted with cigarette butts that a lot of assholes were too inconsiderate to dispose of properly.) I'm not generally into--what do they call it, shipping?--but Theo becoming a Goldman-in-law is an idea I kind of like, even though it was rushed through in the final act. For most of the others I'm finding I'm already starting to forget where they ended up, and I just don't give a shit.

This is definitely it for TWTPE, though. There was a tremendous air of finality to this book, at least as much so as there was with IatD. Ironically, it's ending at the very point when I'm becoming genuinely interested in what comes next. Europe's in for a very different second half of the twentieth century (though if HT did try to keep going he'd probably end up regressing to the mean sooner or later). I even care about Spain all of a sudden: Especially now that they've absorbed so much of a Stalinist marinade in taking so much aid from Moscow, the Republic's ideology is so foreign to Spanish culture that I'd be very interested to see how they try to consolidate power. I think they'd have to step lightly around their neighbors as well; the USSR is far away, and no one closer is going to help them if they piss off the capitalists who surround them. I have to think that, if they survive, it will be as something like Tito's Yugoslavia: communist, but independent of the USSR, on good terms with non-communists, and tolerant of all sorts of things of which Party doctrine disapproves. But repressive just the same.

But despite these pleasant diversions, I'm very ready to say goodbye to this continuity.

That raises my last question, though. HT and Del Rey have been putting out a novel every summer since at least 1997. My interest level has waxed and waned from one year to the next, but it's become such a part of my annual rhythm that I'd miss these books if they went away altogether. And every time I've said HT's not going to do another series after he finishes one up, he's surprised me.

So what do we think will be next? As I said, I'm so sick of WWII; and I don't think he can do any more with it, either. This series has just covered so many different AH options that I have to think he's out of ideas. Not all of them were followed up on, but we at least flirted with: no appeasement; France stays in the fight; Japan swings north instead of south; the US keeps out of Europe (that changed in the very end, but the war ended so quickly after that that I'm counting it); Britain goes crypto-fascist; everyone gangs up on Stalin; Hitler's overthrown by his own people; and even no atomic bombs. What could possibly be left?

I'm wondering if we'll see more WWI material generally as a result of Centennial Fever. Actually I do have an AH of that which I suspect might be promising: More Republican primaries in 1912 and/or less influence for Taft in the RNC leads Theodore Roosevelt winning at the GOP nominating convention. I don't believe Taft had the charisma to lead a third party challenge of his own, and if the party's right wing bolts, they wouldn't draft him. Taft may not have been comfortable with presiding over a continued expansion of executive power, but all his policy preferences were solidly progressive. If conservative Republicans go off on their own, they'd get a right-wing standard bearer who could very well drain almost as much support from Wilson as he would from Roosevelt. If not, the right wing of the GOP could just stay home or cast protest votes or something, but I don't think that would seriously hurt Roosevelt.

So you've got TR as President when the war breaks out, and you can bet that within a year's time he'd have found or manufactured an excuse to get involved. If all that American money and manpower comes pouring in on the Entente side while Russia's still in the fight and before the UK and France have been weakened through several years of attrition, the numerical inequality could possibly tell very quickly. So the war would still be nasty and brutish, but at least it would be short--maybe, just maybe, so short that the politicians who have to decide how it will end would not be so consumed with hatred that they'd impose an unjust peace which would just fuck things up all over again.

But I don't want that to be HT's next project. As I said, I want him to be done with mechanized warfare for a while. I'd like to see him go further back in time. Another Civil War story would be good. Something pre-industrial would be better.