I'm going to start this one off by doing quickie jobs of stuff I can remember off the top of my head for the next week or two, attract some other EIaK reader to build on that if we're lucky, and then, hopefully, once the rigmarole associated with a changeover of academic term is resolved, get down to brass tacks as I did around this time last year with WBtP and the year before with RB.
A word on this book, it's the most shamelss in a long line of shameless OTL mass rip-offs by HT. Absolutely everything is instantly identifiable as such, right down to the Shqipetar flag (see inset)
and the motto "In the Prophets We Trust" on Vespuccilander coins. Sometimes he even seems to go out of his way to bring in more rip-offs. The puns aren't even clever; they're often just synonyms, like Albion for Britain, or city names, like Tver for Russia or Torino for Italy. (One exception comes at the very end when Otto says that in the wake of the WWI analog Tver will be ruled by a peasants' council until someone "steels himself" to take the throne.) So as with WBtP I believe we should throw in one-line "X is based on Y" references so people don't think we're trying to pass off a plagiarism or something. Turtle Fan 16:49, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
- Ok. TR 16:59, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
- I had a similar reaction to the world building in EIaK. It's just a textbook summary of 1910s history with all names mad-libbed.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 02:37, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
- Yep. It's still one I remember fondly, though. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:27, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
- The main character is quite likable and lively in his adventures. This surprisingly seems like the most cinematic of HT's novels, that I could see working as a movie without much change to the plot. The novel itself is a bit padded, like it missed an editing job or two. It might have been better as a novella than a novel.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 06:51, 9 January 2022 (UTC)