| Through Darkest Europe | |
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| Author | Harry Turtledove |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Alternate history |
| Publisher | Tor |
| Publication date | September 18, 2018 |
Through Darkest Europe is an alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove, (Tor, September 18, 2018). It was originally announced under the working title of God Wills It!. The novel is set in the present in a world where Christian Europe remained a backwater of religious fanaticism, but the Muslim world of the Middle East and North Africa became the progressive and developed "First World".
The first stated Point of Divergence is that Al-Ghazali, a great Islamic philosopher who flourished around 1100, adopted a pro-science worldview, rather than his allegedly anti-science stance of OTL. The second stated POD is that the 13th century Italian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, a pro-science man in OTL, took the opposite "reversal" and caused the Christian world to become intellectually stagnant.
The bulk of the novel is set in the Grand Duchy of Italy, where two special investigators from the Republican Sultanate of the Maghrib have been summoned to help root out and suppress the Aquinist terrorist branch, who seek to return Europe to a medieval way of thinking and remove all outside influence. Maghribi agent Khalid al-Zarzisi is the novel's sole POV.
Similar Turtledove works[]
Turtledove has also had Christian Europe fall behind Islamic civilization in "Islands in the Sea" and In High Places, all of which have very different PODs.
"Occupation Duty" sees the birth of all modern Abrahamic religions nipped in the bud, with various strains of polytheism dominating the modern world. The story focuses on geographic analogs of Israel and Palestine, whose OTL positions are similarly "reversed."
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