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Adar
Jul 27, 2001

Pierson posted:

Turtledove and a lot of this genre always struck me as slightly creepy because it seems they really, really loving love to write about the Nazis/Confederacy winning and will go to great lengths to make sure they do, and will then almost always write the following timeline as "hey this isn't so bad HMM REALLY MAKES YOU THINK". Is that about right or am I giving them a bad rap? I like the 'maybe it could have happened this way' pseudo-documentary books rather than the pulp-action ones so I've never really picked him up.

A lot of alt history is written by creeps (Stirling) but Turtledove is Jewish and not one of them. He also has a PhD in Byzantine history, so when he used to write books set in that era a lot of them were surprisingly worth reading for the history - the Videssos cycle and some other early books have a backstory featuring alt-history Catholic vs. Nestorian Christianity, and it's pretty well done/historically accurate from what I can tell.

Then he realized ACW/WWI/WW2 sold better and all of those sets are hot garbage.

Which leads me to my next question: are there other books set off the beaten path, i.e. not 20th century/Romans, that haven't been mentioned? The covers scared me off Flint but I'll give him a try.

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