Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Every once in a while i pick up something pulpy to read - and being a fan of alternate history i tend to enjoy watching a good author struggle with the difficulty of tracking the implications of a small change on history. There are plenty of bad ones - but one of the best was 'The Rivers of War' by Flint... a book that fictionalizes Sam Houston's life, changing the effect of a single knife thrust in a single fight, and letting a substantially different series of events unfold. It's not fantastic... it's not silly... a guy on a harley doesn't save the world at the end... you get the idea.

I'd read Stirling's first series with the people from Nantucket who're suddenly several thousand years in the past and it was great fun. Oh sure, he manufactures some canned plot complications, but like i said - it's pulpy. I figured I'd grab the next series - where he changes things up in the rest of the world. Well - this one doesnt work so well... in fact its pretty much everything that's wrong with the genre. Rather than go into all the idiotic character mashups and dramatis personae du cardboard (i expect that in pulpy sf) I want to go after the thing that actually bothered me about the book.

Way Too Much Stupid. Zookeepers releasing tigers into the wild when there are no guns? Steam engines not working because of 'compression' issues but propane tanks are still under pressure for ballooning? And combustable explosions are gone? so what. Plenty of pool supply stores - if the bad guy is truly evil (and since he's flying the flag of mordor, i'd assume that qualifies) why not just raid the local pool supply store and chem the enemy. The author fell in love with the premise that archery + bicicles + freeways = mongols and he never stopped to consider how stupid that was.

Flint's 1832 stuff was a lot more interesting - and a lot more historically grounded. When Stirling goes off and starts in with the Wiccan spells seeming to work? yeah... he's crossed over... at that point elvis left the building.

Ah well, time for some more interesting reading...

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