#john barnes

Oh, you don't think this novel about a timeline-hopping war against basically the Time Lords but lower tech is accurate in how it portrays potential alternate histories, review site I randomly found bashing this book I'm now obsessed with? That it's protagonist being an action hero type doesn't fit or that it's too insistent on using historical figures in prominent roles? Well then, if you're such a stickler for accuracy and have such disdain for pulpy althist, then why in the ever loving fuck did you decide to read a book called PATTON'S SPACESHIP!? If I, someone who hates supernatural romance, choose to go and spend my time reading a book called Fangs Of Love, what right do I have to get mad at it for being what it told me it was? I live and die by being a stickler for shit, but that only matters when something presents itself as wanting to be taken seriously but then can't walk the walk. When realism has hit at least the Harry Turtledove level of historical figures always seeming to be present even if they shouldn't be, or shouldn't have been born, that kind of thing starts to be less relevant, and this book is well past that point.

It respects the "butterflies stop the same people from being born past the point of divergence" rule, but if we're in an alternate 60s where the Nazis won because they had an alternate dimension funneling them superweapons(which is not bad writing if you're writing the action-movie story you want to write instead of the thoughtful and intricate alt-historical text that someone wishes you'd wrote) then you bet your ass that George Patton and Bernard Montgomery are going to be leading the last bastion of the free world with a nuclear-powered USS Arizona as one of their main raiders of Japanese and German ports, upgraded courtesy of Drs. Edward Teller and a defected-from-decadence Werner on Braun and commanded by Captain John Kennedy. As the novel points out, it's not like he'd have stayed in torpedo boats forever. There, see? Some realism for ya. Hell, it even does something that some other novels like this don't and has a moment where the protag is told directly "because this timeline diverged so long ago(big divergences in the 30s, but the bad guys started meddling at least as far back as WW1), all these historical figures you think you know perfectly aren't the same people as in your time, even if they're alike in some respects", thus squaring away the presence of both von Braun(who genuinely rejected the Nazis in this world as opposed to just wanting to save his own skin like in ours) and irl North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap(the last bastion of the Allies is in Southeast Asia, southern China and parts of Indonesia) as being on the side of the good guys instead of the bad guys. "It'd be cool if they were doing this" is all the justification the story needs, because that's just the kind of story it is.

‘SUMMER OF LOVE’: O VERÃO DO AMOR DE 1967

* * * * *

“Supposedly nobody outside the group knew there was a group. Of course we all knew that wasn’t true. High school was like the little clear plastic tunnels that Paul’s hamsters lived in: you could run a long way but never get out, and always, everyone could see you.”