Harry Turtledove
Science fiction
I was pretty sure when I picked up Through Darkest Europe in the library that it would be a lazy alternative history. By "lazy" I mean an alt-hist that doesn't make any real effort to ask "How would the world be different if . . .", but instead just does a one-for-one swap of terms. In this case, it reads as if Harry Turtledove took a contemporary setting and ran it through his word processor, doing two-way search-and-replace for certain key terms:
- Christianity ↔ Islam
- ISIS ↔ Aquinist
- Syria ↔ Italy
- The West ↔ The Muslim world
- Europe ↔ The Middle East
- English ↔ Classical Arabic
- Allahu akbar! ↔ Deus vult!
- Jihadists ↔ Crusaders
And so on.
This makes it basically impossible to say anything interesting about the setting. I already know that free speech and equality are good, and religious fanaticism is bad. Uttering these sentiments in a setting where it's Europe that's the poor and backward region doesn't tell me anything I don't know.
This makes it basically impossible to say anything interesting about the setting. I already know that free speech and equality are good, and religious fanaticism is bad. Uttering these sentiments in a setting where it's Europe that's the poor and backward region doesn't tell me anything I don't know.
So, yeah, it's lazy writing. That's not necessarily a deal-breaker; sometimes I'm a lazy reader as well. The deeper problem with Through Darkest Europe is that Turtledove didn't find it necessary to include a story. His protagonists wander around his parallel-world Italy exclaiming at the parallels ("Look, Dawud! These Europeans force their women to dress conservatively! Gosh, isn't that awful?"), having meetings, and reacting to violence that happens around them. Instead of giving them a specific problem to solve or goal to achieve in chapter 1, they're on a vaguely-defined security-assistance mission, which they eventually pursue to the extent of making a couple of phone calls. There's also a superfluity of interior monologue, to much the same lack-of-effect as the dialogue.
Writers gotta eat. I guess the good news from Harry Turtledove's perspective is that he couldn't have taken long to crank this one out.
Some of Turtledove's other work, including but not limited to alternative history, is much better than this. Look for his short-story collections; "Counting Potsherds," in Departures, is a fine example of what this genre should do.
A better take on the same idea is Matt Ruff's The Mirage, which has a similar backdrop -- it's set in a secular federation of humanist-Muslim Arab states, constantly at risk from fanatical Christian terrorists from the feudal backwaters of America. But the hero, a Muslim cop on a homicide case, comes across weird artifacts that we recognize but he doesn't -- an Xbox, for example, and a copy of the New York Times -- and the murder case turns into a larger investigation, whose main question is obvious to us but not to him: what happened to turn the world we know into the one we see here?
ReplyDeleteSounds interesting! And, yeah, that's a better way to do it. Keith Roberts's Pavane is a little bit similar, with a nice twist at the end. Or you can do what the short story I referenced above does: show how things are different and what the consequences might be. Or you can talk about the turning point itself, and use that to make people think how and why things turned out the way they did.
ReplyDeleteThrough Darkest Europe does none of the above.