penumbra was kind enough to lend me her copies of the AH series by Michael Dobson and Douglas Niles. The good news is that they will be returned very quickly and that if I ever get my act together and write the entire
Imperium trilogy, I am sure to be published. After all, people are paying money to buy this drivel, right? The bad news is that I actually had to read these self-indulgent works of American military tripe to understand this. There is a third bit of good news: neither book is quite as bad as Harry Turtledove's
The Man with the Iron Heart, which takes the same faults present in this series and exponentially amplifies them. Yes, I suffered through hundreds of pages to find one bit of characterisation in Turtledove's Heydrich beyond blind obedience to a militarily, ethically and materially destroyed political regime. I gave up, having not found a scrap of logical character depth in
any character whatsoever.
I posit that concentration on plot leads to an unavoidable weakening of the other two points of the writer's triumvirate: character and setting. To be precise: the common flaw in all these novels is the assumption that a good timeline and interesting point of divergence can alone hold up a novel; as a result the characters' actions are decided
a priori of the logical sequence arising from their personalities, which leads to a paradoxical situation; the paradox is resolved by minimising any character depth in the antagonists which may lead to a timeline/moral contradiction; such weakening of character nullifies reader empathy, leaving the reader's mind free to note historical or contextual inaccuracies, which, while not glaringly obvious, are sufficient to destroy any lenience given to the author/s by the reader. In short, for want of a timeline, the authors lose a reader. It should be noted that I make no assumptions about whether this choice is deliberate: plot is the most crucial element of the triumvirate in all complex novels (cf. "Twilight" in which plot is subservient to character, namely self-insertion fantasy and "Harry Potter" in which plot and character are equally subordinate to setting, i.e. it is the magical world which makes the franchise successful over other series possessing an Homeric hero) and therefore must be given due attention. I merely argue that
if the timeline is possible if and only if a character acts out-of-character, then the book will fall into the denigrating sequence I outlined.
The points of departure (PODs) in both Turtledove's
Man with the Iron Heart (henceforth
Man) and Niles and Dobson's
Fox on the Rhine/Fox and the Front (henceforth
Fuchs am Rhein) are "good": they both provide significant departures from our time line (OTL) with minimal initial alteration and appeal to something more than a niche market, i.e. are publishable. In
Man the POD occurs when SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich survives the OTL assassination by British trained Czech partisans (qv.
Heydrich: Henchman of Death for an explanation of this). The POD is minimal and plausible:
"Then, perhaps with the instincts he’d picked up flying a 109 [a Messerschmidt
fighter plane] on the Eastern Front, Heydrich thought to check six [o'clock].
When he looked behind him, he saw the other Czech who’d been hanging around
this corner sneaking up on the car."Thus does Heydrich not only survive but consider the possibilities open to an SS-trained partisan group were the Axis to lose the war. Rather prescient of him, as it turns out, because his survival seems to have no other effect on the war whatsoever. (Dare I say that this is somewhat unlikely?) From June 1942 onwards he siphons material and men from the Eastern Front and trains them into a well co-ordinated network of sleeper cells. The novel resumes on VE Day, after the unconditional surrender of all German armed forces.
Fuchs am Rhein has an even more minor POD: "Brandt decided that the briefcase could remain where it was," allowing it to explode and kill Hitler. In OTL, the briefcase was moved behind a support pillar and caused perhaps the only well-documented, real-life case of the
Clothing Damage trope. Fall Walküre is partly successful, until Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler usurps Bock's government. This is largely considered to be a likely outcome of a "successful" von Stauffenberg plot anyway. Thus far, both
Man and
Fuchs am Rhein have credibility in all sections of the triumvirate: the plot is plausible, the characterisation is historically accurate and the setting is consistent with OTL and accurately portrayed.
The evolution of their timelines is the crucial factor in both works: the final events cannot, it can be argued, be reached by setting initial conditions - the POD - and boundary conditions - the limits placed upon the action by the positions of each character - and letting the plot evolve naturally according to characterisation. It may be argued that this is a necessary condition for the books to be publishable: the ending must satisfy the target audience, therefore if the naturally evolving timeline causes an Axis victory (specifically the Germans over the Americans and Commonwealth) then there must be an intervention to prevent this and end up with a Reich defeated by the Americans. In
Man an historically accurate Heydrich would not have made the tactical errors resulting in his death and in
Fox on the Rhine, an historically accurate Rommel would not have been foiled by the blindsiding at Dinant which causes his capitulation. (Hence
Fuchs am Rhein would be a single volume, given the strategic situation in Germany's favour against the Allies, as a Soviet victory over Germany does not fulfil the requirements for a publishable ending).
I'm being called to make dinner: more later. I am enjoying the books - just not in the way I think they were intended!
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
flirty
stressed
accomplished
amused
I keep dying on level 1!
confused
