Harry Turtledove World War Series

Let me tell you about Harry Turtledove and the World War series. Mr. Turtledove is a really good author. The series that I just recently finished reading left my mind spinning and left my creative juices flowing. HT, as I shall call him, is a master of history and at writing alternate history. That is he takes a specific event or time frame and changes a few facts and continues it along the same path.

To the eight books I have just finished reading. The first series is called the World War series and it takes place in 1942 during World War II. At the height of the German Empire spreading and the Allies not truly coming together, aliens invade. Now your first reaction is probably to laugh or scoff but don’t. HT tells a very intricate story, and you get the points of view of nearly every party fighting. You get the point of view of the Americans, Russians, Germans, English, Chinese, Jews and lastly of the aliens themselves.

Their invasion is based upon faulty surveillance though, not faulty but outdated information. The probe they sent to earth arrived in about the 11th century and showed images of humans riding horse back and carrying spears. On their own planet and the other two worlds they conquered life moved extremely slowly so they expected that to be the case for humans. The aliens were rather shocked and horrified to discover in just about 900 years we had advanced so far having; tanks, rotor planes, submarines and fighting a global war. Having expected an inferior technology less race of beings the conquest fleet left with only so much weaponry. Yet even with their lack of quantity of weapons their tanks are far superior, their planes have jet engines, and ultimately they have nuclear weapons.

Once the aliens revealed themselves and entered the fighting we humans had to learn to put our fights aside and join forces or face enslavement of all of humanity. So we see many unions of groups we would not have seen in real history to fight the aliens. One of the most intriguing aspects is how when the aliens arrive they are so repulsed by what the Nazi’s are doing to Jews that the Jews actually aid the aliens. Many of them saw this as their way to survive and as a way to get back at the Germans who the aliens also now loathed. But later the Jews realizing that they intended to enslave all of humanity turned on the aliens as well.

As we humans are good at doing we fight back and eventually steal, borrow, and barter for the alien technology and use what we adapt to fight back. There is fighting literally on almost every continent of the planet. The aliens could nuke the whole planet and solve a lot of problems but there is a colonization fleet that is 20 years behind and they want to find planet Tosev 3 (earth) intact, habitable, and the people subjugated. But to show their power they do unleash nukes on some cities; Berlin and Washington D.C. to be exact. But once we discover this technology we stand toe to toe and fight with nukes as well. Eventually the U.S., Germany, and Russia win their independence but the aliens get over half the planet and uneasily a peace is reached.

But the colonization fleet is still on its way and bringing millions more aliens to colonize earth.