A Review: Himmler's War, by Robert Conroy

Sorry about the delay in this month’s entry, but here we are, better late than never, right?

I honestly don’t know what to make of this book, Himmler's War. First, the author, Robert Conroy, has done some very creditable work in this genre, including his first novel, 1901. What puzzles me is that with a promising start, this book can end, well,  so lukewarmly.  Let me explain.The book starts out with an interesting take on a familiar World Word Two alt-history premise where Hitler is killed and Himmler takes charge after the accidental killing of Hitler by a lucky hit from an American bomber (We saw a similar concept a few years ago in Dobson’s and Niles’ superior Fox on the Rhine, where the SS boss takes charge after the assassination of Hitler).

Fine. I can take that as a point of difference. I can even accept when Himmler strikes a separate peace with Stalin (also seen in Fox on the Rhine). In this book, however, the deal is slightly sweetened for the Soviets (I won’t say how), who give the Nazis a couple of thousand T-34 tanks to bash the Western Allies with.  I can accept all that, plus the other goodies Conroy throws at us to keep the plot boiling in a satisfying manner. It could’ve very well happened that way.

Unfortunately, I do have a major bone to pick with Conroy. And that unfortunately, has to do with a central point to his plot: that the Nazis, as thin on the ground with resources as they were by the summer of 1944, could build and deploy an atom bomb by the spring of 1945 (I don’t consider this a spoiler as there is this huge mushroom cloud-thingy on the cover of the book).  By that time, the Nazis had already thrown in the towel on the atomic bomb, conceding that while it was a technical possibility, they simply didn’t have the resources or the manpower to pull it together. When you compare it with the four and half years and billions of 1940s dollars spent on the Manhattan Project, you get an idea of what it actually took to develop a workable atomic weapon. (A better and more plausible alt-history Nazi atomic weapons program is in The Trinity Paradox, by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason, where an anti nuclear activist from the 1980s travels back in time to 1943, and unwittingly passes secrets along to a Nazi mole who enables the Germans to develop a “dirty bomb” that they drop on New York City.)

So in the final analysis, while Himmler’s War is a rollicking read, it suffers from this lack of historical plausibility that makes for so much of the real great alternative history books and makes this book not so satisfying as it should be.  There’s no doubt that Conroy can write; however, he has yet to deliver us, in my opinion, a worthy successor to 1901.


Meanwhile, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing both Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 (both are free to preview). Both books are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  And if you’re looking for an experienced marketing communications guy, do me a favor and have a look here. Thanks.

Announcing a New Title: The Key to My Heart

Well, it's almost ready.

 I'm pleased to introduce my latest novel, The Key to my Heart. I've been steadily at work on for the past three years and now is almost ready for its launch on Smashwords.com. I'm just in the middle of the final edits and have received the all-important ISBNs for the varying e-editions. Here's the cover I've done - let me know what you think. 

The Key to My Heart started life over ten years ago as an exercise in a "hard-boiled" detective novel, but I put it away. I came back to it a few years ago and here it is.  As I said, I'm very pleased with the finished product. I think it was well worth the wait until the plotline was able to gel.

Ah, but what is this book about, you ask?  It's set in post-war San Francisco and the hero is a washed-up P.I. named Chance Gannon.  When he's gunned down by mysterious and beautiful woman in his own office, it launches him on a case that not only threatens his life, but the entire world!

I hope you like it.

I expect to launch The Key to My Heart in the near future. So watch this space!

Meanwhile, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing both Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 (both are free to preview). Both books are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  And if you’re looking for an experienced marketing communications guy, do me a favor and have a look here. Thanks.

Review: The Axis of Time Trilogy by John Birmingham

You’re in command of a U.S. Navy nuclear-powered supercarrier packed with advanced jet fighters, missiles and the latest in command-and-control systems. All of the sudden, there’s a strange electrical disturbance, a vortex opens and you’re thrown back in time decades to the eve of a great battle that will decide America’s fate.

What do you do?

Stop me right there if you think you’ve seen this one before. You’d be right. That’s how the film The Final Countdown (1980) begins with the USS Nimitz thrust back in time to eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

An F-14 dines on a Japanese Zero in The Final Countdown.

So you can imagine my misgivings the first time I fell across the initial book in John Birmingham’s superior Axis of Time trilogy, Weapons of Choice, where the fusion-powered U.S. Navy supercarrier USS Hilary Clinton (Hey, it could still happen!) is thrown back in time from 2021, along with a multinational fleet of similarly advanced ships with their weapons and crews to the eve of the Battle of Midway in 1942.

The alone almost earned the book the distinction of winning an airborne trip across my living room. But, fortunately, I stayed with the book and was quickly rewarded. Where in The Final Countdown, the heroes are yanked suddenly back through time through a cheap-ass deus ex machina plot device that saves the timeline just as they were about to take on the Japanese and change history; the protagonists in Birmingham’s book are under no such compunction and set about merrily changing the course of history in big juicy ways with their advanced technology.

But the bad news is some of that same technology has also fallen into the hands of the Axis and the Soviet Union.  

The commander of the time travelers is Admiral Phillip Kolhammer. Kolhammer has the unenviable task of fighting a reinvigorated Axis, all the while keeping his own 21^st Century forces together and working with his contemporary allies of 1942, some of whom would just as soon take all of the technology and use it for their own gains. Kolhammer is also battling racial and moral attitudes of time. Here I think Birmingham benefits from hindsight a little too much and may be a bit hard on the Allies; they were, as he seems to forget, men – and women – of their time.

In the next two books of the series – Designated Targets, Final Impact – we see some of consequences of  - intended and not – of Kolhammer’s tampering with the timeline. Birmingham shines here with some very good speculative writing, trying to guess at the sort of strategic, technological and social changes that might be wrought by the mass landing of a bunch of technologically advanced time travelers in a less advanced era. By the end of the last book, with a cloud hanging over us, we are left wanting for more.

Birmingham is supposed to be work on a new novel in the series, so I will be happy to read it once it comes out.

I definitely recommend this series if you like military alternate history. All three books in the series are  available in paperback your local bookstore or online.

If you like that sort of stuff,  you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing both Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 (both are free to preview). Both books are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  And if you’re looking for an experienced marketing communications guy, do me a favor and have a look here. Thanks.

Book Review: Stephen King’s 11/22/63

A belated Happy New Years, first of all.

I received 11/22/63 as a birthday present last August.  As I was just finishing off  The Company of the Dead (see the review) I put it aside and made it next on my list to read for this blog. With breaks for moving across the continent, job searching, finding a new place to live and oh yes – reading and reviewing Lavie Tidhar’s admirable Osama: A Novel, I can now report that I have just finished reading Mr. King’s magnum opus on the subject of time travel, the JFK assassination and the butterfly effect.

The first thing I will say, if you have not read this book already – read it. Buy it, even. You are missing a great reading experience.  At over 800 pages it is an immersive experience for both narrator and reader was we go back in time via “rabbit hole” to the world of the past. By “immersive,” I mean immersive. You literally taste and smell the world around you. King’s background research is first-rate into both the era and the subject matter at hand is nothing short of impressive.

A schoolteacher, Jake Epping is given a key to such a “rabbit hole” in time by a close friend with one proviso: he has to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing JFK.  Aye, and there’s the rub: for all of his extensive research, King has firmly come down on the side of the “lone gunman” theory – that Oswald, history’s greatest fuckup and self-professed patsy – could’ve pulled this off just by his little old self.  If you’re one of the many out there like me who believes at some level that there could’ve been a conspiracy you may find this vaguely unsatisfying as King connects the dots.

Lee Harvey Oswald: Patsy or Lone Nut with a Gun?

In the interests of full disclosure, let me say that I was only a few months past my first birthday the day John F. Kennedy died. So my connection to Camelot is somewhat tenuous at best. I grew up however, sharing that sense of collective loss and outrage mixed with disbelief that one man, however deranged and however lucky a shot, could’ve been responsible for changing the course of history.  Or, if you prefer the argument of King, things worked out exactly the way they should’ve.

I can’t help upon reflecting upon King’s central thesis of the place of the “lone nut with the gun” in society. Unfortunately, recent U.S. history – you can supply the places and dates –has been marked with examples of what one deranged man with a gun can do, so perhaps the Kennedy assassination is just one in a series of very lamentable incidents.

But I digress.

So with his friend’s blessing, narrator Jake goes off into the World of the Past. He gets involved in a few events that are a prelude to the main event, that only serve to give him confidence and help build him as a character.  I had thought at one point this was getting in the way of the main action, but now I see King’s wisdom in his plotting his book this way. Well done. Once this is done, events assume their own pace and chug along nicely until the inevitable and suspenseful climax.

If you’re looking for a book that is by turns well-written, fun, immersive (there’s that word again) well-researched and full of plausible speculative fiction at its best, then Stephen King’s 11/22/63 is the book for you. Enjoy.

In the meantime, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing both Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 (both are free to preview). Both books are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  And if you’re looking for an experienced marketing communications guy, do me a favor and have a look here. Thanks.

Poetic Justice

Occasionally on this blog, I allow for a few diversions from the topic of  SF and alt-history. One of these, as I have posted before, is of my love of writing poety and then reading it at open mics.

So it's only fitting that I thought I'd say how honoured I am to be included in the forthcoming poetry anthology, Poems from Planet Earth, which is a collection of the poems that have been read at the fabled Planet Earth Poetry series in Victoria, BC that I had attended in better days. The trade paperback sized anthology will soon be available in the new year from the kind folks at Leaf Press, and will feature a whole range of poets, from the famous to the unknown (like me).

Here's my contribution... I invite speculation as to what it's about:

But that shouldn't stop you from reading the rest of the fine poets in the book. Go and buy it. I can tell you truthfully, that you will be reading the collected work of the most formidable group of poets in Canada. It has been my distinct pleasure to have been associated with them.

In the meantime, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing both Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 (both are free to preview). Both books are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  And if you’re looking for an experienced marketing communications guy, do me a favor and have a look here. Thanks and have a happy holidays.

("Lament"  © 2012, Michael Cnudde)

Reviewing Osama: A Novel

Osama:A Novel by Lavie Tidhar was on the surface an unlikely book for my reading list. But, when I saw it on the bookshelf of my local store, looked at the back cover blurb and then read the first few pages – the ultimate test – I knew the author had me.

As I mentioned earlier on this blog, Osama takes place in an alternate universe where global terrorism never seemed to take hold. Joe (we don’t know his last name) is a private detective living in Vientiane, Laos.  That there is still a French colonial feeling to the environment already tells a bit – not a lot - about the time and place. It’s there Joe receives a job from a mysterious woman who track down the author of a series of paperback men’s adventure novels, all with the unlikely hero: Osama Bin Laden.

Joe’s search across the world is a shrewd and observant commentary on the real-life hunt for Bin Laden.  There is a conceit of a novel-within-a-novel at work here, with long quotes from the Bin Laden series of novels, with titles such as Osama Bin Laden – Vigilante: Assignment Africa, which reminds me of the Grasshopper Lies Heavy novel-within-a-novel in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. I don’t make that reference in a mean way: as a writer, Tindar is very effective and his work his work shares the vibrations of Dick’s best work. Clearly, this author is one to watch for.

Tindar deftly sketches out the universe that Joe the detective lives in. It’s a little slower-paced, a little less technologically advanced, there are clues that the Second World War didn’t fare so well for the Allies and perhaps most tellingly, the people who read the Osama Bin Laden books can’t understand the concept of killing for killing’s sake and are relieved it is only confined to the pages of a pulp novel.

Of course, there’s much, much more at play here, but I’m not one for spoilers, so I’ll end it here with a strong “buy” recommendation for the Holidays.

I’m still reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and hope to have a review for you soonish.

In the meantime, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing both Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 (both are free to preview). Both books are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  And if you’re looking for an experienced marketing communications guy, do me a favor and have a look here. Thanks.

An Update to My Rant!

Well, we have good news... apparently ChaptersIndigo (or Heather) did listen. Elvis Saves JFK! is now back up on ChaptersIndigo!

I want to congatulate and thank them for coming to the rescue of this independent author. They certainly responded quickly to my tweet on my Twitter feed and my post on this blog, so it shows that they do listen and care.  I feel a lot better about the future of publishing now. So feel free to shop at ChaptersIndigo without guilt; I know I will. Nice people, they are.