Alternate Generals

If you're going to borrow it, there are a few stories worth checking out. Lillian Carl's "The Test of old," focusing on the Romans vs. Boadica, was one of the better stories, albeit somewhat roughly told via the memoirs of an old Roman. S.M. Stirling's, "The Charge of Lee's Light Brigade," has a somewhat interesting premise at least: that Gen. Lee of Civil War fame, instead fights with C.S.A. along with other British forces at Balaclava in a very different Charge of the Light Brigade. Somewhat slyly, Stirling seems to have inserted George MacDonald Fraser's legendary scoundrel and rouge "Flashman" in the story as an homage to the great Scottish writer, which works rather well as Flashman does campaign there in "Flashman at the Charge." Another of the best stories is William Sanders' "Billy Mitchell's Overt Act," in which a military aviation pioneer manages to thwart the attack on Pearl Harbor. Told as a series of excerpts from books, interviews, and testimony, he manages to weave a very engaging tale. The final story, R.M. Meluch's "Vati" is probably the best of the bunch, showing what might have happened had a more imaginative and forceful man taken over German air operations and sped up production of jet aircraft, thus preventing D-Day. It's something the Germans did manage to do at the end of the war, but by then was too little, too late.

As for the rest: "Tradition," by Elizabeth Moon (who's "Deed of Paksenarrion" trilogy I love), suffers from an unknown main character, British WWI Rear Admiral Cradock, a slightly obscure setting, the Mediterranean (more interestingly treated in the historical fiction of John Biggins), and the need to have detailed maps at hand to follow the action. Brad Linaweaver's rather silly "And to the Republic For Which It Stands" imagines an alternate Caesar. Lois Tilton's "The Craft of War" is annoyingly written as a dialogue between Socrates and a student about Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." Jody Nye's "Queen of the Amazons" is a terrible Crusader piece fortunately followed by a competent as usual WWII piece by editor Turtledove. Unfortunately, one then segues into an utter piece of dreck, Esther Friesner's "An Old Man's Summer" featuring the rambling reminisces of a dying Eisenhower. Bill Fawcett's "The Last Crusader" establishes the fun premise of Napoleon as a Cardinal, but doesn't take it anywhere. Even though it didn't particularly engage me, Janet Berliner's "A Case For Justice" is worth mentioning for taking as it's subject, the South African leader Jan Smuts. William Forstchen's "A Hard Day For Mother" folds a cliché "brother vs. brother" Civil War tale into the battle for Round Top Hill at Gettysburg. David Weber's "The Captain From Kirkbeam" is the first of two seafaring stories, his being about a commander trying to blockade French ships from sailing into the Chesapeake Bay during the War for Independence. "Vive L'Amiral," by John Mina imagines Nelson as fighting on the French side, rather than the British, with rather different results, of course. Brian Thomsen's "Bloodstained Ground," is a rather cheezy and weak attempt to show a drunken Samuel Clemens uncovering the hidden truth about "President" Custer and what really happened at Little Big Horn.

So, maybe four or five stories worth reading all told, mixed in with a few more interesting premises, and a lot of bad and just plain boring ones. You're better off checking out Robert Cowley's "What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been."


Some stories illogical and not thought out   April 3, 2000
 2 out of 3 found this review helpful

Having read stories by the various authors I thought that a collection of short stories would have contained the best that was on offer, unfortunately I found that, like the curates egg, only some parts were good. There was no story in the book that was outstanding, There were none that was not at some time entertaining. When I read a book I expect to be entertained, certainly in a fiction I do not expect to have to conduct research for my own endings, which I had to do with two of the stories. This was not what I expected and I feel a bit cheated by the whole thing.


Good tales - but author let down by publisher   March 31, 2000
 1 out of 2 found this review helpful

The publishers should hang their heads in shame over this one. Look at the cover artwork -- no Romans/Carthaginians-in-tanks stories are actually in the book. Also the lack of explanatory notes which should have accompanied the tales make it harder for the non-history buffs to work out why the alternate endings are just so important. The only good thing about this was it made me go back to my own reference books and check out the American War of Independence, and the flight of the Goeben in the Med at the beginning of WWI - among others. The other point is that too often with some of the stories, they end as a rather flat fleshing-out of a 400-word synopsis. But, yes, I'd still recommend it


It sucked, not a collosal screw-up, but still horrid.   June 25, 1999
 0 out of 1 found this review helpful

Well there are a couple of good stories in there. The Napoleon being a Cardinal, Nelson siding with Napoleon, Hitler getting jets, and USSR almost collapsing but fighting Nazis in 1947.

Still most stories ran from obscure bull-sh*t to "lets stop being a writer and summate". It featured some interesting premises, but used the familiar device of stopping the story to explain to the reader what happened and how and why.

If you want the truth, only four stories were any good. "The Last Crusdader" by Bill Fawcett. "A Hard Day for Mother" by William R. Forstchen. "Vive l'Admiral" by John Mina. And "Vati" by Meluch.

That's 4 good stories out of 16. Better odds than Vegas, but still a major stink-bomb.


Some deep stuff, but too deep?   January 7, 1999
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Although the stories in this anthology are on average much better than the stories in the alternate history anthologies edited, e.g., by Mike Resnick a few years ago, the casual reader is nevertheless going to run into trouble when reading this collection. The problem is that the various authors have done too good a job, while the publisher has totally screwed up.

In other words, several of the stories in this anthology are based on "too" obscure historical what-ifs. Unfortunately, as has become well-known by those who closely follow science fiction, it turns out that the introductory notes that were supposed to be included with the stories were left out by the publisher! >So... there is some decent stuff in here. But unlike other recent alternate history collections, the reader is going to have do some more thinking about the stories in order to gather a better appreciation of what the authors put into the tales.