Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar: In the Balance

One of my favorite book genres is what is called alternate history. If you are unfamiliar with what this is, it is really simple. It is a story set in a world that is based on our own, but where an event in history is changed. The story can be set at the time of the change or it can be set some time after the change has occurred. Although I have read books of this type from many different authors, the leader of this genre has to be Harry Turtledove. He has written dozens of books in this type of setting, one of my favorites is actually a series of eight books that starts out with the book, Worldwar: In the Balance. Although this genre is usually included as a sub-genre of science fiction, because it is also speculative fiction, the stories rarely contain elements of traditional science fiction, i.e. aliens, spaceships and such. The Worldwar series, and its follow on series Colonization, is an exception to that.

The story opens with a lizard-like alien race approaching a world they call Tosev 3. The Race, as they call themselves, are used to hot dry worlds. The three worlds already in their empire are all desert worlds with little water on them. This world is cold and wet, but they are ready to make it a part of their empire anyway. Probes from their home world had examined the planet some sixteen hundred of their years ago, about eight hundred of Tosev 3’s years, and found a primitive form of intelligent life on the planet. For the most part they had weapons no more advanced than swords, and bows and arrows. One of the images of warriors did show a figure with early armor covering it from head to toe. Conquest of this planet, they believe will be easy as it took tens of thousands of years for them to advance from this level to the technologically advanced level they are at now.

As they ships of The Race close on the planet, they find that all is not what they expected, since the natives have advanced to the point of having radio, armored vehicles and aircraft, although at a level of quality well below that of their own. These weapons are being used in a series of wars being fought all over the planet. The aliens decide to launch their invasion anyway as they are still confident of victory.

The world, of course, is our own Earth. The wars being fought are what we call World War Two. It took me a while to figure exactly when this invasion occurs, but the events related at the beginning of the book give more than a hint. First, the Germans have just eliminated a major pocket of Russian troops around the city of Kharkov. Americans have landed on the island of Espiritu Santo and there is fighting near the town of Gazala. All of this occurred near the end of May 1942. What pinpointed the exact date was the 1000 plane raid by the RAF on the German town of Cologne. This occurred on May 30th. This kind of historical accuracy and detail is one of the hallmarks of Turtledove’s books.

The characters are drawn from all over the world and are a mix of fictional and real historical ones. Some of the historical characters that are integral to the story included, Vyacheslav Molotov, Mordechai Anieliewicz, Otto Skorzeny, Col. (later General) Leslie Groves and several members of the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, including Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Walt Zinn and Arthur Compton. For those who don’t know about the Met Lab, they were working on building an atomic pile under the stands of Stag Field at this time and would go on to form the core of the Manhattan Project under the command of General Groves.

These characters are woven into the story of the fictional characters who include three American minor league baseball players (one of whom is an avid reader of science fiction) and a married couple one of whom is a part of the Met Lab team. In Russia, we meet two members of a German panzer crew who have been involved in the effort to eliminate the Russian pocket near Kharkov and a female Soviet pilot who is flying harassment missions in the area. Also there are British characters including a Lancaster bomber crew who are among the first to feel the power of the alien’s military machine and a radar man serving near Dover who thinks there is more to the pixies he keeps seeing on his screen than others want believe. Other human characters include a Jewish family that is trying to survive in the Warsaw Ghetto, wondering when their time will be up and a Chinese peasant woman and her village’s apothecary who first have to face an attack by Japanese troops, then the arrival of The Race.

Turtledove also includes the stories of the invasion fleet’s leader and some of his senior leaders. The pilot of one of the armada’s killercraft, what we would call a jet fighter, as well as the crew of a landcruiser, tank. Other characters include researchers, intelligence operatives, the governor of Warsaw and two soldiers who are captured by American troops and placed under the watchful of eye of the science fiction reading baseball player and brought to the Met Lab for interrogation and study.

Turtledove weaves an interesting story where human enemies have to cooperate to defeat a mutual enemy, while still not entirely trusting each other. The world as we know it is turned upside down as people have to deal with invasion, alien experiments and the basic need to survive in this world. Everything is not perfect as the leaders of The Race have deal with a situation not at all like what they expected and as they do, tensions and dissensions rise. When it is found that a simple human herb called ginger acts like a drug to The Race’s males the problems begin to mount.

All in all the book is one of Turtledove’s best in my opinion and left me wanting more when it first came out