Sidewise, Side Foolish IV:

The 5 Best and 5 Worst AH Authors I’ve Ever Read

In my last "Sidewise", I shifted away from the specifics of the best and worst of AH literature into a more general study of how AH story premises work-- or, in some cases, don’t work. This time around I’ll return to precise topics related to AH literature, to be a bit more precise my most and least favorite AH authors. In a switch from the pattern I’ve followed with my other three "Sidewise" commentaries, I’ll be starting this one off with the dregs of the field and move on to the cream. So gather up your courage and descend with me into the dismal depths as we look at...

1)Jo Walton(Farthing, Ha’penny)

So far Ms. Walton is 0 for 2 in creating decent AH literature; if the finale of her Still Life With Fascists trilogy, Half a Crown, turns out to be anything like the trilogy’s two previous entries, I think I’ll have to write her off as a hopeless failure in the AH genre. Farthing left me flatter than the Sahara Desert after I was finished slogging through it, and Ha’penny didn’t do much for me either. I’ve never read any of her other books; for that matter, I don’t even know if she has any other books out besides Half a Crown. However, I have to tell you Farthing and Ha’penny aren’t exactly the quality of books that are going to win her many new fans—or convince me to read much of her future work.

2)Gael Baudino(O Greenest Branch!)

A word of advice to Ms. Baudino: Stick to writing for Folk Harp Journal.

Let’s not beat around the bush here. Gael Baudino knows as much about writing alternate history as I do about Brazilian military science-- nothing whatsoever. You’d have better luck trying to crack open a bank vault with a nail file than figuring out the POD for Branch!; in fact, reading that book turned out to be such an exercise in futility for me it turned me off to Branch’s sequels for good. To paraphrase a line from The Simpsons: If I brought a pen to the monkey house at the zoo and had the monkeys barf in it, I could get better AH novels.

3)Oliver Lange(Vandenburg)

When I first heard about this book, I was sufficiently intrigued by its premise to hope that it would be a quality what-if story along the lines of Fatherland or Resurrection Day. That hope was dashed somewhere around page 55 as it slowly sank in that I’d made the mistake of investing my time in what turned out to be little more than a curmudgeonly diatribe about the world going to hell in a handbasket and Americans getting soft. How I managed to stick it out to the finish, or why I didn’t bail out on it sooner, I can’t begin to imagine.

4)Kristine Kathryn Rusch("Faith", "Fighting Bob", "Sinner-Saints")

Whatever faults Ms. Rusch may have, inconsistency is not one of them-- her short stories are reliably awful most of the time. At best they’re forgettable; at worst(as in the case of "Faith") they tend to be mean- spirited to the point where you sometimes get the impression that they might have been ghost-written by Ann Coulter. I shudder to think what fresh horrors await unsuspecting readers if Rusch ever decides to put her mind to cranking out something longer; the defects that crop up in her short stories would be magnified tenfold with any manuscript which she produces in book-length form.

5)Robert Sheckley("Dukakis & the Aliens", "Miranda")

I’ll be the first to concede I haven’t read as much of Sheckley’s work as some people, but what I have read leads me to wonder why on earth so many of his literary peers had such high praises for him when by all rights they should have been avoiding his published work in droves. Besides being terminally unfunny and having zero clue as to how write halfway decent dialogue, the late Mr. Sheckley wasn’t all that great at characterization either. And as far as AH premises are concerned, his track record on that score was also less than stellar(as I previously pointed in my original reviews of "Dukakis & the Aliens").

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So much for the zeroes; now to get to the heroes. Presenting...

1)Robert Conroy(1901, 1862)

One of Conroy’s fundamental strengths as an AH author is his ability to blend fact and fiction. In 1945, his novel about Japanese militants overthrowing Emperor Hirohito and thereby extending World War II in the Pacific, he makes effective use of seemingly minor characters to illustrate the psychological damage inflicted by the Holocaust and the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Another strength is his mastery of actual historical information; 1901, his debut book, reflects a rock-solid grasp of the mindsets that governed the McKinley and Roosevelt presidencies in America and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s regime in Germany.

But what might be Conroy’s biggest strength is his knack for creating original characters that stick in the brain long after you’ve turned the final page. Patrick Mahan, the chief protagonist of 1901, may just be the most memorable young officer in American fiction since Ensign Keith in The Caine Mutiny; his forthrightness and professionalism in the face of the book’s German invasion could teach many real American officers a thing or two.

2)David Atwell("Hell’s Door Opened")

OK, I realize that I’m once again setting myself up for charges of apple-polishing, but it should be said that our esteemed CTT editor happens to be one of the greatest AH writers in the biz today. As a matter of fact, you might be interested to know it was his Australian War of Indepenedence timeline that was one of the inspirations for my "Red Dusk" trilogy and its spinoffs. While his primary specialty is Australian history(which is only natural considering he’s Australian himself, LOL), he also happens to possess a knack for first-class AH pieces about American history-- as his Civil War series Action Jackson currently demonstrates.

3)Harry Turtledove(The Center Cannot Hold, How Few Remain)

Of course, no mention of the best AH writers in literature today is complete without at least a passing mention of the man many consider the dean of the AH genre. While he’s known mostly for his multi-book sagas(including the Worldwar series, which to my great overwhelming embarrassment I haven’t even skimmed yet), he also happens to have a genuine and considerable talent for shorter AH works too. It was his Great War series that initially attracted me to his work, and if you want to catch a glimpse of Turtledove at his best that series is the ideal place for you to start.

Rumor has it that his eleventh book in the Great War series, In At The Death, is the last novel of the series. One can only hope that Turtledove decides to change his mind on this score, because I for one  would be interested to see how his ATL plays out through the ‘50s and ‘60s. For that matter I’d like to know what became of the major characters who were still alive at the end of In At The Death.

4)Mike Resnick(Alternate Presidents, Alternate Tyrants)

While my introduction to Resnick came by way of his editing work on the alternate history anthologies published by Tor, I noticed as I delved further into the AH field that he happens to be a first-class author in his own right. If you don’t believe me, check out his short story "The Lights That Blind, The Claws That Catch", which details how Theodore Roosevelt’s life-- and the history of the world --might have been changed if his first wife Alice hadn’t died in 1884.

5)Brendan DuBois(Resurrection Day, "Victory at Pearl Harbor", "The High-Water Mark")

While DuBois originally made his mark in the literary world as a mystery writer, he’s recently been starting to display some serious chops in the AH field too; in fact, his best-known book to date, Resurrection Day, neatly intertwines both genres, since it tells the  tale of a homicide committed in a world where the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated into full-scale global nuclear war. His next book, Amerikan Eagle, is looking for a publisher and I hope it finds one soon-- according to the capsule summary provided to Uchronia.net, the book takes place in the highly intriguing setting of a 1943 in which Huey Long is President of the United States.

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And that will do it for the latest installment of my "Sidewise" commentaries. As always, if you want to offer any feedback either for or against what I’ve said in this article, you can drop me an e-mail at ChrisO_01801@yahoo.com or beacon92@hotmail.com to share your own observations about the best and worst AH authors. Thanks for listen... er, reading.