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Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM |
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This Day in Alternate History Blog
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Weapons of Choice – John Birmingham
I confess that I picked up this
book with a feeling of trepidation; the theme is one that’s very hard to pull
off successfully, even with the best of writers.
However, I was wrong and my first impression was that the traditional ‘The
Final Countdown’ plot had finally found the author it deserved. A multinational battle force
from 2020 gets swept back in time and encounters a WW2 battle fleet.
After a short confrontation, the two fleets make an alliance against the
Japanese. But what effects will the
time travellers have on their new allies? Birmingham avoids the clinch of
love and joy forever more and has the newcomers disgusted by the racial and
sexual attitudes of the Americans from 1942.
The Clinton group reflects a multicultural
society that finds the racist and sexist attitudes of 1942 America almost as
repugnant as those of the Axis powers, while the mere thought of
non-whites and women not just serving in uniform but holding command drives many
Allied officers and civilian officials apoplectic.
There are humorous scenes; the British admiralty is shocked at the news
of Pound’s impending death and they demand that the UK ships in the fleet come
to Britain at once. The book suffers, however, with
an unashamedly liberal agenda. Saying that Hillary Clinton was "the greatest President for the Navy
since Reagan" is simply unbelievable. The author is too concerned with political correctness at
times, damaging his credibility. It
also does not fit in with the era – if the US had been fighting terrorists for
twenty years, I’d expect a harsher attitude.
A lost city does not mean peace and brotherly feelings towards all men,
it means the opposite. The advanced
tech of the newcomers is too advanced for us to understand or fit in context –
why not use a modern-day fleet instead?
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