jethrien

Title: Worlds That Weren't
Authors: Harry Turtledove, S.M. Stirling, Mary Gentle, Walter Jon Williams
Genre: Alt-history anthology
Thingummies: 3

Synopsis: 4 alternate history stories: Socrates goes with Alkibiades, a novella set in America from The Peshawar Lancers, the Visigoths conquer North Africa instead of the Vandals, and instead of going mad, Nietzsche goes to the Wild West.

Thoughts: These four kind of have to be evaluated on their own merits, even though you're stuck with all of them.

Turtledove's novella requires a solid brushing up on your classical history to appreciate, but is clever, well-written, and well-researched.

Stirling's tale contains all of the flaws of his Peshawar Lancers, with none of the redeeming qualities. His afterword compounds the problem. Both sexist and racist, his narrative thinks that it's faking the sexism and racism of the society while rising above it, but is actually sexist and racist on a different level. Excellent. Perhaps even worse, it basically skips the climax. We follow the action very closely and then suddenly he realizes that he's writing a novella instead of a novel and just jumps over pretty much everything. We go from a temporary escape to a "Well, Bob, it sure was exciting when you rescued us" description to a "several months later, the massive campaign this started had just wound up and during that time we resolved our personal feelings!" description.

Gentle's piece feels terribly disjointed, if promising--the characters are really interesting, but this is a prelude to what appears to be a massive epic, and nothing really makes a lot of sense without having read that epic.

Williams initially rubbed me the wrong way--the protagonist is insufferable. Then I realized who the protagonist was, and that he was intended to be insufferable, and I liked it better.