his collection of 17 stories represents Turtledove's output during the 1990s, from such various sources as Analog, F&SF and a number of theme anthologies. Short prefatory notes offer authorial insights into the pieces.
Bookending the rest of the entries are two linked stories, "Forty, Counting Down" and "Twenty-One, Counting Up." They both concern the time-travel exploits of one Justin Kloster, who seeks to remedy his middle-aged angst by jumping back to help his young-adult doppelganger change the future. The trick to these mirror-image accounts is that one tells the tale from the middle-aged perspective, while the other recounts the juvenile point of view. On a related note, "The Green Buffalo" deals with inadvertent time travel during a Wild West archaeological dig.
A cluster of uchronias, the mode for which Turtledove is most widely known, occurs next. "Must and Shall" details the harsh 20th-century United States that results from Lincoln's premature assassination. In "Ready for the Fatherland," World War II is protracted in strange ways by the early death of Hitler. And Russians become conquered freedom fighters in "The Phantom Tolbukhin." Two further items dovetail with Turtledove's novels set in the Videssos Empire, a Byzantine world different from our own timeline: "The Decoy Duck," about missionaries on the borders of empire; and "The Seventh Chapter," concerning some randy monks and their creative interpretation of scriptures.
Three satirical or parodic ventures occur in "Deconstruction Gang," which posits a world where semiotics is actually a usable tool; in "The Maltese Elephant," which follows the hardboiled quest for the titular beast; and in "Vermin," the most straightforward SF piece, about rigidly religious colonists on an alien world.
Turtledove turns his hand to pure fantasy in a number of stories here. In "Ils Ne Passeront Pas" two World War I doughboys manage to stave off a biblical Armageddon. "After the Last Elf Is Dead" examines a Tolkienish world where the forces of evil are triumphant. The famed Jewish golem makes an appearance at the start of World War II in "In This Season." And finally, "Honeymouth" seeks to unriddle the mystery of how a dissolute warrior can possibly have gained the loyalty of a fastidious unicorn.
Lincoln and Hitler lost in the timestream
Harry Turtledove exhibits a wide range of talent in this volume, although (as we'll see below) he is not immune from a little self-Xeroxing. His easy narrative voice and transparent style always manage to convey the maximum information in the clearest, most economical fashion. And he's a wellspring of neat concepts. But as one of the more prolific authors in the SF field, he's also liable to spin off such rather trivial left-handed exercises as "Myth Manners' Guide to Greek Missology #1" and "Goddess for a Day," both of which are basically weakly risible standup routines about ancient Greek deities, without a second thought as to their limited appeal.
His mildly alarming tendency to utilize a good story template over and over is evident in "Must and Shall" and "Ready for the Fatherland." Both stories start out identically, with the premature execution of a pivotal wartime leader (Lincoln, Hitler), then jump to a harsh future where the protagonists initially seem like good guys but are revealed by climactic reversals to be ethically compromised by the exigencies of their timeline. Although each story is very effective on its own, when placed side by side they suffer a bit from repetitiveness.
Turtledove's stance on the tragicomedy that is our life comes across cleanly and appealingly in all his tales. He's prone to see humor even amid the most dire circumstances. Nowhere does this show more vividly than in "Ils Ne Passeront Pas." The cynical banter between the two trench-dwelling footsoldiers carries them through the worst that can be thrown at them, up to and including the plagues of Revelations. Yet at the story's close they find solace in such simple pleasures as a cigarette and a loaf of bread, awaiting stoically whatever war will bring, yet not without some hope and a sense that life is worth living.
Overall, Turtledove is one of those contentious contrarians that SF seems to breed. He's most happy upsetting expectations (in "Vermin," the bugs that the colonists deem mere nuisances turn out to be essential parts of the ecology) and undermining verities. Such fruitful upheavals of all we take for granted are part of what SF does best.
