Dilandu wrote:Okay I finally received the book, and to put it short: someone played too much "Red Alert" game as kid. And mixed history with propaganda enough to make dr. Goebbels really, I mean REALLY proud.
I'll make a more coherent review of this particular fragment as soon as I have time.
You are, of course, entitled to your own opinion, and since you're a Russian and I'm not, I would be surprised if our reading of history was identical. Nonetheless, I stand by mine.
I don't believe that I portrayed Joseph Stalin as one bit more cynical, ruthless, calculating, or defensive minded (after all, is it fair to call it paranoia when they really are out to get you?) than he actually was. In the alternate history, he did
precisely what he did in our history, right up to the point at which Hitler had his accident. Based on his actions up to that point, and his desire for "spheres of influence" (i.e., strategic depth) which had impelled his invasions of both Finland and Poland, I really don't see him suddenly feeling all warm and safe following the restoration of the German monarchy.
I understand that some people have viewed us as Nazi apologists because, after all, Klaus von Schröder was a supporter of Hitler in his twenties, and therefore nothing can possibly redeem him. Once a Nazi, always a Nazi.
Of course, anyone who thinks that Klaus von Schröder was ever a card-carrying Nazi hasn't read the book carefully. And they have also failed — possibly because their moral outrage blinders popped up too early in the process — to understand that the entire theme of the book where the von Schroeder family is concerned is that of moral responsibility. It was almost inevitable that Klaus — a young man growing up in a defeated Germany which had been saddled with the moral guilt for World War I, which had been humiliated, which was in economic chaos, which was torn by armed conflict between people like Rosa Luxembourg's Spartacists on the one side, the
friekorps on the other side, and people like Gustav Noske using the one against the other — would have been attracted to any voice of strength. The ability of human beings to close their eyes and ears to clues that lead to conclusions they don't want to reach is one of our best developed talents, and Klaus was guilty of exactly that right up to Crystal Night. But he was never a Nazi, never joined the Party, never swore any oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler except for that required of every officer in the German military after Hitler rose to power. And once he wound up in an intelligence career track, he gravitated into the ranks of those who ultimately attempted to assassinate Hitler. I think that my fictitious Klaus would probably have been less inept than the real-life plotters, and I think he almost certainly would have moved earlier, but because I'm working with real life, I have to take what I can get.
The key thing, though, is that Klaus von Schroeder never —
ever — forgive himself for having been associated with the Nazi state, however it came into existence and whatever his youthful beliefs might have been. His wife, whom he had sent to the US for safety, refused to ever return to her native Germany again because of what it had done. And as soon as Klaus had finished what he regarded as his duty to
West German intelligence, he joined her in the US and never again returned to Germany himself. He taught his son, and his grandchildren, that there must never be any compromise with expediency and that moral choices can never be shirked.
That was the "life message" that our timeline's Klaus von Schroeder learned the hard way and passed on to his descendents. That is, in fact, the central theme of the entire novel: that moral choices cannot be shirked or ignored.
In Benjamin 2's universe, things proceeded exactly the same way they did in ours until Hitler's death. Please do note that Jacob and I never said that any of the people involved in the original post-Hitler dogfight in Germany was a hell of a nice guy. All of the key players in government were members of the Nazi party, and they wound up devouring their own. I don't think there's anything particularly unrealistic in the way the immediately post-Hitler political alliances inside Germany shook down. And I think people should remember that (in terms of political appeal) this was Hermann Goering at the height of his power. His Luftwaffe owned the air over France; in this universe, the BEF wasn't getting out at Dunkirk because he or Hitler thought airpower alone could prevent it; his strategic offensive against Great Britain hadn't failed; his boast that he could keep Stalingrad supplied by air hadn't proved hollow; and he hadn't failed to stop the Allied strategic bombing offensive against the Reich. So, yeah, he'd have a lot more "street cred" than any of the other contestants.
Klaus von Schroeder 2's actions throughout were those of someone who had already recognized that Nazis were scum. But, again, it's critical to remember that for Benjamin 2's universe
the Holocaust never happened. It certainly hadn't happened prior to the choosing up of sides following Hitler's death. And, following Goering's encounter with his very own IED, there was nobody left to fill the void, Germany was tired of the Nazis' internal, bloody warfare, and a proposal to restore the Hohenzollern monarchy really wouldn't have been that far out of line barely 20 years after Wilhelm II's abdication.
What happens after that in Benjamin 2's universe moves in a very different direction. I think it's totally reasonable to assume that Stalin, who had already seen the West's hatred for the Comintern (and vice versa; both sides with good cause), had good cause to assume that things weren't going to get any better with a restored German emperor on the throne. If he wanted strategic depth before the war, he
damned well wanted it
after the truncated version of the war fought in Benjamin 2's universe. So of course he refused to give back Soviet-occupied Poland. And, equally of course, a new German Kaiser who wanted to display the difference between him and those nasty, rotten Nazis,
did agree to give back
most of the Poland Germany had occupied (as long as it got to keep the Polish corridor), as well as withdrawing from France and repatriating the captured BEF. And when the secret protocol of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was revealed as part of that same process of proving what an improvement he was on the previous management, it only confirmed (1) that the new German Empire was coming clean and that (2) the Soviet Union was just as cynical and calculating as everybody who hated it had always claimed it was. So the emergence of an anti-Soviet front in Western Europe is scarcely unlikely.
It's also unlikely that an opportunistic Stalin who felt ever more threatened would stop thinking in terms of strategic depth, and when the Pacific War broke out, diverting both the UK and the US from European events (and, at least theoretically, diverting France, as well, given its colonial interests in Indochina) he could scarcely fail to see his opportunity to acquire the "spheres of interest" (strategic glacis) he'd wanted in 1939 all along his western border.
I also don't think that it's at all unlikely for the combatants in the war which followed to do precisely what they did on the actual eastern front and concentrate on developing
tactical airpower to a pinnacle of efficiency without developing its strategic counterpart. British strategic airpower evolved largely because it was the only way the UK could even pretend to be attacking Germany after it was evicted from the continent. That wasn't going to be a factor for the Western Alliance and the Soviet Union, and neither of them was going to want to divert resources from direct tactical applications when they were locked in combat along a front hundreds of miles — heck, thousands of miles — in length. The Pacific Allies, on the other hand, would still have faced the distance challenges that the combatants actually did face in our world. Let's not forget that the B-29 was ordered not to attack Germany, but to reach
Japan. I did color outside the lines a little bit when I had the UK deploying the Lincoln and the US deploying the B 36, but both of those aircraft were available in our universe within a few years of when they were available in Benjamin 2's universe (Lincoln's first flight June 9, 1944; B-36 first flight August 8, 1946), and the ordinance I described was in fact developed during World War II.
I am fully aware that Siberia is what you might charitably call a hostile environment even before you start worrying about possible partisan activity and guerrilla attacks, especially for mechanized forces. That's one reason we emphasized that the Pacific Allies' contribution was primarily in the air, attacking Soviet factories and — especially — oilfields and transport infrastructure. There was quite a bit of ground fighting, but it was mainly
defensive on the part of the Pacific Allies, dealing with the offensives that the Soviets desperately launched in an effort to reach and take out the airfields.
As for the Ukraine's response to the Western Alliance and Klaus von Schroeder in particular, let's not forget how many Ukrainians collaborated with the Germans early on in our own world war II. There were a lot of reasons for that, including Ukrainian anti-Semitism, resentment over Stalin's purges of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, traditional Ukrainian hostility towards Russian dominion, and people who thought communism itself was a Really Bad Idea. Given that, I think it's very plausible that in a universe in which Germany was not exporting Nazi-ism and the Holocaust, in which all Slavs had not been proclaimed
untermenschen and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians hadn't been dragged off as slave laborers, and in which Ukraine was promised an independent state
under Ukrainian self-rule, those four million or so Ukrainians that ended up in the Red Army after Ukraine's liberation would have been far more inclined to stick with Germany.
So, yes, I think our historical assumptions are pretty much plausible.
As for some of the other criticism that's come our way — including that this book is an apology for Nazi-ism — I find it difficult to believe that people who aren't intentionally misreading what we've written could think that.
We made it, I thought, crystal clear that Benjamin Schröder, in either universe, believed Nazi-ism and the Holocaust represented the nadir of human brutality to other humans. Our entire purpose was to take a highly moral human being, one who'd been brought up to understand the overriding importance of moral integrity and the willingness to make the hard choice, and present him with the
hardest choice we could conceive of. To create a situation in which the consequences of his choice wouldn't be theoretical, but concrete, and assuming he survived, he would always know that he was personally responsible for enabling the greatest act of genocide in the history of the western world.
Steve Stirling caught a lot of flak for the Draka when he created them. I remember people who charged that the books were "a white supremacist's wet dream," and he got hammered a lot — not as much as he would today, with social media's ferocity, but still a lot — as a racist who sympathized with the Draka's objectives and, hence at least by implication,
supported them. Now, I happen to know Steve personally, and because I do, I also know that my original assumption (before we ever met) about what he was doing was in fact accurate.
The Draka don't represent Steve's ideal society; they represent the most hideous society he could conceive of. And the point that he was making is that evil doesn't look into a mirror. The villain isn't the villain in his
own story, or in his own
eyes, and Steve "played fair" with both the villain
and the reader by making that clear. And in the process, he made clear the utter disconnect between the Draka and any recognizable concept of moral behavior. The Draka were an entire society — by the time they got done tweaking their genes, an entire sub species — of sociopaths. Who had exactly zero ability to empathize with anyone who wasn't also Draka. Of people who saw other humans as sheep or cattle or, at the very best, slaves to be used and expended at will. Of people who were prepared to embrace any means, however cruel — indeed, the crueler the better — to keep their slave populations cowed and submissive. This was Steve's
nightmare, not his "wet dream," and he put you inside the heads of the Draka, let you see what they were doing through
their eyes, expressly so you could appreciate the bottomless evil of someone who could love his or her own children and murder millions of
someone else's children without ever even considering the morality involved.
A lot of people missed that. Maybe those same people or their children will miss the point that Jacob and I are trying to make. Not much we can do about that, if they do. Frankly, not our
job to "fix it" if that's how they persist in reading the story and experiencing the characters.
But we don't have anything to apologize for, either.
ADDENDUM!
It was just brought to my attention that we have also been accused of a major plot fail in a review on Goodreads because we have Shigeki going back in time to spy on terrorists and political opponents, and he never simply uses his chronoport to arrest or eliminate the miscreant before the terrorist act (or whatever) is committed. That's because he can't. In fact, it's because of a major plot element. You can't change events
in your own universe by going back in time. This is a "known fact" to the technologists of both SysGov and Admin. What they don't know (prior to the book) is that, instead instead of your actions simply having no effect, they split off an alternate history in which your actions
do occur and have permanent consequences.
Shigeki is going back in time observing known criminals/terrorists after they have revealed themselves in order to (1) gather further evidence against them for their trials and (2) to identify and track down any associates and accomplices who have not already been identified and arrested. And
of course he's been arresting those people whose guilt he can prove from observations in the past in his own present. He just can't hop back and arrest them three weeks ago and thus stop them from committing the crime in the first place. Or, rather, he could hop back, arrest
somebody three weeks ago, and return to the future with someone who had planned to commit the crime, but only to discover that the iteration of that person in his own universe had gone ahead and committed it.
The fact that everybody in both societies "knows" that they
cannot change the past is key to
all of the plot action in the book.
Just saying.
