AH: The small and the limited.

[jrittenhouse]

I was watching an old TWILIGHT ZONE episode tonight about a boxer on his way down who charms a little boy, who enthusiastically uses his ‘big wish’ power that he goes on about during the earlier part of the show to change the result of the fight; instead of the boxer getting flattened and dropped much further down the list, he wins and looks like a

Comments

[scarfman]

Spider Robinson has a story like that, except about the Beatles. I think it's in Time Travelers Strictly Cash? Paul resurrects John on what happens to be John's sixty-fourth birthday. Robinson tried to make it accessible to non-Beatles historians with footnotes. There was practically one every paragraph. It didn't work, really.

[princejvstin]

I think Baxter has an AH story involving the Beatles, too.

[princejvstin]

I couldn't really figure out what the Point of Divergence was supposed to be, but I think it was that Ruth never got into the major leagues due to this minor league contract, and without Ruth, baseball never took off as it did.

[jrittenhouse]

No, it goes back further than that - I think. But WTF knows?

[princejvstin]

The writer just drops the magic in as a deus ex machina, and very little changes other than neeto-keeno, I haz spells! I haz draginz!

Do I detect a dislike of Naomi Novik here? (Surely you aren't slamming Lord Darcy, are you?)

[jrittenhouse]

Why, yes, you do detect a dislike of Naomi Novik. Various friends tell me they enjoy the stuff, and I say after going through it that I'd rather gargle Tabasco.

As I said in an earlier piece in this series, Lord Darcy is nice stuff, and fair mysteries. As AH, I dunno.

[princejvstin]

Admittedly, the allohistorical aspect of Lord Darcy is sort of lost in the magic and mystery aspects of the novel.

I must have missed your previous entry about Lord Darcy, or it slipped my mind in the early morning. :)

As far as Novik, her novels have been somewhat uneven. And I am firmly of the opinion that for everyone, there are novels and authors that they just can't stand, no matter the sales figures or awards given.

[jrittenhouse]

Sales figures are irrelevant to my like or dislike of a book; I've never been a follower.

[mbcrui]

I find Turtledove does a lot of "Look how smart I am, look what I know" digressions which take away from the story. Tom Clancy does it too, but you can skip the what-should-have-been-edited-out parts in most of his work and still have a good story. I haven't found that with Turtledove as much as I'd *like* to like his work.

[jrittenhouse]

The problem is that I *know* from talking to Harry and reading his stuff that he does do the research. Which - well, my hat's off to him on that. I caught him in a couple of obvious goofs years ago, but you needed to have lived in Chicago to know that you can't replace thye Michigan Avenue bridge with a pontoon.

The stuff I object to on Harry is the meandering POV, tons of characters, and so on. This one was probably fine for folks who are fond of Harry and like old baseball, but was mind-numbing to me.

[kalimac]

Have you read Howard Waldrop's story "Ike at the Mike"? It does something similar, but Waldrop has stylistic chops unknown to the likes of Turtledove which, I think, enable him to pull it off.

A lot of Waldrop's stories have a similar effect. The most ingenious is "The Ugly Chickens," which begins with a man discovering that one of the most basic facts he knows about his field of expertise Ain't So. What makes the story so delightful, though, is the way Waldrop spends the entire rest of the story slowly and inevitably pulling the rug out from underneath this discovery.

[jrittenhouse]

Would that Waldrop was as big a seller as Harry is!

[princejvstin]

Waldrop is an underappreciated niche writer to be sure.

It would be horrible if his biggest fame only comes after he passes, pace, say, Avram Davidson.