Re: [OT] Turtledove

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Atkinson" <johnmatkinson@yahoo.com>
>
> --- KH.Ranitzsch@t-online.de wrote:
> > Otherwise, I was not impressed. His descriptions of
> > nations other than	the USA are a mix of stereotypes and sloppy
research
> > [ I can elaborate on that if you wish ],
>
> Keep in mind, when dealing with Germans he's a Jew
> writing about a world where the Nazis stay in power
> after WWII.  Objectivity is NOT going to be his strong
> point.

While I was slightly irked by his stereotypical Nazis, this is not
really
the problem I have with this aspect of the book.

It's the amount of spurious details that he gets wrong:
- The German Rocket plane has Svastikas on its wings. German planes had
them
on the tail
- Somebody uses a quarter Mark (explicitly described as 25 pfennigs) in
a
payphone. There never was a 25-Pfennig coin (at least not after the
first
world war, and it was only an experiment at that time).
- The German family celebrates Christmas on the morning of Christmas
Day.
Germans celebrate Christmas Eve.
- On Chrstmas, the grown son goes to a party with his girlfriend. In a
German family, there would have been a heated discussion about going
amay on
Christmas - it's a family celebration.
And there are others. He might just have glossed over such points, but
he
wants to give detaisl and gets them wrong every time.

Most of these details are more American than German. The impression I
get is
that Turtledove describes Germans as just like Americans, except that
they
have a Nazi government.

I notice this most when he deals with Germany, of course, but the other
nations don't seem to be much better.
- America looks very 1980's-like to me.
- Arabs are Muslim fanatics - Islam was not that strong in the 1960's

You could claim this is part of his alternate history, but for most
points,
he doesn't show how this could be linked to the book's story.

Greetings
Karl Heinz