Two of my favorite books. Sounds like I’ll give Bitter Seeds a try. Thanks!

I teach history and found a really cool article on counterfactual historical fiction, but my college students got totally confused by it. Apparently they’d NEVER encountered this genre before and didn’t know anything about scifi or fantasy. Weird.

I’m both a SciFi/Fantasy fan and a WWII buff, so this was a fun premise. I’m on the last few pages and it was quite an enjoyable read, no less because it’s set earlier during the war – which isn’t covered nearly as much in popular culture.

Without giving spoilers away, I thought it was well worth reading and I look forward to Ian’s subsequent books as I see some real potential. For a first novel, this one is quite good.

I’d like to turn this argument on its head, and suggest that perhaps this is just society’s way of coming to grips with tragedies that have passed.

If you look at the history of cinema, it seems as if there’s a grieving process for stories and films related to a particular war. To use WWII as an example (not the only one where this has happened but a good one):

It starts with the storytellers getting over the shock of the event by making heroes of their particular side (ie worthy heroic war films of the 1950′s where everyone died.)
From there it moves to fictionalising the villains and fighting against them in fantasy conflicts, both as wish-fulfillment and to “not let the next generation forget” (as in “The Great Escape” or the like)

As time goes on and the survivors get older, these two genres continue on separate courses. The worthy tragic stories get progressively more bittersweet and esoteric (“Diary of Anne Frank” and such), while the wish-fulfillment stories grow more and more outlandish (“Superman vs. the Nazis”). It’s at this point parodies appear (Any Mel Brooks film, or the UK shows “Allo Allo” and “Dad’s Army”), since the wish-fulfillment has reached a point where it is begging to be made fun of.

Finally we get to the point where, three generations on, the context and real weight of the original tragedy is lost, and what is left is a lazy cultural shorthand for evil (the Hitler parodies on You Tube, or the intellectually lazy folks in political debates who call their opponents Nazis.)

Of course, there’s crossover between these eras, but you will notice that the films and books tend to stick to their times as the public taste for them changes. “A Bridge Too Far” will probably never be remade, even given financially desperate Hollywood’s current penchant for safe bets. This is because people have moved on.

Basically, I reckon what we’re seeing here are examples of the last. The last veterans of the WWII conflict are dying, and with them is passing any realistic memory of what happened. What’s left in its place is an easy archetype for evil which saves writers the trouble of having to come up with an original scary villain for themselves.

Incidentally – the Arc Dream guys are cool as hell. Shane Ivey ran us through a Godlike scenario that same year and it was loads of fun.

Nazis are not “trendy” . . .

SIX MILLION DEAD JEWS testify to this TRUTH.

http://www.arcdream.com/godlike/

I think several of us thought it was a graphic novel, by the comments above. I guess the cover is very graphic novel-like, and the plot description even more so.

Not that I want to judge it before reading it, but I think it needs more than Cory’s described in his review.

IIRC, Dion Fortune did indeed make that claim, and Gerald Gardner, I think, and plenty of others! Prancing around sky clad on the white cliffs of Dover in at least one account.

Spear of Destiny is certainly fiction, and if only he’d marketed it as such and added a narrator, maybe a detective story in the present, he might have had a huge bestseller on his hands!

And now that I look again I find myself wondering if that cover art is John Jude Palencar, or just someone heavily influenced by him.