Orlando Barrios Rodríguez

Kinda cute alternate history, althought the factbook style doesn't do much for me--instead of seeing it presented like a crazy story of events changing the world in novel and interesting ways, we get a bunch of stuff about Dai-Nippon's products and land area and whatnot, and have to dig deep for the history. The idea is that Japan gets beat in a war with the Russians in 1938 and gets off the Asian mainland and focuses on its natural backyard, the Pacific, while the Sovs (but not the Western Allies) fight the Germans in 1940–41 and win, but not that convincingly, and the near-misses are part of what help Germany and Japan transfer to less fucked-up governments (the assassination of the leaders of the former helps), and the Soviet Union is kind of a dark Stalinist place but is effectively contained by strong G and J, and events happen and there is an Anglo-Japanese alliance and a US–Japanese war and I appreciate the author's desire to have the world be less fucked up but in a realistic way and I like the idea of Australia ("Macronesia") colonizing the ocean floor and of Korean dog soldiers grown out of genetic soup and I can even roll with the inevitable marines in power armour but about the time the author runs out of ideas and decides to start an apocalyptic war (because of "the economy," if you care), I lose interest.… (más)