Entertaining short novel. Very well presented in Audible format. A bit stilted in some places, and a bunch of themes which could be more fully explored in another book (or a full-length novel), but it had a decent plot, clearly presented characters, and some cute riffs on modern society. ( )

My reactions to reading this anthology in 2002. Spoilers follow.

"Down in the Bottomlands", Harry Turtledove -- Apart from Turtledove's Sim World series and Harry Harrison's Eden series, there are few alternate histories that use, as their deviation point, an event of natural history rather than recorded human social and political history. This is one of those stories. It postulates that a chain of barrier mountains closes off the Mediterranean Basin from the Atlantic Ocean and that it dries up to form the deep, dry, landlocked Bottomlands, (Death Valley on a big scale. Turtledove does little, by way of alternate history, with the idea. The Krepalgan Unity (roughly the area of modern France, Spain, and Portugal) hatch a scheme, using buried nukes, to geologically breach the mountains between the Atlantic and the Bottomlands thereby flooding it so they gain sea access and Tarteshan, the nation of the hero Radnal vez Krobir, being deprived of the mineral resources of the Bottomlands. The plot reminded me of an Alastair Maclean novel (specifically his Night Without End and Goodbye, California with its scheme to use earthquake inducing nukes) with its murder of a secret agent in the midst of a Bottomlands tour group and Radnal being pressed into service to detect and capture the murderers (the rather obvious suspects of Lofosa and Evillia given their reflexive prowess in unarmed combat) and find the nukes. We get little sense on how humanity's history has changed in what appears to be a time contemporary to ours apart from that nudity taboos have altered, no Christianity appears present, brides are bought in Tarteshan and tortured in its pragmatic justice system. I don't know enough about history to comment on the animals and plants of the Bottomlands and their relation to our world. It's an engaging enough story and the Bottomlands are an interesting jumping off point to an alternate history of the supercontinent of Africa, Europe, and Asia, but Turtledove doesn't do much with it apart from the adventure plot of Radnal foiling the attempt to flood the Bottomlands and being rewarded with a title and the friendship of a noblewoman who is the niece of the tyrant of Tarteshan.

"The Wheels of If", L. Sprague de Camp -- This is the second time I've read this story. This time I was struck by its similarity to de Camp's classic Lest Darkness Fall in that both feature intrepid and ingenious protagonist thrust into a strange world and remake it for their own ends. The ultra competent protagonist Park is very much in the competent man tradition of Heinlein and the Golden Age: he learns languages, researches his historical place, fights a war, outwits violent political faction, and leads a double life as a political party organizer and bishop. (Though he doesn't do much like with technology unlike the protagonist of Lest Darkness Fall.) It's also interesting to note that, given this early stage in the development of the alternate history sub-genre, de Camp spends the opening four and a half pages on covering the real historical events that the world of his story deviates from: King Oswiu of Northumbria accepts the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope rather than the Celtic Christian Church, and Moslems lose the Battle of Tours. Now days, an alternate history would probably take much less space to cover the hinge events of the fictional timeline or just allude to them in passing.

"The Pugnacious Peacemaker", Harry Turtledove -- I appreciated this story more the second time around, especially Turtledove's research into the Incan culture particularly, as he's wont to do, its language. (This is, perhaps, more a tribute to his skill than his recent long series of alternate American histories which frequently just replay historical events of our time.) Some said that this story clashes with its prequel, de Camp's "The Wheels of If". There is some difference in style -- more puns, more emphasis on sex though Park fails to bed widow Kuurikwiljor, more humor. The main difference is one of plot. In "The Wheels of If", protagonist Park settles things through political machinations, blackmail, and military action. Here he falls back on his main skills as a lawyer. To be sure, Turtledove recasts an historical event -- the Zorasterian holy text of the Avesta getting them status as a People of the Book under Islamic doctrine. (The analog is actually fairly close. The Zorasterians had memorized holy texts like the Incans of this story do and, like in this story, find it politically expedient, when dealing with Moslems, to have a written holy text.) However, the Moslems of this story seem implausibly reasonable given that the Zorasterians of Persia still seem to have been persecuted after writing down the Avesta. ( )

Sample Chapters: http://webscriptions.net/chapters/0671578359/0671578359.htm

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