Review: The World That Wasn't podcast

You can probably tell I am a big fan of Jordan Harbour's Twilight Histories (it is a featured podcast after all). Nevertheless, I would like to see more alternate history podcasts since I feel there is a lot room for new and unique shows. There have been attempts in the past like Nicholas Pardini's What If History and the multiple incarnations of the AlternateHistory.com Podcast, but nothing that has lasted as long as Twilight Histories. Occasionally an SF or history podcast will have a lone alternate/counterfactual history episode, but never enough to satisfy the hunger of a hardcore alternate historian. So, of course, I was happy to discover the first episode of The World That Wasn't.

TWTW follows a format similar to Pardini's What if History in that it is essentially just two guys (Nicholas Davidge and Jamie Toal...I found out how the spell Jamie's name after being contacted by the TWTW guys on Twitter) as they discuss various what if questions. What is unique is that they also have a guest historian and include sounds effects, music and even short skits, so the level of professionalism is up there with Harbour's Twilight Histories, yet it is different in that it is not a second person narrative, but an alternate history discussion.

I probably shouldn't spend all my time comparing TWTW to other podcasts, because that is hardly fair. Instead lets talk about the first and, so far, only episode where our hosts talk about what if Germany won the Battle of Britain. Not a bad start, although they do inevitably talk about a successful Operation Sealion, which is (for those who don't know) the inspiration for the term "alien space bats". To our hosts' credit they did have Sonja Ostrow of Vanderbilt University on to reign them in when they go too fantastical and they also discussed other potential scenarios such as a failed Operation Sealion, the evacuation at Dunkirk failing and Britain making a negotiated peace with Germany. I also liked how they tried to stay on the overall topic and not go on too many tangents into other periods of history.

There is not much else to say after that. I think I can say without any trepidation that I will certainly subscribe to TWTW and look forward to next month's episode.

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Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update and a blogger on Amazing Stories. Check out his short fiction. When not writing he works as an attorney, enjoys life with his beautiful wife Alana and prepares for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter.

Interview: Tony Schumacher

Anthony "Tony" Schumacher is the author of The Darkest Hour, an alternate history thriller set in a world where Britain fell to German invasion in World War II. I enjoyed the book and so I reached out to Tony for an interview. He graciously accepted and here is our conversation:

Who is Tony Schumacher?

He is my crime fighting alter ego who stalks the streets and rooftops of a night…. Oh hang on, that’s Batman.

Tony Schumacher is me, a writer, based in Liverpool, UK, the author of The Darkest Hour, an alternative history novel published by Harper Collins late last year. I've stumbled around doing all sorts of jobs, I've been a policeman, a stand-up comedian, a builder, a salesman a bouncer… honestly the list is endless. I’m just glad that I've finally found the job that really makes me happy.

I’m a writer.

What got you interested in alternate history?

Years ago, I genuinely can’t remember when, I read Len Deighton’s SS-GB and that got me hooked. Since then, the whole “what if” debate has fascinated me. Buy me a beer and I’ll bore you all night about it!

What is The Darkest Hour about?

It’s about a guy who has lost everything, literally everything, his family, his dignity, his integrity, and most importantly his sense of right and wrong. He’s doing the worst job anybody has ever done and a long way from humanity, the question is, can he find his way back?

How was Germany able to successfully invade Britain in your novel?

Oooh this is a toughy. I should first explain that when I wrote the book it initially featured a lot of geopolitical stuff, large scale explanations and debates about how this or that happened. What I found though, as time went on, is that I became more and more interested in the story of John Rossett than I was in how the world had been shaped before we met him. I made a decision to take a lot of the stuff about the war out, and concentrate on the life of the people left in the war’s aftermath. There is a great movie called The Lives of Others that is set in East Germany during the seventies. It captures that humdrum grimness of existence under a cruel regime, where people don’t care who is in charge, they only care about where their next loaf of bread is coming from.

I wanted to capture that feeling; that grimness and the sense of powerlessness that the “little guy” has in that situation, which is why the grand moves of Hitler and Churchill had to take a back seat.

But… saying all of that, I did have a scenario running in the background that is touched upon in the book, and it runs like this:

Britain was routed at Dunkirk. Many of the little ships never made it back across due to the weather and were either scuttled or grounded on the beaches of northern France. The French surrendered immediately instead of hanging on for a month or so after, and the French navy fell under the immediate control of the Nazis and was swiftly mobilised under the Vichy (or some such) government as an ally of Germany.

Unlike in real life, the Nazis didn't hesitate, and within days of the collapse at Dunkirk and the loss of such an immense amount of equipment, they launched an invasion with their own armada of barges and little ships, supported by the newly reinforced Axis navies.

Weather, and a reeling British high command, limited the RAF and its strikes against the invasion force that managed to land and take a decent sized port (in the disarray of the capitulation of Dunkirk insufficient engineers, and explosives, were available to effectively put all the south coast ports out of action.)

The Royal Navy withdraws from the channel in the face of the Axis naval forces, primarily to allow a future Government in Exile a means to get its remaining troops out of the country, with a view to  defending what would be left of an empire.

The Americans, under President Lindbergh watch on, after negotiating an oil and territory treaty with the Japanese (who are looking west towards an eventual conquest of China, and a future possible conflict with Russia before they turn their own eyes south, and the riches of an isolated Australia). Lindbergh sees the Nazis not just as a bulwark against Communism, but also as a future trading partner who would open up a single European market in the long run.

I've probably missed something out here, but I think that is how in my imagination things could have played out, although I would stress, as I did in the book itself, I’m a story teller, not a strategic planner!

Why do you think WWII alternate histories are popular in English speculative fiction?

Wow, good question! I don’t know, I don’t even know why they interest me so much? It can’t just be because the Nazis had cool uniforms can it? I wonder if it is because talking about it, flipping around ideas and solutions gives us the chance to be god?

Who designed the cover?

The lovely people at Harper Collins did two for me. The US one is quite distinctive, with a Union Flag and Swastika, it’s pretty bold and in a way a little disturbing. So much so that the powers that be decided to use a different one for the European market, just in case the US one caused offence.
I’ll be totally, honest, I don’t know which my favourite is, I think they both look amazing.

What are you reading now?

At any one time I’ve got about five books on the go if I’m honest, a couple of thrillers, plus an incredibly boring one about book marketing (I know I know, you don’t have to say it.) Alongside those is a really interesting war diary by a guy called Major Roy Farran, who was one of the founders of the SAS, called Winged Dagger. And finally the autobiography of Jan Karski, who was an incredible Polish Jew who fought with the resistance against the Nazis in Poland. Karski also managed to infiltrate the death camps, catalogue the atrocities taking place and then get out and tell the world, a truly amazing man.

Any advice for aspiring writers?

Three things:

Firstly, write! I’ve lost count of the number of times people tweet or email saying “I want to write but it all seems so daunting…” or “I want to write but I don’t know how to do it…” Believe me, it really is simple… all you have to do is start writing.

It’ll get easier as you go along, and the one thing about writing is: the more you do it… the better you get.

So write!

Secondly, network, talk to other writers. You don’t have to join a writing group (I didn't, but I’m guessing it would do no harm if you did) all you have to do nowadays is join twitter, read and comment on blogs, share your own work and read other peoples work. You’ll get loads of criticism, and give lots out, so learn how to spot the good stuff (a lot will be rubbish), and then learn from the mistakes of others as well as your own.

Thirdly, don’t give up. I really believe that is the ultimate secret, whatever you do… do not give up, because if you keep pushing, you’ll get there.

(I could probably say buy a book on marketing as well, but it would be too boring if I did!)

World War II Alternate History Will Always Have An Audience!

Guest post by Daniel Fletcher.

Alternate histories of the Second World War predate the end of the war itself, and indeed, even its beginning. British scribes forewarned of the Europe ‘lit by the lights of perverted science’, to quote the late, great Winston Churchill, as far back as 1937 with the foreboding and futuristic Swastika Night from Katharine Burdekin.

With the now-almost laughable prospect of a Nazi invasion of the British Isles a very real and prominent fear at the time, Burdekin used a pseudonym in the event that Hitler’s Aryan supermen actually managed to make it over the pond – an act that in reality would require the collapse of Britain’s superior naval and air forces in an alternate Battle of Britain, and a complete debellation of Fighter Command and the English channel defence.

Even in the event of successful landings, wargames staged in the ’70s conclusively proved that even had landings been possible, the logistics of supplying those troops would have proved impossible in the face of a determined British naval and air defence, lending Operation Sea Lion its infamous moniker as The Unmentionabe Sea Mammal: Bane of all Alternate History Buffs Since 1946.

Yet World War II offered slaughter and suffering of an unparalleled savagery; the epic magnitude of the carnage had never before been seen, and all being well, never shall be again. Yet the incalculable misery and bloodshed it brought to the world is the very reason why such minor annoyances as fact and logic will likely never deter the adventurous writer whose compulsion leads to the realm of alternate history.

In the subject-specific realm of Unmentionable Sea Mammals, Jackboot Britain, the alternative history novel of 2014 has had no backlash for its playful skirting around the possibilities of a successful invasion. Of course, multiple factors had to be introduced in order for the downright impossible to become merely implausible – a Luftwaffe strategy that focused solely on Fighter Command and not bombing cities, the avoidance of British scuttling of the French fleet and the combined forces of Germany, Italy, Vichy France and Spain all turning on the beleaguered British Isles, et al. Sea Lion was not the focus of Jackboot, merely the backdrop of its narrative.

Thence, this combination of potent factors had to be translated onto the pages of Jackboot in a way that did not detract from the rest of the epic novel; the wide-ranging narrative of an all-encompassing tale of captured soldiers, Waffen-SS jailers, Wehrmacht Occupation Force troops, Jewish teachers and liberal journalists of the civilian population, auxiliary partisans in the underground resistance, monosyllabic alcoholics and Great War survivors of the Lost Generation, men of the SS-Einsatzgruppen murder squads, the Nazi elite and as chief antagonist, notorious villain of the 20th century in ‘Blond Beast’ Reinhard Heydrich himself, the depraved Machiavellian scoundrel christened ‘The Man With The Iron Heart’ by none other than Adolf Hitler.

A wide range of characters –British, German and otherwise, civilian, partisan, military and paramilitary alike – combine to depict the love and loss, suffering and slaughter, triumph and tragedy that stems from the carnage and chaos of war, and the destructive effect of prejudice, hatred and man’s lust for power.
Jackboot Britain is available now on Amazon.

Earlier works dealing with the successful invasion of the British Isles glossed over the minutiae of Sea Lion details, such as SS-GB by Len Deighton, the narrative of which begins almost one year after the Germans had taken administrative control over London and by implication, Britain and the UK whole. The story focused on a police detective and a murder mystery he becomes embroiled in that threatens the fabric of the new Nazi Britain; Deighton weaves a well-paced tale that discards much of the detail of its alternate war history.

The esteemed playwright Noel Coward wrote a play entitled Peace In Our Time during the war, first performed on stage in 1946. The added irony of what is now a relative sidenote in the alt-hist canon is that the talented Coward himself had been included on the infamous ‘Black Book’ compiled by Heydrich’s SD for the SS Security Police; a comprehensive list of over two thousand ‘Enemies of the Reich’ who were to be detained and liquidated upon the subjugation of Britain.

Other works – such as Philip K. Dick’s masterful 1963 Hugo Award winning The Man In The High Castle novel, and the million-selling, fast-paced detective story set in a ’60s era Nazi Germany in Robert Harris’ Fatherland depict a more overwhelmingly victorious Germany, with the Soviet Union all-but annihilated and utterly conquered in both, and in the former, even the United States had fallen to the fascist trifecta of Axis nations in the German, Japanese and Italian alliance.

That possibility – the subjugation of both the British Empire and the United States of America circa 1940-45 by the comparatively weaker Axis nations (the US alone produced more armaments than Japan and Italy combined, while being sufficiently rich in resources to never require the out-and-out war economy as was enforced from Berlin, Rome and Tokyo) stretches the limits of imagination yet further than the now-comfortably held consensus view that it is nothing short of ludicrous to suggest that Britain was ever in danger of falling into fascist hands.

Yet decade-to-decade, the alternate histories of World War II continue to be written. Literature that appeals to the millions of avid and voracious readers of War-Lit and in particular, Second World War era novels and can simultaneously entertain and educate must be considered a very welcome addition to this brand of literary canon.

Jackboot Britain follows in the footsteps of the pioneering alt-hist works of WWII, and all the rest that followed since. It will not be the last. But the sub-genre of alternative history novels that is so loosely thrust into the massive dual-genre of the ‘Science Fiction and Fantasy’ bracket should be welcomed for its varied works across the decades, and only considered to have provided its last meaningful, significant or worthy words when it can no longer produce original, entertaining and educational novels for its fans.

All being well, my own contribution to this sub-genre will be appreciated, and one fervently hopes that WWII alt-hist can continue to produce worthy works long into the literary future!

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Daniel Fletcher is an Asia-based English writer, novelist & poet. Wrote his first book aged 22 in Ibiza, Spain entitled Jackboot Britain, an alternate history based in a Nazi-occupied UK. Moved to Thailand at 23 and thereafter worked as a professional copywriter and martial arts reporter, before becoming a full-time author in 2014. Second novel due for Aug/Sept '14. Loves reading, writing, travelling, cannabis, psychedelia and surf!

Review: "Hitler Invades England" by George Crall

Grade: C

Operation Sea Lion has plagued alternate historians since its inception.  It has been the fodder of many alternate timelines...most of them implausible.  I do not have to remind you that "alien space bats" was first coined during a debate about an Operation Sea Lion timeline.  It seems almost impossible to have Germany successfully invade England, but many still try even today.

Hitler Invades England by George Crall, however, presents one of the more plausible scenarios I have ever read involving a German invasion of England. Crall does not diverge his TL in 1940 and try to follow Sea Lion to the letter as many have mistakenly tried before him.  Instead the timeline begins to diverge years earlier in 1938 when Claus von Stauffenberg manages to convince Hitler refocusing his strategy on defeating Britain as soon as possible.  According to Stauffenberg, Britain is to key to the Reich's victory and once he convinces Hitler of this fact Europe's future begins to grow dim.

As his plans takes shape, Germany develops the industrial and technological capacity to invade England and keeps the British unaware by following a foreign policy that makes the Germans seem less antagonistic (the war actually does not start until 1940).  The book covers the initial planning, to the start of the war, to the invasion of England and the early advancement into the interior.  It ends with a series of OTL bios of the historical actors in his book along with further speculation on history.  I would have liked to learn more about the later campaign and what would have happened after England eventually surrendered, but that story was not available.

The book contains a lot of historical data on the people and weapon systems used in the war.  If this was a textbook AH, like When Angels Wept, I probably could have given it a better review.  Crall, however, attempted to tell the story using a large cast of characters both historic and fictional, but with the large amount of info contained with the book, the transition to the narrative form hurt the story in the long run and distracted me from the scenario Crall was crafting.

The dialogue was rather weak (I lost count of the number of times I read someone say "as you know" to someone else) and the characters were not believable.  The Germans sounded more like 21st century Americans and the British characters acted more like stereotypes than people from that period.  Though it is possible to find a balance between info dumps and characterization (see Then Everything Changed), Crall was unsuccessful in this attempt. 

Crall has managed to make Operation Sea Lion more plausible, but how he presented his ideas prevents from giving this novel a better review.  With more work on his writing Crall may be an excellent alternate military historian and I hope to see more of his scenarios in the future.