Recent content by Ivan Druzhkov

This, of course, assumes that there actually will be a reintegration of all the various nations into a greater American nation. Given all the pain, misery, and bad blood that has been tracked across North America since 1860, I think that there's probably a sizable portion of the population that...

So, guys, remember Orson Scott Card wrote this book called Empire a few years ago? The one where the culture wars escalate to the point where Noam Chomsky uses his army of mechs to occupy Manhattan and is promply defeated, somehow allowing Niall Ferguson to become president as part of his...

Despite the bugs and the slapdash way it was finished, Iron Storm is still one of my favorite games of all time. Hell, it's the closest I've ever seen anyone come to describing what the eternal world war Orwell described in 1984 would look like on the ground. There's apparently a spiritual...

No, not quite. I think you may be conflating our timeline with the RA1/RA2 one. When the Soviets went back in time to remove Einstein, they didn't remove OTL Einstein (the one who invented a time machine in 1946 and erased Hitler, and who has nothing to do with the RA universe after the intro...

I always had a bit of a problem with stories set in worlds without WW2 (or with WW2s that end inconclusively) that essentially have the same type of geopolitical system (realist, multiple nation-states in continual opposition to one another) persisting until the end of the 20th century, all...

Yeah, I had problems with the premise too. I did find it kind of weird that nations that had few qualms about, say, napalming civilians into puddles of fat, would turn tail after a few IEDs. It always seemed to me that the British and American attitude towards postwar Germany was something...

Keep in mind, though, that Michael Bay has the power to make anything explode in a fireball just by thinking about it. Personally, I'd be more worried about the possibility that having that much shittiness confined in such a small space will provoke the creation of the hotly-debated Shitty...

Judging from the scenario you outlined, it looks like the Cold War in Europe is going to right buggered up. Rather than having a nice West/East dichotomy, the 1950s will have a loosely-aligned US-UK-French alliance, a slowly consolidating Eastern Bloc, and a vaguely Nazi West Germany that...

Wasn’t quite sure where to put this; I suppose here is as good a place as any. My decision to post this was brought on by the discussion between B_Munro and Thande over in the thread on creating a “more realistic” version of the Bring the Jubilee, which started off another thread about...

A little coda I came across this paragraph while reading, of all things, an old review of Turtledove's Worldwar: In the Balance. It takes a little work to figure out, but it really cuts to the heart of the matter I was writing about in that article.

1. Depends. If you're a high-schooler just starting out with AH, then it's a decent introduction to the subgenre. If you're reading solidly adult fare, then you might find it lacking. When you read it, you'll probably find yourself, to quote SF scholar John Clute, "back in the nice old...

I don't know about a movie; while the visuals are impressive, there isn't much in the way of characters or a plot. Bert Smallways is basically just a viewpoint (and a particularly dense one at that) who exists solely to be dragged from location to location to watch the collapse of civilization.

That's the point. Spinrad's whole purpose for Lord of the Swastika (the book Hitler wrote in The Iron Dream) is to savage traditional sword 'n' sorcery by recounting OTL's Hitler rise to power as a Golden Age heroic fantasy. Interestingly enough, while most people who've critiqued the book...

Okay, mildly off topic post. I was browsing through the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (which you can't afford, but should totally read anyway), and I found the entry for Turtledove. It was a pretty standard mini-bio, but the thing that really stood out was the final line, which ran...

Read it, and currently writing something brief about it, as a matter of fact. I'm not entirely sure how seriously a reader should take this as an AH scenario. It's pretty clear from the text that Wells wrote it in order to illuminate the implications of aerial power in warfare and of the...