A scathing article from "online humor website" Something Awful.
And before you think he's just some internet punk, he actually makes some good points in other articles:
My Tank is Fright
What made the P. 1003 so desirable should be pretty obvious to you or me with our magical 21st century hindsight. Imagine dozens of them streaming over the English Channel inside a cloud of fighter escorts, effortlessly landing squads of elite paratroopers wherever they were needed. Or consider how history might have changed had Hitler, rather than taking his own life, waved goodbye to Berlin and boarded a waiting P. 1003 with Otto Skorzeny to be whisked away to a submarine and taken to safety in Argentina. Many hundreds of alternate history novels have hinged on flimsier concepts. Hell, I'm pretty sure I read one where Hitler turned into a ghost and possessed a cyborg version of Rommel.
Mmm, VTOL.
Rate my Alien Invasion
The Worldwar Series (Books)
Alternate history writer Harry Turtledove's "Worldwar" series is probably one of the best known recent alien invasion stories. In these books a fleet of lizard men arrive in orbit around the earth to invade and subjugate the planet and prepare it for their colony fleet. Turtledove proposes aliens that are very slow to progress technologically. They scouted our planet a thousand years ago and saw us riding around on horses with swords. Assuming that we would remain that way for quite some time they didn't send a very large invasion fleet. Instead, they arrive at the height of the Second World War and find us driving around in tanks and on the cusp of discovering the atomic bomb. Their invasion does not go as planned, and by the end of it humanity has reverse-engineered much of their technology and is giving them a fair serving of what-for.
The Invaders: Short and skinny reptilian bipeds with a debilitating addiction to eating ginger.
Their Strategy: Land on earth with tanks and space jet planes and take over the primitive sword-wielding humans that currently rule the earth. Once the invasion starts and they're facing weapons much closer to their own than they had anticipated their strategy fragments into a stubborn "old school" and a myriad of bizarre slavery and breeding programs with humans. One of the more interesting strategies is to rely on human collaborators, which include Jews in Nazi Germany.
Their Armaments: Nuclear weapons, tanks, and future jet planes.
Mankind's Reaction: When the aliens invade mankind is fairly preoccupied with the largest war in human history. Once things get going, however, the various powers turn against the aliens with Turtledove making coy parallels to events that really happened later in the war. Man's general strategy is a mass war not unlike the one it was already fighting coupled with a vigorous reverse engineering of any technology that humans can get their hands on. Turtledove's interesting foray into this sort of speculative disruption of history is his obsession, and it is painfully obvious in the Worldwar series. Themes that could have been explored thoroughly in a single volume have bloated into four books in one series with two and counting in a second series. War of the Worlds wasn't 2800 pages long, Harry.
The Invader's Downfall: The invaders don't actually lose in the Worldwar series. They get their asses kicked, but they're still clinging tenaciously to the earth by book four. Their defeat can all be traced back to their inability to change or adapt and their incorrect assumption that humanity would progress as slowly as they had.
Invasion Rating: 3/5 The aliens had the technology and the will to beat mankind, but underestimated the size of force they would require to succeed. They made the best of what they had, but were defeated by Turtledove's bewilderingly enormous cast of generic square jaw characters and shallow caricatures of historic figures.
And before you think he's just some internet punk, he actually makes some good points in other articles:
My Tank is Fright
What made the P. 1003 so desirable should be pretty obvious to you or me with our magical 21st century hindsight. Imagine dozens of them streaming over the English Channel inside a cloud of fighter escorts, effortlessly landing squads of elite paratroopers wherever they were needed. Or consider how history might have changed had Hitler, rather than taking his own life, waved goodbye to Berlin and boarded a waiting P. 1003 with Otto Skorzeny to be whisked away to a submarine and taken to safety in Argentina. Many hundreds of alternate history novels have hinged on flimsier concepts. Hell, I'm pretty sure I read one where Hitler turned into a ghost and possessed a cyborg version of Rommel.
Mmm, VTOL.
Rate my Alien Invasion
The Worldwar Series (Books)
Alternate history writer Harry Turtledove's "Worldwar" series is probably one of the best known recent alien invasion stories. In these books a fleet of lizard men arrive in orbit around the earth to invade and subjugate the planet and prepare it for their colony fleet. Turtledove proposes aliens that are very slow to progress technologically. They scouted our planet a thousand years ago and saw us riding around on horses with swords. Assuming that we would remain that way for quite some time they didn't send a very large invasion fleet. Instead, they arrive at the height of the Second World War and find us driving around in tanks and on the cusp of discovering the atomic bomb. Their invasion does not go as planned, and by the end of it humanity has reverse-engineered much of their technology and is giving them a fair serving of what-for.
The Invaders: Short and skinny reptilian bipeds with a debilitating addiction to eating ginger.
Their Strategy: Land on earth with tanks and space jet planes and take over the primitive sword-wielding humans that currently rule the earth. Once the invasion starts and they're facing weapons much closer to their own than they had anticipated their strategy fragments into a stubborn "old school" and a myriad of bizarre slavery and breeding programs with humans. One of the more interesting strategies is to rely on human collaborators, which include Jews in Nazi Germany.
Their Armaments: Nuclear weapons, tanks, and future jet planes.
Mankind's Reaction: When the aliens invade mankind is fairly preoccupied with the largest war in human history. Once things get going, however, the various powers turn against the aliens with Turtledove making coy parallels to events that really happened later in the war. Man's general strategy is a mass war not unlike the one it was already fighting coupled with a vigorous reverse engineering of any technology that humans can get their hands on. Turtledove's interesting foray into this sort of speculative disruption of history is his obsession, and it is painfully obvious in the Worldwar series. Themes that could have been explored thoroughly in a single volume have bloated into four books in one series with two and counting in a second series. War of the Worlds wasn't 2800 pages long, Harry.
The Invader's Downfall: The invaders don't actually lose in the Worldwar series. They get their asses kicked, but they're still clinging tenaciously to the earth by book four. Their defeat can all be traced back to their inability to change or adapt and their incorrect assumption that humanity would progress as slowly as they had.
Invasion Rating: 3/5 The aliens had the technology and the will to beat mankind, but underestimated the size of force they would require to succeed. They made the best of what they had, but were defeated by Turtledove's bewilderingly enormous cast of generic square jaw characters and shallow caricatures of historic figures.
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