Out of the Darkness (World at War, Book 6)
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Out of the Darkness (World at War, Book 6) Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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Final instalment of Turtledove's WW2 Epic
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"Out of the Darkness" is the sixth and final part of Harry Turtledove's reworking of the World War Two story set on a planet where people use magic instead of technology.
Dragon riders replace aircraft, Behemoths replace tanks, East and West have been transposed, Eurasia has been moved to the Southern hemisphere so that the Finns look like Zulus and the Saraha Desert becomes "the land of the Ice people." And all the names have been changed. But otherwise this is not alternative history at all.
By chance I read Anthony Beevor's "Stalingrad" shortly after reading the earlier voume ("Through the Darkness") in this series which included the events corresponding to that battle, and the same author's "Berlin" just before reading this one. Again and again I found myself recognising the real events on which Turtledove bases the disasters and atrocities in the "Darkness" books.
When reading the earlier books in this series I thought Turtledove's aim was to do was write an account of great evil and how some people were sucked into it, others fought against it, others just tried to live through it, changing some of the details so the reader could leave some of the emotional baggage behind. By the time I reached this book, my mind was instantly translating everything back to real-world equivalents - Algarve as Germany, Kaunians as Jews, Swemmel as Stalin, etc - but the book still has power to make the reader think. As one character explained in the previous book, nobody is the villain in his own story.
It is also a gripping story, not because the reader is in any doubt about what will happen overall, but because you want to know what will happen to the many viewpoint characters, most of whom are fictional creations caught up in real events.
In fact, Turtledove takes one noticeable liberty with history in this book, which I won't spoil by giving it away here, but anyone who wants to explore the point further after they've read this book might also be interested in Barbara Delaplace's short story "No Other Choice" which is included in the collection "Alternate Presidents."
The "Darkness" series is best read in the correct sequence -"Into the Darkness", "Darkness Descending", "Through the Darkness", "Rulers of the Darkness", "Jaws of Darkness" and finally "Out of the Darkness". The mood is as black as the titles indicate, but the series is a very exciting read. |
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