It oughta be a movie: Worldwar Series, by Harry Turtledove (Books 1 & 2)
This sci-fi alternate history series posits: What would have happened if aliens invaded during the middle of WWII? I first read these books back when I was graduating high school and remembered it as an engaging story. I wondered if it would hold up, now that I’m older and know more about the real history. The answer is: Yeah, pretty much! In fact, I’m rather surprised that this hasn’t already been adapted for a TV series or movie franchise, given the popularity of WWII stories and the increasingly mainstream appeal of science fiction and fantasy.
Unusually, the first book begins with the alien perspective. Fleetlord Atvar of The Race is preparing to launch his attack on Tosev 3 (Earth), which his emperor hopes to make their third colony world. Atvar brings up an image to show his officers the kind of enemy they expect to face: a Saracen warrior on a camel or a knight in armor.
Kirel added, “These are recent images, too: they date back only about…eight hundred of Tosev 3’s revolutions. And how much, my fellow warriors, can a world change, in a mere eight hundred revolutions?”
A lot, as the reader already knows but the aliens do not! While The Race’s technology is indeed superior, humans have a lot more practice in war and the leaders of the aliens are shaken to realize that they are within a hairsbreadth of figuring out nuclear weapons. While much of the global south falls quickly under “Lizard” control1, the great powers that were involved in WWII continue to put up resistance throughout the series.
Alien intervention largely puts inter-human hostilities on hold - though of course it does not erase the reasons for those hostilities – and the timeline is altered in significant ways. For instance, because the Germans are distracted by the Lizards, the Warsaw ghetto uprising actually succeeds! It’s leader, Mordechai Anielewicz, survives and becomes a pivotal figure in the story, as does the fictional spokesperson Moishe Russie. Some events echo real ones that don’t actually occur in this timeline. For instance, a Lizard ship carrying many of their nuclear weapons gets blown up, scattering uranium across an area near the town of Chernobyl, and two cities have nuclear weapons used against them, but instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki they are two major world capitals. We follow these events as they unfold through the eyes of many different individuals. These POV characters are mostly fictional, but regularly interact with actual historical figures like Anielewicz, physicist Dr. Enrico Fermi, General George Patton, and Otto Skorzeny. The exceptions are Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov2 and Colonel Leslie Groves, whose thoughts we get to hear. We also continue to get the perspectives of both leaders and ordinary soldiers of The Race, as they struggle to understand the cold, wet, and unexpectedly violent world they’ve come to conquer.
1. They call us “big uglies”, as humans are taller but very weird looking compared to the more reptilian species they are used to.
2. It is hard not to like Molotov in these books because he comes off as such a stonecold badass of a diplomat. He is utterly unperturbed at being brought on the Lizard spaceship, and his scornful internal monologue during his meeting with Hitler is priceless. He was absolutely not a good guy, but his record surviving as Stalin’s right-hand man and Churchill’s description of him as a “man of outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness” suggests his reactions to things in the book are probably fairly accurate.
One thing I like about the books is that they try to reflect how people from particular cultures and backgrounds would actually think and act, whether that is pleasant to modern readers or not. For instance, there are three white American baseball players among the POV characters who on the one hand are generally likeable guys with talents or backgrounds that prove helpful to their new situation, but are simultaneously quite racist or sexist on an ingrained, unthinking level. I was also pleased that the books included a couple of perspectives that are often left out of stories about WWII. Ludmila Gorbunova is a “night witch”, one of the female Soviet pilots who harassed invading Nazis with low-flying night attacks in dinky little prop airplanes (kukuruzniks). Liu Han is a Chinese peasant woman who lost her whole family in a Japanese attack shortly before getting captured by the aliens, and whose experiences turn her into a rebel.
However, looking at the story with 2021 eyes, the representation could definitely be expanded. Ludmila and Liu Han are the only female POV characters, and almost all the major female characters end up in romance subplots which are a bit iffy to one degree or another3. The one who doesn’t is the sole queer character, who shows up halfway through book 2 and then dies. This is an unfortunate oversight for storytelling as well as representation considering that the aliens A) liberated the concentration camps and would probably have had questions about the pink triangle and other badges imposed by the Nazis on the groups they were attempting to eliminate and B) were conducting experiments to understand human families/breeding patterns. The aliens were trying to figure out why otherwise harmless humans will fight like deranged maniacs if their partners or children are threatened...and that doesn’t just apply to straight or fertile people4. We don’t see the perspectives of any Black or Latino characters either - again a bit odd, considering that the aliens occupied Africa and Latin America first, and getting an idea of how this swap in colonizers affected the local populations would have made a nice comparison to the “lesser of two evils” situation that Europe’s Jewish population finds itself in. A more egregious omission is the total lack of any Japanese POV characters, given that the other major players in the war are all represented. One alien does end up a prisoner of war in Japanese-occupied China, which is of course very unpleasant for him. But since we have POVs from both inside the Warsaw ghetto and the Wehrmacht, having only a non-human POW’s perspective on Japan feels oddly unbalanced.
3. I don’t know about you, but being literally in Hitler’s backyard would be a major mood-killer for me, if the knowledge that my potential love interest was a German officer wasn't already.
4. Picking up just one human who isn’t interested at all in the opposite gender, or whose anatomy doesn’t match their clothing choice, would be a complication in the data that the alien scientists would have to interpret.
That brings me to the aliens themselves. I really like that we get to see their internal social dynamics and thoughts in a way that makes them seem like real people. I also like that Turtledove went with an almost dinosaurian character design and biology, plus some chameleon-like eye turrets, rather than some boring big-eyed humanoids. Also, their frustration with the unexpectedly fast development of human technology is funny and kind of thought-provoking – would it be unusual to see the kind of rapid increase in tech that earth has experienced over the past few centuries? However, there are some aspects of their social system that reinforce certain norms I don’t think we have reason to expect would apply. For instance, all the soldiers are males and females seem to be relegated to child-rearing. That seems a little odd, given that individuals are asexual when not in oestrus, that such an advanced society could easily devise medications to suppress oestrus if it was inconvenient, and that among many species of dinosaurs, reptiles, and birds females are as large or larger than the males. Similarly, the idea that at least three alien species accept an imperial hierarchy basically without question is…well, I’m not sure whether to say “troubling” or “implausible”. However, it IS pretty funny to see the horrified and confused reaction of the aliens when Molotov points out that the USSR used to have an emperor but then killed him, and their further confusion at the “snout counting” method of government used by the US and some other countries. Speaking of which, I wish the books clarified whether the aliens had a religion. They seem to be aware of what religions are, but other than respectfully swearing by the emperor don’t seem to have any rituals or sacred texts of their own. Did they once have one or more religions but abandoned them? Having it confirmed that these aliens have “an emperor and a court and all the trappings of the outworn past” (as Molotov puts it) and also have abandoned religion as unnecessary would mess with the heads of Soviets and Americans alike as much as the idea of government without an emperor does the Lizards!
Despite those flaws, though, this remains a very entertaining and creative book series. I don’t think I’ve seen anything else quite like it, and it is absolutely worth checking out if you like history and science fiction.
Adaptation issues:
Because of its length, complexity, and number of characters, I think these books would lend themselves best to a TV series adaptation. You could get 4-6 seasons out of just the original four books, and there are follow-up books as well to draw from. The dialog is generally good, and descriptions are detailed enough that much of the screenplay and costume and set design could be drawn directly from the books, though some of the more pertinent internal monologue would have to either be cut or conveyed through facial expression and added lines of dialog.
However, to address some of the issues mentioned above, I would probably cut some scenes and characters to either streamline the story or make room for a broader range of human perspectives. For example, there are quite a few RAF characters, but the one who really matters to the plot is radarman David Goldfarb. He suspects the blips they are seeing are something real before the aliens attack, gets to test out putting a radar set on a plane for the first time, makes the suggestion of having shifting frequencies to avoid being targeted by Lizard missiles, and plays a role in rescuing Moishe Russie. The other UK airmen don’t need to be focused on until it is time for a tense scene from the second book when the RAF goes to the USSR to share the radar technology and find that the town where they’ve landed hasn’t been fully captured by the partisans but is still partially under Nazi control. Even then, I might prefer to refocus on someone like “the fair Tatiana”, a partisan sniper, because she reminds me of Ludmila Pavilchenko – immortalized by Woody Guthrie though she and the other female Soviet fighters are otherwise largely forgotten in American-told histories! Similarly, Sam Yeager the sci-fi loving baseball player who ends up in charge of Lizard prisoners and interacting with the Manhattan project people should absolutely stay. But Mutt Daniels - his manager, a WWI vet who ends up back in the trenches - could be mostly cut. We get other scenes of the war within the US and some of Mutt’s could be refocused on the criminally underused Lucille Potter. She’s a level-headed nurse and the only person we see take a scientific interest in Lizard anatomy, yet most of her story involves Mutt unsuccessfully trying to get into her pants5! Another ballplayer, Bobby Fiore, ends up on the Lizard ship with Liu Han. They develop an OK relationship, considering the circumstances of being breeding experiment lab rats, but he could be replaced by any guy who isn’t a rapist and has an ounce of consideration for other people’s feelings. We also don’t need him to bring the Chinese communists into the story – Liu Han herself suffices for that – so swapping him out with someone from a different part of the world could again help broaden the perspective.
5. When Mutt learns that Lucille is a “lizzie” (as he puts it), he struggles to reconcile ideas of perversion with her impression of her as “good people”. He almost manages it when she asks: “If I’m good at what I do, why should the rest matter?” and he responds “I dunno”…and then immediately ruins it by adding “but it does, somehow.” And even then he doesn’t stop trying to pursue her! Just fuck right off, Mutt!
Speaking of what to add, we have a hint that interesting things are happening in India – there is a fragment of a news broadcast about passive protests, and physicist Jens Larssen wondering if that is against the Lizards or the British – so I’d love to know what Gandhi was up to in this version of 1943! I’d also like to see the American front from the perspective of a black soldier. These guys were the first to serve in an integrated US army but still experienced considerable discrimination, and it would be really interesting to explore that in this altered timeline. Barbara Larssen doesn’t have much to do other than be the vertex in an accidental love triangle between Yeager and her presumed-dead physicist husband Jens Larssen, so I might make her a “calculator”. Because modern computers hadn’t been developed yet, the calculations in the atomic bomb development were done by a bunch of women working slide rules and mechanical calculators. Many were wives of scientists, so Barbara would fit right in…and it would make more sense how Jens met her if she were a math major instead of a literature graduate! In terms of the missing Japanese characters, I’d maybe add in Naotake Satō, the ambassador to the USSR. He comes across as an interesting and long-suffering character in this video about whether the atomic bombs caused Japan’s surrender. One could also add a regular Japanese citizen; this book could be a good starting point for choosing an interesting POV. I’d also want to make some tweaks to the depictions of the Communist fighters in China. Their thuggish, slogan-spouting manner reminds me more of 1960s Red Guards than the way I’ve mostly heard the original revolutionaries described. Stalin’s right-hand man and a frickin’ SS officer come across as more likeable and human than these peasants attempting to liberate their country from imperial control of three different kinds, and that doesn’t seem fair6! The previously reviewed ‘Wild Swans’ could be a good resource to draw on, especially since Liu Han goes on to be important in that movement.
6. Although it was kind of funny when Nieh Ho-T’ing says to Bobby Fiore: “You did well…You understand that in guerilla war the fighter is but one fish in a vast school of peasants. When danger too great to oppose confronts him, he disappears into the school”… “Look like farmer, they not shoot me.”… “That’s what I was talking about,” Nieh answered impatiently.
