Worldwar: Difference between revisions
Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 4 as dead. #IABot (v2.0beta9)
(quote cleanup) |
(Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 4 as dead. #IABot (v2.0beta9)) |
||
| (4 intermediate revisions by 2 users not shown) | |||
Line 2:
''Worldwar'' is an [[Alternate History]] continuity by [[Harry Turtledove]] about an [[Alien Invasion]] during [[World War II]].
The Race are [[The Reptilians|reptilian]] aliens bringing a invasion fleet to the world of Tosev 3 (locally called "Earth"), expecting a fairly easy conquest given the locals' level of sophistication. Then they discover that the planet is [[Aliens Steal Cable|emitting radio transmissions]], though their reconnaissance probe found them as sword-swinging savages only eight hundred years ago, which by their standards is nowhere near enough time to advance technologically at all. Confusing, implausible, an affront to the Race's rigid doctrines and if the Tosevites have advanced that much, it throws the certainty of the invasion in doubt. However, Fleetlord Atvar decides he could go down in history as one of three leaders to conquer an alien world, or the first to turn tail and flee. They go ahead with the conquest exactly as planned.
A mistake.
Line 18:
* [[Affably Evil]]: Skorzeny spends so much time being incredibly likeable and fun to be around that most people have to continually remind themselves that he is an unrepentant Nazi. After he has gotten one of the primary characters imprisoned by the SS many other officers, unaware that he was behind the arrest, actually use his example as motivation to break their superior out of custody.
* [[The Alliance]]: Nazi Germany, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the British Empire, the United States of America and Imperial Japan put aside their differences in order to kick alien ass during [[World War Two]].
* [[Alternate History]]: Aliens invade during World War II.
* [[Alien Arts Are Appreciated]]:
** Some members of the Race have taken to baseball, and it is noted that the Race like Leni Riefenstahl's film-making techniques.
** After his defection, Straha, (who has been considered by other members of the Race to be more like Humans than one of the Race) notes that he ''doesn't'' care for a lot of human art and music. He is somewhat fond of Bach, however.
** By the time of ''Colonization'', the next human generation (including Sam Yeager's teenage son) have grown up with the presence of the Race and think the trappings of their culture are pretty cool, shaving their heads and wearing body paint. They do not say "cool", though; like the Race's biology they prefer "hot".
* [[Alien Catnip]]: Ginger has a powerful and instantly addictive narcotic effect on the Race, and once the colony ships arrive it even turns out to send their females into heat, quickly resulting in some enterprising Race females inventing prostitutes who take money to snort some ginger and have sex.
Line 28:
* [[Allohistorical Allusion]]:
** Being interrogated by the Japanese, Race soldier Teerts wishes that a nuclear bomb would fall upon the city. The city is Nagasaki.
** After being able to destroy several Race landcruisers (albeit with heavy losses) with the help of the new developed panzer tanks, one of Jäger's men wonders if the next type of tank they'll develop will be a [[Cool Tank|Tiger]] mounting a long, barreled gun and sloped armor. That was precissely what had [[wikipedia:Tiger II|the tank that succeeded the Tiger]].
** In ''Colonization'' the Race and Nazi Germany go to war; due to the Race's ability to knock down the majority of German missiles, the Nazis are defeated and most of their major cities destroyed: Flensburg, on the Danish border, ends up as the capital. It was also the capital of Germany from 1 May to 23 May 1945 in our own timeline - Karl Donitz led the German government from there after Hitler's suicide.
** In ''Second Contact'': One member of The Race says to another, after dealing with Nazi ambassadors, that the city of Nuremberg is a trial. The Nuremberg Trials were war crime tribunals that tried the real Nazis after WWII was over.
Line 36:
** As the result of being hit by the Dora cannon, a Race starship explodes. By chance, this ship holds the majority of the fleet's nuclear ordnance, The bombs do not go off, but they do spread radioactive contamination across a wide area in the Ukraine. When a joint Soviet-German mission captures some of the uranium, two of them are running close to an abandoned village. The German officer asks what the village is called; the Soviet partisan replies it is Chernobyl.
* [[Anyone Can Die]]: Sometimes (though rarely) to the point that a viewpoint character barely gets two narration sequences before dying.
* [[Badass]]: Otto Skorzeny, very much so.
* [[Badass Bookworm]]: Jens Larssen manages to travel his way across war-torn America on a ''bicyle,'' fights as a competent infantryman in Patton's army and repeatedly shows himself to be tough, resourceful and determined despite the fact he is simply a nuclear physicist with no combat training. Rare case of a badass also being a [[Butt Monkey]].
* [[Beardless Protection Program]]: Moishe's escape from the ghetto.
* [[BFG]]: The ''biggest gun'' ever built in [[Real Life]], [[wikipedia:Dora (artillery)|a German 80 cm K (E) railway siege gun]], makes an appearance. The Germans use it to blast a couple of Race spaceships. [[I Call It Vera|It is named Dora.]]
* [[Bizarre Alien Biology]]: The Race mates in seasons, gets stoned off of ginger and uses far less water than humanity (with resulting "toiletry differences" - see [[Nobody Poops]]). Averted with food: other than liking things saltier and needing less water, the Race can eat human foods and vice versa. Inverted from the Race's perspective: the biology of the "Big Uglies" is weird to them; that they (we) can mate all year round, are always influenced by this, and the crucial role this plays in shaping human society is deeply bizarre and pretty disgusting to them.
* [[Blood Knight]]: Skorzeny does not appear to care who he fights, or for what reason, just as long as he gets to fight. The child-like enthusiasm he displays, including when he is using weapons of mass destruction, before, during and after said fights [[Crosses the Line Twice|is both disturbing and more than a little funny.]]
* [[Break the Haughty]]: [[The Ace|Flight Leader Teerts]] gets put through the wringer. Also, the entire series could count as one [[Break the Haughty]] moment for the Race.
* [[Boisterous Bruiser]]: Otto Skorzeny of course, it is one of his chief characteristics that he enthusiastically enjoys everything he does.
* [[Butt Monkey]]:
** Jens Larssen. The guy loses his job and marriage, gets stuck behind enemy lines, gets press-ganged into fighting on the front lines on more than one occasion despite being a mere scientist, gets sent on a [[Snipe Hunt]], gets the clap, etc... Really, his only purpose in the story seems to be to have one humiliation after another piled onto him.
** Ussmak appears to be the Race's equivalent of a [[Butt Monkey]]. Butt Beffel, perhaps? He is a tank (or "landcruiser" to use the Race's terminology) driver whose first commanding officer gets killed in his very first engagement by sniper fire; his replacement commander is a [[Too Dumb to Live|Grade A Idiot]]; his best friend, the tank gunner, gets killed shortly later; his tank gets blown up when Skorzeny, of all people, rams a satchel charge between the turret and the chassis; when Ussmak bails out he lands in a particularly radioactive patch of mud which gets him a ''lovely'' stay in a hospital ship and to add insult to injury one of the orderlies there gets him addicted to ginger. Then he gets assigned to a new crew and gets to play cat and mouse with Wehrmacht/Waffen-SS troops and armor in France; then he takes part in the invasion of Britain where he gets introduced to a new type of warfare, ''Chemical Warfare;'' then he gets sent to Siberia, and the Race can not stand cold weather, where his second crew gets killed. Afterward, Ussmak finally snaps and leads a mutiny at his base and then defects to the Big Uglies. Unfortunately, the humans he defects to are Stalin's USSR complete with Beria's NKVD, so you can guess that doesn't exactly end well for poor Ussmak.
* [[Call a Rabbit a Smeerp]]: Humans tend to use the Race's names (or translations thereof) for inventions they arrived at first. Nuclear weapons are "explosive-metal bombs"; the LASER is "skelkwank", and so CDs and DVDs being called "skelkwank discs". The Race call their tanks "landcruisers" and their fighter planes "killercraft".
* [[Canada, Eh?]]: When the United Kingdom falls more and more under the sway of the Greater German ''Reich'', David Goldfarb and his family emigrate to Canada where, they hope, the immediate presence of the United States will allow the country to resist Nazi influences better than Britain.
Line 65:
* [[Covers Always Lie]]:
** The British covers in particular miss off the Race's chameleon-like eye turrets (something which is mentioned every third paragraph) and consistently gives them a dragon-like insignia as a symbol, when the books specifically point out that the Race have no concept of national symbols because they have been united for so long that they have no 'Other' to define themselves against.
** The Russian covers show the Race as raptors. [https://web.archive.org/web/20130109223554/http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1e/Russiantilting.jpg See here].
*** The covers for the various books in the series were probably done by different people, as the Race looks completely different from book to book. See all four book covers: [http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/tertldav_garri/tertldav_garri_flot_vtorzheniya/cover.jpg first]{{Dead link}}, [http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/tertldav_garri/tertldav_garri_otvetnyi_udar/cover.jpg second]{{Dead link}}, [http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/tertldav_garri/tertldav_garri_oko_za_oko/cover.jpg third]{{Dead link}}, and [http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/tertldav_garri/tertldav_garri_velikii_perelom/cover.jpg fourth]{{Dead link}}.
**** Plus, the second to last one is also the cover picture of "Hell's Faire," (by John Ringo), and the last one appears to show a human at an advanced computer console, when the book in question takes place at the end of WWII.
***** It's actually not uncommon for Russian cover artists to simply "borrow" all or parts of covers from foreign books, even if they don't quite (or at all) fit the plot. After all, the cover is there just to sell the book.
Line 75:
* [[Crazy Prepared]]: The Race expected humanity would be nothing but sword-wielding primitives. They still arm their Conquest Fleet with ''[[Tank Goodness|tanks,]] [[Gunship Rescue|attack choppers]], [[Cool Plane|fighter aircraft,]] [[There Is No Kill Like Overkill|and]] [[Nuke'Em|nuclear weapons]].'' They were, however, completely unprepared when the humans engaged in chemical warfare, not even having the ''concept'', but they press on anyway. The crazy preparedness is brought up when Shiplord Straha is asked why they bothered bringing so much hardware to fight a bunch of primitives. Straha looks at the person asking like he's "egg-addled" (i.e. crazy) and explains that when you go to war you must prepare for war. Simple as that.
* [[Dead Guy, Junior]]: There are two children named Heinrich in the ''Colonization'' series, both carrying on the legacy of Heinrich Jager and the example he set. That these two children are the sons of both a ''Wehrmacht'' officer and a Jewish milita leader speaks to the quality of the man himself.
* [[Deadly Gas]]: When the Race invades the British isles, mustard gas is used against the invaders. We even get a description of its effects (they are '''''not''''' very nice.)
* [[Deal with the Devil]]: The Lodz ghetto Jews make one with the Race, knowing that it probably is going to be bad, but they figure ''anything'' is better than [[Those Wacky Nazis]].
* [[Deliberate Values Dissonance]]: One of the biggest problems between the Race and humanity is that they just do not '''''get''''' one another, and can not grasp what is "right" or "wrong" to each other.
Line 105:
* [[Heel Realization]]: This happens to Panzer Commander of the Wehrmacht Heinrich Jäger when an old Jewish man shows him the bullet hole in his neck, and tells him the story of how he got it. Heinrich had heard the rumors before then, but he hadn't believed in them. The third book sums it up nicely:
{{quote|What Skorzeny didn't get and wouldn't get if he lived to be a hundred - not likely, considering how the SS man lived - was that ''what we were supposed to do'' and ''what our superiors ordered us to do'' weren't necessarily the same thing.
Soldiers didn't commonly had to make that distinction. Jäger hadn't worried about it, not until he had found out how the Germans dealt with Jews in the east. Since the, he hadn't been able to look away. He knew what sort of disaster awaited the world if the [[Alien Invasion|Lizards]] won the war. Like Skorzeny, he was willing to do just about anything to keep that from happening. Unlike the SS man, he wasn't willing to believe that everything he did was fine and virtuous.
That made for another subtle distinction, but he clung to it. }}
* [[Hide Your Lesbians]]: Miss Lucille, despite Mutt's obvious crush, rebuffs all his advances and explains that she is not interested in any man, not just him. However, while some of the Liu Han/Bobby Fiore or Sam Yeager/Barbara sex-scenes are composed of graphic details, when Mutt asks if she is one of those "lizzies" she merely asks what his reaction would be if she was. It is never expounded upon, and she soon begins [[If It's You It's Okay|to return Mutt's attraction]].
Line 118:
** A member of The Race thinks this of a Nazi official she talks to about their status as the "Master Race.".
* [[Insufficiently Advanced Alien]]: The Race are spotty with this; if they'd arrived twenty years earlier, the invasion would probably have been a walkover, and if they'd been twenty years later, humanity would have likely walked over them.
* [[Intelligent Gerbil]]: The Race are described in the books as 'looking like chameleons with delusions of grandeur.'
* [[Ironic Echo]]: The first book opens with Atvar and the flagship's shiplord, Kirel, looking at an image of the enemy they expect to face, a knight on horseback from the Middle Ages and laughing at the prospect of an easy conquest. The last book in the ''Balance'' series and the first of the ''Colonisation'' series opens with them doing this again, somewhat more ruefully.
* [[Lady of War]]: Ludmila Gorbunova and Liu Han. "The Fair Tatiana," a Russian sniper who begins an affair with Jerome Jones, would apparently need to beat off men with a stick if her skill with a rifle had not already scared them off.
Line 126:
* [[Meaningful Name]]: America's spacecraft tend to be named for explorers; the first ship to reach the Asteroid Belt is the ''Lewis and Clark'', and the first ship to reach Home is named ''Admiral Peary''. The first FTL-capable ship is named ''Commodore Perry'', after the man who forcibly ended Japan's isolationism. The Race eventually learns the meaning behind these names and is none too pleased.
* [[Mildly Military]]: Major Samuel Yeager and Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson never receive orders from their immediate superior to halt their investigations into the US space station, neither is ever transferred to a different post to reduce their access to information, and neither even has their security clearance revoked. What they do get is a screaming fit from Curtis LeMay who, though a three-star general, has no authority over them due to the chain of command. The one person who gives them orders ''is not authorized to give them orders''
* [[A Million Is a Statistic]]: Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tōjō are main characters; along with several of their subordinates who perpetrated [[Real Life]] atrocities in [[World War Two]]. What else needs to be said?
* [[Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness]]: For a story about an alien invasion it is a surprising Level 5 hardness (At least, until the ''Colonization'' series and ''Homeward Bound''). With the exception of cold sleep, all technology is either equal to or inferior to real life technology. At no point do they bend, break or even ''bounce'' the laws of physics.
* [[Molotov Cocktail]] - Molotov is one of the main characters, but he never actually touches one. Sam Yeager and Liu Han have them in their sections, though.
Line 134:
* [[Nicknaming the Enemy]]: Humans are called Big Uglies; the Race are called Lizards.
* [[No Biochemical Barriers]]: Somewhat touched upon. The Race's biology and biochemistry are similar enough that they can live on Earth and eat some Earth biomatter with pretty much no problems. However, what would be slightly chilly to humans is beastly cold to them (apparently, their home planet is so hot that ice only exists in laboratories) and then there's the thing with the ginger.
* [[Nobody Ever Complained Before]]: Members of the Race cannot understand why humans insist on fighting back instead of just placidly accepting their rule. Do not the humans realize that the Race is by definition the most superior species in the universe and thus natural rulers of all life? How dare they think they can resist! And how dare they actually win!
* [[Nobody Poops]]: Averted; differences in waste volume are a source of difficulty in the Race space plumbing when humans are aboard. Also, the Race are somewhat shocked that human plumbing is so good, and love hot showers.
* [[Nuke'Em]]: Played with. The Race tries ''not'' to use nuclear weapons in order to keep Earth as clean as possible. They do destroy several human cities, including Berlin and Washington, D.C., but their strategy is intimidation and retaliation, since they do not want to go overboard and end up wrecking the entire planet.
* [[Numbered Homeworld]]: The Race refer to Earth as Tosev 3 and the other worlds in their empire as Rabotev 2 and Halless 1; each planet is named after the star of its stellar system and the position of the planet. However, their homeworld is called simply Home.
* [[Odd Friendship]]: Ludmila Gorbunova (Communist Russian Pilot) and Heinrich Jaeger (Nazi Tank Commander)
* [[Oh Crap]]: The Race have quite a few moments of this; especially when it concerns human nuclear weapons programs.
** During the Race's first (and only) encounter with the German [[BFG|Dora cannon]], which fires 80-cm shells, they mistakenly assume (by its speed and size on the radar) that it's a missile and attempt to shoot it down with their own. [[Hilarity Ensues|However, the round's tough outer shell shrugs off the missiles]], allowing the cannon to take out two ships before the cannon is found and destroyed.
Line 149:
* [[The Reptilians]]: The alien variant that the Race are.
* [[Reptiles Are Abhorrent]]: The Race. Played with, however, since in many ways they are more likely to honor agreements and treat their prisoners quite humanely (at least, the ones they do not experiment on).
* [[The Right of a Superior Species]]: The Race considers themselves eminently justified in conquering Earth and making humanity a subject race because of what they view as their incomparably superior culture and technology, even though said technology turns out to be not quite ''that'' advanced over humankind's.
* [[Rock Beats Laser]]: Part of the underlying theme. The Race starts out by detonating nukes in the upper atmosphere to cause electromagnetic pulses to wipe out electronics...only to find that human technology still runs on valves rather than transistors, which are not affected by EMP. Later, they find out that counter-missiles are ineffective against German supergun shells, and that radar is pretty useless when it come to detecting a [[wikipedia:Po-2|low-flying place made of wood and fabric.]] And so on.
** The Race also, apparently, has no concept of martial arts. When the Japanese capture a Race pilot, his captor, just to teach the lizard a lesson, starts kicking him. The pilot tries to attack the officer with his teeth and claws, but can't get close and is literally beaten into submission. He is very surprised that a kick can hurt so much and that anybody with a gun and a sword would bother with unarmed combat.
Line 155:
* [[Self-Deprecation]]: In ''Aftershocks'', Monique Dutourd is thinking about a Byzantine historian at the University of Tours, and text goes "which struck even Monique as uselessly arcane". Author Harry Turtledove has a Ph.D. in Byzantine History.
* [[Serious Business]]: Most of the stuff the Race does. They do not even allow actors playing the Emperor to put on the appropriate bodypaint because it would be seen as blasphemy.
* [[Sex Is Evil]]: Well, not exactly evil. While the Race does find the reproductive process pleasant when they're in heat, they find the idea of ''always'' being horny abhorrent and terrifying. They do have a cultural reason for this abhorrence, since during mating season they become [[Sex Is Evil and I Am Horny|so addled by horniness]] that the resulting orgy pretty much grinds their civilization to a halt for its duration.
* [[Shout-Out]]:
** The initial Race invasion is compared to ''[[The War of the Worlds (novel)|The War of the Worlds]]'' by Sam Yeager when he and Mutt Daniels are shot out of their train in the beginning of the ''Worldwar'' series.
** A "grey-haired colored fellow" brings some US troops fried chicken in the first book, and Mutt Daniels offends him with some *ahem* ''Southern'' terms for blacks, while another kid calls him "Colonel." The black man corrects him by saying his name is Charlie Sanders.
** In the ''Colonization'' series, members of the Race refer to "[[Sherlock Holmes|The Red-Headed League]]."
Line 171:
* [[Tank Goodness]]: The Race's main battle tank, from the in-book descriptions, seems to be a carbon copy of a Russian T-72. The only difference is that the compartments are designed for Race bodies and that the Race version is powered by hydrogen fuel cells. The human forces need to use [[Zerg Rush]] tactics (6-10 Panthers/Tigers per race tank, and the Americans count 10:1 as good odds) in order to triumph over the Race's more advanced weaponry. However, to paraphrase the Germans, "They (The Race) are like the Russians: their tanks are good, but their tank ''skills'' are ''scheiße.''"
* [[Technology Porn]]: The descriptions of the Dora supercannon, in the first novel, are a fine example of this.
* [[Thicker Than Water]]: Averted with The Race, as they cannot understand why humans put so much emphasis on familial relations. Understable, since the Race are raised in a communal fashion, with no mothers or fathers, and are more generally 'domesticated' rather than 'raised' as we would think of it. Thus, Race children form no real bonds with any one particular 'parent' individual as they grow up. Friendship, however, is a powerful bond in the world of the Race, since they feel that the people you choose to be close to are much more important than the circumstances of who birthed you.
* [[Those Wacky Nazis]]: Yeah, ''the good guys this time.'' Sort of.
* [[Time Skip]]: The series jumps forward twenty years between the end of the ''Worldwar'' series and the beginning of the ''Colonization'' series. Many characters have died in the interim and new people are introduced to flesh out the roster. Those characters which are returning have changed, turning from low-ranking young soldiers to experienced officers, and [[Face Heel Turn|some are no longer as pleasant as they were in their youth.]]
* [[Unexpected Successor]]: Secretary of State Cordell Hull assumes the Presidency after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death.
Line 188:
[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Harry Turtledove]]
[[Category:
[[Category:Military and Warfare Literature]]
[[Category:Military Science Fiction]]
[[Category:Alternate History Literature]]
| |||