# World War II in SF



## psikeyhackr (Feb 27, 2022)

How many science fiction stories have you read that have World War II as their centerpiece or setting and what did you think of them?


*Weapons of Choice* by John Birmingham 

The 1st in a trilogy followed by Designated Targets and Final Impact.  An alternate universe time travel story where an international fleet from 2021 is transported to 1942 and interferes with the American fleet steaming toward Midway to fight the Japanese. Much death ensues since neither side knows what is going on and the automated equipment from the future fights the ships.

The social interaction of the chronologically out of sync warriors is really more important to the story than the Japanese.


*Proteus Operation* by James P. Hogan

Another alternate universe time travel that is deliberate rather than accidental with a team from the Kennedy era trying to change a timeline that has already been changed by people in the 21st century.

I avoided this book for years since at the time a ignored time travel books. It turned out that the character development in this story is better than Hogan's usual unimpressive performance. Not that I am a great judge.


*Worldwar: In the Balance* by Harry Turtledove

This is the first in a series of 9 books.  Aliens invade Earth during WWII.  Kind of hilarious with the aliens not having really advanced weapons though they can cross interstellar space.

I learned about the Russian Witches here. Female aviators that killed Germans flying rather crude planes during the night.


*Man in the High Castle* by Phillip K Dick

I read this a really long time ago and don't remember much just that I thought it was pretty boring. Not a PKD fan.


*Slaughterhouse Five* by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Also read a really long time ago. Found it confusing the way the story just seemed to jump around. I didn't know at the time that Vonnegut had experienced the firebombing of Dresden. I don't research authors very much.


*The World Set Free & Things to Come* (film) H. G. Wells

These are kind of pre-WWII WWII stories. I have started World Set Free and intend to get back to it and watched Things to Come multiple times. The acting is hilarious.  Wells is very interesting in his visions of the future in his fiction and non-fiction. 


WWII is interesting in a lot of ways as a turning point in history.
The war accelerated certain technologies, jet planes, RADAR, rockets, computers and the atomic bomb. Many also claim it ended the Depression. The concept of GNP/GDP was a result of the Depression/WWII era.


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## Brian G Turner (Feb 27, 2022)

Ralph Kern has published a really good series of SF based on WWII, stating with _A Rain of Fire_, based on the Dunkirk evacuation:




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						A Rain of Fire (The Great War Book 1) eBook : Kern, Ralph: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
					

A Rain of Fire (The Great War Book 1) eBook : Kern, Ralph: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store



					amzn.to
				




There's also a pretty cheap boxed set edition of the first 4 books currently available for 99p:




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						The Great War: Books 1-4: (A Military Sci-Fi Box Set) eBook : Kern, Ralph: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
					

The Great War: Books 1-4: (A Military Sci-Fi Box Set) eBook : Kern, Ralph: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store



					amzn.to


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## Foxbat (Feb 27, 2022)

Brian G Turner said:


> There's also a pretty cheap boxed set edition of the first 4 books currently available for 99p:


Good to know. Just added these to my kindle. You know how canny we Scots are with the pennies


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## Swank (Feb 27, 2022)

I enjoyed  *Proteus* and *Slaughterhouse*. Love *Cryptonomicon. Glidepath *is also a great read.


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## psikeyhackr (Feb 27, 2022)

Brian G Turner said:


> Ralph Kern has published a really good series of SF based on WWII, stating with _A Rain of Fire_, based on the Dunkirk evacuation:



Sounds interesting, never heard of it.









						A Rain of Fire (The Great War Book 1)
					

War has come to the Galaxy.  The dark forces of the Neo Hegemony strike, sweeping across the worlds of the Arcadian sector and crushing a...



					www.goodreads.com


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## Rodders (Feb 27, 2022)

I read a few books by Harry Turtledove in which the main story was an alien invasion during WWII. I enjoyed them at the time Enough to read 5 books in the series.


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## Danny McG (Feb 27, 2022)

So are we talking about actual sf war stories or are we including alt history stories where like Hitler won ?

One that springs to mind is The Big Time by Fritz Lieber, the girl protagonist found herself in a time war after getting killed when the Nazis were invading Chicago


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## alexvss (Feb 27, 2022)

There's a game called *Wolfenstein*. It's an old game but there's a reboot currently in its second installment. Basically, the Nazis won the war by dropping the A bomb in Manhattan. You play as a member of the resistance in a 1960s where technology is much more advanced than we are today.

In _*The Saga of Tanya the Evil*__, by Carlo Zen, a businessman is reincarnated as a little girl in a alternative WW2 where there's much more technology than today. He (she) enlists and fights as a child soldier._


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## psikeyhackr (Feb 27, 2022)

Danny McG said:


> So are we talking about actual sf war stories or are we including alt history stories where like Hitler won ?
> 
> One that springs to mind is The Big Time by Fritz Lieber, the girl protagonist found herself in a time war after getting killed when the Nazis were invading Chicago



SF is sure complicated, ain't it?

Both I guess since I listed High Castle.

Actually I was only thinking of stories that directly involve WWII and its events. I had not considered something like Rain of Fire so I suppose it should be excluded.  I put in H G Wells since he is said to have predicted WWII and conceptualized the atomic bomb.  Big Time sounds like it is outside what I intended.
*
Cryptonomicon *fits. I started that back in the days that I was still decoding spots on cellulose.  It didn't seem to be going anywhere interesting and I quit. But I remember the scene of Yamamoto being shot down. Then it occurred to me that it was similar to Perry crashing in Old Man's War.  Did Scalzi steal that from Neal Stephenson?


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## Danny McG (Feb 27, 2022)

*All the king's men* by Gordon Stevens.

Hitler invades Britain after Dunkirk, the book is mainly about the resistance fighters who carry on the struggle while desperately trying to get America involved.


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## Swank (Feb 28, 2022)

psikeyhackr said:


> SF is sure complicated, ain't it?
> 
> Both I guess since I listed High Castle.
> 
> ...


Given your apparent interest in science via SF, it is bananas you didn't read this.


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## BAYLOR (Feb 28, 2022)

*Fatherland *by Robert Harris 
*SS-GB* by Len  Deighton


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## psikeyhackr (Feb 28, 2022)

Swank said:


> Given your apparent interest in science via SF, it is bananas you didn't read this.


Do you mean Cryptonomicon?


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## Vladd67 (Feb 28, 2022)

BAYLOR said:


> *Fatherland *by Robert Harris
> *SS-GB* by Len  Deighton


Are these Scifi though?


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## psikeyhackr (Feb 28, 2022)

Vladd67 said:


> Are these Scifi though?


What would make The Man in the High Castle science fiction other than PKD being an acknowledged SF writer?


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## Foxbat (Feb 28, 2022)

psikeyhackr said:


> What would make The Man in the High Castle science fiction other than PKD being an acknowledged SF writer?


It’s a long time since I read this but I recall something  of the ending where the protagonist is (I think) sitting on a park bench and feels himself slipping into another universe where the Axis lost the war. That’s probably the only scene that could be argued to lean towards SF or F.

Of course, maybe the Axis really did lose the war and the whole book concludes with that immortal cliche…it was all a dream


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## Swank (Feb 28, 2022)

psikeyhackr said:


> Do you mean Cryptonomicon?


Yes.


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## psikeyhackr (Feb 28, 2022)

Swank said:


> Yes.


I may tend to think that science and technology is what makes something science fiction but that does not mean it is the only factor in my liking a story. I have never finished Diamond Age either and I think it is really strange that with all of the blather about education in the US that we do not have a large faction advocating for a standardized educational tablet for K-8 if not K-12.  Stephenson seems to bore me halfway through his books.

I finished Snow Crash but it was a struggle. That was before the book was well known and I still don't see what is so great about it. And I don't comprehend how anything could shatter the Moon as in Seveneves without a significant percentage falling to Earth in a matter of days. Far worse than the dinosaur killer.


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## Swank (Mar 1, 2022)

psikeyhackr said:


> And I don't comprehend how anything could shatter the Moon as in Seveneves without a significant percentage falling to Earth in a matter of days.


Perhaps the physicists Stephenson consulted when he wrote Seveneves are utilizing a better model than you are?


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## psikeyhackr (Mar 1, 2022)

Swank said:


> Perhaps the physicists Stephenson consulted when he wrote Seveneves are utilizing a better model than you are?


Maybe, did he say that he consulted physicists?l









						Seveneves: tedious physics and appalling genetics
					

I’ve been reading Neil Stephenson’s novel from a couple of years ago, Seveneves, and I have to say…it’s terrible. There will also be spoilers below. Maybe you should just not read…




					freethoughtblogs.com


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## psikeyhackr (Mar 1, 2022)

Swank said:


> Perhaps the physicists Stephenson consulted when he wrote Seveneves are utilizing a better model than you are?



The Moon is not just a big rock that can simply be broken into pieces. The interior is more complicated and under pressure. Just releasing the pressure would complicate things.









						Inside the Moon | Inside & Out – Moon: NASA Science
					

The Moon is composed of different layers. The heaviest materials have sunken down into the Moon’s center, and the lightest materials have risen to the outermost layer.




					moon.nasa.gov


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## Danny McG (Mar 1, 2022)

psikeyhackr said:


> The Moon is not just a big rock


It's cheese, everybody know that.


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## Swank (Mar 1, 2022)

Danny McG said:


> It's cheese, everybody know that.


It's cheese under pressure, which means that if you poke a hole in it, all the cheese shoots off into space. Just like how volcanos on earth blow all the lava into space, where it eventually falls on the moon.


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## psikeyhackr (Mar 3, 2022)

Danny McG said:


> It's cheese, everybody know that.


A good thing it is in a vacuum.

Imagine the smell of 3 billion year old cheese.


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## alexvss (Mar 3, 2022)

In *Look Who's Back*, by Timur Vermes, Hitler flees 1945 Berlin with a time machine and ends up in the present. And that's pretty much all the technology in the story. The aim of the book is to show how easy it is for Nazism to come back. Can it be considered Science-Fiction?


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## psikeyhackr (Mar 3, 2022)

Weapons of Choice by John Birmingham can be kind of shocking in its portrayal of the US in 1942 but I stumbled across a historical comment. 



> There is the experience of Enrico Fermi, one of the most famous Italian immigrants. A book review of a biography§ of the illustrious nuclear scientist tells it this way:
> 
> “In March 1939, at the Navy Department in Washington, Adm. S.C. Hooper was informed of a visitor. ‘There’s a wop outside’, the desk officer announced. The man in question, who overheard the slur, was Enrico Fermi. He had just won the Nobel Prize and had come to warn of the danger posed by his own recent discoveries in nuclear physics. Fortunately for his newly adopted homeland, he had a thick skin. America, not Italy, would build the bomb.”



Another site said one of the officers at the meeting later called Fermi a "wop scientist".









						Dissent within the Manhattan Project Community | Steve Huggins Writer & Author
					

An Atom of Opposition: Dissent Within the Manhattan Project Scientist Community "I am become Death, The shatterer of worlds." ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Trinity Test of the First Atomic




					stephenhugginsauthor.com
				




So maybe Birmingham got the social psychology correct.


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## psikeyhackr (Mar 6, 2022)

This has been tried before but with Fantasy and Horror:





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						World War 2 Fantasy / Sci-Fi / Horror Novels?
					

I'm really looking forward to the upcming video game "Operation Darkness" which mixes traditional WW2 stories with fantasy elements like wizards, vampires, dragons, werewolves and more. I've also always been interested in Nazi occultism and such like was seen in Hellboy, so that got me wondering...




					www.sffchronicles.com


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## Danny McG (Mar 7, 2022)

A link here to a series (Second Chance) by Christopher G Nuttall where the modern day UK is transported back to 1940 and war with the Nazis
Post in thread 'March 2022 Reading Thread' March 2022 Reading Thread


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## psikeyhackr (Mar 7, 2022)

Danny McG said:


> A link here to a series (Second Chance) by Christopher G Nuttall where the modern day UK is transported back to 1940 and war with the Nazis



I've read a bunch of stuff by Nuttall but never heard of that one. I'll be on the lookout.


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## Danny McG (Mar 29, 2022)

I was looking at books by Gregory Benford and I saw this one....




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						The Berlin Project by Gregory Benford
					

The Berlin Project by Gregory Benford - book cover, description, publication history.



					www.fantasticfiction.com


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## Foxbat (Mar 30, 2022)

psikeyhackr said:


> Imagine the smell of 3 billion year old cheese.


Isn’t that the stuff they process, package in small plastic tubs and sell as grated, dried Parmesan?


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## AllanR (Mar 30, 2022)

Boys from Brazil --takes place after the war with clones of Hitler running around South America.


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## psikeyhackr (Mar 31, 2022)

Foxbat said:


> Isn’t that the stuff they process, package in small plastic tubs and sell as grated, dried Parmesan?


It would not last 3 billion years in the Earth's atmosphere. That stuff is only aged 10,000 years.


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