White men economically dominated theKingdom ofHawaii for years beforeAmerica overthrew it and brought the islands underU.S. Much good it did them,the Japanese officer thought. The Hawaiians had gone out of their way to accommodate bothBritain and theUnited States, with the Union Jack in the canton and red, white, and blue horizontal stripes filling the rest of the field. The flag of the newly restoredKingdomofHawaii fluttered on five flagpoles above the late-Victorian palace. Fairy terns, almost whiter than white, floated through the blue, blue Hawaiian sky. Thereâs only one more in this series though.Also by Harry Turtledove “THEDAIMON”INWORLDSTHATWEREN’T RULEDBRITANNIA IN THEPRESENCE OFMINEENEMIES DAYS OFINFAMY I COMMANDERMINORUGENDA WALKED PAST THE FRONT ENTRANCE TOIOLANIP ALACE.

A major fault with Days Of Infamy is you never feel any of the narrators are in real jeopardy.

In the Great War series I remember Turtledove killing off at least one of his narrators. Most of the viewpoint characters are actually rather uninteresting but the beach surfer type is an unusual choice of voice. There is too, a nice twist on the Doolittle Raid, now launched on Hawaii and not the Japanese home islands. He gets to say similar things at the US surrender of Hawaii as he did in the real 1942, though. Here, for example, General Yamashita is on Hawaii and not at Singapore. Offstage, the Japanese still over-run Malaya and Burma – though surely that would have been a serious overstretch (which arguably was the case in reality, even without Hawaii) – but Turtledove has of course rearranged some things to suit his narrative. Some of them indeed are more or less the same cardboard people from those other series (Fletch Armitage for instance is only a transplanted Sam Carsten) and too often they repeat thoughts theyâve had previously. The cuts between viewpoints make the flow jumpy, some characters are merely irritating and others appear solely in order to push the story on. The twist this time is we get a few Japanese to follow. What if Japan had not just raided Pearl Harbor but actually invaded and taken Hawaii?ĭays Of Infamy has the usual Turtledove modus operandi familiar from his Great War, American Empire, Settling Accounts, World War and Colonisation series which all had multi-stranded narratives, each thread from a different viewpoint character. This book covers what might be termed the natural twentieth century US Altered History scenario but which I donât believe anyone else has tackled. Once more from the sublime ( Lavinia) to the ridiculous.

Harry turtledove days of infamy