I just finished reading a great series of books by S.M. Stirling called Dies The Fire. It is an alternate history type thing, but with a different twist than most alternate history books I have looked at have. In most alternate history works there is something in the past that is changed and it is usually something of historical significance (duh). Normal alternate history fodder is stuff like Napoleon winning the battle of Waterloo or the Romans inventing steam powered engines. Mostly stuff where a stoned dropped into the pond causes ripples which change the modern day. Dies The Fire branches off much closer to our present time with a much more wide reaching event. Screw dropping a stone into a pond and getting ripples, Stirling drops a 10 megaton nuke on the pond (not literally).

The event is called The Change and no one in the story knows what caused it and it is never revealed to the reader either (at least in this trilogy, something may be revealed in a semi-related trilogy called Island in the Sea of Time or the follow-up series The Sunrise Lands that Stirling is currently writing). The effect of The Change is basically a small variation in the laws of physics that cause electricity, gunpowder, and other explosives to stop working and even changes the way compressed air behaves rendering most of our advanced technology useless in 1998.

The first book starts the day of the change and covers the first year as the survivors fight to stay alive. After that the other two books pick up nine years later and are mostly concerned with a war that has been brewing since the very beginning between the various factions of survivors.

I have never gotten into alternate history books before, but I really enjoyed these. At times Stirling can get a bit long-winded describing fields and the flowers in them and the forests that surrounds them and the streams that run through those forests and the snow capped mountains where the ice melts to produce those streams, but he is nowhere near as bad as J.R.R. Tolkien or Anne Rice or Stephen King can be at times. And unlike some of their books these books never got painfully dull with such things (don’t get me wrong because Anne Rice is one of my favorite authors and I love The Lord of The Rings, but at times it can be a real challenge trying to read them and stay awake at the same time; just like my posts). It is funny that I mention Tolkien here because he is heavily reference in these books thanks to one of the characters being a huge fan of his and it is almost sad that she never got to see the wonderful film adaptations (though truthfully she probably would have hated them like most hardcore fans often do when something based off of the property they worship isn’t 100% true to the original).

Anyway I liked the books. The whole thing was a very interesting bit of what iffery. I don’t think I will read the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy because it doesn’t sound as much like my cup of tea, but I am looking forward to the follow up series. I will probably wait for all the books to be published before I start on it since I kind of like to tackle them all at once.