Good day Hivers and Book Clubbers,
Back with another review, in what is becoming quite a faster tempo than usual for me. Consider it compensation for the 3/4 months of absence in late 2022. This time, I'm taking a break from the non-fiction, and get back into fiction with an alternate-history novel. This one is titled 'The Atlantropa Articles', written by Cody Franklin and released in 2018.
Franklin is an alternate history afficionado, with his Youtube channel AlternateHistoryHub. Here he goes into many alt-history scenarios in videos ranging in length from 5 minutes to multi-parters that can go for an hour in total. This book is his first attempt at a full-length book.
As with earlier reviews of alternate history, I won't talk much about the plot in the book. I'll talk more about the setting, the motifs etc. But still, consider this the SPOILER ALERT for the book. You've been warned.
Victorious, but how?
So let's set the stage for what is 'alternate' about this book's history. It starts from a single premise: What if World War II never happened?
This seems to have worked out in a terrific way for Hitler and the Germans: no war has put them in the position to unite Europe under the banner of the Reich, and this has lasted until the times of the story, which is placed about 2000 years in the future.
So how does one unite Europe without a war of conquest? The answer, in this book, is the Atlantropa Dam (hence the title), a massive infrastructural project. This dam has dammed in the Mediterranean Sea, and thus provided Europe with a phenomenal amount of power/energy. Yet something has gone drastically wrong as well: the Mediterranean has completely dried up and thus become a desert.
After having read the book, I don't follow how this chain of events leads to the Germans taking over Europe. Could the National Socialist regime stabilize if it did not end up at war? I certainly think so. I also think that they would be able to think of the type of grandiose project that is the Atlantropa Dam in this universe. I'm reminded of the plan (never executed, of course) that circulated for irrigating the Sahara and making it fertile using the Mediterranean. A somewhat similar project; perhaps the author took inspiration here.
But how does this all add up to Germany having the diplomatic upper hand, to unite Europe under its banner? It's left vague; I'm not sure the author himself knows.
Technology ascendant, History forgotten
So far the world-building has left holes, in my view. But the Germans themselves have forgotten far more than that in this universe. 2000 years in the future, they seem to have forgotten how the Nazi State started out, how it came into being.
The Germans in this alternate universe think Hitler was blond, like themselves. Their version of 'Mein Kampf' is radically altered from the original. They don't recognize the Horst Wessel Lied, and cannot place it remotely in the correct century.
They call their North-African enemies Jews, since this is their professed enemy, yet no Jews figure in the story. The people that attack them from the south carry crescent moon emblems and are brown: we'd recognize them as the Arabs, and they are Muslims, not Jews. They have no clue how to distinguish between these two religions; they have also completely forgotten what Christianity is; how is this possible?
So the Germans don't know their own state's history, have no clue who their enemies are, yet continue to fight them in what is left of the Mediterranean. How is this knowledge lost? How does a successful civilization lose this perception completely? Once again, the book offers no answers at all.
I'm reminded of the fact that we know very little of German history 2000 years ago: the swamps and forests of old Germania during the time of the Romans is quite the blind spot today. But this was mostly due to the fact that the German tribes at the time did not write anything down; our knowledge of them is mostly Roman.
But how does this example, which works backwards, stretch into the future? Into the 1940s, 1950s and 60s, with the mass-printed media, the advent of radio, television, et cetera?
And the book makes it abundantly clear that German technology has not stagnated: this alternate history has created a spacefaring civilization. Off-hand mentions of colonies on other worlds, and an orbital strike is used on an enemy. So in ways, this civilization is far more technologically advanced than we are, yet it has suffered a Maya-like implosion on a historical/cultural level.
Conclusion
I don't want to come off as too negative; I did read this book from start to finish within 48 hours, and I did enjoy it. It is about 190 pages long, so it makes for a relatively short read.
However, I would have liked to see the background and world-building more fleshed out. This type of book won't suffer if Franklin had used 50-100 extra pages to color the surroundings.
It's not a bad first try though; I do like the main question's uniqueness. Not a case of 'who won WWII' but 'what if no WWII'. That's intriguing. There are some plausible parts in the mix, but there are also some holes in the narrative that I would have liked to see explained.
I hope I've piqued your interest in this book, or for alternate history in general. It's good to support these types of authors who are just starting out, and I've never heard of this publisher (Mango) either. So I don't regret buying the book, even though I might have sounded negative overall. I hope to see you all in another review soon enough. Until then,
-Pieter Nijmeijer
(Top image: self-made photo of book cover)