This story has an interesting premise—a Nazi officer is plucked from a falling Berlin into a fantasy world where he learns a lesson about all peoples being people—but both fails to deliver and muddles its efforts.

I like didactic fiction fine (it’s the reason I love Cory Doctorow so much), but the intended lesson of this story is clear from the beginning, and it’s never really obvious whether or why the main character undergoes any personal development. What passes for development is largely motivated by his wanting to get in a particular woman’s pants, and the story wants to justify his use of other women as sexual substitutes until the object of his lust finally reciprocates… and treat him as (relatively) feminist for not forcing himself on her to begin with.

I appreciated Turtledove’s meditations on language and technology, which many books of this genre wouldn’t deal with, but there are just too many issues with the book for me to really appreciate it.

• After the Downfall
• Harry Turtledove
• feminism
• language
• technology
• Cory Doctorow