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Title: History with Find and Replace
Review: This is not Turtledove's best work -- in fact it is one of his weakest. He has simple taken actual history and done a find and replace, changing north to south, east to west, and most character and place names with puns (some obvious, as Nathen Bedford Forrest = "Ned of the forest"; some rather more obscure as New York = "New Eborac" {old english place name for the site of York}) This game of name replacement seems to be the main point of the book, and might have supported a short story, but not three novels.The puns draw from a wide set of languages and references, although this causes a linguastic mishmash in the resulting names, with no internal explanation.The magic is a simialr find and replace of technology, with no consideration given to how actual magic would change things.I think the author should have done a straight historical novel about the Civil war, skipping the replacements of names and tech. this would have been a rather better book, IMO.
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