f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] Bitter Seeds (The Milkweed Triptych, #1) [Author] Ian Tregillis [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2013/03/20 [Review] 
I loved Stross’s “A Colder War”, and enjoyed Powers’s Declare and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, so this was right up my alley. I enjoyed the concept and a few touches like the Thule Society, and don’t regret reading it: taking blood sacrifice seriously in a “beware while fighting monsters” makes for a gradually creeping sense of doom which is fitting, and I was impressed to see the old medieval debate over the language of infants resurrected and then taken to the max, which was a real bit of esoterica. The logical conclusion, a British program into Enochian, is a nasty enough conclusion that it convinced me to keep reading the series. Downsides: the repeated use of raven sections is blunt; Gretel’s character is even blunter, we’re told almost on sight that “she sees the future and is manipulating everyone” and this is ground in ad nauseam, while subtlety would’ve worked better (maybe 1 hint at the beginning and then a revelation at the end for the inattentive reader - but we get what must be dozens instead); Nazi Germany is a total caricature; while sometimes the descriptions of places or events are excellent (like the opening), characters can be pretty wooden and I feel like Marsh is made to punch people to move the plot along (eg. to get himself fired, and then to ignore Will and not ask the sane thing like ‘why would you suggest something so horrible as an abortion when you know how much losing our child hurt us?’). The alt history is a little crude and lacking in details: in contrast to Declare or “A Colder War”, which wove in and rewrote all sorts of historical tidbits (some extremely obscure, in Declare), Bitter Seeds only does big brushstrokes - tanks going through the Ardennes, bad winter weather in Russia, a failure of a hypothetical Operation Sea Lion - and it omits all sorts of historical backgrounds that could’ve enriched it (Nazi occultism is a bizarre subject which is surprisingly underused by Tregillis; someone should’ve given him a copy of Morning of the Magicians or something). Hopefully he’ll weave a more intricate tapestry for the Cold War books; at least, I’ll be quite disappointed if James Jesus Angleton doesn’t make some appearances.
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