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Out Of The Darkness (The Darkness Series book 6) by Harry Turtledove
01/02/2006 . Source: Paul Hanley 
pub: Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster. 655 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-7434-6849-X. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.simonsays.co.uk
This is the sixth and I would imagine the final book in Harry Turtledove's 'The Darkness' series. As the blurb on the book says this is a 'novel of world war and magic.'
I have reviewed earlier books in the series and if you have read them or my earlier reviews, you will be aware this is essentially a rewrite of the military history of World War II but with dragons in the place of aircraft, behemoths in place of tanks and sorcery to give killing power that equates to shells, bombs and bullets. In this saga, we have now reached the equivalent of 1945. Algrave, this story's equivalent of Nazi Germany, is being overrun from all sides and the war is grinding towards a close. It finishes with the magical equivalent of nuclear bombs on the remaining enemy power, Gyongyos, and our surviving characters settle down to the start of peace.
I was rather scathing in my last review about this thinly veiled reference to our own recent history as I felt it was somewhat short changing fantasy readers. However, I am interested in military history and have enjoyed identifying various events from real history. As well as the major battles and so forth, Harry Turtledove picks up on lots of smaller parallels. One, which of course here relates to a magic item, carefully looted by one of the peasant soldiers who form the hordes of the Unkerlant forces swarming into Algrave has its parallel in Eastern Germany in 1945. Apparently, when the Red Army reached Germany many of its soldiers had never encountered electricity before and on seeing electric lights carefully unscrewed the bulbs and put them in their packs to take this magic light back to their own family homes in deepest and then still unelectrified Russia.
Anyone who has read Harry Turtledove books before knows he used the broadest of canvases, in this case a whole world at war and describes the action from a wide variety of viewpoints. Whilst he may have stinted on a fresh plot for his story, he certainly has the energy to create nearly 200 characters for this book and give them all lives.
I generally like Turtledove's books and I enjoyed this one. If you have read other books in the series or even other books by him you will know what to expect. Clearly, it would be difficult to start at book 6 and get as much from this as someone working through from book 1 as the characters inter-react and develop as their circumstances change.
The events of World War II clearly fascinate Mr Turtledove as he has used them in a number of his other books. What this does do, especially someone like me who has always read a lot of military history as well as Science Fiction, is make you consider events afresh. When the real events, such as D-Day, the strategic bombing of Germany, Hiroshima and so forth involved one's own country, it is difficult to be objective but when viewed from the prospective of fictional countries it perhaps makes one consider event afresh.
In conclusion, I quite enjoyed it. If you have read the earlier books this follows on with many of the same viewpoint characters and brings to whole series to a conclusion.
Paul Hanley
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