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  • Worldwar: Striking the Balance

  • By: Harry Turtledove
  • Narrated by: Todd McLaren
  • Length: 25 hrs and 36 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (21 ratings)

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Worldwar: Striking the Balance

By: Harry Turtledove
Narrated by: Todd McLaren
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Publisher's Summary

At the bloody height of World War II, the deadliest enemies in all of human history were forced to put aside their hatreds and unite against an even fiercer foe: a seemingly invincible power bent on world domination.

With awesome technology, the aggressors swept across the planet, sowing destruction as Tokyo, Berlin, and Washington, D.C., were A-bombed into submission. Russia, Nazi Germany, Japan, and the United States were not easily cowed, however. With cunning and incredible daring, they pressed every advantage against the invaders' superior strength and, led by Stalin, began to detonate their own atom bombs in retaliation.

City after city explodes in radioactive firestorms, and fears grow as the worldwide resources disappear; will there be any world left for the invaders to conquer or for the uneasy allies to defend? While Mao Tse-tung wages a desperate guerrilla war and Hitler drives his country toward self-destruction, U.S. forces frantically try to stop the enemy's push from coast to coast. Yet in this battle to stave off world domination, unless the once-great military powers take the risk of annihilating the human race, they'll risk losing the war.

The fatal, final deadline arrives in Harry Turtledove's grand, smashing finale to the Worldwar series, as uneasy allies desperately seek a way out of a no-win, no-survival situation: a way to live free in a world that may soon be bombed into atomic oblivion.

What if? Listen to the rest of the Worldwar series.
©2009 Harry Turtledove (P)2011 Tantor

Critic Reviews

"A cast of thousands with a plot to match, well-drawn...aliens, a wealth of fascinating speculation." ( Kirkus)

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Got boring

I was waiting for this to finish. It came close to being the first audiobook in 4 years that I didn't finish. The conclusion was satisfying but god damn it just dragged.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

A fun story with an excellent narration

Overall, I think most sci-fi fans will enjoy this series.
The narration is seriously top notch, Todd McLaren has an amazing narration range. Characters all feel different, regardless of race or gender.
I read all of the World War and Colonization novels years ago and loved them then, now that I've revisited them in Audiobook I feel some of the shine has been buffed off.

As this series progresses I feel as though the characters, all of whom started rich and developed well, were slowly chipped into more and more 2D characters from the rich 3D characters they started out as.
So as to say, the depth that made them great shallowed out over the novels, especially so in this one.

The sheer amount of repetition of things in this series is mind-boggling. Does Harry Turtledove not expect the average reader to remember what kind of plane someone flies after mentioning it every 30 or so pages? Or specifically what Atvar thinks of the Humans? Or any number of things that could be described as drearily cliche and predictable of their associated characters.

I LOVE the idea of this kind of alternative history. Installing sci-fi themes into one of the most important periods in Human history.
It bothered me how unadvanced the Race were though, for what they had achieved. The slow ship speed across space, I was alright with that. I thought that added a certain reality to it all.
But all of their technology besides their spaceships were just late 20th-century level tech.
How could they send ships filled with war machines to conquer a planet (even though they expected horse riding savages -which we get told repeatedly from start to finish) that they know from the beginning is a much wetter and more difficult planet than their own without any kind of facilities to manufacture new machines?
Let alone the fact that they are completely and totally unable to adapt to ANY difficulties that aren't expected.

On modern-day Earth, German engineers have a reputation for being methodical, thorough, slow and excellent at designing machines (that certainly goes for the machines my company uses). For all intents and purposes, in work reputation, modern German engineers are much like the Race in the novels. But if you stripped all curiosity and desire to improve from them to make them exactly like the Race, would they even be able to improve their designs and the functionality of the machine?
My point there being, how is it, that a species with apparently zero interest in improving their systems even in the face of their systems totally failing to be adequate, that they could ever advance to the point to even leave a tribal system.

That all being said, I did enjoy the windows shown into the Race, despite how over the books it started to annoy me.

There are lots of things in these novels that annoy me. And lots that I enjoyed. The delivery is what truly saves this series.

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