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On My Desk: Harry Turtledove x3

August 27, 2008 I just received galleys for Harry Turtledove's The United States of Atlantis, coming out from Roc in December. Already in my possession are galleys for Harry Turtledove's The Breath of God, coming out from Tor in December, and Harry Turtledove's After the Downfall, coming out from Night Shade in December. I believe these are his third, fourth, and fifth books of the year, following July's The Man with the Iron Heart (Del Rey) and The Valley-Westside War (Tor), though there might be others from earlier in the year that I'm not remembering.

One of my colleague theorized that Turtledove has in fact perfected time travel, and he takes a few years to write books in the past or the future and then returns in time to hand in the manuscript. Has anyone noticed whether he ages suspiciously rapidly?

Seriously, how does he turn them out so quickly and still maintain reasonable standards of quality? Wikipedia lists 84 books he has authored or coauthored over the past 30 years. They come out from good publishers, and our reviewers generally like his work, though they rarely find it star-worthy. He fills his niche well and continues to expand it, inspiring others along the way. For example, the idea of a Werhmacht officer riding a unicorn probably didn't exist until Turtledove wrote After the Downfall, and it led David Palumbo to paint this marvelous cover modeled after Napoleon Bonaparte Crossing the Alps. (We can all be grateful he didn't spin off the infamous Nazi unicorn tattoo instead. That link is, by the way, very not safe for work.) I tend to associate that sort of prolificism with skinny pulp novels written by hilarious hacks like Lionel Fanthorpe, not with volumes of solid prose based on meticulously researched history and developing plots and characters over the course of multiple books.

Of course, it's always possible that his secret is simply to stay off the internet. I can't even imagine how many literal millions of words I've written online since I started posting to Usenet in 1996. I know my personal blog averages around 380,000 words a year. That's four novels, right there, and it doesn't include emails and Genreville posts and comments and IMs and text messages and all the other reasons I have classic keyboarder's RSI. So maybe the amazing thing about Turtledove isn't so much the raw verbal output as the ability to resist interactivity and focus on building worlds for himself. That's a hard thing to do, these days, and I admire it.

Posted by Rose Fox on August 27, 2008 | Comments (2)