18 November, 2007 With the name A War Like No Other, one is immediately drawn to the battles of the Twentieth Century – the stalemate of the First World War, the unparalleled devastation of World War Two, or the terrible conflagration that was the Vietnam War. Yet the title of this book speaks not of these wars, but of another that raged some 2,000 years previous.
A War Like No Other is, simply put, a thematically based history of the Peloponnesian War fought between the Greek city states of Sparta and Athens. For nigh on thirty years, these two military giants of their time fought an on-again, off-again war of invasion, rampage, devastation and destruction over Greece and Sicily. The outcome? Ultimately, Sparta won the war, but in doing so sealed its own doom. Continue Reading >>
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14 February, 2007 Any person interested in history is often consumed with the thought of “what might have been”. What would have happened if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo? What if the French had settled what is now the Eastern Seaboard of the United States of America? What if the Maori had never signed the Treaty of Waitangi? Alternative History provides a rich vein of imaginative ideas for storytelling, exploited with great cunning by many a fiction author. Some, such as Robert Harris' Fatherland which poses the question of what would have happened to Europe and the Holocaust if the Nazi's had won World War Two, are considered masterpieces. Resurrection Day, by Brendan DuBois, deserves the same acclamation.
Resurrection Day is set some ten years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, centred around the the character of Carl Landry. The difference between our history and the history of Resurrection Day is the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In our timeline, President Kennedy enforced a blockade, resisted pressure to attack Cuba when a U2 reconnaissance plane was shot down, and negotiated a withdrawal of the Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba. In the timeline of Resurrection Day however, things go drastically wrong. An aggressive U.S. General takes matters into his own hands and retaliates for the downing of the craft, leading to an invasion, a nuclear exchange, and the deaths of millions of Americans as a result. Resurrection Day is set in the aftermath of this war, in which the surviving members of President Kennedy's administration are war criminals, and the U.S. is reduced to being a semi-despotic Second World state reliant on the goodwill of the U.K. while the European Powers reassume their dominance of the globe. Continue Reading >>
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