Talk: Supervolcano

The video is worth a look. HT does a pretty good job of making Supervolanco sound interesting.

Video? Turtle Fan 19:57, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

Ah, there it is. Interesting. I realized I'd never heard his voice before; I was expecting it to be higher and less lilting.

And yes, he does make Supervolcano sound like fun. Reminds me of Birmo's current project, from his description. Turtle Fan 20:22, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

I am a little frustrated that the interviewer's only real question about TWTPE is "What happens to ULTRA?". Really, you have only one question, and you come up with something that incidental to ask about? Not "will all six books be about the war, or will 4-6 be like AE?" TR 14:59, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

That's pretty lame. My question might have been "Is it going to keep getting better, or will it go back to sucking?" Of course, they would have killed my mic after that, but hey. Turtle Fan 19:57, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

Not only that, it's a question which HT ducked. He probably would have ducked any spoiler request, but this was clearly approached just as an opportunity to show off what the questioner knew. Much to the frustration of the brother.

He did say "it screws it to the wall" rather quickly. Then again, given the course of events, it's hard to see it making a damn bit of difference. I could be wrong. TR 20:52, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

Oh, realistically, it should make a difference; ULTRA was certainly a major advantage. Dramatically, now, I just don't see the story hinging on it; it's too dry, to arcane, too incidental, like the person who, in the lead-up to either TG or IatD, said the US should not be able to build a lot of jets because certain parts of the jet engine need to be lined in nickel and most of the US's nickel deposits are in the Ozarks. Or something like that.

Of course, if the lack of an ULTRA becomes that big a deal, it's much easier to have Vaclav say "Oh, you know, I captured this machine during the retreat to Prague. They had it in Czechoslovakia instead of Poland this time" than it is to say "There's a lot of nickel in the Catskills. God put it there instead of in the Ozarks this time." It's parallelism, but that's certainly never stopped him. Turtle Fan 23:04, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

And what's so hilarious about the Poles being on the Germans' side? They hated Germans less than Russians, especially Soviets. That's nothing new. There's more irony in the Germans on the Poles' side, between the horror every Versailles-hating German felt at having Poland athwart Prussia and the anti-Slavic racism of the Nazis. If the Germans hold on longer than you're expecting, I'm sure eventually the Poles will realize too late that they've made a Faustian bargain as the SS starts shipping them off for slave labor.

I've found myself sort of defending this series over at AH.com, mostly from people who haven't read it. There is a faction of users that are convinced that Poland in AH fiction should be able to act with the foresight that it didn't/couldn't in OTL, and so HT had to have gone to great lengths to force the Polish-German alliance. TR 20:52, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

Ah-ha! That's evidence of HT's Anti-Austr-- Err, I mean, Anti-Polish Bias! :PMr Nelg

Or Evidence!, at least. Turtle Fan 00:34, October 27, 2010 (UTC)

I think one of the charms of AH is that it allows you to soften the history of a group whose painful past is one which has made them sympathetic to you. When their lot is just as shitty in the new timeline as it was in the old, it can be a let down. I guess that can lead to certain illogical extremes. Most feelings can. Turtle Fan 23:04, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

Oh, and that award he had two books nominated for this year: What two? He didn't even write two books this year. Turtle Fan 20:22, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

Link. They nominated both USAtlantis and LA for 2010, even though both were published a year apart. TR 20:52, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

That's odd. Unless--These awards are given out every year, aren't they?

Trying to decide which one I would have picked to win, between them. USA had the more interesting premise for its tale, but LA told a much tighter story. Turtle Fan 23:04, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

Retrospective on Supervolcano Trilogy

Supervolcano Trilogy? More like Superlativelyboringcrap Trilogy. The theme of the Supervolcano and its rearrangement of ecology, which should have resulted in a Mad Max post-apocalyptic feudalism and/or a Dougal Dixon readaptation of fauna, takes a back burner to tedious dysfunctional family drama, supplemented by a second rate slasher story.

Divorced police veterans who drink a lot, eager young musicians who smoke weed, and dumb bitches who go through men like hats.

If the whole story had been Kelly Birnbaum, geologist extraordinaire, making her way through the rearranged ecology, discovering fascinating new phenomena and escaping from dangers encountered along the way, it might have been a bearable series.

The Ferguson family drama was unnecessary to the Supervolcano theme. If they had been a human-interest subplot, they'd be a tolerable counterpoint to provide perspective, but when the freaking MAIN CHARACTERS are irrelevant to the novel's overall purpose, you know you've got a problem.

The South Bay Strangler might have been interesting as its own novel, if it weren't identical to any novel by James Patterson, Judith Jance, John Sandford, etc. Even HT doesn't pull that off very well, as the Strangler theme gets cast aside and forgotten until one character comes out with "Remember the Strangler? We just had a clue fall into our lap that proves it was Scooby Doo all along!"

Colin Ferguson is identical to any number of HT protagonists, as acknowledged in Turtledove's Tropes. Louise Ferguson was just plain annoying. The little kids born during this series were distractions to make us think something relevant was happening.

Rob Ferguson and his Maine adventure started out mildly interesting, but bogged down in repetition pretty quick. By the end of All Fall Down if not sooner, new events stopped happening. The cloying folksiness of the backwoods Mainites became diabetically grating. All the Maine scenes in Things Fall Apart could have been condensed into the one-liner "And they all lived primitively-but-happily ever after."

Marshall Ferguson was mildly less annoying than some of the other characters, but not wonderful.

Bryce Miller was (to me) the least interesting POV. His happy marriage was identical to Colin's and his writing ups-and-downs were identical to Marshall's. He's the ultimate 7th wheel.

Vanessa Ferguson was a missed opportunity. She's a childish, obnoxious bitch, but HT has his ways of making hateful characters into engaging POVs, Jake Featherston being the obvious champion. As hateful as Vanessa is, sympathy builds for her in the turmoil she suffers, so we find ourselves hoping she'll overcome. (What the fuck was wrong with the Saunders expedition? Did they have their humor and culture-appreciation genes surgically removed?) The problem in Vanessa's case is that she wanders from one bad scenario to another in episodic fashion, with little sense of plot progression or building toward a goal. It never once seems that her trials and tribulations are leading up to some big epiphany, or that she's progressing as a character. (It is interesting to note that HT violates Chekhov's rule by having Vanessa purchase a gun and then never fire it. I wonder whether this indicates a changed plan or a red herring.) She ends her part in the series as the same level of immaturity and victimization that she started out in; the character remains so static that her entire Hero's Journey might as well not have happened. The introduction of Bronislav Nedic, a delightfully despicable character who might have been a deluxe POV himself, seems to promise an actual interesting development, but that thread isn't resolved but just stops. HT really could have written a proper ending to the Bronislav storyline at the cost of several monotonous Rob chapters and/or Bryce chapters.

The international scene resulting from the ecological disaster is glimpsed briefly. The Iran-Israel war and the resurgence of Russian imperialism could have been novels in their own right, but only get a few pages apiece.

In the end, most of the series has been a family drama and a police drama, either of which could have taken place in our normal non-Supervolcanoed world with only slight editing here and there. When we look back on what the series initially promised, we wonder "so what was it all for?"

This train-wrecked trilogy made The War That Came Early seem like a great, fully realized story arc. I'm wondering, why did HT bother with this crap? I would have vastly preferred Winter of Our Discontent or volumes 7, 8, 9 of Crosstime Traffic Series to this tripe.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 21:51, June 14, 2016 (UTC)

The year the first book came out I was broke as a joke. In those days I had the habit of buying hardcover editions of every book I had any interest in reading, and leaving them on my bookcase ever after even if they sucked. (In fact I have a vague reflection of a bookcase collapsing under the weight of all that mediocrity a short time later, which, believe it or not, actually made me much more selective in my reading lists, as well as eventually giving me an interest in e-books and, still better, the public library.)

Anyway, I couldn't justify dipping into my ever-shrinking bank account to purchase the first book when it came out, and thus, I never read it, nor its sequels. Instead I learned the contours of the story through the work TR and ML4E did here. And what I learned made it sound dreadful. (Not as bad as The Opening of the World, where the shoe was on the other foot; after the series' pathetic climax--yes, that is a double entendre, and works perfectly on both levels--I just warned them not to read it and flat-out refused to do any more work on it here.) I think at one point, on some talk page or other, I asked TR "Is it as bad as it sounds? From what I've gathered, the volcano is just the barely-relevant background to some dysfunctional family's squabbles" and he said "Yeah, pretty much." While I do see some appeal to the idea of a story of people just realistically soldiering on after something horrible happens--the larger-than-life adventures of most of the POVs in Birmo's Without Warning were certainly entertaining, but soon got pretty ridiculous, which may be why I lost interest in the story when Book 2 came along--doing that would require two things that Supervolcano didn't seem to have: characters who were likeable enough that the reader actually gave a shit about whether they survived, and a disaster whose wider implications are dealt with enough that you don't keep wondering what else should be happening.

At one point I wondered if this was HT's back-handed response to the common criticism that the then-somewhat-recent SA books had too little human interest to them: "Really? You want to know about made-up people's ordinary lives, while momentous events are unfolding all around them? Well, all right!" Turtle Fan (talk) 06:48, June 15, 2016 (UTC)

Universally hated series?

So, did ANYONE like Supervolcano?Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 05:36, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

See Template talk:Supervolcano‎. It was OK but not great. ML4E (talk) 16:39, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Never did get around to reading it. All the information that went up on the wiki made it sound like a bit of a snoozefest so I decided to devote my limited reading time elsewhere.

I may circle back to it some time in the distant future; I've had the thought that, after HT is dead and gone, I may find myself wanting to revisit those of his works that I never read for nostalgia's sake. (That, or maybe I'll just keep activating the hologram of a Tosevite warrior from Medieval Europe.) Turtle Fan (talk) 14:38, 13 April 2023 (UTC)