I picked up A World Of Difference today

[Burton K Wheeler]

How much am I going to regret it?

 

[Sovereign12]

I liked the story.
I read it when it first came out and while it is AH, it is more SciFi, and the AH elements are only background for the main story.
The book is more about a more advanced culture inadvertently disrupting a less advance culture.

 

[Burton K Wheeler]

I have a sort of soft spot for planetary romance fiction. Heinlein's Mars and Venus are a really great balance of alien and familiar that we don't see even in modern scifi. I find the premise of a habitable/inhabited Mars and Venus told as if they'd been discovered that way in the 1970's really compelling and a great basis for AH. Turtledove's older and shorter books are mostly pretty good, so I'll be optimistic.

 

[RamscoopRaider]

I don't regret buying it, but I only paid 50 cents or a buck for it (or it came in the $5 bag, can't recall). I think its pretty good and one of his better works

 

[Burton K Wheeler]

I don't regret buying it, but I only paid 50 cents or a buck for it (or it came in the $5 bag, can't recall). I think its pretty good and one of his better works

I got it for a quarter.

I’m about a third of the way in. So far I find the characters really bland and nothing about the Martians is particularly interesting. Turtledove is usually good at grabbing you early with a story, even in his potboiler series books, so I’m not sure why he didn’t in this one. Maybe my expectations were too high.

 

[Burton K Wheeler]

It started slow, but I wound up enjoying it quite a bit. The characters were, as usual for Turtledove, the best part. The overarching theme was about Cold War politics, which dates it pretty badly. It didn't have the bubbling imagination that an SM Stirling treatment of humans landing on an inhabited Mars would, but I actually appreciated it for what it was. I got to thinking after I finished and I realized that all of Turtledove's books are ultimately about how ordinary people get caught up in big historical events and even the important decision makers are pawns of historical processes.