Homeward Bound
Written by Harry Turtledove
Narrated by Patrick Lawlor
4/5
()
About this audiobook
For the aliens known as the Race, the conflict has yielded dire consequences. Mankind has developed nuclear technology years ahead of schedule, forcing the invaders to accept an uneasy truce with nations that possess the technology to defend themselves. But it is the Americans, with their primitive inventiveness, who discover a way to launch themselves through distant space-and reach the Race's home planet itself.
Now-in the twenty-first century-a few daring men and women embark upon a journey no human has made before. Warriors, diplomats, traitors, and exiles-the humans who arrive in the place called Home find themselves genuine strangers on a strange world and at the center of a flash point with terrifying potential. For their arrival on the alien home world may drive the enemy to make the ultimate decision-to annihilate an entire planet, rather than allow the human contagion to spread. It may be that nothing can deter them from this course.
With its extraordinary cast of characters-human, nonhuman, and some in between-Homeward Bound is a fascinating contemplation of cultures, armies, and individuals in collision. From the man whom USA Today has called "the leading author of alternate history," this is a novel of vision, adventure, and constant, astounding surprise.
Harry Turtledove
Harry Turtledove is an American novelist of science fiction, historical fiction, and fantasy. Publishers Weekly has called him the “master of alternate history,” and he is best known for his work in that genre. Some of his most popular titles include The Guns of the South, the novels of the Worldwar series, and the books in the Great War trilogy. In addition to many other honors and nominations, Turtledove has received the Hugo Award, the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and the Prometheus Award. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a PhD in Byzantine history. Turtledove is married to mystery writer Laura Frankos, and together they have three daughters. The family lives in Southern California.
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Reviews for Homeward Bound
26 ratings9 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5If you haven’t read the proceeding seven books in the Worldwar/Colonization series, there’s no point in reading this one.And, even if you have read them, Turtledove’s usual worm’s eye view of things, the puns, the constant repetition about the alien Lizards’ conservatism and human’s reckless innovation, may try your patience.The plot is somewhat padded and simple. Americans, including perennial series character Sam Yeager, venture to the alien Race’s Homeworld in a slower than light ship, passing the years in cold sleep. Thus the novel takes place over several decades. Once there, they try to force the ultraconservative Lizards to treat them as equals. The Race naturally resists but some also wonder if humanity ingenuity has now exceeded them in science and technology and if worse is to come.Yet … it is a must read for those who have read the rest of the series. All those scenes with our many viewpoint characters and their conversations, however repetitious, and their interior monologues left me sorry to leave them. Turtledove has made these characters believable. As with his other alternate history novels, one has the sense of seeing a real world sharing a past with ours but facing, like us, an uncertain, unseen future like us, just a different one.And this novel has a great deal of melancholy. There are characters caught between two worlds: Kassquit, the Chinese woman raised by Lizards as an experiment, and her opposites, Mickey and Donald, Lizards raised in a human family. And the characters not alienated by circumstances are alienated by time. Almost every other character, Lizard and human, ultimately realizes, to paraphrase a Steely Dan lyric, that the world they knew don’t turn no more.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After all the years of the Race being on earth we finally get to see what Home is like...hot with all kinds of nasty things to eat. It was a nice ending to a great series.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The United States starship arives at Home and the Race has a choice...fight now when things are at par....or fight later when they are behind. A very good read.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Well... that was... underwhelming
It's an OK book but hardly counts as an ending for the series.
:/ - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Tedious and slow but it does put finis on a good series.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Interesting storyline you wouldn't want to put down; each chapter drew you into the next. Characters were a little bit wooden and I would have loved if Kassquit had not been flat; she could've been a key character in a fascinating predicament and it was interesting when we got to see her think through things, but instead she was mostly a problem for Sam/Jonathan/Ttomalss/Atvar to mull over. Dialogue, phrases, etc. were repetitious. Foreshadowing was a bit heavyhanded in places but not too bad.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This bills itself on the front cover as "The enthralling climax" to the Worldwar series, in which an alien species arrives to conquer earth during World War II and finds it has bitten off rather more than it can chew. I picked this up in the secondhand bookshop at the top of the Yaya Centre in Nairobi (the only place where I have ever seen these books on sale - does Kenya have a secret Turtledove fan club?) and realised I had completely missed a whole intervening series, entitled Colonisation, which followed on from the original Worldwar series. But Turtledove's rather slow and turgid writing included enough hints about what had happened in the missing volumes to make me quite glad that I hadn't read them. I had all the information I needed to follow the story. It's quite a clever ending to the series (hoping that it is the ending and not just the prelude to yet another new trilogy), although I guessed the startling new technology many chapters before it was revealed. Talking of trilogies, the blurb on the back cover refers to Worldwar and Colonisation as trilogies, whereas last time I looked the former had four books in it, not three. Even more so than the earlier ones, this focuses rather too much on the USA. It would have been nice to have a book which gave more attention to earth's response to aliens, rather than just the USA (with a passing mention of the Deutsch, Russians and one or two others). Some of the dialogue is very trite. Attempts to inject humour via two comic space pilots are completely overdone. Not being a regular reader of science fiction, I was not aware of Robert A Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961) until I happened to pick up an old copy in the depths of southern Sudan where one tends to read anything one can find. It seems Turtledove was not the first to imagine an alien species who do things very slowly indeed after great consideration, and who have been around much longer than humans, as Heinlein's Martians fit the bill. But then, I suppose, so do Tolkien's elves and ents. The idea of a species that only mates in season is also found in Heinlein's book.All in all, though, it's not a bad read and not a bad ending to the series.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5the flat resolution of the initially interesting "World War" series. There's just no new stroke of invention available when the publisher wanted some text to justify royalties. Sorry, Harry, I don't think you should have bothered with this one.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This bills itself on the front cover as "The enthralling climax" to the Worldwar series, in which an alien species arrives to conquer earth during World War II and finds it has bitten off rather more than it can chew. I picked this up in the secondhand bookshop at the top of the Yaya Centre in Nairobi (the only place where I have ever seen these books on sale - does Kenya have a secret Turtledove fan club?) and realised I had completely missed a whole intervening series, entitled Colonisation, which followed on from the original Worldwar series. But Turtledove's rather slow and turgid writing included enough hints about what had happened in the missing volumes to make me quite glad that I hadn't read them. I had all the information I needed to follow the story. It's quite a clever ending to the series (hoping that it is the ending and not just the prelude to yet another new trilogy), although I guessed the startling new technology many chapters before it was revealed. Talking of trilogies, the blurb on the back cover refers to Worldwar and Colonisation as trilogies, whereas last time I looked the former had four books in it, not three. Even more so than the earlier ones, this focuses rather too much on the USA. It would have been nice to have a book which gave more attention to earth's response to aliens, rather than just the USA (with a passing mention of the Deutsch, Russians and one or two others). Some of the dialogue is very trite. Attempts to inject humour via two comic space pilots are completely overdone. Not being a regular reader of science fiction, I was not aware of Robert A Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961) until I happened to pick up an old copy in the depths of southern Sudan where one tends to read anything one can find. It seems Turtledove was not the first to imagine an alien species who do things very slowly indeed after great consideration, and who have been around much longer than humans, as Heinlein's Martians fit the bill. But then, I suppose, so do Tolkien's elves and ents. The idea of a species that only mates in season is also found in Heinlein's book.All in all, though, it's not a bad read and not a bad ending to the series.