Harry Turtledove's City in Chains
A Book Review
Author’s Note: Before I start the review proper, I’m going to tell a story because I’m Jimbo and this is Jimbo’s Awesome Science Fiction and Fantasy Reviews.
Long about 1998, I was a young man still living at home. I worked mornings. My father worked afternoons. I would see him every day when I got home from work and we would talk about whatever, but mostly nothing. You know how it goes. Weather, work, and local sports teams were the most common topics of conversation. That’s what us Americans are good at.
But one day, the old man told me about a book he had seen at the bookstore. It was something about the Confederate States of America winning the American Civil War after their troops were armed with the AK-47. I thought it was the dumbest premise I had heard in my life. At the time, I had never even heard of Alternate History as a genre (although I guess I had seen, and laughed at, The Final Countdown. Seriously, that movie was terrible.) He told me I should buy a copy. Translated into English from Dadlish that meant that he wanted me to buy a copy so that he could read it after I got done with it. I declined. That weekend, my old man passed in a boating accident. We had plans to go fishing in that same boat the next day.
Not too terribly long after, once I had gathered myself enough to make it to the bookstore, I came across Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South. It was the book my dad had been talking about, I’m sure of it. I picked up a copy just to spite myself. I thought I’d have to force myself to read it. I loved every word of that damn book. I can still remember details from that book like it’s tomorrow. There are books I’ve read more times, but you’d be hard pressed to find a book I remember better. If you, or someone you know, has had their work of Alternate History reviewed at Jimbo’s, you can thank my old man for getting me started on the genre.
So, all maudlin remembrances aside, this one’s for you, Pops. I love you. Rest in Peace, James Ricky “Rick” McCoy. I’ll see you when I get there.
If you love (or even just kinda like) Alternate History then you need to know Harry Turtledove, if you don’t already. Turtledove is not the only Alt-Hist writer, nor is he the originator of the genre, but he is the best. He’s been doing it for decades now and, while I’m not sure if the fact that his Alt-Hist is so well grounded in the real history because he’s done the research or because he has a Ph. D from Stanford and just picked up enough along the way to make things work, it always works.
It had been awhile since I’ve read any of Turtledove’s stuff, mainly because I lost track of all my favorite authors when I got divorced and then picked up some new ones afterward, but when I saw a new Turtledove in Kindle Unlimited I couldn’t resist the pull. And when I picked up City in Chains I wasn’t disappointed.
Lutesse, the city at the center of City in Chains, isn’t Paris in World War II, or at least not quite. It is, however, a city occupied by a foreign army. It is a city full of everyday people thrust into a mess not of their own making. It is a city full of wannabe survivors just waiting for the occupation to end. There is even a stiffening resistance, a radio network of sorts and a bunch of collaborators. But it’s totes not Paris in WWII. That’s why it’s called Lutesse. Trust me.
I picked up City in Chains because it had Turtledove’s name on the cover and it was affordable. I didn’t even bother reading the blurb because Turtledove is one of those authors for me: If he wrote it, it’s worth reading. I was still able to pick up on the comparisons between Lutesse and Paris without knowing they were supposed to be there. I went back and read the blurb to confirm, but I really couldn’t conceive of what else it would be.
Turtledove has a habit of building casts of characters and switching between them as needed to tell the story. I was surprised, but not dismayed, to find out that City in Chains revolves mainly around two characters: Guisa Sachry, an actor/playwright and Malk Malkovici a junkman and follower of the old gods, who is totally not Jewish in the way that Lutesse is totally not Paris.
Guisa’s employment as an actor brings him into frequent contact with the occupying Cleuh army. He gets invited into all the best parties and, in a city where starvation is common among the lower classes, he manages to maintain a paunch. He’s a bit of a womanizer. But for all of that, I kind of liked the guy. He does his best for his wife (they’re childless) and he keeps the city entertained despite the fact that he’s working with the bad guys. He knows he’s doing so though, and it does bother him. He just fails to see a choice.
Malk, on the other hand, is in a very different position. He is a follower of the old gods who owns a junkyard. He has to cooperate with the Cleuh or they’ll send him to a camp off in the East. He makes good profits while doing so, and also while aware that the Cleuh are taking many of his people away and they’re not coming back. But he’s a family man. He has to do what he has to do to take care of both his wife and his brother, Sarmel. The men sell their scrap metal to the Cleuh in exchange for both a living and their lives. They do fairly well financially.
The strength of City and Chains and of Turtledove as an author is the fact that points of view switch constantly but Turtledove not only turns it into a cohesive story, he makes it entertaining. We get to see a lot more of Lutesse from two points of view than we would from one, and that’s really important to the story. In any situation, different things happen to different people. Turtledove understands that and he knows that he needs to show what the differences are.
Turtledove does a remarkable job of displaying both sides of things in another way as well. He gets that even during wartime, good things happen among the mostly bad things. Going too deep into this would be spoilers and we don’t do spoilers at Jimbo’s except when we do and I don’t think I need to here. Suffice it to say that even in a city of nightly dragon flamings (totes not World War II style bombings. I mean, the Mighty Eighth never used dragons. I checked.) the occasional blessing can occur, seemingly by accident.
I like that about Turtledove’s work in general. He gets that life can suck sometimes, but he doesn’t focus solely on the “Woe is me” angle. A little bit of optimism in a terrible situation goes a long way. Just ask Malk Malkovici. That guy never gives up, even when I wouldn’t blame him for doing so. And trust me, he goes through enough that it would be easy for him to toss in the sponge.
Guisa finds his enjoyment in other ways, not all of which are appreciated by his wife. He still manages to enjoy himself at times and get through things however he has to. Admittedly, he’s pretty well compensated so he has an advantage here and he milks it for all its worth, but he has moments of levity when he’s not in the basement hiding from an air raid.
City in Chains appears to be a standalone novel and that makes me kind of sad. What’s even worse is that it looks like a standalone standalone, unlike Turtledove’s How Few Remain that was a standalone book with ten sequels across three different series. I’m going to miss Malk and Guisa. They were cool to hang out with a few days during a Michigan winter when I needed something to distract me from the endless snow and cold.
Bottom Line: 4.75 out of 5 Old Wagons
City In Chains
Harry Turtledove
Aethon Books, 2025
City In Chains is available for purchase at the following link. If you click the link and get literally anything from Amazon I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.