Tag: ian tregillis

Trilogy of the Week: The Milkweed Triptych.

I got Ian Tregillis’s The Milkweed Triptych about a decade or so back; it’s alternate history time-travel cosmic horror that really does need to be read in order. I enjoyed it immensely, and am in fact re-reading it, now that the coronavirus is forcing me to finally clean the damned basement. We’re excavating wonders down there, people! WONDERS*.

So check it out. Fair warning, though: it’s grim. The whole thing is pretty damned grim.

Moe Lane

*Including a pile of old notebooks that I nearly threw away before I remembered that my biographers wouldn’t thank me for that.

Ian Tregillis’s “What Doctor Ivanovich Saw” is up at Subterranean Press.

It’s a short story set between Ian Tregillis‘s second and third books in his alternate-history-cosmic horror trilogy The Milkweed Triptych.  I’m pleased to see it: I wasn’t expecting any more stories in this particular universe, and why I certainly understand that impulse to leave well enough alone* it was still a nice series.  Glad to see that there’s just a little bit more of it.

Even if Tregellis doesn’t quite get the American domestic situation circa 1940 quite right. Or right at all, really.

Moe Lane

*When the entire trilogy involves a situation that makes our World War II look like an utopia, there’s a certain tendency to not want to push one’s luck.

Just finished Ian Tregillis’ The Coldest War.

The Coldest War is the second book in The Milkweed Triptych, which is an alternate history (cosmic horror*) series set in England and Western Europe during the Second World War and some years thereafter.  The first book (Bitter Seeds) in the series came out in 2010: there apparently had been some sort of epic disaster in getting the sequel published, but apparently that’s all been settled.

The Coldest War is a good book, but you ABSOLUTELY MUST READ BITTER SEEDS FIRST; this is no more a trilogy than the Lord of the Rings was.  Not to give away the plot, but it appears to be developing a scenario that is not unlike the one in James P Hogan’s The Proteus Operation: only, again, horror rather than science fiction.  I suggest checking out all three books, but if you haven’t read the Hogan one yet read that one first.  It’ll cheer you up enough to let you withstand the not-quite-subtle despair found in the other two.

Moe Lane

*Not Lovecraftian, per se, but HPL would have enjoyed the concept.  He might have found it a bit sparse, but he would have enjoyed it.