In the Mail: SS-GB.

I picked SS-GB up because – well, this is actually kind of entertaining. A couple of people on Twitter got exceptionally pissy just because I made the perfectly reasonable observation that Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America was such a godawful book and crappy alternate history that I couldn’t finish it, which gets funnier and funnier the more I think of it. I mean, why the hell do they care if somebody thinks a book is awful*? Anyway, I forget how I found out that the BBC actually made a miniseries based off of Len Deighton’s SS-GB (which was an infinitely better alternate history novel**); but I did find out, and I purchased it accordingly. And here it is! Hope it doesn’t suck.

…Well, it was entertaining to me.

Moe Lane

*Unless, of course, they share the same opinion, and kind of resent that somebody’s coming out and saying something that they’d like to. But that would be ascribing motives, and we mustn’t have that.

**I don’t actually know if Deighton is a better writer than Roth generally. I do know that even the suggestion that he is would probably be enough to make certain people gnash their teeth; which is, again, pretty damn funny when you think about it.