I don't read much alternate history, which is pretty funny for a former history major, but it's just not a part of the SF field I've explored.  My most memorable encounters, I think, were with Maureen McHugh's moving "The Lincoln Train," and the very interesting anthology that Kevin Anderson put together, Global Dispatches, which imagines what H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds would have been like to various historical characters of the time.

I've looked at Harry Turtledove's alternate history novels with some longing (he gets great covers), but I've never dived into one, and I like Harry himself quite a bit.  He always sounds reasonable, and he's generous with his time and advice.  Normally that would be enough to get me to read something (I have a tendency to seek out the work of writers I've met in person).  But, it hasn't been that way for Harry's fiction.

Until today, that is, when I read Harry's story in the June Asimov's, "News From the Front."

He does an interesting trick with this alternate version of WWII: he imagines the war being fought the way it actually happened (at least at the start), but with a press that acts like today's media.  In other words, every step of the war is second guessed; troop movements and key developments are revealed instead of being hidden, and the media bias against the war is evident.  Of course, the war goes differently than the history we know.

What was cool was how this form of fiction made me think about today's situation.  Personally, I think we're wrong to be in Iraq, not because of any deeply informed study of the war on my part, but because I'd always believed that America was the "white hat" character in the western that is the world.  In my vision of America, we never draw first.  Invading Iraq because of what we thought they might do just feels wrong to me.  It doesn't feel American (plus, it sets a horrible precedent that gives us no moral high ground when some other government does a preemptive invasion of another country).

Harry's story, though, made me rethink the progress of this war.  The parallel he sets up is that we couldn't have won WWII if the press behaved like it behaves today.  By extension then, would the war in Iraq been very different (and perhaps more "successful") if the press' behavior had been more like the press during out WWII?

I don't know, and I'm not a particularly political person anyway (unless you ask me about  No Child Left Behind!), but Harry's story once again struck me with the power of fiction, and the power of science fiction in particular, to raise disturbing issues.