The Coldest War

[sawyl]

It looks like I forgot to write up Ian Tregillis' excellent The Coldest War when I read it at the tail end of last year — something I really ought to correct before writing up its sequel, Necessary Evil. Here, then, are a few thoughts.

The book opens in 1963, twenty years after the end of Bitter Seeds and World War II. Captured by the Red Army at the end of the war, Klaus and Gretel, two of Doctor von Westarp's battery-powered übermenschen, have endured a tedious existence in a Soviet research facility, initially as test subjects but, more recently, as relics of the past. All this changes when Gretel decides that the time has come to leave and activates a series of contingencies she put in place decades earlier — something that puts her previous, apparently random, actions into a particularly ruthless context.

Meanwhile, back in Blighty, Raybould Marsh and Lord William Beauclerk seem to have changed roles. Will, a broken drug addict at the end of the war, seems to be riding high: married, successful, and the lynchpin of his aristocratic brother's charitable foundation. Marsh, on the other hand, has been destroyed by the loss of his baby daughter during the war and by the weight of having to care for his son John, a child whose soul was taken by the Eidolons in compensation for a piece of powerful wartime magic. On the edge of alcoholism, prone to violence, unable to keep a job, and with his marriage in ruins, Marsh is easy prey for Gretel when she arrives in England.

As Gretel starts to pull her old playings back into her great game, it becomes clear just how much some of the characters have changed. Stuck in England after the war, Reinhardt, the formerly proud human salamander, has degenerated into a pathetic crank, obsessively hoarding 1960s technology in a desperate attempt to recapture his former glory by reconstructing something like a Reichsbehörde battery. Klaus, however, has been greatly improved by his time in captivity. No longer the determined nazi of Bitter Seeds, his time spent reading and waiting and enduring medical examinations has mellowed him considerably. Now, instead of following his overbearing sister's demands, he has developed his own strength of character and started to build outside interests; rather charmingly, just as the world appears to be going to hell, he opts out and spends his time teaching himself to paint. Gretel, of course, remains largely unchanged by the passage of time which makes sense, given her role as shaper of events.

It seems to me that The Coldest War has it all. Tregillis creates a wonderfully convincing alternate history for the cold war, with supernatural Eidolons and nazi supermen replacing atomic weapons — it is no coincidence that the Soviet Willenskräfte project is based at Arzamas-16. He also conjures up a cast of genuinely convincing characters, complete with deeply human flaws that make them feel authentic despite the wires implanted in their heads or their abilities to speak supernatural ur-languages. Finally, Tregillis' manages the coup of creating a plot around a precognitive character with the ability to manipulate events like a particularly ruthless virtuoso — something that could, in less accomplished hands, have degenerated into a horrible mess of contradictions.

Very highly recommended.