During the Korean War, when U.S. soldiers were retreating down the Korean Peninsula under the unexpected onslaught of Chinese troops, General Douglas MacArthur asked President Truman to authorize the use of atomic bombs on Communist targets in Manchuria. Truman refused. In Harry Turtledove's Hot War alternate history series, however, the president approves MacArthur's idea.
In the first volume, Bombs Away (2015), MacArthur's plan catastrophically backfired. American atom bombs exploded in Manchuria and, in retaliation, Joseph Stalin nuked U.S. allies in Europe. The war escalated until several Russian cities, including Moscow, were destroyed, along with the West Coast of the United States and Paris, with the Red Army and NATO waging war across the ruins of a divided Germany.
Fallout picks up where Bombs Away left off, but readers should be able to enjoy it without having read the first installment. The atomic genie is out of the bottle, and President Truman sees no way to stop the nuclear madness. Meanwhile, civilians and soldiers are caught in a deadly conflict that dwarfs the world's last war. Turtledove follows a huge cast of characters, sometimes too many, to portray his dark vision of alternate world history: a mother outside nuked Seattle living in a refugee camp; Red Army and West German troops in Europe; an American soldier in Korea; a German woman in a Russian gulag; a British barkeep in love with an American pilot; a Jewish family outside destroyed Los Angeles; a Russian Manchurian hiding in Soviet Siberia. The quick shifts among drastically different perspectives can be jarring, but Turtledove, the master of alternate history, has done well again. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer