I hope I have those names right; the books are elsewhere right now. They also provide an alternate history, taking place in 1947 after Brit fascists made peace with Hitler sometime between Dunkirk and Hitler's invasion of Russia. They are both good and scary. I half hope she doesn't write any more, and half hope she does, because if she does, I will read them, and I dread even thinking about the terrible place Britain has become.

Modern day Britain has become a different sort of dreary place, what with trying to ban pointed knives and actually banning and removing fire extinguishers from an apartment block because they don't want the residents to try to stick around and fight small fires.

Her next novel in that series, "Half a Crown" is coming out this August.

and one all the more depressing is Len Deighton's "SS/GB" of some years ago.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3525380.ece

It begins thusly:

Fire extinguishers may be removed from blocks of flats across Britain after they were deemed dangerous by buildings risk assessors at two blocks on the South Coast.

The reason given is not that they are faulty, but they don't want residents to try to fight fires, rather to evacuate and let the whole damned apartment block burn down, presumably.

Or is the point that they should all run out and righteously build IED's and slaughter their occupiers? I'm always confused by the fervor with which we're all supposed to agree with anti-occupation-ism here at salon.com.

I never thought The Man in the High Tower was about an occupied country. It's about a post war country that lost and the rules, the borders and the organization of it has changed, as Germany's did. In many ways, apart from Dick's paranoia, it's about a new country that's forced to adjust to a new set of ruling classes where those rulers have imposed a kind of odd postwar prosperity on the country. Economically things are kind of ratty, in a civil service mass transit kind of way in Dick's California but they're light years ahead of where they were in the 1940's even where they were in contemporary times when Dick wrote the book. So part of the story implies a trade-off, a quiet complicity that comes with occupation vs. class aspirations.

A haunting new alternative history imagines an invading German army living alongside the natives in rural Wales.

You don't have to imagine it. The Germans invaded England in 450 C.E. The Celts still live under Saxon rule to this day.

The Queen is one of them, you know. "Windsor," my Aunt Fanny. Her real last name is Hanover. And the Mountbattens are really the Battenbergs.

See, it's not so hard to imagine now, is it?

While I too find it silly to remove fire extinguishers, I think, given the choice, I'd rather prefer a Britain made "dreary" by lack of fire extinguishers and pointed knives than one made "dreary" by lack of, oh, Jews and homosexuals.

And a bit too old for WWII.. A lucky break for him.

As part of the Home Guard he was taken to his post when Operation Sealion was expected. Every single man was given his "dying point". Operation Sealion would have closely resembled the siege of Stalingrad writ large.

Frankly, if I were a German occupier I would have had far more to fear from my mother than my father. Dad got angry, Mom got even.. Think Maggie Thatcher on steroids.

Are we supposed to feel sorry for the British after they did the same thing to countless other countries for centuries? Give me a break.

wrote a series of books with an alternative history of WWII wherein aliens in spaceships invade the earth right in the middle of WWII. It was a fun read for me.

Germany eventually gets toasted by the aliens but the human species, able to adapt better than the aliens, battle the aliens to a draw.

How shall I put this politely?

If you can't see a difference between the British Empire and Nazi Germany, you're either a blithering idiot or a psychopath.

There, that seemed pretty polite.

There is nothing bleaker in print today.

You obviously have not read "Marching Through Georgia".

http://tinyurl.com/266qy6

What if the British had encouraged loyalists from the former American colonies to settle in South Africa? What if those settlers had been imperialistic and had expanded into Rhodesia a century before Cecil Rhodes? What if they continued their expansion to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa and then to the Ottoman Empire? Would the resulting state have a social structure combining the worst features of the Confederacy and the Afrikaners, but with a government more militarized and efficient than the Spartans or Prussians? Welcome to the Domination.

Turtledove's series is where I learned of the Nachthexen..

I found the account of Comrade Molotov's ride with a Nachthex most entertaining..

http://pratt.edu/~rsilva/sovwomen.htm

Some of the bravest human beings I think I have ever heard of..

Harassment night bombing was very difficult to do, considering the low performance of the Po-2 biplanes (their top speed was 94 mph/150 kph, less even than most World War I fighters!) and how vulnerable that made them to enemy night fighters. But the Night Witches learned their trade well. The Po-2 was very slow, but it was also very maneuverable. When a German Me-109 tried to intencept it, the Russian plane could turn violently and nimbly at much less than the 109's minimum speed (stall speed), requiring that the German make a wide circle to come in for another pass. Then he was again met with the same evasive tactic, time after time. Many pilots got to nearly earth-level, flying low enough to be hidden behind hedgerows! The German fighter could only try again and again until he got frustrated and just left the Po-2 alone. No wonder, German pilots were promised an Iron Cross for shooting down a Po-2.

Read it? I lived it. I know personally the descendants of the survivors of Kitchener's concentration camps.