james_davis_nicoll | This Side of Judgment (Reply)

From: (Anonymous)

You're confusing this book (which seems to be some sort of near-future police procedural) with _Days of Cain_, which came out in 1997. AFAICT, Dunn had just three novels, all in the 1990s, and hasn't written any SF in this century.

Unfortunately, yes, it is the same guy. Go figure.

Dunn seemed like a decent enough writer -- he was very interested in the Nazis, but that by itself doesn't mean much, and I don't recall him showing any of the other classic indicia. _Days of Cain_ has its problems, sure, but it's an SFnal treatment of the Holocaust that isn't stupid, mawkish, cranky, or falling into any of the other obvious traps. That's no small accomplishment.

IMS the central premise of the book boiled down to something like "God help us, this is in fact one of the best of all possible worlds": there's no way to eliminate the Holocaust without making even worse stuff happen down the line. This is not a cheerful point of view but I don't find it implausible. YMMV.

Canoodling through some of the articles at that link -- sigh -- I see that one of the few things he and I agree on is that David Irving deserved everything he got. The man hates him some Nazis.

My very tentative take is that he's a military historian type of the sort you'd expect to be writing MilSF and hanging out at Baen's, but for some reason he's set his sights a little higher.

That said, there may also be a touch of the Brain Eater at work too. The articles I skimmed showed a lot of demonization of constructed Others (liberals! they come in three different flavors, and all are stupid and suck!), which definitely wasn't present in _Days of Cain_. The whole point of that book is that the protagonist is (1) totally wrong, (2) doomed to failure, and (3) sympathetic anyway.

Other-other hand, he might just be one of those creative folks who come across as much more/less thoughtful/sensitive/imaginative/nuanced in one medium than in another. (Gosh, that would be unusual.)

Anyway, he seems to have given up writing SF, so likely moot.

Doug M.