Review: Hans Schantz' The Hidden Truth and A Rambling Wreck

A Double Review

On 9-11, the capitol was burning, the white house destroyed.

The newly sworn in President Lieberman swore to get the terrorists and their Saudi backers.

At least the World Trade Center is still standing. Welcome to the alternate history of Hans Schantz's The Hidden Truth.

And yeah, it's going to get strange.

And yes, you read the headline correctly. Today is a double-header review. Why? I'll explain. Meet me in the story.

The story

In Hans Schantz's The Hidden Truth, book 1, our hero, Peter Burdell, trips over an obscure fact: three historic deaths in electromagnetism that happened before their time.

Conspiracy?

Maybe.

But one that would require modern technology and knowledge to sway the course of history...

So in A Rambling Wreck, this leads to a 400 year old (minimum) conspiracy that spreads through government, science and academia.

Part of the problem with reviewing one book at a time is that, here, they’re really one continuous novel. We follow Peter as he follows an obscure piece of historical trivia that doesn't jive with other sources of history, and then he goes right down the rabbit hole. The end result is that these books are one part alternate history, one part paranoid political thriller. Usually, paranoid thrillers are a turn-off for me, since they tend to be exhausting. Here, though, it feels more like Person of Interest. It’s only a little paranoid. With touches of FISA memo sprinkled in.

It’s a fun series. There are parts that drag, but not many. Most of the slow bits are highly informative and interesting. You get to learn stuff. This one is politics and science heavy. The history here is the easy part. The politics is merely the terrifying part.

The characters

The nice thing about this series is that every character is well developed. We get to see all of them grow and evolve before our eyes. Peter Burdell is the biggest example of this. We see him go from smart teenager to a deep cover espionage agent on par with a John Le Carre character. His best friend and tech guru evolves slower, but is nearly as interesting. Even the crochety old uncle has an interesting arc as he mentors his nephew in the dark arts of spycraft.

The world

Foucault’s Pendulum, that masterpiece of Umberto Eco (wherein he created Dan Brown as a fictional character long before anyone had ever heard of him) took every paranoid conspiracy theory, fed them into a computer, and the computer tied them together into something apocalyptic.

Hans has taken over a hundred years of historical facts and made a conspiracy that will scare the heck out of me for a long while.

The politics

Right wing. How right wing? Let's just say that a lot of the plot points can be summed up like this: What if every stupid Democrat policy that created more misery … wasn’t stupid, but was deliberately designed for the disastrous outcomes that happened as a result of them?

Umberto Eco wishes that he had written these books.

Also, if you’re still, somehow, a fan of FDR, you won’t be by the midpoint of book 1.

Content warning

On screen, there is very little to object to. But there is talk of mature subject matter. Think of it as PG-13. I don't even recall much in the way of foul language.

Who is it for?

Anyone who enjoys alternate history, real world history, or just a good spy thriller. Alternate History even for people who don't like alternate history.

Why read it?

It's it's just good fun: plenty of spy craft, with a good amount of science.