A Million Shades Of Gray
John C. Hertel
Paperback
(PublishAmerica, July 20, 2004)
A group of fighting men from 20th century Earth suddenly find themselves in a magical realm and that is where all similarity between this book and all other fantasy/sci-fi books comes to an end.This book is intended to entertain, but it also dares people to think about some very disquieting things, subjects that have been dealt with in platitudes and rationalizations for far too long. For some reason, recent history has been dealt with in very broad strokes, while at the same time fantasy literature has become increasingly sophisticated and beautiful. I have combined these two in a way that may seem familiar, at first. However, this story is populated with characters that speak plainly and cut straight through all the layers of nonsense that civilization has built to hide its failures. Or, as acting Sergeant Major Fritsch would say, “I’ve never seen anything official stand up to a bullet.”The natives of this world have never heard of round worlds, moons, or of “suns” that rise before setting. Narva has no native life forms; this continent is not actually part of a planet, in the strictest sense of the world. This is a carefully cultivated environment, and the first men from earth will come as a shock to the natives. This is not some intellectual group of explorers, but a battle group from the 2nd SS Panzer Division, fresh from the Russian Front, circa 1944. How can people who actually believe in magic deal with hundreds of Nazi storm troopers? They can, because on Narva, belief can make it real.