Behold ye among the heathen, and regard, and wonder marvelously: for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told you.
There are no great men, only great challenges that ordinary men are forced by circumstances to meet.
Behold: I give you the Overman.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It’s 1939. The Nazis have supermen, the British have demons, and one perfectly normal man gets caught in between. Raybould Marsh is a British secret agent in the early days of the Second World War, haunted by something strange he saw on a mission during the Spanish Civil War: a German woman with wires going into her head who looked at him as if she knew him.When the Nazis start running missions with people who have unnatural abilities — a woman who can turn invisible, a man who can walk through walls, and the woman Marsh saw in Spain who can use her knowledge of the future to twist the present — Marsh is the man who has to face them. He rallies the secret warlocks of Britain to hold the impending invasion at bay. But magic always exacts a price. Eventually, the sacrifice necessary to defeat the enemy will be as terrible as outright loss would be.The novel
Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis depicts an
Alternate History World War II where a Nazi
Mad Scientist figures out how to turn children into powerful psychic soldiers. As a result, the Nazis are indisputably winning the war. A clever British spy witnesses one of these kids doing their thing and realizes his countrymen need a paranormal equalizer of their own. Fortuitously, his best and oldest friend Lord William Beauclerk knows
a thing or two about the supernatural and is willing to
bleed for king and country. Thus, the Milkweed project is born and things then proceed to
get worse. Oh,
so very much worse.
The first book of
The Milkweed Triptych. Followed by
The Coldest War.
Examples
- Alternate History
- Awesome, but Impractical: The Nazis in charge of the psychics project are more focused on the more flashy psychics, than they do on the more subtle ones despite having a wider range of applications. Best exemplified when needing to eliminate a defector in a public area, instead of the psychics who can turn intangible, invisible, have precognition or telekinetic powers, they send out the pyrokinetic to make the defector spontanously combust in the middle of a crowded hotelbar, despite it being a covert mission.
- Badass Normal: Raybould Marsh has his moments.
- Black and Gray Morality: Granted, they're fighting Nazis but still, the British do some exceedingly evil things in the name of king and country.
- Interestingly while the Nazis are pretty much as bad, even if you only talk about the two side's respective supernatural weapons program. The British atrocities get more screen time then their Nazi counterparts.
- Blood Magic - required to summon the Eidolons. Beyond that, it takes more and more blood to summon them each subsequent time.
- Body Horror: You get psychic powers. Great! Too bad you have to have giant WWII-era batteries wired directly into your brain to fuel them.
- Conditional Powers: The kids' powers only work as long as their batteries are charged.
- Creepy Child: All the Nazi psychic children but Gretel is creepy even to the other Tyke Bombs.
- Cool Vs Awesome: Battery-powered Nazi psychics vs British warlocks summoning Eldritch Abominations.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Eidolons.
- Gentleman Wizard: Lord William Beauclerk
- Ghostapo / Stupid Jetpack Hitler: The Gotterelektrongruppe started out as Thule Society occult hogwash, then Mad Scientist Doctor Von Westarp applied the scientific method to things and got his battery-operated psykers.
- Intangible Man: Klaus' willenskrafte. Can only use it as long as he can hold his breath but doesn't have to worry about falling through the floor.
- Invisibility: Heike.
- It Got Worse: Very much so for everyone concerned.
- Language of Magic: Knowledge of Enochian is required to negotiate with the Eidolons once summoned.
- Mad Scientist: Doctor Von Westarp.
- Mind Over Matter: Kammler is an extremely powerful (and extremely brain-damaged) telekinetic.
- Mundane Utility: Reinhardt comes up with a way to make roads in the desert with his pyrokinesis. It works — barely.
- One Person, One Power: each child gets one power and one power only.
- Oracular Urchin: Gretel.
- Playing with Fire: Reinhardt is a mean bullying pyrokinetic.
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: The means by which the Enochian lexicon was derived.
- Psychic Powers: The willenskrafte wielded by the children. Pyrokinesis, telekinesis, phase-shifting, invisibility and, scariest of all, decades-range precognition.
- Spy Fiction - of the Stale Beer variety.
- Summon Magic: the British Warlocks can summon the Eidolons. Then the negotiations begin.
- Teleporters and Transporters: Marsh figures out how to get the Eidolons to do this for them.
- World War II
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