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12 May 1940. Westminster, London, England: the early days of World War II.
Again.
Raybould Marsh, one of "our" Britain's best spies, has travelled to another Earth in a desperate attempt to save at least one timeline from the Cthulhu-like monsters who have been observing our species from space and have already destroyed Marsh's timeline. In order to accomplish this, he must remove all traces of the supermen that were created by the Nazi war machine and caused the specters from outer space to notice our planet in the first place.
His biggest challenge is the mad seer Gretel, one of the most powerful of the Nazi creations, who has sent a version of herself to this timeline to thwart Marsh. Why would she stand in his way? Because she has seen that in all the timelines she dies and she is determined to stop that from happening, even if it means destroying most of humanity in the process. And Marsh is the only man who can stop her.
Necessary Evil is the stunning conclusion to Ian Tregillis's Milkweed series.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
- Sales Rank: #256948 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-04-30
- Released on: 2013-04-30
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“A combination of Alan Furst's brand of historical espionage with the fantastical characters of graphic novelist Alan Moore.” ―New Mexico Magazine on Bitter Seeds
“Exciting and intense… The clash of magic and (mad) science meshes perfectly with the tumultuous setting.” ―Publishers Weekly on Bitter Seeds
“A white-knuckle plot, beautiful descriptions, and complex characters―an unstoppable Vickers of a novel.” ―Cory Doctorow on Bitter Seeds
“A striking first novel.” ―Locus on Bitter Seeds
“Bitter Seeds may rival Naomi Novik's Tales of Temeraire as a sustained historical fantasy.” ―Booklist on Bitter Seeds
About the Author
Necessary Evil is the third title in Ian Tregillis's alternate history series, the first of which, Bitter Seeds, was highly praised. Tregillis lives near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he works as a physicist at Los Alamos Laboratory. In addition, he is a member of the George R. R. Martin Wild Cards writing collective.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
one
12 May 1940
Westminster, London, England
I crouched in the painful embrace of a hawthorn hedge, the screams of a dying world still echoing in my ears.
Hot sweat tickled my scalp. But I shivered from chills, nausea, and the lingering touch of the Eidolons. I hadn’t realized just how ill I felt until those demons took me apart and reassembled me twenty-three years in the past.
I was a time traveler. A refugee from the world’s end. The sole survivor of a cataclysm that I had caused.
The western sky blushed orange and pink beyond a swath of royal parkland. The last traces of gloaming silhouetted lampposts in St. James’. All dark, all unlit. The only other light came from a narrow gap in the opaque curtain covering the window overhead; a shaft of pale light speared through the shadows above my hiding spot. London itself was a hulking presence sensed but unseen in the night. The Admiralty building loomed behind me, cloaked in blackout. I could smell the dampness from a recent rainstorm and woody sap from where I’d cracked a few hawthorn branches in my hasty exit through the window. Everything was silent but for the occasional distant hum of a car along Whitehall.
The darkness lent an unexpected familiarity to this place and time. Like encountering an old lover after leaving her behind long ago, and discovering she hadn’t changed a jot.
This was the spring of 1940. Those early days of the Second World War, before France had fallen and we’d lost an army on the beaches of Dunkirk. Before the first dominoes had toppled in that long chain of events culminating decades later in a demonic apocalypse.
My job was to break that chain. Somehow.
The suffocating weight of that task left me breathless. I couldn’t take in the sheer enormity of it all without becoming dizzy. A spasm cramped my gut.
I took a steadying breath and tried to ground myself in the here and now. In a previous life I had been a gardener, and so I concentrated on my immediate surroundings.
Long thin shoots poked randomly from the top of the unkempt hedge. They broke the clean, level lines of the shrubbery. The slender branches had just begun to swell with white May blossoms, and my shivering caused green thorns to skitter against the window glass of the Admiralty. Thorns like those had pierced my shirt when I leaped from the window. They raked my skin from waist to armpit.
It was probably a quickset hedge, a century old or more. But now there was a war on, and people had more pressing concerns than keeping the hedges tidy.
That simple observation, more than anything else, even more than the blackout, forced me to accept the reality of it all. Will had done it. He’d sent me back.
Picture this, if you will: A man, not quite fifty-three years old, a bit heavier than he ought to be, plagued with a bad knee and a worse temper, his face and voice ruined by fire. Make him nauseated, feverish, alone. Now watch his back bend, his shoulders slump with despair, as he grapples with the enormity of his impossible task.
That was me.
Footsteps rattled floorboards inside the Admiralty, approaching the window where I’d made my escape. I retreated deeper into the hawthorn, clamping my jaw as thorns pierced me in a dozen new places. I put the cold, unyielding stone of the Admiralty building at my back and tried not to breathe. My muscles ached with the effort not to tremble lest somebody heard the bramble rattling against the windowsill. My stomach gurgled.
Somebody fixed the blackout curtains. Darkness engulfed me.
And then a woman’s voice floated through the shadows. She had to be standing in the room where I’d landed, just a few feet from where I now hunched in the cold and dark. What she said was muffled by the window and the curtains, but I could still make it out. I think she intended that.
“Ah.”
I knew that voice. Another spasm twisted my gut.
A man said, gruffly, “What?”
Of course, I recognized his voice as well. But I wasn’t ready to think about that yet.
“It worked,” said the woman.
God as my witness, I could hear the corner of her mouth curling up as she said it. Only two words, but more than enough to send another volley of chills rattling through me.
Gretel. The clairvoyant who manipulated the world for decades—and killed my daughter and destroyed my marriage—in her paradoxical bid to elude the Eidolons on the last day of history. I and the people I cared for had been nothing more than unwitting pieces in Gretel’s long, elaborate chess game. As had Great Britain itself, and the Third Reich, and the Soviet Union. Puppets all. I trembled again, this time with rage.
It worked.
Yes, it had. She’d tricked me into unleashing the Eidolons. And then, as the world had ended around us, she’d dangled an irresistible carrot before me: the chance to save my dead daughter. Because she knew Agnes was the only lure strong enough to yank me out of my apathy; by that point, I didn’t much care the world was ending.
And now she knew I was here. Knew that she’d won.
Or had she?
For my Gretel, my bête noire—the Gretel who instigated the bombing raid that killed Agnes; the Gretel whose specter had haunted every day of my life in the decades since war’s end—had perished along with everybody else when the Eidolons ended the world. But, of course, she didn’t care. For though she was mad, she wielded the power of the gods. Thus her long game amounted to nothing more than a convoluted self-sacrifice. A feint at the Eidolons, a bit of supernatural sleight of hand, so that another version of herself could thrive. So that a different Gretel, the Gretel of this new splinter time line, could live free of the Eidolons.
What a privileged perspective I enjoyed. A sickening thing, this insider’s view of her cold-blooded machinations. Revolting, the extent of that madwoman’s psychosis. Terrifying.
I doubled over and retched while the footsteps receded and he took the prisoner back to her cell. I knew he was doing that because I had been there.
I am there. Right now. But so is he.
Was this me, shivering and sweating and bleeding in the darkness? Or was I that other person, safe and warm inside the Admiralty? I had his memories, but he didn’t share mine. Didn’t share my wounds. Didn’t share my disfigurement, didn’t feel the constant pain in my throat. He hadn’t endured two failed attempts to start a family.
Tears squeezed through the corners of my clenched eyelids when I thought of family. My darling daughter, Agnes, dead so young. My son, John, a soulless vessel carved by the Eidolons to facilitate the eradication of humanity. And my wife, Liv, with her freckles, cutting wit, and poisonous resentment.
A new realization hit me in the gut so sharply that it threatened to loose my watery bowels. This was 1940. None of that had happened yet. Liv still loved him. Loved him in a way that had long since withered and died for me. Loved him in a way he didn’t deserve. It wasn’t fair. I hated him for it.
But the seed of an idea lodged in the fertile soil at the back of my mind. I couldn’t dislodge it. Nor did I want to.
I waited until I was certain Gretel and her escort had gone downstairs and nobody inside would hear me shaking the hedge. An owl hooted in St. James’ while I extricated myself from the hawthorn. Several minutes of cursing earned my freedom along with a bevy of fresh scratches. They bled freely as I staggered across Horse Guards to the park.
Footing was precarious; many of the city’s parks had been turned over to gardening and home defense. I took a tumble in a trench that had probably been dug for the sake of filling sandbags.
My head throbbed in time with the pulse of sweat down my temples. Another wave of nausea rippled through me. The watery churning lent an urgency to my wanderings. But I knew the park had no public loo. Not in 1940. And I couldn’t spare the time to find one.
As I squatted in the mud beside the lake, it occurred to me that I’d once seen this shoreline studded with tents. A staging area. That memory dredged up others in its wake, most particularly of a strange and frightening encounter. But my thoughts skittered away again; I was reluctant to dwell on that, though I couldn’t put my finger on why.
My relief was short-lived. I had just pulled up my trousers when a light shone in my face. The mild throbbing in my temples flared into a mature headache.
“Oy now, what are you about?”
Oh, dear God, no. Not now.
I couldn’t see for the light in my eyes. Something pale fluttered in the shadows outside the torchlight. Possibly a handkerchief. A second voice with a plugged nose said, “Christ. I think he shitted in the lake.”
“I’m ill,” I mumbled. Each word a fire in my throat.
The full extent of the humiliation slowly dawned on me, easily the worst in all my miserable life. The possibility Gretel knew about this made it even worse. At that moment I didn’t care about saving the world. I wanted it all to go away.
“Maybe so,” said the second voice, “but the royal parks aren’t your personal toilet. That’s rotten disgusting.”
The first man tipped his electric torch so that it wasn’t aimed directly into my eyes. I made out the glint of a badge and the silhouette of a bobby’s helmet.
“I’d like to see your identity card, sir.”
And that’s when I realized I was in trouble. The dread lay so heavy upon me I thought I might sink into the mud.
HMG had issued ID cards to all its citizens at the start of the war, back in 1939. We’d carried them until the early 50s, when the wretched National Registration program was finally scrapped.
But none of that mattered. Because today, in 1940, ...
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
AWESOME CONCLUSION TO A BRILLIANT SERIES
By Paul Genesse
(No spoilers)
I really loved this series and it was fun to read the third and concluding novel of the Milkweed Triptych, Necessary Evil by Ian Tregillis. The plot threads were nicely tied up, and I was constantly surprised with the direction of the book.
The first two, Bitter Seeds and Coldest War were amazingly good (see my reviews of both) and Necessary Evil kept up the tension. I won't ruin the first two books here, as the beauty of the series relies heavily on not knowing what's coming. Overall, I think the first two books had me more worried about the characters and their fates, but Necessary Evil was excellent. I still never knew what was going to happen.
Gretel, the character who can see the future is back and the interludes from her point of view were brilliant. The chapters when we get into her mind were my favorites. The turn her character takes later in the book was unexpected for me, but I can totally understand why it happened. I don't know what else the writer could have done with a goddess like character to make the rest of the novel work, but I wasn't expecting the series of events involving her shift. Never trust Gretel is still the best advice anyone can give.
This was a very unique and ambitious series, and book one, Bitter Seeds was an incredible achievement. Book two, The Coldest War blew my mind, especially the ending, and I wondered how the third novel would compare. For me, the second book was probably the peak of the series as far as high drama and tension, and Necessary Evil was not as epic in some ways, though it was a worthy conclusion. I think reading the three books back to back to back would be best, as there are clues in book one and especially two that will improve the experience of the reader in book three. All the books are so interdependent with each other it's hard to separate them. Having book two fresh in your mind when reading book two would be best.
The author created such a complicated web that little things mean a lot, and small events change the course of history. Pulling it all together in the finale was a fantastic achievement and the epilogue had a lot of heart. I was so glad to read the last chapter, as some writers fail to deliver there, but Tregillis pulled it off perfectly.
If you're a fan of alternate history, spies, characters with super-powers, and great writing, read this series for sure.
Highly Recommended 5/5 Stars
Paul Genesse
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Time-travelers versus X-men versus Warlocks - the Final Episode
By Peter S. Bradley
Marsh is back...back in London of 1939.
If you have read the prior two instalments of the "Milkweed Tryptich" - and you should before reading this review - you know that Ian Tregillis has played out the ramification that a Nazi superscience program - based on giving human beings "battery-powered" abilities - has succeeded. This tipped the early days of World War II dramatically in favor of the Germans, allowing the Germans to destroy the British military at Dunkirk. The only thing that spared Britain from invasion were the warlocks, who dealt with Lovecraftian horrors, aka the "Eidoloen," from another dimension. With the warlocks, the Brits were able to defeat Germany, but this left all of Europe in Soviet hands in this alternate history...and the Lovecraftian horrors with the key to the destruction of the world.
Marsh - the protagonist of the first two books - is sent back in time through the eldritch powers of the Eidolen. His mission is to destroy the German program and the British program, and maybe spare his alternate self from the life of misery that he lived after his daughter was killed in the saturation bombing of a small British village. He's aided in his mission by Gretel, the German "mutant" with the ability to see, and control, the future. Gretel for some reason has decided that she loves Marsh and therefore must destroy Marsh's baby daughter and his wife.
Does Marsh succeed in his mission? Will the British army survive Dunkirk? Will the Eidolens eventually destroy the universe? Will we have the history we remember?
You can pretty much figure that out for yourself.
The strengths of the book was its conception of an alternate history, so similar but so different from ours. This "big picture" element of the book is what kept me reading through to the end, quite frankly.
On the other hand, I didn't like the characters at all. The were, quite frankly, a bunch of whining, bipolar ingrates. Marsh and Will and the rest would go from being judgmental, sarcastic twits to their "friends" to berating themselves privately for being such bad friends to berating their friends for being "stupid toffs" every other scene. Will and Marsh would think kindly of each other, until they were together and then they would become accusatory jerks to each other. Marsh's relationship with his mentor seemed to be a sketch in how to have an abusive relationship ("Well, I must say Marsh, when you cock something up, you cock it up royally.") And why was Gretel infatuated with Marsh? Not a clue, other than that it helped move the plot along.
Gretel could have been a fascinating character, but midway through this book, she loses her power to see the future and is taken off the board, except insofar as it is necessary for our heroes to torture her by letting her injuries fester and then sending her to a Britsh-version of the Gulag. Admittedly, Gretel was evil, which is not surprsing since she grew up in a human "test to destruction" environment, but our heroes became essentially unsympathetic in my view in their treatment of Gretel. I mean, hate her, but give her some medical treatment, for heaven's sake!
Also, another character that we formed an attachment to in "The Coldest War" is written out of the script without any effort at redemption.
Also, the plot coincidences and lack of common sense were annoying. Younger Marsh really was going to get on a sub to go to Germany to destroy the dreaded German experiment with no plan or resources...on the say so of a complete stranger, i.e., the older Marsh. And, of course, it made sense not to take the younger Marsh into the older Marsh's confidence because of no reason in particular.
And then there was the reveal that the mysterious old man in book one really was the older Marsh in book three, except that they were completely different time-lines. Tregillis attempts to explain this as "reverberations" with babble of jargon, but this was unconvincing, and seemed to beg the notion that another Marsh from another time-line made it to older Marsh's time-line, but then did nothing except make two plot-necessary appearances....or something else.
All in all, this was an entertaining book and an entertaining trilogy. I certainly don't recommend that a forewarned reader not read it. I did find the characters annoying and the plot holes problematic, but I did keep with it to the end to see what the answers were going to be and how things came out in the end. The writing is accessible, and I did get a sense that Tregillis was providing a reasonably accurate view of life in London during the Blitz.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Unnecessary banality
By Matt Morgan
Not sure why so many seem to write so glowingly of this deeply disappointing end to a trilogy that started with such promise. It feels like Tregillis had some really great ideas and bounced them off a lot of very wise heads to get much-needed insights into making "Bitter Seeds" quite the compelling read, then went it alone with the next two books. The reasons for Gretel's schemes coming undone are poorly explained and unconvincing, the demises of the other REGP ubermenschen are hollow and forgettable, the escape from justice of people every bit as despicable as Marsh makes Gretel out to be (I'm looking at you, Stephenson) is galling, and the meshing of the alternate time line feels fumbled (deus ex tempora, if you will). Clearly I'm in the minority of opinions on this book; many readers must enjoy their adolescent black ops fantasies served with heaping helpings of petty vengeance and jingoism.
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