Lucid, well-researched and riveting. - Rated 
God knows, I wouldn't like to tackle a subject as diverse as a near-future naval battlefleet transported back to World-War Two, with the social, psychological, and cultural complexities to contend with. It would take a special kind of writer to make it believable and keep the pace flowing. Fortunately, John Birmingham is equal to the task, throwing himself into it with enough gusto and panache (with tongue just slightly in cheek - this is sci-fi after all) to keep the reader turning the pages.
Birmingham writes technologically advanced warfare better than Clancy but the social interaction between the culturally diverse characters are what really makes this book fascinating (witness Admiral Kolhammer's twenty-first century diplomatic sensiblities contrasting with Admiral King's twentieth century bluster), all the while considering the unwinding global impact of such a technologically and culturally dissimilar group's sudden arrival into a comparatively primitive society.
The scale of the topic is such that the story lacks a little depth and humanity but sacrifices have to be made somewhere or the book would begin to lose it's pace.
In short, this is as good as it gets. Settle back, suspend your disbelief and enjoy.
Poor, too slow and too boring - Rated 
This book is not really a thriller at all. It has an interesting premise but the execution is too drawn out and the characters too numerous. There is also too much political correctness, with the women tough and resourceful and the men dumb and slow witted. Not recommended.
Clever stuff from a man who can really write - Rated
John Birmingham can write, he does his research and treats the reader with respect. In these three ways he stands head and shoulders above just about everyone else who has written alternative history recently.
As well as the much-commented upon social commentary aspects of this book, I found particular enjoyment in the fact that he was going backwards AND forwards. That is, he first imagined a pretty complex future and then he projected those people and their technology back into history. Doing this took no small amount of skill, and for that I salute him.
I enjoyed the book, loved the image of Lonesome Jones bawling out the racist WWII marine and thought some of the concepts were handled well. The issue of copyrighted material being taken back to a time before it was even conceived let alone produced was very clever, and the logistics issues of fuel and armaments for modern weapons systems was also addressed well.
I'm not sure US armed forces will ever hand over weapons to embeddded journos, but I picked that whole aspect as parody anyway. In fact, the whole trilogy came across as Birmingham thoroughly enjoying himself, with rip-roaring battle scenes interspersed with clever ideas, dialogue and satire. It's not War and Peace, but it's not meant to be. Enjoy!
Enjoyable alternate-history thriller - Rated 
The Axis of Time Trilogy is a high-paced, high-tech alternate history thriller, probably what Tom Clancy and Harry Turtledove would come up with if they were locked in a room together.
The book opens in the year 2021. The western world has been at war with terrorist extremists for decades. London and Tokyo have suffered terrorist attacks which outstrip 9/11 in ferocity, Iran and Iraq have fought a second war, and the west's military forces have become used to fighting with ultra-high-tech arms and equipment against a shadowy enemy. When extremists seize control of Jakarta and begins executing foreign nationals, the United Nations authorises a massive military response. A flotilla of ships from half a dozen nations assemble under the leadership of Admiral Kolhammer on his flagship USS Hillary Clinton (who in this timeline was President and a great champion of the US Navy until her assassination). A research vessel conducting atom-smashing experiments in an attempt to create stable wormhole technology is caught up in the flotilla when her escorts are ordered to join it. Ill-advisedly, they continue with their experiments in the midst of the fleet, and accidentally destroy their vessel by creating a 15km-wide wormhole which sucks the entire fleet into it and dumps them in the North Pacific in June 1942. Right on top of Admiral Spruance's fleet sailing to relieve Midway Island.
It's a pretty solid, high-concept basis for a novel, essentially a reverse of the 1980s movie The Philadelphia Experiment on a much bigger scale with a dash of Harry Turtledove's Worldwar saga thrown in for good measure. At first it appears that the war is going to be pretty one-sided. As is shown in several engagements, the UN Taskforce possesses weapons so advanced they can obliterate entire Japanese fleets and industrial centres from hundreds of miles away. However, their weapons stocks are finite and the industrial base required to build new ones will take decades to establish. Also, in an interesting move, the incredulity which greets the arrival of the Taskforce is amended somewhat by it being in line with Einstein's own theories (Einstein has a couple of brief but amusing appearances in the novel, and in a funny scene is given a laptop as a gift). Unlike Turtledove, Birmingham tries to keep the famous historical figures restricted to brief cameos, with really only Admiral Yamamoto and Admiral Spruance receiving significant time on the page.
Birmingham's portrait of the world of 2021 is pretty grim, showing a world where the War on Terror has grown in size to endanger the lives of everyone, with suitcase-sized nuclear bombs destroying large chunks of major cities and the world militaries becoming hardened to the point of heartlessness with regards to mass casualties and suffering. Yet he also contrasts this nicely with WWII. WWII weapons may be vastly inferior, but in enormous quantities they maul the Taskforce quite badly on its arrival. And whilst the entire world may be at war, the clearly-delineated lines between good and evil, right and wrong give the people hope for survival and eventual victory, whilst the soldiers from the future are altogether more cynical and downbeat.
This interesting sociological portrait is probably the greatest strength of the novel and is what lifts it above other identikit military thrillers from the Clancy/Brown school of writing. The other thing is Birmingham's clever depiction of futuristic technology. Since the book is only set fourteen years hence, it doesn't go too overboard, although some may feel the use of implants capable of shooting medicine straight into soldiers and sailors at AI command is a little bit more advanced than that. The US fighter jet of choice is a more advanced version of the F-22 Raptor (which has just entered service in real life), whilst the new standard US supercarrier is the George Bush-class (actually, in real life, it's going to be called the Gerald Ford-class, but the novel was written before that decision was made).
Despite Birmingham's technical proficiency and his intriguingly bleak outlook of the future, he suffers from some weaknesses. Whilst the shock the 1942 US miltary feels at fighting alongside female, black, homosexual and Asian officers is perhaps understandable, Birmingham does repeatedly make the point about the period being casually rascist, sexist and homophobic to the point where it starts to get a bit tedious. There are also some leaps in logic in the middle of the book. The first half or so is pretty much entirely devoted to the shock of the Transition (as it is called) and its aftermath and barely covers 24 hours. The second half covers another month or so and ranges over a much vaster area, from Moscow and Berlin to Tokyo to Los Angeles and Brisbane. The transition between the two styles is a little jarring. Given the size of this novel (just shy of 800 pages) compared to the two sequels (450 and 380 pages respectively) one wonders if splitting this book in half to make the change in style work better would have been a better idea.
At heart, this book is an above-average military blockbuster with an interesting SF twist and better-than-normal characters. As the series progresses and moves further away from real history, I suspect the books will get less interesting (as happens with most Turtledove series), but the first book leaves enough cliffhangers and unresolved plot points to make the sequel, Designated Targets, worth a look when Penguin publishes it (presumably at the end of 2007). I'm particularly looking forward to seeing how Britain's Prince Harry - in the novels an SAS Captain in his late 30s - is treated in the sequels, where he apparently plays a bigger role.
Great - Rated 
I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
A major pitfall of this genre is that the author tries to convey his/her anachronistic opinions and sketchy historical knowledge into a story that requires too much suspension of disbelief.
John Birmingham avoids this, dropping a cast of characters from a conceivable 21st century future into a 20th century crucible of war and concentrating on the social aspects as much as the technological. This first book in the series is quite clearly setting the scene and spends quite a lot of time on reactions after the initial plot device.
Unlike some of the other editors here I have no problem with the gender of a small number of characters or their behaviour - it's all very plausible. Incidentally, most of the commanding officers are male; none of the main characters are "written out"; and there are only three books in the TRILOGY.
This book kept me reading all the way through. The attention to detail and occasional joke poking fun at the less well-written books in the same part of the bookshop made it all the more enjoyable.
Question is... where are the other books in this series? They've been printed before but they don't seem to be available now...
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