I remember joining the Science Fiction Book Club in 1985 and choosing this as one of my selections, mainly on the basis of its being advertised as an alternate history novel.
So how does it stack up when re-read more than 30 years later ?
'Elleander Morning' (278 pp) was published in 1984 in hardcover by St Martin's / Marek. A mass market paperback edition was released in the U.S. in 1985 by Tor Books, and in the UK, by Orbit / Futura.
Jerry Yulsman (1924 - 1999) was a freelance photographer, who wrote several guides and manuals on the topic. In addition to 'Elleander Morning', he wrote a novel, 'The Last Liberator', about the Ploesti bombing raid of World War II, based on his own personal experience of the raid as a crewman aboard a US Army Air Force plane. Yulsman also apparently may have written a 1971 nonfiction book (as 'Jerry Yulsmon'), titled 'Oh, Copenhagen !', about 'the new Danish pornography'.
The book is set in 1983, only it's not 'our' 1983. It's a world in which the Second World War never happened; Soviet Russia was defeated by a multinational coalition in 1953; and the Germans were the first to detonate an atomic bomb (in Antarctica, in 1980).
A young American woman named Lesley Morning learns that her father - from whom she had been estranged - has died, and travels to London to handle his estate. There she is given a curious set of books that belonged to her grandmother, a woman named Elleander Morning.
One of the books is a privately-printed pornographic memoir of a Victorian gentleman. The other is the two-volume Time-Life History of the Second World War, copyrighted 1970.
Perusing the pages of the History of the Second World War leaves Lesley Morning stunned and horrified. Is the book a hoax ? If so, it's one of the most elaborate hoaxes ever perpetrated.
As Lesley Morning sets out to discover the truth behind a war that never took place, the impact of the books sets in motion events that will come to threaten the security and safety of the entire world..............
'Elleander Morning' is a very readable book, with most of the chapters - which alternate between two different timelines - short and straightforward. The plot unfolds without much in the way of contrivances.
However, as a 'science fiction' book, it's something of a middling effort. The means by which an alternate timeline comes to place owes less to a scientific explanation, and more to the rather gimmicky mechanisms that are found in the time travel novels of Jack Finney. There also is quite a bit of semi-pornographic content (Yulsman apparently wrote a number of Sleaze novels under a pseudonym) that doesn't contribute all that much to the novel, but serves to pad the page count.
As well, author Yulsman seems to have been more intent on making 'Elleander Morning' a romance novel with sci-fi trappings, rather than a sci-fi novel with a romantic theme. In this regard it can be argued that 'Elleander Morning' paved the way for the supernatural and fantasy romance genres that are so prominent nowadays.
Summing up, if you like a sci-fi novel with a heavier than normal melodramatic content, then you may like 'Elleander Morning'.
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