"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."
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.
The first book of The Milkweed Triptych. Followed by The Coldest War.
Bitter Seeds provides examples of the following tropes
- Awesome, but Impractical: The Nazis in charge of the psychics project are focused on the more flashy psychics than 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 sending intangible Klaus, they send out the pyrokinetic Reinhardt to make the defector spontaneously combust in the middle of a crowded hotel bar, despite it being a covert mission.
- Badass Normal: Raybould Marsh has no powers but finds himself up against those who do, and survives.
- 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.
- Blood Magic: The British warlocks have to shed blood every time they summon the Eidolons, Eldritch Abominations that find human life abhorrent and so are attracted to the spilling of blood. It takes more and more blood to summon them each time, until British Intelligence are forced to commit major acts of sabotage against their own citizens (such as blowing up passenger trains and air raid shelters) to keep the supernatural war effort going. Worse, the more blood is spilled, the more information the Eidolons have on the nature of humanity, a necessary precursor to exterminating us.
- Body Horror: Psychic powers require giant WWII-era batteries wired directly into your brain to fuel them.
- Brother–Sister Team: Ostensibly Gretel and Klaus, but thanks to her precognition he's always responding to her gambits rather than them working together.
- The Chessmaster: Gretel. A sociopath with perfect precognition. It's not till the third novel that we discover just how far ahead she's looking.
- 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 before she was taken in by Doctor von Westarp.
- Cool vs. Awesome: Battery-powered Nazi psychics vs British warlocks summoning Eldritch Abominations.
- Downer Ending: The book ends with Marsh's wife pregnant with an unholy child, and the British government taking children and putting them in total isolation to turn them into warlocks.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Eidolons. They're so alien that they find our existence impossible and very much want to wipe us out.
- EMP: Pixies, designed by the British to knock out the batteries used by the psychic soldiers. In the short story "What Doctor Gottlieb Saw" Gretel creates an improvised EMP device by sabotaging a diesel generator, in order to murder one of the other psychics at the moment he's using his intangible powers.
- Fingore:
- When Will mucks up a negotiation, Marsh has to cut off one of his fingers with garden shears to appease the Eidolons.
- Before the events of the novel, Klaus had his fingertips stuck inside a granite wall when he lost concentration, and had to have them amputated with a bone saw.
- Ghostapo: The Götterelektrongruppe 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.
- Got Volunteered: After Klaus breaks Gretel out of the Admiralty, the British kill two birds with one stone by recruiting everyone who saw him use his supernatural powers into the new section set up to combat them, which at the time was short of recruits.
- Innocent Flower Girl: Subverted; Gretel likes to gather wildflowers, but it's only a sociopathic facade.
- Intangibility: Klaus' Willenskräfte. He can use it as long as he can hold his breath but doesn't have to worry about falling through the floor.
- Invisible Introvert: Heike has the power of invisibility, and is easily the quietest of Dr Von Westarp's "children"; all of the Götterelektrongruppe have been mentally warped by the surgery and training used to give them their powers, but where the others are psychopaths, narcissists, hopelessly traumatized, or just brain-damaged, Heike is simply asocial and uncommunicative. She's so withdrawn that almost none of the other members of the Götterelektrongruppe notice that she's grappling with serious depression until she commits suicide; the only one of them who did notice is Greta, and that's only because she was the one encouraging Heike to kill herself.
- I Love the Dead: Reinhardt is so obsessed with Heike he has sex with her corpse after she is Driven to Suicide.
- Invisibility: Heike's superpower.
- Kill All Humans: The ultimate aim of the Eidolons, as the mere existence of our form of life is abhorrent to them.
- Killed to Uphold the Masquerade: A British officer is executed on trumped-up charges of espionage and sedition because he's spreading rumors of what's going on.
- Language of Magic: Knowledge of Enochian is required to negotiate with the Eidolons once summoned.
- Mad Scientist: Doctor Von Westarp. First the amoral version, but he later suffers Sanity Slippage as well, failing to get dressed while thinking he's in uniform.
- 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. The group efforts are more effective when clearing a path through snowfields and the Ardennes forest.
- One Person, One Power: Each child gets one power and one power only.
- Playing with Fire: Reinhardt is a mean, bullying pyrokinetic.
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: The means by which the Enochian lexicon was derived; children were raised in isolation from any other language, and this was what they started speaking.
- Prophecy Twist: Gretel predicts that Reinhardt will get everything he wants. He gets Heike (after she's dead), and gets to use his powers in a glorious Last Stand only to suffer How the Mighty Have Fallen in the next novel.
- Psychic Powers: The Willenskräfte wielded by the children. Pyrokinesis, telekinesis, phase-shifting, invisibility and, scariest of all, decades-range precognition.
- Race Against the Clock: Doctor Gottlieb has one day to prove that a test subject's death wasn't accidental (the time it takes for Doctor Von Westarp to return from Berlin) or he'll be executed as The Scapegoat.
- Summon Magic: The British Warlocks can summon the Eidolons. Then the negotiations begin, and bad things will happen if you can't deliver.
- Super-Soldier: The Reichsbehörd.
- Teleporters and Transporters: Marsh figures out how to get the Eidolons to do this for them. Unfortunately the Eidolons wait till he's in a serious fix, then make him promise the soul of a child in exchange for getting him out of it.
- Tested on Humans: A group of concentration camp inmates are used for a demonstration for Heinrich Himmler.
