In The Guns of the South Harry Turtledove tells the story of an alternate history of the US Civil War. Time travelers from South Africa come from 2014 bearing AK-47s. They want the South to win so that many nasty things can happen to Black people.
By the end of the book, the South has won, Lee is president and the South Africans have been mostly rounded up. The Southerners do not like the idea they have been used as a “cat’s paw.”
The time travelers have left behind an unknown number of visitors, most of whom are captured, thousands of AKs, computers, history books and other stuff. Tons of stuff.
OK, so it is time to start thinking about NaNoWriMo. How would a sequel play out? Presume no more time travelers arrive. Presume (and this is key) that so much future stuff has been displaced in time that it cannot be kept a secret.
As I see it, Lee calls a conference of the US, CS and the British. They agree to share the future stuff in order to ensure the future is even brighter for the English Speaking peoples than it is in our time line. I like the idea, but is seems polyannaish. We need a snake in the garden, a source of conflict.
The idea is silly, that is not the issue. Would it make a good story? What would be a good source of conflict? How would such a history play out, you think?
Among all the computer equipment, someone finds a disk with an interesting-looking label, pops it in, is amused by the Elf Bowling game, shares it among his buddies, the disk is copied… then on January 5, 1870, the dreams of a global utopia come to a screeching halt because nobody wants to wish Joshi a happy birthday.
I dunno. I think your premise is flawed. Lee explicitly states that his government will never share that knowledge. His reasoning is thus:
The south only won because of the advantages the AK-47 gave them (with some other items like k-rations to a small degree).
The south is still largely behind in manufacturing and their industrial base.
The best source of advanced tech and quick growth is the minds of the captured AWB men.
The USA still hates the CSA and wouldn’t mind another round.
Most ominously, at the end, the north has begun producing their own AK-47s in northern factories for use against the Canadians and British troops in the northern war.
Put those facts together and there’s one hell of an incentive to keep it quiet. So I don’t think it would happen during Lee’s term in office.
But I would speculate that the south would make strong advances in these areas: Medicine, Engineering, and Management Theory. All of those would help a lot. Heck, just having 1870s doctors learning 21st century medicine would be a great leap forward.
OK, try this: During his term Lee promotes the expansion of Washington University in Lexington, Virginia. Along with scholars such as the south can gather he connects the most educated of the Rivington men and commences the promotion of a strong higher educations system designed to bring the advantages of the future to the CSA through the dissemination of their knowledge into the educated classes. Within 20 years this makes the CSA the intellectual center of the western world.
Meanwhile, James Longstreet succeeds Lee as President of the CSA and uses political manuvering to isolate the USA and promote closer ties with Great Britain. Britain, hoping to get Canada back continues a policy of shutting down US merchant shipping and tried to draw the US into a naval war that it can’t win.
IIRC, the book has one of the worst endings I have ever read. Completely impossible given the political climate. The South would have seceded from the CSA.
Though Lee works to share the technology equally, Britain’s closer ties with the Confederacy enable their scientific luminaries to better exploit the knowledge, leading to a greatly accelerated British Industrial Revolution.
Victorian Era class struggle is exacerbated, and cultural osmosis results in a peculiar new working-class musical genre, heavily informed by both British and Confederate folk and ethnic traditions, which gains explosive popularity among the young and disenfranchised on both sides of the Atlantic. Electric sound recording and wireless transmission technology allow this new style to become an industry unto itself, characterized by flamboyantly experimental dress and boundary-transgressing lifestyle choices.
Ultimately, a quartet of British musicians travel to the CSA and establish a pastoral community in a forested area outside Little Rock, Arkansas (the Confederate flashpoint of the new musical culture). They are accompanied by a hybrid human-insect bodyguard, a product of accelerated British biological science, who possesses the extraordinary ability to generate bio-electric power and illumination.
Their presence is discovered by Mary Todd Lincoln, who swears vengeance on the Confederacy and its British allies. To crush the hopes of these musicians and their ideals, she travels to Little Rock, where she lives with her henchmen inside a giant jukebox.
Thank you Terrifel for giving this matter the weighty and scholarly attention it deserves.
The ting is keeping the Covington people is not an option. There are too many of them. Further, I have never encountered an alternative history that dealt with the idea of the whole world knowing the secret. That is the (only perhaps) original idea in my head at the moment.
What would happen to society if we had a blueprint for the future. Would that spoil the fun? Would the politicians be able to lead us into a more perfect future? What would such a future look like? Also, how soon would it arrive? 1915 stuff by 1890?
No problem. I try to be ready with a helping hand; a friend indeed, should you ever need.
I hope at the very least you make use of Mary Todd Lincoln in some capacity. She was possibly the most fascinating woman of the Civil War era. Her middle name means “death.” Among her many skills, she was able to slay a man with a mere touch using her deadly Quivering Palm attack, and was completely immune to all known types of snake venom. Also, she was a stone babe.
Probably more like 1955 stuff by 1890, at least as far as technology and industry are concerned; a quarter-century is plenty of time for the engineers of the era to exploit the information. Why bother with the Wright flyer when you have the knowledge to build a B-50 Superfortress? Even a general history of scientific accomplishments would likely result in massive advances in physics, chemistry, medicine, agriculture, materials science, etc.
Culturally and economically, it would probably be a different story. The time travelers’ “blueprint for the future” necessarily incorporates the fact that the slave economy of the South is due to fail, and any technological advances will only hasten that collapse. Confederate leaders would need to convince people to look embrace a forward-looking industrial society, rather than cling to the outdated agrarian tradition. It would take a gifted, charismatic leader to institute such changes… someone with uncanny powers of persuasion and the ability to rally the spirit of a nation. Someone like Mary Todd Lincoln.
The interlopers would certainly be able to explain that B-29s were possible, but almost certainly would be unable to explain how to build one. Vacuum tubes for example would only be hinted out. Is it possible to just straight to transistors? And so on.
Engineers working on such problems would at least have the benefit of knowing that such things are possible, which is a huge advantage in itself. Is powered flight an achievable goal? Can a machine be made to calculate automatically? Can moldable plastic materials be produced that are more versatile than cellulose?
If that future swag contains anything like a college-level text in physics or chemistry, then the sky’s the limit.
