Inspired by a thread posted by someone wondering whether Turtledove would ever finish his series about an alternative universe where the Confederacy won the Civil War, I sorta briefly highjacked the thread to post some quibbles I had with choices Turtledove made in this series. After I did that, I wondered if anybody else had any problems with the choices he made in this or any other of his alternate history series. If you do, please respond to this thread. I’d like to get a good history debate started.
One of the things I don’t like about the Southern Victorious series is that we know the South will lose WWII, so it kind of ruins the series for me…yet I couldn’t put the book down.
I don’t like the way he’s going out of his way to have Featherston act like Hitler. In the earlier books, he is shown as, yes, a driven man, but one that has some sense about him. The whole Pittsburg debacle just seemed to forced.
I too hope this thread takes off. I’d love to debate stuff that never happened.
For some odd reason, my favorite character is Jefferson Pinkard.
Jefferson Pinkard is a great character.
Doesn’t it bother you that there are no famous authors on either side of the Mason-Dixon line in these books? And that the famous authors that existed in our world like Hemingway and Twain aren’t authors in this world? There seems to be no popular entertainment other than newspapers and radio in this world. As long as there have been people there have been writers.
OMG There are more books!? I only read Guns of the South. I guess I’ve been kinda busy!
GotS is a standalone book.
The series in question takes the same premise, but is pure alt. history, not time travel SF.
How Few Remain is the first in the series.
Actually the one time I really thought Turtledove got something wrong was while I was reading his “World in the Darkness” books. For those who haven’t read it, it’s a fantasy series based on replaying the events of World War II. There are a number of obvious parallels, and I happen to have been enthralled by the tropical, black, desert-dwelling Finns. 
But the thing that bothered me was:
When the Algavarians(sp?) started their death camps for the Kaunians, it was being done with an actual military purpose in mind. One that I agree is pretty reprehensible, but at least there was more of a benefit to the deaths there than there was with the Final Solution. I’m not saying it doesn’t fit with the world that he’d made, just that it wasn’t as good a parallel as many. It was more rational, to be honest, than the history he’d been using for inspiration had been.
Sam Clemens (who in this timeline was a newspaper editor in San Francisco) appears as a PoV character in How Few Remain.
The thing that disappoints me the most is the appearance of George Patton. In his earlier books Turtledove went out of his way to only use historical characters he felt would plausibly exist in an altered timeline. In How Few Remain, set less than twenty years after the “divergence point”, this was no problem. Then in the Great War series, set fifty years after the DP, you saw only a handful of historical characters.
Turtledove has commented on this. He says that once history changed, people would also change. Fifty years after a major change like a Confederate victory, virtually every American being born would be different and nobody recognizable from real history would exist. As an example of this, Turtledove specifically named George Patton, whose father left Virginia after the Civil War to move to California where he met Patton’s mother. In his timeline, the couple wouldn’t have met and Patton wouldn’t exist.
But then as the series moved on, Turtledove abandoned this idea. Instead of historical characters disappearing, they became more frequent. And in the most recent books, George Patton has appeared as a Confederate armor commander.
I don’t think the rule itself was as necessary as Turtledove said. But anytime an author breaks his own self-imposed rules, the work suffers. When authors start “cheating” in one way they usually start short-changing the book in others as well. No author can produce good work if he doesn’t have respect for his own work.
I read “How Few Remain”, Turtledove’s story about the setting of the imagined second Civil War (ie the Union penned in by the South and by Canada) and was struck by how creative the story’s basis was and how badly it played out. According to Turtledove none of the Union officials could walk and chew gum at the same time. They rolled snake-eyes every single time, while the Confederacy got every break in the book. If a Union official dropped his buttered bread it was damned sure going to fall butter side down every single time. I found this annoying and unrealistic.
The only problem with that complaint, zamboniracer, is that I found the book, while uninspired, completely believable. For example, in our history, this was the time when the US Navy, the force that had the first purpose-built steam powered ironclad ship (not simply a steam frigate, which relied on wind as primary motive power, like both the French Gloire and English Warrior.) had gone back to a complete wind powered fleet. There were orders from the uniformed head of the Navy, at the time, that to light off the boilers and use the steam plants, there had to be a logged emergency, ferchrisakes. And that a board would sit on any use of the steam engines.
Certainly, with the US Civil war lost so quickly, all of the Union generals that most people will name, never achieved anything. Grant, Sherman, and others were all new men, raised up by Lincoln agains the advice of his cabinet, more often than not. Without the long-dragging war that the Civil War became, I found it completely believable that the tradition of McClellan would infuse the US Army. Just as the Navy would continue to be the most ‘traditional’ of all the navies of the world.
In my not so humble opinion, that would be a formula for just the sort of return engagement that Turtledove portrayed in How Few Remain.
My problems with the book was that it was about as interesting as watching tofu dry. Except for where Lincoln’s political conversion happened. Hell, he bombed the BLEEP out of the city I live in, and I still didn’t care.
It would have been interesting to know how Wilson became president of the CSA in this alternate timeline. Now, Wilson isn’t an impossibility like Patton. He was born before the Civil War in Virginia to Ohio-born Virginian parents, so the altered timeline wouldn’t have prevented his birth. But his professional career would have been very different. In real life, after getting his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University (in Baltimore), he went to teach Political Science at Princeton, and then worked his way up the academic ladder to become President of Princeton, and then jumped from there to Governor of New Jersey, and then from there to President of the US. Obviously, that wouldn’t have happened in the new timeline.
Tied in with his career is the career of another man, John McReynolds, who was, in the original timeline, a US Supreme Court justice, and in this timeline, Chief Justice of the Confederate Supreme Court. McReynolds was born in 1863 in Kentucky, and, after getting his law degree, practiced law in Nashville, Tennessee. When Teddy Roosevelt became president, he made McReynolds Assistant Attorney General, where McReynolds became known as a “trustbuster”. When Wilson became president, based on McReynold’s reputation, he made him Attorney General. Unfortunately, McReynolds was abrasive and unpleasant, and he and Wilson couldn’t stand each other, so, when a Supreme Court seat opened up, Wilson appointed McReynolds to the court. In the alternate timeline, how did he get there?
I honestly don’t think he put much thought into the “Wilson as president of the South” idea. He practically stole the idea from MacKinlay Kantor’s If The South Won The Civil War. He even says so in the introduction of the book. I’m paraphrasing greatly, having it been years since I’ve read it, but he said something to the tune of “It seemed so plausible, that I used the idea in my own series.”
I highly suggest If The South Won The Civil War. It’s a short book, only took me about 2 hours to read, but entertaining nonetheless.
One thing that bugged me, slightly, after the Great War…
When Custer is talking about conquered Canada, he mentioned Newfoundland.
Which didn’t join Canada until 1949, in the real world, and there’s no indication given that it happened any earlier here, or that it was connected to Canada by the American occupying forces.