This post has been grappled by the…
…eh, screw it.
Unless Turtledove wusses out, I don’t see how this timeline won’t remain a pretty nasty one (as compared to our own) even after the inevitable crushing defeat of the Confederacy. Several characters comment in this latest installment about the “What do we do after we’ve won the war?” question. The thing is, there’s no country, like the real-world USA, which has remained aloof enough from the fighting to emerge as a not only strong but relatively unscathed power able and willing to impose a magnanimous peace (or at least impose a magnanimous peace on Japan and in Western Europe; the peace imposed in Eastern Europe by Stalin was much more the sort of conqueror’s peace people on the “Southern Victory” timeline seem to believe in). I really can’t see the USA coming up with a “Marshall Plan” for the CSA–there’s nothing in the history of these peoples to indicate they’ve learned about the wisdom of being magnanimous victors, and I would frankly find it unconvincing if peace and justice and understanding just suddenly break out after this latest round, without something more to set the conditions for it.
All of which makes me wonder if he’ll continue the timeline after this war is over, and what his world will look like if he does. I can’t really see what anaogies he’ll be able to draw between his post-war world and anything in the real world post-World War II–unless maybe he sets up the USA as the USSR and the CSA, Canada/Newfoundland, Quebec, and maybe Mexico as Eastern Europe.
Liberia as Israel comes to mind.
That is, of course, if he doesn’t pull a Shamalan and…
Let the CSA and/or the Brits develop The Bomb first, and, if not giving them the means to end the war, at least sending the world into a nuclear death spiral. (Or an incredibly tense stalemate, made under the pain of continental destruction.)
Remember, in this timeline, the US is really irredentist. I think, the US wins, you’re going to see the US annex the Confederacy, and keep the whole thing under martial law and pretty brutal occupation for at least a generation, using the tools it learned in Utah and Canada. Which means it will probably need to withdraw from Canada to free up troops.
Yeah, it’ll be something like that. Though I could see setting up ‘homelands’ in the CSA for the surviving black population and giving them their freedom there. Like setting them up in Alabama and Mississippi (or maybe Louisiana!) as independent territories or something.
I also think the Japanese sudden withdrawal from the eastern Pacific gives Turtledove room for another series. It’s clear that the Japanese are going to take SE Asia from Britain and France. That means Churchill will be looking to get them back and ally with the US if possible.
OK, I’m 350 pages in, and here’s a question that’s been bothering me for the last 2 books: George S. Patton, Jr. Turtledove has him fighting for the Confederates, which, given his family’s military history would seem appropriate, but (our timeline)George was born in California, and his mother was a Californian. It’s unlikely that George Smith Patton, Sr would have married Ruth Wilson in the alternate timeline of the How Few Remain series. So, is this an anomaly, or is the George S Patton Jr. in these books the son of George Smith Patton, Sr and another woman, and thus a different man altogether?
Oh, yea, and who is the MacArthur who keeps fucking up in Virginia?
I would suspect that ‘Donald’ MacArthur is a close analog of Douglas. For whatever reason Turtledove changed his name and attributed many of Douglas’ mannerisms and such to the ‘Donald’ character. So we have to postulate that the same person was named for a different purpose in Timeline 191.
As for Patton it has to be chalked up to one of Turtledove’s astounding coincidences that, if it’s another person with Patton’s name they’re close to being identical characters.
I finished the book. I have a few questions that I’ve never been able to find satisfactory answers to.
In this timeline, why did the Russian Revolution fail? I can’t understand why Germany defeating Russia even worse than in our timeline would prevent the Czar’s abdication, and I can’t understand how the Bolsheviks would lose the Civil War when they had even less to fight (since the Entente has no soldiers to assist the White Army with, and the Americans have no desire to). Can anyone explain this to me?
No Lenin delivered to Finland station like a smallpox virus in a sealed railroad car would be my guess.
In the altered timeline the winning Germans have no need to inflict Lenin to cause chaos in Tsarist Russia, rather I imagine they want to prop up the Tsarists.
Also, regarding Russia, the revolution happens sooner in the books than it does in the real timeline. The revolution starts after Nicholas is assassinated by socialists in 1916, and the White cause is immediately taken up by his brother Michael. Since the war hadn’t been going on for as long, it’s possible that the Tsarist cause had more support and was thereby stronger.
Colonel Lemur considered what Captain Amazing had said, then nodded reluctantly. But if General Turtledove wasn’t willing to provide his subordinates a better explanation they could only guess at the answer.
Finished last night. A few comments:
(1) I felt that the switch in momentum was jarring. At the end of the previous book, the confederates were pretty much always better at everything, had the upper hand in all ways, and then barely barely barely got Morrel-ed. From page one of this book, everyone’s commenting about how the US has more people, more planes, better tanks, etc. Is that a realistic analogue to real history?
(2) I am SO SICK of “…and how the negroes would have acted if they hadn’t been treated the way they did never even crossed his mind”, and the equivalent.
(3) There were two obvious cameos I noticed and remembered: Fidel Castro and Woodward and Bernstein (along with Tricky Dick?). There were a few other things tossed in that sounded like they had to be cameos: the dancer in the show Carsten seens in New York… Peggy June Lee, or something like that; and some guy named Leroy whose nicname is “Duke”. Thoughts?
(4) I agree that a very interesting question is “what happens next”? Assuming the US wins, as seems nearly certain now (although I was strongly speculating that the last chapter would be professor FitzWhatever telling Featherston that the nukes were ready, if only because otherwise there wouldn’t be enough war left to fill another book), what do they do? What can they do? What should they do? And what will the next book focus on? The last days in the bunker? The Nuremberg trials? Jefferson Pnikard needs to face up to his crimes, not to mention Jake and Ferdie.
(5) I love the word “flabble”.
And I’m SO SICK of constantly being reminded that Confederate tobacco is far, far better than Union tobacco and that Union rations are far, far better than Confederate rations. Hey, Harry, the point’s been made, m’kay?
Finished it a few days ago! Mr. Rilch went through it at an alarming rate, but I was savoring every word like it was Dove chocolate.
Overall, I liked it, although it wasn’t perfect. The battle scenes were riveting, and I liked the tighter narrative, with more scenes being viewed from both sides. Turtledove was a pretty big tease, though, with a mention in almost every chapter that the bomb race is crucial, and both sides feel like they’re losing, and OMG we’ve got to build it before they do, and we’re getting there we’re getting there but can we be fast enough?! And then in the last scene, Featherston launches…what, stink bombs? Definitely a whimper, not a bang.
Not sure why Enos Jr. is on Carsten’s ship, unless something way important is going to happen there in the next installment. Rather makes me think Carsten’s days may be numbered. And the new first officer on the Josephus Daniels reminds me of the joke about the XO who, on meeting a new ensign, grumbles, “Well, I guess they decided to send the fool of the family to sea!” “Oh, no, sir,” says the ensign. “That custom has stopped since your time.”
And I’m not sure why it was such a huge deal that Jr. remembered meeting Carsten, unless he’s later going to further remember that it was after that convo that Sylvia made her decision to shoot Kimball. Also, a sidenote: I reread that scene, and before Carsten meets the Enos family on Boston Common, he first visits a whorehouse, where he is served by an Italian woman named Isabella. I must not have picked up on that the first time, that this was Sylvia’s friend from one of her factory jobs, who slept with the boss because she was a lonely widow, and was aware that this was where she might end up. And she did. 
I’m getting a bit weary of O’Doull’s scenes. Let’s have a smoke and talk philosophically. Puff, puff, war sucks, here comes another wounded guy who struggles against the ether cone, war sucks. We GET it already.
OTOH, Dover is a great addition! I hope, though, that he’s not another Gordon McSweeney: someone who’s just too darn good at what he does to live.
And I like Cassius, too. Although I’m not sure what the point is of having two guerilla POVs. I’d thought that would be made redundant by Moss stealing a plane. No such luck. Jorge Rodriguez was cool as well, and it’s good to have a CSA character on the front lines again. There’s a definite imbalance between the CSA and USA: Professor, your bias is showing.
I’m disappointed that Featherston is not coming unglued as I’d hoped he would be. In fact, he’s become a rather uninteresting character. But I was impressed by the scene where he visits the front and asks very pertinent questions of the officers. He’s a darn good soldier. Hitler was not a good soldier, which is why the dumbass tried to fight a war on two fronts. Glad to see there’s some deviation from the real-world parallel.
I’'ll give Grimes props for taking his first bullet like a man, and for getting an idea that was impresssive enough to be passed all the way up to Philadelphia. Still, we never got a followup on that, I don’t think. And I’m sad that we probably won’t be seeing Reisen again. He and Grimes were such a total Willie and Joe! And of course, before Grimes was wounded, they just had to be deployed in Rosenfeld. Poor Alec Pomeroy, who is presumably now an orphan.
Is it me, or did Morell seem a teeny bit petulant about Pound becoming a tank commander?
Sucks that Flora had to lose her friend, and her son got drafted. Sucks more Pinkard and co. got out of town one step ahead of Dowling. Sucks even more that Scipio had to die. Still, it had been set up that the men in the camps were on even shorter time than the women, so it wouldn’t have been realistic for him to survive. But I had to brood for about half an hour after I read that scene. At least Hip gave him a little bit of happiness first.
Is the portrayal of Patton at all accurate, or just Turtledove’s invention? I would give props to Potter for calling his bluff, but it’s already been established that he’s impossible to intimidate. But whatever happened to his and Forrest’s plot against Jake?
Real-world references: Well, I loved the subtle Tolkien reference, of course! Woodward and Bernstein scanning a government office for listening devices was cool, apart from the fact that I think they’re the wrong age to have been there. However, it didn’t have to be pounded home as hard as it was. And bringing Nixon into it was going way too far. If Turtledove wanted to do a Nixon reference, he should have been the guy Grimes lost so much money to in poker.
All in all, I enjoyed it a lot, but I’m not awaiting the next installment as fervently as I was this one, because I don’t know where Turtledove is going with this. Or how he can go anywhere with it, for that matter. But we’ll see. Probably a full-bore press into Atlanta.
I recieved the book on July 27th, but missed this thread as I was on vacation reading the book! I thouroghly enjoyed it. I’m so used to Turtledove’s constantly repeating his charator’s quirks that I just kind of ignore them, I’ve long ago given up on maybe him thinking that we’d remember the damn things.
Anyway, I can’t see the CSA getting the bomb first because that would just keep the story repeating itself for another cycle. I think he’s a better storyteller than that, at least, I hope he is. Maybe Germany will be first, with no holocaust and no Hitler don’t they have the better scientists? They might drop one on London and that may lead to a cold war between the USA and the CSA, or not.
The next book I read was his Pearl Harbor redux, End Of The Beginning, so my alternate history cup was running over.
At one time, Turtledove would have been the first to agree with you.
Turtledove used to be a regular poster in an online SF forum I was also a member of. He posted that one of the things he disliked about other writers’ alternate history novels was their use of parallel characters; Turtledove said that if history was different, the people would be different. And to cap off that discussion, he used George Patton as an example of somebody who wouldn’t have existed if the Confederacy had won the Civil War and history was different. (Patton’s father’s family was from Virginia and fought for the Confederacy. After they lost the war, the family moved to California to start over and this was where Patton’s father eventually met Patton’s mother.)
Early in his series, Turtledove used a number of actual historical characters like Custer, Lincoln, and Douglass. He justified this because they already existed before his historical departure date of 1862. As the years in the series passed, you saw fewer historical characters and more fictional characters. Turtledove at one point said that Admiral George Dewey would be the last real person to appear in the series.
I’m almost finished with this book, but I just realized something, after what, 7-8 books into the series.
Irving Morrell. Writes a book about armored warfare. Faces off against Patton. Who reads his book about armored warfare. :smack: :smack: :smack:
I can’t believe I missed this for so long. It’s not exactly a subtle name-change, it’s as blatant as the Engels Brothers, but I guess it was subtle enough.
“You sonovabitch, I read your book!”
Since you’ve brought it up, I’ll add two more real-world references. Someone, I forget who except that it was a CSA character, quoted Finley Peter Dunne. “Trust everybody, but cut the cards.” I was mildly surprised that a Confederate would have heard this quote from a Chicago columnist, but I love Dunne, so who cares? 
Also, the password, when O’Doull is skeptical of the soldier who tells him the medics have to break camp, is “Oh, Sequoyah!” Glad to see R&H still exist in this timeline, too.
