Contributor Comments

Dale Speirs: Welcome to the APA. So, we now have a Canadian perspective as well as Brazilian, English, and Australian ones in POD. I saw nothing to complain about in your first contribution. I’m afraid I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to Canadian history. I am vaguely aware of the Metis and their rebellion. I have also occasionally just kind of shaken my head about the folly of designing a best-in-the-world fighter plane, then not only canceling it, but also quickly making it nearly impossible to reverse that bad decision. I’m looking forward to seeing more of your material.

Andrew Goldstein: Thanks for the reviews. The semi-AH about the "Lost Genius of English Architecture" sounds like fun. I also enjoyed your speculations on comic-book history. I was never interested in the super-hero type comic books as I was growing up but I discovered comics aimed at grownups when I was in college, and I’ve always thought that the format has enormous potential. Unfortunately, attitudes toward it as being inherently a child’s medium are very deep-rooted. By the way, I find it appalling how difficult it is to quickly get across the concept that a video or a comic is aimed at people with a certain amount of life experience but is not necessarily pornographic and may in fact have no sexual content at all. You say ‘for adults’ and people think ‘pornographic’. You say ‘for mature audiences’ and people think ‘porno’. You say, for people over 18, and people still think ‘porno’. Oh well. Hopefully you are no longer on "tenterhooks" if you ever were about my American Indian survival ideas. I hope you enjoyed them. If you like alternate North Americas, you may enjoy my Spanish South Carolina scenario in this issue. I have to admit that I am a little disappointed in it. I thought it would lead somewhere a bit more interesting.

 

David L. Freitag: I like your idea of the south staying in the union and trying to combat Lincoln within the system. It might even work if some of the southern states less eager to secede stayed in and just the first few states seceded. What if a block of states including Virginia remained in the union but refused to allow their territory to be used for actions against their former countrymen. That might give Lincoln fits. The states involved would be on a tightrope, but if they constituted a large enough and solid enough block both sides might be reluctant to push them too far. The option of a kind of armed neutrality might be very attractive to the governments of some of the bitterly split border states, though given the passions involved within the states it would be very difficult to maintain. I suspect that Abraham Gubler’s ‘Carthage and Rome’ comments were intended for me. Good point on the fact that northern Europe had very little attraction for Arabs. I’m glad you enjoyed Bat Out Of Hell. I share your discomfort at the speed at which I have Tony get his claws into Anna. I think it would happen given the way I view the two personalities, but I am a little uneasy about it. My current revision of BOOH uses something similar to your idea of having Tony’s victims play a role in stitching Exchange and BOOH together. I didn’t name Cuba because I thought naming it might make the story obsolete before it needed to be. Name Cuba and if Castro dies and/or his regime crumbles the story is dated. Leave the island unnamed and if that happens readers can associate the story with another island and dictator or even a made up one. That’s the idea anyway.

As you anticipated, I am a little disappointed that you haven’t invented an exotic ecology for Kasyada yet. If I got you started thinking about doing one I’m glad. It sounds like it could be fun. I’m trying to recall if you’ve done anything with Kasyada’s plate tectonics yet. If you haven’t, that may give you some clues as to the fauna. An all-monotreme mammal fauna would be cool. If you want to get really exotic, you might want to look at a group of small crocodiles (of all things) in Africa toward the end of the dinosaur era. They had developed mammal-like teeth, and presumably habits. There was a fairly extensive range of species, including some whose teeth indicate vegetarian habits. The teeth looked so much like mammal teeth that they were classified as belonging to some otherwise unknown group of mammals for many years until someone found more extensive fossils and realized what they really were.

Andrew Schneider: I know this isn’t going to be really helpful, but I’m afraid I don’t like the current version of The Ides of March quite as much as I did the original. I think you may have cut a bit too much, though I understand the motivation. It is very hard to sell a story as long as the original version as a newcomer. I’m afraid that’s been the story of my writing life.

Ian Montgomery: I tend to agree with you on the fact that war is not always or even usually an economically stimulating thing. It would be a very challenging but interesting thing to do a scenario with World War II delayed or avoided altogether and try to predict the history of technological advances without the war.  See my Brainstorming Section for a more in-depth discussion.

I’m interested in the economic aspects of your Atomic League time-line. I wonder how far back one would have to go to avoid the Great Depression or make it relatively short and harmless. I suspect that it would take a shorter World War I or a more enlightened peace settlement to avoid it entirely, but smarter US economic policy might have kept it from being as bad as it was. Maybe something off the wall could have intervened to shorten it. Some of the big Brazilian gold deposits get discovered in 1930? Spain gets into civil war in 1930 instead of 1936 and is forced to spend its gold reserves (second largest in the world at the time I believe)? Either one pumps some additional liquidity into the system. I don't have the slightest idea if it would be enough. That probably depends partly on the psychological impact the new liquidity has.

I suppose you could have the Rif War in Morocco go a bit differently, so that Spain has to spend its gold on fighting there. It wouldn’t have to last too much longer before Hitler could be sticking his fingers in that situation. The Rif war involved both the Spanish and French parts of Morocco, so if it continued France would be getting drained financially on the one hand, but would be getting combat experience for its troops on the other. How useful that experience would prove in World War II is kind of questionable. The equipment and training needed for a guerilla war is not at all the same as that needed for a modern European war. Chances are the French army would have invested heavily in tankettes and planes suitable for colonial operations like the Italians did and would have been even weaker in World War II.

In regard to your comments to Craig Neumeir on whether Reagan intended to drive the Soviets to bankruptcy by his military buildup or just got lucky: It was an open secret that Reagan viewed the Soviet economy as the Soviets’ weak spot early on. I remember reading in an issue of the Kiplinger report in the first year of his administration that Reagan’s policy toward the Soviets was to reduce their ability to cause mischief by crunching them economically. I suspect that he honestly believed that they were a military threat, and the military buildup was partly to keep them from lashing out militarily when their economy weakened. From what I’ve seen, the Star Wars program was a mixture of a genuine effort to defend the United States against nuclear attack and a disinformation campaign intended to keep the Soviets from doing something rash while the Reagan buildup was taking place. Some specific aspects of it were definitely intended to get the Soviets to spend scarce resources on areas we knew to be dead ends.

Some parts of the program served each of those purposes in various stages of its existence. For example, the Star Wars X-ray laser research probably started out as a genuine effort to find a way of defending the US against missile attack. When it apparently ran into insurmountable technical problems, it became an item of disinformation. When Aviation Week ran an article that outlined a rumored X-ray laser that could direct the energy from a nuclear blast into thousands of laser beams, each powerful enough to shoot down a missile, the Soviets had to sit up and take notice. Something like that could be deployed quickly and with no warning. Mount satellites with the lasers on submarine launched missiles or hide them in an existing already highly classified satellite.

The Soviets had to ask themselves why the information about the program got leaked to AvWeek. Was the Reagan administration just playing with their minds or did it already have systems deployed? If it a system was already deployed then the Reagan administration was sending them a message by leaking the information. The Soviets simply couldn’t assume that the US was bluffing. They had to spend whatever it took to make sure that sort of X-ray laser system couldn’t be done. Their only other choice was to assume that we had it deployed and ask for the terms under which they were to surrender.

Remember also that the Soviet Union did not cease to exist under the Reagan Administration, and it wasn’t really Reagan’s policy to destroy it as an entity. If Reagan had been in a position to simply dictate what the Soviets did, he would have probably had them withdraw from Eastern Europe, give the Baltic Republics an opportunity to become independent if they wanted to, reduce their conventional forces to a more rational level, and stop committing extra-judicial violence against their own people. If the Soviet Union could hold together under those circumstances, then he would have probably been quite content to let them do so. As a matter of fact I recall at least one Reagan administration official reiterating that it had long been US policy not to challenge Soviet control over the lands that had been Soviet prior to World War II.

None of that is to deny that there was a certain amount of luck to the decline of the Soviet Union. They had a bad stretch of years starting in about 1984. In 1984, they suffered an accidental chain-reaction detonation of almost all of the munitions from their Northern Fleet. Fortunately, it didn’t get the nukes, but it got so much else that the northern fleet was essentially disarmed. James Oberg says that they suffered five or six other military munitions explosions large enough for word to reach the west in 1984. Then a few years later they had to deal with Chernobyl, and I believe they also had a missile factory blow up. All of those accidents had to have cost them billions to clean up, not to mention the cost of replacing the munitions. From that standpoint, I guess that you are right that Reagan was lucky rather than smart. On the other hand, the Soviet Union would have been more capable of recovering from those accidents if they hadn’t been economically squeezed at the same time.

On the Nazi economy bit, I’m a bit puzzled because I could swear I read a book by R.J Overy recently which came to exactly the opposite conclusion—that said the German economy would have been quite capable of continuing and growing if World War II hadn’t intervened. I was a bit surprised by that conclusion, but I’m pretty sure that’s what he concluded.

 

Robert Alley: On the National Security Agency (NSA) banning Furbys and the Federal Aviation Administration trying to: I thought at first that they had simply been struck by an out-of-place attack of good taste, then I read something that explained why at least the NSA action. Furbys electronically record speech as part of their pseudo-learning process. They then incorporate words and phrases that occur commonly into their ‘vocabulary’. Not a good idea around state secrets. My stepdaughter’s Furby still repeats a phrase that it picked up from one of my friends in California—in his voice no less. One of my engineering friends and I recently tried to plot out the results if someone sent a Furby back in time to about 1937 or 1938 (pre-World War II). How would people react to such a thing? How much could scientists of that time learn from it? Based on our experiments, the thing has enormously more computing power buried in it than was available to any government of that time. If a World War II-era government could somehow tap into that power, then it would have an enormous advantage over the other governments in terms of code breaking, attacking scientific problems, and probably in a number of other ways. We came up with a few tentative titles: A Furby at Penemunde, Hitler’s Furby, and from a time-line started when a Furby went back a little further in time Attack of the Furby Worshippers. Maybe we should add a new category to our AH classifications, like AH(b) (for stuff that combines aspects of the AH and B-movies).

I actually like your idea of the Civil War starting in the mid-1850’s over the pro-and anti-slavery guerilla wars in Kansas and Nebraska. You may be right that it wouldn’t change much due to the population and wealth of the north, but I’m not entirely convinced of that. There is nothing carved in stone about which side the various states are going to jump in on. In our time-line, quite a few border south slave states added their power and wealth to the northern side. Six years earlier they might not have. Try defending Washington DC with Maryland in the hands of the other side. There would also be a less determined enemy of slavery in the White House, which might mean less decisive action against the seceding states. Depending on the spark that caused Civil War in the mid-1850’s, you might even see something really weird like one or more northern states trying to secede rather than supporting a Federal policy in Kansas/Nebraska that they consider pro-slavery.

Your response to Andrew Goldstein: You mention in passing that the great powers might have formally partitioned China in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion. That could have had interesting results. At least some Chinese would not have taken that without a fight. China is a huge and very rugged place. It would take some digesting. I suspect that by the time they were through partitioning China, the Great Powers of Europe might have been less enthusiastic for a general war. I’m not sure they would even be in firm possession of China by 1914. If they were, and World War I went on as scheduled, that could lead to some interesting three-corner battles in China during World War I. The two sides might try to bid for Chinese support, or the Germans might realize that they were going to lose their part of China anyway and become supporters of Chinese nationalism. I’ll have to think about that more.

Your response to David Johnson: Yeah, I think it’s legitimate to speculate on what impact having a second inhabitable planet in our solar system would have on our society. The celestial mechanics probably wouldn’t work, but it’s a useful and potentially informative area of speculation. Why squelch it?

Your response to Kawato: From what I’ve read, when Antarctica was connected to South America (up until twenty five to thirty million years ago if my memory serves me correctly) the overall climate was warmer because ocean circulation was focused near the equator rather than near the poles. Of course, part of the trick there is that there were places where the circulation could happen near the poles—North and South America weren’t connected yet, and at times there were passages between Asia and Africa.

Your response to Rittenhouse: If you want a pirate state in the Caribbean, you might try Providence Island. A group of Puritans settled there (near the coast of Nicaragua) about the same time Puritans settled in New England. I believe that the colony straggled on for around twenty years before the Spanish captured it. The island involved was potentially very hard to capture from the sea, given enough defenders. It was already being used as a base by English privateers. Ironically, several hundred Puritans from New England were getting set to re-migrate to Providence Island shortly before it fell. If something had delayed the Spanish fleet long enough for those reinforcements from New England to arrive (maybe it could get caught in a hurricane or something), then Providence Island might have held out indefinitely and become a privateer hangout, then possibly a pirate one after the restoration—possibly run by die-hard anti-royalists.

Your response to me: Why do scenarios where JFK is not assassinated get very ugly very quickly? Actually, I may have overstated that a bit. They get ugly from a liberal point of view, not necessarily from the point of view of the country. Chances are that the Republicans would still run Goldwater in 1964. JFK would almost certainly win, but I don’t see him as quite the type of gutter politician Johnson could be, so I suspect that he would win by a lot smaller margin than Johnson did. He would have a record to defend, including the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The Republicans would have hammered away at that mercilessly. JFK would have probably been forced to the right a bit by their attacks. That in turn would probably have meant more American commitment to Vietnam sooner. As long as McNamara was around, that would have proven disastrous. Accountants, especially that one, don’t do well at running wars. I see the course of the Vietnam War going about the same as it did in our time-line, but offset to about a year earlier through at least 1968. The Great Society programs would not get off the ground. Getting them passed required that Republicans be smashed extremely flat. It also required that the Democrats be led by a politician with extremely good ability to control the legislative process. Johnson was that kind of politician. JFK wasn’t.

Without Johnson in the presidency from 1964 to 1968, the space program would have probably fallen on bad times quickly. The urgency would have gone out of the lunar program without a popular martyred president to dedicate it to. As support for the Vietnam War dropped, Kennedy would probably tend to gut it in order to have funds to purchase support from increasingly anti-war liberals. I suspect that the Soviets would have probably beaten us to the moon, which in the long-term might have been good for Americans in space.

In 1968, Johnson might well have run for president. He wasn’t young, but he still had some years left in him. Johnson versus Nixon in 1968 would have been a real slime-fest.

Overall, I don’t know if we would have been better off or worse off by 1999 given this set of circumstances. It depends on whether you think the Great Society and the way we did the moon landings were a good idea. It also depends on who wins in 1968. If Johnson wins, we might get to keep McNamara for another 8 years. We might also get to keep our then current Vietnam policies for another 4 to 6 years. By that time, things would have been so screwed up that I’m not sure they could have been put back together.

Your comments on Bat Out of Hell: Yeah, I blew it by making it appear that Tony really was an emotional vampire. I intended to leave that kind of up in the air, but I pushed it too far in the direction of him really being one when I had Bret appear to believe that he was. Actually, I intended for that comment to be another part of Bret’s revenge, but I didn’t make that at all clear. I have since added a couple of sentences to make it explicit. Bret’s idea is that if Guzman is solidly convinced that he is an EV, that belief will destroy him in prison when he can’t indulge in emotional vampirism. So fostering Guzman’s belief in his powers helps Guzman destroy himself. Bret hates rather comprehensively.

Your comments on the Carpatho-Ukraine scenario: I think we’re pretty much in agreement on the longer-term consequences as you probably saw from last issue.

I don’t know enough early English history or enough US labor history to comment intelligently on your treatment of either of the editor’s divergences. Based on what little I know, the English one seemed plausible enough. You made it quite clear that you considered the US workers revolt one to be extremely unlikely, which is correct. You did a good job with what you had to work with, in my uninformed opinion.

David Johnson: Thank you for pointing out The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I’ll have to look that up. I have to disagree to some extent with your response to Goldstein. I don’t believe that American Indian lack of immunity to European diseases rules out as much as you imply.  See the Brainstorming Section for a more in-depth response.

Your response to Jim Rittenhouse: If you’ve ever visited my website, you’ve probably noticed that I’m heavily into Cryptozoology too, though I’m a moderate skeptic on the larger creatures.

Your response to me: The most common misspelling of my name is ‘Cozart’. That’s so common that many of my relatives have just given up and started spelling it that way. Your comments on BOOH were very useful by the way. I took most of them to heart (and modified the story accordingly)

I enjoyed your take on the Great Uprising of 1877, but as I told Robert Alley, I don’t have enough background to comment intelligently.

Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro: As usual, I’m impressed by the sheer extent of your publishing activities. A print on demand AH collection? Interesting idea. Two anthologies? Sounds like fun.

Your comments to me: Given money, time, and energy I might actually try a novellas-only SF magazine. In practice that means it is extremely unlikely, at least from me. As you probably saw in last POD, I see Hitler ultimately grabbing a lot more than just a slice of Poland with the Carpatho-Ukranian option. On BOOH: Yeah, the "As you know, Mr. Biology Teacher" bit was weak. I replaced it with something a little smoother in the current edition.

Peak Time: That’s one very different story. I enjoyed it.

Kurt Sidaway: Your idea of Britain and Hanover becoming permanently joined was interesting. On a Portuguese conquest of the Aztecs: A third option is a series of trading posts along the coasts, keeping other powers out but not actually conquering the Aztecs. That would have fit with Portuguese practice in Africa. They tried to go the trading posts route in Brazil too, but found that the Indians didn’t want what they had to offer badly enough to work as hard as the Portuguese wanted them to. That led to colonies and conquest.

Unrelated to but triggered by this: the French tried to settle in Brazil and Florida in the 1560's—challenging both Portugal and Spain. What if they had challenged the Spanish more directly—say by settling in Northern Mexico and trying to pry the various Indian groups loose from their allegiance to Spain. They would probably get their heads handed to them unless they established a base first, or maybe did something unexpected like sailing into the Pacific and going after the west coast of Mexico. They might be able to ally with groups like the Yaqui and establish a base, then ally themselves with the Chichemic tribes of north central Mexico to attack south. Given European help, those wild nomadic desert tribesmen could have given the Spaniards fits. In our time-line, they gave the Spaniards fits even without that kind of help.

Your comments to me: I’m glad you enjoyed Bat Out Of Hell. Yes, I am going to tone down the emotional vampire aspects of Tony’s character. In terms of Anna’s nearly psychic analysis of Bret’s usefulness, I don’t believe in psychic powers in the "Psychic Hotline" sense. I do however believe that intuition can be such a powerful thing that it can create the illusion of psychic powers. I have an uncanny ability to predict the actions of some of my stepdaughters ex-boyfriends—to the point where I told my wife and stepdaughter that one of the more psycho ex’s was about due to do something stupid again, and then saw his name in the Police Beat the next day.

In my later years as an active computer programmer I often found that if I was totally stumped about a debugging problem I would often get an impulse to try something that appeared totally illogical. If I followed that impulse, it almost inevitably led to me solving the problem very quickly. Again, I don’t think this is psychic. I think that some part of the brain uses its own set of rules to solve problems for you in the background. It was probably around before humans learned to talk, so it doesn’t communicate all that well with the linear, logical, speech-oriented part of the brain. There are times when it can be very powerful though. Good professionals in just about any field develop a powerful intuition and learn when to rely on it. That’s what I have Anna doing.

As you probably noticed, I developed the Carpatho-Ukrainian scenario in ways that parallel your thoughts in many ways.

Wesley Kawato: As I pointed out last issue, I don’t think this is the proper forum for a creationism versus evolution debate. I respect and admire Christianity, but I feel that if anyone really wants to get involved in a creation versus evolution debate they can go any number of places on the Internet. At the same time, the article you reprint raises a couple of issues that I think can be set to rest in a way that should be of interest to people in Point of Divergence.

First, why did it take so long for agriculture to develop? Because innovations have to fit into the existing culture and make sense within the context of that culture. I’ll use an AH-related scenario to illustrate the point.  See my brainstorming essays and mini-scenarios section for a more in-depth discussion of this and other issues you raised.