Feedback--Point
Of Divergence Sept1999
Robert Alley: Your comments to Jim Bante: The book Nomonham talks about the Japanese in 1941-42. The local Japanese in the Kwangtung army were itching for a chance to avenge their defeat by the Russians at Nomonham in August and September of 1939. They had plans to go for it in the winter of 1941/42. Those plans were not supported by the Japanese government, which had it’s plate full with the US and British. In an earlier time, whether or not the Japanese government approved would not have mattered much, but the Kwangtung army got it’s wings clipped after the Nomanham debacle. Another factor in the failure of the Japanese to go after the Soviets is that the Soviets never really let their guard down that much. When the Siberians left, they were replaced by an essentially equal number of partially trained recruits, with weapons that were by Japanese standards rather formidable.
Your comments to Jim Rittenhouse: So we would eventually have gotten Johnson and the Great Society anyway? Depressing thought. At least the space program would have had strong support for another four to eight years.
Your comments to me:
· Good extrapolation of the Great Forest of Oz concept. You’re right about the impact of exotic animals still being a problem. It might be somewhat less so than in our time-line because our hanger-on species tend to be temperate-zone species from relatively open areas, but undoubtedly something would get loose and make a pest of itself.
· On the French in Virginia: The survival of Henri might have kept the lid on civil war between the Catholics and Protestants, but it probably wouldn’t have prevented low-level violence and hatred between the two sides. Historically, the Huguenots did try to found at least three French Protestant colonies in the 1550’s and 1560’s, one in Brazil and the other two in the northern Florida/South Carolina area. I see them as having the potential for a movement similar to the great migration to New England, but on a smaller scale. By the time the French Wars of Religion settled down, and the French started colonizing, that potential was significantly reduced. Also, I believe that the French crown by that time had developed a policy of trying to keep Huguenots out of their colonies. Ironically, many French Huguenots immigrated to the English colonies, especially South Carolina. There, they became part of the wave of "English" settlers which swamped the French colonies.
· On "Armored Vehicles": Here, I think I fell victim to an urge to make the article a little too authentic. I wanted it to really seem like something an armor enthusiast of another time-line would want to read, while at the same time giving hints as to what was going on beyond that restricted world. That was a delicate balancing act. On the one hand I had to include enough detail on the armor to satisfy an armor enthusiast, and not belabor things that someone like that would already know. On the other hand, I wanted to use the article as a vehicle to give the reader an idea of what actually happened in the time-line, and not totally lose people who are not armor enthusiasts. Oh well. Not everything I try works.
· On "Dunkirk Weather": The key to the situation England finds itself in with this scenario is that they find themselves with a choice of giving in to Hitler’s terms or losing the empire piece-by-piece. How long could England sustain itself with major pieces of the empire gone? A major factor: if Roosevelt decides they are a lost cause, or if enough other Americans do, then Lend-Lease won’t happen. That means bankruptcy by early 1941 at best. If the Japanese decide that the British are weak enough and seize Malaysia, then suddenly the British have to replace essentially all of their rubber supply. Not easy or cheap to do on the spur of the moment. The Germans had a synthetic rubber industry. The US had an embryonic one, which they were able to expand incredibly rapidly in 1942/43, partly by seizing the German patents. I suspect that Britain would not have been able to improvise a huge industry like that quickly enough to keep their economy from tubing (pun noted but not intended) when the Japanese cut off the rubber. Certainly prices would skyrocket and eat away at their foreign exchange, probably accelerating their bankruptcy by three to six months. A key point in understanding British policy since about 1917 is that World War I bankrupted Britain. Had the US not intervened in World War I, the British would have run out of hard currency to buy US goods by about July 1917. The British were able to retain the outward appearance of being a great power through the inter-war years mainly because there were no strong challengers left, and they could cut their military back to a very low level. Once Germany rearmed, and forced Britain to, it was just a matter of how many months Britain could keep spending down it’s stock of hard currency. When that stock ran out, the illusion of England as a great power would end.
· Miscellaneous comments: Interesting comments on Kentucky and neutrality in the Civil War. A neutral block actually would have made for a more interesting Civil War. I might actually be tempted to give up my self-imposed ban on Civil War AH’s and write something up on that. You make a good point on blind alleys and the German atom bomb. On SDI: I think that there are still some Ultra-large secrets out there that will cause us to look at the 1980’s in a whole new light. Let’s face it, we’re still finding out important things about the 1940’s and 1950’s, like the FBI intercepts and partial translations of Soviet codes during that era and the light they shed on Soviet espionage in the US.
· On print on demand books: I’ve toyed with the idea of making some of my novellas, or some of my longer scenarios into print-on-demand things and selling them through the web site. There doesn’t seem to be a viable market in the US for either non-book-length AH scenarios or stories between 25,000 and 85,000 words long. Actually, there is very little market for stories in the 15,000 to 25,000 word range either. Unfortunately, that’s the length most of my stories tend to end up at.
· Quarantine: I did a little more on the Quarantine fragment last issue, then got sidetracked by my writing class. Hopefully I’ll get back to it by the POD after this. I’m still having trouble actually getting much written on Quarantine for some reason.
· Freedom: I actually know a few people who tend toward the Wickes brothers’ mindset. They actually tend to be hyper-informed, though from weird sources. One guy listens to the BBC and Radio Moscow religiously over the short-wave because he doesn’t trust US news sources. The guy knows more than I do about what is going on, once you free the facts from their rather paranoid matrix. Exchanges would fascinate him, both for their potential to escape the reach of the government and for their potential as another part of the ‘government conspiracy’.
Editors divergences: Your Mongol invasion scenario is very well thought through. I enjoyed it. Then we have the death of Lenin as an X-files episode. Interesting. You did miss one quotation mark just past the middle of page 28, if you want to know that sort of thing (depends on if you want to go for publication I guess.) Other than that, it was very well done. I enjoyed it, also.
Dale
Cozort: As the
44 pages of my issue 20 zine point out, rumors of my inability to do a
zine and
graduate at the same time were greatly exaggerated. Actually, I walked
into
collation thinking that Jim knew I would have something because I had
posted
most of it on my web site a month earlier. Jim figured that if I had
something
I would have told him I did, which I should have. Oh well, Sidaway
deserved the
Clearcut Award this issue anyway. In case you didn’t figure it out, all
of the
reviews were of books that are available in this time-line except for Go
For
the Silver, and The American League of Nations
Mandates.
Obviously, Go For the Silver came from a time-line where the French successfully invaded Mexico in the 1560’s in conjunction with dissident sons of the Spanish Conquistadores instead of falling into civil war. In our time-line, those sons of conquistadores may have conspired to put Cortes’s son on the throne of an independent Mexico or the alleged conspiracy may have just been someone taking the drunken talk of young men too seriously. In any case, in our time-line Spanish control of Mexico was never seriously threatened by settler revolts, though there were several serious revolts of the conquistadores in Peru.
The American League of Nations Mandates takes a little more explaining. Some of you may have already figured all of this out from the review, but just to be sure, I’ll give a brief outline to fill in any blanks. In our time-line, there was actually serious talk of US mandates immediately following World War I. They would have been in Kurdistan and Armenia. They didn’t get off the ground because the US wasn’t all that interested, and the other allies were too busy fighting over scraps of land and settling petty issues to realize that they had a vital strategic interest in keeping the US involved in Europe. Those two things actually reinforced one another. As the Allies fought over scraps of land, the US public became more and more disillusioned about the whole thing. In another, not too distant time-line, a more farsighted French diplomacy decided to use the mandates to keep the US involved in the Old World, and also to push Poland into grabbing German territory instead of territory in the east.
With the American Mandate blocking eastern expansion, in the Mandates time-line the Poles don’t squander Allied goodwill grabbing territory to the east of them. Instead, they are awarded essentially all of the disputed territories between them and the Germans. In our time-line the Allies initially were willing to award that territory to Poland, but Allied disgust over the way Poland handled expansion to the east meant that the disputed territory was divided by a combination of plebiscites and miniature wars between German and Polish irregular forces.
Keeping Poland out of wars to the east had one additional benefit: In our time-line, the Poles got embroiled in a war with the Soviet Union. At one point it looked like the Soviets had that war won. The Czechs took advantage of Polish weakness to grab some disputed territory between the two countries. The Poles never forgave the Czechs for what they considered a stab in the back and the issue kept two countries with obvious and vital interests in common from allying against the German threat. In the Mandates time-line, Poland and the Czechs become reasonably close allies as the German threat emerges. Polish forces are equipped with the very good Czech tanks and artillery. With the US protecting a major part of their eastern front, the Poles spend the 30’s focusing primarily on Germany as a potential enemy.
Together, the Czechs and Poles are strong enough to deter the Germans in 1938 and 1939, at least with a little French help. World War II is postponed, but the Germans gradually become stronger relative to their enemies through the early 1940’s. In the mid-1940’s as the 25-year American Mandates are about to end, the already uneasy peace of Europe is disturbed by a race toward atomic weapons. In our time-line, the French already had an embryonic program using Norwegian heavy water at least by 1940. In this time-line, all of the Great Powers are racing toward nuclear status by 1945, with spending spurred by reports of their neighbors’ progress. By the late 1940’s or early 1950’s, nuclear weapons arrive in a very tense Europe, and cause The Great Burning.
At least one major bug crept into my story Freedom. I changed the name of the point of view character from Ben to Joe for a variety of reasons. I forgot that I had used the earlier name in part one. Hopefully people figured it out.
I looked at my huge table of contents for last issue and decided that there has to be a better way of organizing this thing. Let me know it you like the organization of this issue better.
Tom Cron: I appreciate the reviews, as usual. Your comments to me: I’m both blessed and cursed with so many ideas that I would like to develop that I’ll never get to them all in my lifetime. For example, my first POD comment featured a scenario where Malaria was introduced to the New World around the time of Carthage. I would love to develop that one, but it is at least three or four stories away from happening, and I keep coming up with new ideas that I’m full of enthusiasm about. That keeps pushing it down the list. Oh well.
David Freitag: Your comments to me: In my Spanish South Carolina scenario I was kind of visualizing the Spanish colonies going the way of the historic Spanish settlements in Florida. Once the missionized Indians surrounding the Florida settlements died off from disease or attacks from better armed Indians, the Spanish settlements in Florida faded into insignificance. The few hundred Spaniards had little or no impact beyond their immediate area, and the colony itself passed into British, then American hands without having much of a continuing legacy.
I enjoyed your Prester John story. I also enjoyed your speculations on time-travel and "Islands".
Robert Gill: Welcome. You made a good start with a fairly unique AH and comments on previous issues in your first contribution. I’m looking forward to more. Fair warning: I appear to be spelling-challenged on peoples’ names, so try not to be offended if I screw yours up in some way. I seem to do it to everybody eventually.
Andrew Goldstein (1 & 2): Congratulations on your success with your American Indian chronology and the Victorian supers game. On whether agriculture spread from China to Southeast Asia or vice-versa: <shrug> Everything I’ve read says that agriculture started in China and spread south, but it has been a while since I read much about it, and new discoveries could well have changed that. I’d be interested in hearing about it if theories on that have changed.
On the Mississippians: See my mini-essay in the Brainstorming Mini-Essays section.
I’m somewhat puzzled about why you feel that the hybrids in "Sardinian Surprise" are a problem. Who would be in position to oppose the breeding? The idea is that it is done clandestinely using slaves.
On Quarantine, I’m glad you enjoyed it. As the little portion from last issue hints at, Europe has not been left to its own devices, and yes, people do slip through the blockade. I haven’t figured out how to deal with the issue of attempts to go from the New World to the Old yet.
On "Before Columbus" type themes, I recently read a claim that the Olmec culture was the result of contact with contemporary China. The guy claimed that the two cultures had identical motifs and written symbols, to the extent that when he took Olmec stuff to China the Chinese thought he was just bringing back Chinese artifacts. I take this claim with the same large grain of salt that I take most claims of pre-Columbian contacts. Actually, I think that the most plausible claim is that the Polynesians landed in South America, specifically Chile, and introduced chickens and possibly pigs to the area sometime not too long before Columbus. I think that’s perfectly plausible. If they could get to New Zealand and Hawaii, they probably got to South America. That kind of contact doesn’t run into the problem of introducing a lot of diseases, because the Polynesians were just as susceptible to most of those diseases as American Indians. Another contact which doesn’t seem horribly implausible is the possible one between Ecuador and Jomon Japan in the very early stages of the development of civilization in Ecuador. Also, I’ve often wondered if the ancestors of the Canary Islanders might have ventured out further into the Atlantic and discovered the New World. They had to be excellent sailors to get to the Canary Islands and back.
Contribution 2: Thanks for the review of "GURPS Who’s Who". I’ll have to look that up. Your comments to me: An odd thing about the founding of New Orleans: It was apparently rather hard to find the mouth of the Mississippi from the ocean in the 1600’s (and presumably the 1500’s). Apparently there were all kinds of dead-end channels in the area, and the real mouth didn’t look very important. As a result, when LaSalle was trying to found a colony there, both he and the Spaniards (repeatedly) missed the mouth of the Mississippi. On Mississippian pseudo-qipo’s: It has been years since I saw the reference, but I believe the tribe involved was the Chickasaw. On what it would take to establish Marsupials as the world’s primary mammalian group: See my brainstorming scenario A World Dominated By Marsupials.
David
Johnson: Your
comments to me: On "Dunkirk Weather", yeah, I think you’re right
about increased German feelings of invincibility getting them in
trouble in
Russia at some point. I suspect that it would lead to even more of the
"Master Race" junk that alienated potential allies in the Ukraine and
other parts of the Soviet Union which weren’t thrilled with Stalin. On
the
other hand, I suspect that the Soviets would have more trouble rolling
back the
Germans than they did in our time-line. See my mini-essay: Soviet
Dependencies on Western Aid in World War II.
On the Furby mini-scenario: Yeah, it does have a surprising amount of potential. My engineer friend and I were also toying with a just-for-grins scenario that we nicknamed "The Cross-Time Garage Sale", where someone goes into a garage sale in the late 1930’s (assuming they had such a thing) and sees something labeled "The Commodore 64 computer". See the Brainstorming Scenarios for that one.
On the Carthage mini-scenario: My understanding is that it took from 1492 to 1518 (26 years) for smallpox to cross the Atlantic to the West Indies, with thriving Spanish colonies over most of that time-period. I’m not sure how long it took for other diseases to make it across, but I suspect that there was probably an inverse correlation between the severity of the illness and the time it took to make it across. Malaria might be an exception to that because it can be a chronic disease. I could see contact over a period of ten or fifteen years, probably with slower voyages, not bringing anything fatal enough to make the archaeological record as something very notable. The earlier the contact, or the more peripheral the people involved were to the main body of civilization, the less likely it would be to show up as a huge die-off. For example, as I point out elsewhere in the comments, I think that a reasonably likely contact would be between Indians in Chile and Polynesians, sometime within 200 or 300 years before Columbus. Some of the tribes in Chile had some very odd breeds of chicken that were similar to Polynesian chickens. I could see the Polynesians passing chickens and pigs along to the local Indians and taking the sweet potato back with them, and passing it from island to island. If the contact happened late enough, it would be very hard to distinguish between rapid spread of pigs and chickens beyond the reach of Spanish settlement and animals that were already there. As another example, there was undoubtedly a substantial Norse settlement in Greenland for nearly 500 years, with occasional contact with North America, and presumably regular contact between the Norse and Eskimos. Can we see archaeological signs of disease from any of that? Not that I’m aware of.
Also, on the west coast of the continent, there was undoubtedly a slow flow of traits back and forth across the Bering Strait. Bows and arrows probably spread from Asia to North America via that route, and were probably followed by gradual improvements in the technology. By the way, bows and arrows were surprisingly late getting to the New World. They arrived in the Cahokia area in a big way around 400-500AD. They didn’t make it to Mexico until around 900 AD. There was a very definite north to south gradient in the quality of bow technology, with northern Indians generally much more effective bowmen. The Incas hadn’t really adopted bows yet, though they did hire mercenary bowmen from the neighboring jungle tribes. That was a major factor in the Spanish conquest of Peru. The jungle mercenaries gave the Spanish fits, but the rest of the Inca armies simply couldn’t kill Spaniards except in special circumstances.
On Quarantine part 2: I hadn’t really thought about voyages from Mexico up the west coast. My dark age would slow that down somewhat, but I can’t say it wouldn’t happen. The fact that California was still primitive would probably also slow things down a bit. Eventually contact would be made. I’m not sure what happens after that. Just something else I’ll have to work out.
On the second piece of Trolleyworld: this is still good stuff. I was very disappointed when what I thought was the next page turned out to be the first part of the next person's zine. I’m looking forward to the next installment. Nitpicking mode on: On page 30, near the bottom, "aught" should be "ought", I think. Nitpicking mode off. I really got into this. I’m looking forward to more next POD.
Wesley Kawato: On the issue of how a time-traveler would set primitives on the road to civilization: A time traveler might find younger people (Caveman hippies) more receptive to new ideas, but I think you’d find it surprisingly hard to show the benefits of agriculture to anyone 40,000 years ago. From the perspective of someone who has grown up in a society without agriculture, there may not be any. I see the conversation going something like this (with tongue firmly in cheek):
:Hippy" Caveman(Cavehippy): So you take this "wheat" and bury it, right? Then more "wheat" grows, right? Cool. What do you do with it then?
Time-traveler: You eat it.
(CaveHippy buries wheat seed and sits waiting for it to sprout).
Caveman(in a disappointed voice): I’m sure this is going to be groovy, but when is it going to happen?
Time-traveler: In four or five months.
Cavehippy: What do we do between then and now?
Time-traveler: Stay here. Keep the weeds from choking it out. Keep the birds from eating it.
Cavehippy: Well, like what do we eat in the meantime?
Time-traveler: The same stuff you normally do.
Caveman: Cool. Oh wait. Bummer. We’re like one of those biblical plagues of locusts, dude. We come to an area. We eat everything that’s edible. Then we move on. If we stayed here we would starve to death.
(Time-traveler scratches his head.)
Time-traveler: Well, maybe you could come back in four or five months.
Cavehippy: Cool, but what about the weeds and birds and stuff?
Time-traveler: Well, you would lose some of the crop to that, but there might be some left.
Cavehippy: Groovy. Oh wait. Wrong time of year. There won’t be anything else to eat here.
Time-Traveler: Well, you could eat the wheat.
Cavehippy: Psychedelic, man. By the way, do you mind if I try some of this "wheat"?
(Cavehippy grabs a handful, with the seeds still in the husks, puts them in his mouth, and chews.)
Cavehippy (talking with his mouth full): Seems a tad tough and tasteless, not to mention scratchy.
Time-Traveler: Well, you don’t just eat the wheat. You have to get the seeds out, then most people grind it up and make bread out of it.
Cavehippy: Bread. Cool. But what is this grinding? Can I try it?
(Time-Traveler pauses, then in a subdued voice): Well, I suppose you could grind it up between two rocks, if you had the right kind of rocks.
Cavehippy: Heavy, man. Speaking of which, what happens to the seeds we don’t eat right away?
Time-Traveler: Store them.
Cavehippy: In what?
Time-Traveler: A pot or a basket.
Cavehippy: Dynamite, dude. What’s a pot ?
(Time-Traveler explains).
Cavehippy: Heavy, man. Way too heavy to carry with us.
Time-Traveler: Well, that’s the point. You don’t have to carry it because you don’t have to go. The wheat will feed you. You can stay here.
(Cavehippy edges away): Like forever man?
Time-Traveler: As long as you want to.
Cavehippy: Groovy. And we can eat this "wheat" all the time. By the way, how does it taste compared to mammoth-burgers?
Time-Traveler: Well, actually kind of bland.
Cavehippy: And we’d have to eat it all the time? Wouldn’t that give us like vitamin deficiencies or rickets or something?
Time-Traveler: Well, actually health of the average person does decline when agriculture gets going.
Cavehippy: Bummer. Sounds like a bad trip to me.
Okay, enough bad pseudo-hippy caveman. The point is that if the average person of 40,000 years ago could actually see agriculture in action, they probably wouldn’t be interested. Their lifestyle would almost certainly seem better to them. They would also be missing several of the key pieces of infrastructure that made agriculture feasible. By 10,000 years ago those pieces of infrastructure—something to store seeds in, grinding stones to turn seeds into something edible, fishing techniques good enough to let people settle down, among others—were developed. Also, many of the big game species that had made the previous lifestyle productive were extinct. In that new context, farming made sense, and developed several places where there were suitable crops to be domesticated. Even then, farming usually didn’t become important in an area for at least a thousand years after it started. It took that long for it to become enough more efficient than other ways of making a living to be worth a large-scale effort.
By the way, the line between agriculture and non-agricultural ways of life is often blurry. For example, in the western deserts of the US some otherwise non-agricultural tribes dug irrigation ditches of up to a mile long to water wild stands of a favorite food plant. Near the Great Lakes, Indians gathered a kind of wild rice. If the rice got scarce in a lake, the Indians would go to another lake, gather seeds, and scatter them in the first lake.
On Freedom: The government only found out the Exchange was coming three hours before it happened. The Wickes families were asleep during that time.
Ian Montgomerie: I appreciate the end-depth comments on the "Ukranian Option" and the "Dunkirk Weather" scenarios, though I disagree with many of them. Let’s take the Ukranian scenario first. On Japanese intervention: before I started researching the Japanese/Soviet border wars I thought that the most significant one was in 1938. That turns out to be wrong. The most significant fighting, and the battle where the Japanese got their heads handed to them, occurred in the summer of 1939, according to the book Nomanhan, which covers the background, the battle, and the consequences of it in almost excessive depth. Fighting was still going on in September 1939, and the two sides didn’t reach a truce until mid-September 1939. The Pact of Steel was devastating to the Japanese, because it deprived them of Germany as an ally at a time they were in a mid-sized shooting war with the Soviets. I’m not sure of this, but that pact may have affected the outcome of the Japanese/Soviet struggle. The Soviets brought in divisions and material from throughout the Soviet Union to teach the Japanese a lesson in late summer 1939. They might not have been in a position to do that if Germany had not been seeking a pact with them. For a more in-depth analysis, see my mini-essay: Germany Versus Soviets in 1939.
On "Dunkirk Weather": Well, actually the weather was pretty bad from a German standpoint. When you get big hunks of days when you can’t even get your planes off the ground, that’s obviously going to have an impact. Without the weather, the Luftwaffe would have been shooting fish in a barrel, because Dunkirk can only be approached by most ships via a few deepwater channels, most of which ran right under German guns, and of course the ships in harbor would have been sitting targets. Due to a miscommunication, much of British anti-aircraft capability was destroyed by their own people, so there was little in the way of air defenses. In terms of the Luftwaffe and the anti-shipping role, I have to disagree with you on that. When the Luftwaffe took a hand in naval warfare—in Norway and at times in the Med—they were reasonably effective. True, Goring rarely put much in the way of resources into naval operations, but that wouldn’t be a factor here.
On the issue of other people jumping in and looking at ways of grabbing pieces of the British empire, certainly Japan would have that potential. The Soviets had long-held ambitions in Iran, where the British had oil concessions. Spain, of course, had ambitions in Gibraltar and French North Africa. I guess we’ll just have to disagree on the snowball effect of a defeat at Dunkirk. I look at reactions in the US, where people were urging the government not to send arms to Britain in our time-line because they figured it was a lost cause and we would be needing those arms ourselves in a short time.
Remember, Dunkirk was the first break in an essentially unbroken string of German victories. The perception all over Europe even before the fall of France was that the democracies were in decline, that they no longer had the will to fight. Confirm that with not just the defeat of France, but also the capture of the bulk of the British army, and the humiliation of the British navy, and I can see people all over the world perceiving the Nazis as the wave of the future, and acting to secure their place in that future.
On the question of a Japanese seat at the peace table, I say "The Japanese want a seat at the table, and they quickly begin seizing British and Dutch possessions in the Far East to give them that seat." I’m not sure where you get "since Japan is not at war with Britain" out of that. Obviously, if Japan is seizing parts of the British empire, the two countries are at war. In this case, the Japanese intent is to get a share of the spoils without serious fighting—the same motivation that caused Italy to jump into the war in our time-line.
On the issue of an Indian nationalist revolt: well, there would certainly be motivation for it, and the perception of opportunity. Indian nationalism certainly gave Britain a great deal of trouble during our time-line’s World War II. Why do you consider a revolt unlikely under these circumstances? On the question of Canada and Australia: Australia provided a large portion of British strength in North Africa. I don’t consider it at all unreasonable that they would keep those troops at home if Japan looked like a threat. Certainly Australia felt threatened by the Japanese in our time-line, and the fact that Churchill would not release Australian divisions from the Middle East in 1942 is still a sore spot among Australians.
As far as Canada goes, no, the Canadians weren’t threatened militarily in a realistic sense. At the same time, the psychological shock of the unexpected German victories was such that even the US felt threatened. Reality doesn’t always trump perception, and in this case the perception was that Hitler and the Germans were far more powerful and ready for war than they actually were.
Canada would feel threatened, and that could have the effect that I assert.
I do agree that the process of disintegration might have taken longer than I imply.
Final thought: I guess I knew in the back of my mind that you were Canadian. My mind glitched as it often does on names and other personal information. I’m sorry.
Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro: Again, congratulations on your successes in Portugal’s Science Fiction market as well as Brazil’s. It sounds like both countries have markets that are small enough to be broken into, yet good enough to be worth breaking into. The Fantastic Venus anthology sounds like it is worth looking up. I also enjoyed your bit on the fauna of Rio.
Andrew Schneider: I like your answer to the Steampunk challenge. Yes, my version of Island California would be very vulnerable to introduced species. I also enjoyed your reviews, especially the one of "Climb the Wind".
Andrew Schneider - II: I’m firmly resolved not to get in the middle of the "Influence of Christianity" debate, so I’ll just use that convenient phrase "RAEBNC" for that one. I’m glad you enjoyed Dunkirk 1940 and "A Bad Day in East Africa". I’m sorry to hear that "Ides" still hasn’t been picked up. We need a semi-pro or profession AH magazine. Unfortunately, I kind of doubt that there is enough demand to support such a thing. As a matter of fact, I’m not even sure how long there will be demand for the current number of mainstream SF magazines. They have the obvious problems of increased competition with video, the Internet, and computer games, not to mention media tie-in stuff. They also have a couple of other problems. The core of their audience is people who are really into science fiction. These people have read all of the standard themes and want something more exotic. But giving them something more exotic often makes the magazine less accessible to someone just getting into science fiction. At the same time, several of the magazine appear to be moving for more "respectability" in literary circles, with the emphasis shifting from idea-driven stories to character-driven stories. I suspect that if taken very far, that shift will be fatal. Most science-fiction readers I know got a taste of character-driven fiction in their high-school or college literature classes, hated it, and would resent paying good money for a "science fiction" magazine that was composed mostly of that kind of story. I’m not saying that science fiction should have cardboard characters. I’m just saying that when character shoves idea out of the central position in a story, the story is less appealing to a science fiction audience.
Your review of "How America Fought It’s Wars" reminded me again of why I enjoy this APA so much. I would have totally overlooked that book if I hadn’t seen your review. Thanks. I may also look up "Superman: War of the Worlds based on your review, so thanks for that also.
Kurt Sidaway: Congratulations on the clear-cut. You earned it with a very good zine. I like the concept of an AH tour guide, though I have to admit that I haven’t had a chance to think through the AH behind it in any kind of depth. I liked the way you extended the idea of an early Roman breakup in your reply to Alley. I also enjoyed your Cross-time saloon bit.
Dale Speirs: The ‘telegraph as e-mail’ bit was great, and the snail telegraph was a nice touch. The alternate Canada mini-scenarios ranged from fascinating to ‘I guess you have to be really into Canadian history to appreciate it’, but then again I suspect that many non-US AH buffs have the same reaction to intricately worked out American Civil War scenarios. By the way, your Avro Arrow discussion interested me enough that I actually bought a book about the decision to cancel it. It claims that the Arrow was cancelled due to US arm-twisting.
Your comments to me: Unfortunately or fortunately the American colonies were just too valuable to be allowed to become isolated unless they became impossible to get to, at least after 1519 and the discovery of Mexico with all of its gold and silver. I suppose that between 1492 and 1519 a series of bad years for voyages between the continents or wars might have done the trick.
See the essay ‘Quarantine’ Without Aliens for an off-the-top of my head attempt at this.
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