Robert Alley: Your response to Ribeiro: A lot of nasty little incidents never make the national news even now, apparently, or never get much prominence.  One of my friends with a lot of time on his hands somehow gets his hands on local media of various kinds and passes some of the more spectacular stories along to me.  For example, a really nasty and violent racist group staged a series of bank robberies in the early 1980s with the idea of using the money to finance “the Revolution”.  Most of the core members apparently got killed off in various shootouts with law enforcement.  I’m a big news hound, but I was only vaguely aware of what was going on.  As far as black/white tension and riots go, as bad as things can sometimes get now, they rarely get as bad as some of the violence of the 1920s through early 1940s, where riots sometimes took on almost war like qualities, even to areas being bombed in at least one case.  Of course some parts of the LA riots took on an almost war-like aspect with organized and armed groups of Korean merchants, many of them with experience in the South Korean army, taking on rioters attacking Korean-owned stores.

On the subject of lost info, my family, and probably most families, have a lot of family pictures.  Unfortunately my mom and dad, along with most of my aunts and uncles are dead now.  Most of the pictures are unlabeled and in many cases no one in the family knows who was who in them.  That turns a valuable piece of information “this was your grandmother at age two” into just a picture of somebody in old-fashion clothes.

I may have already told you this story, but when I was a few years out of college I worked for a place that was still doing all of their applications programming in IBM 360/370 assembler language.  This was long after high-level languages like Cobol had been adopted almost everywhere else, but this company’s IT people just kept improving the way they did things in assembler, writing a huge number of macros that were essentially their own private computer language.  They also designed their own terminal-handling system and their own file-handling system.  The normal operating system couldn’t even access their files or even know they were there.

After quite a few years of this, the head guru left, along with most of the programmers.  I was one of the people who got hired to try to pick up the pieces and move to a more rational system.  They had quite a few programs there with no source code, including one that ran every Friday night.  It was called “Friday Night special” and nobody knew what it did, but nobody dared pull it out of the schedule because they were afraid that the whole house of cards might collapse if they did.

Speaking of lost information, the little private school my daughter goes to moved into a building that had once housed the offices of the DeKalb Genetics chicken-breeding operation.  When that operation got closed down, they left forty or fifty years worth of breeding records in the basement.  We had to get rid of them for space reasons, and because they were starting to mold, but I felt awful seeing that stuff go into the dumpster because I knew that someone could have easily gotten a PhD thesis or two out of all of that research, and instead it just went out into the dumpster.  Companies in the few hundred to a thousand employees ranges are notorious for just tossing anything that isn’t immediately useful without regard to historical value, and of course with all of the various takeovers, buyouts and mergers that gets even worse.  In many cases the new management doesn’t even know what they are throwing out.

In the computer industry, a lot of prototypes and software, and even the more obscure computers that went into production have probably been lost.  Shortly before Commodore went bankrupt about 8 years ago they liquidated everything in their warehouses including about 40 to 50 prototypes of the computer that was supposed to be the successor to the C64.  I tried to buy one, just because it was something unique, but I didn’t move fast enough.  Probably a good thing.  I wouldn’t have known what to do with it.  There are specs and pictures of it out on the net.  It would have been a nice little machine for an 8-bit—a considerable move up.  There’s a computer alternate for you.  Commodore gets that thing out, stays afloat and keeps churning out new versions for the low-end home market.

There are actually people who still swear by their old C64s.  Some of the more fanatic have kept upgrading their systems to the point of near absurdity.  There are systems out there with add-ons that let them use the latest SCSI hard drives, and that have add-on processors that run at 20 Mhz (versus the original 1 Mhz).  The processor is a 65816—a faster version of the one that Apple used in the Apple IIGS, and runs mostly from very fast RAM that would normally used as cache memory for a more modern system.  That 20 MHz sounds slow until you realize that the software is all written in highly optimized machine code that goes right to the chips.  That code is now running at roughly 20 times the original speed, which is plenty fast enough to make games unplayable.  There are also add-ons that allow people to add large amounts of memory to the old C64.  The systems can’t access that memory directly, but they can use it as a Ramdisk—a very fast pseudo-disk drive that is actually RAM.

Of course with all of that extra power, now a group of people are trying to write a new operating system to take advantage of it, and with the operating system nearing completion, another group has actually designed new hardware—a board that goes into a standard ATX case and acts like a very fast and powerful C64.  I believe that the board is currently available for developers and the intention is that it will be marketed to the die-hard C64 community later this year.  I think that the people who designed that computer may also be considering designing an advanced psuedo-6502 processor for a more advanced design.  That’s one advantage of the Internet.  No matter how odd your interests you can find like-minded people out there and work with them.

Speaking of oddness and the Internet, I stumbled across a site by a guy who claimed to be a time-traveler from about twenty to thirty years in the future a while back.  Seemed reasonably rational other than the time-traveler bit.  If I recall correctly, he claimed that he came back to get an old IBM computer for some reason, one of the low end models that came along before the IBM PC.  He also claimed that there would be a civil war of sorts in the US starting in 2004 between essentially the Red and Blue states, with an element of urban versus rural tossed in.  That would be followed by a limited nuclear war caused by countries trying to move into the vacuum caused by the collapse of US power.  Judging from the postings, the guy has some people half-convinced he’s for real.

Other things of note: Interesting about the unusual weather pattern allowing US settlement of normally unsuitable areas of the plains.  I wonder if moving that pattern around a little bit could have left the Indians with a bit more land or more autonomy.  It might not have appeared worth it to take the areas away from them.  On the other hand, attitudes of the times tended toward forcing the Indians to settle down on worthless land, whether there was any economic point to it or not.

Your longer-lived Ottoman empire triggered a thought.: I wonder if there would be any way to extend the “Turkish threat” of the 1500s and early 1600s into the 1700s.  As I recall it, the last gasp of the Turks as a threat to march further into Europe came in the 1680s.  Is there any way that they could have reformed militarily so that they remained a credible threat to the likes of Austria and Russia?

Interesting analysis of the Chinese political situation surrounding the “Great Leap Forward”.  Actually I believe that the Holy Roman Empire was destroyed by Napoleon in the early 1800s

Your comments to Cron: I’ve often wondered what would have happened if the Poles had decided to accept an eastern boundary at about the Curzon line early on, and then concentrated their efforts on getting as good of a border as they could in the west.  I could see France pushing that as a means of insuring that Poland would inevitably be at Germany's throat with no chance or a deal, while minimizing the potential for conflict with Russia.  In the early days of Polish weakness France could have had a great deal of influence in pushing Poland in that direction.

There would be several potential consequences of the Curzon line being accepted early on.  First, as I mentioned, the Poles would be likely to get more territory on their western borders with Germany.  The constant border wars on their east soured the Allies on the Poles and made them look much harder at Polish claims in the west.  Without those skirmishes, and especially with whole-hearted French support, the Poles might very well have gotten Danzig outright, as well as more of Upper Silesia and even parts of the southern part of East Prussia which were historically subject to plebiscites that the Poles lost. 

That would give the Poles more of a German nationality problem to counterbalance the lack of Ukrainian, ByeloRussian, and Lithuania nationality problems.  It would also make them considerably stronger economically in some ways.  Upper Silesia was an important economic region and total control of Danzig would have meant that Poland didn’t have to spend a great deal of money to build an alternate port.

On the other hand, depending on where exactly the line was (I can’t tell from the map), the Poles might well not have had as much of the oil supplies of Galicia to draw on.  Also, the Ukrainians of eastern Galacia would have tried to set up an independent state, just as they did historically.  If the Poles or Russian didn’t crush them, there might well have been a Ukrainian mini-state in that area between the wars.  It would have been in Poland’s best interest to have a friendly buffer state between them and the Soviet Union, but unfortunately the area was very mixed ethnically, with the mostly Polish city of Lvov and several other pockets where Poles were a majority scattered through a mostly Ukrainian countryside.

I enjoyed your analysis of the politics around the Mexican/American War, but don’t know enough about the period to comment on it, beyond saying that the idea of the US detaching some of the northern Mexican states and pseudo-independent client states has some interesting potential.  A longer and deeper Mexican tradition of distrusting and hating the US has interesting strategic implications further along.  I wonder if a more nationalist Mexico might take advantage of the US Civil War to try to get back some of the client states or even some of the border states that they lost in 1848.  Of course that would require that the French not be in the process of trying to take over Mexico during the Civil War.  On the other hand the French-imposed regime might try something like that in an attempt to gain legitimacy in Mexico.  Of course that would require that the US look a great deal weaker than it did historically.

Your comments on the early death of President Pierce and the election of Fillmore are also interesting also, but again I don’t have much expertise in the politics of the period.

Your speculations on Pilgrims in Virginia are also interesting.  They certainly would have a wide-open field for moving on when they became disillusioned with Virginia.  I believe that what is now Maryland would have been open to them, as well as North and South Carolina.  I doubt that the Spanish would have put up with them settling in Georgia.  There may have even still been Spanish missions there.  I don’t remember exactly when the Indians chased the Spanish out of their missions there.

South Carolina is one of the more interesting possibilities, and I may borrow the idea for a scenario at some point.  I suspect that the Pilgrims would have moved far enough away from Virginia that the Virginia government couldn’t easily assert control over their new colony. That would probably rule out the northern part of North Carolina at least. 

South Carolina has potential. Historically South Carolina was settled primarily from Barbados, with plantation slavery already firmly a part of the culture.  It was also settled around fifty years later than the pilgrims would have probably have been moving in.  That would have had powerful effects on the dynamics of the interior Indian tribes, and many of the historic Indian tribes would probably not have been major players in anything like their historic forms.  Most if not all of the southern tribes that most people have heard about were the results of refugees from South Carolina-inspired slave raiding or disease coalescing in some relatively sheltered location. 

The Pilgrims were not necessarily morally opposed to slavery-either Indian or Black--at this point.  The relative absence of Black slaves in New England was partly due to the fact that those slaves tended to die in large numbers from respiratory problems in the cold New England winters.

 I’m not sure what form the colony would take on in South Carolina.  Attacks from Spanish Florida would certainly be a major threat in the early days.  That might have made importing large numbers of slave with the potential to revolt in the middle of a Spanish attack risky.  The colony wouldn’t be able to participate in the lucrative trade for beaver to any great extent, because there were few beavers in South Carolina.  Historically a trade in deerskins developed, along with plantation agriculture with rice as the primary crop.  I’m guessing that the Pilgrims would have stuck with relatively small farms, probably clustered together for defense.

I doubt that the descendants of the Pilgrims would have expanded very rapidly unless the Puritans followed them to South Carolina.  The Puritans came to New England a decade later than the Pilgrims, but quickly eclipsed them in numbers and in economic and political power.  By 1675 there were between five and six thousand descendants of the Pilgrims in Plymouth Bay colony, and roughly five times that many Puritans in Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut.  I suspect that while where the Pilgrims would have ended up is an interesting issue, where the Puritan migration would go under these circumstances would actually be more important in the long run.  Would New England still seem like an inviting place to the Puritans when they started looking for a place to settle if the Pilgrims hadn’t already settled there?  That’s an interesting question.  The Dutch would have been settled in New York for roughly a decade, and they would have been trading with the New England Indians.  Shifting groups of adventurers tried to settle in New England at about the time the Pilgrims did and shortly afterwards.  The Pilgrims managed to disrupt those settlements, but if they hadn’t been around New England might have seen the kind of small unofficial settlements that I visualized in The Saguenay.  Of course those settlements would have had to compete with French and Dutch settlements from the early on, and if the Puritans did settle in New England the relative vacuum in New England would have only lasted about a decade, rather than sixty or seventy years.

I’d love to explore this further, and I probably will, but I’m running out of time for comments, so I’ll set it aside for now.

Your comments to me-Mars: I’m afraid I’m not as up on the ins and outs of executive orders as I should be.  You may well be right about the public comment period not applying there.  I’ll have to check.  I can work around it fairly easily if I need to.  On high-order fusion: I got the idea from a friend who is going for a PhD in physics, but he isn’t infallible.  I’ll do some more checking.  The idea with the congressional aide having inklings about what was going on is that something this big can’t be totally kept from people who are deep enough on the inside, although they may not know all of the details of what is happening.  Part of the idea of behind the other time-line people knowing English is to illustrate that they are learning about our society a lot quicker than we’re learning about ours due to the technology gap.  Of course it also makes the dialogue work a lot easier.

Good analysis of how the Hitler Doesn’t Declare War situation might play out.  I don’t totally agree with your analysis on Poland.  I get the impression that Hitler mainly dumped on Poland because he could without repercussions.  He hated the Czechs as much as or more than he hated the Poles, but he needed their skilled manpower to keep Czech factories going, so he treated them relatively well at least by Nazi standards.  The point is that Hitler could be practical when he had to be.  Other than that, most of your analysis seems pretty reasonable.

On Cron and “SF for Dummies”, I tend to agree that the genre magazines are gradually going away.  Silver printed some circulation figures on the big ones, and they really don’t look good for the long run.

Your alternate Internet bit is interesting.  I recently read an article that argued that Mozilla, the Open Source descendant of Netscape, is poised to make the bulk of the Microsoft hold on the computer industry go away by giving people a platform independent way to write modern applications.

The Open Source movement is full of people who feel that Linux and the various Open Source applications have a real shot at displacing Microsoft’s operating system and Microsoft Office.  I’m not so sure of that.  Platform changes tend to happen when someone can offer a new platform that leverages off of programmers’ and users’ existing expertise.  MS-Dos was kind of a super-CP/M, so people could move easily from one to the other.  The early versions of Windows were easy for MS-Dos users because they were just shells on top of MS-Dos, and MS-Dos users could still do most of their work in DOS if they wanted to, while imagining that they had the same capabilities that Mac users did.  The transitions to Windows 95 thru Windows XP all just added capabilities while most of the expertise remained useful throughout the process.  The result is not a particularly good operating system in a lot of ways, but it is a very difficult one to displace.

Linux is in some ways a super-Unix, with a very different underlying philosophy than MS-Dos/Windows.  Moving from Windows to Linux would mean giving up a lot of expertise and having to relearn a lot of philosophies and ways of doing things.  People who are real Windows gurus would presumably resist that, and they typically are in a position to influence a lot of buying decisions.  I suspect that if Windows is going to be replaced it will be by something that looks and acts a lot more like Windows than Linux does.  That doesn’t mean that Linux won’t make inroads.  I could see it grabbing a double-digit share of the desktop market in a few years—maybe 15 to 20 percent. 
 
I’ll try to remember to tackle your Beringia speculations next time.  I’ve got a lot to say about them, but if I get going on that I’ll never get to the other commentary,

Dale Cozort: I glanced over my last zine a couple days ago.  I’m still reasonably proud of it, though the nits that I overlooked in my enthusiasm are more apparent now.  I submitted Time Heals along with a copy of the zine to the real Analog, and got a rejection slip on it.  At least the rejection was personal because it mentioned my Analog wannabe magazine.  I reread Time Heals not long ago, and wasn’t as impressed with it as I was initially.  It reads like the first few pages of a story rather than an actual story.  I still like the idea though.

I came across another reference to the built-in-Dekalb TDR-1 attack drones that I featured in my “Real or from an alternate timeline“ contest a couple of issues ago.  One of the aviation magazines, Aviation History, has an article on them in its January 2004 issue.  They were actually used in combat in small numbers (50-odd?) in the Pacific in October 1944, and about 46% of the flights hit their target or got close enough to do significant damage.  At that point the navy abruptly shut the program down, apparently for internal naval political reasons and essentially buried it until it was declassified in 1966.  The navy concentrated efforts on a radio-controlled glide bomb called the Bat, which also played a minor role toward the end of the Pacific war.  Apparently there is only one TDR-1 left in a museum in Pensacola Florida.

I think I probably should have made some of my comments to Docimo a private e-mail rather than comments.  Oh well.

By the way, as you’ve probably figured out my 144 digest-sized pages isn’t directly comparable to everybody else’s 8.5 by 11 pages.  For clearcut purposes we should probably compare oranges to oranges.  So how many normal-sized pages would my zine have been?  If I recall correctly, when I moved stuff over from the 8.5 by 11 format to the digest format I had around 60 normal-sized pages done.  That became a little over 90 digest-sized pages when I moved to that format.  I added roughly fifty more digest-sized pages after I went to that format, which my back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate would be somewhere between 90 and 100 normal-sized pages.

Tom Cron: Two of your speculations caught my eye.  I’m guessing that the assassination of an American ambassador by Japanese militants would not have triggered a war in 1936.  The US was deeply isolationist at the time and even having one of its ships sunk during the Panay incident a year later didn’t trigger war.

The bit about the Indians around Plymouth not being wiped out by disease shortly before the Pilgrims arrived has potential.  If disease totally missed them, my guess is that the Pilgrims would settle for a short time, hack off the Indians enough to start a war and figure out that they had to leave in fairly short order. 

If disease hit the Indians but was much milder than it was historically, then things get a little more iffy.  The Wampanoags helped the colony survive the first winter partly because they wanted to use it to counterbalance the weight of the Narragansetts, who were not hit anywhere near as hard by disease, and thus suddenly became the local great power.  If the impact of disease on local Wampanoag groups was less, they might not need the Pilgrims to counterbalance the Narragansetts and might either let the colony starve or help the process along by guerrilla  attacks.

Your comments to me: I have a 130+ page World War II scenario that I intended to bring out shortly after I brought out American Indian Victories.  I need to flesh it out considerably, possibly make maps, and do some fact checking, but the basic scenario is pretty much done.  Unfortunately I have a lot of projects that are at about the 90% done level.  That’s starting to kind of bug me, and I’m determined to get some of them done before I start anything else.  At the same time, I keep having new ideas and getting enthusiastic about them.  It takes a lot of self-discipline to turn aside from a new idea that seems absolutely fabulous in order to finish polishing one that’s almost done, and I’m not always self-disciplined enough to do that.

Anthony Docimo: I don’t know if I can figure out a way to keep the crusades from occurring, but I did have a thought: The tragic children’s crusade could be a cool place to find people who never were.  We’re talking thousands of European children going off to die, usually of exposure or starvation for no particularly good reason.  Any one of them could have been brilliant in some area or another. 

Yes, I’ve heard of Ankarapithecus, but I can’t recall from where or what the species was.  From the name I assume it was some sort of Turkish fossil Great Ape, probably from the Miocene.  That brings up an interesting point.  There were apes in Europe and the Middle East until very close to the time apes and humans are supposed to have diverged.  That means that there is a remote possibility that very early human ancestors originated in Europe or the Middle East and then migrated to Africa as Europe cooled off during the ice ages.  I vaguely remember reading somewhere that there are actually better potential ancestors for chimpanzees in Europe than there are in Africa, so maybe the whole bunch migrated down from Europe and displaced whatever apes were already there.

Reality seeds: Tsar Nicholas does not abdicate?  I’m guessing that he would still be overthrown, but the Russian revolution would be much bloodier in the initial stages.  I’m not sure how that changes the later stages of the revolution.  I would guess that the Bolsheviks wouldn’t do anywhere near as well because they would have probably played a minor role in the initial revolution and the that revolution would have thrown up capable non-Bolshevik leaders capable of taking on the likes of Lenin more effectively than the Mensheviks did historically.  A violent overthrow of the Tsars would certainly unleash a time of anarchy, with the Germans taking advantage of it.  Eventually someone would re-impose something very like the old system, just as the Bolsheviks did.  If the Tsar or some of his family survived, they might run a rump Tsardom somewhere for a while, or even be called upon to restore order when enough people got tired of the feuding factions.  Another possibility: some Russian general might decide to play Napoleon, either by trying to join and then take over the initial uprising, or by imposing order at a strategic time.

Of course it is also possible that the Tsar might be able to survive by giving some temporary concessions—possibly yielding some power temporarily to an elective body of some kind and then gradually whittling that power away.  That’s kind of what happened in the aftermath of the humiliating Russian defeats in the Russo-Japanese war.  It could have happened again.

Napoleon Doesn’t Abolish the Holy Roman Empire?  Well, he would have lost out in the short term because he was able to use bits and pieces of the old empire to bribe friendly German princes.  A lot of the medium-sized German states got considerably bigger if they were friendly to Napoleon.  In the long run he might have been better off letting the HRE be because going along with its destruction and taking part in it tended to delegitimize the allied German princes, while Prussia gained in legitimacy because it didn’t take part.  Let’s see, Russia and the Ottoman Empire were at war at about this time.  What if Napoleon had thrown the weight of France on the side of Russia to partition the European part of the Ottoman Empire?  I’m guessing that wouldn’t have worked because the Russians wanted more than the French would have been willing to give them—essentially all of the Balkans as at least a sphere of influence.  If they could have agreed to split it though, that would have changed history in some very major ways.

Charles 1st is not so ill-fated?  I’m not I’d call him ill-fated so much as ambitious, arrogant, and kind of dumb.  Make him smarter or give him better advisors and England might have become much more like the French and Russian absolute monarchies, at least for a while.  If that happened, immigration to New England would have gone through the roof, and New England would have probably tried for independence much earlier than it did, maybe even by the 1670s or 1680s.

Horses are never domesticated?  Oh boy.  That’s a big one, but actually not all that unlikely.  Horses could have become extinct before Eurasian civilizations advanced enough to want to domesticate them, or they could have been ornery enough that they couldn’t be domesticated, which is apparently the case with zebras.  In that case, the central Asian nomads don’t become as big of a force as they did historically.  That isn’t all bad in terms of how fast cultures advance.  Possibly the affect of poorer communications would be offset by the comparative lack of nomad raids.  What could substitute for horses?  Well, if donkeys were still available for domestication you might find people riding around in carts pulled by donkeys or oxen to a greater extent.  Donkeys wouldn’t have the military utility of horses, at least not without a lot of selective breeding.  Donkey charges just wouldn’t do much.  I suppose that you could hook a couple of donkeys up to a chariot, but I’m guessing that they would be smart enough and timid enough to go the other way if they saw a bunch of armed men.  Camels might work to move men around quickly, but I doubt that they would be worth much in a fight.  Camel-mounted archers?  Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on them being controllable in a fight.

Neanderthals survive in the British Isle?  I think I arrived at this one independently—read something in a British archaeology journal about the gap in human habitation of the British Isles and came up with a way of filling it.  I can’t absolutely vouch for the fact that I didn’t read your reality seed when I first got the zine, forget about it and then reinvent it when I saw the article on the gap in human habitation.  In any case, I did a scenario on this theme for this issue, as you probably noticed.

Your comments to me: Historically the Turks were very interested in the fate of Turkish speaking people in the USSR during World War II, and Hitler treated those Turkish-speaking people comparatively well by German standards as part of an ongoing German effort to woo Turkey into the war on the Axis side.  There was some vague and very tentative talk of a Turkish role in Turkish-speaking parts of the USSR, but nothing serious came of it.

On the dinosaurs pushing out large mammals if they survived anywhere:  Frankly, I don’t believe that, as you can probably tell by my dinosaur survival scenario last issue.  It was necessary for the plot of the Flintstones bit though.  On which continent the South American monkeys and rodents came from:  That was hotly debated up until fairly recently.  One school of thought felt that the South American monkeys descended from a group of Tarsier relatives that lived in North America from the Eocene to the Miocene.  That view was apparently torpedoed by DNA studies that showed that Old and New World monkeys were a group, closer to each other than to Tarsiers.  At about the same time, monkey fossils similar to the New World monkeys were found in Africa.  That seems to have pretty much settled the issue, but the whole issue of the origin of higher primates in still very much up in the air.  Some recent fossil finds in Asia seem to point to Asia rather than Africa as the place of origin of the whole monkey/ape group, though that claim is extremely controversial. 

If there were primitive ancestors of the monkeys in Asia in the Eocene, that opens up the possibility that they made it over to North America and then to South America.  North America and Asia shared much of their primate faunas during that period and the Eocene fossil record for primates is spotty enough to make that a remote possibility

From old and possibly faulty memory, living Capybaras don’t get much bigger than a hundred to maybe a hundred and fifty pounds.  I believe that the Moriscos rebelled in the late 1560’s.  Don’t have the reference handy.  A revolt of Moslems in southern Spain seems like an ideal opportunity for the Turks to weaken their main rival, and possibly even get a Turkish foothold in Spain.

Robert Gill: I enjoyed the Parking Lot Is Full cartoons, especially the Oswald one.  Your comments to me: There is more on those drones in the latest issue of one of the aviation magazines (see my comments on my own zine).  If I recall correctly, Conquistador does mention the divergence that kept the New World from being settled, but it doesn’t make a big deal about it.  To be honest I don’t even remember what it was—possibly some change in Alexander the Great’s reign or itinerary of conquest. Europe won’t be explored in any sequel, for reasons that I can’t reveal without a major spoiler.  The people in Mars Looks Different are from a parallel time-line, somewhat convergent with ours, and I agree that the names probably need to seem a little more exotic.

David Johnson: Excellent job on the cover of section one.  I love it.  I enjoyed your review of American Empire.  I’m afraid I gave up on the series after getting halfway through book two.  I haven’t given up Turtledove though.  He is quite capable of being an excellent author, as I’ll hopefully point out in this issue.

Your nightmare fieldtrip sounds about right—the best of intentions meet up with the reality of students and turns into something out of Steven King.  Been there, done that.

Your comments to me: I’m toying with Applied Atomics as the name for the Technogeek group.  What do you think?  Advanced Atomics and Industrial Atomics aren’t bad either.  Oh wait, Imperial Atomics, that’s even better.  Thanks.  Good point on losing contact with the various space probes.

You make a good point about the time lapse.  Yes, I do have the president and company moving fast, maybe unrealistically fast as you say.  I’m visualizing a small group of very top people moving at the kind of speed that they would if they figured that nukes would be flying within the next couple of weeks.  I think, or maybe hope would be the better word, that under those circumstances people could move fast.  I’ll have to look at the Stan/Ward sections and see if I can give a better since of the time.  I did do a time-line, but I probably didn’t think it through as well as I should have.

On the pod’s engines and getting to Venus orbit: Yep. 

On Char: Good point on the finances of doing a “Most dangerous Game”. 

Other comments: You nailed all of the Real or AH articles, though the only ATL element of the Antarctic animals one was the Primates.  The rest was real.

By the way, knowing your interests I suggest that you make a point of not missing the alternate technology section at the end of the zine.

Wesley Kawato: The alternate history elements are gradually coming to Char.  I’ve already brought in some of them, but I’m trying to make them subtle.  I’m glad to see that you are continuing with Nova SF and continuing to pursue The Queen of Alaska.

Gerson Lodi Ribeiro: Well, I’m glad you are out from under your Fandom chores.  Your anthology doesn’t sound like it is exactly my cup of tea, but I hope you do well with it.  I don’t imagine an English translation is in the works.  I wonder how a small-press company dedicated to bringing Portuguese-language stuff to the US market would do?  Maybe some kind of Print-on-Demand thing might work.  The US market is pretty glutted and hard to break into, but something different and good might find a little niche.

I’m interested in the publisher that is packaging novellas in book form.  Is he publishing single novellas or two or three novellas per book?  My stories tend to want to be in the novella size range, and there is no US market that I can find. 

I like the idea of Napoleon using steam warships to invade England.  There were a lot of technologies that weren’t all that far from feasibility and that would have helped him in the struggle against England.  For example, primitive railroads of sorts weren’t too far off by the end of his reign and would have made the Continental System a lot more workable.

Your comments to me: No, the ex-wife with the succession of psycho boyfriends isn’t from personal experience, though my stepdaughter made a series of very bad choices in that area, and that probably had some influence on the story.  I’m glad you continue to enjoy Char. 

The Megalon interview with Jim: Good stuff.  I wish there was more of Jim’s ideas and writing in the APA.  (Hint hint Jim)

Michael Pratt: You’ve got quite an impressive zine this time around.  Hopefully I can do it justice.  I enjoyed the review of the Sealion exercise.  That could actually be the basis for an interesting AH.  What if Hitler had gambled on SeaLion and lost?  The British round up whatever troops the Germans manage to get across, shoot down quite a few more German planes than they did historically as the Germans try desperately to salvage the invasion, and sink any part of the remnants of the German navy that tries to take a hand.  That kind of a defeat wouldn’t be materially ruinous to the Germans.  They might lose a couple hundred more planes—maybe as many as five hundred, plus some supply ships, and maybe some major naval combatants if Hitler get desperate enough to try to use them to try to retrieve the invasion once it is obvious that it is failing.  In terms of troops they probably wouldn’t lose more than the equivalent of maybe two or three divisions at most, because they couldn’t get anymore into the battle if the British put their full resources into the battle.

The Germans would lose a lot more in terms of prestige though, and perceptions of power can very much influence the realities of power.  The rest of Europe would become slightly but definitely less cooperative with the Germans as it becomes obvious that they have been defeated and therefore can be defeated.  Nationalists in British colonies and mandates like India and Iraq would be a little more respectful of British power, as would real or potential enemies like the Japanese and the Spanish.  So whatdayathink?  Does that have potential?

I enjoyed the Gettysburg what if reprint.  Reading between the lines, I suspect that the author figured that the Confederates would have lost the battle for Pipe’s Creek, which I think is likely.  My feeling is that the most likely way for the Confederates to win the Civil War is to not have it—to avoid doing anything that precipitated the war and force Lincoln to either start the war himself or let the Deep South states slip away without a fight.  How might that have happened given the flashpoints at Fort Sumter and a couple of other places?  Well, for quite some time, the bulk of the Federal garrison around Charleston was in essentially indefensible Fort Moultrie rather than Fort Sumter.  It moved to Fort Sumter arguably without authorization, though that is debatable.  Had the garrison remained in Fort Moultrie, the Confederates might well have occupied Fort Sumter without much resistance, in which case the garrison at Fort Moultrie would have been essentially irrelevant since Fort Sumter dominated the harbor to such an extent that bring supplies in would have been impossible without Confederate agreement.  The other remaining Federal installation in the south was in Florida if I recall correctly, and didn’t dominate the harbor of a major port city, so the south would have had no immediate need to assault it.

Even without a Fort Sumter or equivalent, I doubt that the south would have been allowed to go quietly.  There were too many other potential flashpoints, including collection or non-collection of tariffs.  At the same time, I think that avoiding Fort Sumter was the south’s best chance at independence.

On the Buffy reprint.  Unfortunately it came out unreadable in my issue.  Too dark.  Too bad.  I really enjoy that show, along with the Angel spin off, and Firefly, which is from the same team but involves a very different universe—one without vampire or any of the other supernatural accoutrements of Buffy.

Now on to The Janus Project.  I’ve been looking forward to this ever since I skimmed the issue before I started doing comments.  Interesting idea you have going here.  These stories have a lot of potential.  They grabbed me and held my attention as well as most stories by professional authors do.  I did notice a considerable number of little glitches, mainly of the their/they’re/there or two/too/to kind, but there were also a few places where the sentence didn’t make sense as written.  I could usually figure out what you meant, but there was a word missing or in some cases you used the wrong word.

I usually informally go through several stages in my writing.  I do a creative pass, just getting the stuff written.  I later go back and edit for typos and awkward phrasing usually just highlighting sentences that don’t sound right.  I sometimes enlist my wife in that, and she always finds a few typos that I miss.  Still later I go back and edit for length.  I usually find that I can tighten things up by about 15% and end up with a better story.  Finally, I go back and add little touches that hopefully bring scenes alive to the readers.  I’m not sure where you are in that process or even if you do something similar—probably not everybody has to.  If you’ve done a typo editing run and still think there may be some glitches left, I’ll be happy to run them by my wife for “red penciling”.

Please keep writing this.  In terms of plot and characters it is quite good.  It is very enjoyable as written.  It does need some editing, but that can be taken care of.

Steven Silver: Good to have you back.  I think your last issue was either my first, or the one right before I joined.  I enjoyed your reviews, especially the ones of The Year of the Hangman and Ruled Britannia.  I hope to have my review of Ruled Britannia in this issue, time permitting.  Les Lettres de Paston grabbed me and I enjoyed it a great deal as a story, though I’m afraid I don’t know enough about European politics of the period to have any clue as to what if any divergence was involved.

Kurt Sidaway: I enjoyed your review of 1632.  I bought a copy, read about half of it, then came to a place where my copy had several badly scrambled or missing pages.  I had lost my receipt and frankly couldn’t remember where I bought the book.  I put the book aside and never got back into it.  Sounds like I’m missing a pretty good read.  I’ll have to see if I can finish my mangled copy and maybe go on for the sequel, though your comments on that make me somewhat less interested. 
Up-and coming?  Me?  That’s flattering.  Probably not particularly accurate, but it is flattering.

Your comments to Johnson on cities and epidemics: My understanding is that in the Old World cities could only sustain themselves due to net migration into them because the high mortality rates from various diseases, and that held true until sanitation and modern medicine pushed the mortality rates down in the surprisingly recent past.

Your comments to Alley: You know it would be kind of interesting to think through the implications of moving the Black Death around say fifty years one way or the other.  Would it make much of a difference?  The equivalent of Columbus arrives in the New World fifty years earlier or later?  I’m not sure what the implications of that would be, though I’m sure there would be some.

That actually triggers another thought: how much difference did it make that the New World was discovered by Columbus?  Did his personality and relationship with the Spanish crown make a difference in the pattern of European settlement?  Did the fact that he was sailing for Spain rather than Portugal or France make a difference?  See my Columbus scenario earlier in the zine for more.

I like your attempt at a US/Lithuanian war, though I don’t know enough about the individual involved to know if it is feasible.

Thank you for your typo-finding on Mars Looks Different.  I try very had to catch everything like that, but inevitably a few problems slip through.  Part of the problem is that, well I know what I meant to say and tend to read it that way, even if it isn’t quite what is actually there.

Your writing: Good fiction here.  Quite a range, too.

The Meeting: The English crown moves to Virginia along with a lot of royalists, which weakens England enough that the Dutch and French threaten both English regimes’ holdings in India.  Sounds plausible enough for AH work.  Which side are the various West Indies colonies on?  Also, how are the Spanish colonies doing?  I’m trying to remember when England took over Jamaica from Spain.  I think it was during the Commonwealth era.  I wonder how that would have played out in this time-line.  The West Indies islands became vital economically in our time-line, so it’s pretty important for the timeline which way they go.

As far as the story itself goes, I enjoyed it, which is my main criteria for a story.  It was a little rough around the edges in a few spots, but that’ll probably work itself out in the revision process if you decide to pursue this further, and I encourage you to.  The main technical problems I saw in this and your other stories were pronoun ambiguity and a pretty heavy use of passive voice.  Both are problems I struggle with, so I’ve become more conscious of them. 

In several places I had to stop and parse the sentence or the paragraph to make sure I understood who “he” or “they” referred to.  I could figure it out, but having to do so did slow down my reading a little.  That forces a break in the mood that you’re creating and detracts a little from the story.  What I mean by passive voice is that you tend to say things like:

“There were no portraits on the walls…in fact the only decoration…was a large hanging… It was the Arms of the Commonwealth..”

That’s all grammatically correct and I have no problem with it in terms of enjoying the story, but I’m told that most editors look down on extensive use of “was” and “were” in descriptions.  They claim, rightly or wrongly, that it makes a story seem flat and somehow less real or less exciting than something like “The bare stone walls..” did something or other, or “Or Lord Whozit looked at the walls, bare except for a whatzit..”  The idea is to engage senses and give a sense of action even while you are setting the scene.

Viena: This confused the heck out of me until I figured out that the two columns scrolled through the story independently.  After that, it was enjoyable.

Utgaro:  I enjoyed the story and I hope you continue it.  I do have a couple of quibbles with the background.  First, I have trouble buying it taking as long as you have it taking for North America to be populated given the initial scenario.  Second, I doubt that horses would have been domesticated as a first (well, second after dogs) domestic animal.  From what I’ve read, it appears that unless they “inherit” an already domesticated animal and the habits and routines surrounding it, cultures need to go through some intermediate steps before they domesticate a large and demanding animal like a horse and then ride it.  Indians historically ‘inherited’ an already domesticated animal and were able to copy the accoutrements for dealing with it from the Spanish—saddles, bridals, stirrups, etc.

I make those comments from an AH purist point of view.  They don’t ruin the story for me, and I hope you continue it.  If you find ways around them great.  If you can’t I wouldn’t worry about it.

Overall, great job.  A big zine, but well worth reading. Vienna looks finished, but I hope you continue your other stories.

Dale Speirs: Wow, a normal-sized zine nestled in among these sixty and seventy page monsters.  That’s actually somewhat refreshing.  I wasn’t really convinced by your Whatever Happen to Rasputin divergence.  I just can’t see the Russian system of that time period working that way. 

The first part of Beringia, the AH That Never Was pretty much sums up what seems likely to become the prevailing view of the initial populating of the New World.  I tend to agree with that viewpoint.  I think that surviving in northern Siberia was a much more significant barrier to human expansion than getting across the Bering Strait.  Once the human toolkit was sophisticated enough to live in northern Siberia, it was sophisticated enough that people could make it to the New World.  I don’t buy into the second half of the essay to the same extent.  I think that climate and the development of civilizations were intertwined enough that civilizations might not develop at all, and if they did they wouldn’t be Chinese and European in any real sense.

I enjoyed the review of Drake’s Fortune.  It’s sad that so many people buy into that sort of thing.  My father-in-law fell for some similar frauds when he got older, and would have probably lost the family home and become destitute if my wife hadn’t stepped in. Oh well. 

I also enjoyed your review of Dr. Strangelove’s Game. I’ve noticed that as I get more knowledgeable about history and alternate history my focus has gradually shifted away from the tactics and battles that drew me into the field in the first place and towards more of the root cause of events.  I went from looking at the details of the Normandy landing to looking at how the Allies produced the overwhelming weight of men and materials they deployed, and finally at how they financed it all.  I have to be careful because each step takes me a little further away from what interests most people about history and what most people understand about history.  I’ve thought of several perfectly good points of divergence that I wouldn’t even think about writing about for anyone but myself because they are heavily dependent on economics and that makes most peoples’ eyes glaze over.