Your comments to me: Good point on the microbes, harmless to people from the common world culture, but fatal to isolated groups.  The Others in this Exchange are non-human and quite some distance from humans, which would make that kind of disease spread somewhat less likely, though crowd diseases might well jump species.  Many of our deadliest diseases probably jumped from herd animals to humans.  The option of a disease spread is there if I need it.

 Good nitpicks on There Will Always Be An England.  On the blasts from the distant past: The “China mucks about in pre-conquest Mexico” bit is obviously more than a little naive given the nature of Chinese society at the time.  I think you’re on the right track in trying to change the nature of China to be less isolationist, but I suspect that the changes necessary to make Chinese in Mexico happen would ripple through a lot of Eurasian history too.  I agree on the approximate timing of the divergence caused by inhabitable Venus and Mars.  I remember when it became apparent that the traditional science fiction Mars and Venus were impossible, and that means it had to be in the early to mid 1960s.  Your analysis of the impact of finding out that Mars and/or Venus were inhabitable/inhabited sounds about right.  A lot of momentum went out of the space program when it became apparent that there were no easily inhabitable worlds out there within reach.

 I don’t recall many of the details of the Springfield Goes Back story.  I do remember that I planned to have the town (which varied between Rockford, Springfield and DeKalb depending on where I lived at the time) go back to the early 1500s, where they would encounter surviving Mississippian mound-builders, less developed Indian tribes, and eventually conquistadors attracted by Indian stories of a great city in the north.  The Indians where the Spaniards currently were would be happy to send the Spanish on, so stories would grow, abetted by a smattering of trade goods.  I was going to have the proud Indians improving their lives by trading with the modern city, but becoming poor in a relative and psychological sense.  The town that went back would try to overcome some of their lost tech by hiring Indians to do the grunt work, setting off trade wars as Indians from further away tried to gain access to the new wonders and Indians stole weapons or modified seemingly innocent items into weapons.  I did a lot of thinking about the story but it always floundered on the fact that I didn’t understand the implications of the technology available to the town involved, and I knew it.

 On German/Soviet/Romanian war in June 1940: Interesting thoughts about the impact of all of this on Hungary as an Axis minor ally. 

 On being in charge of the Soviet Union during the lead-up to the German invasion: I like the idea of shooting down German reconnaissance planes and pretending that the pilots are bandits.

 No vigil.  Just a place-holder.  Would love to see you back on a regular basis, but I know work has gotten a bit ferocious for you.

 Good point on the disappearance of the Woodstock crowd being perceived as a CIA or military plot.  That would have some severely radicalizing impacts on surviving anti-war people, and on trust in the government.  No government explanation would satisfy friends and parents.  How could it?  Every conspiracy theory would claim the disappearance as its own, and every religion would have a slant on it.  I’m pretty sure Christians would not mention the rapture.  I could even see the disappearance spawning a slew of new minor religions, most of them probably pseudo-eastern ones. 

We haven’t even started to explore their impact wherever they went.  Some possibilities that might be fun:

·         1860, right before the American Civil War.  That would be an interesting test of anti-war sensibilities.

·         1940, where the generation’s anti-war message would be tested even more severely.  Would they team up with isolationist Republicans to keep us from helping the Allies against Hitler?  I’m guessing that most of them wouldn’t, but there would be a major split.  How would the society of 1940 react to that kind of influx?  They would probably be horrified and I’m guessing that all but the most extreme of extreme liberals circa 1940 would devote their lives to keeping the future that led to Woodstock from happening.  On the other hand, I could see a minority of 1940s people fervently embracing the Woodstock future.  Every intelligence agency and newspaper on the planet would go after these guys to try to get insights into the future, once their bona fides as being from the future was established.  I could see the US government trying to limit access to the Woodstockies, though with hundreds of thousands of them that would be difficult.  That could actually be a pretty interesting story: the 1940s era FBI trying to track down Vietnam war era antiwar protesters, while the German, Soviet, British, and Japanese spy agencies tried to get to them first, and isolationist and interventionist newspapers tried to get to them and spin their stories to support their favored positions.  Sounds like a real mess, which often makes for a good story.

·         1492, where the romantic notions about ecologically correct and peaceful Indians would run into the realities of the nearby Iroquois, who would not be pleased by several hundred thousand strange white people suddenly showing up and trying to survive on the same ecology they were trying to live on.  You could do a nasty ironic story of the Woodstock generation descending into Lord of the Flies type activities.  I suppose you could make it even nastier by putting them in the middle of the beaver wars of the late 1640s.

Obviously their skills sets and upbringing would make them completely unsuited to any of these places.  It would be interesting to see how they reacted and how the locals reacted to them.  This could actually be an interesting anthology: get a bunch of authors together and have them each put the Woodstock people in a different era and then play the situation out as plausibly as possible.  It would have a huge appeal to baby boomers, though probably not so much to anybody else. 

Your comments to Grey: Laughing out loud.  Now I need to write something that says all of the things that you have Grey saying.  Maybe someday.  I may do something with Clockwork Confederacy.  It’s actually a cool concept in a weird southern-wank kind of way.

 
Lisa Brackman: Wonderful issue.  I wish you could be a regular here.

 Dale Cozort: Sorry about the unreadable comments.  The grey looked fine on the screen and on the original printing, but the copy service darkened it to the point of being nearly unreadable.  I didn’t notice that until I had already sent them out.  Won’t happen again.  By the way, the pictures on the cover all came from a website called Black and WTF that collects strange old black and white photos.

Anthony Docimo: I like the idea of moving the big Japanese quake around, though I would move it to the middle of 1937 to abort the China Incident, or maybe to the middle of 1941.  That would shake things up a bit (pun unintended but noted).

Mark Ford: Way to take the cover idea and run with it!  Nicely done.  I hope you have better luck with your computer in the future.

Robert Gill: I don’t like the current Doctor quite as well as the last one, but the show is still quite good, and I love Amy Pond. I like your reality seeds, especially the Pancho Villa one and the one on stopping the Greek/Turkish was of the early 1920s.  I’m not sure your point of divergence would stop that war, because I get the impression that there was considerable support for it from the Greek population, and there were large Greek minorities in many of the areas Greece was after.  A less greedy Greek leadership might conceivably have been able to grab some additional booty and get away with it.  Hard to say though.  The new Turkish leadership was pretty competent.

 Interesting divergence on Kennedy getting assassinated as president-elect.  I’m not sure I buy Johnson as significantly poorer at international affairs than Kennedy, and I think that the conventional and nuclear balance of power during the Cuban Missile Crisis made the Soviets being much more aggressive than they were unlikely unless a particularly inept US move put them in a corner that they couldn’t get out of.  I know you didn’t write the scenario, so I guess I’m responding to Greenberg.  In the RFK survives scenario, I think that Nixon selecting Lindsay as VP is an if-only rather than a realistic possibility.  Nixon needed to have somebody to the right of him, not to the left, if he was going to get elected.

 I like the Opus cartoon.  Feel like doing that to the TV quite often when her name comes up.  Lindsay Lohan too, though at least in that case I have a bit of morbid, slip on a banana peel curiosity--as in how did she get that screwed up that fast.

Johnny Grey: As you know by now, I’m talking to myself here.  I enjoyed writing as Johnny Grey.  I may try it again sometime.  The Fanfic was especially fun to write.  I added a few things to the version I gave the SM Stirling website people to put up, and it’s really considerably better.  I think that I take some of the fun out of writing when I know I’m writing for publication.  Writing something I know is just playing around felt really fun.  I’ve got to do that from time to time.

David Johnson: Interesting about California having a wet year.  The Midwest was wet this spring too.  I barely got in half a dozen bike rides during a time period when I normally get in twenty or thirty.  That has put my summer weight loss back several months.  Normally I lose fifteen to twenty pounds in spring and early summer, then plateau for the rest of the summer before gaining most or all of it back during the winter.  I’ve got to find a sport I enjoy during the winter.

 Building forensics, huh?  Interesting.

 I also got dragged into the smart phone world.  My daughter bought me an Android phone as a something present.  She has been annoyed that she can’t text me when she feels like it.  I don’t have angry birds on it, but I do have Fruit Ninja on my iPad, and spend way too much time on that.

 Cover: In case you haven’t figured it out, I appreciate your efforts on the covers.  They really add a lot of class to the distro.

 Uchronia: I sent them a copy of the book, plus two e-mails.  No joy so far, though they do update with other books on a regular basis.  They may be just updating the stuff from major publishers and ignoring small press.

 Your comments to Kurt: I wonder what current consumer products will turn out to be the radium watches of our time.  Hopefully there aren’t any lurking out there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were.  On Snapshot winds: yeah, I’m guessing that beings capable of copying an entire continent can handle wind through the vents, if they feel like it.  They might not care.  I’ll have to think about that.

 Your comments to me: I’m glad you’re enjoying There Will Always Be An England.  I’ll have to think about ways to differentiate the three groups more effectively.  I’m glad you’re still enjoying Snapshot, and I appreciate the nitpick.

 I appreciate the Doc Savage, though I have to confess that I haven’t read any of the e-books yet.  I’m hoping to once I get caught up on my writing commitments, which I hope will happen around the end of November.

 What you said about sending a time machine back to record the missing Dr. Who episodes.  That’s actually twisted enough I could see writing a story about it.  Fanatic fan imprisons the Doctor or takes a companion hostage to force him to go back and save the missing episodes.

 I love the alternate TinTins.

Wesley Kawato: I did a little research on your writer and discovered a nasty, backbiting subculture of small-time science fiction wannabees that I had never known existed.  I’m not sorry I had missed them for so long.  What I got out of what I read was that he had definitely gotten some of his own stories printed in multiple magazines without revealing that they were reprints, and had publicly acknowledged/apologized for that.  I didn’t see anything in the way of plagiarism complaints that seemed solid.  I think some of the stories you listed as being in Nova SF are also available in other magazines, which is okay if he presented them to the second magazine as reprints.

Jim Rittenhouse: Sorry I ran out of time on our more ambitious plans for last issue, but the Rittenhouse issue wasn’t bad.  Thanks for the thoughts on China.  I hope you or we can do something with them at some point.  I’m following the saga of Meredith as a skater.  Not what I would have predicted, but still very cool.

Kurt Sidaway: I share your apathy about the royal wedding, though I did watch a bit of it to laugh at the funny hats.  Your comments to Johnson: Ah, I knew you had another round of library administration follies in you. Your comments to me: I checked an atlas briefly before I wrote the geography bits, but probably misinterpreted something. Oh well.  Plenty of time to fix that.

 Interesting bit about the Newton rebellion.  I really should read up on British history.  The whole enclosure business seems to have been a tragic thing that destroyed a lot of the structure of the English countryside.

And on to Mittleuropa Pt2: Still moving along rather well in general.  Minor nitpick in the first paragraph: You have a potential pronoun confusion there with the he/his.  It took me out of the story for a second as I worked out who was who and who which he or his belonged to. (And that sentence is undoubtedly far more confusing than the one I’m pointing at, ironically). I noticed a few other places in the segment where pronoun confusion was a potential problem too, so it’s something to keep an eye open for in the edits.  It might even be worth it to do a search on “he” and “his” and make sure it’s clear who you’re referring to.  It’s not that a reader can’t figure it out.  It’s that they shouldn’t have to because it takes them out of the story for a second.

Another minor nitpick: A POV purist would probably ding you for head-hopping when you say: “…so beckoned the now intrigued Otto to lean closer.”  The idea is that if Daniel is the POV character we only know what Daniel knows.  He may know that Otto looks intrigued, but he doesn’t know that Otto is intrigued.  And yeah, that is truly a nit.

General observation: especially for action sequences, watch out for passive voice.  For example, in the last paragraph on page 22, “As he was walking…” reads slightly faster and stronger as “As he walked…”  Again, a nit, but multiply it enough times through a story and it makes a difference in the feel of it.

Posted on Jan 4, 2012.

More Stuff For POD Members Only

What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA.  POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.