Robert Alley: The bit about the meaning of Nixon’s gesture in Venezuela is great.  I’ll have to pass that along to my ex-ESL teacher wife.  Your response to Dale Speirs on Beringia: Yeah, I think that it would be very difficult to get the kind of civilizations we developed in anything like the places they historically developed during an ice age.  Actually it might very well be hard to develop that kind of civilization in any set of climatic circumstances other than the ones we got.  My understanding is that the current interglacial has seen considerably less climate variation than most interglacials.  I did some reading on how agricultural civilizations develop a while back, and it looks as though it generally takes over a thousand years to go from the first experiments with cultivating crops to the point where permanent villages appear.  In some cases that transition takes several thousand years.  It depends partly on how adaptable the local vegetation and animal populations are to domestication.
If all of that is true, then it probably takes over a thousand years of relatively predictable weather for agriculture-based civilizations to form.

Some of the pieces of civilization can occur without agriculture.  The Indians of the Northwest seem to have gone quite some distance along those lines based on intensive fishing.  I also recall reading about an ancient town in Romania that apparently had several thousand people but predated agriculture.  It was just at a very favorable spot for hunting and gathering, probably on a river near marshlands where aquatic resources could be exploited.  How would glaciers or lack of glaciers affect that kind of development?

In the period between about 15,000 years ago and the advent of agriculture parts of Europe developed what looked like the beginnings of more complex societies several times, with increased populations, social hierarchies, and some degree of craft specialization.  Those developments all crashed.  The author’s theory was that while those tendencies could develop without agriculture they couldn’t be sustained.  The crashes could also be explained by unstable climate.  As a matter of fact the two explanations are not mutually exclusive.

Actually, when you put this together with the article Dale Speirs pointed to last issue on how manmade change altered the amount of carbon in the atmosphere you might end up with a situation where the beginnings of agriculture one place on the planet helped create conditions that made development of agriculture other places more likely.

I like Dave Barry’s idea of making the indexes part of the humor of a book.  Cute.

Your response to David Johnson on Turtledove’s stuff.  Yes, it is hard to take a divergence very far away from the Point of Divergence and make a reasonably credible story out of it.  It’s even harder to make a reasonably credible AH scenario out of it.  After a very few years the complexities of the interactions of your changes becomes mind-boggling.  When I first got serious about writing alternate history I naively decided that I was going to do whatever research and thought it took to design a credible alternate time-line starting from Spain not taking Mexico in 1519-1521 and going through to today, with no hand-waving whatsoever.

 I spent months researching various aspects of the impact of that point of divergence before I realized that the job I had set for myself was absolutely impossible.  For example, the gold and silver from the Americas flowed all over Europe.  How many businessmen became rich from that gold and then went on to develop or finance something significant.  How many peasant children lived or died based on that gold circulating through the European (and Chinese) economies?  What would those peasant kids and their descendents for over a hundred generations have done?  How much of the capital for later large-scale enterprises came from that gold?  How much of Europe’s experience with creating large-scale enterprises came because of that gold?  The reality is that even the most carefully researched alternate histories become exercises in hand-waving in a surprisingly short time.  You learn to do what you can do in the way of research and not worry overly much about the rest.

When you write a story set in an AH where the divergence happened 50 to 100 years ago, you are to some extent writing a fantasy, no matter how carefully you researched and how carefully you thought things through.

Your response to Cron: Good point about the potential problems a more popular alternate confederate president might have created for the Union after the war.  That got me to thinking:  was there ever a chance for a negotiated end to the war that brought the southern states back into the Union on a less victor/vanquished basis?  I’m thinking in terms of a point being reached where the south understands that it is beaten and the north realizes that finishing off remaining military resistance would be a monumental challenge, so the two sides negotiate some kind of face-saving formula for the southern states to rejoin the union.  I’m not at all sure how that could happen.  Maybe if Lee’s army escaped to join other confederate pockets of resistance that might do it.  I don’t know.  I’m not sure how much that sort of ending would have changed the subsequent history of the US.

Your response to Sidaway: You know, something you said triggered a thought: What would it have taken to end up with a World War II where the first couple of years of war in the air were fought primarily by fighter bi-planes?  That wasn’t that far from happening.  The Brits and Italians still had a lot of bi-planes in front line service at the beginning of the war, as did the Soviets.  I wonder what it would have taken to put the Germans in the same situation.  A wrong decision or delays in Me-109 development?  A decision to put scarce resources into building more fighters in 1935-36, which led to Germany having a lot more Heinkel bi-planes and less resources to build more modern planes in the later 1930’s?

Your response to Pratt: You make some good points on the impact of even a failed Sea Lion on Britain’s position elsewhere in the world.  I don’t recall seeing any reasonably realistic scenarios where the Germans tried Sea Lion and it failed.  That may be something I should consider for next issue.  Of course I probably should finish up all of the other scenarios that I’ve started and not finished first.

I think I may have mentioned this in a previous issue, but I’ve read about a hundred pages of Children of Apollo and my reaction is: Good idea, some good writing, but the book badly needed an editor.  There are scenes that aren’t well written at all and way too many typos of the kind that a spell-checker won’t catch.  In some cases the mistakes jarred me out of suspension of disbelief.

I recall reading somewhere that Von Braun deliberately steered away from the British because he knew they were broke in the aftermath of the war.  I get the feeling that while most British politicians felt that Britain was and would remain a great power, the two parties vying for control had very different visions on what a great power was and how Britain should maintain that power.  Conservatives tended to want to build a great power military while Labor tended to figure that the Americans could handle most of that routine stuff and that Britain should go about building a society that would outshine the rest of the world and make Britain the example for other countries to follow.  That difference in emphasis made it very hard for Britain to actually get anything major done in the period between 1945 and the mid 1960s because Conservative governments would fund promising technology programs and subsequent Labor governments would cancel them before they could be deployed and spend the money on Labor priorities.  Now if Labor somehow became convinced that rocketry was the way to go, things might have gotten interesting.  At the same time, if that had happened Britain could have put together a credible rocket program with or without Von Braun’s team.

Your response to Docimo: Yeah, dogs were important.  They were also a surprisingly good fit with humans.  I don’t think that any of the other species of Canids are anywhere near as compatible with our lifestyles than even the early ancestors of dogs, though I would be interested in seeing more documentation on that.  It could be that if dogs hadn’t become domesticated some other closely related species would have, like African Wild Dogs or one of the South American wild dogs.  I seem to recall that local Indians may have toyed with domesticating one of the South American wild dog species, though I can’t put my hands on the reference and it has been many years since I read that. (more on this in the scenario seeds).

Of course if you start out with a different dog species, you might end up with a different set of diseases that could be transmitted between the two species, which could be a problem.  You might also find that with a different species of ‘dog’ it might be harder (or easier) to control the breeding.  That could mean less diverse breeds of ‘dog’ or even more diverse ones, if that’s possible.

Just as an off-topic aside, I wonder if the diversity of traits we have bred for translates into advantages for feral dog populations over truly wild canids.  In other words, do the traits that we breed for like speed or more effective scent hunting go away when the selective breeding stops and the animals are subjected to normal ecological pressures, or do they remain in the feral populations and give them an edge?

Your comments to me: Yeah I noticed the formatting problem, but only after I had printed off about 10 copies of the zine.  I sort of fixed it for the rest, but given the amount of pages involved and the expense I decided to leave the ones I had already printed be.

Your comments on Time Heals: yeah, I had the same feeling when I reread the story.  I wanted to see more, but I’m not sure where I might go with it.

Bird Song was designed as a Probability Zero story.  In Analog terms that means that it may be a good story, and it may have some good ideas in it, but it also has one or more BIG plot holes and is not meant to be taken seriously as a whole.

Your comments on Australian elephants: yes, the survival of Thylacoleo would be very iffy.  To be honest it was kind of a wish thing rather than a hard-nosed ‘this is the most likely course of events’ thing.  I think you’re right about the non-domesticated herbivores and carnivores of Australia taking a hit in this scenario.  On the other hand, the larger species of kangaroos are tough animals, quite capable of thriving on foods that most other animals would starve on.  They would probably survive.

Thylacines were kept as pets on a small scale by British settlers in Tasmania.  They could be trained to walk on a leash and gave warning when someone was approaching ‘their’ house, usually at a greater distance then dogs did.  Some families of settlers sought out Thylacines as pets and kept several animals in succession, only stopping when the animals became too rare for that to be possible.  Now that might have just been eccentric behavior on the part of the Brits, but it does indicate that Thylacines were reasonable candidates for domestication and that we can’t automatically assume that dogs would have replaced them.  One problem with the domesticated Thylacine idea though is that as far as I know they never bred in captivity.  That may have been due to the awful conditions in zoos of that era, or there might not have been very many opportunities where animals of the same age were in the same zoo, but it might also mean that Thylacine breeding required something that they couldn’t find in captivity—privacy or a low stress level possibly.

Your comments on the B17 scenario: Oh boy.  I appreciate the amount of thought that went into those comments, but at this point I’m afraid that I don’t have time to respond in the kind of depth this deserves.  I’ll try to get back to this next time.

Your comments on the American Revolution scenario: I’m visualizing the interior of the American southeast becoming an earlier, larger, and wilder version of the Wild West, with Indians, settlers unwilling to accept British authority, outlaws, and the British all vying for control, with shifting alliances, little “republics” not recognized by the British, and maybe even outlaw “republics” and some groups that on the borderline between just wanting to be left alone and being outlaws.  The more I think about it, the more I realize that while I wouldn’t want to live there, this could be a fun place to put a story.

On If Bigfoot Was Real: Actually, if you want to see what a bear somewhat convergent on apes would look like, look at a Sun bear.  I may have already mentioned this, but I watched a pair of them play at Minneapolis Zoo a while back and they manage to look and act very anthropoid, even without thumbs and with two or three inch claws.  They appear very intelligent, curious, surprisingly capable of manipulating things and very good at moving around on their hind legs.  They were play wrestling part of the time while I was there and one of them stood up and let loose with a flurry of punches that would have made any human boxer jealous—probably five punches faster than I could have thrown one.  They all missed and it didn’t look like they were serious intended to hit, but it was still impressive.  At least one of the bears appeared quite comfortable on his hind legs, take maybe three quick strides backwards at one point and also moving forward on his hind legs, though they did do most of their moving around on all fours.

 On the formatting problem: again that was something I caught after I had printed out some copies.  In this case I reprinted the page for the bad copies and thought I had replaced all of the bad pages.
 
Dale Cozort: Let’s see.  I wrote two stories about a year apart and both of them have the hero getting kissed by a female who is not quite human in last zine.  I’ll have to watch the extent to which I reuse themes.  Looking back, I like my scenario seeds.  If you missed them they might be worth a quick look.

I was just looking at the cover for the first section of last issue.  I believe that this is my first attempt at a cover for a section, though I’ve done a few covers for special sections that are entirely my stuff.  This is fairly typical Dale Cozort: obscure old computers and bad puns (Ultra–powerful Enigma machine).  Oh well.  It was fun putting it together.

Robert Gill: An interesting and apparently refreshingly balanced look at the CIA-backed coup in Iran.  The United States did a lot of things in fighting the cold war that are still haunting us today, and this one certainly ranks up there.

David Johnson: I’m glad you enjoyed the Analog.  You’re right that the Bird Song story only works as a Probability Zero story.  It does have plot holes that you would drive a truck through.  Judging from the comments it didn’t work at all for the people who aren’t regular Analog readers because they took it seriously.  Some pretty perceptive observations on Char.  I won’t spoil the story for you by telling you which ones I’m talking about.

Thanks for the tip on Rex Mundi.  I’ll have to look that up.  The idea of Protestantism as an underground movement is very interesting.  I don’t know as I would have taken the geopolitical developments quite the way they appear to have, but I have to admit that I’m a bit envious of the writers.  This sounds like a fun world to play in.

Thanks for the island stuff.  Island biogeography has long fascinated me.  I like the natural laboratory element they bring to nature.  “Let’s see what happens if we populate an island entirely with rats.”  “Let’s see what happens if we take elephant, a species of deer, and hedgehogs, and put them together on an island.”  Ecologies do get stitched together out of the most unlikely combinations.  Unfortunately those ecologies are very fragile.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m especially fascinated by the possibility of isolated human development on islands.  We haven’t been around long enough with the capability of getting to islands for that to happen for a really great length of time, but apparently a very aberrant race or possibly species of men developed in Sardinia and survived until a little under ten thousand years ago.  The Andaman Islanders seem to have been isolated for a very long time, though I haven’t been able to find out much about their history.  The islands between Australia and Asia would have been a logical place for isolated island races of man to develop.  The Philippines might also have potential.

Thanks also for the article you emailed me on the possible survival of pygmy elephants into the era of early civilizations.  Fascinating stuff.

I really need to study the early history of Spanish California quite a bit more.  The Spanish colonization came late in the game and only in response to outside threats in the area.  I wonder what would have happened if Spain had been forced to use the resources they used in settling California elsewhere or had chosen to do so.  Would England have tried a colony there?  Would the Russians have expanded down the coast further than they did historically?  Would the Indians have had another sixty to eighty years of being left pretty much alone by Europeans?  If so, how would they have developed in those years?  I’m guessing that horses would have started reaching the area, and they would have been adopted as pack animals and mobile meat reserves.  I’m not sure much else would have changed.  I don’t think anything that happened in those years would have done much to stop the flood of Anglo settlement when it arrived.  I’m not sure if the Indians would have done better or worse without the Spanish mission experience in the long run.

Your response to Speirs: I think I may have already said a lot of this in an earlier issue, but I don’t have a problem visualizing people similar to the Australian aborigines ending up in South America.  They wouldn’t have to cross the Pacific.  I’m guessing that the early settlement of the Americas would have been by coastal people from Asia essentially following the coast.  Who would those people have been?  In the early stages, probably people very similar to Australian Aborigines.  They probably were able to populate Australia from Asia because they were the predominant coastal people of Asia at the time Australia was settled.  I could easily see them also being the first wave of settlers for the Americas.  Later, as other people pushed the ancestors of the Aborigines out of coastal Asia, those people would also be candidates to push them out of North America.  I visualize the Americas being populated by a wave of people related to the Aborigines, followed by a wave of people related to the Ainu of Japan, and then by the various mainstream American Indian groups, with each wave pushing succeeding waves south and eventually into less desirable areas.  That would account for Australian-like skeletons in South America without implausible Pacific voyages.

On Alley’s Netscape alternate history:  I think that Netscape’s primary threat to Microsoft was that Netscape might take control of the user interface away from Microsoft.  If the Netscape browser had become the primary way that people interacted with their computer, it might have been easier for companies to eventually slide Windows out from under that user interface and sub in something like Linux.  I’m guessing that was what Microsoft feared.

The people behind Mozilla are still trying to get back the browser market.  I think that right now the Open Source movement is gradually whittling away at the mechanisms that Microsoft uses to control the market.  At the same time, Microsoft is working hard to come up with new methods of lock-in.  A couple of things to watch in all of this: Open Source applications like OpenOffice, Gimp, and AbiWord make a lot of alternate operating systems more viable, not just Linux.  Open Source means that if you can get a critical mass of people behind an operating system you can get software ported to that operating system much easier than you could before Open Source became prominent.  Also, a long shot and a sleeper: there is a group out there working on an Open Source Windows NT work-alike called Reactos   They are still at the alpha stage, (version 0.21) but they are serious about producing software and the project appears to be starting to pick up momentum.

I hope you aren’t too disappointed that I didn’t continue all of the stories or scenarios that I started in the pseudo-Analog issue.  I’m sorry to say that I got myself over committed again, and I simply don’t have time to pursue all of the things I started.

Wesley Kawato: I’m glad that you feel comfortable in your job.  I’m not sure whether or not the demise of the series starring your current hero is a good thing.  We’ll see as you move on to something new.

Ian Moore: I’m glad to see that you’re still in the APA.  You make a good point about the specifics of the partition line in Palestine.  Neither side really wanted a partition that the other side could accept, so the specifics of the line didn’t really matter.  What might have worked would have been to do the partition and leave British troops on the borders dividing the two entities for a few years to let people get used to the borders.  Of course Britain was in no position financially to do that, and didn’t want to anyway.  No one else was willing to spend blood and treasure to bail them out.  There’s no guarantee that would have worked anyway.

I think you really nailed it on Italy’s postwar role if the Italians hadn’t entered the war.  It would be interesting to see how long Italy held on to the colonies.  If they found oil in Libya, which they probably would have eventually, that would give them incentives to keep trying to hold onto it.  I could see the Italians and French working together to fight Arab nationalism in North Africa.  Would an Egyptian nationalization of the Suez canal still happen?

Of course all of that assumes that World War II would still happen pretty much as it did historically.  I’m not so sure that would be the case.  For one thing, if Britain didn’t have to fight in North Africa and the Mediterranean, they would have much more power to use elsewhere.  Would Japan still try to head south if Britain had the naval and air power that historically was tied up against Italy available to fight in the Pacific?  I’m not so sure they would have.  Of course the ships that historically were tied up in the Mediterranean might also have been useful against the U-boats in the Atlantic.  

I would be interested in seeing how a Japanese invasion of Malaysia/Singapore would play out if the British and Italians weren’t actively at war.  The Brits would want to keep enough in the Middle East to keep from tempting the Italians, but they would undoubtedly shift some capital ships to the Pacific, probably including at least one aircraft carrier, maybe more.  I’m guessing that the Japanese would just roll over anything the British sent against them in the air and at sea.  I’m not so sure they would do so well on the ground.  If the Brits sent some of the tough Australian and New Zealander troops that were historically in North Africa back to Malaysia, I’m not at all sure the Japanese would have been able to prevail.  The best of the Australians and New Zealanders were very good.  Even the Germans were impressed with some of the New Zealanders.

If Italy wasn’t in the war, that could have implications all over the place.  For example, there is some chance that the Germans might have been able to take Moscow if Italy hadn’t been in the war.  That’s been argued over back and forth for decades, but my reasoning goes:

• Rescuing the Italians in the Balkans probably didn’t delay the German attack much, but there was a point in October where the Soviets had essentially run out of armies between the Germans and Moscow.  Fortunately the fall rains started at about that time and the Soviets could concentrate their limited remaining forces on holding chokepoints on the paved roads.  The Germans couldn’t move cross-country at any great rate of speed given the mud, so the Soviets were able to delay the German advance long enough to build new forces and bring troops in from the Far East.  If the German offensive had started even three or four days earlier they might well have either taken Moscow or been very close to taking it in October of 1941.
• The Balkan diversion used up consumables—spare parts, ammunition, and most importantly oil that the Germans could have otherwise used on the eastern front.  The oil was very important.  Amazingly enough, historically the Germans invaded the Soviet Union with something like 60 days worth of oil stockpiled.  They were able to use captured stocks to some extent, but Soviet oil was very low quality and had to have some additives to be usable in German vehicles.  Taking the Balkans had to have drawn down German oil stocks to some extent.  So did supplying Italy with oil.  Every time the Italian fleet moved, it used oil that would have otherwise have been available for some other use—and Battleships take a lot of fuel to move around.  If the Italian fleet is sitting in port, that oil could have been doing something else, quite possibly moving German tanks closer to Moscow.
• If the British were not tied down in North Africa, they might be able to send more aid to the Soviets in 1941 and 1942.  The US probably would be able to also.
• The British shipping situation would probably be in far better shape because the British could send ships through the Mediterranean instead of around Africa from late 1940 through mid-1943.  As I noted earlier they would also have more naval power to apply to the U-boat war in the North Atlantic.
• The advent of Lend-Lease might have been postponed to some extent, because without the drain of fighting in North Africa and the Mediterranean the British would have presumably been able to fight on their own a bit longer without running out of money.  That’s actually a potentially important point, because if Britain was able to hold out financially until the German attack on the Soviet Union, Lend Lease might have gotten embroiled in a hot debate over whether or not it should be extended to the Soviets.  I’m not sure if Roosevelt could have pushed through a Lend-Lease bill when it was obvious that much of the benefit would go to the Soviets.  If he was trying to push through Lend Lease when the Soviets were in the war, he might have to accept language excluding them from Lend Lease.
• If Italy was not in the war on Germany’s side, the Germans would have had to have been much more careful in how they dealt with Romania.  Romania was the source of most of Italy’s oil as well as a lot of Germany’s.  That’s part of the reason Mussolini reacted so angrily (invading Greece) when Hitler moved troops into Romania.

Kurt Sidaway: Sorry to hear about your annual job uncertainty.  When I worked for state government over here they primarily just moved peoples’ offices around.  Your response to Silver: I’ve had some success indoctrinating my daughter into fandom.  She likes Babylon 5 and Firefly.  She also attends conventions with me a couple of times per year and seems to enjoy them.  Your comments to me: I think that I was figuring that Ward had a picture of his daughter in his pocket and that Moira had seen it while he was unconscious and being searched.  I do need to make that clear.  Thanks.  I’ll pass your comments on Valentine’s Day along to the author.  Thanks for that too.

Dale Speirs: I enjoyed your article on the economy of abundance.  I find it hard to visualize how an economy with no type of scarcity at all would function, but to some extent the economies of the developed countries are economies of abundance.   The traditional needs of food and shelter are for the most part met (though not universally), and scarcity for most people shifts to higher end things like high-end computers and luxuries of various kinds.

To a certain extent, computers are already items of an economy of abundance.  If you don’t have to have the latest and greatest, computers can be essentially free.  A 386 or low end-486-based machine has essentially no resale value, and may even have negative value.  A friend of mine hasn’t bought a computer for probably ten years.  He just takes older model machines that his friends want to get rid of and uses them.  He surfs the net, does research papers, and is very happy with what he does.  He’s up to a Pentium at 166 Mhz now and will probably be upgrading to a Pentium II at 350 Mhz in a year or two.  Of course he’s also a hardware guru, and is comfortable putting together computers out of old junk, but I know other people who follow the same strategy with no hardware expertise.

I also enjoyed your discussion of the petroleum industry.  I do have one problem with the analysis though.  The price of extracting oil is almost certainly going to go up considerably as we go through the most easily available reserves.  At some point the old SUV is probably going to be too expensive to drive.

Interesting article on human-induced climate change.  Like you, I wonder what impact the enormous die-off of American Indians from European diseases had on climate.  That’s actually an interesting point.  If some point of divergence limits that die-off, would that make the little ice age less severe?  If some point of divergence produced a larger amount of agriculture in pre-Columbian North America, would that mean that Europe and Asia got warmer?  The butterfly stuff just got a lot more hairy to deal with if that’s the case.  That sort of thing could also work in unexpected ways.  If you advance technology in parts of Africa with a large elephant population, presumably the elephant population gets reduced and the forests spread to places that they couldn’t spread with the heavier elephant population.  That might or might not more than counterbalance human forest clearing and lead to a reduction in greenhouse gases.

Your mailing comments: I also have a lot of trouble sitting down and writing something for money.  I find it far easier to write something for POD, and then adapt it for publication.  That’s one of the big values of POD for me.  I can tell myself that I’m just writing for a group of friends and then look at what I’ve written later and say “You know, that’s good enough to get published.”  Hopefully I’ll get over the need for that at some point, though you’ll still see my stuff here first for the most part.

I’m glad you enjoyed my phony Analog.  It was a lot of fun to put together.

I’m aware of the school of thought that says the dinosaurs were already fading in parts of North America before the end of the Cretaceous, and I certainly think that climate changes could have been part of the reason they disappeared locally.  I’m not sure we can assume that colder climate equals end of the dinosaurs even locally though.  There is a very heated debate going on about the metabolic processes of dinosaurs and there is some evidence that seems to show that at least some species may have been able to tolerate climates that no current large reptile can tolerate.

It’s unfortunate that we don’t have good fossil records in the time approaching the end of Cretaceous from more areas.  Was the decline of the dinosaurs a local phenomenon or was it worldwide?  One article I read a few years ago pointed out that we can’t even really prove that dinosaurs were still around anywhere other than in North America at the end of the Cretaceous.  We can prove that they were widespread five or ten million years before that, but not that they were still around in say Europe or Asia, or Africa at the end of the Cretaceous.  That may not be the case anymore, but it apparently was then.