Comments
For Previous POD’s
Your response to Schneider: I agree that a non-atomic end to the war with Japan would have resulted in an extremely bloody mess--and a sore that wouldn't heal completely for decades. The only silver lining I can think of is that it might have continued Lend-Lease enough longer that England and France could have gotten back on their feet a little more economically.
Your comments on Exchange: You are definitely right about the movement toward colonizing this other time-line. As a matter of fact I was originally planning to head in that direction. I'm still toying with the idea of an alternate ending to Bat Out of Hell, which incorporates just such an effort on the part of my exile faction. I think that there would be at least some push for government sponsored or approved settlements. I assume in the stories that a broad consensus has formed against such efforts, but frankly I'm not sure things would go that way. Fear of disease and the very competitive other time-line animals would point toward keeping the other time-line as kind of a super-Antarctica--a scientific playground. On the other hand, the sheer wealth of an untapped time-line would make it very hard to keep such a consensus.
All it would take would be one or two countries going after settlements and every other country would have to scramble to keep up. I suspect that as Exchanges begin to trail off countries and sub-national groups would try to covertly grab off other time-line territory. Let's see. Sub-national groups could include Cuban exiles, Kurds, maybe Englishmen dreaming of a new empire, black and white separatists in the United States, die-hard white South Africans, fascists, die-hard communists, American Indian radicals, literally dozens of religious sects, and probably a lot of others.
Your comments to Robert Alley: I honestly don't believe that a dictatorial U.S. government was in the cards at that point in the process, during or right after the revolution. The sense of national identity was still weak. People identified primarily with their states rather than with the weak structures of the Continental Congress. In our time-line, chaos at the Congress level led to increased assertiveness at the state level, not to 'the man on the white horse'. I see no reason why making the chaos worse would have reversed that. If anything I suspect that it would have led to increased state power versus any central government, at least in the short term.
State governments of the period were very much like independent nations, with their own armies and in some cases their own navies. That wasn't a new development. The colonies fought their Indian wars with essentially no support from England, and provided much of the military muscle for the French and Indian wars. They did those things as loose coalitions of colonies, not as a single body.
Yes, the colonists still considered themselves Englishmen up until the revolution, but their allegiance to the crown was more theoretical than actual, especially in the New England states. English kings in the 1600's sometimes tried to make the ties tighter, but instability in England with the English Civil War, the reign of Cromwell, the Restoration, and the "Glorious Revolution" usually got in the way.
The Continental Congress was an ad hoc mechanism for pooling the efforts of those essentially independent colonial governments. Think in terms of NATO or the United Nations, but with less structure or moral authority. The most likely response to a collapse of that structure would be that the major states get fed up with paying for the structure and disband it, then set up a new, weaker coordinating body to finish off the war.
I believe that state refusal to give more money to the Continental Congress was a major factor in the causal chain that led to the mutiny that was your original point of divergence. So: the states don't trust the Continental Congress with much money or power. As a matter of fact they are so stingy with money that the troops mutiny due to lack of pay. And this causes the states to give up even more power? Doesn't seem like the most likely reaction.
It took a lot of years (eight, I believe) under the weak central government of the Articles of Confederation before the states were willing to give up even the power that they did in our constitution. It is extremely unlikely that they would give up even more power in the middle of a war supposedly fought for independence.
It is true that revolutions in countries like France, Iran, and Russia have led to dictatorial governments. The difference between that situation and this one is that those countries had a tradition of dictatorial governments before their revolutions. Dictatorial governments were all that people in those countries knew. When they were faced with chaos, Frenchmen, Russians, and Iranians went back to the only other form of government they knew. Just as importantly, they had the tools to go back to that form of government in the form of a bureaucracy with expertise at running a dictatorship.
The American colonies had never experienced a dictatorship unless you count the religious ones of the Puritans in their early days. True, they had the English king but his rule was very remote and of very little practical consequence to the colonies. When faced with chaos, Americans would be most likely to return to the form of government that they knew, which was colonial (now state) government, combined with a very weak central government. That's exactly what happened in our time-line, and I can't really visualize a POD in the 1780's that changed that.
You might try the late 1790's or the early 1800's. At that point a true federal government was in place under our current constitution. I believe that the first transfer of power between the Federalist Party and anti-Federalists was a bit rocky. Also, the "two terms and you are out" tradition started by Washington was just that, a tradition. Given the right reasons-say a major and immediate external threat--Washington could have decided to run again, which would have created a whole different tradition and might have led eventually to the results you are looking for. Or maybe Aaron Burr could have been a little luckier and got to be president. I could see him trying to break the two-term tradition.
For what I think is actually a more
likely early American AH, see my
mini-scenario: The Independent States of America.
"Your Musings On Evil Empires": I enjoyed your search for an efficient evil empire. I agree with most of your conclusions, but I think you come very close to gutting the "evil" part of the equation. The resulting empire sounds like an okay place to live, not great but not horrible, and getting conquered by it doesn't sound all that frightening. I also suspect that it would be difficult to keep such an empire in its efficient state for very long. It would probably remain efficient only as long as it has credible competition.
Your Musings On Crosstime Travel: Good stuff. I hadn't really thought through the logistics and economics of going back and forth to alternate time-lines.
Your comments on Indispensable: I also had misgivings on the depiction of Hoover, but you put them into words much more effectively then I did, I suspect.
Your comments to David Johnson: You make a very compelling case against the South giving up slavery if it won the Civil War. Good points on ideology versus economics. Your airship "Battleships" and "Aircraft Carriers" also have some potential. It would be fun to work out the tactics of that kind of a battle. It might take longer than you would think for an "aircraft carrier" airship to become obsolete.
Your comments on Kasyada: For what it is worth: There is apparently a large underwater plateau in a remote corner of the Indian Ocean which is primarily of volcanic origin, but which has some fragments of continent-style crust. It was created by a very large and very prolonged (from Cretaceous times until around 30 million years ago) series of volcanic events. Parts of the plateau were dry land for a considerable part of that time. I’m not sure what if anything that could add to the Kasyada story, but I found it interesting.
Your comments to me: What I was visualizing with the "no penicillin" bit was that something totally out of left field could have been festering in the germ-friendly environment of World War II, getting ready to jump to humans in a big way. In our time-line penicillin knocks it out before it gets big enough to get on most people’s radar screens. Say a US or Australian soldier picks up something deadly in New Guinea. In our time-line he gets sick and so do his buddies. Penicillin knocks out the bug. End of story. In a time-line without penicillin, said bug kills the soldier and his buddies, but not before spreading to the next company over, and then to a soldier going on leave to Australia, then to his girlfriend, and so on.
Good point on no DDT causing more problems than no antibiotics. No DDT might also have meant that the Germans would have been more likely to use gas warfare. I seem to recall that the Germans were deterred from using their war gasses at least partly because they thought we had equivalent ones due to the development and secrecy surrounding DDT.
On Ice Age Surprise: Yeah, the out-of-Africa theory is still controversial. So are a number of other things that I assume happen for the sake of the scenario. The issue of whether of not the Neanderthals could speak is very controversial. The whole idea that the volcano eruption had that much impact on human development is relatively new, but it will probably become very controversial. By the way, advocates of that theory think that at humanity’s lowest ebb there may have been fewer than 15,000 survivors.
On story ideas that have me stumped: The problem is that the ones that have me stumped are often ones that I think have enormous story potential—more so than any of the ones I’ve submitted to POD so far. This may sound selfish, but I’m not quite ready to give up sole ownership of those ideas. At the same time, if I can’t write them and am unlikely to become able to write them, they don’t do me or anyone else a great deal of good, now do they? And of course, if I sit on them long enough someone else will probably come up with the same idea independently and actually write it.
Your comments on Sidaway’s Rome doesn’t
fall scenario: Good points on the
gradual nature of the end of Rome. People living in the era probably
didn’t
consider the changes to be all that earth shattering. Actually, I’m not
sure
you want the Roman Empire to continue. I get the impression that it had
become
a negative influence on the lives of most of its subjects at least a
couple of
hundred years before it fell—which brings up an alternative Roman
scenario I’ve
been toying with. (By the way Jim, this sort of deals with one of your
editor’s
divergences of last issue.) See my mini-scenario: An Early
Roman Breakup.
On your take on the Editor’s Divergences:
Your "Revolutionaries of 1905 wasn’t bad. I don’t rate any of your options as all that likely, but they are pretty good given the constraints of the flags.
"Radicalism in the Hispanic World" was interesting. A successful peasant’s uprising and a state theoretically run by and for peasants. You have the dynamics of the resulting government about right, though I think the Mexican State would also face strong separatist movements. The Maya of the Yucatan and the Yaquis in the north would take advantage of the prolonged civil war to try to grab autonomy or independence.
In terms of international impact, the Mexican government of our time-line helped the Spanish Republic to the extent it was capable of doing so—sending 20,000 or so rifles. Your time-line’s Mexicans might or might not be able to do more. If they built up a domestic arms industry during and after their civil wars they might be able to play a greater role. I don’t see the Mexico of the period being able to build tanks or planes without outside help, though I suppose they might get that help from Europeans looking for a way to beat the international arms embargo against the sides in the Spanish Civil war. I could see a French aircraft manufacturer setting up a factory in Mexico to avoid the French nationalization of their aircraft industry, and also to get around the arms embargo.
Of course that starts to have an impact on World War II. If the Spanish Republic had a reliable alternate source of weapons, they might keep the Soviet Union more at arms length, which in turn would impact the Soviet Union’s ability to gain lessons from the Spanish fighting. The Soviets would also be less likely to get access to the large Spanish gold reserves. If that gold gets circulated through the rest of the world, it would have large but unpredictable economic impacts.
Your "Christ versus Mithra" scenario came very close to the one I wrote about a little earlier, then backed away at the last minute. You come up with a pretty good version anyway.
Interesting question on the fate of European colonists in the Darwinia universe. I’m still looking for a copy of that book.
On the sixties and hippies versus radicals: I was just a few years too young to get into most of that stuff, thank god. I was somewhat politically aware, but still unsophisticated enough to view things in very simple terms.
Your comments on Exchange: Yeah, I have to agree that the last half did emphasize the adventure aspect more than the AH aspect. I would like to change that before I send the story off again. It shouldn’t take a major revision, just adding a few little touches here and there.
Your comments on Ice Age Surprise: The idea that a volcano created a population bottleneck among humans a little before 70,000 year ago has been around for a year or two. I saw it in Discover magazine along with several other places. I took that idea and added two more pieces to it. The idea that the instability of that time-period selected strongly for people and societies capable of innovating is mine. The idea that the volcano and its aftermath tipped the balance between the Asian and African subspecies of humanity against the Asians is also mine. Both ideas seem logical given the volcano bottleneck and the fact that humans in Asia would face local as well as global impacts, but they are strictly my amateur theorizing.
Good job on the editor’s divergences.
40 Acres and a Mule: That’s an interesting concept. My knowledge of the reconstruction period is spotty and rusty, but I believe that at least some southern blacks that served in the Union Army may have been promised some amount of land for their efforts. I vaguely recall that there were even some attempts to follow through on the promise while the war was still going on. It would have been interesting if black civil war veterans had been settled in some concentrated blocks in the south. I wonder how they would have reacted to attempts to impose Jim Crow laws in the 1870’s. I suspect blocks of black veterans who had been economically independent for ten years or so would have reacted rather vigorously to attempts to take that away from them. Of course that assumes that many of them would have the ability to keep their economic independence. I suspect that not all would.
Jim Bante: I like your idea of Jesuit Reductions in North America. Unfortunately, European diseases tended to make such efforts essentially death camps for the Indians involved. The French actually did manage to convert a majority of the Hurons in the 1640’s, but two-thirds of them then died off from introduced diseases and the rest were for the most part killed or starved to death or absorbed by the Iroquois. The French had to have been very frustrated in our time-line. They were very good at lodging themselves among the strongest tribe in an area and turning them into allies. Unfortunately, the tribes chosen then usually were reduced to a small remnant by disease in very short order. I’m not sure which diseases caused the problems, but the pattern seemed to be that tribes could maintain their populations reasonably well—getting hit hard in individual epidemics but usually surviving as cultures and as military powers-- as long as there was a buffer area between them and white settlements. When Europeans settled cheek-to-jowl with Indians, those Indians got hit with both the long-distance epidemics and the ones that didn’t travel so well, and that tended to reduce Indian populations to a very low level—often under ten percent of the original level.
Your review of "The Unfought Battle": Yeah, the French and English had a brief opportunity to do some damage to the Germans in early September 1939. It was very brief though. The Poles folded quickly enough that the Germans could have probably shifted stuff back to the French border within a week after the battle for Poland started without making too much of a difference in the battle for Poland. The French simply weren’t ready to go within that first week. They had just mobilized and were still shaking units into shape. Now granted they should have prepared in such a way as to be ready to go faster than that, but in September 1939 they hadn’t.
The Allies were also concerned about two things. First, they were concerned about the possibility of a German backdoor offensive through Belgium. The French were unwilling to violate Belgian neutrality, so any offensive would have had to be along the French/German border. If the French committed too much of their power to an offensive there, the French feared that the Germans would secretly move their panzer divisions west, then strike through Belgium. Second, both the French and English were terrified by the prospect of an all-out German air offensive. That wasn’t as unrealistic a fear as it looks like in hindsight. In September 1939, the French had no usable radar. They had few modern fighters. They were expecting poison gas and high explosive attacks on their cities and were terrified about the impact of those attacks on already shaky civilian morale.
To get an idea of what Allied leaders thought they were up against, look at the battle of Britain. Now, take away radar on the English side. Take away Ultra intercepts. Take away the Spitfires and most of the Hurricanes. Put the English pilots in Gloster Gladiator biplanes or early model Hurricanes without the high-performance propellers. Take away the well-trained, aggressive Polish exile pilots that made up over ten percent of British airforce pilots during the Battle of Britain. Force the British to patrol blindly through their airspace, exhausting their pilots in response to false alarms. Let the Germans make unrestricted use of nerve gases to attack English cities. Are you sure that English morale would hold up under those circumstances? Are you sure that English pilots would be able to keep putting up a defense? I’m not. I can certainly understand British and French leaders being fearful under those circumstances. I’m not even sure that they were wrong to sit on their hands in September 1939.
Andrew Goldstein: I like the idea of multiple states in what is now China. I’m not sure that splitting up an already existing China is the route to go. The ancestors of the Chinese got an early start on agriculture and used it to absorb what was probably a very large number of ethnically and linguistically diverse people in the area which is now China. A few remnants of those people survive in China, enough to show that there was once a large amount of diversity, especially in southern China. If agriculture had started early enough in the southern part of China, or if had diffused ahead of the ethnic Chinese, you might get a much more diverse population. Of course reconstructing what the southern Chinese would have looked like and how they would have acted would be very difficult if not impossible.
David Johnson: Good comments on the Eden scenario and the fact that it would inevitably change earth. On the question of whether or not an inhabitable Venus or and inhabitable Mars would have excited the public at large: I can’t speak for the public at large but it would have mattered to me personally. I was heavily into astronomy in fifth and sixth grades, and I can still remember how let down I felt when I saw the first flyby photos of Mars and they looked like the moon. At about the same time, I learned for sure that Venus was too hot for life. I had been brought up on science fiction where there was an exotic desert Mars and a wet, hot Venus—both with exotic life of their own. I felt cheated and turned my back on the space program almost immediately.
I still want the inhabitable Venus and Mars of my childhood back, though the existing ones are proving to be much more interesting than I thought they were back then. I’ve been planning to do an inhabitable Venus story for at least 20 years, but I haven’t been able to get past chapter 1 on it. I want to do that before I die.
By the way, I read recently that the Venus we see now is not a steady state type of thing. It apparently oscillates between two or three different states. In some of those states the cloud cover is much diminished, though I don’t believe that the heat goes down anywhere near livable levels. Still, I wonder what impact being able to see the land under Venus’s clouds would have had in the 1700’s through the 1950’s.
That triggered another what
if: What if the invention of the telescope
had been suppressed by the appropriate authorities. Telescopes have
obvious
military applications, especially at sea. So one European power has use
of
telescopes and the others don’t for a few dozen years until the secret
leaks
out. Maybe telescopes could have been invented in an area loyal to
Spain in say
the 1580’s? Let’s say they keep it a state secret for the next twenty
years,
which means that they have a major edge in every sea battle, including
the
Spanish Armada ones. That’s just a stray thought. I’m not sure what the
timing
or impact would be.
Wesley Kawato: I’m not sure where the bit about the last Mound Builder civilization lasting until 1450 came from. If you are talking about the Mississippian Mound Builders, they were still a functioning society when De Soto went through the Southeastern United States around 1540. The last Mississippian-style mounds were probably completed around 1630. The Hopewell and Adena mound-builders were long gone by 1450. They faded around 500 AD.
Andrew Schneider: I’m glad to hear that someone else is seriously aiming for publication. I appreciate your comments on Exchange. I think you are right about the backstory being weak. I’ll have to think the issues involved in the exchanges through a little more thoroughly. I also have to agree about the Wickes brothers. I should do more with them. They are potentially interesting characters. Thanks for catching the Bridger/Bridges mistake. I’ll have to take care of that.
Your review of The Great War: American Front: You know, I wanted to like this book, because I’ve liked a lot of Turtledove’s stuff, and because I’ve seen the author in action on the old Genie on-line network and he seems like a very nice and classy guy—very well read and very knowledgeable. Unfortunately, I couldn’t talk myself into liking this book. The individual segments were interesting enough and really well written, but by the end of 500 plus pages most of them hadn’t gone anywhere important. I felt that the book could have said everything that needed to be said a lot more effectively with a little over half of the sub-plots and a little over half the number of pages. I also had some problems with the AH. The idea of the Republicans going Socialist is kind of cute but unrealistic. I can’t see the Republicans being stupid enough to take on the name of the Socialist party, even if they did merge with the Socialists. Politics 101: In an America where Socialists are regarded about the same way anarchists are, do serious politicians call themselves Socialists, or do they come up with some name like Social Republicans? And would blacks really be attracted to unmodified German/Russian style Marxism? I doubt it. They would have had a very different historical experience. They might take some of the ideas from the Reds, but I think that American Blacks would have come up with their own ideology to fit their own situation.
I also think that the story misses several points about World War I. For example, the static fronts on the Western front of World War I were a function of a lot of men and firepower on a relatively narrow front. The other fronts weren’t like that, and I doubt that the long American and Canadian frontiers would have been either. Also, the Allies in our World War I depended heavily on borrowing money from US banks to finance the war. A US divided and at war with the Allies would not make those financial resources available to the Allies. Would the war still last as long as it did if the Allies had to rely solely on their own finances to import the sinews of war? Probably not. You can’t generate a stalemated World War I by just tossing in machine guns and heavy artillery. You have to give both sides the ability to finance their armies, while still importing food as necessary to feed their populations. Also, ask yourself where England was importing much of its food from around World War I.
I also had to wonder where the millions of European immigrants that came to the United States in our time-line went in this one. Probably not the United States. A militarized, economically weaker US would not be anywhere near as attractive. I suspect that if those people had stayed in Europe, there would have been an explosion in Europe long before 1914. If they mostly went somewhere else, then chances are that somewhere else would have become a major power in the world.
I can like a story without great AH if it is a good story. I can like a story that doesn’t go anywhere if it has a great AH, and teaches me something about our history. There is a lot of really good writing in this book—well-drawn characters that I care about and very dramatic situations. With about 150 to 200 less pages, plus a few less problems in the AH background, this could have been a great book. As it stands, I didn’t particularly like it.
Tom Cron: I’m glad you enjoyed the on-line scenarios. Yeah, I obviously think that even World War II, the most over-used time period for AH’s, still has a lot of under-explored potential. I’m glad you put in Robert Alley’s Cross-time saloon story. It was really good. The fact that he is playing in your playground brings up an interesting question: To what extent would it be useful for us to write stories in each other’s time-lines—with prior permission of the originator of course? I would love to do the animals of Kasyada or Crocker Land. I would also love to see someone in POD ask if they could put a story in an unoccupied corner of one of my time-lines, or ask if I would mind if they took one of the brainstorming ideas I toss out and turn it into a full story or at least a scenario.
Jim Rittenhouse: As usual your quotes and reprints were excellent. I especially enjoyed the articles on the 1918 Influenza and the sleeping sickness.
Your comments on continued manned space programs: You got the ‘no Robert McNamara’ bit right. I actually think that one thing that shot down the space program was the fact that the first relatively good space probe photos of Mars happened to show an atypically cratered and moon-like section of Mars. That certainly put a damper on my enthusiasm. Of course I was eleven years old at the time, but I still remember the feeling of loss as the photos seemed to reveal that Mars was just a slightly larger version of the Moon.
Editor’s Divergences: I’d love to read "Last Testament". I suspect that it would be difficult for CSA guerrillas to hold out for 12 years without becoming indistinguishable from bandits. They would have a lot of popular support at first, which would help. The increasingly obvious hopelessness of their cause would probably erode that support over the years.
Is there is any way the South
could have won via guerrilla war? I doubt
it. It would have taken sanctuaries, external sources of arms and
financing,
and a North capable of getting tired of the fighting. I don’t see that
happening. It might be barely possible that the guerrillas up in the
hills
could keep the embers of hatred alive long enough for the federal
government to
do something dumb and trigger another insurrection. That insurrection
would
almost certainly fail unless it received outside assistance. Secret CSA
bases
in remote corners of the American West? Clandestinely training up new
generations of soldiers? Confederate remnants stirring up, training,
and
equipping Plains Indians? Large numbers of displaced CSA troops
propping up the
French Puppet Empire in Mexico in return for sanctuary? That would
probably
lead to a US invasion of Mexico. Just thinking in print here.
Abraham Gubler: Your first rejection letter? I hope that it is the first of many. I’m actually wishing you well when I say that. Rejections mean that you are writing stories that you believe in, and sending them off to potential publishers. That can only be a good thing.
Your comments to me: I’m glad you enjoyed Ruins of New England. My comments on my writing experience were intended to brace people against being discouraged by a few rejection slips. I’m glad they helped.
Records from Lee Harvey and the Big Boppers? Just say no.
My main problem with How Few Remain is that the US is so incredibly passive in the face of their many defeats. I suspect that at least initially that would not happen. The US would mobilize, and fight hard, not just lay there and let itself get kicked. Also, if England is at war with the US, where are its food imports coming from? I seem to recall that England became dependent on food imports from the US sometime in the mid-1800’s. They could have probably switched that dependency elsewhere, but not easily and not without consequences in terms of the area(s) where they imported from becoming more economically powerful.
Kurt Sidaway: Interesting comments on the 30-years war. A Protestant Holy Roman Emperor would be very weird. I’m not sure how the Protestant princes would react. I suspect that at least some of them were using religion as a club against the power of the Emperor. A Protestant Emperor would be just as big a threat to their power eventually. I’m not sure how it would all sort out.
Your comments to me: I’m glad you enjoyed Exchange. On Ice Age Surprise: Yeah, sex would happen even without the capability for a common language. For that to matter though, the offspring would have to be able to survive in one of the two cultures. What if the offspring were physically incapable of speaking the language of either of their parents’ well enough to be accepted as a true member of the society? That’s quite possible given different sound ranges for the parents.
Craig Neumeier: Twenty-one pages of comments. That is impressive. The quality was high too. I especially enjoyed your comments on the relationship between knowledge and ethics.
Your comments on American neo-fascist groups: They are not a serious problem in and of themselves. There is one way that they could become a serious problem. Some of the more sophisticated of these groups are trying very hard to stimulate mistrust between the federal government and the rather large number of people who feel the federal government has overstepped its proper role in one way or another. I think that they would like to push the government into fearing and trying to crack down on a wide range of groups at or near the libertarian end of the political spectrum. Then when those groups react to that crackdown, the neo-fascists intend to step in and use these people as foot soldiers against the government. That probably won’t happen, but it is very important not to confuse extreme but non-violent opposition to the government with real threats for violence.
Your comments to me: On Laughing Girl, I really need to finish up the second story in that sequence and get it into POD. That’ll explain a lot of things. Yeah, the girl appears psychic. So do a lot of radio psychics. There are some clues in the story as to how she pulled that off:
· If he saw her face it would ‘break everything’
· The little Indian girl had the book, then Laughing Girl did, and she was totally unconcerned about the fact that he had saved the little girl.
· Laughing Girl knew about Nick’s friend Steve.
· Clearly if she wasn’t psychic she had some other source of knowledge about the future. She knew and understood too much.
· She appeared to not only be able to read minds, but to be able to predict the future.
There are wheels within wheels here. I’m sorry to leave you hanging for so long on this story.
I’m glad you enjoyed Ruins of New England. In terms of the research, I have to confess that I did that a long time ago and due to a fascination with the time-period. The story is set in New England and in that time-period because of an existing body of research. Why did King Phillip’s War fascinate me at one time? I don’t know. It was a very dramatic war, and it was the last time that North American Indians had a remotely realistic chance of pushing the Europeans back into the sea. Their chances in King Phillip’s War were very remote—think "If we draw all four aces, and the king of the wild card suit, and if we play our cards exactly right, and if they make a lot of mistakes, then maybe." I like lost causes though. Why else would I write a scenario where New Guinea takes over the world?
You may be right about your Muslim scenarios possibly resulting in a better world. I’m used to thinking of Moslem countries as backward and despotic, with a tendency to slaughter people for no good reason. I can’t really say that I know of anything inherent in the religion that causes that though.
On the relative moral worth of Aztecs and Spaniards, I suspect that we are just going to have to agree to disagree on that. I’m not particularly fond of the Aztecs either. My point is not that they weren’t a nasty group. By my standards and yours they were. They were also only one relatively small group of people in pre-Columbian Mexico. Aztecs dominated groups with a combined population of several million people. The Aztecs themselves were no more than two or three hundred thousand people. They didn’t even dominate all of the high-culture areas of Mexico. The Aztecs never conquered large parts of northern and western Mexico. The Tarascans were kind of my favorite Meso-American group. They were almost as powerful as the Aztecs, and had a political system much more understandable to me than the Aztec one. They integrated conquered territory instead of just extracting tribute, and molded local elites into Tarascans.
Were the Aztecs nastier than the Spanish because the Aztecs used human sacrifice as a deliberate weapon of terror and the Spanish speared women and children as an occasional sport/weapon of terror? Maybe. The Spanish crown did try to control some of the worst abuses of the conquistadors.
I guess part of my problem with condemning the Aztecs stems from my political viewpoint. I believe that as soon as human cultures generate a surplus of food, humans within those cultures start trying for the role of parasite within the culture, redistributing that surplus and skimming off some of it for themselves. The real question is whether they end up as parasites on the culture or in a symbiotic relationship with it. The methods by which the relationship is established and maintained is interesting, but really boils down to the fact that whatever means necessary will be tried. If the Spaniards had ever faced a situation where they either cut out a lot of hearts or lost control of Mexico, chances are that they would have cut out the hearts. They certainly had no problem with killing prisoners. After the last battle in their war with the Haustecs, they killed ten thousand prisoners—essentially the entire elite of the people. It was the equivalent of killing off all of the nobility of say France. It was very effective. The Haustecs never gave them trouble again.
On Mexican Indian depopulation: See my mini-essay Mexican Depopulation Without the Spaniards?
On Exchange and where most of Aaron’s friends were: Yes, I screwed up. Aaron’s friends were either with him or not. I caught that on a rewrite about two days before I saw your comment in POD. I do appreciate the catch though. I caught it on about the twentieth read-through. You apparently caught it on the first.
Other Exchange comments: You may be right about Aaron not knowing stuff that he should. I’ll have to see if I do that too much. I’m not sure I agree with your comments on the number of large predators that they meet early on. Large mammal predators are very mobile, have very keen senses, and are very curious and opportunistic. Given gunshots, helicopter noises, and the smell of burned monkey flesh, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see all of the big predators within a five or ten mile radius converging on the area.
In terms of prey species, I believe that I do mention Ground Sloths, horses, and Mammoths, along with the kangaroos. The kangaroos are a debatable point. The general impression I get is that kangaroos are a reasonably close match for ecologically equivalent ruminants. In Australia, most of the larger ones seem to be holding their own reasonably well against sheep and cattle, too well for many ranchers. Wild ruminants equivalent to kangaroos have been introduced to Australia in some areas, and kangaroos have gone wild in some parts of Europe. In both cases the introduced species have survived precariously in pockets. It looks like a stand-off. In our time-line kangaroos are at a major disadvantage due to the small size and poor soil of their continent, but they are still competitive or very close to it. I don’t think it is unreasonable to have them become more formidable given a different set of circumstances.
On the fact that I have wolves with language: I know that’s a stretch, but then again so is a slightly evolved chimpanzee that stands on two legs and talks. Wolves are one of the more logical non-primate choices for language. As you point out later, social complexity may be a key ingredient for developing intelligence, and wolves certainly could develop that.
I would amend the social complexity bit to include any source of complexity. Orangs are solitary, but they have brain-size roughly equivalent to a chimpanzee’s. The complexity there appears to be in keeping track of the fruiting cycles of the hundreds of different fruit in an Orang’s large territory and plotting efficient routes so they arrive at the most lucrative fruit trees when the fruit is ripe but before birds and squirrels have eaten it.
I suspect that competition may also be as a factor. In the 1970’s a guy by the name of Jerison studied brain-sizes in predator and prey animals and claimed to have found evidence for an "arms race" between predators and their prey in terms of brain-size. That seems reasonably, though I don’t think that he really proved cause and effect. He did show that brain-size has increased over time.
By the way, his charts show the sun bear, a small, largely tree-living south Asian bear having a brain size equivalent to a chimpanzee in a body in the same size range. (I thought Jim might enjoy hearing that).
On the relative polish of Ruins and Exchange: Yes, Exchange still had another couple of revisions to go when I put it in POD. Bat Out of Hell is at an even earlier stage—essentially a rough draft with spell checking. I’ll be interested to see if my writing style has improved enough to offset the lack of revisions.
On Ice Age Surprise: The bit about the single eruption having a thousand years of effect does seem questionable. That is what the articles I’ve been reading claim. It was an extremely large and explosive eruption, and apparently there is evidence for the correlation between the volcano and the bad weather. That doesn’t necessarily prove cause and effect, of course.
On my having a plausible idea for letting American Indians develop without Old World interference: I took that as a challenge and started working on both the time-line and my story using that idea again. Actually, I’m finding it much more fun, and more plausible to allow contact through early 1520, followed by a cutoff. I may have the time-line and the first part of the story ready for this POD, but at this point I can't guarantee that.
Your comments to Cron: I agree that the Aztec empire wasn’t built for the long haul, but then again neither was the Assyrian empire, and it lasted a good many hundreds of years. A state like that is only as strong as its last battle, but that may keep the edge on the ruling class and their military. Of course, if an Aztec-style state comes up against a more politically integrated state of similar size, the Aztec one is almost certain to lose. The Tarascans were apparently building such a politically integrated state in Western Mexico, and had already brushed up against the Aztecs an time or two.
Your comments to Kawato: I agree that evolution is going to inevitably going to be assumed. I also just want to comment that I would really hate to see people paying postage for a creationism versus evolution debate. If they want that, it is very easy to find it on the Internet. I would actually be rather intrigued by an alternate history involving a recently created universe, but I strongly doubt that it could be made credible to a scientifically sophisticated audience.
You are right about the fact that religions, especially Christian ones, tend to get little or no positive attention in SF. Babylon 5 was a major exception to that. I watched an episode and realized that I had not seen a Protestant religious leader portrayed in any kind of favorable way on television for at least twenty years until I saw that episode. I find that very sad because I think that religion can be and often has been a very positive factor in society.
Your comments to Keller: If you like alternate biology, you may enjoy my version of California as an island later in this issue. Your sister’s comment on the differences between the social systems of chimps, bonobos and us are interesting. I’d like to hear more about them. I’ve actually been toying with the idea of doing a story featuring a society with our kind of intelligence built on top of a chimp or bonobo-type social structure. It is very hard to visualize, and may not be realistic. I am still in the very early stages on that one. That brings up an interesting question. When did our social system evolve? The split between us and Neanderthals may have gone back as far as 700,000 or 800,000 years if we can believe the limited DNA results. That’s almost a fifth of the way back to the Chimp/Bonobo/Human split. Neanderthals may have been very different from us socially.
Your comments to Lodi-Ribeiro: I vaguely recall reading an article on how the Incas worked to expand their empire among societies at the chiefdom or tribal level in Ecuador. They actually managed to adapt to that environment better than I would have expected. They used some very sophisticated tactics. As I recall, their successes were relatively limited due to the nature of the people they were trying to conquer, but they were adapting. The Incas were surprisingly good at adapting their empire-building techniques to local conditions.
Your comments to Jim on the clear-cut award: As I said on-line, extremely large zines are a problem that tends to correct itself. Fifty to one hundred page zines are expensive to produce. They also take an incredible amount of time if the material is all produced in the two-month period between PODs. This has been one of my most productive writing periods ever, and even if I included my partly finished time-line on American Indians without European interference I would still not go over forty-five single-spaced pages. This zine is around twenty-five thousand words of new material. That’s roughly forty percent of a short novel. Unfortunately, there aren’t many two-month periods where I write the equivalent of forty percent of a novel. Other than Robert Alley, no one in POD has been willing and able to put out new material at a rate of much more than twenty to twenty-five pages per issue for more than an occasional issue.
Overall comment: You put an enormous effort into your comment section this issue. I didn’t agree with everything you said, but I found it thought provoking. In the case of your feedback on my stories, even when I disagreed with a point or two I still found the feedback very useful. Thanks for the effort that you put into this issue.
Michael D. Pratt:
Eye surgery and going into a ditch to
avoid an airborne car? Sounds like you’ve been living in interesting
times.
Your comments on applying laws on an international basis are
interesting. I had
never really thought of it that way. On the Japanese: I get the
impression that
some of the land fighting in the Russian-Japanese war approached World
War I in
casualty lists and futility, but of course it didn’t last anywhere near
as
long. That’s actually an interesting what-if. Is there any
way that the
Russian-Japanese war could have gone on considerably longer—like a year
or two?
If it had gone on longer, would the European powers have figured out
some
things about the nature of modern war and avoided the trenches of World
War I
or maybe avoided the war altogether? Maybe. On the other hand, they
might have
just decided that both sides just were incompetent. A longer war with
Japan
might also have put the Tsar down for the count. He almost went down in
our
time-line. The end of the Tsar’s empire in 1906 or 1907 would have had
very
interesting results. If Russia went through a chaotic period like it
did in
1917 to 1920 in our time-line, I suspect that the other powers would
try to
partition it. This was the height of imperialism, with all of the
European
powers trying to grab any piece of territory that wasn’t already
grabbed. I
could see a really wild period, with the powers trying to grab pieces
of the
Russian empire, Tsarist loyalists fighting moderates and
proto-Mensheviks and
Bolsheviks, while Polish Nationalists try to grab independence. This is
actually getting kind of fun. I may continue it next issue or as a
scenario on
my website.
Anyway, back to the Japanese: they did some innovative things. The bicycle blitzkrieg in Malaysia was very innovative and effective. Some of their defensive tactics on the islands were very innovative, though their schemes had flaws in them that often caused them to fall completely apart once the US military came up with countermeasures.
The Japanese military emphasized spirit over the material at least partly because they could. How many western armies could use soldiers as "human bullets" against tanks like the Japanese did against the Soviets in the border clashes of 1939? The Japanese also did it partly because they had to, given the scarcity of resources and manufacturing capacity.
Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro: It’s nice to hear about your publishing triumphs. Granted, they are in a much smaller market than the one I’m trying to compete in, but it is quite possible that market will grow and that you will be one of the fathers of it. That is a good goal anyway. In terms of the US market, I hope you to keep trying to get published here too. It is a tough market, but I have to believe that it is possible to get published in it.
I’m glad that you enjoyed Exchange. It is flattering to even have my story mentioned in the same sentence as Sideways in Time, one of my all-time favorite science fiction stories. You are also right in your criticisms. There is too much scientific stuff for a story of this size. Exchange is over twenty-two thousand words long. Analog, which is the best bet among the professional magazines to pick it up, has a twenty thousand word upper limit. I love the alternate ecology stuff, but realistically I need to either pull some of it out or turn this story into a novel.
Your comments on Ice Age Surprise: I do think that it might be fun having a pseudo-Europe discovering other continents with very different human being on them—different to the point of being separate species or close to it.
On your "Portugal discovers North America" scenario: Portuguese explorers did nose around Newfoundland in 1500 and again in 1501. A Portuguese noble family claimed Newfoundland until the line died out in 1578, but never did anything to make that claim effective after the initial voyages. Portuguese fishermen dominated the early fishing in the Grand Banks fisheries off of Newfoundland. In the early 1520’s, the Portuguese tried to found a permanent colony on Cape Breton Island. It lasted between a year and eighteen months before Indian hostility and sabotage by rival European fishermen caused it to be abandoned.
Dale Cozort: Yes, I'm continuing the tradition of commenting on my own contributions. First, I want to make it very clear that my comments on the idea of Greenland as a refuge for Eocene North American mammals were very much just stray thoughts.
I hadn't really thought it through in much depth. It isn't a bad idea, but Greenland is roughly one-fourth the size of Australia. That limits the size of the mammals that could survive there, especially mammal carnivores. The largest fossil animals in Australia are not very much bigger than a cow, and the largest fossil mammal carnivores probably didn't weigh much more than 100 pounds. That probably gives the upper limit for surviving Greenland mammals.
If anything bigger than that survived until the ice ages, it certainly wouldn't survive the reduction of habitat as the ice ages reduced its territory to the limits of a geothermally based refuge. There are still some neat potential mammal refugees. Surviving Hyaenodonts would be fun even if they were small. Depending on when the connection between Greenland and North America was broken, some interesting early canids could have made it, including a species or two with habits like meerkats.
It would be fun to have some of the Eocene North American primates make it, but Greenland would be an unlikely place for that. That triggers another thought, which I'll get back to later. Remind me to get back to my twist on the insular California idea.
By the way, a lot of this could probably be incorporated into the "Crocker Land" scenario, although the surviving animals would have to be scaled down a bit. I suppose that the lost Viking of Greenland could be incorporated into Crocker Land too, although the distance might make that a bit of a stretch.
Feedback to myself on Bat Out of Hell: The ending is a little disappointing. I'm toying with an ending where the exiles make an attempt to break through the lines around the Exchange area right before the Exchange ends, and then establish themselves on their home island in the other time-line. At this point that's still just an idea. I'm also not totally comfortable with the whole Guzman sub-plot, or with some parts of the way that the home time-line responds to the Exchange. In other words, Bat Out of Hell may change a lot before anyone outside of POD sees it. Your feedback may help shape that process. I’ll be especially interested in comments about this time-line’s response to the Exchange. Is it realistic? Did I miss something major that would be done? Is anything counter-productive?