POD usually includes an ongoing series of dialogues on a wide variety of alternate history and related topics.  In some cases those threads are incomprehensible without reading the last several issues of POD.  In other cases they are quite a bit of fun--an ongoing brainstorming session where I generate a lot of my best AH ideas.  As in most brainstorming sessions, the comments are off-the-cuff and without a lot of rigorous fact-checking, but you may find them interesting.

Robert Alley: Your AH CD is unique and extremely cool. Thanks for the effort you put into it. I also enjoyed your review of The Alien Factor.

Your comments to Mark Ford: I'm afraid I was responsible for the title of Have Gun, Will Time-Travel. It was one of my guest editor's divergences, and a play on the old western TV series, Have Gun Will Travel.(By the way. I think there may already be a book or short story with that title}

Your comments to Lodi-Ribeiro: Yes, dogs and wolves can be pretty omnivorous. My dad used to go out into our garden and split a small watermelon in half. He would eat one half and the dog would eat the other, obviously enjoying it a great deal. Even cats will eat fruits or vegetables if they are hungry enough. Farm cats learn to eat cooked sweet corn off of a cob, piercing the kernels with their teeth, and then licking up any juices.

As far as intelligence and sociability go, I'm not at all sure that they would make cooperation less likely. It really depends on whether or not the species involved have common interests. Elephants and certain species of monkeys hang around together at times because the monkeys have keen eyesight and the elephants have good sense of smell. Both are intelligent species, but they have a common interest so they cooperate. New World monkeys often form multi-species groups when their food needs don't have much overlap, because the extra eyes looking for predators more than make up for the minor food competition.

The point of all this is that intelligence can help animals spot common interests and act on them, which is what I have happening with the wolves and oak apes.

Your comments to me: On the Greek/Italian war scenario: I'm guessing that the Greeks would bide their time hoping for the Italians to get embroiled in a war with a more major power, rather than trying to heat things up on their own. The Italians would almost certainly get involved in the German/Soviet war to some extent in this time-line, probably with a group of 'volunteers' along the same line as the Spanish Fascist 'Blue Legion' that fought there historically.

An undefeated Britain wouldn't stop Mussolini on this. In our time-line the Italians sent troops to Russia even with an active war going on with Britain and with Italian troops tied down in occupation duty in Greece and Yugoslavia. The threat of war with Britain wouldn't stop the Italians when the actuality of war with Britain didn't. The threat of British and/or US economic sanctions might deter the Italians to some extent. If Italy isn't officially in the war, then they would still be trading with the west, and getting a lot of vital imports from outside the Mediterranean. That would make it risky for the Italians to get too involved in Russia. I'm guessing they would send a force a little large than the Spanish one-maybe sixty-to-seventy thousand 'volunteers'.

The Italians would probably do rather well in Russia for the first year, just as they did historically. After that, with masses of T34s appearing on the battlefield, things could get very ugly.

Of course if Russia is the main battlefield for Italy, the armies there would presumably get the most modern equipment, which would presumably include their M series light medium tanks. T34s versus M15/42 would be a unique match-up. I wouldn't want to be an Italian tanker in that one. The Italian Semovente guns (large caliber guns on medium tank chassis) would be a much more even match for a T34. They might even have a chance.

As far as the Balkans go, even with a Russian commitment of four or five divisions and the most modern tanks, the Italians would still be rather formidable compared to the Balkan states. The Greek fiasco proved very little about Italian fighting ability compared to other minor powers other than that if you attack an enemy that can mobilize a numerically superior force with little logistics preparation and at the worst possible time of year, you'll get your head handed to you. The Italians weren't capable of taking on a true great power, but they were capable of taking on the likes of Greece or Yugoslavia given reasonable preparation time.

Given the other imperial commitments, Great Britain would probably prefer not to get involved in the Balkans, at least not in 1940 through early 1942. A neutral Italy gives Britain a lot more maneuvering room against the U-boats and in deterring Japan.

Speaking of deterring Japan, if Britain looks strong, Japan has a problem in doing a southern strategy. How can they get to the Dutch East Indies without threatening British-held territory, even if they do go through the Philippines? If you look at a map of the area and at what was held by the British at the time you'll see what I mean.

Your comments on the Delayed D-Day landings: You're probably right about the impact on Eisenhower. He would be the scapegoat, with enormous postwar impact.

I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other on whether or not a landing in southern France would happen in this scenario. It would be a very close call, with neither the Americans nor the British very enthusiastic about it, though for different reasons-the British because they wanted to continue their peripheral strategy and the Americans because if they had to choose between an invasion of northern France or southern France they would far prefer the northern option.

One quibble: The argument about a strong coastal defense versus a strong central reserve in France did take place, but Rommel actually was a proponent of the strong coastal defense rather than of the central reserve. His experiences in the last phase of the North African campaign led him to believe that Allied airpower would make bringing up the reserves almost impossible, and that the main battle would have to be fought and won on the beaches.

A Balkan option is possible, but the American leadership of the time absolutely hated the idea, seeing it as the British trying to use the US to restore British prewar economic and political power. The British tried an independent offensive in the eastern Mediterranean in late 1943 and got stopped cold. Of course they did occupy Greece late in the war, so I guess a Balkan option isn't impossible.

Your comments on Bear Country versus Char: As you can probably see from this issue, it isn't a matter of the sheriff being open to the Rick/Erik story so much as her playing her cards close to her chest.

Your comments on the latest installment of Hitler Doesn't Declare War: I think we're on the same general track in terms of where this is going to go, though as you probably saw last issue I have Roosevelt being very aggressive in trying to push Hitler into a corner where he had to strike the first blow or suffer loss of valuable territory and prestige. You make some good points on the issue of US weapons being most effective with US training, and the implications of that. Historically, the Soviets were willing to use US lend-lease material in less than optimum ways to avoid the scenario of US training for their forces. Of course the Soviets understood conditions on the eastern front far better than we did, and had to adapt western equipment to those conditions. One of my friends has a wonderful book on Soviet armor (unfortunately out of print) that has pictures of early US Sherman tanks up-gunned with the Soviet 76.2 mm gun. I believe they also adapted some Lee/Grants for an improvised amphibious role.

On smallpox: A recent book called Pox Americana talks about the influence of smallpox on the American Revolution. According to the book, American susceptibility varied widely depending on the colony and on social status. New England and the deep southern colonies were much more vulnerable than the middle colonies, with Pennsylvania being relatively safe because of the widespread use of variolation (inoculation with live smallpox). In the early stages of the war, England had a major advantage in that all or almost all of their troops were immune and most American troops weren't. The problem was that variolation meant actually getting a mild case of smallpox, which meant that troops were essentially helpless for several weeks after variolation, and had to be cared for. During that time, the troops could spread real and deadly smallpox to people around them. The continental army found that seventy-five or eighty percent of recruits from some of the southern states were susceptible. That hurt the American war effort significantly a couple of times, once during the attempted invasion of Canada, and once during the British invasion of South Carolina.

Washington managed to get the bulk of the continental army variolated during one of their winter camps, but militia units continued to have problems. The British also got hit at times because their loyalist militias were just as susceptible as rebel ones. Black units were especially susceptible. The British tried to raise such units from time-to-time, usually for non-combat roles but at times for combat. Blacks trying to escape slavery flocked to Cornwallis and died in droves of smallpox and 'camp diseases'. As many as thirty thousand slaves tried to get their freedom by joining Cornwallis and well over seventy-five percent apparently died as a result mainly of disease.

Editor's divergences: Read and enjoyed the Cap'n Cook divergence, but don't have anything profound to say about it. I also enjoyed your French Revolution scenarios. The extended reign of terror bit has quite a bit of potential. I would enjoy seeing that developed a bit more. One option I've been toying with is an early end to the American Revolution-say 1781 rather than 1783. I may develop that into a scenario elsewhere, but the basic idea is that France and England were seriously considering a compromise peace in late 1780 and early 1781 which essentially left the British in control of the colonies they occupied and gave the rest independence. Of the top of my head I believe that would have given the British Georgia, South Carolina, New York, Maine, and possibly North Carolina, depending on how the last couple of months of the war played out. That would depend on Cornwallis not self-destructing, which is surprisingly hard to arrange. That's why the scenario is a maybe at this point.

Dale Cozort: Commenting on my own zine again. On Mars Looks Different I'm considering rewriting parts of the "Ward on a spaceship" section to punch up the action a bit and introduce one of the major villains earlier in the story.

Char still looks pretty good, at least to me, even after it has had a chance to 'cool' a little. Bear Country may need one more revision before it is ready to go out.

Tom Cron: I got your letter, and sent you a long e-mail. I hope you got it. Put me down for a sample issue if and when you get the AH magazine going. I don't know to what extent a specialized Alternate History magazine is viable in this market, but if you go with it I certainly wish you well.

The market for science fiction magazines has dwindled to a major extent as of late. I don't know if that is something inherent in our less literate times with all of the competition from TV and the Internet. I suspect that is part of the problem. Another part may be that much of science fiction these days has lost the adventure aspect that was so prominent early on. Navel-gazing character-oriented stuff simply isn't going to attract young readers. Science fiction magazines also have a problem in that most of their core market is sophisticated to the point of being jaded. They've seen time-travel stories and alternate history stories in almost any imaginable permutation. In order to satisfy that market stories have to have something that they haven't seen before, which leaves out most of the obvious themes. Unfortunately, that makes much of their fiction much less accessible to people who would be encountering many of these concepts for the first time. We almost need a 'Science Fiction For Dummies' type of magazine, where old time-tested and worn concepts that built science fiction readership are creatively recycled.

Anthony Docimo (take 1): I enjoyed several of your reprints, especially the ones about the descent of carnivores and the Guatemalan temples. As you probably know by now, I am fascinated by bears, and especially Sun Bears. I also enjoyed the Deaths of Languages article. To me, the death of a language is in the same class as the death of a species-a long-developed piece of knowledge lost forever.

To be honest I couldn't figure out what you were trying to do with either the first or last of your hand-drawn maps. I do think one of your reality seeds has some potential: The American Ramses bit. What if Franklin Roosevelt had not had the cardiovascular problems that killed him in early 1945? If something else didn't kill him he would have definitely served until 1948. Would he have run again? Would he have continued to win? Interesting idea. I've speculated on what would have happened if he had died sooner, but not on a longer life.

I dealt with your less extensive die off 65 million years ago idea in my "Flintstones" Timeline story a few issues ago. The old time-hopper in my story calls them dino-recovery time-lines. Essentially, he says that if dinosaurs survive anywhere on the planet they push mammals out of large animal niches everywhere. The only exception to that is if they somehow get trapped on Australia. In that case, the handicap of the small continent leaves them unable to spread back when Australia gets close enough to Asia to allow inter-change. Unfortunately for us alternate biology buffs, the chances of dinosaurs surviving on one continent and not spreading to the others is pretty remote. Australia was connected to Antarctica, which was connected to South America, which was briefly and incompletely connected to North America somewhere around 58 million years ago, and got close enough to some other continent to accumulate monkeys and rodents somewhere in the late Eocene or early Oligocene.

By the way, I've thought about doing a biological AH where monkeys and rodents don't reach South America when they did in our time-line. Chances are that marsupials would have grabbed a big hunk of both niches, but would probably not have advanced as far as their real inhabitants did. There was actually a group of opossums that appeared to have filled a somewhat primate-like niche in South America before the monkeys arrived, and several groups of marsupials that filled rodent-like roles.

By the way II: The one possible exception to the interconnected continents bit is Madagascar. It obviously isn't a continent, but it is a reasonably large slice of land, and it apparently separated from India somewhere in the 88 to 94 million years ago range. Latest evidence says that the current crop of Madagascar mammals were the result of widely separated colonizations followed by adaptive radiations. In other words, there was a period of millions of years when the tenrecs (insectivores sort of like hedgehogs) had Madagascar to themselves. I think they were first, followed millions of years later by the lemurs, then twenty or thirty million years later by the carnivores, and then very recently by the rodents. That's based on the genetic distance between the various species of each group on Madagascar if I recall correctly.

Each of those colonization episodes probably resulted in extinctions among the animals that were already on Madagascar. Something probably filled the carnivore niches before true carnivores arrived. Big carnivorous tenrecs? Carnivorous lemurs? Flightless carnivore birds? Monitor lizards? Big carnivorous chameleons? (That could be extremely cool but I don't know if they were around early enough.) Survivors of those African mammal-like crocs? Some group we've never encountered before?

There are some fossil mammals from Madagascar from before dinosaurs went extinct, but none of them are remotely related to the current crop of Madagascar mammals. There is then a huge gap, and then the sub-fossil mammals: Elephant birds, extinct large lemurs, and larger versions of the fossa (catlike carnivore). I recall reading recently that the sub-fossil remains include another type of animal. From possibly faulty memory I believe it was distantly related to an aardvark but in a separate order. I'm guessing that if they are every able to fill in that gap in the fossil record, there will be some very interesting surprises on Madagascar.

Just to make this sort of relevant, here are two biological AH's related to Madagascar: (1) Dinosaurs survive isolated on Madagascar. (2) Creodont carnivores reach Madagascar instead of their true-carnivore contemporaries, and survive the extinction of their kind in the rest of the world.

By the way III: I just thought of a possibly interesting alternate geography: What if instead of racing up and colliding with Asia, India had stayed in the general vicinity of Madagascar, maybe a couple hundred more miles out in the Indian Ocean (assuming there was still someone around to call it that). Asia ends up smaller and without Mount Everest or a lot of other mountains. India becomes a center of diversification for whatever group of animals India had on it when it parted company with Africa. Sound good?

Your comments to me: I'm glad you got the book. I was a little worried when I read your first comment, because it has been quite a while since I sent it. I hope you enjoy it.

The South American die-off: As I understand it, the process was actually a complicated set of replacements that differed from niche to niche and took place over millions of years. South America followed a reasonably parallel course with the rest of the world through about the first half of the Miocene, with native hoofed animals dominating large herbivore roles and Borhyaenid marsupial carnivores dominating the carnivore slots. Toward the end of the Miocene, things started getting weird, with the giant predator birds becoming so dominant that there were few niches left for the Borhyaenids. The native hoofed animals also faded quite a bit. In their case the competition was Ground Sloths and giant rodents related to Capybaras, some of them bear to hippo-sized.

This seems to have been a natural replacement of one group by another simply due to some kind of superior adaptation. Groups on the upswing in South America tended to survive there, though usually with diminished diversity, and even move north when the land connection between North and South America became complete. Groups that were already fading in South America tended to quickly disappear when the land connection became complete.

Unfortunately, both North and South American animals got hit hard at the end of Ice Ages, and a lot of the previously successful South American animals like Ground Sloths and the really big rodents became extinct, along with the last of the old South American hoofed animals.

An example of the process, in the Carnivore niches: Borhyaenids (carnivorous marsupials resembling the Tasmanian Wolf) flourished until the Miocene, but then gradually declined in the face of competition with the giant predatory Phonocoros birds. By the late Pliocene most of the larger, more specialized Borhyaenids were extinct. One late survivor was the Sabertooth Marsupial. The later Borhyaenids tended to be smaller and less specialized as carnivores than earlier ones. The last Borhyaenids other than the Sabertooth may have died out before North and South America connected. The Phonocoros birds were flourishing in South America when the land connection was completed. They got into North America, as you noted, and survived into the Pleistocene.

Among smaller carnivores, there was a period in the late Pliocene or early Pleistocene where several groups of opossums developed larger, more predatory members, some as large as a fox. One of those types of opossums is still around and fairly common in South America. It looks sort of like a weasel and the name of the genera is something like Lutreolina (I still can't get upstairs to my books to check the spelling).

Complicating matters, raccoons got across to South America in the late Miocene and developed into a bear-like form and possibly a fast-running form (I haven't found a good source for that). In the pseudo-bear niche, South America had a succession of (1) A bear-like marsupial, (2) A bear-like raccoon, and (3) Tremarctos-type bears, all within the last 10-12 million years.

The small carnivore niches went from Borhyaenids to carnivorous Opossums to mostly North American carnivores, all within about 5 million years.

By the way, some of the giant South American rodents made it to North America after the land bridge completed. A type of Capybara that probably weighed around 300 pounds made it the southern US. Think 300 pound guinea pigs on stilts.

I'm not sure if this is helpful, but the point is that the old South American mammals were in trouble from internal competition even before the land bridge, and were becoming a minor factor in the South American environment.

Anthony Docimo (take II): Reality seeds: Most significant failed invasions: Well yeah, the failure of the Mongol invasion of Japan was significant. The failure of the Turks to take Malta when they besieged it in the 1550s or 1560s (mind burp on the date) was also a biggie, as was the failure of the Turks to support the Moriscos in their rebellion in southern Spain. The missing Mongol invasion of Europe was a biggie, as was their failure in the Middle East later. The failure of people from Polynesia, Indonesia, or New Guinea to invade Australia has to rank up there. So does the failure of the Vikings to permanently colonize North America. I'm sure there are more, but those come to mind.

If England had gotten Von Braun and his team they probably wouldn't have done much with him. They didn't have the money post-World War II. He would have probably tried to get to the United States as soon as he could. The British had a lot of good innovative technology post World War II. They just didn't have the money or will to fund it consistently.

I would modify your "instead of Stalin' reality seed to talk about what might have happened if the New Economic Policy (NEP) that Lenin started as a tactical retreat in the last years of his life had continued. It was a reasonably peasant-friendly policy that emphasized agriculture and light industry and really did wonders for the Soviet economy in the early twenties. It also allowed the Soviet Socialist Republics a considerable amount of autonomy culturally, though not militarily. If Stalin had died in around 1926 or 1927 that policy might have continued, though the timing of his death would be crucial.

A Spanish Australia could be kind of cool. Based on the Spanish pattern in the Americas they would probably try mission colonies like the ones in California, with the few Spanish settlers getting into cattle ranching. That would eventually spread smallpox and other European diseases into Australia, which would devastate the aborigines. It could also eventually lead to some aborigines transforming themselves into mounted nomads sort of like the Plains Indians, hunting feral cattle and kangaroos from horseback and raiding missions.

Dingos and any surviving mainland Tasmanian Wolves (some sources claim that there may have been a few into the 1850s) would adapt themselves to the new prey animals. Casual, small-scale agriculture would probably spread to tribes in relatively fertile areas. I'm guessing that the Spanish colonies would probably be pretty much left alone by other Europeans until the 1700s. The Dutch might prowl around and launch a couple of raids, but there wasn't too much to attract them. I could easily see a sleepy Spanish Australian colony persisting into the late 1700s. By that time the Aborigines would be somewhat hardened to some European diseases, but still vulnerable to periodic smallpox epidemics.

Islanders from Indonesia might filter in and fill the vacuum left by the epidemics if they spread much beyond the Spanish settlements, which they probably would. During the early part of the English occupation people from an unidentified Indonesian island stopped by to trade with the aborigines from time-to-time and apparently asked the English if it was okay to settle. They didn't have enough of a military edge over the aborigines to settle without English protection, and the English weren't willing to give it. If the aborigines got hit hard enough, the resulting vacuum might attract these people, making the ethnic mix in Australia even more interesting. This actually sounds like it might make for a rather interesting society by the late 1700s.

Tasmania would probably not be totally unaffected by all of this. The Spanish would undoubtedly visit and kill or kidnap a few natives. I doubt if they would find Tasmania a good site for a mission-too thinly populated by too small of a population. There probably would be some very small-scale trade, but Tasmania would probably go on pretty much unchanged until someone else moved into the area. When would that happen? I don't know. Would the convict fleets from England just settle some part of Australia outside the immediate area of the Spanish missions? Mounted nomad aborigines would make their life much more interesting.

Your comments to me: Does Anthony Docimo take II work better for you? On plains Indians and cultural simplification: To some extent didn't the invention of the stirrup have a simplifying impact in Eurasia by giving horsemen a bigger advantage over infantry? Arguably the spread of iron weapons might be considered simplifying because they gave outsiders an advantage over the expensive bronze stuff that only the major powers could afford. Widespread use of camels in the Middle East/North Africa making use of wheeled vehicles much less frequent? All of those are somewhat arguable, at least partly because what is simplification is kind of in the eye of the beholder.

Char doesn't fit easily into any of the categories that you will think of at first, but I think you'll like it when you find out what she really is. I hope so anyway. I don't want to lead you on a novel-length path and then leave you disappointed.

On Bear Country: I didn't consciously name Anna after the one in World of Tiers, though that is one of my favorite series and she is one of my favorite characters. The Green Monkeys are kind of peculiar. There appears to be room in an ecology for one species of animal that you simply don't mess with because they'll keep coming at you until they're dead or you're dead. If my uncle's hunting stories are true, then peccaries play that role in Latin America. The Green Monkeys play that role in Bear Country North America.

There are precedents for prey coming after predators in our time-line, by the way. Meerkats have been known to track eagles that grab one of the group back to the nest and launch mass rescue efforts if I recall correctly. Meerkats, by the way, are my third or fourth most favorite animal after Sun Bears, Thylacines, and possibly Binturongs. The monkeys are mostly diurnal, but they are flexible enough to consider a night attack if they see an advantage in it.

I enjoyed the pseudo X-Files and the Mystery Theatre 3K redo. Fun stuff. I also enjoyed your AH-lite on a time-line where mammals only survived (or only were able to develop into large animal niches) in North and South America, but I have some nitpicks on that one.

First, Creodonts as currently constituted were not, to the best of my knowledge, hoofed carnivores. There was a group of hoofed carnivores that were once considered part of the Creodonts, but as of the last classifications I read are now considered a separate and not very closely related group. I don't have my books in front of me, but from memory I believe that the group that got split off was called something like Mesonchyus, while the remaining Creodonts may actually be a natural group. I'm also a little skeptical of your explanation of why creodonts couldn't be omnivores, though there was a problem with their teeth that made becoming more omnivorous difficult, so I guess the details don't matter too much.

Lemurs and Tarsiers did make it to North America, though I'm not sure that they were there before the age of dinosaurs ended. I believe bats developed before the end of the age of dinosaurs (based on old and possibly faulty memory). Another factor in this scenario: Mammals would be able to occupy some niches even in a dinosaur dominated world, just as they did in our time-line before dinosaur extinction. Insectivores, the rodent-like multiberculates (might want to include them in the scenario too, by the way), and opossums seemed to survive quite well in a dinosaur-dominated world. I'm not sure what the dinosaur world had to compete with primates, so it is quite possible that primates would develop into a diverse group of critters in the rest of the world, though probably not the same diverse group of critters we've come to know and love.

The dinosaur part of the world would not be a continuation of the Cretaceous. The rise of birds had probably already changed things significantly for the smaller dinosaurs by the late Cretaceous. They would continue to do so as time went on.

I'm not sure when the first large predator birds flew, but they had to have had a huge impact on the smaller herbivores of their time. An eagle or a falcon in a dive moves much faster than any land animal. As birds developed their potential, any animal that at any point in its life weighed less than 40 pounds (about the limit for a predator bird that flies to deal with) had to take them into account. That would mean all of the dinosaurs, even the biggest ones since they all hatched from eggs. When predator birds started flying faster than any land animal could run, they would have also had a huge impact on small and medium-sized predators of other kinds-dinosaurs included. They would be formidable competitors

As time went on, dinosaurs would have to cope with snakes, assuming that they developed. It has been a while since I saw the time-line, but I believe that snakes developed either at the end of era of dinosaurs, or shortly thereafter. How would the smaller dinosaurs cope with snakes, especially as the snakes developed sophisticated hunting techniques like constricting and poisons?

Robert Gill: Thanks for the review of Zeppelins West. I'll have to remember to not read that one. Your comments to Sidaway: How many Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans are there in this APA anyway? I thought that was my particular guilty pleasure. Your comments to me: As you probably noticed last time, enough intrusions can slow me down on the writing, and I'm sure the painkillers didn't help the quality any. I ended up buying Children of Apollo and kind of regretting it. It was a potentially good book badly in need of a good editor, or at least a vetting in something like POD. I gave up on it for the time being after about a hundred pages. I may try again. The idea of an AH where the Apollo program continued is a good one.

Wesley Kawato: Robert Alley and I live in the same state, but not the same city. I live in a small (thirty thousand people) university town that rises out of the cornfields about sixty miles away from Chicago, in a house that has been in my wife's family since it was built in 1864. Robert lives in the suburbs about an hour's drive away from here.

On the Custer episode: Custer did have presidential ambitions, but he didn't need any help to get himself killed by the Indians. Dividing his command, leaving his Gatling guns behind, and going after a body of Indians that probably outnumbered his entire command by a factor of up to ten to one in terms of fighting men were all acts of stupidity. Custer was a brave, aggressive, and rather stupid man who once led a cavalry charge into a stone wall during the civil war. He was going to get himself and his command killed at some point if he remained in command. That doesn't mean there wasn't a conspiracy. It just means that a conspiracy wasn't necessary to kill off Custer.

Your comments to me: Char is an attempt at an alternate time-line/mystery crossover. The alternate history element becomes apparent gradually. Actually I've been doing a lot of crossovers lately. I'm currently writing an alternate history/space opera crossover, with elements of my version of the old Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure story tossed in. Actually, I haven't been able to get the Edgar Rice Burroughs part of it down very well, unfortunately.

David Johnson: Glad to hear that you rescued the kitten. We have two rescued cats in our family, along with a Samoyed, a sugar glider, an iguana, and a turtle. Unfortunately my short-tailed opossum died a couple of years ago, and I haven't found a way to replace her yet.

Your response to Cron: Funny.

Your comments to me: France actually started quietly supplying arms to the Ethiopians sometime in the late 1930's. I want to say 1937, but it may have been 1939.

On the aftermath of World War II: yeah, in some ways the Soviet occupation did stabilize things. Without it there would have been a host of problems, such as German's exiled from the border areas with Czechoslovakia or Poland agitating for the right to return-kind of a replay of the very numerous border wars of the immediately post-World War I era.

On Char you put your finger on something that has been bothering me. I need to get better at communicating character emotions. On Bear Country, I think you're right about the segments being too short. I'll have to take care of that. I'm seriously considering one more major rewrite to take into account the feedback I've gotten in POD. I also need to get better at dealing with novel-length manuscripts. The organization techniques that work for a ten thousand or twenty-thousand word manuscript start breaking down when the manuscript reaches novel length.

My difficulties finding your zine were self-inflicted. I desperately need to get better organized.

Ian Moore: Sorry to see that you are leaving the APA. At least you went out with a good issue. I like the Brusilov offensive idea. He did some serious damage even without the follow-up. Too bad his offensive after the fall of the Tsar was such a disaster. On the German/Czech war bit: The Germans really weren't ready for war in 1938, and it wasn't just a matter of tanks. The Czech artillery park padded out the German one nicely, and Skoda works added greatly to German production. Sudetenland coal helped the German coal gasification program a lot. Apparently not all coal is created equal in terms of usefulness in gasification, and Czech coal is ideal. The Germans didn't have the bulk of their pilots trained very well yet, and historically the weather during the crucial period was awful, which would have grounded the Luftwaffe much of the time.

Also, I'm not sure that time would be on Germany's side. Hitler was very much a 'shop window' kind of a guy in terms of the military. In other words he tended to put resources into the obvious big-ticket items like tanks and planes, rather than mundane but necessary things like ammunition, spare parts, and bombs, as evidenced by the fact that the Germans came close to running out of bombs and very low on aviation gas during their invasion of Poland.

Hitler was actually rather compulsive about getting big numbers of high profile weapons. In late 1943 or early 1944 one of the people in charge of tank production pointed out to him that a small reduction of new tank production in favor of spare parts would result in a major increase in tanks actually available to fight. The numbers made that pretty obvious, but Hitler wouldn't buy it. As a result, vitally needed tanks sat waiting for some minor missing part instead of being available at the front.

When you figure that the Germans got the Czech stocks of munitions intact, they had to have been in sad shape pre-capture of Czech stocks. The German army might start losing effectiveness in a matter of weeks. On the other hand, the Czechs did have some problems, including a large disloyal German minority and Slovak nationalists who wanted their own state. Also, Czech fortifications were formidable, but incomplete, with most of them lacking their heavy guns.

I'm not at all sure the Poles would have gotten involved in an attack on the Czechs until they were pretty sure that (a) The German attack was going to succeed, and (b) There was no chance that going after the Czechs would cause the French to pull the huge military loan that the Poles needed so badly to modernize its military. In this scenario, neither condition would be true. That doesn't mean that Stalin wouldn't attack anyway, but in late 1938 such an action would be unlikely. The Japanese had not yet been given the lesson of Nomonham, and they were gearing up for provocations on the Manchurian border. Stalin was a cautious man, with his heart set on letting the west and the fascists fight it out, with the Soviets waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces. Given that mindset, it is likely that he would let the situation marinate for a year or two before jumping in, assuming that the war lasted that long.

Kurt Sidaway: I like the little mini-scenario of the British carving out a larger domain in North America before the American Revolution. I do have to take issue with the thought that the Royal American Battalions would have been the first militias completely financed by the colonies. The early New England trainbands were a local creation and I would certainly consider them militias.

Your comments to me: Thanks for the comments on Char. Very helpful. You'll see why Char reacts the way she does to the painting later. Ken and Rick are playing paintball together very much against Rick's instincts. He went along with Ken being included basically to keep peace with his roommates, especially Bruce. Ken has his own motives for going along with that, which may become apparent later. Ken isn't against rescuing Char, but when he punches her too enthusiastically and thinks he may have seriously injured her, he takes the weasel way out. I may have to make that a little more clear.

Dale Speirs: Am I reading your summary correctly? As I read it there appears to be a correlation between a major volcano eruption and replacement of Neanderthals (my spell checker insists on that spelling) and modern humans in the Mediterranean area (probably minus southern Spain where Neanderthals lasted longer). Now correlation doesn't prove cause and effect, but that could make for an interesting new theory on the replacement of Neanderthals with modern humans. A nasty enough volcano explosion and local weather impacts from dust, etc. could have created a partial vacuum that our ancestors rushed into before the remnants of the Neanderthals could recover their numbers. At that point, modern humans become the incumbents over most of the old Neanderthal territory, with the remaining pockets of Neanderthals surrounded and vulnerable to any kind of local crisis that reduced their numbers temporarily.