Robert Alley: I enjoyed reliving the con panels on AH.   Your comments on Jim’s scenario: Very good analysis.  Really very astute and for the most I agree.  Your comments to me: I don’t have any specific universe in mind for the open source AH idea—just interested in how feasible the concept is.  I do have a mechanism in mind for a sort of shared universe of sorts that may overcome many of the problems that would otherwise plague the concept, but I think I need to think it through a little more thoroughly before I present it.

I sent “50 Black Socks” to Analog and they said that they had run something similar recently.  I’m not sure what they had in mind or how close it was to my story.

You take the German retreat in December 1941 in exactly the direction I had in mind—the small pullback that turns into a major retreat.  I agree with most of your analysis of the consequences, but I think that one of the more interesting consequences of the German retreat would be on the Western Powers.  I suspect that the British and to some extent the US would see the retreat as a replay of Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow and start thinking more about the implications of the Soviet advance than about the German threat.  They would be faced with the very real possibility of the Soviets defeating the Germans on their own, rolling up the German conquests and Germany itself, then appear on the continental side of the English channel, masters of most of Europe.  That was far beyond the capabilities of the Soviet army in December 1941, but that would not be entirely clear to the western allies in late 1941 and early 1942.

The Vichy French would probably get more serious about their covert re-armament efforts as the Vichy worried about what would happen if the Soviets actually beat the Germans and as the perception of German power waned.  The French would be willing to take more risks of getting caught in their rearmament efforts with the Germans tied up in the stabilizing the eastern front.  Unfortunately for Vichy in this situation, the amount of rearmament they could actually do was rather limited.  Most French industry was concentrated around Paris and thus in the German occupation zone.

Vichy did have at least one factory that had been making the B1bis before the French surrender, but I’m not sure they had a complete set of subcontractors to actually resume producing the tanks.  It had one factory capable of making armored utility vehicles, and historically that factory made tracked ‘forestry tractors’ that were retrieved, armored and used as improvised armored fighting vehicles by the revived French army after Normandy.

The Vichy French concentrated most of their covert armored vehicle production on armored cars, secretly producing turrets to up-gun one of their armored cars from the lightly armed version that the Germans allowed them to have to one armed with a 47 mm gun.  They also secretly built tens or hundreds of thousands (can’t remember the exact number but it was large) of HEAT-type anti-tank grenades, and were gathering material to build several hundred light armored cars on a commercial chassis.  As I said, they would have probably accelerated the effort given a German retreat, but the results wouldn’t really amount to much compared to either the German or the Soviets.  Vichy France simply didn’t have the industry or manpower to generate much military power, even if the Germans weren’t in a position to stop rearmament.

The Vichy administrations in North Africa would probably get more aggressive about covert rearmament than it had been historically.  You might even see dual use equipment like truck and radios covertly flowing to French forces there from the US or Britain.

If the chance of a Soviet victory in 1941-42 actually looked serious, we might see some strange things, like covert British/Vichy contingency plans for dealing with the Soviets if they did manage to defeat Germany on their own.  You might also see an increased flow of young Frenchmen into the Free French camp, some because they would now see a chance of defeating German, and some because they wanted to build up a French army to defend the country against the Soviets and couldn’t stomach Vichy.  The Roosevelt administration would probably look into what it would take to revive the French army as a counterweight to the Soviets if the Germans were defeated. The Soviets would almost certainly see western Lend-Lease aid drop off sharply, and some of that material would be quietly stockpiled to rebuild continental armies if the Germans actually were defeated.

Communist parties in most countries of Europe would see an influx of recruits as opportunists tried to get on what appeared to be the winning side.  Beyond that I don’t know how it would all play out.  Stalin would certainly overplay his hand with the offensive, as he did historically.  He would lose a lot more men to the weather during the course of the pursuit, and the Germans would undoubtedly counterattack at some point and cut off massive numbers of Soviet troops.  Of course the Germans would have lost a lot more men and material in the course of the retreat than they did historically, and the Soviets would have recovered sources for additional manpower long before they did historically.  Overall I’m not sure how this would play out.

Kamchatka as an island instead of part of the Asian mainland: You actually did quite a bit with that.  Let’s see if I can add anything to it.  Maybe a somewhat isolated group of people cut off when the ocean level rose after the ice ages?  That doesn’t do to much unless they were seafarers.  In that case they might have been in a position to follow the Aleutian island chain to Northwestern North America.  What would that do?  Maybe get a subset of Old World inventions to the New World sooner.

Ah, here’s a possibility: The island remains Russian and a White Russian army retreats to it to set up a Taiwan-style government-in-semi-exile.  Of course if you believe in butterfly affects you could make the case that there wouldn’t even be a Russia, much less a White Russian exile army if Kamchatka had been an island.

I also like what you did with the seedling about Polish/German border skirmishes of the 1920s getting out of hand.  The only thing I would add is that if Poland won the resulting war, which it probably would with French help, Poland would almost certainly grab all of Silesia, along with Danzig and maybe some parts of East Prussia.  I’m not sure the Allies would let Poland keep all of that, but they probably would if it looked like the Germans started or escalated the war.  Getting those territories would give the Poles a much larger nationalities problem, but it would also make Poland much more economically viable and Germany somewhat less so.  The part of Silesia that Poland didn’t get had a lot of industry and natural resources, and Danzig would have given Poland it’s own already established port, which would have meant that they didn’t have to spend enormous amounts of money to build their own alternative port at Glydnia.  All of that would have made Poland somewhat more formidable compared to Germany than it was historically if World War II actually happened in anything like its historic form.

On the Antarctic Island scenario: Again you covered pretty much all of the possibilities that I can think of., with the possible exception of a few ecological ones.  Antarctica was apparently inhabited by essentially a cold-weather subset of South America’s animals until it became too cold for land-dwelling mammals.  The fossil record is scanty and almost certainly incomplete, but it includes Opossum-type Marsupials, the odd South American hooved animals and at least one representative of the armadillo/sloth group of species, along with the giant flightless birds that have been nicknamed ‘terror cranes’.  Now you could have those animals continuing to develop in our island, or you could have the island temporarily become uninhabitable for land mammals, and then rebuild its ecology from whatever creatures made it in from the sea or the air.  That would probably just result in something like New Zealand only bigger.  You could also have the inhabitable area shrink to the point where only a few types of mammals survived and then expanded to fill the available niches.  Small omnivores like opossums and armadillos would be most likely to survive in that scenario.

Marsupials already have Australia to show what they can do.  What about an island with most of the ecology descended from ancestral armadillos?  That sounds pretty outlandish but it might not actually be.  There were some partially carnivorous ones in South America, and some large grazers in the Glyptodonts.  They could probably fill out an ecology fairly well.

On the scenario seedling where the Germans start World War II five or six days early when they initially planned to: Yes, the Germans would probably find the Poles even less fully mobilized than they did historically, and they would be in a position to seize a bit more territory.  The bit of territory they would be most likely to hold onto in spite of the secret agreements with the Soviets would have been the oil-producing regions of Galicia in eastern Poland.  Historically the Germans got regions producing something like a third of the oil, while the Soviets got the rest.  If the Germans got in ahead of the Soviets and were actually in possession of some of the oil fields that had been allocated to the Soviets I could see them deciding that the Soviets would have to settle for compensation elsewhere.

One other potential implication of this scenario: would France and England actually declare war?  They wouldn’t be as mobilized as they were historically (and they had a ways to go in mobilizing when they declared war historically).  They might have decided to hold off on declaring war for a few days so that the mobilization process wasn’t as vulnerable to German air attack, and then if Poland folded fast enough they might be faced with a fait accompli.  Poland would be beyond saving so why start a war that wouldn’t have any chance of saving it?  It would take a very quick series of initial victories to do that, but the Poles would have considerably less mobilized manpower and the same very long borders to defend, so I could see it becoming apparent in less than a week that Poland was doomed.

If Britain and France did declare war, the Germans might be enough less battered by Polish battles that they could attack West in fall of 1939, which would have all kinds of interesting implications.

The bit about the division-sized German units going ahead with an uncoordinated attack when the Germans originally planned their attack would have the potential to let the Poles get a larger percentage of their army mobilized.  Historically the Poles wanted to do a total mobilization in late August but the western allies pressured them not to and the Poles foolishly yielded to that pressure.  As a result, a fairly large percentage of the Polish army never got mobilized (a third?) and a lot more of it hadn’t reached their assigned defensive positions by the time the Germans attacked.  That made the Poles already difficult position even more impossible.  Given division-sized attacks, Poland would have gone ahead with full mobilization as quickly as possible instead of resorting to half-measures, and either the Germans would have had to carry through with the rest of their attacks or a larger percentage of the Polish army would have been in place to meet that attack.

On the idea of a more decisive Polish victory in the Soviet-Polish war: You didn’t go quite the direction I was expecting with this one, but I like the way you went with it.  There actually was a Ukrainian sort-of Bolshevik sort of Nationalist faction during this period.  It got absorbed into the Communist party during the period of Lenin’s New Economic Plan and shortly afterwards, then got purged during one of Stalin’s earlier purges.  I suppose they could have gone more nationalist and less Bolshevik and ended up allied with Poland.  That would have been difficult to pull off though, given the Polish distrust of anything Bolshevik during this time period.

Any Ukrainian group that allied with the Poles would have to contend with a lot of anti-Polish feeling in the Ukraine, both because of memories of Polish oppression in Ukraine before the partitions of Poland and because of the recent war between Poland and Ukrainians in Galacia that had resulted in a Polish conquest of that area and a flood of Ukrainian exiles from Galacia, including several tens of thousands of men in an exile army.

Historically, the Petliura faction appears to have lost a lot of popular support when they were forced to shelter behind the Polish army and then allied with the Poles to drive the Reds out of the Ukraine.  The Poles do appear to have intended to reestablish a somewhat independent Ukraine though.  The Poles were training a new army for the Petliura faction when they were forced out of most of the Ukraine by the Red army offensive that ultimately failed in front of Warsaw.

I’m not sure what form a Polish-sponsored ‘independent’ Ukraine would have taken.  The Polish leadership was split between a faction that saw the value of having a series of buffer states between Poland and Russia and a faction that felt that any area with a substantial number of Poles should be part of Poland.  There were large areas in what is now western Ukraine where Poles were the majority in some cities, but Ukrainians were the majority in the surrounding countryside.  There were also substantial Polish enclaves in the countryside that were surrounded by Ukrainians.  It would have been very difficult for the Poles to have avoided the temptation to force a dependent Ukraine to accept the borders that Poland wanted, which would have alienated Ukrainian nationalists even more and made the Polish-supported government look like Polish puppets.

When I proposed the scenario I was actually thinking of an even more decisive Polish victory in front of Warsaw, with Red Army troops that historically got away becoming POWs.  That would have forced the Red Army to pull more troops from other fronts in order to rebuild the front in front of Poland.  That in turn might have led the Poles to demand more as their price for ending the war.  I don’t think the Poles would have gone for the full independent Ukraine at this point because they were tired of war and just relieved that they weren’t going to be crushed by the Red Army.  On the other hand, having a buffer state between them and the Soviets would be very tempting and it would also give them something to do with Petliura’s remaining army.

Maybe they would have gone for some kind of a Ukrainian mini-state carved out of the Soviet Ukraine, not big enough to threaten Polish annexation of the part of Ukraine that they wanted, and not big enough that the Soviets would feel it was worth fighting over.  I’m visualizing an enclave along the Polish border with maybe half a million to two million people, very dependant on the Poles for defense against the Soviets and probably economically dependent on the Poles too.

This rump Ukraine would have a delicate relationship with the Poles because it would also inevitably become a gathering point for Ukrainians who were out to create a united Ukraine, including both the Polish-held areas and the Soviet-held ones.  At the same time, whatever government emerged there would have to keep those forces in check because if they got too annoying the Poles would simply annex the area or remove their protection and let the Soviets do so (more likely the former).

This kind of a Ukrainian mini-state is not the most likely outcome, but it isn’t too improbable, and if it formed it would probably become a hotbed of intrigue, with Ukrainian exiles of various factions scheming, Polish security services trying to keep an eye on them, and the Soviets trying to infiltrate.  Both the Poles and Japanese, as well as Western intelligence services and eventually the Germans would be trying to use the place as a convenient location from which to run intelligence operations against the Soviet Union.

I’ve been toying with the idea of using that kind of a state as the background for a series of alternate history spy stories.  I’m not sure how alternate the history would be though.  The impact of that kind of a mini-state on the rest of the world would be subtle at best.  If they had representatives in the League of Nations the Ukrainians could add to the pressure on the Soviet Union during the famines stemming from collectivization.  I doubt that it would make much difference to the Soviets though.  A trickle of refugees from those famines would probably make it to the Ukrainian mini-state.  It’s possible that if the Ukrainians made too big of a stink about the famines the Soviets might try to organize a refugee flood that would overwhelm the ability of the mini-state to cope with them as a method of retaliating.

The existence of a Ukrainian state might mean some degree of increased guerilla resistance in the Ukraine, but the Soviets were generally pretty effective at dealing with that sort of thing, and the Ukraine was very bad guerilla country.  Also, the Soviet Ukraine was given quite a bit of autonomy during the period of the New Economic Plan and for a few years afterwards, so guerrilla activity would probably have died down because of that.

Actually creating a full-fledged independent Ukrainian state at the end of World War I would be difficult for the Poles because of the border questions I mentioned earlier, but if they did succeed in doing that your analysis of the 1920s and early 1930s seems pretty reasonable.  The Ukraine would undoubtedly have some trouble holding itself together due to the lack of people experienced in running governments.  That was certainly true of many of the newly created nations.

I wonder what kind of end Mahkno and his people would come to in this scenario.  He would have to be dealt with at some point by any government hoping to control the southern Ukraine.

As things head toward the late 1930s I think we would see somewhat more divergence than you appear to be visualizing.  An independent Ukraine would have quite a bit of impact on the development of the Soviet Union.  The Soviet Union would be considerably weaker militarily and economically without the Ukraine, especially if the independent Ukraine included the Donets Basin.  It would be interesting to figure out how much of a role Ukrainian agricultural products played in the Soviet balance of payments.  Without the farmlands of the Ukraine, I’m not even sure the Soviet Union could feed itself without imports.  Certainly it would have to invest more resources in agriculture.

An independent Ukraine would deprive the Soviet Union of as many as 30+ million people, which would presumably shrink their military somewhat.  It would also extend the borders that the Soviet Union would have to control by a lot of miles.  Troops watching the Ukrainian border would not be available to keep an eye on the Japanese in Manchuria as well as other potential hotspots.

It’s hard to know how the absence of the Ukraine would affect the politics of the early Soviet Union.   Did Ukrainians play a role in the Kronstadt uprising?  I’m pretty sure they played a role in the peasant uprising that was part of the motivation for Lenin to go with the New Economic Plan.  Would he still go with the NEP with a less serious peasant threat?  Probably, but that’s not a sure thing.

The Soviet Union could end up with a considerably different structure.  The Russian element would be even more dominant than it was historically, and the Soviet Socialist Republics might have even less power and autonomy than they theoretically did in our time-line, if they were even allowed to exist.

The tension between the predominantly Russian center and the predominantly non-Russian periphery was a major factor in the in-fighting that eventually led to Stalin seizing absolute power.  With no Ukraine to partially counterbalance Russia, the center would almost certainly come to dominate earlier, which would leave Stalin without the ability to shift back and forth on that issue.  That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t come to power, but the timing might be considerably different.

Speaking of Stalin’s rise to power: Some analysts have claimed that the ruthless collectivization of the Ukraine set the stage for the later purges by building up a body of people within the party and security apparatus who were capable of mass violence and used to using violence to settle political issues.  I’m guessing that the Bolshevik party would tear itself apart with bloody purges anyway, but that might take a little longer and take somewhat different forms.

With Russian dominance more apparent earlier, you might see even more nationalist revolts in the remaining SSRs, and presumably less loyalty to the Soviet Union among them.  The Moslem areas would make up a larger percentage of the Soviet Union than they did historically, which would have an impact on the quality and loyalty of the Soviet army.

A poorer Soviet Union would have less cash to throw around to support Communist parties abroad, but that sort of thing probably wasn’t a huge budget item, and it was important enough to the Soviet self-image that it would probably be supported anyway.  You might see somewhat less support, but not too much.  I’m not sure you would see the same degree of control of those parties by the Soviet Union as happened historically.  That might have interesting affects on the rise of Hitler.

Would the reduced Soviet Union be a big enough boogeyman to produce the kinds of red scares that happened historically?  Probably for the most part.  The motivation for most of them was largely internal to the countries involved.
 
With a considerably less powerful Soviet Union, would the Germans feel that it was necessary to make a pact with the Soviet Union in order to partition Poland?  If it did, the pact might be something along the lines of the Soviets getting to munch the Ukraine while the Germans munched Poland.  Allowing the Soviets to munch the Ukraine would be a temporary thing on the German part because exploiting the Ukraine was one of the major goals of the Nazis.

On the Brazilian Gold Rush: I didn’t deliberately single out the 3 major Axis countries.  Of the major powers they were the three most dependent on the rest of the world for oil, not to mention a variety of other natural resources.  Let’s face it, both Germany and Japan entered World War II partly or mainly to secure oil supplies.  If Italy had managed to have a coherent foreign policy, they would have been trying to secure oil supplies too, because they were even more vulnerable than the Germans and Japanese to an oil cut-off.  All three countries reaped a bonanza when discovery of the Texas monster fields drove world oil prices down.  In this scenario that price drop doesn’t happen and I just followed the logic of the scenario.

Dale Cozort:  Does my zine for POD look as thrown together to you as it does to me?  I waited too late to get started on this one, and then ran into one problem after another.  I waited to copy my stuff until the last minute, which meant that I paid something like seven cents per copy.  I had just paid a bunch of bills and was just before the end of a pay period, so I did the math and realized that I simply couldn’t afford to do thirty copies at that rate without doing some fund-shifting, which I didn’t really have time to do.  I decided to get twenty copies at the copy center and print the rest on one of my laser printers.  Bad move.  My formerly trusty older laser printer had developed an appetite for chunks of paper—often three or four sheets at a time.  It grabbed multiple sheets just often enough to make double-siding the sheets using manual-duplex nearly impossible.  Finally I decided to run downstairs and use the family laser printer.  Good idea, but I couldn’t figure out any way to make that printer handle manually double-siding sheets.  I wasted a lot of paper and toner, and finally got all but two or three of the copies done.  I also had enough partial copies to almost make up the remaining copies.  By that time it was the morning of collation, and I was holding up collation, so I went on with the copies I had.  Fortunately Jim was nice enough to let me print the missing pages of the last two or three copies on one of his printers.

In any case, I ended up paying close to $50 for the copying, plus the wear on the printers and my nerves.  Ironically I could have waited a month or well--twelve at least on getting all of that done.  Oh well   As much as I love the paper format of POD we do need to move to some kind of electronic format just from a cost standpoint.

Anthony Docimo: A friendly word of advice on the scenario seeds: You might want to put a little bit of background with the more obscure ones so people don’t just say “huh?” and move on.

I like your challenge on keeping the Ottoman Empire alive.  Staying out of World War I until later in the game would be the obvious answer, but it is much easier said than done.  Internal pressures  in one direction or the other would be a problem as you indicate, but so would the fact that Turkey holds the key to whether or not food and weapons pass easily back and forth between the western Allies and Russia.  If the Allies can get weapons and ammunition to the Russian Black Sea ports, the Central Powers are in a world of hurt, as the “Russian Steamroller” becomes more of a reality.  Both sides would know that, so both sides would be frantic to get the Ottomans to Open/Close the straits.  That means that as Ottoman honcho your position and even life is in peril if you are perceived by one side or the other as being on the other side, or an obstacle to the Ottomans coming in on their side.  That would be especially true coming from the Central Powers because the Germans appear to have had a lot of contacts inside of the empire.

You also have to deal with popular anger inside the empire over the British seizure of partially completed battleships that were destined for the Ottoman Empire.  Historically that was a major factor in bringing the Ottomans into the war.  I suppose that with foreknowledge of what was going to happen, you could somehow finesse that issue by offering the British some sort of deal before they hit you with the battleship seizure.  If it looked like it was coming from the Ottoman government and it was a good deal, I could see some kind of trade of battleships now for better or cheaper battleships later being spun into something acceptable to Ottoman public opinion.  That would of course be a very risky course to take, and it might backfire badly, but I think that keeping the Ottomans out of the war, at least until later is key to survival.

In World War II, Turkey did a masterful job of keeping both sides hoping that the Turks could eventually be maneuvered or cajoled into joining their side, then came in and grabbed some spoils once it was clear who was going to win.  They actually may have waited a little too long to maximize the amount of booty they got at the end of the war.  There is a book called “The Elusive Neutral” that follows the maneuvering in a fair amount of detail.

The Turks of World War II had some major advantages that you wouldn’t have though.  The World War I Turks proved at Gallipoli that they weren’t to be taken lightly, and the postwar Turkish defeat of the Greek army solidified the Turkish reputation as having an army that shouldn’t be taken lightly.  
Unfortunately you would not have the advantage of those boosts to your army’s reputation.  The Ottoman Empire had recently been beaten by the Italians, and then by a bunch of penny-ante Balkan states.  That’s not a recipe for being taken seriously.   

At the same time, the combatants of World War I would have enough on their plates that no one would really want to force the Ottoman Empire into the war on the other side.  They just wouldn’t care all that much if that happened as a side-affect of some policy not particularly directed at you.  In other words, the perceived cost of having the Ottomans on the other side was low.  The trick from your point of view would be to keep the benefits of threatening policies from outweighing those low perceived costs.

I don’t think there is any way to raise the perceived costs of crossing the Ottomans without getting drawn into the war.  I’m not even sure that your troops would do anywhere near as well as they did historically given a different entrance to the war.  I think the Ottoman army’s resurgence was due to a variety of factors, including genuine reforms, training, and new equipment, but also due to a lot of people getting fed up with being pushed around, and then gathering self-confidence as a result of the British failures at Gallipoli.

I enjoyed your comment section for the most part, but there were a few things that made me go “huh?”  I’m not sure if they were intended humorously or if one of us really missed the point.  Sorry, can’t remember a specific instance at the moment, but do remember that subtle shades of meaning get lost when there is no body language to guide us.

On Mars Looks Different: I visualize Earth and the moon as a system, with the moon doing the heavy and dirty manufacturing and Earth being the rest of the economic and political unit.  I’m figuring that the moon would not remain inhabitable during the dark ages.  It would be abandoned or nearly so, and then re-colonized from Earth, with continuing close relationships between the Earth and moon.  To be honest, I haven’t really thought through what impact the body’s adaptations to the moon’s lesser gravity would have on all of this.  

I like Mars Looks Different, and I think it will turn out to be a very good story eventually, but I made some mistakes in the plotting phase.  I skimped on the back-story because I was really enthusiastic about the idea and I wanted to start getting actual words on paper (or in this case computer screen)  That worked well for the first two-thirds of the story, but as the story progressed and moved out into the solar system it started to bog down.  I found that I needed to flesh out the solar system, and as I did that I found new twists that I really wanted to add to my plot.  Eventually I got to the point where I had a pretty decent story three-fourths written, but I also had the plot elements of a much better story that when incorporate much of the existing story but will also need to rewrite or rework a lot of the existing story.  As I tried to rework the story I realized that I still needed more depth on my back-story.  This is, after all a complete alternate solar system, with a million-plus year history, rises and falls of entire planetary civilizations and even intelligent species.  You need a lot of back-story to make that feel real, and I’m not there yet.  I do have to watch out so that I don’t just disappear into the research and figuring out the history to the extent that I don’t actually write the history, but I do need the background much more solid.

Why does Baker say that he hopes Ron hasn’t heard about the pox and then tell him about it?  Because if Ron already knows, then word of the pox has leaked out through unofficial channels, which Baker considers a bad thing.

Being on the wrong side of the Aztec/Conquistador divide: Huh?  They happened to pick one of the many techno-mismatches of the last 500 years.  They could have picked any one of a dozen others, but why pick a more obscure example instead of a better known one?  I’m not seeing your point here.

On twenty-percent fatalities from the pox: obviously this would have to be an estimate based on fatalities so far, and the condition of the people who are sick.  It might end up being twenty-one percent or nineteen percent, or even twenty-five percent.  That’s the nature of estimates.

On saving the Incas: The relationship with Huascar is crucial, but I don’t think your solution will work.  Sharing your knowledge with him would probably lead to him claiming that you are crazy, and using what you told him as evidence against you.  You do have some good ideas though.  Yeah, you don’t want to gratuitously show gold, and using the Portuguese against the Spanish makes sense.  You are a long ways from the centers of Portuguese power in the New World though, and closer to Spanish power.  You are also on the Spanish side of the papal line dividing the Spanish and Portuguese spheres of exploitation, and while the Portuguese later ignored that line in Brazil they initially respected it for the most part.  Of course the riches of Peru might make them ignore the line, but you’re hiding those riches from them, so that doesn’t work.  Overall though, this isn’t bad.

     
Mark Ford: I hope that by this time you have recovered more fully from your injuries.  Interesting bit about Edgar Allen Poe and science fiction.  I commented at one of the panels at Windycon that it would have been interesting to see a sort-of alternate history story like “Lest Darkness Fall” done by Edgar Allen Poe.  To which somebody responded that Darkness would fall.  I think you could actually have some fun with the idea of alternate history as done by various famous authors.  Let’s see: Jules Verne?  Poe? Dickens?  Edgar Rice Burroughs?  Now that could get fun.  Phil Farmer once did Tarzan as done by William Burroughs as opposed to Edgar Rice Burroughs.  It was fun in a very weird way.

“Joe Sixpack” is an American expression that sort of means average guy or actually average blue-collar guy—working stiff, not too highly educated.  “Joe Sixpack” works all day at a job that doesn’t require much thinking, comes home and tosses back a six-pack of beer while watching something mindless on the television.  Not a bad person, but not an intellectual giant.

On your response to my AH seedling about the German Army pulling back to the Polish border in December 1941: I don’t think that Lend Lease would shift toward the Soviets in this scenario.  It would be more likely to shift away from them as Roosevelt looked at the implications of the Red Army deep in Europe with no western force capable of matching them.

You are right about my eyes glazing over about the French fighting on in North Africa, and you are also right that I need to plot out the timing of what would happen militarily and politically, probably on a day-by-day basis.

I like the idea of Spain establishing California-style missions in some part of Australia, but I can’t figure out anything that would motivate them to do that.  Gold maybe, but historically there was such a long gap between the time of first settlement and the time gold was discovered that it seems unlikely that the Spanish would just walk in and discover it in time for it to motivate them to settle.  

Here’s an unlikely (and off-the-wall) thought: the Spanish Armada conquers England and looks around for a place to deport stubborn Protestants from England and Holland.  At about that time they discover Australia and use it as a penal colony.  As I said, unlikely.  There were too many more convenient places to park the captives.

Could Australia have become a pirate hangout?  That doesn’t seem likely because it would have been too far from the shipping lanes.  There are claims that the Portuguese actually discovered the west coast of Australia but kept it secret, then couldn’t figure out anything useful to do with it.  I’ve read claims that Portugal discovered Brazil a few years before 1492 and also kept that secret, by the way.

I’m not sure how solid either of those claims are, but it does lead to an interesting scenario:  The Portuguese had every reason to keep any discoveries they made secret in order to keep out or at least delay any European competitors.  What if they listened to Columbus, decided to check out his ideas (without his participation), and stalled him until they could send out a couple of ships to check out his ideas.  When they find something (presumably the West Indies), they somehow dispose of or co-opt him, then keep the find a secret as long as they can.  As long as they were just setting up ‘factories’ in the West Indies islands they could probably keep a lid on the secret.   The English and other powers would probably discover the great fishing areas near Newfoundland within a few years, and they would probably start exploring down the coast from there within a decade or two.  

The Portuguese would probably not initially set up the kind of large-scale settlements that the Spanish set up on the West Indies islands, so Indians there would probably fare a little better for a few years, until the Portuguese figured out that the ‘factory’ system wasn’t going to work in the area.  As they found out in Brazil, while the Indians wanted European goods, they didn’t want them badly enough to work for those goods to the extent the Portuguese needed them to in order to make the system work.

The Portuguese would probably eventually have to exercise direct control over the West Indies Indians, unless of course they found the mainland of Central America/Mexico early enough to short-circuit that process, in which case the West Indies would become a backwater for a while, as trade with the coastal groups of Meso-America took precedence.   The “factory” system would probably work with the likes of the Aztecs, but the Portuguese would probably not be able to keep the influx of gold secret for too long.  They might divert attention of rivals to some other area for a while, but eventually other Europeans would show up off of the coast of Mexico and try to get their cut of the gold and silver trade.

The European powers would inevitably be drawn into Mexican Indian power politics.  Swords, knives, axes, and European military tactics would make their way into Mexico and benefit the Indian powers that got them first.  European diseases would undoubtedly hit the coastal Mexican groups from fairly early on, but the really big killers like smallpox and malaria would take a while, possibly as long as fifty years.

A conquest of the Aztecs would be more difficult in this scenario than it was historically because any power that tried it would find rival Europeans offering advise and weapons to the other side.  On the other hand, I doubt that the Aztec empire itself would have survived in the long term.  It was too fragile and the Aztecs were too hated by the people they had conquered.  


James E. Fulkerson: I’m sorry to say that the Fidel Castro as a baseball player thing has already been done as a short story.  As a matter of fact I believe the story had him up against George Bush senior on the baseball diamond.  I wish I could remember where I read that one.

Robert Gill: I hope I didn’t skip your zine.  I could have sworn I saw a zine from you in issue 42, but I looked cover to cover and didn’t see it again.  By the way, it was nice seeing you in the flesh at Windycon.  I hope you enjoyed the Alternate History panels.  Did you get to see any of Harry Turtledove’s panels?  I didn’t, unfortunately.  I saw him in the distance a few times, and wanted to go to some of his panels but they always conflicted with something else I really wanted to see, plus my daughter would have been bored, which I have to keep in consideration.  By the way, if you find part of this zine familiar it is because I recycled about a third of it from the special POD sampler I did for Windycon
 
David Johnson: Ah, the joys of computer support on a shoestring budget and with an administration that doesn’t really understand computers, and a vendor that gets things there when they feel like it.  And I thought my situation with the little lab I run was bad.  

I know what you mean about all-in-one designs and laptops.  I have a laptop lying around that I really want to get back in service, but I’m not willing to pay what it would cost to replace the proprietary hard drive.

One of my friends sort of got around the proprietary laptop syndrome by buying a very small form-factor motherboard, a small case with a handle, and then stuffing as much as he could inside the case.  The result is a much more powerful computer than he could have gotten as a laptop, at about half of the price.  The downsides are that he has to have a monitor at each of the places he uses the computer (home and work), he has to deal with a separate keyboard and mouse, and the components are probably not as shock resistant as comparable components in a laptop would be.  On the other hand, he was able to cram a fast 64-bit AMD chip, two gigabyte of RAM, and I believe he said two hard drives and an optical drive in that case, all for under $500.  Not bad.  He also has two or three other computers, all networked with gigabyte Ethernet, all with fast 64-bit AMD chips, and all with 2 or more gigabytes of RAM.  I believe he said that one of his computers had eleven hard drives, all of them in the 250 to 350 gigabyte range.  His goal is to put all of a 300 DVD-ROM video library on the computer hard-drives.  The videos are all legally acquired, but he wants to make sure they are backed up and he likes the convenience of just popping up a menu and having any disc he wants available to him.

As you probably know, getting DVDs onto a hard drive in usable form isn’t always a trivial job, an he has gotten heavily into video-editing as part of this process.  That is what forces him to the large amounts of memory and very high-end processors.

I’m getting pretty far away from alternate history on all of this, but I know that several members of the APA are computer geeks as well as history geeks.  By the way, due to budget constraints at the computer lab I’ve adopted I’ve pushed to get them on Open Source software as much as possible.  They use GIMP (GNU Image Processor) pretty extensively, along with Blender (an open source 3D graphics program), and some of them are quite good at using both of them.  The younger kids really love TuxPaint, as Jim could probably tell you (I introduced Meredith to it last time I was over there).  Open Source stuff tends to be exactly what you would expect from something written by programmers with little or no supervision: very powerful but often weird to use, with a steep learning curve.

Okay, enough computer talk and on to Vikings in North America.  You know, it would have really been nice if the Greenland Vikings had kept some written records.  This was after all long after writing had spread to most parts of Europe.  They were Christians.  They even had a bishop some of the time.  You would think that there would have been at least some kind of writing preserved somewhere in the colony.  It’s weird that there is as little as there apparently is.

You would think that with several thousand people there would be someone that would record something somehow.  I suppose that paper would be scarce and expensive, along with wood and metal.  You would think that they would have found some way to record things though—maybe on cured animal hides if nothing else.  You would also think that there would be more information back in Europe.  You would think that the church would want financial information if nothing else.

I enjoyed your reviews of the Greenland Viking books.  “Frozen Echo” sounds like a good one.  There is a section on the Greenland Vikings in “Collapse” by the author of “Guns, Germs and Steel”.  He claims that the Greenland colony died out primarily because the Norse didn’t adapt to the environment, and did a number of things that gradually made the areas less and less hospitable for their kind of culture.  For example, they cut down trees for various projects and regrowth in the harsh climate was too slow to make those trees a sustainable resource.  They based their economy around raising cattle in a climate that really was very marginal for doing that even in good times

He also claims that the Greenland Norse seem to have had some kind of cultural taboo against eating fish.  He says that extensive excavations have found no fish-bones in Greenland Viking settlements.  If that’s true it would be a very simple and logical point of divergence.  Any taboo against eating fish was not shared by Vikings in Iceland or Norway, so it must have sprung up in Greenland.  The logical question would be, what if the Greenlanders continued to eat fish?

Okay, now we get to Mythbusters.  I love that show, but I do take their conclusions with a large grain of salt.  The guys are entertaining, but when I understand the science behind what they are trying to do once in a while I realize that they don’t completely understand it.  I would say that they are right 80 to 90 percent of the time, and they’re entertaining the rest of the time.  I don’t know which of those categories the mirror trick fits in.  I’m guessing that they’re right though.  They seem to have been pretty thorough.

On the idea of an ‘Open Source’ AH universe: I could see things getting out of hand really easily if someone wrote a story that blew a lot of other potential stories out of the water.  Would there have to be someone that accepted or rejected potential contributions?  That’s true of a lot of Open Source software projects, but I’m not sure it would work so well if someone poured their heart into a story and it got rejected because it messed up the universe too much.  Maybe it would work better to separate the universe building and story writing functions.  Maybe contributions or changes to the underlying universe—history, economics, etc—have to be accepted by some kind of central person or mechanism, and stories in the universe would only be accepted if they fit into the existing universe and didn’t change or add to the overall picture.  

I’m not sure any of this would work.  Just tossing ideas around.  I’m actually tossing around some ideas about a shared AH universe that—well gets out of hand a bit.

Your comments to me: I appreciate your ‘nitpicks’ on Mars Looks Different.  The point about Ardith’s “They’re just barbarians” reaction is well taken, as is the one about the long-range spy-radio.  I’ll have to fix both of those things.  On the sixties era car and its radio: I’m not sure how that would play out.  Some people would take a car like that and make it more comfortable with a modern stereo system.  Others would insist on restoring it as close as they could get to original condition, including the radio.  I ran into an example of the second school of thought a couple of weeks ago. My wife knows DeKalb’s local history guru and he joined us for supper.  He talked about one of the local landmarks that he helped restore, and he pointed out that he had insisted that the old style push-button light switches had to stay or be replaced by the same kind of switch, no matter how much it cost.

Your comments on Char: It’s pretty well polished now.  I’ve been timidly trying to market it.  Unfortunately, the timidly part deserves more emphasis than the marketing it part.  I’ve never marketed a novel before and the process has scared me into a major case of procrastination.

On the Brazilian Gold Rush: The more I think about it, the more I think that if someone discovered the gold people would come and try to take it.

Thank you for correcting my misconception on the extent to which Channel Island soapstone got traded around the Southwest.  As far as California Indian agriculture goes, I agree that the corn complex was probably not a good fit.  The California Indians, or at least some of them, had to have been aware of corn-based agriculture.  Most of them didn’t seem to see the appeal.

Actually, I think that California Indians might have been more comfortable with the old pre-corn small-scale farming that the early Hopewell and Adena mound-builders did along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.  I wonder if there was any way the Hopewell could have come into sustained contact with the California Indians.  The Hopewell did have quite a trade network for luxury goods like obsidian from Yellowstone.  I’m not sure what would have attracted them to the parts of California suitable for agriculture though.  

On the scenario where the French fight on from North Africa: you’re right that the French fleet could be a formidable obstacle to any German move into North Africa.  I’m reasonably sure that the French Navy plus the British navy could more than handle the Italian navy in the Mediterranean.  I doubt that the Italian navy could even resupply Italian forces in Libya under those circumstances, much less support much in the way of German forces.  Of course German airpower could certainly play a role in the naval battles as it did historically.

There are also two possibilities that might make a German invasion more possible.  First, I’m not sure how long the French navy could remain a power without spare parts, ammunition, and trained workers from France.  I suppose that the British could help out to some extent, but I’m guessing that at some point the French would find it increasingly difficult to keep their ships viable as fighting vessels.  If they could keep a viable force together and keep the Germans out until mid-1942 I can pretty much guarantee that the Axis would not conquer French North Africa, at least not through Libya.

That last bit is part of the problem though.  Would the Germans have to go through Libya?  If the Germans offered Spain French Morocco in the summer of 1940, he might have entered the war on the Axis side.  In that case, the Germans could have sent a couple of divisions through Spain to Spanish Morocco, and then attacked into French Morocco.  They could have also attacked Gibraltar and tried to close the Mediterranean to Allied shipping.  Of course the Spanish would then find their food and oil shipments cut off, and probably find the British conquering the Canary Islands.  That’s part of the reason Spain didn’t enter the war historically.  The other part was that Hitler really couldn’t give Spain much without risking pushing the French back into the war.

The French in North Africa would have one major advantage.  French North Africa was big, and it didn’t have that good of a road network, so the Germans would have had major logistics problems no matter where they landed, assuming that they did.

On my Saving the Inca Empire challenge: Yeah, staying on the defensive against Huascar as much as possible makes a lot of sense.  You do have to be a little bit careful that you don’t give people the impression that Huascar is winning, because that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Going outside the Inca homeland could be risky in terms of bringing the Spanish down on the Incas before they came historically, though once the Spanish land in force subsequent ships would be logical targets.  One problem would be that the bulk of the coastal people were not particularly happy to be part of the Inca empire.  You could probably do something along the lines of an Inca navy though.  Stirring up trouble among the Indians around Panama?  That could be useful but it would be a stretch logistically for the Incas, and you would risk having any forces you sent there bringing home more European diseases.

Your response to Gill: You mention Wizard of Oz comic strips that try to make Oz more realistic and just make it seem very strange.  Phil Farmer’s Barnstormer in Oz actually did a pretty good job of making Oz more adult and sort of more realistic.  Of course there aren’t too many writers that can do the sorts of things Farmer could do.  He would have been one of the really good ones if he could have just figured out how to end a book or series with the same kind of flair that he showed in the rest of story.  As it was I was always thrilled by his stories and always dreaded the endings because I knew they would be a disappointment.  He had such a good thing going with the first two books of the Riverworld series, but the third one seemed to go on forever without advancing the plot, and the rest of them went downhill from there.

I really enjoyed Allemande Left, but unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) didn’t see any obvious flaws that needed improving.  You might want to look at the character names though.  I’m not sure they quite ring true for the characters.  I’m not sure.  Just a feeling.  Other than that it looks good.

I also enjoyed your Los Angeles timeline reprint, and especially the article about the destruction of the California Indians.


Gerson Lodi Ribeiro:  As usual I find your efforts in the field of Brazilian Science Fiction fascinating.  

Your comments to me: When I first starting writing Char, I visualized her as having the abilities of an idiot savant, but with the added ability to go back and forth from that mode to a more normal mode.  To be honest, Char’s mental abilities are both core to the story and the weakest part of it in my opinion.  As to the Spanish and Peru: Ah yes.  The Spanish didn’t do well against poisoned darts and arrows.
 
Christopher Nuttall:  I have mixed emotions about my name being used for a character in your story.   Depending on the character it might be okay, but I suspect that you’ll want to find a more suitable name if you want to make the story publishable.   Professional writers say that one of the easiest ways to tell the difference between a pro and an amateur is by looking at the character names.   I’m afraid I haven’t quite mastered the name game yet, but I know enough to know that Dale Cozort just doesn’t cut it as a fictional star captain name.  

The idea of the Russo-Japanese war turning into an early World War I has some potential.  I’m not sure it would play out quite the way you have it going, but it does have potential.  The Russo-British rivalry was quite a factor in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and it’s actually surprising that the two powers ended up on the same side for World War I.  

Here’s an idea back at you: what if the Russians had somehow managed to win the Russo-Japanese War?  Given the decay in the Russian military and Russian over-confidence, a Russian victory would be rather difficult to pull off.  On the other hand, Japan was economically fragile so Russia could ‘win’ by not losing too badly long enough for the Japanese to run out of money.  What would the consequences of that be?

I’m guessing that Russia would not do the reforms necessary to rebuild military power.  They would not get the massive French investment that helped them industrialize, so they would industrialize more slowly, which would mean fewer workers for the socialist parties to recruit from. With Russian power not unmasked as a sham, Russia would play a much larger role diplomatically in the period between 1905 and 1914, but would in reality be much weaker.

Japan, on the other hand, would not accept their defeat as final.  They would gear up for round two.  England would probably help with that because they would still fear the Russians.  

The fact that Russia still seemed formidable would probably help defuse tensions between Britain and Germany.  Historically, after the Russo-Japanese war Russia was considered somewhat of a military vacuum rather than a potential adversary by both the Germans and the British, and that undoubtedly played some role in allowing the Brits and Germans to develop more of a rivalry in the years leading up to World War II.

I’m glad you enjoyed Char, and by now you have undoubtedly figured out that what you thought was the ending really wasn’t.  I hope you like the real ending better than the false one.

Your comments to me on saving the Inca Empire:  I agree that making an alliance with Huascar would be a good thing if it was doable, but I suspect that Huascar thought that the empire wasn’t big enough for the two of them.  I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I believe he started the fighting.

Your idea of getting rid of the gold might not be practical, but it does have a certain appeal.  Take all of the readily removable gold and put it in the safe-keeping of some blood-thirsty tribe of poison-arrow savages that live in nearly impassible terrain, then let the Spanish know the general direction it went.  That could make a fun pulp-type adventure story.  “The Search For the Inca Gold” or some such thing.  Could be fun.  Of course in reality you would still have to deal with the mines that the silver and gold were coming from.  Oh well.  At least that would require more work on the Spanish part and I suppose you could make that worse by doing what you could to sabotage the mines.

On the decline of reading: I think you’re right to some extent about the decline actually being a refinement, but I think that to some extent it is also a replacement of paper magazines and books by the Internet.  I certainly see that in myself.  I rarely read newspapers anymore because I find the on-line news is more accurate and timely.  I’ve also drastically cut down on my magazine consumption (much to my wife’s relief) because I find that most of the stuff in them has already been on the Internet for a month or two before it hits the magazine.  Books I still read and cherish.  For reasons of space I would love to have a lot of my stuff in digital format, but I don’t particularly like reading books on computer screens.

I do have quite a few excellent public domain history books on CD-ROM (downloaded them from Blackmask.com and burned the CD).  I also have a CD with all of the public domain Edgar Rice Burroughs books on them, along with a lot of the stuff from the older pulp characters like the Shadow, and some of Sax Rohmer’s stuff.  I get the discs out once in a while and play the stories using a text-to-speech converter so I can listen to the old pulps while I’m doing something else.  The text-to-speech is still barely tolerable, but you can kind of get used to it as background chatter.

I’ve tried e-book readers, but the first generation kind of stunk.  Sony is trying again with a rather expensive but apparently quite good reader.  Maybe I’m old fashioned but I like actually having something physical when I pay for something.  I think I’ve actually bought one e-book in my life.

I might be more interested buying something credit-card sized that you could put into a computer or e-book port—maybe a low-capacity write-once version of a thumb drive with a novel or a textbook on it.  You can get a fair-sized novel on a floppy disk, so a laughably low-capacity thumb drive could easily hold a novel, a lot of art-work, alternate endings, author comments, etc.  Put that in nice packaging (large enough blister pack that it doesn’t walk out of stores too easily), and sell it for maybe about what a paperback book would cost, or maybe a dollar more and as far as I’m concerned you could have a winner.  It would save on space—I could see all of my paperback collection sitting in a case that take up as much space as maybe four of five hardback books.  That would help relations with “She who must be obeyed” quite a bit because it would reclaim a lot of space.

Magazines could also use that kind of system.  Send people a card that would hold the number of issues they’ve subscribed to, with a proprietary reader, then let them download the issues to the card.  Make the card write once and very reliable so that people can have the entire year or three years of say Discover or National Geographic on one card, with indexing capability.  I would buy that.

The key thing about digital distribution of information is that companies need to find ways of making a decent profit without screwing over their customers or their content developers.  A lot of what is wrong with the record industry and to a lesser extent the film industry is that they have used their positions as middlemen between content producers and customers to screw over both sides.  Now the Internet makes those middleman positions less important, and I suspect that if a lot of the worst companies in those industries don’t simply go away it’ll be because they’ve bought enough legislators to prop themselves up with legal restrictions.  And watch for those legal restrictions to supposedly be aimed at pirates, but actually be primarily aimed at making life difficult for independent record and film labels.  

Okay, this is drifting a long ways away from alternate history and getting into current politics, so I had better stop now.

Jim Rittenhouse: Yes, letting the Saturn technology slip away from us was one of the more boneheaded things we’ve done as a country.  I remember that there was a move to try to bring it back in the mid-to-late 1980s when the first Shuttle disaster happened, followed by a series of Titan problems.  As I understand it, one of the problems was that American industry had a great deal of trouble producing some of the precision parts that the Saturn required, and in many cases had to bring skilled machinists out of retirement to meet the requirements of the Apollo missions.  American industry was moving away from that type of manufacturing capability even before Apollo happened, and once the Apollo program shut down it would have been very difficult to bring it back.

A lot of the knowledge to make Saturn happen was sitting out on the shop floors and among sub-contractors.  I remember my uncle who worked at Sundstrand talking about how Sundstrand had to take apart and rebuild some of the machines they used to produce parts so that they could get the tolerances close enough. I’m not sure how sustainable the Saturn industrial base was without a pretty large investment in training skilled machinists, and certainly once the orders stopped the capability went away rather rapidly.  

I do wish that we had at least used the remaining hardware.  What a waste it was to make those last two Saturn rockets museum-pieces instead of using them to oh say rescue Skylab or something useful.  Oh well.

By the way, if Aviation Week is correct, the US may have salvaged pieces from one of the other great Aerospace what-ifs, the B70 to provide a mother-ship for a quick reaction two-stage to orbit satellite launcher/space plane.  I’m not sure I believe the stories, and there are some very good reasons to be skeptical, but they would be incredibly cool if true.

By the way, I read an article not long ago about another possible path for the space program after the moon landings.  Apparently several of the aerospace companies looked at the very simple, very robust propulsion system on the lunar lander and figured out that it could easily be scaled up to make simple but effective main engines.  They were kind of flabbergasted that NASA went with the shuttle instead.

Even if NASA went with the shuttle, there were options in the design of the shuttle that could have gone a different way and might have made it at least a little less of a fiasco.  For example, I remember that the choice of shuttle engines raised a lot of eyebrows, and the problems the shuttle program had with the engines undoubtedly delayed development and probably sucked away funds from other parts of the program.  Also, my understanding is that there were supposed to be a series of improvements on subsequent shuttles that upped the weight to orbit and made the shuttles more maintainable.  

What I’m saying is that while the decision to drop Saturn in favor of the shuttle was wrong, and while the shuttle design was inherently flawed in a lot of ways, there were also a series of smaller wrong decisions that pushed the shuttle program from being a bad decision to being a disastrous one.  I wonder if there was ever any way to take the basic shuttle design and have it turn into something at least sort of reasonable.

As I think about the space program, I also kind of wonder if the problem might have been NASA as an organization as opposed to any particular design that they worked on.  The NASA of the moon landings was for the most part a goal-oriented technologically savvy organization.  With that much money and that many high-paying jobs at stake though, I doubt that it would have remained that type of an organization even without the shuttle decision.  NASA had huge pork-barrel potential, and any administration would have to work very hard to keep it from becoming a risk-averse bureaucrat culture that generated tons of paper studies and very little hardware.

It’s not like NASA hasn’t had opportunities to design its way beyond the shuttle. It has spent billions on design studies for various configurations of cargo rockets and shuttle replacements.  Most of the designs have never gotten to flyable hardware of any kind.  Let’s see.  There was the National Aerospace Plane, Venturestar, and an advanced expendable (can’t remember the name of the program). To the best of my knowledge, NASA hasn’t designed anything capable of reaching orbit since the space shuttle.  That says something about the organization, or possibly about the political environment the organization finds itself in..

If NASA as an organization is the problem, I’m not sure that Saturn versus shuttle makes all that much difference.  Sure Saturn had more potential, but in hands of an organization like today’s NASA would it really accomplish all that much more?  I’m not sure.

By the way, if you aren’t following Space-X and its development of the Falcon series of boosters, you might want to.  I don’t know if they’ll succeed, but they seem to have about as good of a chance as anyone to get the US back to where it needs to be in terms of space launch capabilities.  It’s a well-financed start-up that is looking to produce a series of very inexpensive boosters capable of reaching orbit with payloads ranging from minuscule to near Titan-class.  The first lift-off of their smallest rocket, the Falcon 1, should be happening sometime in March of this year, though it has been delayed numerous times.  Sorry if this is all old news to you.
 On your thoughts on China and the imbalance between sons and daughters: yes, it will be interesting to find out how a society with tens of millions more young men than young women will work.  One good thing about this from a US point of view is that the Chinese families that have worked so hard to get a son are unlikely to take kindly to military adventures that get a lot of them killed.  Police state or no police state, the Chinese government will need to remember that.

Of course US and European governments also need to keep things like that in mind.  It sounds horrible, but when you have one son instead of six in a family, losing that son is a much more traumatic thing.  Small families in the west inherently make large numbers of casualties politically much more difficult.  That’s something that any western leader who wants to remain a leader has to keep in mind.

Your comments to me: Yes, Hitler would have to be out of the picture, at least temporarily, in order to have the German army withdraw significantly in December 1941.  On Mars Looks Different and the presidential succession: Yeah, I know that an executive order would not legally extend the presidential succession beyond what is in the constitution and amendments.  So does the president in the story.  As a matter of fact he says something about it probably not standing up in court.  He’s just trying to provide some kind of guidance in case the constitutional succession is disrupted.  As you know by now, the ending of Char didn’t ring true because it really wasn’t true.  I hope the real ending was more satisfying.

I enjoy your writing and would like to see more of it.  You have the knowledge of history, science, and especially the history of the space program to be a good one, and I think you’ve seen enough of life to be able to do the character stuff well too.

I don’t know how badly you want to be a writer.  I’m not always sure that I know how badly I want to be a writer.  Writing well and a lot is hard at a lot of levels.

I personally find it very difficult to write consistently and well when I try to write on a computer with easy online access.  It’s just too distracting.  For example, while I was writing this I realized that I needed to look something up, and ended up spending a very pleasurable hour and fifteen minutes bouncing from topic to topic before I finally got back to writing.  That’s 400 to 500 words worth of writing that didn’t happen.  Now I don’t want to deny myself access to the Internet, but I do need to spend only the amount of time on it that I can while still accomplishing what I want to accomplish.  

If I spend two hours a day on the Internet and a couple hours a week writing, then I’m not really a writer.  I’m a want-to-be, and I’ll continue being a want-to-be until I am willing to sacrifice some of the Internet time in order to actually write.  It probably seems to you as though I get an enormous amount of writing done, with the thirty to fifty page zines for the APA, but compared to what I need to write in order to actually make a significant part of my living at it what I am doing is nowhere close to enough.  Most of my writing has happened in one of two situations:

1) I’m trapped in a situation with limited online access and not much else going on, or
2) It’s the last two weeks before the POD deadline and I’m frantically trying to put a respectable zine together.

Under those circumstances I can write a lot, and it is generally reasonably good stuff in my opinion.  When I have unlimited Internet access and no deadline my writing output is generally pretty laughable.  I have on a few occasions been able to overcome that, but it is usually when I’m very excited about a story and I’ve set up a computer for writing that has no Internet access.  That really seems to help, but I tend to end up getting out of the habit of using that setup once the story I’m excited about is done.

I find that it’s much easier to actually write (or get anything else done on a computer) if I use a computer and a location in the house that I don’t use for anything else that’s more fun than the work I’m trying to get done.  Let’s face it, for an infoholic like me, surfing the net is usually more pleasurable than writing.  My logical brain may want to write, but the lizard brain that’s still in there often overrides that logic and I find myself using up my writing time surfing.  I think that the general principle here is: Never do anything more pleasurable than your work at the location where you want to get work done.  

I would say that another general principle is: never sacrifice irreplaceable time for writing.  What I mean by that is that there are certain time periods where writing should be minimal.  For the first six years of my daughter Jackie’s life I had no business spending big gobs of my free time writing.  She needed her dad’s time.  That tapered off a bit in the early grades at school, then hit another peak between nine and about twelve.  I’m not sorry I spent a lot of time with her instead of writing during those ages.  The kid or kids should have priority over writing during those times.  The kid needs the time, and the parent/child relationship needs that time to get strong enough to withstand the pressures of the teenage years.

I sometimes wonder if it is even worth it to try to become a professional writer in this day and age.  Established writers are becoming more prolific due to tools like word processors and the Internet.  That makes for a market that’s competitive enough that you have to be extremely good and extremely lucky—almost lottery winner-type lucky to break into the professional markets.  And even if you do break into the professional markets, you typically won’t make a living wage unless you are popular and prolific.  I believe that I read somewhere that the US science fiction market usually supports around 20 full-time writers at any given time.  That may go down as time goes on.  The Internet is bound to affect the ability of professionals to make a living writing for the same reason most college towns don’t have many prostitutes: too many amateurs willing to do it for free.  (I can’t believe I just wrote that—it’s very late and I’m very tired, but there is enough truth to it that I’ll let it stand)

If there is never another formal issue of POD I’ll still appreciate the incentive for writing that POD gave me over the last several years, and I’ll still value your friendship.  If you decide that with work, family and health issues you need to put POD on hold for a while, I would say just get 42 out, put things officially on hiatus for a while, and don’t feel guilty about it.  Meredith is a real keeper and she deserves your time far more than POD does.  If you can figure out a way to have time to keep POD going, great.  I’ll help any way I can.  If you can’t for a while then so be it.  I’ll impose my own deadlines for myself.  That should be my responsibility anyway if I’m serious about this writing thing.

Kurt Sidaway: Your comments to me: I obviously made too convincing of a false ending for Char.  Hopefully the real ending will be a little more satisfying.

Your comments on a successful British revolt against Rome were interesting.  I hadn’t really thought about the impact on the wider Roman Empire.  

I wish I knew enough about the history of England in the 1200s to comment intelligently on your scenario, but unfortunately I don’t.  I read several pages of it, and it sounds fascinating, but I couldn’t tell the divergence from the real history.  Sorry.  Just one of the many gaps in my historical knowledge.
 
Dale Speirs: I was interested in your reprint and comments about pre-Columbian voyages to the New World.  That has long been an interest of mine.  I’m a moderate skeptic on most contact claims, or maybe I should say that I’m a skeptic on claims of significant contact.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a few shipwrecked sailors from this or that Old World tribe or empire survived long enough to contribute a gene or two to the locals, but sustained back-and-forth contact is a lot less likely.  

For sustained contact to have happened, three things would have had to be in place.  First, the Old World civilization would need to discover the New World. Second, it would have to be able to get back and forth on a reasonably reliable basis.  Third, there would need to be some reason to go back and forth—slaves, gold, or some other precious commodity to justify the effort of making the long trip.

So to get sustained contact between the old and new worlds, even for a short period, you would need an adventurous far-ranging seagoing culture on the Old World end, and a worthwhile destination on the New World end.  The further back in time you go, the less likely it would be that the Old World people would find something they would be willing to come back for.  Areas with little or no agriculture and low population densities would generally not be good sources of slaves, or labor to extract local resources.   They wouldn’t have large surpluses of food that can be seized or traded for to restock the Old Worlder’s ships for the trip back.  Also, stone-age societies at any level of culture would by definition not have large amounts of precious metals lying around to be stolen.

There are constraints on how sustained contact could have possible been in that two hemispheres didn’t exchange much in the way of domestic animals or crops prior to Columbus.  

There are some possible exceptions to that though.  Old World cotton did get to the New World, since New World cotton was a hybrid of Old World cotton and a New World plant.  There have also been hints that some very odd breeds of chickens from Chile might have been pre-Columbian, along with pigs in some parts of South America.  It’s actually rather hard to distinguish between Pre-Columbian introductions and very early post-Columbian ones.  That’s especially true when you realize how little of the New World was under direct Old World control or observation for the first hundred or so years after Columbus.  

The timing of the spread of New World crops to the Old World is also controversial.  Sweet potatoes got from Peru to New Guinea at some point before Europeans arrived in New Guinea in force, but the timing and means of getting there are unknown.  There are even people who claim that corn arrived in the Old World before Columbus.  It certainly spread very quickly after Columbus and revolutionized agriculture in a number of places in the Old World, as did potatoes.  
    
If anybody outside of the Vikings did make contact with the New World on a sustained basis, my vote for the best candidates would be:

1)    Phoenicians and/or Carthage to Brazil or pretty much any point in the Gulf of Mexico.  Both groups were good sailors with a tendency to keep quiet about discoveries of commercial value.

The Indians that either group contacted would have been considerably more primitive than the ones that the Spanish found.  The Indians may not have been advancing as fast as the Europeans, but nearly 2000 years of development did make a major difference.

 I don’t know what was happening along the Atlantic Coast of Brazil during the time of the Phoenician and Carthage (Gerson?),  but most of North America would probably not be of interest to the likes of Carthage any more than it was to the Spanish in the early 1500s.  MesoAmerica would be somewhat more interesting to them because of more advanced agriculture and higher population densities.  There wouldn’t be stocks of precious metal to be seized because metal-working didn’t reach the area until around 700 AD.  Some of the outlying West Indies islands might have still been uninhabited or so sparsely inhabited as to invite a colonization effort, but given the fragile ecologies of those islands introduced animals would definitely show up as a major ecological factor even with minor contact.

That brings up an interesting question: When did Old World rats and mice become common hangers-on in Old World ships?  After that happened, one would think that any sustained contact with the New World would have resulted in Old World rats and mice becoming common pests.  Has anyone studied the process by which Old World rats and mice spread to the New World?  Native rats and mice in the New World were a whole different group than the ones from the Old World.

It should be possible to look at DNA and figure out if any Old World rat or mouse populations were established a thousand or fifteen-hundred years before Columbus.  Of course that assumes that rats and mice introduced by the Phoenicians and/or Carthage wouldn’t have simply been overwhelmed by the waves that came over with the Europeans.  You would think that there would be some remnant of the previous wave somewhere though.

I wonder to what extent New World mice became pests attacking Indian food supplies before Columbus.  Several types of field mice are quite willing to get into houses, though they tend to be much easier to catch than Old World mice.  I suspect that in areas like Peru and Mexico where agriculture had been around longer New World mice had probably started to adapt themselves to living off of humans.  That would have probably become less possible post-Columbus because of competition with more experienced and aggressive Old World species.

2)    Celts to northern North America during the period before and just after the Roman conquest.  There were apparently some excellent sea-farers among the Celtic tribes, little or no writing, and no incentive to tell their Roman conquerors about any New World discoveries.  On the other hand, the Indians in the parts of North America most likely to be discovered by the Celts probably wouldn’t have had much to keep them coming back.  Furs?  Fishing?  Exotic slaves (that quickly died of Old World diseases)?  The fishing might do it, but wouldn’t necessarily lead to all that much contact with the Indians.  I wonder if you could look at fish bones from Celtic (or later) times and distinguish between fish caught in European waters versus ones caught off of say Newfoundland.  The species would probably be the same, but there might be some degree of genetic divergence, or some kind of marker from the environment that would still show up in the bones.

The Indians encountered by the Celts wouldn’t have bows and arrows yet (until around 500 AD), and they wouldn’t be farmers yet unless the Celts made it inland to the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys.  Corn farming seems to have spread from the interior to the coast and wouldn’t have made it to the most likely coastal areas of contact until at least 600 AD, and probably at least a few hundred years later.  I can’t really think of any technologies that might have been passed back and forth here.

3)    Polynesians to California or Chile.  I think that this is actually the most likely of the potential contacts.  I can’t see the Polynesians finding the likes of Easter Island and New Zealand and yet somehow missing the entire North and South American continents.  It seems logical that there would have been some contact.  Some people have asserted that the large plank canoes of the Chumash Indians were derived from Polynesian technology, while contacts in Chile spread sweet potatoes to the Polynesians and unique breeds of chickens to Chile.  Good systematic archaeology could eventually settle the issue of contact with Chile.  I’m not sure how you would go about settling the issue of Polynesian/Chumash contact. Tracing the development of the Chumash canoes in detail might help, but wood doesn’t preserve well. Finding unmistakable Polynesian artifacts in California would be nice too, but isn’t all that likely.

Underwater archaeology should eventually settle a lot of these issues.  The ships themselves usually won’t have survived, but the cargoes may very well have.  I think it would be extremely interesting, though rather expensive, to plot out the most likely sea routes to the New World and just see what’s on the ocean bottom. Better yet you could plot out the places where a distressed ship is most likely to have been wrecked along the coasts of the New World and explore there. The cargo would probably be scattered, but some of the heavier stuff might still be intact.  A systematic study of how wreckage gets distributed after a shipwreck might also help.  I get the impression that underwater archaeology is still in its infancy but is already making some impressive contributions to piecing together history,

I enjoyed your reviews of the two economics-related books.  Ponzi sounds like a fascinating though thoroughly nasty character.  As usual, your “Seen in the Literature” section has some interesting tidbits.  The article that claims human control of fire going back 790,000 years is quite interesting.  The article on the early domestication of cats is also of interest because I recently got into a debate with someone over the fact that extremely large feral cats are showing up in Australia.  I thought that I remembered reading that at least some of the wild ancestors of house cats were considerably larger than most house cats, and I suggested that the ecology of Australia is favorable for any cats where those genes get expressed.  The abstract on the antiquity of human endurance running was also interesting, as were the ones on the 16,000 year old Maryland campsite and the relative youth of malaria as a human disease (10,000 years).  I thought that the article on the expansion of Han China primarily by displacing rather than by acculturating surrounding groups was especially interesting.  I would think there would be quite a bit of alternate history potential there.  The bit about the Iroquois doing lasting ecological damage to the lake was also interesting.  Detailed ecological studies are finding more and more evidence that pre-industrial humans had negative impacts on their ecology.

I also enjoyed your con panel reviews, especially the one about Open Source and copyright law.  Don’t get me started on current distortions of US copyright and patent law.