Robert Alley: 

• Your reply to Cron: A Nazi religion? Interesting scenario there. 
• Your response to Dale Speirs: I don't think I was the one who said that the US would make less of a fuss when the south tried to secede if Canada has been conquered in 1812. I did speculate that the US might never have established a relatively powerful central government without the continued English presence/threat in Canada to provide a reason for the states to give up their power. The scenario actually had the likes of Virginia and Massachusetts becoming independent countries and squabbling over the territories to the west of them. 
• Your response to Schneider: I like your Mexico/German alliance in WW I scenario. In the lead-up to World War II the Mexicans and Germans did a little bit of flirting. The Mexicans nationalized their oil companies. The major oil companies boycotted Mexican oil. The Germans saw an opportunity and organized barter agreements that gave them Mexican oil and the Mexicans German manufactured goods. If World War II hadn't broke out when it did that might have had far-reaching consequences a few years down the road.
•  Your response to Gerson: The French tried to found Huguenot colonies in Brazil in the 1550's and the Dutch attempted to conquer Brazil in the 1620's. A partial success by either party could have led to Protestant enclaves in South America, though they would also have larger consequences in all likelihood. 
• Your response to me: You make some good points on the consequences of a US conquest of Canada. I'll have to think that issue through a bit more. I'm glad you enjoyed my phony reviews. If I try that again I'll watch my first person pronouns and toss some AH-type comments into the phony reviews too. Sorry about making you wait several months for the conclusions of the short stories. No, it isn't a conspiracy to keep people in the APA. In some cases I'm trying to keep the issue to a comparatively reasonable size. In other cases (like Quarantine) I simply am not done with the story. Good point on integrating the two halves of Quarantine more thoroughly. Yes, I'm done with Freedom. As far as I know, Anthony and his brother go over to the other time-line and die for their vision of Freedom. Kind of depressing, but that's the way life is sometimes. The BEMs actually started out as a building block of an alternate history novel. I was going to have something that appeared to be a set of totally unrelated short stories that gradually built until the reader realized that the apparently unrelated strands were really all part of the same story. You've seen one of the other strands, Laughing Girl. Maybe someday I'll finish the rest of the stories that weave them all together and you'll see how everything fits. Your editor's divergences: I enjoyed the rocket team discussion. 

Jim Bante: I'm going to skip your editor's cup entry for now, because I want to look at it alongside the other entries that will be in this issue. I thought that your “Hidden History of America” was interesting in a X-files sort of way. I also appreciate your review of the Dunnigan book. I actually don't recall a lot of Alternate History about wars not happening, with the exception of World War I. I'll have to think about that. 

Dale Cozort: First, I made a couple of factual errors in the last couple of issues. I was apparently wrong in one of my comments to David Johnson. I said that the first smallpox epidemic in the New World came in 1518. Apparently smallpox hit one of the islands in 1507, but was so deadly that it left itself without a means of spreading and died out. Second, I was wrong about the timing of French mobilization in September 1939. The figure I gave was for mobilizing AND getting the troops where they needed to be on the front lines, rather than just for mobilizing them. The end-result is the same. The French weren't ready quickly enough to move to help the Poles. By the way, the French mobilization was very poorly done. They mobilized 500,000 men from vital war industries, then gradually released them over the course of the next several months, disrupting war production on the one hand, while disrupting morale and unit cohesion on the other. That played an important role in the French collapse. The French did several other things that reduced unit cohesion. They moved a bunch of young fortress troops from the Maginot line to the B-series units that eventually bore the brunt of the German attack shortly before May 1940. If the German attack had been delayed long enough for those men to be integrated into their new units that would have been a good move, but the timing of the attack made it a bad one. The Germans actually attacked at the ideal time. The French premier had just moved to fire his Commander in Chief, General Gamelin. A very substantial part of the French air force (something close to one-third of its fighter squadrons, I believe) was not immediately available because they were converting to a new (and much better) fighter plane. They started trickling back into the battle reasonably quickly, but the French had already pretty much lost the war by May 15 or 16, less than a week after the German attack started. Given another month, the French would probably have done much better, at least in the air. I also have to apologize for the number of grammatical errors that slipped through last issue, especially in West Story. I did my big printing, then spotted something like three errors on the last page alone. Hopefully this issue will be a little cleaner. 

David Freitag: Your response to Kawato on “Stone Age hippies” was exactly what I was trying to say, but you said it more effectively. Your response to Alley: I missed the censorship bit in the X-file pastiche. Interesting. Your response to me: I'm glad you enjoyed the phony book reviews. I had a lot of fun with them. Choctaw Genesis is now available in paperback for around $20 through Amazon.com. I just got a copy from them. On Freedom, I figured that Anthony would go over to the other time-line and die there rather than getting the amputation. 

Robert Gill: It's nice to learn a little more about you. I thought that the “If Watergate hadn't become a scandal” piece was the best analysis of the scandal from an AH point of view that I've come across. You're almost certainly correct that Nixon would not have attempted to maneuver himself into additional terms of office. I do have one quibble though. I'm almost certain that in the absence of Watergate Nixon would have ordered the resumption of bombing in Vietnam if the North had launched the kind of full-scale conventional offensive against the South that they did in our time-line. I'm reasonably sure that the North's leaders knew that, and they would have probably bided their time for a bit until Nixon left office or became politically weak enough that bombing was no longer an option.

 I suspect that Vietnam would have continued to haunt the US political scene until at least the late 1970's, and possibly beyond. The war would have continued to influence elections in 1974 and 1976 at least, and if the (probably inevitable) fall of South Vietnam had happened under a Democratic president, the saga of Vietnam's boat people and Pol Pot's massacres would have poisoned the US political scene for decades, with Republicans accusing the Democrats of allowing those events. Nixon might very well have intervened more actively in Angola on the side of UNITA, assuming that events there happened on schedule, with all of the potential ramifications that could have in terms of extending the life of apartheid. Your comments to Freitag: I'd like to hear more about those lost fragments of the Koran from Yemen that you mentioned. Sounds fascinating. Your comments to me: I'll have to add The Aquiliad to my long list of books I want to read someday. 

David Johnson: This time I just turned off critic mode and sat back and enjoyed TrolleyWorld. You've got quite a story there so far. I especially enjoyed the scene where the AH company was discussing the CD player. It sounded very real. I also enjoyed your dinosaur survival bit. That's essentially the scenario behind Hanno, the “demon” from Ruins of New England, except that I have my equivalent of your “Survivaraptor” (cool name, by the way) surviving in Antarctica, then spreading back into South America and taking over most of the large carnivore roles there. I believe that South America and Antarctica were connected until around 20-25 million years ago. Your comments to me: I'm glad you enjoyed the AH book reviews. You are right that I need to find a better term for “other time-line” for my Exchange stuff.

Wesley Kawato: Yes, I do intend to get back to Quarantine. Hopefully next issue. Sorry about the wait. You're right about the AH book reviews.

Mike Ralls: Sorry to hear about your computer. And I thought I had it bad when I spilled pop on a bunch of my floppy disks and lost a bunch of POD material a number of years ago. I'm afraid I can't comment intelligently on your civil war piece. I guess someday I'll have to break down and seriously study the US civil war. 

Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro: As usual, I am envious of your publishing success. I have to compare that to my usual quote of rejection slips. (I'm approaching the magic 100). Your comments to me: I have to confess that the Phillip Jose Farmer “Nazis on Venus” series exists only in another time-line. (I did warn you that one of the reviewers might be from a different time-line.) I may talk more about this mythical series in my “Lost Cities” essay in next issue. On Exchange: Yes, at this point all of the Exchanges are occurring with the same time-line. One of the characters speculates that at some point, after the Exchanges with that time-line end, there may be Exchanges with other time-lines. I may or may not ever follow up on that. I do appreciate your grammatical comments on Quarantine. I have to admit that story is still at an early stage of development. On Freedom: Yes, this is the end of the story. It is a little too abrupt, at least partly because Freedom started out as, and still is, part of the Exchange novel, as well as a short story. On the early New World settlement bit, you are apparently missing something between the end of page nine and the beginning of page ten, at least in my copy. Other than that, I found it interesting. It illustrates the difficulty people have in overthrowing a strongly established scientific theory. That's not always a bad thing, but in this case I suspect that the “12,000 years ago” bit is probably impeding the recognition that the settlement of the Americas was a much more complex process than we know at this point.

 Jim Rittenhouse: I enjoyed the revised Volunteers and envy your knowledge of US history in the 1950's and 60's. I also enjoyed your Vietnam reprint. 

Rich Rostrom: Interesting scenario on the “Buchanan alternative”. As irony it works rather well. As AH, it has quite a number of problems, enough that if you and I had been in the same room, I would have put it down after a quick skim and said, “Cute, but seriously now, what do you think really would have happened?” 

I didn't know quite how to respond to this scenario, because the piece does serve a very useful purpose in that it points out the main problem with the idea of the west sitting out a Soviet/Nazi war: one of the two sides might have won before becoming totally exhausted, and that victor could have become a very formidable opponent for the west. At the same time, this specific scenario has some very major holes in it, and I want to point out those holes, while making it clear that they don't invalidate the core concept that staying out of the war was dangerous.

A purely Soviet/German war with the British, US, and French staying out of it is an interesting concept, and was certainly a viable though dangerous option for the western powers. I genuinely would love to see someone do an alternative where they evaluate the impact of that policy without stacking the deck outrageously or assuming that one side was ingesting stupid pills. I don't want to denigrate your scenario because it does what you probably intended it to. However, a scenario that followed the most likely course of events would differ from this scenario in a lot of ways. For example: 

1.  It wouldn't have the Poles giving up major hunks of their country without a fight. The Poles might or might have been wise to do that, but any Polish government that tried to do so would have quickly been ousted.
2.  It would not assume that the Japanese would simply give up in Manchuria in the absence of the Hitler/Stalin pact, which deprived Japan of what its leaders thought was its most important ally against the Soviets. 
3. It would not have the Soviet army doing advances in 1942 that it could not do in 1944, with enormous amounts of Lend-Lease trucks and locomotives to give it mobility. 
4. It would not have the Poles stationing units predominantly from their small (15% of the population or thereabouts) Ukrainian minority in areas where those units would be acting as occupation forces against fellow Ukrainians. 
5. It would not have Ukrainian nationalists doing a number on retreating Germans, then apparently vanishing when the Soviets come through. In the Ukraine at least, resistance to the Germans was primarily a nationalist thing, as anti-Soviet as anti-German. It would almost certainly stayed that way in this scenario, and the Soviets would have had to cope with the resistance just as much if not more so as the Germans.
6. It would not have the French, English, and Italians sitting on their hands while the Soviets took over all of Germany. France would at least grab the Rhineland if Germany was collapsing, and the locals would probably be happy to have them do that, considering the alternative. The French Communist party is extremely unlikely to have been in a position to do anything about it. Even after all of their efforts during the resistance I doubt that the French Communists could have stopped something that was obviously in the French national interest. Without the boost that the resistance gave them, the French communists were a well-organized, but rather small party that rarely managed to become even a small part of government. 
7. It wouldn't have the west sitting by and letting the Soviets develop the atom bomb without attempting to give them a race for that technology. Come on, the British and French were already researching nukes on a small scale by 1940. They would be scared stiff that the Soviets would develop an A-bomb ahead of them, especially if the Soviets had German expertise to draw on. I don't know if they would beat the Soviets, but they would be very close behind if they didn't. 
8. It wouldn't have the Germans tamely becoming part of the Soviet colossus. Even a communist German government would work quietly but persistently to regain the German status as a great power. It might not happen overnight, but the Soviets would have to constantly struggle to keep the Germans in check. 
9. It would not depend on the German army sitting paralyzed for two weeks because its high command was kaput. The German army prized initiative at all levels until very late in the war. The Germans would react, and probably rather well. 
10. It would not assume that Italy would stay out of a Soviet invasion of Germany based on Mussolini's 'friendship' with Hitler. Mussolini would almost certainly already have 'volunteers' involved against the Soviets, just as he did in our time-line. He was more a would-be rival of Hitler's than a friend, and would have reacted in whatever way he thought would befit his self-perceived role as a modern-day Caesar. 
11. It wouldn't assume the same level of fanatical Soviet resistance to German invasion that occurred historically. The purges would have been a closer memory, which would have made fighting for the Stalin regime that much more galling for those who lived through it. Also, the Germans would probably been somewhat less likely to provoke fanatical resistance than they were in our time-line. They would not have had easy triumphs in Poland, France, and the Balkans to give them victor's disease. Since they still would have had access to the oil and manufactured goods of the west, they would have had to be more sensitive to western public opinion, which would have made their brutalities in the east less open and hence less likely to inspire fanatical resistance. 

I could go on, but that should suffice. The reality is that England and France had a tough choice in the late 1930's. If they went to war with Hitler, Stalin would have a choice of joining them or sitting back and letting the 'capitalist' powers weaken themselves. In either case, the Soviets were likely to emerge from the war more deeply entrenched in Europe. The west was likely to emerge from the war drained. If the west didn't go to war with Germany over the Eastern European states, then Germany would probably eventually attack the Soviet Union, probably in conjunction with Japan.

 If that happened, the smart money at the time would have been that the Germans and Japanese would win, but overextend themselves in the process. The Czechs and Poles would get it in the neck, but frankly neither country had endeared themselves to the west in the inter-war years. They let a minor squabble over a sliver of territory keep them at each other's throats throughout the inter-war years. Poland was also a military dictatorship with a mild fascist flavor. Both countries had forcibly incorporated minority groups and then oppressed them. Not exactly the kind of countries the English or French would want to lose their empires over. 

Given the basic scenario here: Soviet/German war with the west staying out, I suspect that the most likely result would be that the Soviet Union would essentially become Nationalist China written large. It would control a large amount of territory and manpower, mainly because the Japanese and Germans were too extended to occupy every corner of the Soviet Union. The parts of the Soviet Union that generated great power status would be lost to the Soviets, and not regained unless the Germans or Japanese suffered economic collapse or got in a war with a coalition of great powers. 

I can't visualize any realistic set of circumstances that would lead to a Soviet occupation of all of Germany. Reasonable and intelligent people can and probably do differ with me on that. The western Allies would not sit on their hands during a Soviet/German war. They were not complete fools. They were men making what they considered the best decisions they could in a difficult set of circumstances. They would know that eventually someone might actually win that war, and that someone might well turn on them. They would have been building up their militaries to face whichever power won. That buildup would have been fueled by booming economies powered by orders from both sides. 

Like I said, as irony this was really pretty good. I like the way you can take an inherently extremely improbable outcome and do a kind of half tongue-in-cheek attempt to give it as good of a shot as possible at plausibility. And as I also pointed out earlier, you do effectively point out that the Buchanan fantasy could easily have had a downside in that one side or the other could actually have won.

Kurt Sidaway: Your response to Freitag on the technology of the Song Chinese was fascinating. I'll have to dig into that era of Chinese history a bit more. Your response to Cron: I like the AH clusters you quote. Your response to me: Yeah, the Parthians and the Persians were formidable enough, but I guess what I was getting at was that they weren't the kind of immediate threat to the existence of Rome that Carthage was. 

Andrew Schneider: I think that alternate history obituaries are a really good idea (grin). I also enjoyed your 'high quality book reviews', as well as review of the AI engine. Terminal Time sounds fascinating. You also motivated me to actually read Resurrection Day, which Jim loaned me a while back.

Dale Speirs: I enjoyed the Louis Riel review. The Metis are sort of the inspiration for my Saguenay (see the scenarios section). I also thought that your soil science professor's comment on salinization, “more civilizations have been destroyed by irrigation than by war”, is very perceptive.

 Jon Zeigler: Welcome to the APA. A time-line designed to give us the background for a non-reactionary fantasy story? A Minoan sort-of lost city survives to meet the classic Greeks? That's an interesting start. Are you planning to actually put a story in it? I'm looking forward to more. By the way, you triggered two essays with the theme of “How many lost cities can we make?” I try to do an Edgar Rice Burroughs and fill South America and Africa with lost cities and exotic tribes through use of alternate history.