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

Robert Alley: Your comments on the ‘Spanish’ flu: You make a good point. Societies generally manage to somehow keep functioning and conducting wars and diplomacy through even the worst of epidemics, at least at the country-wide level.

I’m not sure I would dismiss the chances of Roosevelt continuing in office past 1948 as readily as you do. Obviously any such continuation would require much better health on his part, but politically I don’t see yet another term as being impossible. Whatever you think of his policies, Roosevelt was very good at the political game. Dewey was nowhere near as good, and there was a considerable faction of Republicans who considered him at best the lesser of two evils.

Your response to the ‘Lee in charge of the Mexican war’ scenario brings up another possibility: What if Taylor had lived? What kind of impact would that have had on the course of politics in the 1850’s? I don’t know much about him, to be honest. Would he have been strong enough to keep the presidency in 1852? How would that have changed the lead-up to the civil war? Off-the cuff challenge: What would it have taken for us to see several northern states attempting to secede in the late 1850s/early 1860s? Rigorous and public enforcement of fugitive slave laws? The South winning the battle to make Kansas a slave state? No gold rush and California is populated mainly from the south/looks to become a slave state? War with Spain which ends with Cuba and Puerto Rico in US hands and headed toward becoming slave states? I’m just brainstorming here. I haven’t thought any of these ideas through in much depth.

In any case, still on the subject of the US Civil War: I may have mentioned in an earlier issue that much of the Confederate artillery came from one of the big Virginia naval yards, overrun by Confederate troops early in the war. A neutral Virginia might shield the rest of the south from Federal troops marching overland, but it would make for a much weaker Confederate army. It would also mean that the North wouldn’t have to keep as strong of a force between Virginia and Washington.

The big naval base at Norfolk would make it difficult for Virginia to stay neutral. Either the Federal Navy would be allowed to use the base, which would make a mockery of neutrality, or it wouldn’t, which would make blockading the South much more difficult. I’m not sure how that would play out. The base could become a flashpoint between the Federal government and local secessionists.

Another problem with a neutral Virginia is that it would either have to build up military forces of its own or it would become a relative vacuum as the Union and Confederate army built up. That would reduce the bargaining power of neutral Virginia. If Virginia did attempt to build up an independent military, the Federal government would be hard-pressed to let that happen. The Federal government would be afraid that any strong Virginia military would join the Confederacy at some inopportune time.,/p>

Another problem with Virginian neutrality would be that it would be difficult to keep the example from spreading. If Virginia could remain part of the Union without having to participate in the war effort, why couldn’t any one of half-a-dozen other states? The issue of tax and customs revenue would also become a problem. Virginia would be financing a fairly substantial part of the Union war effort if it was still paying customs revenue to the federal government. Of course Virginian neutrality could prevent the war from becoming hot at all, but I can’t see Lincoln giving substantial concessions to the South, or letting the seceding states go without a fight.

On the “No War for Danzig” idea, getting rid of Hitler would certainly help, but the problem was that Germany was spending far beyond a sustainable level in their arms buildup. Germany was not self-sufficient in a lot of categories of raw materials necessary for a modern society. That meant that they had to somehow generate hard currency to pay for those raw materials. By early 1938 they had stripped German economic resources bare to pay for the initial buildup. They continued it with resources plundered from Austria, then the Sudetenland, and then the rest of Czechoslovakia. That pattern continued with Poland. Germany got oil for the offensive against France partly by trading off captured Polish weapons to Romania and the Soviet Union at cut-rate prices. That limits what Germany could do to avoid a war with Poland. They would pretty much have to either find another victim or drastically reduce military spending. They might go after Romania in conjunction with Hungary, but that would risk damage to the oil wells, which would cause a lot of problems for Germany, as well as Italy.

You’ve got to sympathize with the position the Poles found themselves in by the late thirties. On one side they faced a Germany with a much larger population and much more in the way of industrial resources, run by a psychopath willing to spend his country into bankruptcy in order to build up the military. On the side, they faced a Soviet Union with much larger population and almost unlimited natural resources and run by a psychopath willing to starve millions of his one people to build up his military. Of course the Poles didn’t always make the wisest of choices. Their feud with Czechoslovakia was just plain silly for a country in their position.

Dale Cozort: Yes, I’m commenting on my own zine again (the March issue). I’m reasonably happy with my contribution this time. The end of the World War II scenario is a little disappointing, but I don’t see any other way out of the situation.

I hope everyone got a chance to try out my “is it real or is it alternate history” challenge. The Bear Country section was probably too short to really keep people in the flow of the story. I’m going to have to rethink my presentation of that.

For once I’m happy with my commentary section. It has always struck me as rather selfish to have a huge contribution and then not do a lot in the way of meaningful comments. It is also self-defeating because the interplay of ideas is a lot of what makes POD worthwhile. Unfortunately time pressure sometimes makes large comment sections difficult for me. This time I was able to do the kind of comment section I want to do all of the time, and it felt good.

Tom Cron:. How is the effort to launch an Alternate History magazine coming? I mentioned last issue that we need some kind of a ‘Science Fiction For Dummies’ type of magazine, where old time-tested and worn concepts that built science fiction readership are creatively recycled. Well, I may have figured out how to do that. I’ll talk about it later if and when plans mature considerably more.

I like the first part of Edgar Morin’s story idea. Stalin surviving into the 1960s has some alternate history potential. That could easily result in a nuclear war sometime in the late 1950s. Hard to say. Here’s another idea: What if Stalin had a politically ambitious and able son? Would that son have survived daddy’s paranoia? Would daddy survive? Did Lenin have any politically active children? A North Korean style communist monarchy in the Soviet Union could get interesting.

I also like the idea of a single larger island off the coast of California. Do you know how large the resulting island would have been? I suppose that you could adapt that to the needs of your plot to some extent. Speaking of islands, here are a couple of off-the-cuff ideas: make Easter Island bigger—maybe a Hawaii-sized island group. The Polynesians reach it, maintain their ocean-going traditions and end up doing trading voyages to and from the coast of Chile on a regular basis, passing along pigs, chickens, and some diseases to the Indians. Another possibility: The Dogger Banks near England remain above sea level to the extent they are inhabitable. I think I’ve already done the one where the Torres Strait islands between Australia and New Guinea are one larger island instead of several smaller ones.

Anthony Docimo: The idea of Stalin returning to an independent ex-Soviet Georgia is interesting. I’m not sure how well he would have done in politics there. He had an advantage in Soviet politics in that he had been raised in an area where blood feuds were common, and he took actions that ethnic Russians he was competing against just couldn’t anticipate. Against other Georgians he wouldn’t have that advantage.

On your People Who Never Were: I suspect that Christianity would have been unidentifiable as such if Jesus had been banished to the Huns. Religions usually consist of the teaching/revelations of the founder filtered through the culture of the people who adopt them. Modern African Christians read the Bible and come up with very different interpretations of it than people more influenced by European culture.

Mark Ford: It’s interesting that the early leaders of the US thought it would take so long to settle the US. Of course they didn’t predict railroads, telegraphs, and steamships. The world got a lot smaller when those technologies developed.

Would it have taken five hundred years to settle the US without those technologies? If the industrial revolution was aborted or delayed, how would that affect the rate of settlement? Presumably slow it down, though that is by no means certain.

Another possibility: What if the Napoleonic Wars had continued ten or fifteen more year, with England blockading Europe. What would that have done to the settlement process?

Robert Gill: I’m glad you enjoyed Char. I found your Roman Empire speculations interesting. Finding a mechanism that transfers power without serious succession questions is surprisingly difficult. Going with the eldest child of the current ruler has the advantage of being clear-cut in most cases (unless legitimacy becomes an issue), but there is always the problem of younger siblings of the prospective ruler with ambitions, as well as the fact that chances are very good that you’ll eventually end up with someone totally unsuited to rule. The adoption mechanism is also good, but goes against the natural instinct to pass power down to an heir. At some point a ruler will have a son or daughter who has potential as a ruler or is able to convince a parent that he or she does. At that point things start to go haywire.

A lot of what makes a succession process work or not work is tradition and what the political culture around the leader will put up with. What keeps son number two from killing son number one so that he will become king? In societies where that didn’t happen, it probably didn’t happen because the other players in the game wouldn’t have put up with it. That’s actually a possible point of divergence. If you want some country to become less important, screw up the succession so that whatever weak point it has gets exploited to the point where the legitimacy of the leadership is constantly in question. That’ll generally make any kind of reasonable governance pretty near impossible.

Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro: Sorry to hear about your eye problems. Even during the worst of my knee problems I could at least read and continue writing. That kept me sane during the three months I couldn’t get out of the living room without help. I’m always fascinated to hear news from the Brazilian/Portuguese science fiction markets. They’re so different than the US market.

On Saurian/Avian America: When I wrote Ruins of New England I intended it to be the first of a series of stories in this time-line. The projected stories included one set in a Saurian/Meso-American empire. The Saurians have an interesting and subtle reaction to an attempted Spanish conquest of Mexico.

By the way, I created the Saurians of Ruins as sort of anti-Kzin. I love Niven’s stories, but his Kzin strike me as ridiculous caricatures of what an intelligent carnivore would be like. A carnivore has to be patient and subtle. It has to carefully evaluate every potential prey. Is an attempt on that prey likely to be successful? Is there a significant chance of injury? A predator with a broken leg is probably a dead predator. Scream and leap as a predator tactic would get bred out very quickly.

My Saurians are extremely patient, willing to wait years or even generations to get to a goal. I should go back to my notes and refresh my memory of what I intended to do with the time-line.

Thanks for introducing American Indian Victories to the Brazilian market in a small way. I wish I could have signed the copies you got too.

You’re right about the lack of time devoted to section 3 comments two issues ago. It was just a matter of misplacing that section until far too late. I tried to do better last issue and got a good early start on this one.

I’m glad you enjoyed Char, except for the first paragraph. The phrase “People that into role playing games are pretty rare.” is not really proper English, but it would be understood, and is probably the way the character would say it. I know that US English can be strange to people who didn’t grow up here.

I am probably going to take your advice and concentrate my limited writing time on Char and Mars Looks Different. I will get back to Bear Country as soon as I can, which means that it’ll probably come after Char, Mars Looks Different, and maybe a compilation of my alternate biology stories.

I enjoyed the alternate Frankenstein piece. I also enjoyed your French Uchronic News. Eric Henriet emailed me looking for back issues of POD so he could include information on them in the book. I referred him to Jim for the back issues. I was going to send him some of my distributions, but I hurt my knee before I could do it.

David Johnson: First, I love the cover art you sent on Mars Looks Different. Your comments to me: You are right to be skeptical about Char and the computer. If I’m going to maintain the possibility that she is a savage, I need to have someone use it in front of her to give her any chance of finding it, and that can get a little gimmicky unless I figure out a good reason for someone to do so. (And no, nothing in those sentences in any way tips my hand on where the story is going.)

The bit about the Soviets not establishing right of satellite passage over countries via Sputnik could lead to a situation where minor judgment errors escalate into a crisis very easily. I’m not sure how long it would have taken for the two sides to actually develop anti-satellite weapons that would work and be non-nuclear. That might keep the level of potential hostilities down to a manageable level. On the other hand, if you can get a satellite into orbit I would think you would automatically have at least a limited anti-satellite capability. Satellites are in predictable orbits, so they probably wouldn’t be anywhere near as hard to shoot down as a nuke warhead, at least initially. I could see a race, with decoys, satellites with evasive maneuvering capabilities, and something like the Dyna-Soar as space fighters/reconnaissance vehicles. Space defenses could be a big technology driver. It would be interesting seeing where the race led the two sides. An evolved Dina-Soar as a super SR71? Cheap, essentially disposable satellites that rush across enemy territory one time or a few times before getting shot down? A push to make cheaper launch vehicles with quicker launch capacity? Less telecommunications assets in space?

It would be too dangerous for businesses to invest in space, so I think you are right about space flight remaining a government activity. More manned flights? Quite possible. On the one hand humans do give flexibility which would be valuable in this scenario. On the other hand, there would be a political cost of getting someone captured over the Soviet Union.

I think your reduced-size Smilodon is quite acceptable, especially as a Bigfoot-type mystery animal.

Kurt Sidaway: Your comments to Alley. People were much more casual about a whole lot of potentially hazardous things even twenty or thirty years ago. I recently reread part of a book from my early teen years; Rick Brant’s Science Projects. One of the sections gave detailed instructions on how to make and use a sling (David versus Goliath type). Can you imagine how parents would react these days to a book aimed at 11 to 15 year-old boys and telling them how to build a lethal weapon out of common household items and use it?

A lady in her fifties who grew up out in the country told me that when she was in her early teens her and her friends used to go out in the woods and set up their toy soldiers in elaborate sand castles and then blaze away at them with twenty-two caliber rifles. Can you imagine the average parent finding out that their kids were doing something like that now?

My dad gave me a pocketknife when I was twelve years old. I carried it everywhere, including to school and always thought of it as a tool rather than a weapon. I still carry one pretty much all the time, along with one of those Swiss-army-type multi-purpose tools. That almost got me in trouble at an airport once when I forgot to put the knives in my check-in bag. Fortunately that was before 9/11 and they just made me put it in a box and treated it like any other piece of non-carryon luggage.

Your comments to me: I’m glad you enjoyed Char. I hope you enjoy the next part as much. On Barbary Apes in Gibraltar: I’ve always assumed that they were recent imports from North Africa rather than survivors of the old European primates. They aren’t a separate species or even subspecies from the North African Barbary Apes. If they were European Primate survivors they would have had to have either survived there through the ice ages while not developing into a separate species or even a separate subspecies, which is unlikely. I suppose that DNA studies could make the relationship between the populations clear, though there are rumors that the British have from time-to-time imported Barbary Apes from North Africa to keep the population healthy, which might muddy the waters considerably.

Your comments on Leonardo’s glider and crossbow: I wonder what the world would be like if someone like him had come along a few hundred years later, after the technology became a little more advanced. Put someone like him in the 1700s or the early 1800s, and give him the right backing, and I wonder what the world would look like by now. Of course a person isn’t just the genetics. They also need to be in a society that allows them to approach their potential.

I wonder how many Einstein-equivalents lived short and unhappy lives trying to make it as hunter-gatherers. That brings up an interesting issue. How would the genes necessary to produce an Einstein ever be passed along in a hunter-gatherer society? I can see a lot of downsides to that kind of a personality as a hunter or a gatherer, but I don’t see any upsides. Could the likes of Einstein feed themselves in that kind of society? I would think that they would wander around thinking about something esoteric and miss hunting opportunities to the extent of starving themselves and their families. Maybe that is why that kind of theory-oriented genius is so rare.

Now here is a rather chilling thought: What if there was less selective pressures against Einstein-type genius in some area of the world? Let’s say that Europeans go out and conquer the world and discover some Pacific Island where say ten percent of the population has the potential to be a genius at the Einstein or DaVinci level. (That’s actually two very different types of genius). They don’t have the resources to do anything with that genius until Europeans come along. By the way that is not the idea behind Char, at least not all of it.

If racism wasn’t already such a problem, it would be interesting to see if there were subtle genetic or cultural differences in the kinds of geniuses different societies produce. It would be ironic if we somehow found that the extinct Tasmanian islanders or the original people from the Canary Islands were genetically wired to become great physicists in disproportionate numbers. I believe that there are still a few people with some native Tasmanian ancestry out there, though the last people with only that ancestry died out quite a few years ago.

The study of differences between ethnic groups, and especially differences in intelligence between those groups, has been so tainted with pseudo-science and is so politically explosive that anyone with any common sense leaves it alone, which is probably just as well. At the same time, I have to admit to being curious about how the sixty-thousand years of relative isolation that the native Australians experienced, and the ten thousand years of total isolation that the native Tasmanians experienced impacted the hard wiring of their brains. My understanding is that the people of Melville Island north of Australia experienced a ten-thousand year period of isolation too, so they might be an interesting group to study.

I would be especially interested in finding out what happened genetically to the human populations on the little islands off the coast of Australia. Humans actually occupied Kangaroo Island and one of the islands between Australia and Tasmania for several thousand years before going extinct. They got to those islands before sea levels rose after the last ice age, and were trapped there. It would be fascinating to find genetic material from those groups and see what impact breeding only within a group of a couple hundred people actually had over a period of several thousand years. It would also be interesting to figure out what actually caused them to die out.