The Peshawar Lancers by S.M. Stirling

by Joe Glasgow

The earth is hit by a comet in 1878, and humanity fights for survival in this alternate history by S. M. Stirling. The book picks up the story in the 21^st century; where technology has struggled to advance, and clings to technology from the late 1870’s. Humanity is dealt a devastating blow in the North Hemisphere, and is left in desolation with a cooling climate.

The North American Hemisphere has lost all semblance of civilization, and has become a land of barbarians. The power of the British Empire has relocated to their colonies in Australia, Indian, and South Africa with the help of their surviving fleet. The French to the Algiers, and the Russians somehow survive and turn away from the Orthodox church. 

The book is filled with fast paced action complete with a Russian conspiracy.  The characterization is solid, and the book rings a bit Kiplingesque. I would recommend read the appendix before you start the book. It is filled with a lot of details that will help when start the novel. The science is a bit shaky, but doesn’t take away from a solid tale by Stirling. 

Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! by Daniel S. Fletcher

Daniel Fletcher’s Jackbook Britain is set 1940 in the Nazi occupied United Kingdom.  There is no Dunkirk in this world and the British Empire has capitulated to Nazi Germany. The British Expeditionary Forces have been captured, and the characters live under the iron fisted occupation of the Nazis.

The first third of the book is a little slow getting started, but the action picks up at that point in the book. If you are looking for military action this doesn’t appear, and his only mentioned or the results hinted. The story focuses more on the social aspects of occupation by the occupied, and their German occupiers.

Fletcher is spot on with his characterization of the British folk, but he fell short with the Germans. The German characters came across being a little too one dimensional. The social commentary was too modern for my tastes, and not period enough.

Myself, I didn’t care for the ending. I thought it was too ambiguous, and would hope this is a series, and not a stand alone book. It is Fletcher’s first novel, and hope we see a second book to get a better feel for his work.  

Russian Amerika (Russian Amerika Series Book 1) by Stoney Compton

Russian Amerika is an alternate history with the premise that the American Civil War was lost by the Northern army, and the United States was divided into ten different countries. The story takes place in 1987, where the Russians under the Czar run a police state in Alaska.

The main character is a disgraced Russian officer Grigorievich forced to resign his commission due disobeying an order that saved his men. He leads the revolt with Native peoples in attempt throw of the yoke of the Russian Empire.

The book written with a nice easy to read style, or was it that I was just trying to get through the book at the quick step?. I find the premise of this alternate history  problematic. The characters are a bit one dimensional, and very predictable. The story is filled with a lot of action for fans of military based alternate histories. However, like the characters the action is predictable with predictable outcomes.

It isn't exactly clear with the point of divergence happened in the historical outline. The story hints at a Civil War won by the Confederacy at some point prior to 1860 causing the United States to lose vast areas of land west of the Mississippi. It hints at possible pod before the Civil War. Technology appears to stand still in the book from 1930's-1980's.

I wanted to like this book, but struggled to finish it with all the story line holes. There is a liberal leaning to the book with Mario Cuomo hinted to be the President of the United States, Jimmy Carter as a senior officer in the Confederacy with the First Nations (nation) being on good terms with the United States, but not with British Columbia. What happened to manifest destiny? Or go west young man? Ignoring the fact that native tribes weren't on good terms among themselves.

The book has some entertainment value. I would give it 2.5 stars on the five star scale.

The Shiloh Project, by David Poyer

The two most popular POD's (points of departure) in alternate history fiction are the Axis winning WWII, and the South winning the Civil War. This is one of the latter, and it's an interesting twist on it. I couldn't detect exactly what the difference was that caused the Southern victory (those of you better acquainted with that period of history might find it), but it ended up with an independent Confederacy, which extended itself to the Pacific to include Arizona, evidently including New Mexico, and Southern California, in another war with the Union twenty years later.

The book is tantalizingly sparse in historical facts otherwise. All we know about the presidents of the two countries is that Lee seems to have followed Davis in the CSA, and McClelland, Lincoln, in the USA.  And there was a WWI, but the USA seems to have fought Japan without other countries becoming involved in the 1970's. Oh, and the CSA includes Cuba.

And the plot is a good one. It seems at first to be a condemnation of White treatment of Blacks in the CSA, and it is that, but it's a lot more nuanced than you'd think at first look. It involves the theft of a nuclear device from the USA by the CSA, and that should be enough to get you interested. You can get it from Amazon HERE.  And be careful not to buy another book of the same title by another author, also at Amazon. It might be a great book, but it's not this one.

And failing that, the book seems to pop up at used book stores a lot. I recommend it. Enjoy.

Stuart Schneiderman on Counterfactuals

This is the sort of thing that makes us think. Just what is the purpose of alternate history? This is from Stuart Schneiderman's blog, Had Enough Therapy:

Why Bother With Counterfactuals?

In certain precincts it’s an article of faith that the American invasion of Iraq was a complete and total mistake.

And yet, how does anyone know what Saddam Hussein would have done and what Iraq would look like if we had not invaded.

Then again, do we know, to a certainty, what Iraq would look like today if, say John McCain had won the 2008 presidential election?

Speculations of this order are not, strictly speaking, historical research. History is what happened. These counterfactual speculations are about what might have happened.

Some historians have made a career out of conjuring counterfactuals. Other historians find it all to be an exercise in futility.

At the least, they point out, the number of variables make it nearly impossible to know what would have happened, for example, if Theodore Roosevelt had won the 1912 presidential election.

Counterfactual history is based on a philosophical premise. It assumes that human actions direct or influence the outcome of historical events. It militates against the notion of historical inevitability.

Recently, some wags have been saying that ISIS will implode because of its own internal contradictions or because people cannot long stand to be oppressed by tyrants.

If you, like them, believe in an inevitable outcome you will advise the president against doing anything to counter the ISIS insurgency in Syria and Iraq. Why waste resources on a situation that will eventually resolve itself in our favor?

Then again, even if ISIS will inevitably fail, how many people will be raped and murdered in the meantime?

Some of its defenders consider counterfactual history an antidote to the Hegelian and Marxist view of the inevitability of history. Hegel and Marx believed that human history was an unfolding narrative whose main events and even conclusions were inevitable.

Theirs was a narrative driven theory of history. They saw history following a script and they believed that the script would determine the one true outcome.

If, however, you believe that history is like a game, then the outcome is not predetermined. Different moves by different people change the game and change thee outcome.

Moreover, the players in the game are endowed, as I and others have put it, with free will. For my views, see my book: The Last Psychoanalyst.

Reviewing a book on the subject by one Richard Evans, Cass Sunsteinsummarizes both sides of the argument:

In Evans’s telling, many of the contemporary counterfactualists seek to respond to Marxist historians, to suggest that impersonal forces are
overrated, and to demonstrate the importance of human agency and free will. Indeed, Ferguson saw his collection as a “necessary antidote” to historical determinism, which was his particular target. In Ferguson’s words, the “reality of history ... is that the end is unknown at the beginning of the journey: there are no rails leading predictably into the future, no timetables with 
destinations set out in black and white.” Ferguson seemed to suggest that once we reject determinism, and see that decisions were contingent and might have produced counterfactuals, we can better illuminate the past.

Of course, once we are talking about possibilities, we cannot limit ourselves to what might have happened in the past. We are also interested in what might happen in the future.

If you are formulating policy you do well to consider the different possible outcomes of different policy proposals. Such work does require some imagination, but the materials that imagination will be configuring are facts about the game, the players and the moving parts.

Sunstein notes that such a method applies to some scientific experiments. Even if experiments are not always very useful or very practical when making policy, sometimes they are.

He explains:

They might hypothesize, for example, that if people have to pay a small tax for plastic bags at convenience stores, they will use fewer plastic bags. To test hypotheses, social scientists usually like to conduct randomized controlled trials, allowing them to isolate the effects of the tax. Such trials create parallel worlds and hence alternative histories—one with the tax and one without it. Historians cannot conduct randomized controlled trials, because history is run only once. Yet they nonetheless develop hypotheses, and they attempt to evaluate them by reference to the evidence.
Of course, these experiments, especially in social science, often fail to include all the data. If people use fewer plastic shopping bags they will likely use more burlap or hemp bags. As it happens, reusable shopping bags breed bacteria that cause ill health and thus drive up the cost of medical care… etc. You will have saved the earth and nature, but at the cost of more disease. Bacteria are part of nature, too.

This does not discredit the enterprise. It says that in some circumstances, especially policy making, one needs to be skeptical about the results of narrowly focused experiments. Most especially, in the social sciences. One should be even more skeptical of those who want to make government policy based on test results that are anything but absolutely true.

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The illustration is a "quibcag," which you'll know about if you read the Ex-Army blog. It depicts characters from the alternate history anime, Strike Witches (ストライクウィッチーズ Sutoraiku Witchīzu).

Time Travel and Alternate History

Found on the net. A handy summary of the literary treatment of time travel and alternate realities.

Robert Conroy's: Liberty 1784: The Second War for Independence

By Perry Glasgow

The book was my introduction to Robert Conroy’s work, and I wasn’t disappointed. Conroy grips the attention of the reader in the Prologue to this alternative history yarn when George Washington is beheaded at the Tower of London.

The French loss at the Battle of the Capes allows the British Navy to relieve Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, which leads to the defeat of the American Revolution. The book follows the characters the consequences, trials and tribulations of both historical and fictional characters as a result of the defeat. The Founding Fathers are either imprisoned or executed which brings harsh British rule back to the colonies. The participants of the Revolution are forced to flee to Ft. Washington near modern-day Chicago, or face imprisonment. The dream of Liberty lives within the remnants of Colonials.

Conroy skillfully weaves historical personalities with the fiction characters in a page turner. What he lacks in depth he makes up in telling a great story.

The only disappointment I found is in implausibility of parts of the book to me. The reader has to ask themselves would there have been the French Revolution if the American Revolution had failed? The lack of a Native American presence in the book I found to be a faux pas. Crossing Shawnee territory itself should have provided more of a challenge than presented in the book.  At times Conroy interjects too much modern thought into his characters, but it doesn’t take away from an excellent story line.

The fans of alternate histories should find the book an enjoyable read despite missing on a few points. The book is available from Amazon in both hardcover and Kindle editions.