Done to Death, but a more realistic Draka trilogy?

[vultan]

I know people have made whole TLs based on this, but what are your opinions on the matter? What could make this TL more realistic?
A couple of my thoughts:

-Draka society is laking in Afrikaner influence. Would need to fix that.
-US annexing all of Mexico in one war. Please.
-For that matter, the Draka taking the entire African continent during the Napoleonic Wars?!?! Yeah, sure.
-TOTAL LACK OF BUTTERFLIES. Need I say more?

What else?

[MerryPrankster]

1. Nobody ever seems to attack them first or defeat them--even in the short term.

(In the "Drakas!" anthology, the Madhi in Sudan is able to destroy Janissary legions but is ultimately defeated by treachery. The Madhi managed to hold off the British for 10+ years and the British were far more benign than the Draka re: conquered peoples. I would expect the Madhists to fight to the death.)

At the very least, some of the Muslim powers in West Africa like the Sokoto Caliphate or Morocco should have presented some trouble.

2. Too little internal dissent--the growing power of the Security Directorate over Citizens should have provoked more trouble than it did, even among those who had no problem with the slave system.

(I haven't read the entirety of this story in "Drakas!" but the anti-expansion Rationalist Party managed to threaten the Draka League--however briefly--during the Eurasian War. That doesn't seem to have much effect on the Domination's politics, though.)

[vultan]

Originally Posted by MerryPrankster

1. Nobody ever seems to attack them first or defeat them--even in the short term.

(In the "Drakas!" anthology, the Madhi in Sudan is able to destroy Janissary legions but is ultimately defeated by treachery. The Madhi managed to hold off the British for 10+ years and the British were far more benign than the Draka re: conquered peoples. I would expect the Madhists to fight to the death.)

At the very least, some of the Muslim powers in West Africa like the Sokoto Caliphate or Morocco should have presented some trouble.

2. Too little internal dissent--the growing power of the Security Directorate over Citizens should have provoked more trouble than it did, even among those who had no problem with the slave system.

(I haven't read the entirety of this story in "Drakas!" but the anti-expansion Rationalist Party managed to threaten the Draka League--however briefly--during the Eurasian War. That doesn't seem to have much effect on the Domination's politics, though.)

Okay... cool.

[Leo euler]

I would maybe like to see it written without all the incredible technological advances in the fifty years leading up to 1998. The technology at the end of the Eurasian War seems to be roughly equivalent to OTL, and then we end up with engineered humans by the early 80's and starships by the late 90's? Admittedly it was still a good story to me.

Take out the improbable technological advancement, and I'd like to see how that would work out. Also, I think it would be cool to develop the digital and network side of computers more, as opposed to the "high-security" analog machines in the books.

[vultan]

BUMPAGEE!!!!

[vultan]

Anyone out there who is interested at all in the subject?

[Saladan]

You want realistic? The British Government would never had tolerated ANYTHING the Drakans did. The Slave system would have been banned, The rest of the Colonial Powers would never had allowed the British to dominate the entire African continent. The Draka colony would also never had gotten the population boosts it did, or would never had done any of the other things it did, basically the colony would had remained just another colony.

[SunilTanna]

The lack butterflies and the apparent unlikeliness of the scenario is actually the most forgiveable aspects of the book.

Lack of butterflies = If the world had radically diverged in 1776 or whenever it was, and the book was set in 1942, and was therefore full of completely unrecognizable people in unrecognizable societies organized into unrecognizable countries and alliances, few readers would care. You'd also need a lot more detail to explain what the Pomeranian Pyramidist movement and their leader Otton von Tritt (or whoever was the baddies) were - everybody knows who Hitler and the Nazis were.

Additionally, normal people buying novels (maybe not everybody who reads this board though) want a good yarn, and a comprehensible background with excessive exposition of the background is required.

If you want a theoretical justification - if every possible alternate world does exist in some alternate timeline - then the world of the Draka does exist in one timeline (actually there are an infinite number of worlds of Draka, just a smaller infinity than the total number of alternate worlds).

If you want an alternate theoretical justification, - you could argue that history only actually happened once, therefore all alternate histories or things that didn't happen are inherently implausible, and the reason to discuss them is not plausibility but because they throw up interesting perspectives on actual history, on human nature, on the current world, and/or generate good stories, etc.

I don't know, but I think the simplification in terms of number of countries etc. is also basically therefore for the same reasons. Only a historian would care that Stirling never explained what happened to the Danish Gold Coast (etc.) when the Draka took over West Africa in the early 19th century? If there had been say 100 countries instead of basically about 20 (which later become 2 of course), would it have made any real difference to the main story - or would it have just introduced excessive background complication unrelated to the main story? Remember the Chris Crawford game Balance of Power - it was about the Cold War, and vastly simplified the world, number of countries etc., but it capture something of the core essence of what it wanted to get across - I think Stirling is doing the same.

The thing that I found less forgiveable is how stupid everybody but the Draka is. The Draka win because everybody else acts like idiots. Not just idiots, but really idiotically idiotic idiots. For example: The Alliance lose India because they are worried about legalistic niceties about who is sovereign and who has a defense pact when the Indian incident happens (why not simply warn the Draka, the moment that India declares independence, that any attack on India will be treated as an attack on the Alliance proper?). The Alliance ultimately lose the whole thing, because Fred appears in a covert video message - in full dress uniform. Doh.

I think the Draka series would have been a lot more impressive, and a lot more scary too, if they had won against non-idiotic opposition.

[varyar]

It's not just that the anti-Draka forces are idiots (which they are) but that God (that is to say, Stirling) has it in for them. Everything goes wrong for them at the appropriate times. Everything goes right for the Draka at the appropriate times. In the entire history of the Draka, do they ever suffer any setbacks, let alone actual defeats? Going with the Mirror Universe America theme, where is their War of 1812? Their Civil War? Vietnam? I like the series okay, but it would've been a lot better if the history hadn't played out like a game of Civ II in Easy mode.

[hopper2cool]

Actually the problem I see is both of the above mentioned problems. First the Draka's enemies are morons and have bad luck. Second the Draka so much as never even lose a thumb wrestling match. Take the two together and you get a bunch of super soldiers that's enemies do not realize how dangerous they are.
Read the appendix in the back of Marching Through Georgia and they mention how 1,000 Draka not only defeat but crush 12,000 Ottomans during the Napoleanic Wars. I can believe that it's possible if the Draka had better weapons and position but no one notices this. Repeat this cycle every 20 years for the next 150 years. The Draka win every single battle but no one takes them seriously until 1945.
Then there is after WW2. The Alliance easily could have nuked them. Heck, just wiping out Cairo and Arkona (or whatever their capital was called) would have killed about 10% of the Draka. Sure England would have got nuked in exchange but the Draka only made up 2% of their population. Kill enough of them and the serfs would revolt. It would have been ugly but the Alliance would have won. But no instead they waited until the Draka put some super nuke as a doomsday weapon so the Alliance couldn't attack first and had to come up with the computer virus.

[xxmagex]

There are a couple threads on the internet, webpages that discuss this point.
http://www.alternatehistory.com/gate...aproblems.html
This lays out some of the problems with the Draka timeline/series of stories.

http://gateway.alternatehistory.com/...natedraka.html
This is a more realistic timeline involving the Draka. I liked the reference of "Combat Testing" of nuclear weapons on the Draka.

[B_Munro]

Originally Posted by SunilTanna

The lack butterflies and the apparent unlikeliness of the scenario is actually the most forgiveable aspects of the book.

Lack of butterflies = If the world had radically diverged in 1776 or whenever it was, and the book was set in 1942, and was therefore full of completely unrecognizable people in unrecognizable societies organized into unrecognizable countries and alliances, few readers would care. You'd also need a lot more detail to explain what the Pomeranian Pyramidist movement and their leader Otton von Tritt (or whoever was the baddies) were - everybody knows who Hitler and the Nazis were.

Additionally, normal people buying novels (maybe not everybody who reads this board though) want a good yarn, and a comprehensible background with excessive exposition of the background is required.

If you want a theoretical justification - if every possible alternate world does exist in some alternate timeline - then the world of the Draka does exist in one timeline (actually there are an infinite number of worlds of Draka, just a smaller infinity than the total number of alternate worlds).

Yes, but that justifies writing any absurd scenario that you want: if you replay the battle of Britain an infinite number of times, there will be a TL in which the Germans win because all of the British planes suffer fatal goose or duck-related mid-air accidents or are struck down by timely meteor swarms. It's a fairly feeble excuse.

Originally Posted by SunilTanna

If you want an alternate theoretical justification, - you could argue that history only actually happened once, therefore all alternate histories or things that didn't happen are inherently implausible, and the reason to discuss them is not plausibility but because they throw up interesting perspectives on actual history, on human nature, on the current world, and/or generate good stories, etc.

Since people in the Draka universe do not behave like actual human beings would...(see your own comment about how everyone acts like idiots).

Originally Posted by SunilTanna

I don't know, but I think the simplification in terms of number of countries etc. is also basically therefore for the same reasons. Only a historian would care that Stirling never explained what happened to the Danish Gold Coast (etc.) when the Draka took over West Africa in the early 19th century? If there had been say 100 countries instead of basically about 20 (which later become 2 of course), would it have made any real difference to the main story - or would it have just introduced excessive background complication unrelated to the main story?

Why would the occasional mention of other countries make any difference? There isn't any need to have lengthy digressions on the subject of the Danish Gold Coast _anyway_. A lot of US-written SF seems to work from the premise that the rest of the world doesn't matter anyway: the author need not spend a lot of time on talking about countries other than the "main actors."

You seem to have a rather low opinion of the readers: "we can't show a world at all different from our own, or people will freak out and stop reading!" Frankly, I wouldn't mind if butterflies are minimized: since the US, the British Empire, etc., are all around at the time of the POD, we can countenance a history roughly similar to ours through the 18th and early 20th centuries. But do we really need Hitler, Stalin, etc?

Originally Posted by SunilTanna

I think the Draka series would have been a lot more impressive, and a lot more scary too, if they had won against non-idiotic opposition.

That would have required considerable extra work on the part of the author.

To be honest, I'd prefer an _earlier_ POD: the British East Indies company takes the Cape from the Dutch in the 17th century, for instance. Gives a century or so for the fairly immigration-happy British to build up enough of a population to make the 19th century conquest of Africa more plausible. (Takes out the Boer influence, I'm afraid).

Possible different take: I'd have them more like the cultured, sophisticated Europeans of the late 19th century who wrote books on the tragically inevitable eventual extermination of the arker races - the Survival Of The Fittest, don't you know. Africans aren't slaves - they are "wards", "protected peoples", "development under conditions suitable for their primitive mentalities", etc. This eventually turns into a system of total control as it becomes clear that said Africans aren't putting up with it - but forced labor, disposession from land, salutary massacres, etc. were all fairly _normal_ behavior in European colonies in the early 20th century. Was there a great outcry against the Germans when they squashed the Herero?

The difference is that the Draka take the logical of racial hierarchy and biological racism to it's logical extremes in the 20th century rather than turning away from it. No preening, bejeweled supersoldiers with harems of slave concubines: rational, well-trained people in neat uniforms or conservative dress carrying out the mosr vile methods for crushing the human spirit because "those people" can only benefit society within certain roles - as agricultural workers, factory labor, etc. - and any who think otherwise will be efficiently exterminated. Like the Nazis in Russia, but with a greater role alloted for serf labor. Of course, after the fortunes of war bring them in control of rather white-looking people in N. Africa and the Middle East, people better organized to resist, things take a definite turn for the darker.

The whole racial superman thing, the transformation of the Draka into a virtual national army, the paganism thing - they all seem to come out of nowhere, unmotivated, in the 19th century. Rather, let's make it more of an evolutionary process arising from actual racial and biological attitudes of the times: and by the time biology evolves to the point where such ideas become silly, the Draka have eventually trapped themselves in a system from which their is no exit, and no way to go but forward, for they have burned their bridges far worse than the South Africans of OTL did.

Bruce

[Dan Reilly The Great]

I never really got into the series myself, but I do seem to recall a mention of the tse tse flies being controlled in order to explain why the Draka arent having any problems with disease in africa, but little else is mentioned in respect to the subject (I think). What about aids? or ebola? If these guys are all over the continent, and they most definetly treat their slaves like crap(unsanitary conditions), it would stand to reason that the Draka Dominion would be horribly infested with some major viral outbreak of some kind at any given time.

[hopper2cool]

Originally Posted by Dan Reilly The Great

I never really got into the series myself, but I do seem to recall a mention of the tse tse flies being controlled in order to explain why the Draka arent having any problems with disease in africa, but little else is mentioned in respect to the subject (I think). What about aids? or ebola? If these guys are all over the continent, and they most definetly treat their slaves like crap(unsanitary conditions), it would stand to reason that the Draka Dominion would be horribly infested with some major viral outbreak of some kind at any given time.

Actually, the Draka in general treated their slaves fairly well. Not because they were nice but because it was more efficient and it did keep the various dieseases farther away. Also slaves who really piss of their masters are sometimes diced up which I guess could help to explain their better medical skills. Of couse it's mainly BS and handwavium.

[SunilTanna]

Originally Posted by B_Munro

Yes, but that justifies writing any absurd scenario that you want: if you replay the battle of Britain an infinite number of times, there will be a TL in which the Germans win because all of the British planes suffer fatal goose or duck-related mid-air accidents or are struck down by timely meteor swarms. It's a fairly feeble excuse.

Actually no. Because I also said further down the point of alternate history is to throw an interesting light on history, human nature, or generating an interesting story, etc. I don't think these scenarios would.