Guns of the South, Continued

[Strategos' Risk]

Has anyone written a sequel or stories based in the Guns of the South universe? I know Turtledove isn't going to write one, as the timeline is so changed there's no telling what the CSA can/will do. However, I still have lots of ideas about it. Will the senators read all of the documents? How will they react to the 21st century's progresses and regresses? What are the documents that the Afrikaaners took? Will there be one of those American Civil War secret intelligence bureaus founded? Will there be Confederate agents running around the world, stopping WWI, the rise of Communism, etc.? There's lots of potential in this.

[MerryPrankster]

The "Guns" TL will eventually diverge from OTL so much that as the years go by, the information in the books the Afrikaners took back will become useless. I think you could have some major Confederate miscalculations based on this, though someone as smart as Lee could figure out the "butterfly effect."

By the end of the book, Lee has used the Rivington Men's treachery to get popular support to free the slaves, the North has AK-47s and has conquered Canada and Alaska, and what else? Anglo-Confederate cooperation against a Northern leviathan will set the stage for the coming world conflicts.

Who is the US going to ally with against Britain and the CSA? France? Germany, assuming it will unify (with a POD this late, it probably will)? If Britain gets slapped like that, will their defeats in Canada cause ripples elsewhere (like in Argentina, whose prosperity depended on supplying Britain with agricultural goods?)?

[Strategos' Risk]

I was thinking about something a little less mundane than the power structures of the world. I was thinking about social attitudes- when the CSA reads some of the stuff about contemporary racial attitudes (that which isn’t the Afrikaaner propaganda), there might be some changed minds. Could there be eventually civil rights established for minorities in the CSA? Possibly around the early 1900s/1910s? Also, reading about what eventually happens in the decolonized/Western-caused trouble zones (Middle East, China, etc.), would the CSA intervene at all? I was thinking about a secret organization with rooms that have huge charts/timelines, and Confederate agents pouring over them, noting butterfly effects, checking the progress of history, etc.) If there’s Encarta on the Macs the Afrikaaners had, all bets are off.
Technologically, couldn’t the CSA rise to the very top? Even if there’s no actual technical data, they could still look in the right directions. For example, take penicillin, discovered by accident. They would read the history, and start experimenting with molds immediately. Lots of inventions would be discovered ahead of schedule. Of course, they would do some sort of pact thing to limit them, so that the world doesn’t suspect the CSA as some sort of magical place. I think in order to protect such discoveries, the CSA wouldn’t try to fight in wars in America at all, unless they came up with more weapons from the future. 1800s tanks, anyone?

[Strategos' Risk]

Originally Posted by Matt Quinn

I think you could have some major Confederate miscalculations based on this, though someone as smart as Lee could figure out the "butterfly effect."

Lee already figured that out from his conversation with Rhoodies, remember?

[MerryPrankster]

Strategos,

He did?

Oh well. It's been several years since I've read the books.

[robertp6165]

Originally Posted by Matt Quinn

By the end of the book, Lee has used the Rivington Men's treachery to get popular support to free the slaves, the North has AK-47s and has conquered Canada and Alaska, and what else?

The Confederates also got other weapons...50 caliber browning machine guns, for example, when they captured Rivington, as well as hollow charge rifle grenades, mortars, UZIs, and other items. Lee made a point of keeping all these other things secret, just in case they were needed in some future conflict.

Originally Posted by Matt Quinn

Anglo-Confederate cooperation against a Northern leviathan will set the stage for the coming world conflicts.Who is the US going to ally with against Britain and the CSA? France? Germany, assuming it will unify (with a POD this late, it probably will)? If Britain gets slapped like that, will their defeats in Canada cause ripples elsewhere (like in Argentina, whose prosperity depended on supplying Britain with agricultural goods?)?

Well, actually, there is no reason to think that, in the GOTS timeline, that the Confederacy would, in fact, ally itself with Britain (or anybody else) against the United States. Britain and the other European powers played no part in the achievement of Confederate independence. Lee was coldly received when he went to visit Lord Lyons in the aftermath of the capture of Washington, and Britain was applying diplomatic pressure to force the Confederacy to contribute naval forces to the anti-slavery blockade off the coast of Africa. In fact, by the end of GOTS, the Confederates, while neutral in the conflict between the U.S. and Great Britain, are pretty obviously cheering the U.S. on. Relations between the two American powers seem to have improved greatly since Lincoln was ousted from power. So it may very well be that the Confederacy and the United States will be allies WITH each other and not AGAINST each other.

[Strategos' Risk]

Would anyone like to speculate about the race relations in the GOTS CSA?

And would the CSA decide to become a colonial power, solving or starting conflicts with future history?

[robertp6165]

Originally Posted by Strategos' Risk

Would anyone like to speculate about the race relations in the GOTS CSA?

And would the CSA decide to become a colonial power, solving or starting conflicts with future history?

I would think that race relations in the GOTS CSA would be better than in the OTL. There are several reasons for this. One would be the influence of Robert E. Lee, who would certainly encourage Southern whites seek racial harmony with the freed slaves (if nothing else, the famous example of Lee stepping forth in church to kneel next to a black man and take communion, which then shamed the rest of the white congregation into doing the same, would indicate this, and Lee has even more incentive to do this in the GOTS universe, since he knows how history came to judge the South and it's racial system). A second reason is that some of the main reasons that race hatred was so prevalent in the postwar South in the OTL would not exist in the GOTS universe. Slavery was not ended at the point of Northern bayonets in the GOTS universe, and since the Republicans won't get to use the votes of freed blacks to keep themselves in power in the Southern States for almost 12 years, the violence, graft, and corruption of Reconstruction won't occur, and thus won't be blamed on blacks. Given these facts, it is hard to see how race relations could not be better than in OTL.