Hey folks. I just finished reading the last of Robert Sobel's 1976 5-book trilogy, "For Want of a Nail"(a rewrite of "For All Time"), in which the Revolutionary Americans somehow win the battle of Saratoga in 1777; it spirals on from there, with the United States ending up as a super power by 1976, squaring off against a Socialist Russia calling itself the "Soviet Union" as it were.
Any thoughts?
TBH, I really enjoyed it, but I thought I'd comment on a few things-
First of all, what was UP with Germany? It went from being just a cluster of small states until 1870 or so to being a Great Power, and then beaten down, only to rise up under a maniacal dictator, and then permanently smashed down to size and partitioned between the Capitalist West and Communist East.....hell of a ride, don'tcha think?
And speaking of dictators.....Adolf. Hitler. If you thought Vicente Mercator was a bad guy(and he kinda was, more so after the Bali incident!), Hitler makes him look like an angel. I mean, 6 million Jews executed, just because they were Jews? And 6 to 9 million more Poles, Roma Gypsies, etc., on top of this? (Holy fuck. Even the Generalissimo of Imperial China wasn't this bad.)
And then you have Joseph Stalin......Gulags? 25 million dead from maltreatment and criminal incompetence, including 8 million Ukrainians? Stalin may not have been on the level of Hitler, but he comes awfully close. And don't even get me started on Chairman Mao......
There's some good spots, though: the United States ended slavery in 1865 and 100 years later, finally got around to forcing the South to comply with federal law; here in OTL's Confederation, slavery ended in the 1840s but black men didn't get to vote at all in parts of Indiana or anywhere in the Southern Confederation until 1908; black women weren't allowed to vote until 1948 in most of Georgia!
Sobel also mentions the increasing trend towards social democracy in much of the European West, particularly the Nordic nations, as well as Canada in North America.
Atomic weapons seemed to have been gained a lot earlier, too: 1945 ITTL, while it took until 1962 IOTL(which never made sense to me at all). The Cuban Missile Crisis also reminds me of the real-life Boricua crisis in 1971, and the one over Taiwan in 1984(I was just 14 then)....though, luckily, the powers stepped down ITTL just as they did in our universe.
We have fewer weapons than the *U.S. does, but we didn't ban atmospheric testing until 1977, and only since the late 1980s have any real agreements been reached.
I'm also surprised Sobel hadn't mentioned global warming much, either: It was a real concern IOTL as early as the '60s and temperatures began to skyrocket in the early '70s. (In fact, as of a few years ago, we've officially passed the 1*C mark) And only now, is serious worldwide action starting to come to fruition, as it is with the ozone layer.
I did, however, appreciate the amount of time he devoted to popular culture; he even gave cameos to a few OTL Mexican singers, which was really nice. Towards the end, he even hinted towards the development of the first ITTL video games; it would be pretty cool to see what people could come up with in that regard.
I also appreciated many of the cameos and tributary references to certain OTL personages in general; who knew that OTL's G.G. Henderson Dewey would end up running against the "cousin" of showman John Truman? Or that Lennart Skinner would show up as a school teacher who inspired the name of a rock band? (OOC: Heh heh.
)
What did you guys think? I personally liked how many of Sobel's characters occasionally crossed paths with one another, and how they came from nearly every corner of the globe.....
Any thoughts?
TBH, I really enjoyed it, but I thought I'd comment on a few things-
First of all, what was UP with Germany? It went from being just a cluster of small states until 1870 or so to being a Great Power, and then beaten down, only to rise up under a maniacal dictator, and then permanently smashed down to size and partitioned between the Capitalist West and Communist East.....hell of a ride, don'tcha think?
And speaking of dictators.....Adolf. Hitler. If you thought Vicente Mercator was a bad guy(and he kinda was, more so after the Bali incident!), Hitler makes him look like an angel. I mean, 6 million Jews executed, just because they were Jews? And 6 to 9 million more Poles, Roma Gypsies, etc., on top of this? (Holy fuck. Even the Generalissimo of Imperial China wasn't this bad.)
And then you have Joseph Stalin......Gulags? 25 million dead from maltreatment and criminal incompetence, including 8 million Ukrainians? Stalin may not have been on the level of Hitler, but he comes awfully close. And don't even get me started on Chairman Mao......
There's some good spots, though: the United States ended slavery in 1865 and 100 years later, finally got around to forcing the South to comply with federal law; here in OTL's Confederation, slavery ended in the 1840s but black men didn't get to vote at all in parts of Indiana or anywhere in the Southern Confederation until 1908; black women weren't allowed to vote until 1948 in most of Georgia!
Sobel also mentions the increasing trend towards social democracy in much of the European West, particularly the Nordic nations, as well as Canada in North America.
Atomic weapons seemed to have been gained a lot earlier, too: 1945 ITTL, while it took until 1962 IOTL(which never made sense to me at all). The Cuban Missile Crisis also reminds me of the real-life Boricua crisis in 1971, and the one over Taiwan in 1984(I was just 14 then)....though, luckily, the powers stepped down ITTL just as they did in our universe.
We have fewer weapons than the *U.S. does, but we didn't ban atmospheric testing until 1977, and only since the late 1980s have any real agreements been reached.
I'm also surprised Sobel hadn't mentioned global warming much, either: It was a real concern IOTL as early as the '60s and temperatures began to skyrocket in the early '70s. (In fact, as of a few years ago, we've officially passed the 1*C mark) And only now, is serious worldwide action starting to come to fruition, as it is with the ozone layer.
I did, however, appreciate the amount of time he devoted to popular culture; he even gave cameos to a few OTL Mexican singers, which was really nice. Towards the end, he even hinted towards the development of the first ITTL video games; it would be pretty cool to see what people could come up with in that regard.
I also appreciated many of the cameos and tributary references to certain OTL personages in general; who knew that OTL's G.G. Henderson Dewey would end up running against the "cousin" of showman John Truman? Or that Lennart Skinner would show up as a school teacher who inspired the name of a rock band? (OOC: Heh heh.
)What did you guys think? I personally liked how many of Sobel's characters occasionally crossed paths with one another, and how they came from nearly every corner of the globe.....
