Conquistador Revisited

[Strategos' Risk]

Okay, one last segment of random notes, and I'm done with this thread. No one's replying anyways. If anyone wants the appendices I can post them on some other thread.

* The gang kill a bunch of evil Afrikaaners. They all happen to be named after the characters from Guns of the South- which is a real book in this world because it shows up in Adrienne's library. This scene really pissed me off when I read it the first time because it just seemed like genre fanservice.

* Fuck New Virginia, part eleventh:

The other half [of a band of evil Injuns] carried bows, and his eyes widened again at their shape—backed with horn and reinforced with sinew, the powerful double-curved Turco-Mongol type he'd seen in museums and sporting events in Central Asia. He whispered a question to Simmons.

"Some demented renegade taught them," the Scout answered, sotto voce.

"He belonged to a bunch of burks FirstSide who liked to play at Middle Ages; the bloody things are a menace, believe me. Fortunately they're not easy to make or use."

* S.M. Stirling teaches us about Russian culture!

"Officers and NCOs beating up and abusing recruits is an old tradition in the Russian armed forces; ditto senior enlisted men picking on younger, stealing their pay and rations. It's really old, goes back to czarist times. They still have a scandal every once and a while, new guys getting killed or having all their food stolen until they collapse, that sort of thing. And if the Batyushkovs are old-fashioned, chances are the military types they recruited for this would be, too."

"Sounds counterproductive," Adrienne said.

"Oh, it is," Tom said. "But who abandons a tradition just because it's stupid? Also, a lot of Russians have a really intense dislike of what they call 'black-asses,' by which they mean anyone brown with slanted eyes; that goes right back to the Mongol Khans. Get a bunch of unreconstructed Red Army men—I'd guess they used veterans of Afghanistan and Chechnya—and give 'em unlimited disciplinary authority and no overview, and this sort of thing is about what I'd expect."

* The Commission has about a dozen Mosquito fighter-bombers. About the same amount are kept by some of the Families, "they maintain them for the Commission's use in lieu of taxes." And those couldn't possibly ever be used to topple your government, nosiree John Rolfe.

* "a lot of them had Red Army medals jingling on their chests—Russkis were strange that way, wearing decorations on combat fatigues."

The last chapter where Adrienne single-handedly destroys the Gate is the dumbest thing I have ever read.

* Emblems! The Families have shoulder flashes: the Rolfe a lion, the Pearlmutter the Seal of Solomon, the Von Traupitz an eagle, and the Colletta a tommy gun.

 

[Strategos' Risk]

I've written too soon. Alright, some extra stuff. Notes I've found from discussions on SHWI, specifically what Stirling says.

Conquistador with good guys

>I just got the impression Perlmutter was something of a liberal--or maybe that

was only by New Virginia standards ;-)
-- mostly the later. He's a moderately left-wing Democrat in 1946, but not
overly political.

>It seems strange that anybody would want to populate a potential Utopia with ethnic and cultural groups which are almost certain to be at each other's throats in a couple generations.

-- well, over half the immigrants are "general Americans", with a bias towards the upper South. The rest are expected to blend in -- the melting pot. This actually happens; there's a rather amusing instance of it about halfway through the book, which I won't describe

Real-life illustration: my father's father was a Grandmaster of the Orange Order. My wife's father was a staunch supporter of the IRA. Or to give another instance, the little Massachusetts mill-town my wife comes from was, until recently, divided between Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans; the Yankees had about vanished.

The Irish came first; then around three generations ago, they went on strike in the foundry which dominated the town's economy. The Yankee owners distributed pamphlets in the villages of Calabria, and got hundreds of Italian peasants in as strike-breakers.

Relations between the two groups were, to put it mildly, not friendly at first. My wife's foster mother (an elderly lady born in 1899) once referred to them in my hearing as "black Eye-talians, who are always after our beautiful white Irish girls."

Both her son and her foster-son married Italian-American women; the later producing a new generation of Taconi-Moores. Her son and daughter-in-law moved to South Carolina and their daughters are classic "belles".

Samples of Conquistador by S.M. Stirling

>1) The story's set in 2009. Why? While the amount of extrapolation is minimil (only 7 years in the future, after all), it doesn't seem neccesary to the plot...or is it?

-- a number of reasons; mostly to do with the desired relative ages of various characters, and how this affected the plot. And there's a kicker at the end, btw, having to do with the history of the Rolfe family... .

>Are the genetic tests done on the condor that much more advanced than what could be done today?

-- the method used is already in labs, but not yet widespread; it's also much faster and cheaper than the previous ones.

 

[modelcitizen]

* The book mentions that Dimitri Batyushkov, the head of the Russian KGB exiles, has a six-wheeled Land Rover. Hahaha what?

nice of me to respond to something from like a year ago, but hey...


six-wheeled land rovers are used by the Australian army, so, the vehicle, despite being over the top, does exist.


amusingly, according to http://www.allisons.org/ll/4/LandRover/Perentie/ the ADF is replacing their six-wheeled land rover with the Gelandewagen/g-class Mercedes, the better to appeal to ex-KGB warlords perhaps

 

[modelcitizen]

I've written too soon. Alright, some extra stuff. Notes I've found from discussions on SHWI, specifically what Stirling says.

Conquistador with good guys

that is very cool, because I've actually thought of what I would do, given a 'tract' or something like that to populate as I would like. Kind of sick, I know...


Given time, that is, without a time machine, I'd assume some kind of connection to 'first world' over the last four or five decades.

I think from the 1960s on, there are a good number of refugee groups more than suitable for populating the odd nook and cranny in a productive fashion...

Make that from the late 1940s on, why not? I'm only 38 years old, but I guess I can presume that "I" would have a scope of opportunity similar to King Rolfe's.

I'd be slightly "pragmatic" in my selections, in other words, even though I'm Jewish and my parents are Israeli, I would be happy to grab some Palestinian refugees from 1948 et al. Why? As far as I can tell from personal experience and randomly absorbed "knowledge," as a group, they are an urbane, fairly sophisticated and decently educated population. They're industrious, big into hospitality, and they like to have big families.

During the 1970s, I'd be shopping aggressively for Cambodians fleeing the Khmer Rouge --appealing qualities have lots of overlap with the Palestinians noted above-- and for Vietnamese refugees too.

Any time Haitian politics gets ugly, well... I think some proactive "skimming" of the Caribbean for particularly crowded rafts bound for capsizing en route to the United States could yield some grateful settlers, eh?

There are numerous opportunities for "population shopping" any time Africa has a serious conflict. Congo, Sudan, and the list just gets insanely long from there. Any time and place where a group of people are fleeing for their lives is a productively high-yield area for this purpose. Just imagine showing up in Rwanda with some military hardware and a heavy retinue of transport aircraft... I get to fulfill my fantasy of saving the oppressed and I get population at the same time.


Very very rigorous schooling would be crucial to providing as much cultural unity as possible on this "New Atlantis" or whatever the heck one could call it.

I would want to recruit some Gurkhas for training and organizing our conscripted military, another potential source for cultural unity.

Oh yes, we would ah try not to kill all the folks already in the Western Hemisphere... there's got to be a way to avoid that...

 

[Yossarian]

I think if you really want to be a good guy with the gate you should just reveal it to the world. You'll probably still end up being rich and famous as the discoverer, but this way the whole world gets to benefit from the discovery, not just you and your cronies.

 

[Coley]

I could see recruiting from regions hit with economic meltdowns,beyond the Rhodesians and Afrikaners.People like Newfoundlanders when the Cod collapsed,Argentinians during their meltdown,recruiting from poor regions like northern Maine and upstate NY,Mennonites from Belize and Paraguay,Mormons from Mexico.

 

[Burton K Wheeler]

Thanks to @Strategos' Risk for all the analysis.

Conquistador is one of my guilty pleasures. I only read it once, because the plot was paper-thin and I found most of the characters pretty repulsive for one reason or another, but it definitely stuck with me. The idea of what I'd do with my own gate into California is a pretty appealing fantasy.

Has anyone ever done a map based on the description of Family territories at the end of the book?

The only Conquistador map I could find on this site:

I decided to do a (very inaccurate) language map, because nations were very vague, from Stirling's Conquistador at around 2010.

View attachment 17580

 

[Strategos' Risk]

I was going to make a new thread called Conquistador Re-Revisited, but this is a pretty great discussion with annotations and is useful for historical reasons- not to mention it was bumped before (and allowed by a mod, too).

It is now 2019, ten years after the book's original future date of 2009. Not only has that year diverged heavily from ours, our reality has continued in dystopia ways. Though we are finally now seeing the prevalence of VR glasses, and Segways being mainstream seem more believable what with "hoverboards" being a silly fad and app-driven scooters becoming an actual mode of transportation in some cities.

As far as right-wing forces on the march... yikes. I remember when white supremacist neo-Nazi terrorists were the staple of techno-thrillers and safe super villains for Hollywood during the '90s. In some ways, the calcified, xenophobic, reactionary, white nationalist societies of New Virginia appear more present than ever. Or at least the yearning for such spaces.

I wouldn't agree Europeans fleeing muslims would appear in any significant numbers.
Islamic immigration just isn't that big a deal, there'd be very few people getting that worked up about it. And those who are do so because its their land they're taking over, they wouldn't want to run away.

It would appear with the events of the last five years or so, there would be more takers for this sort of thing. Many more.

This world, and its worldview, is depressing to view through the lens of our own depressing world. At least we have smartphones, I guess.

On a more quaint note, I do like the minimally-described 2009 of that book. I wonder what other examples of near-future sci-fi are there to laugh about how naive they were in retrospect, or gasp at how prophetic they are. Some of Charles Stross' and Ken MacLeod's works come to mind. Accidentally alternate history.

Does anyone still think of this book?

 

[modelcitizen]

.....

It is now 2019, ten years after the book's original future date of 2009. Not only has that year diverged heavily from ours, our reality has continued in dystopia ways. Though we are finally now seeing the prevalence of VR glasses, and Segways being mainstream seem more believable what with "hoverboards" being a silly fad and app-driven scooters becoming an actual mode of transportation in some cities.

As far as right-wing forces on the march... yikes. I remember when white supremacist neo-Nazi terrorists were the staple of techno-thrillers and safe super villains for Hollywood during the '90s. In some ways, the calcified, xenophobic, reactionary, white nationalist societies of New Virginia appear more present than ever. Or at least the yearning for such spaces.



It would appear with the events of the last five years or so, there would be more takers for this sort of thing. Many more.

This world, and its worldview, is depressing to view through the lens of our own depressing world. At least we have smartphones, I guess.

On a more quaint note, I do like the minimally-described 2009 of that book. I wonder what other examples of near-future sci-fi are there to laugh about how naive they were in retrospect, or gasp at how prophetic they are. Some of Charles Stross' and Ken MacLeod's works come to mind. Accidentally alternate history.

Does anyone still think of this book?

I would so vacuum Syrian refugees into my "New Atlantis." Just thinking of the restaurants!!! And many educated professionals too.

And maybe no heartbreaking image of a dead child face down on a beach.

 

[CraigD6]

Despite his control of New Virginia being saved in some part by the actions of a native American tracker and an involuntary colonist that is not white, sadly I think that if Rolfe and his like minded committee still retained (or regained) a gateway to our world, they would continue to take the same sorts of people as they did before and ignore the rest. Whilst our world is in many ways increasingly xenophobic and divisive and there would indeed be many takers for joining this new world, I don't see them getting let in. Rolfe would get an intake of people from the Baltic states and Ukraine, who have reason to fear a resurgent Soviet Union. Then he would get the many that these days feel disenfranchised somehow; the WASP Americans that hate the influx across the border to the south, the right of centre and far right of Europe that object to the tide coming across the Med, maybe the smaller wanna-be independent states (Catalan and Scottish to the front of the queue). Many wold be of a similar mindset to the original families. Legitimate refugees from the Middle East, Africa, Asia, would be few and far between, and probably be cherry picked rather than bought across in large numbers.

Despite the unpleasant tone of the book, as seen by the attitudes of the settlers, it still remains one of Stirling's better books and I would have liked a follow on rather than the saga that spun off of Islands in the Sea of Time. I imagine that old man Rolfe would like to see the new world found at the end used firstly as a massive hunting preserve.

 

[Strategos' Risk]

I think the Rolfes would pick those of a distinctly aristocratic bent. Despite formerly a bunch of WWII vets, they ended up being kings and queens of their robber empire. So they won't be picking up random suburban SUV-driving QAnon plebes, to make up a random stereotype of someone who might have a similar worldview as the Conquistador set, but lacks the pretensions of nobility or good breeding that he has. Definitely no Portland free speech demonstration-going hoi polloi would get in, either. Absolutely no one who uses Twitter or any form of social media. Given their bucolic bent, they'd definitely be recruiting from South African farmer families again in the modern day of our world.

Perhaps I'll have to dust off Conquistador Expanded one day. Maybe throw in one Syriac Christian clan, maybe some Crimeans, maybe some upper crust Tory Brexiters?

Again, the sad thing is that these days Conquistador seems almost quaint- the real world has an increasingly worse tone than the book.

 

[Lusitania]

Typical Stirling though for other than pied noir he completely ignored The tens of thousands of Portuguese forced to withdraw from African colonies or even Brazilians frustrated and scared or the violence and lack of prospects to built a lusophone community. The Italians in the book are his old army buddies but not from Italy. Also found lack of other disfranchised Europeans.

 

[B_Munro]

I had a personal theory about the radio business: there's actually a huge machine buried deep beneath Ralf's original house, a leftover (and only partially functioning) bit of tech from a now gone interdimensional empire, and what he stumbled upon was a radio frequency that activated it, not modifying a radio into an interdimensional travel device by accident. That's only plausible if you're Homer Simpson.

The Greek Empire broke up into city states? WTF? I thought the notion was that there was a bunch of small to middling empires speaking languages relating to Greek as the OTL Latin Languages do to the Roman one, from India to the Atlantic.

BTW, have you seen Goliath-Maps version of "Indo-European China?" I don't believe the original scenario at all (horse nomad armies were still getting their mojo together in those centuries, and warring states China fielded apparently huge armies - China would never be that militarized again), but he did something fairly cool with it:

https://www.deviantart.com/goliath-maps/art/The-Selang-Arsi-and-their-neighbours-763456456

 

[Lusitania]

I had a personal theory about the radio business: there's actually a huge machine buried deep beneath Ralf's original house, a leftover (and only partially functioning) bit of tech from a now gone interdimensional empire, and what he stumbled upon was a radio frequency that activated it, not modifying a radio into an interdimensional travel device by accident. That's only plausible if you're Homer Simpson.

The Greek Empire broke up into city states? WTF? I thought the notion was that there was a bunch of small to middling empires speaking languages relating to Greek as the OTL Latin Languages do to the Roman one, from India to the Atlantic.

BTW, have you seen Goliath-Maps version of "Indo-European China?" I don't believe the original scenario at all (horse nomad armies were still getting their mojo together in those centuries, and warring states China fielded apparently huge armies - China would never be that militarized again), but he did something fairly cool with it:

https://www.deviantart.com/goliath-maps/art/The-Selang-Arsi-and-their-neighbours-763456456

Hi pod I believe was the Alexander the Great empire survived long enough to push the nomad migration from steeps of Asia and Siberia into China breaking it into multiple countries like in Europe. Then later on the Alexander empire collapsed.

 

[Strategos' Risk]

Typical Stirling though for other than pied noir he completely ignored The tens of thousands of Portuguese forced to withdraw from African colonies or even Brazilians frustrated and scared or the violence and lack of prospects to built a lusophone community. The Italians in the book are his old army buddies but not from Italy. Also found lack of other disfranchised Europeans.

Yeah, that's why I added Iberian colonizers with these guys. Also wouldn't there be Greek exiles right after WWII

 

[Lusitania]

Yeah, that's why I added Iberian colonizers with these guys. Also wouldn't there be Greek exiles right after WWII

The thing was the pied noire left Algeria in the 1960s while Portuguese colonist left in 1974. So instead of going to South Africa or Brazil many would of gone there but as separate group.

As for Greeks right after war no since that’s when doorway discovered. But could see when turkey attack Cyprus and when military government was replaced by civilian. They in turn would of supported many new ones to migrate after financial problems.

 

[Lusitania]

The thing was the pied noire left Algeria in the 1960s while Portuguese colonist left in 1974. So instead of going to South Africa or Brazil many would of gone there but as separate group.

As for Greeks right after war no since that’s when doorway discovered. But could see when turkey attack Cyprus and when military government was replaced by civilian. They in turn would of supported many new ones to migrate after financial problems.

Also late 1970s right wing government in Brazil falls to democracy thousands of people could of been candidates to join Portuguese.

A Spanish group also could of been brought in when rightwing government falls in Argentina and after Pinochet falls in Chile.

 

[Strategos' Risk]

Brazil might be a bit too exotic for New Virginia. But hey, I added one Persian shah exile family (and alluded to a smaller Persian Jewish one) so they could probably fit in as one of the oddball borderline cases in Rolfe's kkkangaroo court.

As for Greeks right after war no since that’s when doorway discovered. But could see when turkey attack Cyprus and when military government was replaced by civilian. They in turn would of supported many new ones to migrate after financial problems.

That's a great idea! Though they did grab some German Balts (and in one passage, Poles and Lithuanians) in the '40s so apparently their organization moved fast.

I'd like to continue Conquistador Expanded eventually by adding some of these ideas, but I've got other projects I'm more interested in, and also there's a bit too much perverse curiosity in classifying these "white refugee" groups. It definitely doesn't feel as anachronistic and safe as it did a decade ago.

People can always feel free to add their own members of the ideas of the 23 (or flesh out reddie 2.0's list).

 

[modelcitizen]

Syrian and Lebanese refugees can pass for Italian or Greek as long as they avoid conversation. Once "New Phoenicia" is up and running, then they can feel at home.

 

[Mr_ Bondoc]

Syrian and Lebanese refugees can pass for Italian or Greek as long as they avoid conversation. Once "New Phoenicia" is up and running, then they can feel at home.

Unfortunately, as shown by the Trump Administration or Prime Minister Boris Johnson, that won't hold water for long. Give it 30 seconds before everything goes to hell in "New Phoenicia..."