Alternate Alternate Stirling Timelines

This is a very interesting question, especially if you expand the discussion to include Turtledove.

Although both authors have their detractors on this board, I'd wager that without the influence of Turtledove - even more than Sterling - this board might not exist at all and, if it did, it would be much smaller.

While I count myself among one of Turtledove's main detractors as a novelist, his main AH series created PoDs and explored divergences that were pretty unique at the time of their writing.

We might decry HT's tendency to project real historical people into his timelines or present some AH events as little more than our history with the names and locations changed, but the basic premise of the TL-191 series remains fascinating and plausible: What would be the long-term effects of CSA independence achieved in part due to British and French involvement? To this day, I consider his central conceit that the US would find itself drawn into an alliance with Germany perceptive and plausible, as well as the probability that this would make any European war automatically a world war with major combat occuring in the Americas as well. His presentation of the US in this war as a somewhat prussianized, a bit less democratic, and very militarized nation also is plausible. In fact, from sports and socialists to race relations and economics, he paints a very plausible portrayal of a 20th century far darker than the one we inhabit. Too bad he tells this story through so many incredibly wooden and repetitive POV characters.

Again a good point. With Turtledove though I get the sense that the nature and rate of his writing - idea, brainstorming, notes, collating and spell-checking, publishing - makes it very different. There's less a sense that there are roads left untraveled - he just writes so much so fast. The bigger question with him would be - what would this place be like without him? Alas, though, the answer is likely "boring and obscure."

Of course if you know of an alternative direction he could have gone, please do tell. If there was any truth to the conceit that Turtledove originally intended the Great War to be an Entente victory, with the US being the Nazi parallel, that would indeed be fun to read. Or write for that matter.
 
Of course if you know of an alternative direction he could have gone, please do tell. If there was any truth to the conceit that Turtledove originally intended the Great War to be an Entente victory, with the US being the Nazi parallel, that would indeed be fun to read. Or write for that matter.

And if the U.S. and its allies win the third round, *that* would be even more interesting.

However, given the growing industrial power of the U.S. and the weaknesses of the Confederacy, the U.S. losing gets more and more unlikely as the years progress.

Maybe they're about to finish the Confederacy for good in alt-WWI when, with the Entente victorious, Britain and France force them to back off with minimal gains?

It's not really a loss, but it's definitely the fruits of victory being lost at the last second and I'd expect a lot of rage in the U.S. It'd be an alternative "stab in the back" myth.
 
And if the U.S. and its allies win the third round, *that* would be even more interesting.

However, given the growing industrial power of the U.S. and the weaknesses of the Confederacy, the U.S. losing gets more and more unlikely as the years progress.

Maybe they're about to finish the Confederacy for good in alt-WWI when, with the Entente victorious, Britain and France force them to back off with minimal gains?

It's not really a loss, but it's definitely the fruits of victory being lost at the last second and I'd expect a lot of rage in the U.S. It'd be an alternative "stab in the back" myth.

True and quite doable. What hampered Turtledove most in doing things like this was his nigh-absolute focus on the, well, American Front. That meant that he ran the Great War in Europe as an almost ludicrously straight parallel, with only obvious differences resulting from America on the other side. Even many of those - like the implications of British involvement in Canada over France - were overlooked.

If we push that aside, he could easily have had neutral Ottomans or any one of a dozen other things that would have seen Germany reduced in 1916 or 1917 and the United States humiliated once again. But since it was simply an issue of narrative perspective, and driven by little besides market forces, I find it difficult to imagine Turtledove doing so. This is a man who caters to his base.
 
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Oops. I meant "fourth round."

U.S. loses Confederacy, loses Second Mexican War, and isn't satisfied with the results of WWI (I don't think them being outright defeated is possible, realistically), but the U.S. and Germany, both of them rather scary this time, win WWII.
 
In some ways I actually think that if the USA had put Grant in charge of the army and he developed an aggressive US Army with a tendency like the one of OTL to look into both firepower and mobility as well as putting a great deal of effort into strategic planning that a longer and less clear-cut victory for either side Second Mexican War would be even more interesting. He'd be dead of throat cancer by the time any such war broke out, though I can see him putting someone like Emory Upton in charge of the US Army as his successor ITTL.

It's very possible Hiram Maxim might find some willing customers with such a US Army, and the Maxim Gun would be in use earlier as a US weapon. The CS Army is portrayed in that war as still less disciplined than a US Army walking to the path of our own version would be so there's the prospect of CS Muzzle-loader armed troops charging into Maxim Guns and getting mowed down.

By ATL-WWI the US Army develops its modern emphasis on mobility and firepower and everything that makes ours good, amplifying the numerical advantage it has with a firepower advantage, and able to send army groups against CS Armies. The CSA, however, through a lot of Anglo-French help develops sufficient firepower of its own to prove too tough to completely crack with WWI mobility.

By ATL-WWII the US Army, with its influence from the Second Reich would be going in armed with the M-1, the Tommy Gun, the BAR, and the equivalent of postwar Shermans. To keep the Barbarossa overtone intact the USA under Social Democracy has distributed most of its forces in the east where the CSA attacks in the West and is in the process of switching to better tanks and aircraft that outgun anything the CSA has when the CSA starts Blackbeard.

By the end of WWII, the US Army is marching with equivalents to the M60 and carrying M14s for use against a CS Army heavily outnumbered and outgunned and trying to use terrain to counter all of this and not having overmuch luck with it. And against a US Army with numbers vastly greater than IOTL and with the OTL one's emphasis on superior firepower at all costs and on mobility, the CSA ceases to exist by the 1940s.
 
True and quite doable. What hampered Turtledove most in doing things like this was his nigh-absolute focus on the, well, American Front. That meant that he ran the Great War in Europe as an almost ludicrously straight parallel, with only obvious differences resulting from America on the other side. Even many of those - like the implications of British involvement in Canada over France - were overlooked.

Unfortunately so true. I'm not sure WW1 in Europe was run as a complete parallel because we really don't know enough, and it might as well not even have happened.

One area where Turtledove really dropped the AH ball is in....zeppelins, that Solid Sterling Staple of AH and ISOTS. Germany allied with the USA and its (let's pretend earlier developed helium deposits) would give the Central Powers such a cool advantage in aviation. I get all wiggly inside just imagining squadrons of German battlecruisers operating from New York escorted by massive long-range, and nearly invulnerable' helium-filled airships with hook-on Albatros fighters, with the massive US battlefeet supporting them. Take that, John Bull! The more I think of it, HT never does zeppelins. Never! Maybe he should be drummed out of the AH profession, after all.
 
Maybe I'd understand and fit in to the general culture of AH.com if I knew what a Draka was.

(OK, OK! I've read a summary or two, probably at TVTropes or some such place:p!)

However, one story that Stirling co-wrote, along with Gibson (often credited with inventing "cyberpunk") was The Difference Engine. I hope I don't have to explain what that novel was, but then y'all are probably quite astonished that I'd never heard of "Draka" before joining this site.

I'm just wondering, with all this reverence for Stirling hereabouts, has anyone here done much with the Difference Engine timeline?

Personally I always wondered what would become of Karl Marx's revolutionary city-state of Manhattan. I imagined that on the technical front they'd develop fluidic Difference Engines that processed at the speed of sound, output video in the form of a screen made of pixels of variously-colored flame, and could react to and manipulate audio input. A sort of Difference Furnace if you will...
 
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