Conquistador Book-Is it Plausible?

I think it was the later migrations that got pushed into China - one example given that I remember was the Magyars, which makes sense. A lot of these tribes headed west because of a weakened Europe - here they head east because of a weakened China
 
We don't get a whole heck of a lot of details about Eurasia from what I recall, but I believe there was something about Iranian or possibly Tocharian nomads taking over China that I was a bit skeptical about.

Yeah, thats the main thing that stands out to me.
I hope that was just rule of cool rather than racism.



Seems inplausible , even if these tribes were pushed east...IOTL the tribes that were pushed west were far more Mongolian than caucasian looking anyway. They were then largely genetically assimilated by the Europeans.
Chinese who don't speak anything like Chinese I could buy but white looking Chinese? Nah.
 
Many of the early peoples of central Asia were probably Indo European speaking such as the Tocharians and the Kushans. The mummies from the Tarum basin looked like the could have bee Irish.
Many of the Chinese probably look like the Weegers of western china.
 

Hnau

Banned
I have the book! One implausibility is that ITTL Alexander lives until 280 BCE... and dies at 76. That seems highly unlikely for a person with his lifestyle in this time period. I'm not saying he couldn't have lived longer, but 76 years old? Come on...

His successor Alexander II is reported to rule over an empire that stretches "from Iberia to the Ganges River". This empire enters decline around the turn of the millenium and by 300 CE "the last pretence of political unity was gone". There's a lot about the Iranian-speaking and Tocharian groups migrating into China, but nothing about Germanic peoples.

Overall, I say it's pretty realistic.
 
I have the book! One implausibility is that ITTL Alexander lives until 280 BCE... and dies at 76. That seems highly unlikely for a person with his lifestyle in this time period. I'm not saying he couldn't have lived longer, but 76 years old? Come on...

His successor Alexander II is reported to rule over an empire that stretches "from Iberia to the Ganges River". This empire enters decline around the turn of the millenium and by 300 CE "the last pretence of political unity was gone". There's a lot about the Iranian-speaking and Tocharian groups migrating into China, but nothing about Germanic peoples.

Overall, I say it's pretty realistic.

For what was probably a cobbled together meta-narrative of over 2000 years of history I give it a pretty big thumbs up.

It can't be the down and dirty detailed to the very fine points type of history that fills in all the vague points one might like in a dedicated TL, but it works perfectly for the story and it's narrative and on the surface I agree it's pretty plausible.

For instance, imaging a time traveler to OTL reading a brief snippet about the rise and fall of Rome, he'd probably be scratching his head over how that was even plausible if the history is divergent enough.
 
The North American stuff seemed fairly plausible, what with the Aztec hegemony collapsing and a bunch of independent Nahua speaking city states replacing them, I also seem to remember reading something somewhere saying that Mexico was on the cusp of leaping into the Bronze age like the books mention happening
 
The North American stuff seemed fairly plausible, what with the Aztec hegemony collapsing and a bunch of independent Nahua speaking city states replacing them, I also seem to remember reading something somewhere saying that Mexico was on the cusp of leaping into the Bronze age like the books mention happening

In one of the appendices it mentions Mexico was going into a Bronze Age when Rolfe arrived and then the plagues pretty much drove people to extinction.
 

Hnau

Banned
It seems like they were already using bronze by the time Rolfe showed up. I'm not sure it is likely the Mexican plateau would be divided up into city-states... it seems like an area that would be hospitable to empires. But it's not that big of a deal.
 
There were no Goths in China in the book. The wiki, amazingly, is incorrect.

It was the Central Asian tribes that went into China, though technically speaking what we think of as China had not come into being at the time. The Tocharians came in first, gradually displacing the indigenous nomads on the Chinese fringes / cohabiting with the Chinese. Then the Iranian people's behind them came in and pushed them out of China proper. He doesn't give a lot of detail, but roughly speaking in the modern day Manchuria, Mongolia, and the northeast of China are Tocharian, the Chinese core speaks Iranian-ish languages but is racially as OTL, and Southern China has some Han bits among the local languages.

No Goths.
 

Flubber

Banned
The book has been discussed a few time in Books & Media and that's where this thread belongs. Search for threads begun by Strategos' Risk.

Leaving aside the migration questions already raised here, there are serious problems with New Virginia's population growth among other things. The book's 2009 is also very different from our own both technologically and socially.

The Gate itself is a deus ex machina and forgivable as a plot setup. The rest of the book, however, is Stirling's usual seemingly plausible claptrap. It seems okay when you're first reading it but the trouble begins when you actually begin to think. Just like the Draka series actually.

So, to answer the OP's question, no, the book isn't plausible at all.
 
I have the book! One implausibility is that ITTL Alexander lives until 280 BCE... and dies at 76. That seems highly unlikely for a person with his lifestyle in this time period. I'm not saying he couldn't have lived longer, but 76 years old? Come on...


Though several of his generals did.

Iirc, Antigonus, Ptolemy and Seleucus (maybe others) all made it to 80 or thereabouts, so clearly it's not impossible.

However, for it to happen I'm pretty sure the PoD would need to be before that arrow wound which punctured his lung on the Indian campaign. I agree with Mary Renault that after that his chances of making old bones went sharply downhill.


Overall, I say it's pretty realistic.

Inclined to agree. It's not half as wild as The Peshawar Lancers.
 
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As far as I remember it, the migrations did not have any tribes moving from Europe to China. Rather, when the climate deterioration that began the movement of tribes into the Roman Empire OTL kicked off, tribes in TTL instead went eastwards, pushing the next tribe on untill the domino effect had the end tribes pushed into China.

I found the premise of the OTL -like starting world much harder to swallow, it seemed the authour had bought the "clash of civilizations" rethoric hook, line and sinker.

I dropped the book halfway thorough thogh, cause I found that I hated all the characters. This is rare for me, the only other books I can remember this happening with is John Normans, and Peter Bretts "Desert Spear".
 

ingemann

Banned
Let look at tyhe back history, Alexander live longer and set up a dynasty. The Roman Empire never develop (Alex conquer if I remember correctly), 600 years after Alexander his empire collapse, and because the middle east has been Greekified, it end up small city states which never reunifies, because they are Greeks. The Germanic tribes crush the celts and Europe are split between Greeks in the south and Germanics in the north. The Germanic move to the east push the West Scytians into Central Asia, where they push the Tocharians and East Scytians into China (which end up Euro-asian racial) which end up as small states. The Middle Eastern Greeks have developed the printing press, but writing fail to spread into Germanic lands.

So let look at some of the early problems which I know about. The middle eastern Greeks have been under centralised for 600 years and because they Greek they suddenly give up centralised states for city states. That's a bad joke, empires replaced city states for good reasons and the Byzantines showed that Greek didn't adopt city states again. As for writing, the Germanic developed runes soon after their contact with the Romans and it spread to all Germanic people quite fast. As for China my biggest problem is not the population replacement of Mandarin, that's not impossible (especially if they hit in one of the more trouble periods), that are extremely unlikely that a unified empire doesn't rise. China are perfect for big unified empires and southern China are still populated by original Chinese groups.

Other critic are the fact that the Hawaiians are here cannibalistic, there was a good reason that the Polynesians was cannibals and the Hawaiians wasn't, and that was the lack of contact with external groups. Systematic cannibalism only make sense in two contexts; for hunter-gartners or for highly mobile raider cultures (which doesn't have to deal overly much with the relatives afterward).
 
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