Does anyone here think Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain is plausible?

Art

In Fire on the Mountain, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry Arsenal succeeds, instead of failing. The end result is a socialist South called Nova Africa, Texas and California independent, or part of Mexico, Garibaldi and Hatian "mule" cavalry. I found it as patently absurd as Bring the Jubilee. And I would love to read real good successful slave revolt in America!
 

B_Munro

At best, John Brown brings about an earlier Civil war and maybe the slaves are freed a couple years earlier than OTL. At worst, he manages to set off a big enough slave revolt that the North is horrified by the slaughter of Whites and fails to intervene when the South carries out a policy of extermination on any slave within a hundred miles of the area of revolt who doesn't buff white shoe with his or her tongue quickly enough, and set off panicky massacres of slaves throughout the south.

Bruce
 

Art

YES!

That's exactly what I think. Don't get me wrong, I'm NOT a white supremacist, but know the time of the American Civil War quite well, and the factors for a successful slave revolt, let alone one that results in a socialist government, is incredibly implausible. The time for such a revolt would be after the Civil War, rather than before it. I don't hate socialists, either. I LOVED Reds: a Revolutionary Timeline, Except for retaining that psychotic J. Edgar Hoover. But that timeline was really set up, and the reasons for it were extremly well explained. Bisson's was terrible. It was as outright silly as "Man in the High Castle" and Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee" , both horror alts for which no adequate explanation is ever given. There was this site where people could comment on the book, and people were mostly saying stuff like, "if only this could have happened, a "Gentler America" and nonsense like that. It does my heart good to hear sense, for a change.
 
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