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The Southern Victory series
AKA TL-191. Sometimes inaccurately known as the Great War series. One of Harry Turtledove's more recent works, a very long series of very long books dealing with a Confederate victory.
The Southern Victory series is perhaps the most often criticised of all Turtledove's works, embodying the common criticisms of poor editing, flat characters whose defining characteristics are repeated every time they appear, and the very obvious appearance of OTL events in an ATL setting where they often do not make sense. Generally speaking, this criticism has worsened throughout the series: many have praised How Few Remain, which is also told from the perspective of historical rather than invented characters, for its relatively original story and concepts. Some of this persisted into the Great War trilogy, which contains worthwhile concepts such as a powerful American Socialist Party, but it is generally agreed that the rot set in with the American Empire trilogy. Flocculencio, noting that American Empire was originally just going to be one book and was later expanded to three big volumes, speculates that Turtledove is unnecessarily padding his books in order to get more royalties to put his kids through college. Unfortunately, he now has a sufficient fanbase that this works.
The Southern Victory series is home to Sam Carsten, who embodies Turtledove's text repetition disease, infamous on the forum. In case you didn't catch it the first 52,587 times, Sam sunburns easily. And zinc oxide cream doesn't help much.
List of books in the series
- How Few Remain
Great War trilogy
- American Front
- Walk in Hell
- Breakthroughs
American Empire trilogy
- Blood and Iron
- The Centre Cannot Hold
- The Victorious Opposition
Settling Accounts tetralogy
- Return Engagement
- Drive to the East
- The Grapple
- In at the Death
See Also
The series' entry on Uchronia.net
Series overview in the Harry Turtledove Wikia
TL-191: After the End - A timeline continuation project by David Bar Elias.
TL-191 Map Thread - Maps of the world situation and countries in this series during various eras.
Photos from Featherston's Confederacy (TL 191) - Thread with photos stylized or photomanipulated to look like they came from this series.
TL-191 US and CS Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates - Thread about the heads of state of TL 191's USA and CSA.