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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
AH.com Remakes and Continuations
TL-191: Filling the Gaps - A project by Craigo that tries to fill in the historical developments and events that aren't directly mentioned in the series' canon, but must have occured given the nature of the narrative.
TL-191: After the End - A timeline continuation project by David Bar Elias.
See Also
The series' entry on Uchronia.net
Series overview in the Harry Turtledove Wikia
Mowque Reads TL-191 - Mowque rereads the TL-191 series chapter-by-chapter and discusses and analyzes its content with fellow AH.commers.
TL-191 Map Thread 1 - Maps of the world situation and countries in this series during various eras.
TL-191 Map Thread 2 - 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.
Discussion on the realism of TL-191 as an AH work
Non-Parallellism in TL-191 - TL-191 is often criticized for having far too many parallels to OTL. Yet, as this thread tries to point out, it does try avoid this trend from time to time, adhering a bit more to logical conclusions on how the different setting and context would influence certain historical events and developments.
DBWI: The Turtledove TL-191 Discussion Thread - A fun and expansive DBWI thread in which AH.commers talked about a Southern Victory series equivalent from the point of view of people from TL-191. Of course, the analogous series dealt with real OTL history. The thread includes some nifty book cover parodies by Tom_NUFC, appearing on page 4 and 5.
Turtledove's OTL novels in the TL-191 universe - Similar to the above, but the discussion is shorther and without the DBWI element.
Axis of TL-191 - An ISOT scenario in the vein of John Birmingham's Axis of Time series, but with the ISOT destination of the OTL ship and crew being TL-191 instead of OTL history.
Your area in TL-191 - Discussion about how the domicile of AH.commers would fare in TL-191 and what its probable fate would be.
Realism issues with the Mormon Rebellion in TL-191
Realism issues with TL-191's Second Great War
Musings on the odder differences between TL-191 and OTL
TL-191 US and CS Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates - Thread about the heads of state of TL 191's USA and CSA.
"How Few Remain" TV Miniseries in the Works