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@RyanF has written a book review of one of the classics of the AH genre, For Want of a Nail, by Robert Sobel.
Discuss.
Discuss.
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Book Nook: For Want of a Nail
- Thread starter David Flin
- Start date
Two chapters of real history told with AH bias? A critique at the end saying "man AH-Sobel's so biased"? That is grand commitment to the bit!
It's really, really weird that this is a book everyone in AH knows about but is out of print (see also Back In The USSA). With indie publishing having a thousand niches and various old or dead writers's books as kindle downloads, you'd think someone would have it up to get small money.
It's really, really weird that this is a book everyone in AH knows about but is out of print (see also Back In The USSA). With indie publishing having a thousand niches and various old or dead writers's books as kindle downloads, you'd think someone would have it up to get small money.
I've not finished it yet but the amazing thing about For Want of a Nail is how it prefigures so many fully-formed academic AH tropes - not a flawed prototype but a masterpiece from first principles.
I actually followed this theory (having heard of it earlier) for my most important AH flags in All Union and went a step farther by having them actually be intentionally bland/mediocre to deter their use as nationalist rallying symbols.
(The lowlight is the Independent Republic of Romania, a Soviet puppet state whose flag can be described as "Gaddafi Libya monocolor but blue instead of green)
It struck me when reading it that For Want of a Nail really is the first AH timeline, complete with a focus on election tables (while large amounts of violence gets skimmed over). It’s also racist at times, which is pretty normal for a book written in 1973 but that’s a foible of a lot of AH timelines - both because the wish fulfilment attracts people on the fringes, and it’s easy to fall into that if you only ever have a birds’ eye view of a scenario.
Kramer Associates is, I think, the biggest thing that it does right while being still quite original. The idea of there being a cross between Chiquita and the British East India Company is very plausible too. I will say, it did get quite ridiculous when it somehow separated itself from the metropole successfully. In general, megacorporations like this are dependent on the metropole, by its sufferance or support or otherwise, and though they often deform the metropole’s government to keep power, if the metropole wants them dead, they die. The East India Company put up a fight to efforts within Parliament to regulate it and even succeeded for a while, but ultimately it did fold after they got passed. I don’t really buy the idea that a megacorporation could survive being separated from the metropole, much less be the first to build a nuke. That said, it’s an interesting idea.
Kramer Associates is, I think, the biggest thing that it does right while being still quite original. The idea of there being a cross between Chiquita and the British East India Company is very plausible too. I will say, it did get quite ridiculous when it somehow separated itself from the metropole successfully. In general, megacorporations like this are dependent on the metropole, by its sufferance or support or otherwise, and though they often deform the metropole’s government to keep power, if the metropole wants them dead, they die. The East India Company put up a fight to efforts within Parliament to regulate it and even succeeded for a while, but ultimately it did fold after they got passed. I don’t really buy the idea that a megacorporation could survive being separated from the metropole, much less be the first to build a nuke. That said, it’s an interesting idea.