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The Marble Man: The Guns of the South, The Lost Cause, and Harry Turtledove

The biggest problem I have with the book (and have had since I first picked it up in my early teens) was the use of South Africans as time-traveling gunrunners; even at that young age, I wondered "surely there are neo-Confederates & other white supremacists in the early '90s who would've jumped at the chance to give the South AK-47s?" I suspect that given the end of apartheid at the time of writing, Turtledove might've figured that angry AWB types made good villains; yet they felt out of place even for AH, and the justification for/ultimate goal in altering the Civil War that they gave Lee was, to put it politely, a mix of clunky and "huh??" Yes, they used the excuse that their time machine could only go back 150 years, but a more believable use of them as characters (esp. given the scene with the AWB book laying out their ideology) would've been their going back to WWII to make sure Hitler won and South Africa became an apartheid "paradise." Were this book to be written today, I have little doubt there's plenty of R-W militia groups who'd be used in their place, and to far more chilling effect.

I never had the impression, going by unreliable memory, that the AWB had the resources of a modern-day state behind them. They had AK-47s, a handful of more advanced weapons, history books, radios and a small number of other things. They didn’t have tanks, aircraft or nukes. That suggests, to me, that they were a paramilitary group at best and there were limits to what they could obtain before going back in time to set wrong what once went right.

Their options are therefore more limited than you might suppose, if their goal is to create a client state and/or ally for Apartheid SA.

Nazi Germany? They would have trouble changing the course of the war - a few thousand AKs aren’t going to make much of a difference - and it would be very hard to gain a position of influence over the Reich. The gap between AWB and the Nazis isn’t that big - besides, the Nazis might regard South Africa as an enemy state.

The Boer Republic? Already isolated, in their minds, from the world; about to go to war with the UK, a war they might still lose even if they had modern weapons. Coming to terms with the UK might work, but would be ideologically problematic. Plus, too great a risk of their team coming apart, as they’re not strangers in a very strange and potentially hostile land.

The CSA offers a number of advantages. The tech gap is wide enough that Lee et al will have no conception of what awaits them (radios, for example), allowing AWB to manipulate Confederate politics and build a 1940s tech base years before its time ... giving them a chance to embed themselves in the fabric of society. The CSA will also be isolated, allowing them a chance to ally with South Africa when - if - it becomes an apartheid state; it will make the CSA dependent on AWB, which will give them a great deal of additional clout. And, as the South Africans are inherently not Southerners, it will be a great deal harder for their group to disintegrate and merge into the local population.

Hope that makes sense.

Chris
 
It seems a pretty firm-but-fair review by @moth, as the novel is still being read now.

The "Lost Cause" and mainstream acceptability of confederate symbols until relatively recently is something that has to be remembered, because the further we get from then the weirder it's going to seem to future generations. I have a friend in Georgia who was genuinely shaken at eighteen to read the primary sources for secession and saw they all mentioned slavery, because it went against everything he'd been told. I bet you in ten years time, another eighteen-year-old will find that unfathomable, "how could you not know?", because by then someone's probably used lasers to turn Stone Mountain into a Star Wars picture.
I can literally track in the last few years discussions with my Dad on this where he seems to have become a lot more accepting of the point about why the Stars and Bars is so awkward having grown up only seeing it in stuff like Dukes of Hazzard.

To quote myself from theLost Cause: Genre Trope to Avoid thread last year


Being born and raised in Alabama, I can vouch for this being the experience for an awful lot of folks IF they bother to go looking beyond what they learned in fourth grade Alabama history classes. I've also had the experience of seeing people arguing on Facebook, saying Alabama didn't succeed due to slavery while citing the Alabama Ordinance of Secession to back their case, having apparently never read it. The Lost Cause myth is deeply entrenched here, to put it mildly.

It's also partly the reason why, despite having a Civil War alternate history idea, I've decided for the moment not to pursue writing about it.
 
I mean I feel like Dad's somewhat excused as we're in Britain and, well, who actually discusses the American Civil War here?

There was an incident in Sandhurst, IIRC, when they hired an American to lecture cadets about the American Civil War. It became a little problematic when it was discovered that he was teaching 'the war of northern aggression' ...
 
It seems a pretty firm-but-fair review by @moth, as the novel is still being read now.

The "Lost Cause" and mainstream acceptability of confederate symbols until relatively recently is something that has to be remembered, because the further we get from then the weirder it's going to seem to future generations. I have a friend in Georgia who was genuinely shaken at eighteen to read the primary sources for secession and saw they all mentioned slavery, because it went against everything he'd been told. I bet you in ten years time, another eighteen-year-old will find that unfathomable, "how could you not know?", because by then someone's probably used lasers to turn Stone Mountain into a Star Wars picture.

It'd be an improvement that's for sure.
 
I'm not saying this by claiming to be on the right side of history, but when I first read GOTS in the early '00s, I always thought it strained credibility that the entire Confederate government having a change of heart just because they read the critique of the future. It made them all marble men at that time, insofar they would willingly allow themselves to be shamed by a future they knew not of, and as one of the senators in the says, "sounds like a damnyankee!" So the whole conceit of them uprooting their entire cultural fabric and destroying their own economy- it's not as if the Rivington Men brought with them notes on how to build automated factories, nor would they know about that- is fundamentally unsound. Not just from a historical or 21st century moral viewpoint, but it's simply unconvincing as a plot point.

That said, the idea of an ISOT happening and that's only known to a single government has always fascinated me, and I always was curious what would have happened in the GOTS world afterwards even if it was run by ahistorically enlightened Confederates.
 
That said, the idea of an ISOT happening and that's only known to a single government has always fascinated me, and I always was curious what would have happened in the GOTS world afterwards even if it was run by ahistorically enlightened Confederates.

I remember it's noted at the end that the US has started producing their own copies of the AK-47 and gone marching off into Canada with them, so I can't really imagine they have good things in mind for the CSA in the future, slavery or no slavery.
 
How Few Remain but in the GOTS universe would make an entertaining read. I know that GOTS is very much a one-shot story but it would be great to see sequels of it nonetheless even in fanfic form, but there's few. I wrote one lousy one years ago. The best and only one I've seen is a DeviantArt map that shows where the world would be present day in the GOTS world, it had a lot of tantalizing references to conspiracies both maintaining the Confederacy's secret and trying to combat it.
 
While I must admit that I have not read GOTS, I feel an in-depth examination of alternate history's relationship with the CSA is long overdue. At least all bit the most egregious don't try to whitewash the Nazis.

There is, I fear, a need for a similar discussion about AH and the European colonial powers.
 
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You can find my review on Wikipedia. I stand by it - except one problem. What did the AWB plan to accomplish by killing Lee and co? I would have liked it to be the first of a series- and a vignette with various Confederate leaders reading their OTL memoirs!
 
You can find my review on Wikipedia. I stand by it - except one problem. What did the AWB plan to accomplish by killing Lee and co? I would have liked it to be the first of a series- and a vignette with various Confederate leaders reading their OTL memoirs!

Good question. It seems suicidal. Perhaps they hoped the attack would be blamed on pro-slavery factions and therefore intimidate the anti-slavery factions? Or new elections would have to be held, giving Forrest a second chance?
 
I don't often post negative reviews, I want authors to feel comfortable working with us and for our site not to feel hostile. Harry is someone we respect and who has been kind to us.

When I get one submitted, I think very carefully if I want to publish it. I felt in this case that the review was spontaneous (I did not ask for it to be written), it was fair (it critiqued the work not the man) and it was aimed at a piece of work significant enough to take criticism (this is not going to be the first google result for the book or convince a novice writer to stop writing).

I haven't read the book in question so I do not know if I would agree with the review but I felt it was a legitimate attempt to talk about the book.
I was pleasantly surprised to.see my review on wikipedia. I stand by every word of it but still can't understand what the AWB intended to accomplish by assassinating Lee!
 
I was pleasantly surprised to.see my review on wikipedia. I stand by every word of it but still can't understand what the AWB intended to accomplish by assassinating Lee!

Perhaps they bought too much into the mythology and decided that it would be better to get rid of him, rather than let the ban-slavery effect sink under its own weight.
 
holy shit

I need to get to a computer to respond properly, but, yeah

holy shit
Check my review. To me the only defect was the AWB's attempt on Lee - they could hardly have hoped to take over the Confederacy. I would rather have liked a series - and also the reaction.of various Confederate Generals to reading their biographies!
 
Check my review. To me the only defect was the AWB's attempt on Lee - they could hardly have hoped to take over the Confederacy. I would rather have liked a series - and also the reaction.of various Confederate Generals to reading their biographies!
"How did we lose when we did nothing wrong and were upstanding heroes? Maybe these books from the 1970s onwards will shed some light on it?"
 
OK to comment? Then I have just one question: Why was Lee a neurotic? I'm not that familiar with the ACW. And if he was, how bad were the other generals (competence-wise!)?

(I didn't read the book, so I can't say much about it, except to wonder "Why did the AWB get their hands on a time machine? Shouldn't that be much harder than getting some black market weapons?")

And about HT whitewashing Lee: I don't know his reasons. Was he that naive to believe what he writes? I can't believe that. Was he pandering to the audience? Quite possible.
 
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And about HT whitewashing Lee: I don't know his reasons. Was he that naive to believe what he writes? I can't believe that. Was he pandering to the audience? Quite possible.
He was naive at best in following the then popular "Shelby Foote School" of Confederate apologists. At best he was one himself, which was far from unusual at the time.

In neither case is he above criticism for the bullshit.
 
Never heard of that guy until now - but at least I hope that HT never had the bad sense to write that "the French Maquis did far worse things than the Ku Klux Klan ever did".
In How Few Remain HT has Stonewall lecture Frederick Douglass about how he's nice to slaves and has Douglass take this positively. So no, I wouldn't give him that much credit.
 
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