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Review: Guns of the South

I was going to say "I wonder why this book was his breakthrough after a decade of writing" and then I see the cover again of a famous historical figure holding a modern gun, very clearly telling you what's up and offering something unusual and it's in a very well-known setting Americans like reading about.

And hey, what's the cover for the first Worldwar?

71SZCnjrxlL.jpg
 
I was going to say "I wonder why this book was his breakthrough after a decade of writing" and then I see the cover again of a famous historical figure holding a modern gun, very clearly telling you what's up and offering something unusual and it's in a very well-known setting Americans like reading about.
Dibs on my next book's cover art featuring a famous historical figure holding an anachronistic gun.
 
One thing about Salt's comment on the Afrikaners is to remember when this book was published. It was presumably written a year, or maybe more, before then, at a time when apartheid in South Africa was only painfully slowly coming to an end. There was fear of a civil war in South Africa and the storming of the Kempton Park World Trade Centre by AVF and AWB had yet to come in 1993, a point which was seen as coming close to provoking a war.

Thus, I would argue, especially writing in the late 1980s/early 1990s, the portrayal of the time-travelling racialist/racist fanatics, was pretty accurate in terms of how you could see such men behaving and talking, nightly on TV. They may now seem 'puppy kickers', but at the time the book was produced this was an accurate reflection of what you could witness and, in fact, can still see. Nick Broomfield's two documentaries of him meeting Eugene Terreblanche, in 1991 and 2006, do highlight this, as does Louis Theroux's 2000 interview with him.

The quick abolition of slavery by the South in the novel does jar. However, it is perhaps not as much of a stretch of the imagination as again it might seem now. Teaching of the American Civil War used to highlight a whole range of aspects which are now neglected in favour of an exclusive focus on slavery. This neglects, for example, that some slave states fought for the Union and there were many thousands of supporters of slavery who lived in the North; indeed fought on the Union side. Given that Russia abolished serfdom in 1861, it might not seem as extreme as it might now, to envisage that one way or another the South would have been compelled to scrap formal slavery. What is likely, though, as was the case in northern states which were early abolishers of slavery (of course, all states had had it when the USA was formed), such as Ohio, instead used indentured labour which was slavery in all but name. Turtledove, thus, is getting to grips with a more complex picture than the common view of the war these days.

Despite Salt's comments, I think this book actually is a challenge to the Confederate apologism something which Turtledove was acutely aware of. His attitude to the issues is clear in terms of his sustained public comments through the years. The book shows that, even with assault rifles; even with racist support from the future, the Confederacy could not sustain its policies and would have been compelled one way or another to alter, just as the autocratic Russian Empire had been compelled to do. That is not an apology for Confederate behaviour; that is a dismissal of Confederate fantasies which too many other AH books pander to without challenging.

I think when critiquing we need to be careful not to have a triggered response to the superficial and actually dig into what the author intends. Of course, they may not achieve their intentions. However, the simplification of analysis of the American Civil War, ironically, has not helped a genuine analysis of American history and why the issues of 170 years ago remain so alive for the USA today.

My final point is: what is wrong with parallelism? I will continue to argue that it is in fact a necessity for any AH author that wants to have a chance of selling books in the mainstream; beyond an actually small circle of specific readers.
 
Thus, I would argue, especially writing in the late 1980s/early 1990s, the portrayal of the time-travelling racialist/racist fanatics, was pretty accurate in terms of how you could see such men behaving and talking, nightly on TV.

That's a fair point. There's a lot of people in recent years saying "I thought Villain X was garishly over the top and then this proper scumbag showed up on the news". There's some real weirdos in the world. And if you're seeing them as the face of an issue every night, they're going in your book.

With the Confederates though, this sounds like a semi-mainstream Noble Confederate Figures (like "Good Germans") view from the time it was written. Views have changed in the States (probably too far the wrong way with some people, as you get "burning civilian targets is Cool if they';re the Bad People")
 
I think it would be interesting to redo Guns of the South but from the perspective of Lee's slaves. Because to them the differences between the AWB and the Confederates are entirely academic. One is a bunch of thugs that torture and murder black people, and the other is a bunch of thugs that torture and murder black people but have a gentlemanly veneer while doing it. It would be a good way to deconstruct the Lost Causerism at the heart of the book.
 
Yes, although when you dig into these, it's noticeable (in Missouri, at least, an area I looked into in some detail) that slavery within the state was patchy. Some areas were essentially free, others had slavery (and these correlated to the type of economic activity going on in the locality). Support for the Union, recruitment and all the rest, was very strong in the free areas, and support for the Confederacy was strongest in the unfree areas. A map showing levels of slave ownership and a map showing levels of support for the Confederacy are basically identical.

Leslie Anders, in his history of the 18th Missouri Infantry (Imaginatively entitled The Eighteenth Missouri) goes into this during the early part of the history (and in some detail around the time of the burning of Platte City), it's clear that the Missouri divide was strictly on slave/non-slave lines.
Very similar happened in Virginia - to the point that we got another state out it.
 
Very similar happened in Virginia - to the point that we got another state out it.

People overestimate the unionism of West Virginia, though. The Eastern Panhandle and Southern West Virginia were pro-Confederate. They only became part of West Virginia because they were forced to.
 
This neglects, for example, that some slave states fought for the Union

Excep this isn't really all that accurate either.

Missouri basically had an internal civil war on the topic. Maryland saw 25,000 fight for the Confederacy and was prevented from secession by a combination of Lincoln and the governor quickly acting to prevent the significant part of the population who might have supported such a move from doing so. Delaware had legal slavery but so few slaves and so localised in the far Southwest of the State that the majority of the state was de facto free, and Kentucky was so divided on the subject they declared neutrality.
 
I think it needs to be remembered that before the early 2000s or so hardly anyone had had got around to reading the Confederate declaration of independence, its constitution, its leaders speeches or letters about the war or what it was about or what they did to black people afterwards to keep as much of the pre war order in place as possible.


Apparently there was at least some people North and South who were distracted from tariff levels, industrialization and knotty constitutional questions on the relationship between the Federal Government and States by the question of whether or not blacks were people or property. I understand the debate could get quite heated in some circles even if its hard to imagine now people getting so worked up about such a niche issue compared to whether or not the North was really all that good since immigrants worked in factories.
 
I think it needs to be remembered that before the early 2000s or so hardly anyone had had got around to reading the Confederate declaration of independence, its constitution, its leaders speeches or letters about the war or what it was about

You can say that, but I know a guy in Georgia who wanted to prove the Civil War wasn't about slavery so he actually did look that up and went "holy crap, it was about slavery! Everything I got told was wrong" while other people looked up stuff the Confederate leaders wrote after they lost (ala German generals writing "it was Hitler not me" in the Cold War).
 
I was going to say "I wonder why this book was his breakthrough after a decade of writing" and then I see the cover again of a famous historical figure holding a modern gun, very clearly telling you what's up and offering something unusual and it's in a very well-known setting Americans like reading about.

And hey, what's the cover for the first Worldwar?

71SZCnjrxlL.jpg
That or flags, isn't it.

Mind you, there's loads of Worldwar covers, those are the American ones but our ones are quite different - except for the third book I have the American one because there didn't seem to be a copy of that one in the entire country when I ordered it.

I've got an article coming up on different cover designs, I could do one entirely about Worldwar on reflection. The Italian (I think) ones are particularly bonkers, because they use the US design but then blatantly copy-paste on top the head of Probably Atvar from the British ones.
 
Mind you, there's loads of Worldwar covers, those are the American ones but our ones are quite different

The ones I remember in libraries were just the lizards with their ray guns, so someone in the UK felt it was better to present it as sci-fi alien invasion over the alt-hist - which I guess means Guns of the South didn't really cut through here as much at the time, which makes sense as the plot, US cover etc are very targeted to an American audience.
 
The ones I remember in libraries were just the lizards with their ray guns, so someone in the UK felt it was better to present it as sci-fi alien invasion over the alt-hist - which I guess means Guns of the South didn't really cut through here as much at the time, which makes sense as the plot, US cover etc are very targeted to an American audience.
Not sure if I've ever even seen GOTS on the shelves in the UK - there are a few Turtledove books I could only find in the US or Canada. (Same with How Few Remain, though the other TL-191 books did arrive here).
 
Not sure if I've ever even seen GOTS on the shelves in the UK - there are a few Turtledove books I could only find in the US or Canada. (Same with How Few Remain, though the other TL-191 books did arrive here).

I think I got Ruled Britannia from the US and not here, which if I'm right is a bit funny
 
I've always been taken by the quote from Colonel Mosby of Mosby Raiders fame. "I've always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarrelled with the North about. I've never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery."

He also said: "The South went to war on account of slavery. South Carolina went to war, as she said in her secession proclamation, because slavery would not be secure under Lincoln. South Carolina ought to know what was the cause for her seceding."

Still, what would Mosby, who fought in the damn thing, know about what it was about.
I think the issue is that a lot of people just don't like to see their grandparents called genocidaires, even when (I would say especially if) they were, in fact, genocidaires.

It's the same reason a lot of people refuse to even entertain that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were anything but 100% justified.
 
I think the issue is that a lot of people just don't like to see their grandparents called genocidaires, even when (I would say especially if) they were, in fact, genocidaires.

It's the same reason a lot of people refuse to even entertain that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were anything but 100% justified.
Not sure that tracks tbh.

For a start there are plenty of Confederate sympathisers in places that stayed loyal to the Union or indeed in countries that were never a party to the conflict at all.

For another the atomic bombs were just big bombs used in a war that saw a hell of a lot of bombs dropped. You can argue maybe they were not necessary because the Soviets or that strategic bombing in general was immoral but it very much comes down to your read of the strategic situation and means and ends whilst well if you think the CSA was sympathetic you think a bunch of slavers were sympathetic end of.

You don't need to twist yourself in any knots to argue in favour of the bombings or that they were unnecessary but understandable or that they were evil and good and intelligent people can honestly argue any position. You can't do the same with the CSA, they were the bad guys.
 
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