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SLP is interviewing Harry Turtledove - what would you ask?

Meadow

I am a knight and I'm building a train
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In an exciting coup, @Gary Oswald has got the man himself to agree to an interview with SLP. We are sending over some questions for him to answer when he can, and the interview will be published on the SLP website when we hear back.

What would you like to ask the most successful AH author in the world? We think it's right to ask our community what they would want to hear, and while we only have room for 9-10 questions, Gary and I will try to include as many popular questions as we can.

Please post your questions before Tuesday 12th January.
 
@Gary Oswald mentioned to me in a private message back in December that he would be very keen to land Harry Turtledove for an interview, so to hear him this rapidly having gotten a hold of the man is doubly pleasing.

I suppose my questions are rather soft ones, and very open-ended, but still one I would very much like to hear him expand upon:

"Do you feel that in your writing, it is more a case of the story giving birth to the setting, or the setting giving birth to the story?"

and, closely related, I suppose:

"How do you feel about world-building?"
 
Do you think Anne Colton effectively utilized girl power by funneling money into illegal paramilitary death camps in Northern Virginia?

--

More seriously, a lot of your longer works and series tend to mirror OTL quite closely albeit in interesting or intriguing ways whilst the shorter form ones seem more daring and outside the box, is this a nature of the market where what people know and care about sells or is it it easier to draw parallels rather than building an entire world every book.
 
With the success of The Man in the High Castle and other alternate history TV series in recent years, have you considered trying to get any of your work adapted into TV series or film? Which works do you think would work best for adaptations?

Are there any of your books that you in hindsight you wish you wrote differently in terms of plot? If so, which ones?
 
How would you reply to the criticism that your portrayals of figures like Robert E. Lee in, say, The Guns of the South play into the Lost Cause narrative – that is, how would you respond to someone who asked why you made the choice to make at least some Confederate characters heroic?
 
What are some interpretations of historical events or characterizations of historical figures that made sense at the time of publication in your works - the most prominent example perhaps dealing with the Confederacy - that you wouldn't write nowadays?

(I guess this is kind of like the Lost Cause question from @Beata Beatrix, but a bit more broad.)
 
For some alternate history of an alternate history, was the fan theory that the dynamic of the Southern Victory books could have been flipped (with the United States as a metaphor for WW1 and WW2 Germany) ever seriously considered? If so, what choices ended up precluding that - if not, what other "what ifs" went into the writing of the series?


incorporation of the mcsweeney corollary is strictly optional
 
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