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The Guns of the South
January 1864 –General Robert E. Lee faces defeat. The Army of Northern Virginia is ragged and ill-equpped. Gettysburg has broken the back of the Confederacy and decimated its manpower.
Then, Andries Rhoodie, a strange man with an unplaceable accent, approaches Lee with an extraordinary offer. Rhoodie demonstrates an amazing rifle: Its rate of fire is incredible, its lethal efficiency breathtaking--and Rhoodie guarantees unlimited quantitites to the Confederates.
The name of the weapon is the AK-47....
"It is absolutely unique--without question the most fascinating Civil War novel I have ever read." –Professor James M. McPherson – Pultizer Prize winning Battle Cry of Freedom
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First published September 22, 1992
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About the author
Harry Turtledove
564 books1,966 followersDr Harry Norman Turtledove is an American novelist, who has produced a sizeable number of works in several genres including alternate history, historical fiction, fantasy and science fiction.
Harry Turtledove attended UCLA, where he received a Ph.D. in Byzantine history in 1977.
Turtledove has been dubbed "The Master of Alternate History". Within this genre he is known both for creating original scenarios: such as survival of the Byzantine Empire; an alien invasion in the middle of the World War II; and for giving a fresh and original treatment to themes previously dealt with by other authors, such as the victory of the South in the American Civil War; and of Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
His novels have been credited with bringing alternate history into the mainstream. His style of alternate history has a strong military theme.
Harry Turtledove attended UCLA, where he received a Ph.D. in Byzantine history in 1977.
Turtledove has been dubbed "The Master of Alternate History". Within this genre he is known both for creating original scenarios: such as survival of the Byzantine Empire; an alien invasion in the middle of the World War II; and for giving a fresh and original treatment to themes previously dealt with by other authors, such as the victory of the South in the American Civil War; and of Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
His novels have been credited with bringing alternate history into the mainstream. His style of alternate history has a strong military theme.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 605 reviews
October 20, 2015
The best evil-racists-from-the-future-supply-AK47s-to-the-South-so-they-can-win-the-Civil-War novel I have read.
February 19, 2017
Despite my fondness for alternate history, I've never gotten around to reading much of it, and Harry Turtledove's work in the field was virgin territory to me until I read this book. (I know, that's pretty shocking, since his name is practically synonymous with the sub-genre in U.S. book circles!) But I've recognized this novel as a must-read for years, and finally decided (long story!) to read it now rather than later. I'm very glad I did; it's early in the year, but this might well be my favorite read of 2017.
As is often the case, the Goodreads description of this book is copied from the back cover; and it explains the premise very well. Here, the alteration in history isn't caused by a change of events or decision within the historical setting, but by the intervention of time travelers from outside of it: a fanatical bunch of South African white supremacists from 2014 (this book was written in 1992), who come bearing a supply of AK-47s for the Confederate armies, which they hope will turn the tide of the war. (Their world has developed time travel technology, which they've stolen to use for their purposes, but it only works in 150 year jumps --hence, from January 2014, they couldn't go any further back in time than January 1864.) Since the cover of this edition proclaims across the top in capital letters, "THE MASTER OF ALTERNATE HISTORY DEPICTS THE ULTIMATE REVERSAL: THE SOUTH WINS THE CIVIL WAR," I'm hardly guilty of writing a spoiler in quoting it. But the meat of the novel lies in the scenario of how the South wins --and more importantly, what happens after that, since this tale spans the years 1864-68.
The Civil War was the bloodiest war, in terms of American deaths, in our history; despite the facade of postwar sectional reconciliation, it left a legacy of grievance and hatred on both sides that's been the province of demagogues to exploit for political advantage ever since. And like the war itself, this legacy is inextricably bound up with the unqualifiedly pernicious institution of slavery, which many Southerners (though not all) went to war with the goal of protecting, and which some Northerners --though not nearly as many as modern Northern pundits would like us to believe--went to war in the hope of destroying. (So inevitably, it's a legacy that tends to be seen differently, and with a lot less detachment, by black Americans than by white ones --even by whites who abhor slavery, as practically all living whites in America do today.) This isn't a moral climate that lends itself to appreciation of nuance and a desire to understand the perspectives of others, historical or contemporary; rather, it's a climate that fosters stereotyping and demonization of the hated Other, whether they actually have or had demonic beliefs or not. All of this makes a premise like Turtledove's an absolute minefield for an alternate history novelist to tread.
Yet Turtledove treads it without flinching, and does so with precisely the appreciation of nuance and desire to truly understand where his characters were coming from historically that tends to be the first casualty of wars (whether they're the shooting kind that we had in the 1860s or the screaming kind that we have now). He does this while putting the issue of race/slavery squarely at the heart of his novel, and as the central question that has to engage his characters' moral growth and decisions. And his characters are almost entirely Southerners, and mostly white Southerners. His perspective is the same basic one that all decent and educated people have today: that race and skin color have nothing to do with individual intelligence and character, and that no human being has the right to own another (though he shows that perspective naturally by the unfolding of his story, rather than by long sermons and didactic passages). Obviously, though, not every character he's dealing with has that perspective. His two viewpoint characters, General Lee and Sergeant Nate Caudill of the 47th North Carolina, start with somewhat more enlightened views of blacks than some Southerners (Lee's being a bit more advanced than Caudill's), and have essentially decent instincts, but even they are people of their time with lessons to learn. Virtually all of his white characters have some racial prejudices --some, like Andries Rhoodie and his cohorts, based on hate, but most simply based on the ignorance that comes when whites and blacks never really get to know each other. No punches are pulled here in depicting the ugliness of the whole slavery culture that these people take for granted (the description of a slave auction is nauseating), and the frequent use of racist terminology grates like a vegetable grater over flesh. (The book got its stars despite those characteristics, not because of them.) But the realism is necessary to what the author is trying to do.
Turtledove's day job is an academic historian (he has a PhD. in the subject) and author of serious nonfiction history books written under his pen name of H. N. Turtletaub. He bases this novel on massive research; almost all of the characters who populate the book, as he explains in the historical notes, were real people whose depictions stick as close to known facts as possible, and the locations (except for the town of Rivington) are mostly real places and described accurately as they were in the 1860s. The behavior of Lee, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Gen. Grant and the other political figures is entirely consistent with their known personalities and attitudes, and the developments of his alternate history are entirely plausible given the changes to the timeline that he posits. This is a long book (556 pages of text), but it's a gripping page turner all the way, where the length is a plus that just serves to build a fascinating world more fascinatingly, and give you more time with believable, flawed, but mostly likeable people you come to really care about. Apart from the racial epithets, there's some profanity and scatology (many of these characters are soldiers, and they talk like many of their real-life counterparts actually did), but no obscenity except on one occasion from a South African; and while there's some unmarried sex, none of it is explicit. The plotting is spot-on perfect, IMO.
"You Southerners may have made the Confederacy into a nation, General Lee, but what sort of nation shall it be?" --Lord Richard Lyons, British minister to the U.S.
As is often the case, the Goodreads description of this book is copied from the back cover; and it explains the premise very well. Here, the alteration in history isn't caused by a change of events or decision within the historical setting, but by the intervention of time travelers from outside of it: a fanatical bunch of South African white supremacists from 2014 (this book was written in 1992), who come bearing a supply of AK-47s for the Confederate armies, which they hope will turn the tide of the war. (Their world has developed time travel technology, which they've stolen to use for their purposes, but it only works in 150 year jumps --hence, from January 2014, they couldn't go any further back in time than January 1864.) Since the cover of this edition proclaims across the top in capital letters, "THE MASTER OF ALTERNATE HISTORY DEPICTS THE ULTIMATE REVERSAL: THE SOUTH WINS THE CIVIL WAR," I'm hardly guilty of writing a spoiler in quoting it. But the meat of the novel lies in the scenario of how the South wins --and more importantly, what happens after that, since this tale spans the years 1864-68.
The Civil War was the bloodiest war, in terms of American deaths, in our history; despite the facade of postwar sectional reconciliation, it left a legacy of grievance and hatred on both sides that's been the province of demagogues to exploit for political advantage ever since. And like the war itself, this legacy is inextricably bound up with the unqualifiedly pernicious institution of slavery, which many Southerners (though not all) went to war with the goal of protecting, and which some Northerners --though not nearly as many as modern Northern pundits would like us to believe--went to war in the hope of destroying. (So inevitably, it's a legacy that tends to be seen differently, and with a lot less detachment, by black Americans than by white ones --even by whites who abhor slavery, as practically all living whites in America do today.) This isn't a moral climate that lends itself to appreciation of nuance and a desire to understand the perspectives of others, historical or contemporary; rather, it's a climate that fosters stereotyping and demonization of the hated Other, whether they actually have or had demonic beliefs or not. All of this makes a premise like Turtledove's an absolute minefield for an alternate history novelist to tread.
Yet Turtledove treads it without flinching, and does so with precisely the appreciation of nuance and desire to truly understand where his characters were coming from historically that tends to be the first casualty of wars (whether they're the shooting kind that we had in the 1860s or the screaming kind that we have now). He does this while putting the issue of race/slavery squarely at the heart of his novel, and as the central question that has to engage his characters' moral growth and decisions. And his characters are almost entirely Southerners, and mostly white Southerners. His perspective is the same basic one that all decent and educated people have today: that race and skin color have nothing to do with individual intelligence and character, and that no human being has the right to own another (though he shows that perspective naturally by the unfolding of his story, rather than by long sermons and didactic passages). Obviously, though, not every character he's dealing with has that perspective. His two viewpoint characters, General Lee and Sergeant Nate Caudill of the 47th North Carolina, start with somewhat more enlightened views of blacks than some Southerners (Lee's being a bit more advanced than Caudill's), and have essentially decent instincts, but even they are people of their time with lessons to learn. Virtually all of his white characters have some racial prejudices --some, like Andries Rhoodie and his cohorts, based on hate, but most simply based on the ignorance that comes when whites and blacks never really get to know each other. No punches are pulled here in depicting the ugliness of the whole slavery culture that these people take for granted (the description of a slave auction is nauseating), and the frequent use of racist terminology grates like a vegetable grater over flesh. (The book got its stars despite those characteristics, not because of them.) But the realism is necessary to what the author is trying to do.
Turtledove's day job is an academic historian (he has a PhD. in the subject) and author of serious nonfiction history books written under his pen name of H. N. Turtletaub. He bases this novel on massive research; almost all of the characters who populate the book, as he explains in the historical notes, were real people whose depictions stick as close to known facts as possible, and the locations (except for the town of Rivington) are mostly real places and described accurately as they were in the 1860s. The behavior of Lee, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Gen. Grant and the other political figures is entirely consistent with their known personalities and attitudes, and the developments of his alternate history are entirely plausible given the changes to the timeline that he posits. This is a long book (556 pages of text), but it's a gripping page turner all the way, where the length is a plus that just serves to build a fascinating world more fascinatingly, and give you more time with believable, flawed, but mostly likeable people you come to really care about. Apart from the racial epithets, there's some profanity and scatology (many of these characters are soldiers, and they talk like many of their real-life counterparts actually did), but no obscenity except on one occasion from a South African; and while there's some unmarried sex, none of it is explicit. The plotting is spot-on perfect, IMO.
"You Southerners may have made the Confederacy into a nation, General Lee, but what sort of nation shall it be?" --Lord Richard Lyons, British minister to the U.S.
July 8, 2017
The best alternate history novel?
Hell, I don’t know, I haven’t read that many, but this one was pretty damn good.
SPOILER ALERT! In this book, the South wins the Civil War! OK, so not that much of a spoiler, I think that’s on the cover. But HOW that happens is how Turtledove makes this interesting.
A group of racist South Africans goes back in time and equips General Lee’s army with AK-47s. The added firepower was all the crafty old tactician needed to turn the tide on Grant and Lincoln.
So what happens when the CSA lasts beyond 1865? Lots! And Turtledove follows Lee, an educated North Carolina First Sergeant returning to his civilian career as a school teacher and four score and seven other interesting characters both historic and imagined who populate the CSA that might have been.
The most obvious theme explored in this sideways history is racism. For those easily offended by a certain racial slur, this may not be the book for you. Turtledove strives for and achieves narrative historic accuracy but in doing so drops more N words than The Dude dropped F bombs in The Big Lebowski. Turtledove examines the peculiar institution in terms of those most affected, those who have grown to accept that way of life, those who insist on maintaining the status quo and the Apartheid terrorists who started the whole mess.
This was a good book and I enjoyed reading it, but WAY WAY too long. Damn! Tell your story and then stop typing, this could have been so much better a hundred pages less. Still, very good and I’ll revisit Turtledove and this sub-genre again.
Hell, I don’t know, I haven’t read that many, but this one was pretty damn good.
SPOILER ALERT! In this book, the South wins the Civil War! OK, so not that much of a spoiler, I think that’s on the cover. But HOW that happens is how Turtledove makes this interesting.
A group of racist South Africans goes back in time and equips General Lee’s army with AK-47s. The added firepower was all the crafty old tactician needed to turn the tide on Grant and Lincoln.
So what happens when the CSA lasts beyond 1865? Lots! And Turtledove follows Lee, an educated North Carolina First Sergeant returning to his civilian career as a school teacher and four score and seven other interesting characters both historic and imagined who populate the CSA that might have been.
The most obvious theme explored in this sideways history is racism. For those easily offended by a certain racial slur, this may not be the book for you. Turtledove strives for and achieves narrative historic accuracy but in doing so drops more N words than The Dude dropped F bombs in The Big Lebowski. Turtledove examines the peculiar institution in terms of those most affected, those who have grown to accept that way of life, those who insist on maintaining the status quo and the Apartheid terrorists who started the whole mess.
This was a good book and I enjoyed reading it, but WAY WAY too long. Damn! Tell your story and then stop typing, this could have been so much better a hundred pages less. Still, very good and I’ll revisit Turtledove and this sub-genre again.
March 22, 2015
I stumbled across this book while prowling around this very site and was instantly captivated by the cover; I mean, it's a picture of famous Confederate General Robert E. Lee holding one of the most recognizable firearms of our time--the AK-47. To be honest, it's not even well-done; he's gripping it all weird and it just kind of looks like shit. Throw in a good review from one of my friends on the site and it was an easy three or four dollars to spend, even though I swear the young lady that rang me up looked at the cover, then back at me with a kind of disdainful amusement...I'm sorry it wasn't fucking Naked Lunch or Gravity's Rainbow or whatever. Those are probably bad examples, I don't even know what cool people read these days.
So obviously I'm coming into this experience with a fair amount of bias against its literary quality based solely on the cover and the premise. You might be wondering why I would even want to read this having said all that, and the answer to that is because I occasionally enjoy trash. Well, I can safely say that this book is not trash and that the author managed to take such a ridiculous premise and build a convincing speculation on it. The guy is not some weird hack that got popular by a bizarre stroke of fate, he got a Ph.D. in Byzantine history from UCLA and obviously knows the American Civil War and all the people involved back to front. The book also mercifully doesn't consist of scene after scene of Confederates mowing down Union troops like some low-budget action movie, as the war ends fairly early in the novel. The real idea or theme this book deals with is the question of what the CSA would have grown into had it won the war, and Turtledove has some very interesting and even pleasantly surprising speculations on that.
As usual I try to avoid spoilers as much as possible in writing reviews of books but the back cover tells quite a bit; a militant racist South African organization uses a time machine to travel to 1864 and hook the Confederates up with a bunch of AK-47s, which is a hilarious difference from the rifled muskets most soldiers were using. The novel follows two protagonists; the aforementioned Robert E. Lee and Nate Caudell, a teacher and First Sergeant in the Army of Northern Virginia. Despite them both being Confederate scum, I had to like them; Lee is smart, compassionate, and committed to his duties, and Caudell is a rational, humble and thoughtful salt-of-the-earth type guy. Despite my best efforts I enjoyed the dumb love story between Caudell and Mollie Bean, a great Hooker With a Heart of Gold™-type character. The two characters provide a nice and easy way to watch both Lee's decision-making and its effects on the little people.
Some flaws did present themselves as I made my way throughout the novel. Lee is great but he is also a bit of a Gary Stu. That said, I can imagine that bitching about that kind of thing is pretty common with alternate history stuff--everyone has their own impression of the people and events and that's going to clash. The fact that it stimulates thought and discussion on the subject is probably the important thing.
The best way I can summarize this book is that it combines an outlandish concept with well-researched and detailed speculation and storytelling. Reading the author's note at the end really drove home what an effort Turtledove made to create a realistic alternate world; the different factors and conditions he used to create the presidential elections of both countries was pretty complex and fascinating. The first fifty pages also serve as a kind of rudimentary user's guide to the AK-47. Without giving away too much, it also has a refreshing (for me; some might say naive) faith in humanity's inherent goodness and progression towards a more compassionate state of being. If any of this sounds remotely entertaining and worth looking into, you might want to give this a try.
So obviously I'm coming into this experience with a fair amount of bias against its literary quality based solely on the cover and the premise. You might be wondering why I would even want to read this having said all that, and the answer to that is because I occasionally enjoy trash. Well, I can safely say that this book is not trash and that the author managed to take such a ridiculous premise and build a convincing speculation on it. The guy is not some weird hack that got popular by a bizarre stroke of fate, he got a Ph.D. in Byzantine history from UCLA and obviously knows the American Civil War and all the people involved back to front. The book also mercifully doesn't consist of scene after scene of Confederates mowing down Union troops like some low-budget action movie, as the war ends fairly early in the novel. The real idea or theme this book deals with is the question of what the CSA would have grown into had it won the war, and Turtledove has some very interesting and even pleasantly surprising speculations on that.
As usual I try to avoid spoilers as much as possible in writing reviews of books but the back cover tells quite a bit; a militant racist South African organization uses a time machine to travel to 1864 and hook the Confederates up with a bunch of AK-47s, which is a hilarious difference from the rifled muskets most soldiers were using. The novel follows two protagonists; the aforementioned Robert E. Lee and Nate Caudell, a teacher and First Sergeant in the Army of Northern Virginia. Despite them both being Confederate scum, I had to like them; Lee is smart, compassionate, and committed to his duties, and Caudell is a rational, humble and thoughtful salt-of-the-earth type guy. Despite my best efforts I enjoyed the dumb love story between Caudell and Mollie Bean, a great Hooker With a Heart of Gold™-type character. The two characters provide a nice and easy way to watch both Lee's decision-making and its effects on the little people.
Some flaws did present themselves as I made my way throughout the novel. Lee is great but he is also a bit of a Gary Stu. That said, I can imagine that bitching about that kind of thing is pretty common with alternate history stuff--everyone has their own impression of the people and events and that's going to clash. The fact that it stimulates thought and discussion on the subject is probably the important thing.
The best way I can summarize this book is that it combines an outlandish concept with well-researched and detailed speculation and storytelling. Reading the author's note at the end really drove home what an effort Turtledove made to create a realistic alternate world; the different factors and conditions he used to create the presidential elections of both countries was pretty complex and fascinating. The first fifty pages also serve as a kind of rudimentary user's guide to the AK-47. Without giving away too much, it also has a refreshing (for me; some might say naive) faith in humanity's inherent goodness and progression towards a more compassionate state of being. If any of this sounds remotely entertaining and worth looking into, you might want to give this a try.
July 18, 2012
The Premise: White nationalist Afrikaaners travel back in time and equip Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia with fully automatic AK-47 rifles on the eve of the Battle for the Wilderness in 1864. Hijinks ensue.
That's it, really. Guns of the South is simply that premise followed to one possible conclusion. Though the premise is fantastical, it is slyly subversive: in following the most popular general "what if" of alternate history (South Wins the Civil War), Turtledove is able to prey on the vanity and insecurity of the modern day "Lost Cause" sympathizer by juxtaposing those ostensibly racist Southerners with those even more racist late 20th Century South Africans.
We see the triumphant Confederates chastened and cognizant of the error of their ways (slavery), so much so that they join up with their Union foes to vanquish the schemes of the two-dimensionally evil Afrikaaners. What's puzzling is that, for someone who is so notoriously conspicuous with his various reminders to the reader that he's Done His Research, Harry Turtledove refuses to recognize the historic reality that a) caused the Civil War, and b) made many of his historical characters (particularly the Southerners) so unsympathetic. Even Nathan Bedford Forrest, the butcher of Fort Pillow and founder of the Ku Klux Klan, is rehabilitated under the magic of Turtledove's prose. Forrest is Not Bad After All, once Saint Robert E. Lee's beatific influence is felt.
One might say "Hey, it's fiction, what's the big deal?" The big deal is that the author is by design using the allure of a well known historical era, with its well known cast of historical characters, to get people to read his book. Playing around with "what if"s can be fun and useful in fiction (cf. Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee). But some counterfactuals are simply nonsensical, illogical, and offer prime examples of begging the question. "What If Hitler Didn't Invade the Soviet Union?" is a good example: anyone with a grasp of the primary sources understands that the only way for that to have been avoided was for Hitler (and by extension, the Nazis) to have never come into power in Germany in the first place, and so posing the question makes no sense. "What if the Civil War Wasn't About Slavery/Race/etc?" is the proposition underlying the more superficial counterfactual in Guns of the South involving South Africans and AK-47s. That underlying proposition is necessary, because without it, there's no way to make many of Turtledove's protagonists as likable and sympathetic as he demands. To pose that question is silly, and renders moot the era to which Turtledove would have us journey.
That's it, really. Guns of the South is simply that premise followed to one possible conclusion. Though the premise is fantastical, it is slyly subversive: in following the most popular general "what if" of alternate history (South Wins the Civil War), Turtledove is able to prey on the vanity and insecurity of the modern day "Lost Cause" sympathizer by juxtaposing those ostensibly racist Southerners with those even more racist late 20th Century South Africans.
We see the triumphant Confederates chastened and cognizant of the error of their ways (slavery), so much so that they join up with their Union foes to vanquish the schemes of the two-dimensionally evil Afrikaaners. What's puzzling is that, for someone who is so notoriously conspicuous with his various reminders to the reader that he's Done His Research, Harry Turtledove refuses to recognize the historic reality that a) caused the Civil War, and b) made many of his historical characters (particularly the Southerners) so unsympathetic. Even Nathan Bedford Forrest, the butcher of Fort Pillow and founder of the Ku Klux Klan, is rehabilitated under the magic of Turtledove's prose. Forrest is Not Bad After All, once Saint Robert E. Lee's beatific influence is felt.
One might say "Hey, it's fiction, what's the big deal?" The big deal is that the author is by design using the allure of a well known historical era, with its well known cast of historical characters, to get people to read his book. Playing around with "what if"s can be fun and useful in fiction (cf. Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee). But some counterfactuals are simply nonsensical, illogical, and offer prime examples of begging the question. "What If Hitler Didn't Invade the Soviet Union?" is a good example: anyone with a grasp of the primary sources understands that the only way for that to have been avoided was for Hitler (and by extension, the Nazis) to have never come into power in Germany in the first place, and so posing the question makes no sense. "What if the Civil War Wasn't About Slavery/Race/etc?" is the proposition underlying the more superficial counterfactual in Guns of the South involving South Africans and AK-47s. That underlying proposition is necessary, because without it, there's no way to make many of Turtledove's protagonists as likable and sympathetic as he demands. To pose that question is silly, and renders moot the era to which Turtledove would have us journey.
July 29, 2007
This is a great book. The cover has Robert E. Lee with an Ak-47 so you know it isn't your standard book. Even though a Confederate victory via time travel is far fetched, it isn't the main part of the book. It has much more to do with the Confederate States as a nation and how it comes to terms with it's own internal problems as well as facing a racism borne out of hatred (by the time travelers), as opposed to their racism based out of ignorance.
The time travelers from a decade ahead of our own were white supremacists from South Africa and sought to create a puppet state, only Robert E. Lee (while not as enlightened as we may be) was a forward thinking man on race and a moderate abolitionist in his own right, and for diplomatic purposes, the CSA would need to curtail slavery for the sake of alliances with Europe which had abolished slavery a generation or two earlier.
In addition to the main plot about the Confederates vs a futuristic coup are referendums on whether Missouri and Kentucky wish to be in the Union or the Confederacy (Missouri stays in the US while Kentucky joins the CSA) as well as a friendship between Lincoln and Lee (two men who's early deaths greatly damaged the Southern states), Lee's plans to phase out slavery, and a US invasion of Canada to offset the loss of their Southern states.
This book may not be a realistic alternate history, but the main point of it is about how the South evolves after being free and readjusting their own views after seeing a much more malignant side of their perspective.
The time travelers from a decade ahead of our own were white supremacists from South Africa and sought to create a puppet state, only Robert E. Lee (while not as enlightened as we may be) was a forward thinking man on race and a moderate abolitionist in his own right, and for diplomatic purposes, the CSA would need to curtail slavery for the sake of alliances with Europe which had abolished slavery a generation or two earlier.
In addition to the main plot about the Confederates vs a futuristic coup are referendums on whether Missouri and Kentucky wish to be in the Union or the Confederacy (Missouri stays in the US while Kentucky joins the CSA) as well as a friendship between Lincoln and Lee (two men who's early deaths greatly damaged the Southern states), Lee's plans to phase out slavery, and a US invasion of Canada to offset the loss of their Southern states.
This book may not be a realistic alternate history, but the main point of it is about how the South evolves after being free and readjusting their own views after seeing a much more malignant side of their perspective.
July 23, 2017
I first reviewed this some years ago. This is an update 8/17/15
I read this years ago and I must say i liked it. Unfortunately it was the last in this seemingly endless series of books I did like. ***Actually this book doesn't have anything to do with the aforementioned endless series on the Civil War. It simply treads the same "subject ground". This I liked...those I burned out on pretty much right away.
This one explores the anachronistic arrival of some South African white supremacists with a large supply of AK-47s to the south during the Civil War, with the (somewhat predictable) changes for the outcome of said war, and the CSA is established as a separate country.
Pet Peeve:
As I said this is a good and interesting read but there is then a series of Civil War books by the author which turns into a sort of "soap-opera" (as has happened with some other Turtledove books). So I read this, then later on started a couple of the later books ...... and put them down.
But, as I said this one is worth the read.
I read this years ago and I must say i liked it. Unfortunately it was the last in this seemingly endless series of books I did like. ***Actually this book doesn't have anything to do with the aforementioned endless series on the Civil War. It simply treads the same "subject ground". This I liked...those I burned out on pretty much right away.
This one explores the anachronistic arrival of some South African white supremacists with a large supply of AK-47s to the south during the Civil War, with the (somewhat predictable) changes for the outcome of said war, and the CSA is established as a separate country.
Pet Peeve:
As I said this is a good and interesting read but there is then a series of Civil War books by the author which turns into a sort of "soap-opera" (as has happened with some other Turtledove books). So I read this, then later on started a couple of the later books ...... and put them down.
But, as I said this one is worth the read.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 25, 2019
In the 1990s it was common enough at my New Orleans high school to see copies of Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South. It offered a beguiling and humorous image of Robert E. Lee in his classic pose, only this time sporting an AK-47 assault rifle. I avoided reading it, only to decide in 2019 to see how Turtledove approached the subject in 1992.
The central figure of The Guns of the South is Lee. In 1864 he accepts Ak-47s from the time-travelling “Rivington Men” who turn out to be the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), a Neo-Nazi group from South Africa. They The AWB think a Confederate victory will halt the spread of racial equality, but Lee foresees that slavery must be gradually abolished if the Confederacy is to survive and thrive in the wider world. The AWB tries to kill Lee, only for them to be defeated by Nathan Bedford Forrest. Lee, as president of the Confederacy, oversees the narrow passage of gradual emancipation.
Time travel is nothing new to Civil War novels. Ward Moore’s 1953 novel Bring the Jubilee is considered among the best of its breed, and its influence is all over The Guns of the South. One thing that is played up by Moore and Turtledove, is the North having an upsurge of racism after the war, with Turtledove discussing USCT formations and freed slaves being left behind.
At the time The Guns of the South was praised for its attention to detail, which is impressive. My complaints were more nit-picking. Lee offers terms not to Ulysses S. Grant, but to Abraham Lincoln himself, certainly something he would never do given the civilian-military relationship and nineteenth century America’s belief that the two were separate. Speaking of Grant, he is far more fair and magnanimous in defeat than the real Grant, who was petty and proud. Grant also seems more like a military simpleton here, a mere bruiser, than the actual commander. The parts where Lee jokes about George McClellan do not comport with his high opinion of him as an engineer, organizer, and strategist. Jefferson Davis seems fine with Lee’s move toward emancipation, which flies in the face of what I have read about the man. As to Lee, he might be too good in the narrative, but I have not made up my mind about him in this regard, particularly when so much written about Lee is hyperbole crafted to fit a narrative.
My biggest grip is with most Civil War scholarship, which does not properly place secession as one of the central causes of the war. We inherited from the Founders not only the unresolved question of slavery, but also a legacy of rebellion and separation in defense who a perceived threat to our “rights.” Before 1861 there were numerous secession crises in American history (most notably the Hartford Convention) and the legacy of the Civil War was to end secession as mainstream rhetoric.
These though are minor points, and The Guns of the South has more detail and accuracy than more celebrated fare of the same kind, including Bring the Jubilee. Of the later book, while I love it, I do have to admit Moore’s take on Gettysburg is incorrect. By contrast, I left The Guns of the South impressed with Turtledove’s knowledge and assessments. I was also impressed that he balanced out an honest assessment of slavery’s importance to the conflict while making the Confederates conflicted and compelling characters. He did all of this with decent prose and an ability to keep the narrative moving along while still stopping to fill in the details. It is a long book, but it moves along at a good pace.
The Guns of the South is a window into how the Civil War as understood in 1992. The Lost Cause was fading, but reunification ruled the narrative. Today, the Just Cause is dominant, certainly among academics and journalists. I have grave doubts that The Guns of the South would be published today by a major corporation.
The Lee of these pages is not the Lee of the Just Cause imagination. Here he is a great commander, with a flexible intellect, and a strong moral compass. In The Guns of the South Lee is more a Southern patriot than an aristocrat. When confronted over his push to end slavery, Lee shoots back “We spent our blood to regain the privilege of setting our own affairs as we choose, rather than having such settlements forced upon us by other sections of the U.S. which chose a way different from ours and which enjoyed a numerical preponderance over us.” Turtledove explicitly pushes back against Thomas Connelly’s thesis. Back then it was controversial. Today Connelly is standard.
When Mitch Landrieu announced that the statues of Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard would be removed, Councilwoman Stacey Head tried save both of them, while supporting the removal of Jefferson Davis and Liberty Place. Head saw a difference between Lee and Davis. When Landrieu spoke after Lee was removed, he never once then or now mentioned Lee’s complicated legacy. With those strokes the dominant interpretation of Lee became that of traitor who should have been hanged after the war. When Stanley McChystal got rid of his portrait of Robert E. Lee he did not sell or give it away but threw it in the trash, Lee’s new destination being a landfill. His decision received wide praise and press coverage.
Only decades before, Lee’s visage hung in the White House. He was on stamps and portrayed in a positive light in numerous works of art. The Guns of the South is Lee’s last hurrah, but even Turtledove’s Lee can see his current place, musing after reading a book from our timeline that “Watching his beloved South beaten had probably also helped break his heart…What point could his life have had, lived out among the ruins of everything he’d held dear?”
Beyond Turtledove’s take on Lee, there is another idea no longer en vogue. The Guns of the South puts forward the idea that without a war that despoiled the land and created bitterness, the South may very well have ended slavery on its own. I doubt it would have happened as foretold by Turtledove, but there is a lot of evidence it would have ended. The falling price of cotton and sugar and international pressure would have been considerable. It was enough to make Brazil end the practice without a civil war. In that way the book suggests that the end of the war was not the unalloyed good we think of it as. The book asks not to assume we know best.
The AWB men assume that the victory of the South is a victory for them. Yet, the two are not a perfect fit. The Confederates, despite some current hyperbole, were not Nazis since they believed in rule of law and democracy. The AWB concentrated on the Confederacy’s belief in white supremacy, but not their political culture nor what Bernard Bailyn called the “contagion of liberty” in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution . Lee notes in the books he reads from our timeline that there is “a continuing search for justice and equality between the races, one incomplete even in that distant future day, but nonetheless of vital import to be both North and South.” Lee, considering that as well as international pressure and the fact that the war had already loosened the slavery system, decides it is better to join the tide of history.
In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf tells Frodo “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” The Guns of the South tells us not to be too quick to judge or assume. After all, that is the fatal mistake made by the AWB, They assumed, much like Landrieu and McChrysal, that Lee was a hardcore white supremacist who would go along with their plans. As the late Shearer Davis Bowman once told me, history is about unintended consequences. I would add that it is also about fatal errors based on wishful thinking.
The central figure of The Guns of the South is Lee. In 1864 he accepts Ak-47s from the time-travelling “Rivington Men” who turn out to be the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), a Neo-Nazi group from South Africa. They The AWB think a Confederate victory will halt the spread of racial equality, but Lee foresees that slavery must be gradually abolished if the Confederacy is to survive and thrive in the wider world. The AWB tries to kill Lee, only for them to be defeated by Nathan Bedford Forrest. Lee, as president of the Confederacy, oversees the narrow passage of gradual emancipation.
Time travel is nothing new to Civil War novels. Ward Moore’s 1953 novel Bring the Jubilee is considered among the best of its breed, and its influence is all over The Guns of the South. One thing that is played up by Moore and Turtledove, is the North having an upsurge of racism after the war, with Turtledove discussing USCT formations and freed slaves being left behind.
At the time The Guns of the South was praised for its attention to detail, which is impressive. My complaints were more nit-picking. Lee offers terms not to Ulysses S. Grant, but to Abraham Lincoln himself, certainly something he would never do given the civilian-military relationship and nineteenth century America’s belief that the two were separate. Speaking of Grant, he is far more fair and magnanimous in defeat than the real Grant, who was petty and proud. Grant also seems more like a military simpleton here, a mere bruiser, than the actual commander. The parts where Lee jokes about George McClellan do not comport with his high opinion of him as an engineer, organizer, and strategist. Jefferson Davis seems fine with Lee’s move toward emancipation, which flies in the face of what I have read about the man. As to Lee, he might be too good in the narrative, but I have not made up my mind about him in this regard, particularly when so much written about Lee is hyperbole crafted to fit a narrative.
My biggest grip is with most Civil War scholarship, which does not properly place secession as one of the central causes of the war. We inherited from the Founders not only the unresolved question of slavery, but also a legacy of rebellion and separation in defense who a perceived threat to our “rights.” Before 1861 there were numerous secession crises in American history (most notably the Hartford Convention) and the legacy of the Civil War was to end secession as mainstream rhetoric.
These though are minor points, and The Guns of the South has more detail and accuracy than more celebrated fare of the same kind, including Bring the Jubilee. Of the later book, while I love it, I do have to admit Moore’s take on Gettysburg is incorrect. By contrast, I left The Guns of the South impressed with Turtledove’s knowledge and assessments. I was also impressed that he balanced out an honest assessment of slavery’s importance to the conflict while making the Confederates conflicted and compelling characters. He did all of this with decent prose and an ability to keep the narrative moving along while still stopping to fill in the details. It is a long book, but it moves along at a good pace.
The Guns of the South is a window into how the Civil War as understood in 1992. The Lost Cause was fading, but reunification ruled the narrative. Today, the Just Cause is dominant, certainly among academics and journalists. I have grave doubts that The Guns of the South would be published today by a major corporation.
The Lee of these pages is not the Lee of the Just Cause imagination. Here he is a great commander, with a flexible intellect, and a strong moral compass. In The Guns of the South Lee is more a Southern patriot than an aristocrat. When confronted over his push to end slavery, Lee shoots back “We spent our blood to regain the privilege of setting our own affairs as we choose, rather than having such settlements forced upon us by other sections of the U.S. which chose a way different from ours and which enjoyed a numerical preponderance over us.” Turtledove explicitly pushes back against Thomas Connelly’s thesis. Back then it was controversial. Today Connelly is standard.
When Mitch Landrieu announced that the statues of Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard would be removed, Councilwoman Stacey Head tried save both of them, while supporting the removal of Jefferson Davis and Liberty Place. Head saw a difference between Lee and Davis. When Landrieu spoke after Lee was removed, he never once then or now mentioned Lee’s complicated legacy. With those strokes the dominant interpretation of Lee became that of traitor who should have been hanged after the war. When Stanley McChystal got rid of his portrait of Robert E. Lee he did not sell or give it away but threw it in the trash, Lee’s new destination being a landfill. His decision received wide praise and press coverage.
Only decades before, Lee’s visage hung in the White House. He was on stamps and portrayed in a positive light in numerous works of art. The Guns of the South is Lee’s last hurrah, but even Turtledove’s Lee can see his current place, musing after reading a book from our timeline that “Watching his beloved South beaten had probably also helped break his heart…What point could his life have had, lived out among the ruins of everything he’d held dear?”
Beyond Turtledove’s take on Lee, there is another idea no longer en vogue. The Guns of the South puts forward the idea that without a war that despoiled the land and created bitterness, the South may very well have ended slavery on its own. I doubt it would have happened as foretold by Turtledove, but there is a lot of evidence it would have ended. The falling price of cotton and sugar and international pressure would have been considerable. It was enough to make Brazil end the practice without a civil war. In that way the book suggests that the end of the war was not the unalloyed good we think of it as. The book asks not to assume we know best.
The AWB men assume that the victory of the South is a victory for them. Yet, the two are not a perfect fit. The Confederates, despite some current hyperbole, were not Nazis since they believed in rule of law and democracy. The AWB concentrated on the Confederacy’s belief in white supremacy, but not their political culture nor what Bernard Bailyn called the “contagion of liberty” in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution . Lee notes in the books he reads from our timeline that there is “a continuing search for justice and equality between the races, one incomplete even in that distant future day, but nonetheless of vital import to be both North and South.” Lee, considering that as well as international pressure and the fact that the war had already loosened the slavery system, decides it is better to join the tide of history.
In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf tells Frodo “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” The Guns of the South tells us not to be too quick to judge or assume. After all, that is the fatal mistake made by the AWB, They assumed, much like Landrieu and McChrysal, that Lee was a hardcore white supremacist who would go along with their plans. As the late Shearer Davis Bowman once told me, history is about unintended consequences. I would add that it is also about fatal errors based on wishful thinking.
April 16, 2020
Well, by the time you have reached my review, you are probably well aware that the book is an alt-history historical fiction spanning the early years of a Confederate States of America that has won the War Between the States with access to future weapons and knowledge.
So let us talk about some of the finer points of the novel, and what you may or may not like about it:
-- This is not a vindication of the South's 'peculiar institution'. One of Turtledove's main characters is General Robert E. Lee, who takes the position (that I believe he held historically) that black slavery would have to end, but that the war was fought not over slavery itself but over whether the Union had the right to force that end upon the individual States.
-- The white supremacists from the future are uniformly bad (which makes sense, or why would they as they did?) The contemporary white supremacists are bad but usually out of ignorance and tradition. There are no northern POVs and no black POVs. The supporting white characters are all non-racists. With one exception, the supporting black characters are uniformly good. So the POVs and characters are biased, but I assume in a harmlessly optimistic/positive sort of way.
-- There's sex at the R-rated level, and the same for violence. There is some profanity that seems contemporary without being gratuitous. There is an extreme abundance of the n-word, although again, this seems to make sense in context as much as we may hate it in modern culture.
-- Time travel paradoxes: Yep, there's a couple.
Big picture? I liked it and thought it was well-executed, but I am an ignorant white monoculture Yankee. I could see that it could offend or trouble others, and have no idea about the historical accuracy (although I expect that Turtledove would not have so successfully tackled historical topics over the years without doing his homework).
Monopoly, putting a 🏠 on Time Travel.
So let us talk about some of the finer points of the novel, and what you may or may not like about it:
-- This is not a vindication of the South's 'peculiar institution'. One of Turtledove's main characters is General Robert E. Lee, who takes the position (that I believe he held historically) that black slavery would have to end, but that the war was fought not over slavery itself but over whether the Union had the right to force that end upon the individual States.
-- The white supremacists from the future are uniformly bad (which makes sense, or why would they as they did?) The contemporary white supremacists are bad but usually out of ignorance and tradition. There are no northern POVs and no black POVs. The supporting white characters are all non-racists. With one exception, the supporting black characters are uniformly good. So the POVs and characters are biased, but I assume in a harmlessly optimistic/positive sort of way.
-- There's sex at the R-rated level, and the same for violence. There is some profanity that seems contemporary without being gratuitous. There is an extreme abundance of the n-word, although again, this seems to make sense in context as much as we may hate it in modern culture.
-- Time travel paradoxes: Yep, there's a couple.
Big picture? I liked it and thought it was well-executed, but I am an ignorant white monoculture Yankee. I could see that it could offend or trouble others, and have no idea about the historical accuracy (although I expect that Turtledove would not have so successfully tackled historical topics over the years without doing his homework).
Monopoly, putting a 🏠 on Time Travel.
November 19, 2012
A very well researched book about two societies Southern and South African.
September 6, 2011
Am I a bad history grad student for reading this? Probably...
I shouldn't have bothered with this. It was really poorly written in parts, especially any time dialogue had to provide some kind of exposition, and plus it made me feel a little dirty to have to root for the Confederates, as they are the heroes of the book. I knew the basic plot: a group of 21st Century racist South Africans travel back in time and give AK-47s to the Confederates so they will win the Civil War. What I didn't realize was that the South Africans don't just leave, they hang around to be a major plot point throughout the book. Why do they hang around? So that the author can constantly compare them with the Confederates and imply that the Confederates weren't all that racist. Turtledove fills the book with South African characters mistreating slaves, and Confederates like Robert E. Lee coming to the slaves' defense. He even goes so far as to have the South African characters buy slaves and horribly abuse them, so he can have Confederates 'rescue' them. The plot of the book turns on R.E. Lee winning the war and almost immediately becoming an open and vocal abolitionist, which is completely nonsensical. And as I said before, the exposition is horribly clunky, with people saying things like "As I'm sure you know, General Lee, because you are a student of our politics, our Confederate constitution, which was passed in 1861, provides for a six year presidential term." Groan.
I will say this for Turtledove: he is creative in his ideas about how history would have progressed in the aftermath of a Confederate victory. He goes into great detail about the subsequent presidential elections in the North and the South, about what would happen to a Lincoln who lived, about relations between the U.S. and Britain if Britain recognized the Confederates, about what would happen to the border states, etc. All of that is interesting. But when you combine the awkward writing with this picture of the rebels as a group of people hardly racist and almost ready to give up slavery on their own...I can't really recommend this book.
I shouldn't have bothered with this. It was really poorly written in parts, especially any time dialogue had to provide some kind of exposition, and plus it made me feel a little dirty to have to root for the Confederates, as they are the heroes of the book. I knew the basic plot: a group of 21st Century racist South Africans travel back in time and give AK-47s to the Confederates so they will win the Civil War. What I didn't realize was that the South Africans don't just leave, they hang around to be a major plot point throughout the book. Why do they hang around? So that the author can constantly compare them with the Confederates and imply that the Confederates weren't all that racist. Turtledove fills the book with South African characters mistreating slaves, and Confederates like Robert E. Lee coming to the slaves' defense. He even goes so far as to have the South African characters buy slaves and horribly abuse them, so he can have Confederates 'rescue' them. The plot of the book turns on R.E. Lee winning the war and almost immediately becoming an open and vocal abolitionist, which is completely nonsensical. And as I said before, the exposition is horribly clunky, with people saying things like "As I'm sure you know, General Lee, because you are a student of our politics, our Confederate constitution, which was passed in 1861, provides for a six year presidential term." Groan.
I will say this for Turtledove: he is creative in his ideas about how history would have progressed in the aftermath of a Confederate victory. He goes into great detail about the subsequent presidential elections in the North and the South, about what would happen to a Lincoln who lived, about relations between the U.S. and Britain if Britain recognized the Confederates, about what would happen to the border states, etc. All of that is interesting. But when you combine the awkward writing with this picture of the rebels as a group of people hardly racist and almost ready to give up slavery on their own...I can't really recommend this book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 22, 2015
The ultimate alternative history book of all time by the ultimate alternative history author of all time. This is the one book to read if to read alternative history.
February 11, 2008
Harry Turtledove, Guns of the South (Del Rey, 1992)
Time to make shish kebab out of another sacred cow. Guns of the South is considered THE alternate history novel by many, the one alternate history novel that should be required reading in history classes and on just about every historian's list of must-read Civil War books. And to be fair, it's almost that good. Really.
As with most fiction of the speculative type, especially alternate-history speculative fiction, the plot can be summed up by asking one simple question. In that case, "what if the South won the American Civil War?" The book is essentially divided into two halves; the first half takes place during the war, and the second half afterwards. And when Turtledove is writing battle scenes, he shines. The first half of the book flies by. It's a page-turner to end all page-turners.
Unfortunately, when Robert E. Lee moves from military command to political life, the story bogs down. Badly.
It does pick up again, a hundred or so pages later, but there are a few places in the book where the pace gets so glacial I started to think I'd accidentally picked up Frank Herbert's Children of Dune instead. Yes, it gets that slow. It all wraps up pretty nicely, but the journey to get from point A to point B can sure be hard sometimes. ** 1/2
Time to make shish kebab out of another sacred cow. Guns of the South is considered THE alternate history novel by many, the one alternate history novel that should be required reading in history classes and on just about every historian's list of must-read Civil War books. And to be fair, it's almost that good. Really.
As with most fiction of the speculative type, especially alternate-history speculative fiction, the plot can be summed up by asking one simple question. In that case, "what if the South won the American Civil War?" The book is essentially divided into two halves; the first half takes place during the war, and the second half afterwards. And when Turtledove is writing battle scenes, he shines. The first half of the book flies by. It's a page-turner to end all page-turners.
Unfortunately, when Robert E. Lee moves from military command to political life, the story bogs down. Badly.
It does pick up again, a hundred or so pages later, but there are a few places in the book where the pace gets so glacial I started to think I'd accidentally picked up Frank Herbert's Children of Dune instead. Yes, it gets that slow. It all wraps up pretty nicely, but the journey to get from point A to point B can sure be hard sometimes. ** 1/2
May 14, 2025
This proves I’m in the simulation. I read this in April of 2025. The bad guys in the story are a group of racist Afrikaners who stole a time machine to provide AK-47s to the Confederacy to ensure a future ally.
In the news the same month, Donald Trump fast tracks a refugee group of Afrikaners who in his words are victims of racism while on the same day eliminating refugee status for Afghans.
In the news the same month, Donald Trump fast tracks a refugee group of Afrikaners who in his words are victims of racism while on the same day eliminating refugee status for Afghans.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 19, 2022
Masterpiece!. Full Stop. This is a superv novel, times three. First, it´s an excelent read. Enlightened, fresh and yet deep. The descriptions and characters are vivid, and its a great merit of literacy dare (see my review on ¨Childrens War¨ about Literacy cowardice) that some of them are historic figures.
Second, and regarding the latter, the book contains a fair amount of historic background and allohistorical contents, in wich is presented a clear and sensible version of the facts that shape history. There are no cartoonish villain or idealized heros.
And this leads to the third aspect of excelency. The novel is an adult critic on both the infantile conception of the Cesesion War repeated in Pop culture, and the picture White Supremacists have on the Confederate States of America.
On a very different level, the novel can be divided into four parts. First, the arrival of the AWF members, their impact and, more important, the Dixies reaction of both, welcome and distrust. I won´t spoil what happens then, I will just say Turtledove did it in the past, and I loved it. Next comes the turning of the tide, the final assault and the resolution of the conflict. A mind-blowing, overwhelming and obscene display of talent and wit. Third comes the aftermath of the war, in both domestic and international affairs, micro and macro, and the accounts of what changes and not yet changes.
Finally, the real setting of scores happens, and the story end with a beautiful show of hope and leaving the long run for us to imagine.
Second, and regarding the latter, the book contains a fair amount of historic background and allohistorical contents, in wich is presented a clear and sensible version of the facts that shape history. There are no cartoonish villain or idealized heros.
And this leads to the third aspect of excelency. The novel is an adult critic on both the infantile conception of the Cesesion War repeated in Pop culture, and the picture White Supremacists have on the Confederate States of America.
On a very different level, the novel can be divided into four parts. First, the arrival of the AWF members, their impact and, more important, the Dixies reaction of both, welcome and distrust. I won´t spoil what happens then, I will just say Turtledove did it in the past, and I loved it. Next comes the turning of the tide, the final assault and the resolution of the conflict. A mind-blowing, overwhelming and obscene display of talent and wit. Third comes the aftermath of the war, in both domestic and international affairs, micro and macro, and the accounts of what changes and not yet changes.
Finally, the real setting of scores happens, and the story end with a beautiful show of hope and leaving the long run for us to imagine.
September 14, 2020
Ah, those halcyon days of 2014, when we had invented time travel...to be fair, this book is from 1992, so one should not be too harsh. But, is this not just another reminder of how absolutely disappointing the future, by which I mean, 2020, has turned out to be?
Also, where on Earth did America Will Break get all of their funding?
Seriously though, I know it is often difficult for people of certain political persuasions to find a protagonist as regressive as Robert E. Lee entertaining (and I am about as far Left as one can go), but if you can set aside the fact that he was not born in the latter half of the 20th Century/early 21st Century, and view him in the context of and as a product of the mid-19th Century, I think you can find that he is quite sympathetic. Yes, Marx was alive and writing at this time, but even Marx could not envision many of the movements we have now embraced.
That being said, I think in the breadth of Mr. Turtledove's work, I enjoy his novels that don't involve a time-travel gimmick and are "authentic" alternate histories more. "How Few Remain" and it's various spin-offs to me are a far more interesting tale of "If the South Had Won?" than one which involves giving them truckloads of AK-47s. Although, the implications of this novel, what with the South now having access to early 21st Century technology, could be an interesting follow-up...almost a Steampunk-like setting, with the Confederacy being a technological power.
Also, where on Earth did America Will Break get all of their funding?
Seriously though, I know it is often difficult for people of certain political persuasions to find a protagonist as regressive as Robert E. Lee entertaining (and I am about as far Left as one can go), but if you can set aside the fact that he was not born in the latter half of the 20th Century/early 21st Century, and view him in the context of and as a product of the mid-19th Century, I think you can find that he is quite sympathetic. Yes, Marx was alive and writing at this time, but even Marx could not envision many of the movements we have now embraced.
That being said, I think in the breadth of Mr. Turtledove's work, I enjoy his novels that don't involve a time-travel gimmick and are "authentic" alternate histories more. "How Few Remain" and it's various spin-offs to me are a far more interesting tale of "If the South Had Won?" than one which involves giving them truckloads of AK-47s. Although, the implications of this novel, what with the South now having access to early 21st Century technology, could be an interesting follow-up...almost a Steampunk-like setting, with the Confederacy being a technological power.
May 16, 2012
Half masturbatory Robert E. Lee fanfic, half apologia for the South...
Honestly, the concept is brilliant--white supremacists go back in time, help the South win the Civil War with AKs, and it just goes on from there. But man, I lost count of the number of times someone said the war was about keeping slaves, only to be shouted down by people saying that no, really it was about freedom and states' rights. For crying out loud.
Aside from that (which isn't all that bad, it just stands out once you notice it--a la Mieville's crosshatching), the main problem I had with this novel was the second main character. Robert E. Lee is a pretty impressive historical figure, and you could definitely do worse in picking someone to fanfic. But the second lead, Nate Caudell, is a conduit to the story rather than an actor in it. He's there to let us see cool battle scenes from the trenches. This is great as far as it goes--the battle scenes are fun and nicely constructed--but Caudell is simply a dull character. He waits around for things to happen; he's not proactive. Even at the end when (SPOILER!) he marries his sweetheart, it's because she suggested it!
On the whole, I'd recommend this more heartily if it were shorter. As it is... yeah, sure, what the hell. Go ahead and give it a try.
Honestly, the concept is brilliant--white supremacists go back in time, help the South win the Civil War with AKs, and it just goes on from there. But man, I lost count of the number of times someone said the war was about keeping slaves, only to be shouted down by people saying that no, really it was about freedom and states' rights. For crying out loud.
Aside from that (which isn't all that bad, it just stands out once you notice it--a la Mieville's crosshatching), the main problem I had with this novel was the second main character. Robert E. Lee is a pretty impressive historical figure, and you could definitely do worse in picking someone to fanfic. But the second lead, Nate Caudell, is a conduit to the story rather than an actor in it. He's there to let us see cool battle scenes from the trenches. This is great as far as it goes--the battle scenes are fun and nicely constructed--but Caudell is simply a dull character. He waits around for things to happen; he's not proactive. Even at the end when (SPOILER!) he marries his sweetheart, it's because she suggested it!
On the whole, I'd recommend this more heartily if it were shorter. As it is... yeah, sure, what the hell. Go ahead and give it a try.
June 5, 2007
Turtledove has a unique way of blending science fiction with history. The way he conveys accounts identify him as a master of history and research. In fact, if he were to publish text books in this manner (without the Sci-Fi obviously), the nation's history I.Q. would rise rather sharply.
It's truly one of those "can't put it down" novels. The way he recreates past events and images with his "twists", shows a mind that thinks outside the box.
"Enfield, Springfield, throw them in the cornfield". Brilliant. A typical marching tune that a unit in that era would compose.
His ability to hold the reader to suspense is 5 star. His character composition, also 5 star. There's really nothing to be said negatively about this book.
It's truly one of those "can't put it down" novels. The way he recreates past events and images with his "twists", shows a mind that thinks outside the box.
"Enfield, Springfield, throw them in the cornfield". Brilliant. A typical marching tune that a unit in that era would compose.
His ability to hold the reader to suspense is 5 star. His character composition, also 5 star. There's really nothing to be said negatively about this book.
November 9, 2008
This was the first Harry Turtledove book I ever picked up. Well, "picked up" is misleading...I actually had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Turtledove for half a minute at a Comic Con in San Diego many moons ago. He was at a table in the back, and had books all around him (enough to draw me in, that's for sure!) He signed a copy to me and my (then) boyfriend, and I happily walked away. I wasn't able to pick it up for a few years - I had tried once, but couldn't get past the first chapter - but when I did, it blew me away.
In what I've come to understand is a common theme for Mr. Turtledove, he's taken a major historical event and put an alternate history to it. In this case, the question is, "what would have happened if the South had won, with a little help from the future?"
It's a very interesting read. The story follows several different characters, from actual historical figures to those created to help the story, and it all flows from chapter to chapter.
I had read at one point that Mr. Turtledove had taken some criticism for his portrayal of Lee, because he portrayed him as a gentleman who stuck to his convictions. True or not, the Lee that Turtledove painted in the novel was the type of person I'd want to know, and the same could be said for Nate and Molly.
In what I've come to understand is a common theme for Mr. Turtledove, he's taken a major historical event and put an alternate history to it. In this case, the question is, "what would have happened if the South had won, with a little help from the future?"
It's a very interesting read. The story follows several different characters, from actual historical figures to those created to help the story, and it all flows from chapter to chapter.
I had read at one point that Mr. Turtledove had taken some criticism for his portrayal of Lee, because he portrayed him as a gentleman who stuck to his convictions. True or not, the Lee that Turtledove painted in the novel was the type of person I'd want to know, and the same could be said for Nate and Molly.
July 4, 2010
Perhaps the only one of Turtledoves novels that I would call truly excellent. Unlike many of his sagas, there's no bloated and exposition heavy storytelling here, just a tightly constructed alternate history with a neat science-fiction twist.
Again, unlike many of his other books, characters are a strength here, bolstered, I think, by the fact that he choses just a few people to focus on, rather than the dozens of on-going characters he usually fills his works with. Robert E. Lee is an interesting choice to act as the protagonist, and though he may be presented as a bit more liberal than he was historically, he still makes for a strong and compelling lead. The supporting cast is also well-constructed, and Turtledove's research into the Civil War was clearly quite detailed. And while the science-fiction elements are a bit flimsy, they certainly serve their purpose and make for an entertaining storyline.
All in all, this is one of the best alt-histories I've read, and I just wish that the rest of Turtledove's work was this tightly focused.
Again, unlike many of his other books, characters are a strength here, bolstered, I think, by the fact that he choses just a few people to focus on, rather than the dozens of on-going characters he usually fills his works with. Robert E. Lee is an interesting choice to act as the protagonist, and though he may be presented as a bit more liberal than he was historically, he still makes for a strong and compelling lead. The supporting cast is also well-constructed, and Turtledove's research into the Civil War was clearly quite detailed. And while the science-fiction elements are a bit flimsy, they certainly serve their purpose and make for an entertaining storyline.
All in all, this is one of the best alt-histories I've read, and I just wish that the rest of Turtledove's work was this tightly focused.
December 15, 2017
Phillip Dick originated the alternate history narrative and Turtledove turned it into an industry.
I had no patience and a certain snobbish disregard for his work. Importantly,my opinion was formed without reading Turtledove's opus. Unsurprisingly, my idea on Turtledove's storytelling prowess was wrong.
I grabbed this civil war yarn bc I had heard that this book was one of his best.
It delivers historically, in plotting, and most surprisingly in characterization. The story of a southern civil war soldier and another soldier, a female in disguise, is heartfelt, moving, and illustrative of the mores of the antebellum south.
I had no patience and a certain snobbish disregard for his work. Importantly,my opinion was formed without reading Turtledove's opus. Unsurprisingly, my idea on Turtledove's storytelling prowess was wrong.
I grabbed this civil war yarn bc I had heard that this book was one of his best.
It delivers historically, in plotting, and most surprisingly in characterization. The story of a southern civil war soldier and another soldier, a female in disguise, is heartfelt, moving, and illustrative of the mores of the antebellum south.
June 9, 2021
It's been about 8 years since I read this so i can't provide specifics with clarity. But what an intriguing notion. Traveling, with modern weapons, back in time to change the course of history. It was the first of the genre that I read and I remember enjoying it.
December 24, 2018
Ever wonder that if the Confederacy with superior weaponry, had won the Civil War and Robert E. Lee became President of the United States, what our world might look like? Read this book. A little history and a lot of imagination make this book an excellent read.
March 28, 2023
I'm going to save you some time: Please read my review of The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader instead of my review of this book - Guns of the South. You see that I've given it one star. That's probably enough.
I'm not joking. If you've got 5 minutes: read my review of The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader.
I've said in a dozen reviews that I'm a sucker for a good time travel book. I'm even a sucker for a bad time travel book. But it's got to be kind of plausible, you know?
Like, I guess my reading of history was entirely wrong, because it turns out Lee was fighting for the South because he wanted to free the slaves. Wild.
I read some reviews of Jo Jo Rabbit that complained that it humanized Hitler. Or went too far. It was no Producers - yada yada yada.
(And true: those reviews were few and far between. Jo Jo won an Oscar for best writing.)
I'm hoping you all already know this: the difference between a Jo Jo Rabbit, or Tropic Thunder, or Stephen Warren... and Guns of the South is this: three are satire - obviously fake histories, satirizing, or drawing attention to... Guns of the South is fake history parading as true history. True history.
I think it's important to call this book out for what it is: sheer Neo-Confederate, Lost Cause propaganda. The What-Ifs of history are fun: sure. What if The South had AK-47s and could have won the war? What if Robert E. Lee was really fighting for the South in order to free the slaves on his own terms? What if Abraham Lincoln was secretly a vampire hunter?
I mean: the hoops Turtledove has to jump through to try to make it make sense. How many times did we read lines like this:
"The North was convinced it had the right to dictate to the South how to treat them. The South was equally convinced it already knew. Caudell wanted no part in having someone hundreds of miles away telling him what he could or couldn't do."
States' Rights, see?
Or the line shortly after...
"Caudell reflected that America would have been a much simpler place were the black man not around to vex it. Unfortunately however, the black man was here."
Go on, Caudell. Where... Or how... What are you...???
"Some of you all think you came here on the Mayflower." - Malcolm X - The Ballot or the Bullet.
Back to quotes from the book:
"'Slavery was not the reason the Southern States chose to leave the Union,' Lee said. He was aware he sounded uncomfortable, but went on, 'We sought only to enjoy the sovereignty guaranteed us under the Constitution - a right the North wrongly denied us. Our watchword all along has been, we wish but to be left alone.'"
Turtledove has Lee say stuff like that again, and again, and again. And he has Lee do some really fancy footwork around things like The Articles of Secession from various states, or especially The South's own Constitution. Article 4.2: of the Confederate Constitution: "...and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired." Or let's go to section 3 if that wasn't clear enough, "....the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress..."
Turtledove has Lee saying things like, "Yes, yes... we did write that, but it was really about State's Rights, see? We wrote that in there so we could free the slaves on our own terms, see? Actually: ACTUALLY: I changed my mind about the negro question once we got them repeaters (AK-47s) from the REAL racists.
From The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader, ask yourself when these arguments (State's Rights) came about, and what purpose were they intended to serve - then and now:
"Especially on the subjects of slavery, secession, and race - the core of this volume- Confederate and neo-Confederate statements change depending upon where people wrote or spoke, and when and why. Why did Confederates say they seceded for slavery in 1861 but not in 1891? Why did neo-Confederates claim in 1999, but not in 1869, that thousands of African Americans served in the Confederate armed forces?..."
The big issue I have with the book is that it the Neo-Confederate propaganda just subtly and insidiously works its way in. The The Myth of the Kindly General Lee. The myth that the war was over "State's Rights." - Please - explain to me the Fugitive Slave Act. If the war was REALLY about State's Rights, why couldn't the Northern States make their own laws when people - human people - traveled in them? Why did the South get to dictate to the North? The myth that slaves liked and wanted to be slaves - that they were better off. The masters protected them.
It was too much. A friend said, "The book can be summed up this way: racists of the future give weapons to racists of the past."
And on top of all of the bad speculative history - when the Rivington men turn on the Confederates, the Confederates are able to whip them, just like they did the North. Exqueeze me? Lee barely gets away: but come on. Why didn't they just install Nathan Bedford Forrest in the first place? So many Rebels had a Damascus Conversion, one would think it was a Big Tent Revival.
You know who else was against slavery? Thomas Jefferson. You know who else didn't free his slaves? Thomas Jefferson.
You know who else promised to free his slave? William Clark - of Lewis and Clark. He promised York freedom. On second thought... let's just not do that.
The book mentions "selling south." Look that one up for a second. Think about the economic implications of manumission. Racists in the northern states saw the writing on the wall, and kept their investments by selling slaves south. Just think about that for a moment.
"'Good heavens father, what did you tell her? That you'd sell her South if she didn't move quicker?' ...Normally, Lee would also have smiled. He had trouble imagining the enormity Julia would have to commit to make him imagine selling her South. Good servants who worked for good masters - which, without false modesty, he knew himself to be - did not have to worry about such things. But that the joke could be made at all spoke volumes to the institutions of slavery."
Yeah: A lot to unpack in that one.
I have a lot of bookmarks pointing out all the Neo-Confederate propaganda, but I don't feel like going through it point-by-point.
Please: read my review of The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader instead. Or better yet, get the book and read it. It's all primary sources. I'll be bringing it with me to book club when we discuss this one. Should be good.
I'm not joking. If you've got 5 minutes: read my review of The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader.
I've said in a dozen reviews that I'm a sucker for a good time travel book. I'm even a sucker for a bad time travel book. But it's got to be kind of plausible, you know?
Like, I guess my reading of history was entirely wrong, because it turns out Lee was fighting for the South because he wanted to free the slaves. Wild.
I read some reviews of Jo Jo Rabbit that complained that it humanized Hitler. Or went too far. It was no Producers - yada yada yada.
(And true: those reviews were few and far between. Jo Jo won an Oscar for best writing.)
I'm hoping you all already know this: the difference between a Jo Jo Rabbit, or Tropic Thunder, or Stephen Warren... and Guns of the South is this: three are satire - obviously fake histories, satirizing, or drawing attention to... Guns of the South is fake history parading as true history. True history.
I think it's important to call this book out for what it is: sheer Neo-Confederate, Lost Cause propaganda. The What-Ifs of history are fun: sure. What if The South had AK-47s and could have won the war? What if Robert E. Lee was really fighting for the South in order to free the slaves on his own terms? What if Abraham Lincoln was secretly a vampire hunter?
I mean: the hoops Turtledove has to jump through to try to make it make sense. How many times did we read lines like this:
"The North was convinced it had the right to dictate to the South how to treat them. The South was equally convinced it already knew. Caudell wanted no part in having someone hundreds of miles away telling him what he could or couldn't do."
States' Rights, see?
Or the line shortly after...
"Caudell reflected that America would have been a much simpler place were the black man not around to vex it. Unfortunately however, the black man was here."
Go on, Caudell. Where... Or how... What are you...???
"Some of you all think you came here on the Mayflower." - Malcolm X - The Ballot or the Bullet.
Back to quotes from the book:
"'Slavery was not the reason the Southern States chose to leave the Union,' Lee said. He was aware he sounded uncomfortable, but went on, 'We sought only to enjoy the sovereignty guaranteed us under the Constitution - a right the North wrongly denied us. Our watchword all along has been, we wish but to be left alone.'"
Turtledove has Lee say stuff like that again, and again, and again. And he has Lee do some really fancy footwork around things like The Articles of Secession from various states, or especially The South's own Constitution. Article 4.2: of the Confederate Constitution: "...and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired." Or let's go to section 3 if that wasn't clear enough, "....the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress..."
Turtledove has Lee saying things like, "Yes, yes... we did write that, but it was really about State's Rights, see? We wrote that in there so we could free the slaves on our own terms, see? Actually: ACTUALLY: I changed my mind about the negro question once we got them repeaters (AK-47s) from the REAL racists.
From The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader, ask yourself when these arguments (State's Rights) came about, and what purpose were they intended to serve - then and now:
"Especially on the subjects of slavery, secession, and race - the core of this volume- Confederate and neo-Confederate statements change depending upon where people wrote or spoke, and when and why. Why did Confederates say they seceded for slavery in 1861 but not in 1891? Why did neo-Confederates claim in 1999, but not in 1869, that thousands of African Americans served in the Confederate armed forces?..."
The big issue I have with the book is that it the Neo-Confederate propaganda just subtly and insidiously works its way in. The The Myth of the Kindly General Lee. The myth that the war was over "State's Rights." - Please - explain to me the Fugitive Slave Act. If the war was REALLY about State's Rights, why couldn't the Northern States make their own laws when people - human people - traveled in them? Why did the South get to dictate to the North? The myth that slaves liked and wanted to be slaves - that they were better off. The masters protected them.
It was too much. A friend said, "The book can be summed up this way: racists of the future give weapons to racists of the past."
And on top of all of the bad speculative history - when the Rivington men turn on the Confederates, the Confederates are able to whip them, just like they did the North. Exqueeze me? Lee barely gets away: but come on. Why didn't they just install Nathan Bedford Forrest in the first place? So many Rebels had a Damascus Conversion, one would think it was a Big Tent Revival.
You know who else was against slavery? Thomas Jefferson. You know who else didn't free his slaves? Thomas Jefferson.
You know who else promised to free his slave? William Clark - of Lewis and Clark. He promised York freedom. On second thought... let's just not do that.
The book mentions "selling south." Look that one up for a second. Think about the economic implications of manumission. Racists in the northern states saw the writing on the wall, and kept their investments by selling slaves south. Just think about that for a moment.
"'Good heavens father, what did you tell her? That you'd sell her South if she didn't move quicker?' ...Normally, Lee would also have smiled. He had trouble imagining the enormity Julia would have to commit to make him imagine selling her South. Good servants who worked for good masters - which, without false modesty, he knew himself to be - did not have to worry about such things. But that the joke could be made at all spoke volumes to the institutions of slavery."
Yeah: A lot to unpack in that one.
I have a lot of bookmarks pointing out all the Neo-Confederate propaganda, but I don't feel like going through it point-by-point.
Please: read my review of The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader instead. Or better yet, get the book and read it. It's all primary sources. I'll be bringing it with me to book club when we discuss this one. Should be good.
March 22, 2024
Surprisingly enjoyable despite me not knowing more than the barest outlines of the American Civil War, and I suspect rewarding for people with a keener interest in this period. As I was reading I got the impression that the setting was being treated with some care, but it was only once I read the author's note at the end of the book that I appreciated how much: Turtledove didn't simply invent plausible Confederate characters, he found real people from the records of the time and elaborated on their background to flesh out the recorded facts. I was fairly impressed by both this and his approach to deciding the elections in the book (he gamed them out rather than solving them via authorial fiat).
Aside from the effort involved at a mechanical level, the book is also just good -- Turtledove threads the needle very well both in making it clear how disadvantaged the South was in the war and making a sympathetic case for their cause, without flinching from the race-based slavery issue that was at the root of the split. Indeed, he makes excellent use of his time-travel device in focusing on just this issue: the AWB organisation coming back in time to support the South are white supremacists, but ironically both their uncompromisingly harsh treatment of slaves and the information they eventually leak to the CSA work against their aims. Vicious treatment of slaves did not find approval amongst most of the Confederates, however much they looked down on the blacks, and the AWB injured their misrepresentation of the future by bringing back with them literature making it clear how much the general consensus of the future was against their viewpoint. Similarly, also, their willingness to resort to violence creates an antagonism that draws support to the opposite of their camp.
I did think there were some awkward components: Turtledove has the Confederates, and Lee in particular, focus on how the future perceives the US chattel slavery system as part of a motivation for gradual reform, but neglects the Confederate reaction to so much else about the future, which would inevitably have shaped the weight they place on its opinion. Bear in mind that at the time, even most of the North did not want black men to be able to vote, let alone any of the other sweeping social changes the future promised. The CSA also seems oddly acquiescent to the opinions of others for a nation that has just fought a war specifically over the principle of being able to make exactly this decision itself.
The cast of the book includes US and CSA presidents and generals, but aside from the grand picture and major political leaders, the book also covers the ordinary man's life, and there are a number of small characters with less than straightforward views on the major topics of the day. I appreciated Turtledove's avoidance of simple mouthpieces for black-and-white positions -- even the main AWB antagonists are accorded some complexity of character. Overall, I was pleased with the book and a little sad that Turtledove didn't develop this alternate history further (though, a little confusingly, it appears he does have another series in which the Confederacy won the war a different way).
August 4, 2017
An intriguing novel that has time-traveling apartheid terrorists go back in time to supply the Confederate army with AK-47s and keep white supremacy alive into their day so that they're not isolated when their government comes under pressure in the early 21st century.
With this story I have to wonder who the intended audience is. I doubt the Confederate pride people will be happy at the reminder of just how horrible slavery truly was (even if Southerners are the protagonists), whereas it was physically painful for me to read of admired figures failing utterly in the great dual purpose of preserving the Union and ending slavery. Defeated Abe is truly a painful sight. It's not overly fun to see the bad guys winning, even if some of the people on that side are decent human beings.
The second half of the book breaks free from that and turns to the course of the new CSA figuring out how its going to rule itself. This section is rather less depressing as Lee is basically a really decent guy and in a position to do some good, while the Neo-Nazi Afrikaner scumbags are less able to dominate the proceedings. Seeing how people from the 1860s view some of the future is interesting to see just from a character standpoint.
As you might tell, I found the first half uncomfortable reading and the second half rather more entertaining. In both sections though, the book is consumed with a lot of superfluous details (including a long sequence on just how to use and clean an AK-47) that leave you impatient for it to just get on with it. The sections revolving around the gradually changing opinions of a local teacher and related characters are especially prone to this sort of dead wood.
The main strength of the book is in its characters and setting though. As ever, Turtledove is a master at reproducing historical figures and attitudes in a way that I've rarely seen matched. Even more impressive is his ability to do so without benefit of their historical actions to build a framework around. Lee is about as close to the figure as any attempt I've seen to capture him. Same goes for Grant, Forrest, Davis, etc. Lincoln seems a bit off, but then it's really hard to imagine how he would react to losing the war. It's so antithetical to think of him as an abject failure that I have a hard time envisioning it.
Historical attitudes are on display too, for all their uncomfortable bigotry. Be prepared for a massive use of the word nigger and some really unpleasant and brutal scenes, none of which have negative consequences for the perpetrators. The book is fortunate in having the Afrikaner fanatics as villains since this gives us someone to hate who's even worse than the Southern slaveowners. But the fact that you end up siding with ever-victorious racist murdering Rebs (and I know the North wasn't much better, but still...) is disturbing in and of itself. So in the end, I still wonder who this book is aimed at?
With this story I have to wonder who the intended audience is. I doubt the Confederate pride people will be happy at the reminder of just how horrible slavery truly was (even if Southerners are the protagonists), whereas it was physically painful for me to read of admired figures failing utterly in the great dual purpose of preserving the Union and ending slavery. Defeated Abe is truly a painful sight. It's not overly fun to see the bad guys winning, even if some of the people on that side are decent human beings.
The second half of the book breaks free from that and turns to the course of the new CSA figuring out how its going to rule itself. This section is rather less depressing as Lee is basically a really decent guy and in a position to do some good, while the Neo-Nazi Afrikaner scumbags are less able to dominate the proceedings. Seeing how people from the 1860s view some of the future is interesting to see just from a character standpoint.
As you might tell, I found the first half uncomfortable reading and the second half rather more entertaining. In both sections though, the book is consumed with a lot of superfluous details (including a long sequence on just how to use and clean an AK-47) that leave you impatient for it to just get on with it. The sections revolving around the gradually changing opinions of a local teacher and related characters are especially prone to this sort of dead wood.
The main strength of the book is in its characters and setting though. As ever, Turtledove is a master at reproducing historical figures and attitudes in a way that I've rarely seen matched. Even more impressive is his ability to do so without benefit of their historical actions to build a framework around. Lee is about as close to the figure as any attempt I've seen to capture him. Same goes for Grant, Forrest, Davis, etc. Lincoln seems a bit off, but then it's really hard to imagine how he would react to losing the war. It's so antithetical to think of him as an abject failure that I have a hard time envisioning it.
Historical attitudes are on display too, for all their uncomfortable bigotry. Be prepared for a massive use of the word nigger and some really unpleasant and brutal scenes, none of which have negative consequences for the perpetrators. The book is fortunate in having the Afrikaner fanatics as villains since this gives us someone to hate who's even worse than the Southern slaveowners. But the fact that you end up siding with ever-victorious racist murdering Rebs (and I know the North wasn't much better, but still...) is disturbing in and of itself. So in the end, I still wonder who this book is aimed at?
September 23, 2013
Harry Turtledove, The Guns Of The South
Earns his alternate history reputation
I've been interested in the alternate history genre, and finally picked up some Turtledove. (The local library had a copy, and this is a standalone book, as opposed to starting one of his big series in the middle)
The story offers an interesting point of divergence and series of events following from it. The analogues to and aspects from real history are meticulously well-detailed. I sensed that throughout the book, and was impressed with the thorough research, but was still surprised by the endnote which said that the characters of the 44th North Carolina were based on actual military records.
The book also does a great job illustrating issues related to the American Civil War. Since a Southern victory was so unlikely in real life, perhaps the science-fiction help was necessary to illuminate those issues. There seem to be too many examples of that to go into here.
I liked the style of two POV characters where one was an average soldier, and one a general and later politician, since overall this offered a wider perspective on the story. An educated man and noncommissioned officer like Nate kept the commoner viewpoint from being too narrow. The parts about his teaching and his relationship with Mollie were great as something universal, or a touch of normalcy amongst the chaos
It makes sense that Lee would end up involved in politics in a world where the South won, like how Grant ended up as US President in real life. Davis serving in Lee's Cabinet reminded me of how John Quincy Adams ran for the US House Of Representatives after his presidency.
I realized early on the the AWB were neo-Nazis or somesuch and the letters really stood for something besides 'America Will Break'. However, I was still surprised that they were South African racists, their gold being in Kruggerand form being the first obvious clue. It was striking how they were even more racist than the Confederates. Overall, Turtledove handles the in-character reveal/explanation/investigation of their nature very well, so the ending involving the AWB explaining their technology/history/etc seems particularly fitting.
It seemed convenient that the 44th North Carolina was the group called back for the combat at the end of the book, but that seemed excusable as a way to use characters we were already familiar with.
Turtledove uses the N-word a lot, but it seems to fit the setting, as opposed to using it gratuitously. It's interesting how many of the characters who are relatively reasonable on racial issues still use that word sometimes. Frankly, I was amused when Turtledove made a pun with the unrelated word meaning 'stingy'.
I read through it again pretty much right after finishing it; I rarely do that even with books I like.
Earns his alternate history reputation
I've been interested in the alternate history genre, and finally picked up some Turtledove. (The local library had a copy, and this is a standalone book, as opposed to starting one of his big series in the middle)
The story offers an interesting point of divergence and series of events following from it. The analogues to and aspects from real history are meticulously well-detailed. I sensed that throughout the book, and was impressed with the thorough research, but was still surprised by the endnote which said that the characters of the 44th North Carolina were based on actual military records.
The book also does a great job illustrating issues related to the American Civil War. Since a Southern victory was so unlikely in real life, perhaps the science-fiction help was necessary to illuminate those issues. There seem to be too many examples of that to go into here.
I liked the style of two POV characters where one was an average soldier, and one a general and later politician, since overall this offered a wider perspective on the story. An educated man and noncommissioned officer like Nate kept the commoner viewpoint from being too narrow. The parts about his teaching and his relationship with Mollie were great as something universal, or a touch of normalcy amongst the chaos
It makes sense that Lee would end up involved in politics in a world where the South won, like how Grant ended up as US President in real life. Davis serving in Lee's Cabinet reminded me of how John Quincy Adams ran for the US House Of Representatives after his presidency.
I realized early on the the AWB were neo-Nazis or somesuch and the letters really stood for something besides 'America Will Break'. However, I was still surprised that they were South African racists, their gold being in Kruggerand form being the first obvious clue. It was striking how they were even more racist than the Confederates. Overall, Turtledove handles the in-character reveal/explanation/investigation of their nature very well, so the ending involving the AWB explaining their technology/history/etc seems particularly fitting.
It seemed convenient that the 44th North Carolina was the group called back for the combat at the end of the book, but that seemed excusable as a way to use characters we were already familiar with.
Turtledove uses the N-word a lot, but it seems to fit the setting, as opposed to using it gratuitously. It's interesting how many of the characters who are relatively reasonable on racial issues still use that word sometimes. Frankly, I was amused when Turtledove made a pun with the unrelated word meaning 'stingy'.
I read through it again pretty much right after finishing it; I rarely do that even with books I like.
December 22, 2014
Time-traveling future racists give past racists advanced weaponry so that racism may prosper. Racism ensues.
"What if the Confederacy won?" is an interesting thought experiment, or possibly a term paper for History class, but the act of basing a novel on it is a whole different can of worms. It involves vivid scenes of wholesale slaughter of troops being mowed down by automatic weapons. Horrific details on the fates of slaves freed by the Union and recaptured by a victorious South. A darker world as the former US reels from loss and a Confederacy fueled with advanced technology rises.
Story has two protagonists, Robert E Lee and some Confederate grunt foot soldier. The foot soldier's story gives you the "common man's" view of events. Highlights include the moment he realizes maybe "n*ggers can learn things as well as white folk". (How progressive of him!) Lee's story covers the politico-social big picture events, as he transitions from general to president of the CSA. The bright moment for him was when he found a history book dated 1990 and learned how the future would come to view his beloved Second American Revolution (Civil War). For a moment, he wondered if perhaps they'd made a bit mistake. Then he says, "Nah". It tries to pitch these guys as sympathetic heroes, but never could I shake the notion that they were villains. (For non-Americans, imagine a book about Arnold Keselring, based around the idea of Nazi Germany winning the war. "Smiling Arnold" grins for photos while Hitler blithely pursues his global genocide. Fun times!)
The US Civil War was bloody and ugly enough. There is no reason for this book to exist. This was a low, mean, ugly story. I disliked just about every moment of reading it.
"What if the Confederacy won?" is an interesting thought experiment, or possibly a term paper for History class, but the act of basing a novel on it is a whole different can of worms. It involves vivid scenes of wholesale slaughter of troops being mowed down by automatic weapons. Horrific details on the fates of slaves freed by the Union and recaptured by a victorious South. A darker world as the former US reels from loss and a Confederacy fueled with advanced technology rises.
Story has two protagonists, Robert E Lee and some Confederate grunt foot soldier. The foot soldier's story gives you the "common man's" view of events. Highlights include the moment he realizes maybe "n*ggers can learn things as well as white folk". (How progressive of him!) Lee's story covers the politico-social big picture events, as he transitions from general to president of the CSA. The bright moment for him was when he found a history book dated 1990 and learned how the future would come to view his beloved Second American Revolution (Civil War). For a moment, he wondered if perhaps they'd made a bit mistake. Then he says, "Nah". It tries to pitch these guys as sympathetic heroes, but never could I shake the notion that they were villains. (For non-Americans, imagine a book about Arnold Keselring, based around the idea of Nazi Germany winning the war. "Smiling Arnold" grins for photos while Hitler blithely pursues his global genocide. Fun times!)
The US Civil War was bloody and ugly enough. There is no reason for this book to exist. This was a low, mean, ugly story. I disliked just about every moment of reading it.
November 4, 2014
A seminal work in alternative history dealing with that old chestnut: what if the South had won the American Civil War? Turtledove makes a convincing case to support the notion the only thing that might have swung the balance in the favour of the Confederacy would have been the introduction of something as radically game-changing as the AK-47. Whilst the amateur historian in me doesn't buy all of Turtledove's conclusions, primarily the notion that the Southern states would have quickly thrown off slavery in the aftermath of victory over the north, this remains a fascinating entry in the never-ending game of 'what if'.
May 16, 2021
In the crowded genre of alternate history and speculative fiction, this book stands a head taller than the rest. Wait. Was that an oblique Abe Lincoln reference? Ha. Maybe so.
What makes this book stand out, you may ask? The narrative is fascinating, the characters believable, and the technical aspects are far better than in most books of this ilk. The author balances suspense, imagination, and a deft familiarity with military strategy. There is so much story packed in this 500 page book, it reads like a trilogy.
What makes this book stand out, you may ask? The narrative is fascinating, the characters believable, and the technical aspects are far better than in most books of this ilk. The author balances suspense, imagination, and a deft familiarity with military strategy. There is so much story packed in this 500 page book, it reads like a trilogy.
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