If The South Had Won The Civil War

"This is also one of the first alternate histories I ever read. I know I was 13 years old because my ninth grade English class had a bookcase full of paperbacks, so I pulled it off the shelf and read it. It did have a considerable influence on me when I was writing the Timeline-191 books. It not only lets the Confederacy gain its independence; it also tracks the history of the Confederate States and the United States for the next hundred years, because MacKinley Kantor was writing it just about the time of the centennial of the American Civil War . And I just want to note that If The South Had Won The Civil War first ran in Look magazine in 1959, it’s maybe 30,000 words, and he got 25,000 1959-dollars for it – which is something like getting a quarter of a million dollars now. So I am most sincerely jealous that he had the clout to do that! Of course, he was just coming off winning the Pulitzer Prize for Andersonville , the story of the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia. So he was a writer to look for. “Alternate history, like any fiction, is not really about the world that you’re creating. It’s about the world you live in” When he got to World War One , he had Teddy Roosevelt as President of the United States and Woodrow Wilson as president of the Confederate States. And those were such perfect choices that I used them too, when I was doing Timeline-191 . Although my look at what an independent confederacy might have been is rather less sunny and optimistic than his… Yes! This is spoilers, but the USA and CSA fight on the same side in World War One, and again in World War Two, and as the centennial of the Civil War rolls around they reunite so that they’re one country again. This is optimism, in my opinion. Yes – and a lot of life is based on chance. I wrote a short story called “Must and Shall” from the line “The federal union, it must and shall be preserved”. It postulates that when Jubal Early, in the summer of 1864, attacked Washington DC, Lincoln went out to Fort Stevens to watch the fighting, and there were bullets whizzing around… And of course, Lincoln was an enormous target: here is this six foot four bean pole who really stood out in the 19th century, when people generally ran smaller than they do now. So, what if he stopped a bullet? What would the world look like if the radical Republicans had reconstructed the conquered South? It’s not a tremendously optimistic story! But yes, a random chance works too. The Wages of Sin is set in 1850s England, in a world where HIV got loose in the early 16th century, instead of in the late 20th century. It spread and was, of course, untreatable: if you got it, you were going to die, unpleasantly. It would take a while for doctors to realize that something new and horrible was loose in the world, especially as – in real life – this is the same time that syphilis spread so explosively. Is this the same disease? Is it a different disease? Do they work together? And how do you balance the interests of staying alive and staying strictly monogamous, with the very human impulse to screw anything that moves? Sure! Henry went after anything that moved, and if it didn’t move, he would shake it. We’re a few hundred years into the wasting changing the politics of the world, and the technology too – most of the people who do a lot of the inventing would never have been born, because there’s a large die-off, and the population is much smaller. Europeans are clinging to the east coast of the Americas in the mid-19th century, and barely penetrating past the Appalachians. India has not been assimilated into the British Empire . There are British and Portuguese and French and Dutch trading stations on the coast. There are no steam engines, there’s no telegraph, these things just haven’t happened yet. And of course there are women all over the world, regardless of which culture they live under, who are oppressed even more systematically than they were in the real 1850s – which really says something. There was a lot! I’ve been to Salisbury, which is one of the reasons that I picked it as my provincial town. I did my homework on what the real London was like in the early 1850s, and then subtracted some, because it wouldn’t be that big or that important. In this world, Scotland is still independent… It’s a thought experiment. You can’t prove whether it’s right or wrong. It’s designed to give people something to think about, and to be entertaining and reasonably convincing at the same time. Thank you! And I would just like to tell all the kindly people out there who will be seeing this that one of the things they should do is look for me in their local bookstores or at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or wherever you shop for books. I’m there, and with a little bit of luck, I may even be interesting…You never can tell!"