Book Review #69: The Guns of the South

[jethrien]

Title: The Guns of the South
Author: Harry Turtledove
Genre: Alt-history (Civil War)
Thingummies: 3

Synopsis: Time-travelers give the Confederates AK-47s.

Thoughts: I've been trying to decide why I was so lukewarm on this book. (Minor spoilers below.)

It's a clever idea: time-traveling racist Afrikaners try to rewrite history by ensuring that the South wins the Civil War. The research is exhaustive, and Turtledove plays out the scenario in great detail (down to figuring out how the electoral college votes would look for the subsequent presidential race). The protagonists are likeable and show some character growth.

But it left me cold, despite being well-written, and I've been puzzling out why.

I think part of the problem is the pacing. This is a book about following the consequences of an action, so it meanders along discovering ramifications instead of charging along a plot line. It drags in places. Turtledove has an unfortunate habit of including snippets that neither advance the plot nor the characters, but that nag at you as you try to figure out why they were included. (For example, on the way to a ceremony, much ado is made over someone's ring. The ring plays no further part in the story.)

Also problematic is the attempt to make racist Southerners palatable to modern audiences. It's been suggested elsewhere that Lee himself opposed slavery, so it's not much of an anachronism for him to find himself embracing abolitionism after the war. But somehow, all the sympathetic characters find their way to modern views on race by the end of the book, and even many of the less sympathetic Southerners see the logic. Only a few years after they won the war, mind you.

To take the place of real racists, we have the Afrikaners. Who are so uniformly despicable that even the racist Southerners deplore their methods. The Afrikaners are the bogeymen, unrelentingly evil so that the Americans can redeem themselves in record time. Their continued meddling prevents the more interesting ramifications of a Southern win from coming about.

The actual time-travel mechanics are deliberately left vague, which I support in general. However, a couple questions remain. They seem able to travel back and forth, which implies that the future they come from remains stable despite the changes in the past. How do they know if they succeeded? Or is there just a new, different timeline? The time machine is stolen--why has no one else from the future tried to interfere? Finally, their menace seems ended when this side of the machine is destroyed. But the machine had to have worked without a receiving platform the first time. What prevents them from coming back?

It's not a bad book. But while the ideas are fun to ponder over, I feel as if it ultimately undercuts its own premise.

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

This is one of my favorite Turtledove books, so a few observations about the history:

"Also problematic is the attempt to make racist Southerners palatable to modern audiences. It's been suggested elsewhere that Lee himself opposed slavery, so it's not much of an anachronism for him to find himself embracing abolitionism after the war. But somehow, all the sympathetic characters find their way to modern views on race by the end of the book, and even many of the less sympathetic Southerners see the logic. Only a few years after they won the war, mind you."

I don't have much of a problem with this mainly because Turtledove shows his work, and because none of the sympathetic characters are the sort that would have been unwilling to make progress in light of the events of the novel. Our non-historical protagonist, an educated schoolteacher, has enough events happen to him that change his mind (the black soldier stripped of his weapons and killed by the AWB, the slave he discovers to have been tortured by another AWB man, his friendship with Henry Pleasants, etc.). Lee, who historically arguably was set to waver on slavery, is heavily pushed by the British and the U.S. peace negotiators, and the AWB sets a strong negative example. The speed of repudiation is comparable to the reversal of attitudes towards anti-semitism and fascism caused by WW2--an apt comparison, since the real world AWB really are the sort of cartoonish villains who would make their logo imitate a swastika in the 1970s. There's nothing quite like extreme evil to drive a culture away from ideas it might have sympathized with before. Forrest's reversal is a bit tougher to swallow, but the Inauguration massacre is so heinous that it becomes plausible.

"To take the place of real racists, we have the Afrikaners. Who are so uniformly despicable that even the racist Southerners deplore their methods. The Afrikaners are the bogeymen, unrelentingly evil so that the Americans can redeem themselves in record time. Their continued meddling prevents the more interesting ramifications of a Southern win from coming about."

I think that's more of a "scope of the book" thing--I don't think Turtledove wanted to seriously explore the historical impact of a Southern victory here so much as he wanted to look at how a historical civilization would actually react to time travelers. He's written at least one short story with a similar theme, where an intelligent Byzantine detective isn't overwhelmed by time traveller technology and is able to realize that an apparently magical murder was in fact just using advanced technology. Turtledove's not a fan of Clarke's law that "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It's actually pretty common in his books with fantastic elements to make the non-fantastic culture much more intelligent than the typical sci-if author does.

For the interesting ramifications of a Southern win according to Turtledove, you'd have to read through the sprawling 11 book Southern Victory series (How Few Remain = 1880s, The Great War (3 books) = World War I, American Empire (3 books) = Interwar period, and Settling Accounts (4 books) = WW2). There's no whitewashing of Southern racism in that series at all, with a major viewpoint character who is an Expy of Hitler, but possibly more evil and competent by comparison. And nothing fantastic in this series at all--it just alters the history so McClellan is defeated in detail before Lincoln can reshuffle his generals, forcing an early defeat on the Union.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I agree that Lee and the school teacher make sense in how their thoughts change. But I feel like he stacks the deck to make his characters choose the "right" decisions. He only lets us get close to people who are already leaning towards abolitionism and then makes damn sure they get the experiences necessary to push them over. It just felt disingenuous, somehow.