July 28, 2007
The End of Turtledove's Confederacy Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:55 PM EST A year and a half ago I reviewed for AmericanHeritage.com a volume in Harry Turtledove’s vast cycle of novels about a Confederacy that achieved its independence in 1862. That volume was the second in a tetralogy called Settling Accounts, which recounted a series of campaigns of an alternate Second World War in part played out on American soil, just as earlier trilogies had recounted an American portion of the First World War and a couple of decades of political history describing the 1920s and 1930s in Turtledove’s alternate universe. On Monday he will publish In at the Death, the eleventh and perhaps concluding volume of a series comprising two trilogies and a tetralogy, plus the novel that set the whole thing going, How Few Remain, first published in 1997. So Turtledove has been knocking out better than one a year in this series for a decade. What can one say about the end of this enormous effort? It is impossible to say almost anything without revealing crucial plot details, so people who want to read Turtledove for the plot should stop reading this blog post now. For anyone else: The author has left room for at least one more trilogy about his postwar world, but his Confederacy is finally conquered, after attempting to exterminate its African-American population, and (spoiler ahead) having developed a nuclear weapon but neither an effective delivery system nor the capacity for repeated production. The two most popular settings for alternate histories are alternate versions of the American Civil War and the Second World War, with the more chilling and memorable books seeing the bad guys win. Turtledove, who alone in his profession has fused these two scenarios, may owe his comparatively big readership to that trick alone, although he has some other virtues. People who dislike his form of alternate history decry him for mechanically recycling actual history—there are a Confederate Hitler, Goebbels, and Manstein (in this case, real history’s Patton), a Confederate Stalingrad (Pittsburgh), a Confederate Auschwitz, etc. For the critics, they all seem too close to their inspirations in what alternate history buffs call “our time line” to give the pleasure the genre sometimes delivers, which includes more ingenious alteration, sometimes subtle, sometimes wild. There is something in this criticism, but it seems less damning of the final volume of the vast series than it may have been before. Turtledove is not simply restaging the known and real history of the New World; the present leaks in too, and to disturbing effect. He has incorporated elements of the Iraq War into his series for a few years now—there are suicide bombers, and a fair amount of other terrorism, including the mutilation of soldiers. For what is in effect a triumphal victory of a cause the author clearly supports, the book is much sadder and grimmer than one might have expected. When the Americans win and are afflicted by terrorists, either in the Confederacy or in Canada or Utah, there are systematic reprisals, usually mass shootings of hostages. It is not clear that they work, but neither is it clear that they fail, or that terror would subside faster without what were in the 1940s the traditional countermeasures. The American Final Solution does not seem an apology for the actual German version, a cry of “Anyone could do it,” because Turtledove’s American South, in the wake of the loss of a First World War, is quite plausibly one of the more tormented and race-obsessed industrialized cultures anyone has ever imagined. For that matter, the countermeasures Turtledove’s American Army takes against partisans are not the ones the Nazis took in real history; they are significantly less dreadful. In terms of military ethics, the soldiers who fight for his United States are recognizably the sort of people who fought for ours in the same decade. The worlds Turtledove has created are by no means the most interesting alternate history written in our time, even among the work characterized as genre fiction. As it happens, this year saw an American alternate history (Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union) that critics took as a work of serious literature, after deciding the same thing a couple of years ago about Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and after having retrospectively upgraded Philip K. Dick’s 1962 The Man in the High Castle. But Turtledove, a one-man industry, has probably made it much easier for others to publish in his genre by producing the readers for other, and to my taste better, writers of genre fiction. Anyone who likes alternate history owes him something, and this latest effort will in no way disappoint anyone who made it through the first ten.
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