GRGR(8)--parallel worlds

[Craig Clark]

Ted Samsel writes <tejas at infi.net>

> Craig,
>   I didn't see Harry Turtledove's GUNS OF THE SOUTH, wherein strangely
> clad soldiers approach Robert E. Lee with AK-47s just before the Battle of
> the Wilderness in 1862, giving the Confederate forces a good number
> of these weapons and training them in the use of them,
> thus changing Merkin History quite a bit. The
> strangely clad soldiers turn out to be Afrikaaners who have developed
> a time machine with Israeli technology.
> 
> Pretty accurate historically. Turtledove is history prof at UCLA and he's
> studied the city plans of Richmond quite well. (I live here in the World's
> Largest Confederate Theme Park ...Tom Robbins, a native, said that).
> 
> later,

I've read no Turtledove, though I doi have a copy of _Agent of 
Byzantium_ floating around somewhere, so this one 
comes as a surprise. For obvious reasons I'd love to read it. 
Turtledove has made a reputation based on alternative worlds SF, 
including an ongoing series where aliens invade during WWII forcing 
an Allies-Axis alliance...

I forgot another seminal alternative history from my list. _The Iron 
Dream_ (in fact written by Norman Spinrad) presents itself as an 
edition of a novel, _The Lord of the Swastika_, written by an Austrian
(born in Branau on the Inn on April 20 1889) who, after dabbling in 
rightwing politics in post-WWI Germany, emigrates to the USA where he 
gets a job illustrating (and later writing for) the SF pulps of the 
"Golden Age"... Complete with a pseudo-academic critical appraisal 
of the text, and with blurbs on the cover claiming that "Hitler is a 
fantasy writer on a par with Tolkien or Moseley", this is SF's answer 
to _Pale Fire_...


Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
 the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
 on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"