Just finished Harry Turtledove's Settling: Accounts: The Grapple, the latest addition to Turteldove's long-running series reimagining American History in light of a Confederate victory in the Civil War. Imagine what would happen if what Henry Kissenger called the modern Hundred Year War had played out on North America, with the CSA playing the German role and the USA playing that of France. We're now deep into World War II, with the CSA on the defensive.
Confederate leader Jake Featerston continues his Final Solution of the black "problem," the a-bomb race is in full swing, and the industrial might of the North has come into full play. (As Shelby Foote famously observed of Civl War counterfactuals, if the North had ever been in serious danger of losing, it just would have taken its other hand from out of its pocket.)
The plotting here is faster than in some previous installments and the writing seems tighter. Certainly, it held my attention far better than some recent installments.
I can’t help wondering how many more installments Turtledove has in him. Is he going to take us through a Cold war on North America? Although Turtledove sticks pretty closely to a historical precedent in his major plotting, I'm doubtful whether he'll put us through a cold war. Instead, he seems to be foreshadowing a shift to the War on Terror as his model. He's pretty clearly signalling a coming occupation of a defeated CSA by the USA, which will look a lot like the occupation of Iraq with civil war, suicide bombers, and so on.
If this alternate history teaches us anything about our own timeline, it is that the Union victory was a heaven-sent blessing. The timeline Turtledove constructed on the basis of a CSA victory is a much darker and nastier place, but it is a very plausible and convincing counterfactual. If the South was able to justify slavery and Jim Crow, it's not hard to imagine a CSA that loses World War I churning up a Hitler-clone with plans for a black Holocaust. Lincoln was right: The CSA had to be beaten to preserve the last best hope.
