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From the master of alternate history comes an epic of the second Civil War. It was an epoch of glory and success, of disaster and despair. . . . 1881: A generation after the South won the Civil War, America writhed once more in the bloody throes of battle. Furious over the annexation of key Mexican territory, the United States declared total war against the Confederate States of America in 1881. But this was a new kind of war, fought on a lawless frontier where the blue and gray battled not only each other but the Apache, the outlaw, the French, and the English. As Confederate General Stonewall Jackson again demonstrated his military expertise, the North struggled to find a leader who could prove his equal. In the Second War Between the States, the times, the stakes, and the battle lines had changed--and so would history. . .… (more)
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I've always liked stories where the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad -- Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Nantucket, etc. I've recently grown to love stories in which we see things from all perspectives -- A Song of Ice and Fire comes to mind, with Star Trek: Deep
I still give the novel three stars for two reasons: first, except for Lincoln, I find all events and characters to be historically consistent. Second, this book sets up some great possibilities for following books in the timeline. I only hope that these sequels make use of the potential, as I haven't yet read them.
--J.
Finished reading HOW FEW REMAIN today. It took me a while but that wasn't because I wasn't enjoying it. Quite the contrary. This is the second of Harry Turtledove's alternate history novels that I've read (the first also being Civil War
HOW FEW REMAIN is about (another) alternate history in which the Confederate States won the Civil War. The "point of divergence" (as alternate history fans call the exact historical point at which the work diverges from actual history) is covered briefly in the book's prelude, which shows a Confederate courier *not* accidentally losing General Robert E. Lee's Special Order 191 which detailed Lee's plans for the invasion of the North. In reality, this order was recovered by Union forces allowing them to defeat the Army of Northern Virginia at the Battle of Antietam. In HOW FEW, the order is not compromised and Lee's forces succeed in capturing Philadelphia, which convinces Britain and France to side with the Confederate States and effectively ended the war.
Aside from the prelude (which takes place in 1862), the novel takes place entirely in 1881. After nearly twenty years of having to share the North American continent with the Confederate States of America (and also twenty years of Democratic presidents following Abraham Lincoln's electoral defeat in 1864), the United States of America, at the order of Republican President James G. Blaine, launches a second war with the CSA after the Confederate States purchase from Mexico two key territories (Sonora and Chihuahua) which expands the CSA's overall territory all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Turtledove's novels are especially rich in the amount of characters he includes. In this one we have Lincoln, much older than he lived in real life and now a man general disdained or outright hated by most as the man largely responsible for the USA's losing the "War of Secession". Lincoln by this point has turned the focus of his attention to crusading for the working man against the powers of big business.
Military figures include U.S. Lt. General George Armstrong Custer, Confederate General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson (head of the Confederate General Staff), General John Pope (commander of U.S. forces in Utah), Confederate General James Ewell "Jeb" Stuart, and a young Theodore Roosevelt, who leads a U.S. volunteer cavalry unit (Roosevelt and Samuel Clemens are especially fun characters in this novel).
Other key characters include the President of the Confederate States James Longstreet, Frederick Douglass, Geronimo (who first works with Jeb Stuart's forces to ambush U.S. troops in Mexico but after which Stuart must somehow keep from waging war with the local Mexican people in what is now Confederate territory), Colonel Alfred von Schlieffen (here, the German military attache to the U.S.), Mormon leader John Taylor (the Mormons decide to take advantage of the war between the USA and CSA to attempt to break away from the U.S.; Custer and his men are sent into Utah to put down the Mormon rebellion), and Samuel Clemens (who never went on to write under the pen name, Mark Twain; instead, Clemens is a San Francisco newspaper editor).
HOW FEW REMAIN is a stand alone novel but it establishes what fans have come to refer to as the "Timeline-191" series, of which Turtledove went on to write nine more novels (three separate trilogies) in. Following HOW FEW REMAIN is THE GREAT WAR: AMERICAN FRONT, which picks up in 1914 and the start of World War I (which, in this timeline, will include the additional plot element of there still being *two* American nations in existence: the United States of America and the Confederate States of America).
Not a sequel to Turtledove’s Guns of the South, this alternate history uses as its hinge the non-loss of Confederate battle plans at Antietam. (In our world, the plans were lost but General McClellan didn’t use them to full extent.) The
The book jumps forward to 1881 when a Second War Between the States breaks out after the Confederacy purchases Sonora from Emperor Maxmillan of Mexico. The USA doesn’t want the CSA having access to two oceans. Turtledove does an adequate job with the battle scenes (though not as good as his Worldwar series) and the setup competent but not real inventive.
It was with this book that I realized that Turtledove’s true talent in alternate history lies not in creating his initial scenarios or the details of his worlds (though he does a good job with these) but in piling detail up on detail, interior monologue upon dialogue and action to create very vivid, well-realized alternate versions of historical personages. He did this with Robert E. Lee in Guns of the South and here with Abraham Lincoln who seems utterly convincing as a Marxist labor agitator. He also does a good job with Count Alfred von Schlieffen, military observer who is appalled at the lack of planning and sophistication in the US military.
Using the incident of lost plans that could have won the war for the South, How Few Remain instead imagines a reality in which the South did win. This causes what we now know as the United States to be split into two countries, the United States and the Confederate States, where slavery is still legal and encouraged.
10 years after the War of Secession, the CSA buys Sonora and Chihuahua from the Empire of Mexico for a trifling amount and the government of the USA loses its mind and declares war ... again. Soon, the entire continent is enmeshed in wars and skirmishes involving Britain, France, and Canada supporting the CSA. The USA just stands on principle, and a perverse hope that being anti-slavery will be enough to win the war, this time for sure. Which, you know, that trick never works.
So Sam Clemens never becomes Mark Twain and stays in San Francisco as editor of a newspaper so he can report on the idiocy of the US government, and the British warships in the bay bent on blowing San Francisco to smithereens. Abe Lincoln survived his time in office but was not re-elected since now, everyone blames him for the loss of a war which has torn the country in two. Abe tours the North and its territories lecturing to any audience that will listen that labor is akin to slavery, and workers need to stand up for better working conditions. Frederick Douglass lives in Rochester, NY with his wife and son and writes stirring articles and speeches for the freeing of the slaves. Theodore Roosevelt owns a ranch in Montana territory and pays the expenses to form a regiment of volunteers ready to serve their country by beating the Canadians back across the border. The Mormons are up to no good in Utah Territory, taking advantage of the war to insist on living by their religious laws which allow polygamy, against US law. And ... oh right, I don't remember which general winds up in the newest states in the Confederacy working with the Apaches and Mexicans against the US incursion. And then the Apaches and Mexicans have a good ol' time killing each other.
What the heck any of this had to do with this war was really sort of beyond me. And as time went on, and I kept reading to see how Turtledove was going to resolve this mess, it became clear that nothing was going to be resolved ... ever. Was the point of the book that war is pointless? Or that the Civil War, in any history, was stupid? Or ... I don't know ...
Too many characters, too many subplots, salacious incidents which don't really drive the story and, my pet peeve, incorrect history about Christmas trees. I don't recommend this to anyone.
Oh wait, that's not how it happened? Pardon me. I'm from Wyoming. Our school system teaches Wyoming history, to which accounts of the War Between the States are merely an ancillary in that they explain why a lot of members of the U.S. Calvary charged with protecting Manifest Destiny-enacting white settlers against Red Indians in the West had fewer than their original compliment of digits or limbs, or raging cases of PTSD. I'm hazy on details.
No, not really. But the Civil War still isn't something I've studied too terribly closely, which may be a shame, but then again may not be, as far as my ability to appreciate what Harry Turtledove has achieved in this founding document of his sprawling alternate history of North America, the departure point for which is the aforementioned recovery of Lee's invasion plan. Without that vital intelligence, Turtledove says, the Union might not have won at Antietam, which means President Lincoln would not have had that victory announcement to serve as his springboard for announcing Emancipation, which means Great Britain and France don't have a clear moral choice in deciding whether or not to continue supporting the Confederacy, which means the Confederacy winds up winning the War and North America winds up with four internationally recognized nation states instead of three (well, okay, three nation states and one Dominion).
That premise established, the action proper of this novel starts up about 20 years later. The Confederacy is buying the provinces of Sonora and Chihuahua from Mexico in order to acquire a Pacific port and the land access to extend its railroads to it. The USA has elected its first Republican President since Abraham Lincoln's one and only term ended in the disgrace of losing the War; this new President needs to look tough and declares war (Lincoln has taken to the railways to travel the diminished United States of America as a quasi-Marxist labor agitator*). Frederick Douglass is an old man, still hopeful that someday, someone is going to give a crap about the countless slaves still in bondage in the Confederacy. Old Yellowhair, George Armstrong Custer, is charged with containing a Mormon rebellion in Utah. Samuel Clemens (whom real history knows better as Mark Twain) reports and editorializes on events in the pages of the San Francisco Call and has uxorious sex with his wife (yeah, I could have done without that mental image too, guys). Jeb Stuart is in charge of moving Confederate troops into the newly-purchased territories as a first step towards colonizing them for the C.S.A. Teddy Roosevelt, Montana rancher, watches events unfolding and hopes the new President will hold fast, but decides his own help is needed to do it and forms up his own Unauthorized Regiment. Etc.
It's always fun to play "What If" over a few beers or whatever, but who else has taken that game to such lengths? Turtledove went on to write ten more novels in this universe he created. Ten. Am I going to read the rest of them?
Well, I'm not sure. This was my first Harry Turtledove, and I did find it diverting and moderately absorbing, chiefly because it was fun to imagine these historical figures in circumstances so radically different from what they're famous for, but, well, those reviewers who have described How Few Remain as historical fan fiction are kind of right. I'm told subsequent books in the series are much, much better than this first book, which news I always greet with irritation; I've just endured 596 pages of this solely so that I understand what's going on in better future books? I'd say that if those future books were solely about Turtledove's own characters, I'd be disinclined to continue, but I can't help but be curious about, e.g. Lincoln, Twain, Roosevelt and Custer** in this alternate timeline. Especially after enjoying the mental spectacle of Custer with Gatling guns. And Lincoln delivering stonking Marxist rants. And Douglass...
Ah me, Douglass. Despite his advanced age, he dons his journalist hat*** and accompanies a Union flanking attack that brings him onto Confederate soil for the first time (he doesn't count his years as a slave because it was still part of the United States then), and when he sees that the little structures he sees burning all over the place are slave shanties, it's impossible not to share his rage. "May they all burn, and all the big houses with them."
Which is to say that, where most of the other historical figures and characters come off as tremendously unpleasant, if not outright *ssh*l*s, Lincoln and Douglass (ha ha) shine as the novel's only real heroes, both of them old men, generally despised if not outright hated, bowed but not broken, sad but not embittered by the Union's defeat in the first war, only sort of hopeful that a second might change anything but doing their damndest to bring about the changes they hope for regardless of what happens on the battlefields. They make up for any number of disappointments (Turtledove succumbs to a failing that is one of my great pets peeve as a reader, the impulse to use "amber liquid" as a synonym for beer or scotch. Why do you do that, writers? Why do you always pick that beverage as a point to vary your vocabulary, and why must you always invoke the image of body fluids when you do? WHY, WRITERS, WHY?) and ick moments (for some reason, sex scenes involving Mark Twain and his wife, and George Custer and not-his-wife, have scarred me for life). They might even lead me to look into more of this series.
*A lot of people are nonplussed by Turtledove's version of Lincoln, but I think it makes a lot of sense, provided one never forgets that this Lincoln is one who not only did not get assassinated but lived to a ripe old age in a world in which the institution of slavery persisted in North America, and no one in the defeated North gave much of a damn about them (and many blamed the war on them, as alt-Frederick Douglass' story illustrates). So, as Lincoln observes to himself as he prepares to address a fairly unreceptive crowd in Great Falls, Montana: "Without more than a handful of Negroes to exploit, it [the country] battened off the sweat of the poor and the ignorant and the newly arrived and the unlucky." Which is to say that those people wound up having it even worse in Turtledove's alt USA than they did in ours, with no newly-freed slaves to soak up the really dirty jobs. Potentially, this could even have retarded the development of the middle class whose interests and abilities so characterized the 20th century in our world. So yeah, I buy Lincoln as a golden years Marxist under these circumstances. For great justice.
**Though I've got to say that Ol' Yellowhair -- and a lot of other Union military leaders -- comes off as a considerable jerk, even before he gets to Utah, where he's hell-bent on stringing up all the leaders of the Mormon Church ostensibly for inciting the Territory to rebel while the Union wages its second war with the Confederacy, but, one suspects, really over polygamy. Everyone is really obsessed with polygamy in this novel, and perhaps that's true for the times, but man, did the multiple wives jokes get old after a few hundred pages. Also: I didn't think anything could ever really make me hate Teddy Roosevelt, but this book did. I had to keep gritting my teeth and reminding myself this is just a character kind of loosely based on Roosevelt. As were all of the historical figures, of course, even the ones who kept their pants on.
***But somehow never encounters, say, Matthew Brady, whose absence from this novel is glaring. I would have accepted at least a passing reference to how he had died or something, you know?