Stars & Stripes Forever (Stars & Stripes, Book 1)

My reaction to reading this novel in 1999. Spoilers follow.

Before Harry Turtledove came along, Harry Harrison was sf’s most vocal supporter and practitioner of the alternate history subgenre. This one bears some resemblance to Turtledove’s classic The Guns of the South (which wasn’t a straight alternate history since Turtledove introduces time travelers with automatic weapons as the hinge point in his history) in that both envision a Civil War which the Union is not victorious but slavery still is ended peacefully. I liked this novel though not as much as The Guns of the South.

Harrison doesn’t have the skill of breathing life into historical figures like Turtledove. His plot is undercut by a couple of coincidences. Of course, show more by tradition, the alternate history writer gets one historical deviation. Here the “sharp agate point” history turns on (to borrow a term from Winston Churchill’s foray into alternate history) is a quite probable one: the Trent affair where two Confederate envoys were taken off a British ship by the Federal Navy in neutral waters and Britain threatened war. Unlike our history, that war happens here.

In our world, the sickly Prince Albert (his wife, Queen Victoria, comes off as a bit psychotic here, ready to go to war at the drop of a hat) averts war with a carefully worded communique. Here, he’s too sick to rewrite Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell’s diplomatic dispatches. The major problem with the book is the second deviation from history in the accidental death of Brigadier General James W. Ripley. His exit takes the brakes off the Army’s conservative ordinance department and begins the steps towards arming the Union army with breech loading rifles so snipers play a larger role in Union tactics. The ironclad building program is accelerated and the navy is armed with breech loading Parrot guns. The third seeming plot contrivance (contrivance in the sense that it seems to be there to get the desired end: a British Empire dispossessed or weakened in the Western Hemisphere by America) is the British expeditionary forces firing on their supposed southern allies and, much worse and much important, raping Southern women after the battle.

Still, even if I didn’t come away with the feeling of reading an actual historical novel like I did The Guns of the South, I liked this novel a lot, found it exciting and compulsively readable. I liked John Stuart Mill helping to craft a peaceful end (with a buyout for slaveowners) to slavery. I thought this plausible and psychologically realistic given Southern abolitionists in the pre-war days and a break in combat after unexpectedly harsh fighting at Shiloh. I liked the real historical bits with Gustavus Vasa Fox, Lincoln’s spymaster (more reliable than Alan Pinkerton). I liked the Union and Confederates destabilizing of British Caribbean possessions. (A lot of documents and dialogue in this novel are direct quotes from historical sources.) Lincoln’s harsh suppression of Northern abolitionists seems unfortunately plausible too. show less

It is "read but unowned" because I threw it out. I didn't discard it, I threw it away!
An unresearched howl of American Exceptionalism. But, you must understand that in history, Patrick Cleburne, a Confederate politician and soldier, proposed that the wah between the CSA and the USA should end, slavery should continue, and the two parties should not waste the big mobilized armies they had created by instead conquering Mexico and Cuba, and then every one could go home with honour.
And that's what this HH book is about, except that everyone picks on the British instead. (In spite of what a professional army would have done to the assembled groups in North America, historically.)

Not that you could tell it from perusing my book shelf, but there are alternate history tales out there that have not been written by Harry Turtledove. This one speculates as to what might have happened had Prince Albert of England had not counseled his country to stay out of America's Civil War. Maybe my opinions have been warped by reading so much Turtledove, but while Mr. Harrison's tale is interesting, I found it lacking. Events moved too quickly for my taste and some of those were a bit hard for me to swallow. Given the smaller number of pages--333, compared to 618 in the last Turtledove book I read--the characters in Stars and Stripes Forever seem more shallow, and less interesting.
--J.

Very campy and feel-good book. I get the feeling that it is not very historically accurate (as far as alternate histories go).