Settling Accounts: In at the Death is the eleventh and it is said the last of the long running Southern Victory Series by master of alternate history Harry Turtledove. But since In at the Death sets up so many possibilities for future stories, one should not bet any money on it being the last.
For those who have not read the series, the premise of the Southern Victory series is that the Confederacy won the War of Secession in the 1860s. The series began with a prequel novel, How Few Remain, which depicted a conflict between the United States and the Confederate States in the 1880s over the latter country’s annexation of a number of Mexican states. There followed three books collectively entitled The Great War which depicted an American front of a far more savage World War I in which the United States was an ally of Germany and the Confederacy an ally of Britain, France, and Russia. Three books collectively entitled American Empire were next, telling what happened in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly depicting this world’s version of the Great Depression and the rise of a fascist state in the Confederacy. Four books entitled Settling Accounts comprised this world’s World War II, fought by America and a Germany still ruled by the Kaiser on one side, the Confederacy, England, France, Russia, and Japan on the other.
As with most alternate history, Turtledove mixes in fictional characters with historical ones, the latter sometimes in the roles they occupied in our world, sometimes in different worlds. Teddy Roosevelt, for instant, is President of the United States during the Great War. But his Confederate counterpart is Woodard Wilson. Other figures who make an appearance include Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, George S. Patton, and Harry Truman. Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter make cameo appearances, the former as a sports broadcaster, the latter as a Confederate naval officer who chose the wrong time to be home on leave. Turtledove also inflicts some in jokes on his readers, bringing up fictional characters to fill the roles of real people (a “C.S. O’Brian” is a popular Irish writer of Napoleonic naval yarns, for example), or making references to fictional characters from other works (a “Jack Carter of Virginia” for example.)
Turtledove has been criticized for two things, mainly, in this sprawling monster of a series. The first accusation is that he tends to be repetitious, making the same description of long running characters. In his defense, books in the series came out once a year and memories can be expected to fade during the wait.
The other criticism is that Turtledove uses too many parallels in his alternate history to the real one. For instance, the Confederacy is Nazi Germany, with blacks fulfilling the unfortunate role of Jews. But of course Turtledove is making some points as well as trying to tell a good story, and sometimes one can get in the way of the other.
However, the world that is rising from the ashes of the alternate universe’s Second World War (or maybe “Second Great War”) is very different than the one that arose from ours. The United States, at the end of In at the Death, occupies territory that comprise Canada, our world’s United States, parts of Northern Mexico, and the Caribbean. The United States, to make sure that the most recent blood bath to occur on the North American continent is the last one, proposes to incorporate the conquered territories into one nation, whether the inhabitants want to or not. And most the former Canadians and former Confederates don’t.
The United States has used and will continued to use methods of dealing with conquered peoples which are older than Ancient Rome. A favorite tactic used is the taking of hostages and shooting them when a guerilla bomb explodes or an ambush occurs. In our world this was the behavior of Nazis and was punished accordingly. In Turtledove’s world it is the standard operating procedure of the republic founded by Washington, Jefferson, and Adams.
Not that the Confederates have clean hands. They killed eight to ten million of their own people because of the color of their skin, using methods that would have been familiar to Heydrich and Eichmann.
Meanwhile, the German Empire bestrides a ruined Europe like a colossus. And Japan, though on the losing side, has passed through the war untouched.
Looming over all is the fact that nuclear bombs now exist and have been used much more liberally in the alternate world than in ours. The concept of nuclear Armageddon is a concept that the people in the alternate world are just beginning to comprehend.
Somehow I don’t think that Harry Turtledove is quite through telling the story of this world, sadder and perhaps more callous than our own.
