by Dale Cozort
Part of the reason the south made no significant effort to reverse the outcome of the Civil War was that their military defeat was pretty decisive. Another part of it was that the north backed off on trying to do much to enforce equality or voting rights a decade or two, and let the southern states do pretty much what they wanted to with their African-American population for around 80 years. Given the seniority system and the solidly Democratic south that resulted from denying African-Americans the vote, the south dominated congress for most of those years too, so in some ways they kept a semblance of the old south going into the 1960s.
A more thorough De-Confederating of the south would have been morally the right thing to do, but it did risk having white southerners become permanently antagonistic to the idea of being part of the US. I don’t think that would rise to the level of American Civil War II, but I could see the KKK and similar organizations directing at least some of their energies toward preparing for another attempt at secession. That could get dangerous during the World Wars. Turtledove did something similar to that in one of his alternate histories, but I think the pattern would be mainly passive resistance, along with southerners looking for a time when the Federal government was weak and distracted.
The subject of inevitable movement toward intelligence didn’t come up in the discussion. I personally don’t believe that life develops that way. I see intelligence as just one tool for survival, and one that has its drawbacks as well as advantages for the organism involved. Instincts allow for faster reactions and apparently require less of the very energy-expensive brain tissue. Essentially intelligence is a way of giving long-lived animals some degree of flexibility in dealing with environmental change.
Our branch of organisms appear to have developed most of our large flexible brains in order to find large “jackpots” of high energy food (ripe fruit) before it gets eaten by birds, bats or smaller local animals. Monkeys and apes can chase other potential fruit-eaters away from prime fruiting trees, but only if they reach them between the time the fruit is edible and the time birds or bats finish them off. In a tropical environment, with huge numbers of fruiting species, knowing the signs that a type of tree is close to fruiting and the best routes to take to get to the fruit before competitors do is vital to the survival of a fruit-eating specialist like most monkeys and apes. That competition gets us to monkey and ape level intelligence. I’m not going to get into what gets us from there to human.
There may be other routes—dolphins and predatory whales, but I don’t get the feeling that intelligence at human or near-human level is inevitable.
On the Fringe alt-US: I would be very surprised to see the Carolinas as one state. They had very different origins, with South Carolina settled from Barbados, which made for a very different founding culture.
David Johnson: Congratulations on the new kitten. Always lots of fun. I made the mistake of playing “chase the laser pointer dot” with my daughter’s cat. Now he comes up to me and begs for a laser pointer fix.
Well, I can’t claim a ‘computer go foom’ of my own, but my wife’s computer recently died, as did my daughter’s Acer Netbook. It would be recoverable if she had burned the recovery CD. I may be able to work around that some way, but haven’t had time to try yet. My wife’s Acer Netbook also went foom temporarily, but I rescued it by reflashing the ROM. My desktop did suddenly forget how to access its LAN card, but I just switched to using the laptop for Internet access. At some point I’ll have to figure out how to reinstall the driver.
On the scans of the Doc Savage series: I would be interested in where you found them. I had the whole series in e-book at one point, but appear to have lost them when a laptop crashed many years ago. I thought I had them backed up, but can’t find any sign of the backup.
Intelligent Scooby Doo? There is a rift in the structure of the universe. Ever watch Phineas and Ferb? Looks dumb until you sit down and watch a few episodes. Then it still looks dumb, but in a twisted Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner sort of way—one joke but told in an infinitely creative variety of ways.
Your comments to Sidaway: The library fiascos continue. I think large organization are inherently dysfunctional, to varying degrees.
Your comments to Ford: I was fortunate enough to miss Galactica 1980 altogether, though I did watch the original Galactica, I’m ashamed to admit.
Your comments to me: As you may have figured out, Dog Years is one of my favorite short stories. I’m going to make a serious effort to get it published as soon as I get caught up with the novels. Thanks for the Snapshot nitpicks. I caught some of them on this edit pass, but there are a couple I missed.
Sorry Mars Looks Different is back on hiatus for a few issues. Lots of structural changes to make it make more sense, and I want to get it stabilized before I put anymore in here.
Interesting info on the Southern California water supply. I didn’t know that.
Good point on Germany suddenly running into very good US pilots in long-range fighters in the Hitler Doesn’t Declare War scenario.
On potential breakups of the US: The Red State/Blue State gap is unfortunately widening. Frankly I don’t think either side has much in the way of answers or is even asking the right questions, and a lot of the division is the result of the extremes on both sides outshouting more moderate voices.
I could see at least a substantial minority of people on both sides thinking that the two halves of the country would be better off as separate entities. Of course that was the case in the Civil War too, with a strong initial sentiment to “let the wayward sisters go.” In the Civil War that sentiment faded in the north as the practical implications of secession sunk in. The same would probably be true in any Blue State/Red State crisis. And of course there would be the issue of the many people caught on the ‘wrong’ side of the border. Most states are red or blue by at most ten to fifteen percent, which leaves a large minority that would probably rather have a very different state level outcome. In many cases it's more of a urban versus suburban/rural divide than a state-level divide. For example, without Chicago Illinois is predominately Republican, though not overwhelmingly so.
Sounds like home taping of the early Dr. Who stuff just wouldn’t work. Too bad. Maybe have some station out in the Commonwealth somewhere accumulate a bunch of the early ones. If I ever perfect my time machine I’ll go back with a video camera and tape them all, then come back and make cents on the dollar invested by selling to wealthy fans. Of course I’ll probably step on a bug while I’m there and start a chain of events that results in a nuclear war just as I pop back out of the past.
I love this installment of Blue Flash. Nicely done! Keep them coming!
Wesley Kawato: Sorry to see that you’re still having computer problems. I would send you one of my older ones if I had time to clean the data off of it. Good luck on getting your magazine out before the computer goes foom.
Kurt Sidaway: I’ve already congratulated you privately for finishing the NaNoWrite goal, but I want to do so publicly. Excellent job! I’m also happy to see that we got the font size problem solved.
Your comments to Gill: I consider myself relatively well informed about the world, but British politics tends to baffle me, as does Canadian politics. I have heard hints that the current US administration has stepped on British toes rather severely a couple of times lately, mainly in points of etiquette, but other than that and a general bemusement at the idea of the Conservatives and Liberals forming a government, I have virtually no knowledge of the current British political scene.
Your comments to Johnson: I suspect your surrender in the bureaucratic incompetence race is a tactical maneuver and you’ll return to the fray in an issue or two. I’m glad I’m not the only one who started on AH long before the computer era. If you happen to find some of your old stuff feel free to toss some of it in a zine sometime. See my two Blasts From the Past this issue. I vaguely recall doing elaborate maps of an inhabited Venus
where the Soviets and the US were backing competing client-states back in high school, but I have no idea if I kept them. I still do have a surprising amount of stuff from back then, several notebooks full of often embarrassingly bad attempts at fiction, a few of them dating back as far as my preteen years. Hopefully nobody but me will ever see those. If I ever get famous I will probably burn or shred them to avoid any publication after my death.
Your comments to Ford: Interesting. Our two parties are (often unfortunately) so entrenched legally and culturally that it is hard to imagine something coming from outside and ousting them. Taking one of them over, now that’s more doable, and has been done from time to time.
Your comments to me: Yeah, Dog Years is unique and rather creepy. The original idea came to me out of the blue, almost fully formed, very different from my normal plotting/writing process.
I loved the first two Riverworld books, but I always thought that Farmer's World of the Tiers books were in many ways stronger.
On the aftermath of a Dies the Fire scenario. You’re right about the distance between friends and lack of knowledge of close neighbors being a factor. On distribution centers: in the US, relatively cheap gas has allowed the distribution centers to be further away from the big cities. DeKalb is sixty miles outside of Chicago, and has several big logistics centers. Goods tend to travel through Chicago as a central transport hub rather than going directly where they are going to end up.
In terms of walking distance, I suspect that most people overestimate how far it would be feasible to walk in a situation where the infrastructure has broken down. If you’re in good shape, used to walking, and have logistics backup (food and water), walking twenty miles per day is probably feasible. If someone doesn’t walk regularly, and doesn’t have logistics backup, I would be surprised if they could average even five miles per day for several successive days. We do a six mile walk for a charity every year and even though we’re in pretty good shape and have regular refreshment stations along the way, we’re always foot-weary, blistered and sore at the end of the day. I would hate to think about having to do even that several days in a row, while carrying everything I needed to survive in an environment where shelter and water were not a given.
Your comments to Docimo: Banning football so people would devote more time to archery? I can see that. It’s kind of weird from a historical perspective that most people consider football a more manly sport than archery.
Interesting about your NaNo experiences. I would probably be better off writing off-line, and I did with Char, but the NaNo challenge seems to be enough to keep me on track for that month. The rest of the year, not so much. I found myself getting sidetracked again and again during my editing.
Shameless self-promotion Section
If you enjoyed this, check out my novel Exchange. Here is the blurb: When her town is temporarily thrown into a wild alternate reality where sabertooths, giant bears and even more dangerous creatures still roam, computer guru Sharon Mack has to fight giant predators, escaped convicts, and a mysterious cult to rescue her kidnapped daughter before the Exchange ends, trapping them forever in an alternate reality where humans didn't make it through an ancient bottleneck.
Exchange is an alternate history novel that blends science fiction, intrigue and mystery, setting a breakneck pace as a piece of our risk averse society meets the wildest of wild frontiers, a beautiful but dangerous place where people can start a new life if they are brave or crazy enough.