The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove
Del Rey: £9.99
ISBN 0-345-41366-0

One of the major problems in time travel or alternate history SF is the presence of characters from a time or a world wholly different from our own who nevertheless have all the attitudes and opinions one might expect of, for example, a late 20th Century Californian. It is not a problem Turtledove has always managed to avoid, but he does so magnificently in The Guns of the South. Much more satisfyingly, in fact, than in the more ‘pure’ alternate history of How Few Remain, in which the South wins the American Civil War through a variation on an incident which did actually happen.

The mechanism for the South winning is rather different in The Guns of the South: a group of time travellers appear and presents to General Lee the opportunity to arm his troops with the AK-47, vastly superior weapons to anything else available. This allows the Confederate army to sweep aside the Union forces.

None of this, by the way, is giving away deep plot secrets. There is no secret, to the reader at least, of either the fact that the mysterious benefactors are time travellers, or of their country of origin.

The Civil War characters are superbly drawn, as though we are actually eavesdropping on characters of the time. In particular, General Lee’s ruminations on the morality of slavery and the light cast on that by the time travellers never make him seem an auctorial puppet. The more lowly characters, too, have lives and concerns of their own. If there is a defect in the characterisation, it is in the portrayal of the time travellers. Yes, anyone who would undertake their plan would have to be much more than a little fanatical. That is not necessarily the same thing as sadistic thugs, and I think the book suffers from the depiction of them in these terms.

Unlike some of Turtledove’s books, this is an actual novel, filled with people you come to care about as they grapple with their situation, rather than simply a pile-up of events distributed around the globe. It is the best thing I have read by Turtledove, and an excellent example of alternate history.

Harry Turtledove is going to be a Guest of Honour at the 2002 British National Science Fiction Convention (better known as Eastercon). Helicon 2 is going to be held in St. Helier over the Easter weekend, 29th March – 1st April.