neotoma | Historical AUs -- fun and so full of crack

So, for Thanksgiving, I went to

twistedchick's house, brought along apple tarts that I made myself, and some DVDs. We watched Pirates of the Carribbean, which I had never seen, and Batman Begins, which she had never seen, and waited for the turkey to be done.

Before I went home, she gave me herbed vinegar -- because I'm the only one she knows who comes close to cooking with vinegar as much as she does -- and her husband lent me 1632 and 1633 by Eric Flint, which I spent the rest of the night ripping through.

These are set of Alternate History novels, and they are delightfully cracktastic. I credit

temve and

the_little_owl, and their bunnies about fusing Star Wars with that era of history for the fact that I was even interested in stories set during the time period, which I really don't know that much about.

Take one West Virgina coal-mining town, circa 2000, and transport to lower Thuringia during the middle of the Thirty Years War.

Are you seeing the crack yet?

The first novel is a bit heavy-handed, a trifle preachy, and entirely too convinced that the Americans would do the right thing, instead of panicking. On the other hand, it's rather fun to imagine what *would* happen if you pitted pike and wheel-lock mercenaries against a bunch of pissed off Applachians with modern hunting rifles and pump-action shotguns.

The author has good points about most things, and has thought through things well. The time-displaced Americans make it a priority, after securing their safety and working on getting the winter food supply assured, to start gearing down their technology.

They can't keep producing the 21st century tech that gives them the superiority against the armies running amok during the Thirty Years War, but they have the resources to create an early 19th century industrial base, which is STILL enough superiority to keep the locals from slaughtering them.

However, I think the author has missed the importance of water power as an energy source and the importance of textiles to the 17th century economy.

The transported town has a functioning coal-burning electrical plant. Which will work fine, as long as they can keep machining critical parts for it. However, at the time, waterwheels would have been the power-source of note, and they have the tech available to machine water *turbines*, which are much more efficient. They could easily expanded their critical functions -- only three machine shops in the town, which all run on electricity -- if they spent time to build a water-powered machine shop, like the one that is still running at the Eleutherian Mills at the Hagley Museum in Delaware; water power was the original power source for industrialization, after all, and it required no more than a reliable river and a properly mounted waterwheel.

Using water power would allow the characters to expand their industrial base even faster, without overstressing the power plant they need for more vital functions.

Textiles are a bit harder, but they're *incredibly* time-consuming to make by human power alone, and used in just about *every* other industry of note. A spinning jenny is not an impossible goal, especially once you already know it is possible. A carding mill would be harder, since carding cloth has anywhere between 20 to 128 wires per square inch and currently is made on very specialized equipment -- but once you have the carding cloth, the mill itself is similar to an offset printing press in construction. Even automating lace production -- which is an insanely time-consuming task to do by hand -- is not beyond 19th century tech and an engineer clever with gears, and highly profitable. Automating looms is actually fairly simple -- and expands the *width* that cloth can be woven to, which is a lot more significant than it would appear at first glance.

I did like that in the two anthologies there was a story about the first sewing machine manufacturing company where some high-school kids figure out how to manufacture a treadle sewing machine using mostly 17th century technology, and a story about dyeing that ends with the realization that the coal for the power plant can also be used to make *aniline* dyes -- colorfast, vivid, and a path to riches that is mind-boggling if you have never thought about fabric dyes before.

The other part of the series I like really well is that the Americans are determined to disseminate their political and cultural ideas far and wide. Mostly because they want to preserve their culture, but also with the idea that having as many people as possible knowing about such things as civil rights, universal suffrage, sanitation, standardized industrial measurement, modern banking, and religious tolerance, it will make the surrounding society change enough so that *they* will be safe, or at least safer and less likely to be attacked by their neighbors, who will hopefully be too busy working on their own industrial booms to bother with anything else.

And it is rather amusing when Gustavus Adolphus shows up towards the end of 1632, tentatively interested in an alliance with the time-displaced town. Because that's when Eric Flint *really* throws a wrench in history and you have no idea what might happen next.

For anyone who is interested, both books and the first short story anthology Grantsville Gazette vol. 1 are available for free from the Baen Free Library -- the publisher has put several SF/Fantasy books online in free and readable formats, which sure as heck should be encouraged.

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Date: 2005-11-28 02:00 pm (UTC)

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