What If the South Had Airpower?--New Historical Novel

[KarlKlein]

Introducing Flight of the Southern Cross:

What if a new technology gave the Confederacy the opportunity to win the war? How far would the Union go to stop it? This historical saga is set against the backdrop of the War Between the States as southern supporters race against time and northern agents to give the Confederate states a chance.

Historical facts, well known and completely unknown, are woven into alternative historical fiction to create a tense and entertaining story. Historical figures interact with fictional characters to create a story that brings to life the war and the individuals who participated.

Amazon Kindle http://www.amazon.com/Flight-Souther...4489882&sr=1-1

Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/14479

[GeoffC]

Welcome to mobileread Karl

[rblover]

The Confederacy could have had Star Trek transporters, phasers, anti-matter bombs, and cloaking devices, and it still would have lost. It was not technology which defeated the Confederates. It was their basic philosophy. Alabaman troops refused to obey Georgian officers. A house divided against itself can not stand. No amount of technology would have made the Confederacy more united. It was doomed to lose no matter what. It had lost beffore it started.

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by rblover

The Confederacy could have had Star Trek transporters, phasers, anti-matter bombs, and cloaking devices, and it still would have lost. It was not technology which defeated the Confederates. It was their basic philosophy.

Pull the other one. Its got bells on it.

(I did like the book when it was called The Guns of the South.)

[KarlKlein]

Originally Posted by rblover

The Confederacy could have had Star Trek transporters, phasers, anti-matter bombs, and cloaking devices, and it still would have lost. It was not technology which defeated the Confederates. It was their basic philosophy. Alabaman troops refused to obey Georgian officers. A house divided against itself can not stand. No amount of technology would have made the Confederacy more united. It was doomed to lose no matter what. It had lost beffore it started.

I believe this was an announcement for a new book not a forum for some ignorant Yankee ranting about something he knows nothing about.

[GeoffC]

Please note this is an International Forum and thrives on civil discussions.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by KarlKlein

I believe this was an announcement for a new book not a forum for some ignorant Yankee ranting about something he knows nothing about.

Who died and made you Alex?

You already ticked me off by using the "warning" icon on your post because, apparently, you're extra-special and your book announcement needs more attention than others. Starting your own miniature tragedy of the commons there....

Then there's the book: as Ardeegee said, I liked it when it was called Guns of the South. Someone is going to have to be pretty persuasive to convince me they can do better what Harry Turtledove, a gentleman and a scholar, did so well. Even more persuasive, actually, since any reference to "unknown facts" tends to peg my bogometer.

After that, you are not only angry about discussion taking place in a discussion forum -- you do realize, I hope, that MobileRead is a discussion forum, and it is as a service to the members, not random book marketers, that this particular section exists? -- but you take it upon yourself to lay down rules for MR members, an authority that belongs in the hands of Alex and the mods.

And finally, you, brand-new member with the e-ink on your forum registration still wet, consider it appropriate to insult other forum members, people who have been around long enough to know the rules and abide by them -- two things which seem to be beyond your ability. You did read the posting rules, right? And you looked at other threads to see what kinds of things take place here? You learned a bit about MobileRead before you posted? Didn't you? Or did you just decide this would be a good place to slap up an ad for your Harry Turtledove ripoff with its "unknown facts"?

Congratulations, you've now alienated a large percentage of your potential readers. If marching into a book club meeting, announcing how "special" you are, and then insulting members who politely disagree with the historical premise of your book, works for you then go do it in offline world, where people can have the satisfaction of seeing you escorted to the door.

[montsnmags]

In the Moderator Star Chamber we have some template messages we can work off for things like this, but, really, what GeoffC just said. Politeness and civility are the watchwords, even in disagreements

MobileRead guidelines are here <---linky

Cheers,
Marc
Moderator

Without my mod-hat on, welcome to MR, Karl. Feel also encouraged to introduce yourself over in the Introduce Yourself forum. Enjoy.

Cheers,
Marc (Don't make me put my hat back on - it itches!)

[ardeegee]

The Amazon reviews are interesting-- all of the positive reviews are by people who have never reviewed anything else on Amazon while the one negative by someone who has reviewed lots of things-- and the negative one is pretty damning:

I read the sample, and within a few pages, noted several annoying homophones - principal for principle, bazaar for bizarre, and more. The author wrote in vernacular for his uneducated characters, and it's poorly punctuated and annoying.

Capitalization is another issue. When you aim a Colt at someone, it should be capitalized, as you are pointing a firearm produced by Colt Arms. When you aim a colt at someone, you might possibly be sending a young horse in their direction.

The general's aide is quite probably a mother hen, though in that scene, yes, he is indeed a wet hen. In most usage, a wet hen is upset, while this aide is merely drenched.

I gave up before completing the entire sample. I wanted to like the story very much, as I enjoy this type of fiction, but I just can't take the overall sloppiness.

Gotta give the author one thing, though-- he really rocks the top hat!

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/auth...uthorid=128714

[GlenBarrington]

Well, the US Civil war HAS been done pretty much by every Alternative History author on the planet. While I'm somewhat curious to see if you've brought anything new to the table, I'm not so willing to spend good money or the time to satisfy that curiosity. I will probably wait to see if anyone here likes it before pulling the trigger myself.

I wonder why no one has done any AH concering the Vietnam war? Or Korea? Or the Mogul Empire? They seem like mines of untapped gold to me!

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by KarlKlein

I believe this was an announcement for a new book not a forum for some ignorant Yankee ranting about something he knows nothing about.

And then there's the fact that even if the Confederacy had had airpower, they lacked the industry and the population to fully exploit it. Also, a lot of their manpower was capital, not labor, and this did not help any.

BTW, did you know that in the late 1850's there was a bubble in the price of slaves? If the ACW had not happened then the market would have collapsed by the mid 1860's. Who knows what would have happened.

P.S. Harry Harrison also wrote a time traveler changes the ACW book: A Rebel in Time. It's pretty good.

[Worldwalker]

Since I've been involved in this discussion, and since I'm interested in both AH stories and the American Civil War, I decided that instead of criticizing the author's behavior, I should read his writing. Well, I've gotten 20 pages into the Smashwords sample. I tried to read it with unbiased eyes, but to be coldly honest: it is not well-written. There is a reason this book is self-published, and not a good one.

I'll leave out the details of the grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and meaning errors, plus brutal abuse of the past perfect tense; I'm not feeling that nit-picky tonight. Suffice it to say that the proofreader should be blamed, not credited. A much bigger issue is the writing itself. There is no kind way to put this: it is dull. It is deadly dull. There is, early on, what is intended to be a tense confrontation, but the scene instead nearly put me to sleep. The main character is described through the old (but never good) technique of him inventorying his body parts in front of a mirror. There are infodumps galore as the author shows off his knowledge of military history and biography. Characters are introduced via page-long recitations of their resumes. The phonetic rendering of dialect is nearly incomprehensible. The prose is often clumsy and awkward, seeming very amateurish, and there are things like that strange "wet hen" comment. I wouldn't call the book unreadable, but I'm certainly not finding it very enjoyable. If the novel continues as it has begun, I would have to describe it as an 80,000-word story squeezed into 440,000 words.

In short, although there may be a good story buried in there somewhere, I have not been convinced that it is worth my while to exhume it.

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

If the novel continues as it has begun, I would have to describe it as an 80,000-word story squeezed into 440,000 words.

785 pages (as mentioned in one of the "reviews") does sound ponderously long for a novel by someone who hasn't already established their mastery of the form. That's one of the good things about having a good copy editor-- extracting the good 200 page book (if there is one) from the 785 pages. Not being told what to cut out may be good for the author's ego, but it isn't often a favor for the reader.

The same goes for authors who have become big enough to get away with ignoring editors. I recently finished Connie Williseses new novel Blackout-- which is the first half of a long novel that was split in two (Blackout ran 579 pages-- the second half, called All Clear, will run 656, so over 1,200 pages all together.) As much as I enjoy her writing, I can not help thinking that the story would have truly benefited by someone cutting out some of the side stories to make a single book. Doomsday Book was only 592 pages, and it said all that it needed to.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

The same goes for authors who have become big enough to get away with ignoring editors.

Two examples come to mind:

Anne Rice's famous Amazon rant which mentions (somewhere in the great wall of text) that no editor will ever touch a word she has written ever again ... funny, a lot of readers don't seem to be touching them, either.

Tom Clancy. Executive Orders. That cement mixer. Nuff said?

This purported novel reminds me of some websites I've seen which appear to be designed, not to sell the company's products, but to show off all the cool coding tricks the designer knows.* A novel is supposed to tell a story; if someone wanted a biographical encyclopedia of Civil War figures, they wouldn't be buying a novel. Novice hard-SF writers fall prey to the same thing: they explain the technology to death, and by the time some plot happens, the reader has lost interest.

Writing, like any art, is as much about what to leave out as it is about what to put in.


*Usually they're designed by consultants and are selling exactly what they were designed to sell: websites. This is great if you're the consultant, but it sucks if you're the client who paid him to design a website to sell your products.

[ficbot]

My brother, an avid reader of historical fiction, used to describe the needs-to-be-edited bits as the 'tea in the bunker' scenes. He used to read these military novels like the Master and Commander books, and some guy would go down into the bunker to have tea with some other guy, and nine chapters later, they are still having tea in the bunker and he's all 'yes, yes, fine, but can we move it along now?'