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Let's Read Fitzpatrick's War (The Only Steampunk with Rights)

Reader mode
Thank for the let's read.
For me, the Timmerman will fall in time. They were born from fascists mad scientists of the modern age, and are degenerating into a cargo cult recruiting more for ideological purity then capacity.
Their power come from knowledge and machines their actions ensure they will one day not be able to maintain.
 
Wait a second, a group of carefully selected ideological purists maintaining advanced technology used to keep other political entities in line?

This is a ComStar origin story?!

 
afraid of being attacked on the streets,
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Given how much of the old world's problems were stuff that the Timermen created as justification for their actions, this has real strong 'white men are the most perscueted demographic in America' vibes. And the good doctor seems like exactly the sort to say that sort of thing.
 
I'm so terribly sorry for falling behind on this after the first post or so, @DragonCobolt . I kept meaning to sit down and catch up so I could follow in real time again but before I knew it my inbox showed you were at the epilogue. I'm sitting down to actually catch up tonight and am now a third of the way through the thread, so... Chapter 7?

So far I have nothing new to add, aside from a few observations on the "vibes" of things fitting in with my observations about Fitzpatrick's relation to Antichrist Fiction, and wanting to write about that.

A lot of Antichrist Fiction tends to depict the world even leading up to the Rapture/Tribulation as fundamentally fallen and imperial, with general movements towards a grand war between great empires of the "West" and "East."

Perhaps the formative work of this genre, which I already told you about in DMs but I've always wanted to bring up in this thread, is Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World. It's a work I actually only heard about from a friend who was referencing it, from which I discovered its strangely extended influence. This book not only started basically a rare subgenre of Christian sci-fi, but is now actually a minor theological touchpoint for the Catholic Church, being referenced by right-wing tradcath theologists and the Popes Benedict XVI and Francis (the two of whom are much more theologically interlinked than I think a lot of people realize because of facile mistakes in applying a liberal-conservative spectrum to the Church's internal politics) alike.

In Lord of the World, the anxious future that Benson foresaw was shaped by the anxieties of his particular background (he was the son of the High Church Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury but had a crisis of doctrine that ended in him becoming a Catholic Priest instead) and the geopolitics foreseen in Pre-WW1 Europe. Europe is depicted as basically unified and dechristianized under a system of Marxist one-party republics (note that this was before the Russian Revolution, so that is some kind of advanced anti-communism being afraid of that already) and on the verge of war with a kind of Yellow-Peril "Eastern Empire" formed from an imperial dynastic union of China and Japan. The Antichrist in this scenario is a Senator Felsenburgh from a gigantic unified republic of North and South America who steps in as a peacemaker unifying the three superstates under a doctrine of secular Humanism and the destructive power of a global airship fleet before persecuting the last Christians (all Catholic, natch) and eventually flying off to bomb their refuge in Nazareth where the novel ends implying the Second Coming happens.

Just from an outline of the setting, the anxieties of Benson's era and background show in the application of dogma and fiction: to a European (and particularly English) Catholic Tory, the rising specter of world liberalism (the United States) and communism (Continental Europe) is seen as a kind of dooming force inherent to western civilization. The book is ahead of its time in a way, as it kind of gets the post-war probability of American liberal internationalism as the ultimate gravedigger of old-style empires in favor of the global order we know today where countries exist but a general secular capitalist system unites all (what some of the Communist Party of China's avant-garde reactionaries dub The World Empire). This was of course also in conversation with other pre-war English science fiction, particular H.G. Wells's Fabian socialism. Wells posited Humanist world socialist dictatorship by aerial bombardment as a good thing in books like The Shape of Things to Come, and kind of originated the airship warfare imagery in The War in the Air, which has a strangely familiar cover...

This book has basically wormed its way into Catholic political discourse post-Cold War, where one gets the sense that in the absence of world communism Rome is starting to see America as again this satanic force of global secularism, which works its way into in my opinion a kind of dangerous and disturbing way of formulating anti-imperialism for an increasingly Global South-adherent Church in right-wing terms. Joseph Ratzinger, before he was Benedict XVI, referenced the book to criticize George H.W. Bush's declaration of a "New World Order" after the fall of the Soviet Union, and then his successor picked up the book again... to criticize the appearance of non-binary gender options on Argentine governmental forms as "ideological colonization."

With the mention of Bush and the New World Order, I then have the slightest justification to swerve into a more modern, American, Protestant version of the Antichrist Fiction: Left Behind. Where Lord of the World was the anxieties of a Catholic Tory about the Protestant Reformation starting something that would end in atheist Americans lynching priests in the name of a united Humanity and firebombing Jerusalem as the opening act to Christ coming back, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are Evangelicals scared that the triumphant liberalism and United Nations at the End of History is actually all a setup where their ideological enemies within America and abroad are all about to spring a trap and instate global dictatorship.

Left Behind is a much more theologically... scattershot franchise (in true American fashion, it was a highly lucrative multimedia project with multiple low-budget movie adaptations and even a real-time strategy video game) because I kind of have to give it to the TradCaths that their Church at least has a tradition to be dogmatic about. Where Benson was a priest with the upper-class training and poise to worldbuild something that veiled his theology, these two just throw it all in a blender. The Antichrist in Left Behind is Nicolae Carpathia, a Romanian (because Eastern Europe is no longer communist but they're still all evil at heart because American conservatives hadn't decided they were "based" yet) politician created by a satanic cult using genetic engineering and artificial insemination (because all reproductive technology is evil). He becomes obscenely wealthy and finances the combined Muslim invasion of Israel the Evangelicals all believe is inevitable, before shortly after the Rapture taking over the UN by promising order and unity in the chaos and putting down all resistance in your standard '90s conspiracy theory UN techno-dystopia. He also has outright magic powers from Satan.

To tie this back to Fitzpatrick's War, I think there's a lot of patterns in this fiction that relates to how the authors externalize anxieties about imperialism that I think Judson is imitating either consciously or unconsciously but also subverting. In both cases, the doctrine and conservatism of the Church is depicted as this hated remnant under an ascendant status quo of western imperialism, which is explicitly tied to secularism and progressivism. The Yukons certainly seem to think their founding conflict was a case of this leading up to killing Iz. They see themselves as the Tribulation Force that won, that actually turned back the clock and made America into a conservative High Church state that would never evolve or change from what they think were the good bits (and also purged things racially down to place names; it doesn't escape me the hated ruined cities of America they built over were all the places where the settlers had still linguistically applied something from the indigenous, now paved over with "pure" Anglo names). Except, what they built instead very much looks like the Empires of Felsenburgh or Bush or Carpathia: a large nation with an alliance system with a technocratic core maintaining totalizing air and space power.

Fitzpatrick then fits the pattern of these Antichrists, but even these good Neo-Victorians all adore him! His reforms are all things that are legitimate if cynical improvements on the system of Yukon, and thus all the "good Christian vigilance" in the world can't stop them from being ready for the New World Order Roman Empire, down to the fashions changing from Victorian English to Classical Mediterranean. And this isn't even a subversion of their system by a Caesar but its fulfillment, with all the visible Timermen support even from where I'm still at in the thread. Their society is really one big set up, where the Christian conservatism is just the home front and resting state of what gets mobilized into World Empire. Social conservatism is actually quite fine with imperialism once eased into it and the women are minorities who have to support it are kept in a box, and the real Antichrist--in the spirit of what I believe Revelations was originally about; Roman imperial persecution of early Christianity as part of its dominion of the whole Mediterranean World--can wear the cross and take communion quite easily.
 
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Oh, Left Behind...I was raised Evangalical and even went to a creepy private school, so I know it well.

I think you're definitely on to something, I mean shit, Fitz even tries to implement a goofy one-world religion! Just like Nicolae Carpathia and Enigma Babylon!
 
I'm really excited to see more of your thoughts as you catch up (sorry for typing it all so fast I just had to get it out of my brain!)
 
Kuja said:
Wait a second, a group of carefully selected ideological purists maintaining advanced technology used to keep other political entities in line?

This is a ComStar origin story?!

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Funny, but I don't think so.

ComStar was founded to keep interstellar communications and thus interstellar civilization alive in fear of an apocalyptic war, which ended up becoming increasingly paranoid and influential because of its value to the galaxy, which led to the spooks and Good Idea Fairies deciding to kneecap everyone else. You could see them as a statement about the exigencies of keeping and maintaining political power, and where all those little compromises and necessities lead.

The Timermen fundamentally wanted to (and did) burn down civilization to rule its ashes.
 
ScottishMongol said:
Sooner or later, someone is going to hit them in one of their blind spots, or there's going to be some internal fissure, or some big swinging dick is going to decide his vision of history is better than the one the Timermen have been doing. And then everything is going to blow up in their faces and something different is going to come out the other side, and history will roll on.
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And then the bays of that 'secret island' open and the Earth is once more scoured clean.

Vyslanté said:
There's something almost impressive in the turbo hypocrisy of "yeah so technology bad, steam age best. please don't look too hard towards our bases on fucking mars"
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Or our manned Pluto mission or interstellar probes or ... warp drive?!
I'm getting the impression the Timermen might have less of a 'manned space program' and more of a 'manned Earth program', while the rest tool around in starships. Unfortunately, most of the galaxy isn't particularly interesting, so instead of simply fucking off they're 'guiding and preserving' Earth in a peculiar primitive state - unmarred by global technology and with a ready-made position of impossible privilege whenever for all their tourist needs, and, conveniently, as incapable of threatening them as the Chinese are of threatening the Yukon.

Like, the way they casually drop 'oh they maybe invented FTL in the late 21st century'. It could be a lie, I suppose they could also be lying about the rest of the galaxy being barren.
 
BaseDeltaZero said:
I'm getting the impression the Timermen might have less of a 'manned space program' and more of a 'manned Earth program', while the rest tool around in starships. Unfortunately, most of the galaxy isn't particularly interesting, so instead of simply fucking off they're 'guiding and preserving' Earth in a peculiar primitive state - unmarred by global technology and with a ready-made position of impossible privilege whenever for all their tourist needs, and, conveniently, as incapable of threatening them as the Chinese are of threatening the Yukon.

Like, the way they casually drop 'oh they maybe invented FTL in the late 21st century'. It could be a lie, I suppose they could also be lying about the rest of the galaxy being barren.
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While a fun thought, I do think that they're not lying about there being aliens.

For one thing, imagine how much fun the Yukon would have obliterating them!
 
I just read the whole thread and it was really interesting, but one question remains for me: why are they using steam powered motors instead of combustion motors? The Storm Bringers and PPW suppress Electricity, not Gasoline.
 
Lechloan said:
I just read the whole thread and it was really interesting, but one question remains for me: why are they using steam powered motors instead of combustion motors? The Storm Bringers and PPW suppress Electricity, not Gasoline.
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This is set way in the future so possibly oil reserves have been depleted.
 
Geckonator said:
In Lord of the World, the anxious future that Benson foresaw was shaped by the anxieties of his particular background (he was the son of the High Church Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury but had a crisis of doctrine that ended in him becoming a Catholic Priest instead) and the geopolitics foreseen in Pre-WW1 Europe. Europe is depicted as basically unified and dechristianized under a system of Marxist one-party republics (note that this was before the Russian Revolution, so that is some kind of advanced anti-communism being afraid of that already) and on the verge of war with a kind of Yellow-Peril "Eastern Empire" formed from an imperial dynastic union of China and Japan. The Antichrist in this scenario is a Senator Felsenburgh from a gigantic unified republic of North and South America who steps in as a peacemaker unifying the three superstates under a doctrine of secular Humanism and the destructive power of a global airship fleet before persecuting the last Christians (all Catholic, natch) and eventually flying off to bomb their refuge in Nazareth where the novel ends implying the Second Coming happens.
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I think I should mention that Robert Hugh Benson was a prolific author who wrote quite a few ghost stories, though not as many as his older brothers Arthur Christopher and Edward Frederic. (EF is probably one of the top Edwardian ghost story writers, and he also wrote comic novels of manners that are still popular in some circles, showing a remarkable range.)

Needless to say, I'm only scratching the surface of the family's oddness. The Bensons are like something out of a bittersweet magic realism novel, only, you know, real.
 
OldShadow said:
degenerating into a cargo cult recruiting more for ideological purity then capacity
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That describes the entirety of the Yukon, not just the Timermen. Specifically, remember Manheim questioning Bruce about whether he felt guilt for the ninety percent of the American population the proto-Yukon murdered when they sabotaged the power grid?
"Sir Robert," said Murrey, spinning his brass and walnut cane and watching his hands as he did, "are you familiar with the concept of shame?"

Manheim opened his mouth to protest, but after some consideration he remained silent.

"Shame, sir?" I said.

"Most of the non-Yukons in Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Greenland, North America, and the British Isles died during the viral plagues, sir," I said.

"Not all of them died of disease, Sir Robert," said Mur- rey. "According to Miss House's book, the 2060 census, the last reliable population count she knew of, tells that there were some five hundred and eighty million people living in America alone. Disease could have killed no more than two-thirds of them."

The examination room was buzzing. Fitz started from his chair, and Valette had to pull him down to prevent him from speaking out of turn.

"I must protest, Doctor Murrey," said Dr. Manheim, trying his best to sound authoritative. "I cannot understand why you are questioning the young gentleman in this manner."

"Sir Robert is a war hero," said Dr. Murrey, calmly shifting his weight against the back of his chair and letting his walking stick rest upon his knee. "He has endured worse experiences than my questioning."

"I want it to be known that these are your questions and not mine," stated Manheim.

"So it will be known," said the unruffled Murrey.

"Are you forgetting, sir," I said, "that the early Yukons saved millions of people? Consider those fleeing the European mainland into Britain after the Moslems surged north."

"Oh, the Yukons accepted some people," he agreed, "those who had white skin and were willing to adapt to our system. Many of those refugees they accepted died anyway when the Yukons quarantined them."

"The early Yukons were products of their times," I said. "You cannot say they were nearly as reprehensible as Iz and the Yellowjackets! They murdered tens of millions in their very homes, they built death camps, they deliberately infected hundreds of millions worldwide with deadly viruses!"

"I would concede," laughed Murrey, "that the early Yukons were not as terrible as Bartholomew Iz. Is that to be our standard, Sir Robert? Is that enough to cleanse the early Yukons of everlasting shame?"

"Ate the Tartars ashamed of Timur the Lame, sir?" I said. "Are the Mongols ashamed of Genghis Khan? More than three hundred years are between us and the early Yukons. Will not three hundred years allow us to forget?"

"So you are conceding they did shameful deeds," he said. "The point you are trying to make now is that they did them long ago and therefore we should forget about them."

This time Fitz did get to his feet.

"Sir," he declared to Manheim, "I request Doctor Murrey direct his questions to me. Clearly he is attempting to provoke—
To pull him back into his chair required the efforts of both Pularski and Valette. Someone at the back of the room shouted, "Let Bruce sit!" The other cadets muttered and shifted about in their chairs, making it necessary for Manheim to rise and ask them please to be quiet.

"Gentlemen!" he said, sounding like a man who wished he could melt into the floor. "Need I remind you the examination continues? Please," he said to Dr. Murrey, "I am asking you as a junior colleague, sir. Please, I beg you—

"Only a little more," said Murrey, and waved the younger instructor off with a gloved hand. "I am almost finished. I apologize to you, Sir Robert, if I have angered you."

"I am not angry, sir."

"Really?"

"Really, sir," I said between clenched teeth.

"Then I hope I never keep company with you when you

are truly enraged, Sir Robert," he said. "Now, let us approach this matter from another direction. Are we first Yukon soldiers or Christian gentlemen?"

"Christian gentlemen, sir, for we must fear God's judgment before everything else."

"I agree, Sir Robert. But why did the early Yukons not fear the judgment of God?"

"They did, sir," I said. "Fate had put them in an impossible situation, sir. Either they would allow themselves and their families to be destroyed, or they could destroy their enemies. They chose the latter option ... no, 'chose' is the wrong word. They had no choice. God gave us Grace, and He also gave us the instinct for self-preservation. The early Yukons obeyed the instinct He gave them. They perhaps fell short of God's Grace, but ... so has everyone else, sir."
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Where Hood was making a motivating speech to the troops?
"Thus God long ago spoke to Israel," he said. "Israel would lose her battles against the Assyrians and the Babylonians; the Persians would, in the fullness of time, rule over Abraham's children, as would the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Turks, the British, and finally, today, the Turks again. Yet Israel lives, if not as a nation then as a light unto the world that cannot be extinguished. For God set Israel free from the burden of History. That is why, in spite of four thousand years of military defeats, a man may travel to every nation and encounter Jews. For God made Israel's soul immortal, and the armies of men cannot destroy what God has made.

"The secret of the Yukons is that although we have God's word and carry his banner, we, unlike the chosen people, cannot endure a single defeat. Never let a foreigner's soft words deceive you: we are the most hated of nations. Rome at her acme was beloved compared to us. Nazi Germany and ancient America each had a warmer place in their enemies' hearts than we do in ours. Should any foe conquer us, they would not suffer one among us to live. Our conquerors would hunt down every Yukon child, every grandchild, every white-haired mother, and would kill them as cats kill vermin. They would overturn every brick we have placed atop brick and toss every word we have written into the flames. The name Yukon would be remembered only as a curse, a word to frighten children.

"God therefore has given us no option other than never to lose. We must win today and a thousand years from today and ten thousand years from now, or everything we are is lost. This is the burden of History we must carry, my friends. That is what weighs upon us from the day we are born. The burden robs us of our youth, of our personal aspirations, and ofttimes of life itself. But cast off the burden and History will destroy us. Cast off the burden, and the future will not know you and yours ever existed."

He was silent while he summoned up the courage to finish his speech.

"My friends, our enemies are as numerous as the blades of grass. We have no choice but to be scythes in their meadow. . . Each of you have wives,children, and you love them. Your loved ones have taught you mercy. In the months to come there will come times when you will want to show that same mercy to the Chinese and to the Turks. Do not do it, my friends. Think instead of how our enemies would act if Fate had put you in their stead. Think of how much mercy they would show you and your families. There will be a day when we may spare our foes, a day when this war will be done. Until then, do not allow yourselves to feel anything beyond your hatred. Hate your enemies when the flames fall upon them. Hate them when you shoot them down. Kill them when they attack. Kill them when they retreat. Kill them when they try to burrow themselves into the ground. Kill them in the midst of their doomed cities. Kill them when they flee to the wilderness. Kill them all. Kill so many that future Historians will speak in an appalled whisper of the work we have done..."
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Point is, the Yukon foundational myth is essentially "our ancestors have committed unspeakable, irredeemable atrocities against everyone else and will never be forgiven, therefore we must always maintain the monopoly of force over everyone else, even if doing so necessitates committing even more unspeakable, irredeemable atrocities, because if we don't, our victims and their descendants will be able to take revenge in kind."
 
And as someone who has watched right wingers talk about the past of America, one can see a slight exaggeration in how they talk about the pre-Columbian Exchange world in the Yukon's decrying of America's sin.
 
DragonCobolt said:
And as someone who has watched right wingers talk about the past of America, one can see a slight exaggeration in how they talk about the pre-Columbian Exchange world in the Yukon's decrying of America's sin.
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Not really seeing it, insofar as if the conquistadors had turned around and sailed home, the Aztecs still couldn't possibly have posed an existential threat to Europe. They had no capacity to cross the Atlantic much less wage Flower Wars there and even without their visitors' intentional aggression, weren't long for the world anyway because the Spanish had God on their side, specifically Papa Nurgle.

The proto-Yukon on the other hand, claim they were facing otherwise-inevitable defeat by a militarily superior foe and a binary choice between being destroyed versus using a superweapon to destroy everyone else. They're possibly lying, or rather, their history textbooks are possibly lying, but the current Yukon population seem to genuinely believe this whether it began as propaganda or an accurate description of events.

I'm reminded of mcjunker's review and the whole point of the Yukon's propaganda being to prevent the formation of class consciousness among the Yukon peasantry which'd hinder their leaders' plans for global imperialism.

View: https://www.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/l1jq1h/book_review_fitzpatricks_war_by_theodore_judson/
The Yukon Empire doesn't benefit the average Yukon peasant, merely the aristocracy and Timermen conspirators who run it. The peasantry fight as cannon fodder in the empire's wars where if they win, they harm their own economic bargaining position with zero-sum competition with free goods plundered from defeated foreigners and if they lose, they get obliterated by said foreigners who quite justifiably hate the Yukon. And to make sure of this, Yukon leadership will wage pointless genocidal wars of conquest where they outright give up the territory they stole afterwards, entirely to make sure the rest of the world hates them and prevent the formation of a Yukon peasantry/foreigners alliance against Yukon leadership.
 
Bassoe said:
Not really seeing it, insofar as if the conquistadors had turned around and sailed home, the Aztecs still couldn't possibly have posed an existential threat to Europe. They had no capacity to cross the Atlantic much less wage Flower Wars there and even without their visitors' intentional aggression, weren't long for the world anyway because the Spanish had God on their side, specifically Papa Nurgle.
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I mean...I never said it was rational propaganda, but on twitter, you can find plenty of people posting shit like a "chad conquistador" saying "the human sacrifices will stop", that kind of thing
 
DragonCobolt said:
We can only hope! Also, like, all it takes is one serious fuckup in orbit and those storm machines are down. And I think the Four Points War would drive home the Chinese desire to keep their surviving schematics from the electronic age quite secure...just in case.
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If I had to guess at potential Falls of the Yukon, I imagine either:
  • A cosmological Outside Context Problem cripples the Timermen's spaceborne trump cards preventing their rivals from building advanced technology, cue arms race between them and everyone else starting in the same situation of working off replicating ancient blueprints for tools-to-make-the-tools for a space race, with the winner building their own Blinking Stars, crippling their opponents' technology and ruling the world.
  • Non-Timermen Yukon nobility revolt against the Timermen conspiracy on grounds of "we also want access to the technological luxuries you reserve for yourselves."
  • Yukon peasants' revolt against the Timermen and Yukon nobility on grounds that fighting in the Yukon's wars makes their own lot in life worse, even if they win. They die as conscripted cannon fodder, in exchange for the rest of the world genocidally hating their guts so they believe have to continue repressing them least they go for revenge and so they face zero-sum economic competition with free plundered tribute vs their own products.
  • Civil war between the earthbound Timermen and a space-dwelling breakaway faction.
  • The Chinese have sophisticated bioengineering* (somehow, given the inaccessibility of electricity and computation). Therefore they could either create a doomsday plague as MAD deterrent against further wars with the Yukon, engage in transhumanist augmentation with each generation using slightly more superhuman intelligence to design even smarter children until they can win by something the purely human Yukon and Timermen weren't smart enough to think of, or go for the whole organic tech tree that doesn't have to care about weaponized EMPs.
DragonCobolt said:
I mean...I never said it was rational propaganda, but on twitter, you can find plenty of people posting shit like a "chad conquistador" saying "the human sacrifices will stop", that kind of thing
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Yes and said people are idiots with an unprovable hypothesis given that we don't know how long the Aztec system of Flower Wars slave-raiding could've lasted without foreign intervention and plagues and given the rates at which it killed people, how the resulting body count would've stacked up against said foreign intervention and plagues.

My point being, the Yukon are ideologically much more like modern neoreactionaries than the historic imperialists they LARP as. The historic imperialists saw their conquests as justified by their own innate superiority as evidenced by the fact that they could carry out said conquests, the modern neoreactionaries fear that they aren't innately superior and therefore unless they keep their ancestors' boot in place, their victims will go for revenge and they won't have the resources/prosperity from pillaging them**.

*
The Super Steppe horse is, like our Ultra Arabians, a product of selective breeding and genetic enhancement. Though smaller than the Ultra Arabian, a Super Steppe can run at a top speed of thirty-three m.p.h. for up to twenty hours, at which time the animal, unfortunately, falls dead.
-page 354
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**
If you tell people modern prosperity was based on slavery by raharris1973 said:
will that be more likely to (a) make them have left-wing opinions and support reparations.

or (b) convince white kids that slavery and racism were really good and the people who agreed to dismantle those systems were suckers. Or think that policies focused on reducing racial disparity and equalizing opportunity are *more* likely to have detrimental effects on them personally or their families than they would have thought before?

I was inspired to bring up this question by a particular blogger/substack author, discussing how educators with one set of pro social justice values believe presenting certain historical facts and patterns assume that certain moral conclusions and governing preferences would automatically flow downhill like water from that presentation of facts, but that it may not always be so, because the receiving audience may not receive the information sharing the same values or committed to live by them. They may have a more zero-sum view of the world. Oiginal excerpt:
But if you take your average student who, I think, doesn't really care about history, I don't think you can just fill their head with certain crucial historical facts and thereby produce good outcomes.

Something that I've written about a few times is that there's a school of academics who seems to believe that if you tell people modern prosperity was based on slavery, that will make them have left-wing opinions and support reparations. Realistically, though, that set of facts seems just as likely to convince white kids that slavery and racism were really good and the people who agreed to dismantle those systems were suckers. Mainly, what I wish more people realized about history is that while history is a very interesting topic, it is probably not as relevant to explaining the present day as a lot of people are inclined to think.
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Thanks for this thread, DC! I appreciate your analysis and got a PDF of the book (available on a popular Russian library site) to check it out for myself. Your posts showed me some themes and ideas that I'd not seen in the text.

DragonCobolt said:
I wonder how well that tunnel would last? Also on a scale of one to ten how scary is it to drive through the Chunnel?
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The only people who drive in the chunnel are the train drivers. Which is a shame because you'd get a better view of the panaromic acquarium windows from a car.

Some people think that it is a road tunnel because cars go thru it, but it's not. The cars are loaded onto very large train carriages for the journey.
 
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Man, I had fun doing this...

Should I do another lets read?

Should I...

A) lets read an entire harry turtledove series. Surely you will not regret lets reading an entire harry turtledove series
B) lets read some other obscure book no one's ever heard of (The Color of Distance/Through Alien Eyes duology)
C) lets read a TTRPG!
 
Man, I am torn between a Turtledove series or another obscure series since Fitzpatrick's War was a fascinating book I literally never hear of before this thread.
 
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