I'm trying to imagine the marketing possibilities: "Andries Rhoodie here. I just wanted to say that the discriminating time traveling white supremacist always chooses Apple for his 1868 computing needs. I'm not really entirely sure what we did with those Macintoshes, but a single video iPod holds enough kinky blinking porn to last the next 150 years. Thank you, Steve Jobs!"
Okay, I'm happy that after having to endure endless tripe about how the Southern states were "oppressed" by the Northern ones and that the Confederacy was built on "high ideals" (ignoring the slavery) that deserved to win out, that finally on page 411 (of the paperback) we get at a little bit of the truth: Jefferson Davis, worried about the voting split along state lines between Bedford Forrest and Robert Lee (who is a closet abolitionist) states, "Sectionalism appears to remain alive and well among us. That is dangerous; if we cannot cure it, it will cause us grief down the road: the United States, after all, tore asunder from a surfeit of sectionalism." Albert Brown (Lee's running mate) replies, "The Constitution of the Confederate States does not provide for secession." "Neither did the Constitution of the United States," Davis replied. "But if the western states have the gall to seek to abandon our confederacy as a result of this election, we shall--" He stopped; for once his facade cracked, leaving him quite humanly confused. EXACTLY!
All in all, it's a worthy read, if very slow to start out as we wade through Turtledove's excellent and exhaustive Civil War research.
No comments:
Post a Comment