Let's Read Harry Turtledove: Now 99% Shakespeare-free!

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read Harry Turtledove: Now 99% Shakespeare-free!

ninjahedgehog: Feb 17, 2011; It's time to kick the tires and light the fires, Big Bird.

Read this book probably 15 years ago and was impressed in how much smarter it is than its elevator pitch -- "the Confederacy gets Kalashnikovs" but with 350 pages thoughtfully exloring what that world would actually look like. Curious to see how it's aged.

I love how in the beginning Rhoodie expects Lee to be blown away by his MRE but Lee immediately clocks it as just the logical extension of what they already have. Kind of a foreshadowing to something that is revealed later -- The AWB doesn't actually have a great sense of the history they're altering, their Civil War knowledge largely comes from a picture book that's heavily implied to be geared towards children.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2021 16:20

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 17:37

ninjahedgehog: Feb 17, 2011; It's time to kick the tires and light the fires, Big Bird.

Gnoman posted:

Discussion turns to the reason that Lee is here - the AK-47.

The AK does indeed have a number of less efficient ancestors, dating back to the 1908 Mondrag�n (the first gas-operated autoloading rifle) or to the failed recoil-operated rifles designed by Ferdinand Mannlicher in 1885. A less capable weapon would still have been a huge improvement to Confederate firepower, and would have raised far less suspicion. This raises the question of why the AWB chose the AK. Obviously it was an easy weapon for them to obtain in large numbers, but the same would have been true of other, less suspicious designs. Either they didn't care about maintaining their cover story, or they blithley assumed that the primitive 19th century Confederates were too stupid to figure it out.

Obviously the real answer is that the AK is more iconic than possibly any other firearm in history and makes for a better book cover, but in-universe I bet AWB also chose it for its legendary reliability. Like you said, they're severely underestimating how savvy the Confederates are and probably wanted something that, from their perspective, even these backwards hillbillies would be hard pressed to break.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2021 17:46

ninjahedgehog: Feb 17, 2011; It's time to kick the tires and light the fires, Big Bird.

Caudell refers to the AK magazines as banana clips a bunch (haha!) throughout this segment, but I'm curious -- for a poor Southerner in the 1860s, how much of a familiarity with actual bananas would he have? My cursory research tells me that bananas were a rare treat for the elite even after the war, but maybe he knew *of* them more than he had actually tried one. Or maybe the Rivington men called it that?

# ¿ Dec 19, 2021 05:33

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