Harry Harrison's
Stars and Stripes trilogy asks a simple question: What
if the United States and Britain had gone to war in 1862? What if the American
Civil War had not run its course and, instead, the two armies of North and
South had combined against a common enemy: Britain?
If the two armies had joined forces, they would have been the single
largest army in the entire world.. The American military were also much more
open to new technology than the British, who were complacent and saw no need
for change, and so the U.S. would also have been equipped with the most modern
weapons.
The potential strength of this combined North-South army is the idea which
first sparked off this project in Harrison's imagination, and it was an idea
which he mulled over, on and off, for almost thirty years. He had the idea,
but how could he bring about the end of the Civil War and reconcile the
warring armies? And what story would he tell as a result?
Harrison knew he had to end the Civil War before the conflict was too far
advanced – beyond a certain point, reconciliation would be impossible because
the fighting – and killing – during this war was on a such a massive scale.
In Harrison's resulting alternate history, the American civil War ends after
the Battle of Shiloh, the first battle of the war. The war ends because both
North and South believe they are being invaded by British soldiers.
How plausible is the idea of a British invasion of the United States? What
could have brought about such an invasion? In fact it came very close to
happening in real life. The events described in the opening chapters of
Stars and Stripes Forever actually occurred, and events could well
have progressed in the way which Harrison suggests.
Relations between Britain and the U.S. were not good – the British ere still
smarting from their defeat in the war of 1812. In the Civil War, Britain
favoured the South, the Confederacy, over the North. So when a Union warship
stopped a British vessel at sea and two men suspected of being Rebel spies
were arrested, British tempers flared. At that moment, in real history, there
was a genuine risk of war between Britain and the Union.
What cooled things down and prevented war was the intervention of Prince
Albert, consort to Queen Victoria. He rewrote the dispatch which was sent to
President Lincoln, toning down the language demanding the release of the two
captured men, and presenting an opportunity for a peaceful solution.
Britain had dispatched troops to Canada and they were massed on the
United States border. War could have happened. And in Harrison's book it does.
Prince Albert was terminally ill with lung problems and in Stars and
Stripes Forever he dies moments before he is able to rewrite the dispatch
to President Lincoln (in reality he died shortly after); Queen Victoria blames
the U.. for causing Albert's death, and war is declared, with the Lords
Commissioners of the Admiralty sending out the following order:
Their Lordships desire you to proceed with the greatest dispatch to the
coast of the United States. There you are to destroy and lay waste such towns
and districts upon the coast as you may find available.
Britain and the United States are at war!
Harrison managed to bring about a war with Britain in which North and South
join forces against the common enemy. But to what end? What story is he
telling here? To answer that question we must view the trilogy as a single
piece, with Stars and Stripes Forever laying the foundations for what
is to come. Here Harrison asks another 'What if?' What if the United States
had solved the problems which had caused the war between North and South,
specifically the issue of the abolition of slavery, and what if the country
had then gone on to become a strong democratising force, spreading democracy
across the world? If that had happened, what would the world be like today?
And this is Harrison's purpose in telling this story, to present a vision of a
truly democratic America, and its attempt to build a more democratic world. He
alters the past to create a present which we might aspire to. With the Cold
War ended, we stand at a point where a new direction in world events is about
to be taken, where a new purpose is needed. Harrison's Stars and Stripes
trilogy presents his view of where we should be headed.
Harrison begins building his new model of America in Abraham Lincoln's office
during the early stages of the Civil War. Lincoln is introduced to an
Englishman, a 'natural philosopher', John Stuart Mill. It is Mill's philosophy
which will play an important role in the development of Harrison's new world,
a world which the author himself admits is a utopian vision.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was a British philosopher, economist, and
politician. In real life he supported the North in the American Civil War,
arguing that the real issue at stake in the conflict was the abolition of
slavery. Mill was a radical thinker, and strongly believed that Britain had a
duty to intervene in foreign politics if that intervention furthered the cause
of freedom.
Mill wasn't only critical of foreign politics, he was highly critical of
domestic politics too: he argued for the freedom of discussion of radical
ideas, and sought to expose unsound practices in Parliament and the court
room. He hated sectarianism of any kind, and believed that social issues were
as important as political ones. He was also interested in matters of
production and distribution, and could not accept any system which condemned
the labouring classes to misery and starvation. Mill also believed in the
equal rights of women: he was a co-founder of the first women's suffrage
society, and published a classic theoretical statement of the case for women's
suffrage, Subjection of Women (1861). He also gave careful
consideration to the suffering and unrest in Ireland, and put forward his own
proposals for a solution.
John Stuart Mill believed that political philosophy was "complex and
many-sided" and should "supply, not a set of model institutions but principles
from which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances might be
deduced."
Clearly a man ahead of his time, it is not difficult to see why Mill's
thinking appealed to Harry Harrison who is an atheist and a Scientific
Humanist, believing that moral thinking does not require religion, and that
ethics can be derived from scientific knowledge, and – most importantly – that
all human beings are equal, and that we all have a responsibility to one
another.
How Harrison builds upon Mills' works to create his utopian world we will have
to wait and see. But there can be little doubt that this trilogy is the
author's most ambitious to date, and is an entirely fitting one to take him
into the next century.
© Paul Tomlinson, August 1999
by Paul Tomlinson – Brighton, 13th August 1999
Alternate History
PT: The Stars and Stripes trilogy is an 'alternate history' story. Alternate history is an
SF sub-genre, but it's being marketed by Del Rey in the US as a category in its own right, almost
as if it isn't SF...
HH: Del Rey have an 'alternate history month' – it started in October last year with
Stars and Stripes Forever. They have found that they can market it and sell it outside the
genre. A lot of Harry Turtledove's books are shelved with mainstream fiction paperbacks, as well as
being shelved with science fiction. If you can get shelved in two places...
PT: Twice as many sales.
HH: That's right! It has generated a new market, and it's a market I'm very interested in. I
have written it before, even before they called it alternate history. A Transatlantic Tunnel,
Hurrah! was set in an alternate world where George Washington was shot as a traitor. The
Technicolor Time Machine involved an alternate world, and so did A Rebel In Time. So I
have a history of doing it.
Stars and Stripes I've had in the works for thirty years! I had the basic idea which is that by the
end of the American Civil War there were 100,000 men at arms, they were a modern army, and
they could have licked every other army in the world at the same time! The other armies were
still armed with Brown Bess muskets and didn't know what they were doing.
That idea had been cooking and cooking, and out of the research I did into the Civil War I wrote
Rebel in Time
The science fiction readership has become very fragmented. Sales have gone down because there are
too many titles on the shelves. There's no backlist any more for the writer: I used to have all of
my books in print, now I have just two. I used to depend on my backlist for a certain amount of
money, but books no longer stay in print and earn money. So to make money you need a big
idea, something like West of Eden or the Stars and Stripes trilogy. As my agent says, bigger
ideas make bigger advances.
PT: What is it about this type of story which appeals to you?
HH: I like it because (a) you can use your imagination, which most science fiction writers
now don't do; there's so much derivative crap around; and, (b) it's hard to do, which means that
writers who are lazy slobs don't do it – it requires an awful lot of research to do it well. So
it's fun to do, but it requires a lot of hard work, which cuts out 90% of other writers; it needs
talent to do it well, which means another 5% are gone! So there's really no competition to deal
with. Plus, if you 'break through' you have a bigger audience: hopefully I get my science fiction
readers anyway and hopefully some mainstream readers too.
Making History
PT: An alternate history story begins with one small change to a pivotal historic event, and
then you track history as it might have been from that point of change...
HH: In alternate history you alter one thing, you find a 'node' and change it. In this
particular book, Prince Albert dies early, and things build from that.
I had one reviewer complain because alternate histories need a good turning point, like the Germans
winning the Second World War. Well, I don't really like that. The whole point of this is that
there's a whole succession of changes, one thing building on another.
You know how the poem goes 'for the want of a nail the shoe was lost' – the battle was lost all for
the want of a horseshoe nail. I had these changes come on subtly: most people know almost nothing
about history, so they're never quite sure when I leave the real world behind.
I deliberately made the change after the first battle in the book, the Battle of Shiloh. This was a
big battle, the first meeting of the two armies in the Civil War, with people piling into each
other. 22,000 men were killed there. In two days the North lost 12,000 men and the South lost
10,000 men, and the battle lines didn't change at all.
By the time the American Civil War was over, there were 200,000 dead, North and South. Plus another
400,000 people died of disease and stress – that made 600,000 dead by the end of the war, which was
two percent of the American population. That's killing on a massive scale.
One reviewer thought I'd made up the Battle of Shiloh until he checked up on it afterwards and
found it really happened like that! He was an English reviewer, so why should he know American
history?
Once it got past Shiloh the real historical Civil War was a downhill thing, so I had to stop the
war there: past that point and there was no way the two sides could be friends with each other. So
I deliberately stopped it then.
It was a matter of changing things gradually, like a snowball going down hill, you slowly pick up
the pace.
But that's the fun of it, making those slight changes.
PT: There's a limit to how many changes you can make, isn't there, before you lose the
audience?
HH: It goes back to H.G. Wells, who said that if a pig came flying over the hedge at you,
you'd be surprised: Wow, great, a flying pig! But if you then had cows flying, and houses flying,
it becomes boring.
This is also very true of alternate history.
PT: Once you've made your one historical change, you then have to stick as closely as
possible to real historical events to make the story believable?
HH: You should stick completely to history as its known, as its recorded, and let it change
bit by bit, in slow increments.
PT: What comes first, the alternate world you want to write about, or the incident which
changes history? Do you know in advance how the world will be, or does it just develop once you've
made the historical change?
HH: In this particular case it was a discovery which came from looking at the figures I told
you about earlier: the combined forces of the American armies could have wiped out the armies of
the whole world – but so what? They weren't going to combine because they hated each other's guts.
But if I stopped the war early enough it could happen. But how could I stop the war early enough?
Finally I came up with the idea of the English invading. So the structure was then there, and it
was a matter of getting the plot right and getting the details right. Backplotting.
The Craft and Art of Science Fiction
HH: Science fiction, like the mystery story, is the home of backplotting. Backplotting
simply means you know where the story's going to end, you build to that. That's the
craft of science fiction; the art is disguising the fact you know the ending, so that
the reader is surprised by it.
This is not to say that with backplotting you always settle for your first idea: I changed the
ending completely in the first book. And in the second I found new nodal points so that I could
make it more difficult for the reader to guess where I was going. The reader must be surprised all
the time, they must see new things which they never knew were coming – so that they'll keep reading
– but all within a logical flow, so that with hindsight you can see its logical, but you couldn't
actually see it coming.
That's very important in alternate history.
Historical Research
PT: You obviously had to do a lot of research for this book, and it sounds as though you
enjoyed doing it...
HH: Oh yeah, it was fun.
PT: Did you find out anything about the historical figures which surprised you?
HH: They pretty much fall into the stereotypes you know. Lincoln was very complex: I read
three books on Lincoln, the best of all being Gore Vidal's Lincoln.
You find things that you were never taught in school... I had an awful job shoe-horning Jefferson
Davis into the scenes in the book with Lincoln, because Davis was a narrow-minded out-and-out
racist. But, as you'll see, I take care of him in the second book! I couldn't go on with him I just
couldn't: in a stressful, emergency situation I got him to react, but I couldn't make him into a
fleshed out character.
Stonewall Jackson was an absolute religious nutcase! I didn't put too much of that in because he's
only a secondary character.
I did a lot of work on Queen Victoria – I have two biographies of her, Her Little Majesty by
Carolly Erickson and Queen Victoria by Cecil Woodham-Smith. The first of these is great —
Vicky with her drawers down! She was an alcoholic, she drank beer...
PT: That was true then, about her liking to take a glass of beer?
HH: She secretly drank beer! Everything about everybody in this book is true, none of it is
made up. It all comes from my reading heavily into the period. Albert used to pick her clothes out
for her. Ninety percent of her dialogue in my book comes from her diary.
PT: Was she barking mad, then?
HH: [Laughs] I have a line in the book: After all, she was Mad George's
granddaughter! She wasn't barking mad, but she was a very foolish little girl with a tine brain
– no education whatsoever apart from tutors. But she was a good linguist, she spoke German, because
the family was German, her French was very good. So she had these attributes. And her loyalty to
Albert... well, he'd make all the decisions for her, so she was very much at sea when he died. She
put her widow's weeds on and retired, and she made almost no decisions at all after his death. I
have her making a few decisions in extremis, which fits with her character very well.
I had one English reviewer say they didn't believe that Albert died because of the drains in the
palace. I have quotes which say that the drains at Windsor were so foul that many of the public
rooms could not be used because of the smell, and that servants were dying of Yellow Fever! Albert
got it from the drains at Windsor, it's on record.
You come across good stuff like that, you've got to use it! If you dig into the period, you find so
many nice things. My agent said: Harry, I didn't know you were a historian. I'm not a
historian, but if it's a period I enjoy I read a lot about it, so in the end I'm pretty well up on
it.
I haven't mentioned it yet, but I should: the English generals then were so incompetent because
they were still buying their commissions. You know the Charge of the Light Brigade? That moron,
Lord Raglan, bought his commission.
I've mentioned odd things here and there, but I'm having an awful job trying not to knock
the British. And I've had some complaints on that score. In A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!
I had George Washington shot as a traitor, and not one American complained at all. But with the new
book, do you know how many reviews I've had complaining that the British weren't that way? One
reviewer said that British soldiers never got drunk and never raped women ever [Rolls his eyes]
They're really very pissed off at this vision.
But all the British hatred for the Americans was quoted from The Times and other newspapers
– every bit of this about them being up in arms against the Americans is absolutely true. Of course
the yellow press was whipping it up and enjoying it, but those were the attitudes.
Britain was a class-ridden society, they hated the Irish, hated the Catholics, and hated the lower
classes.
The 'Evil Brits'
PT: It would be easy for somebody to make the mistake seeing this book as being anti-British
and pro Irish and pro-American, wouldn't it?
HH: Very much so, if they wanted to. But, as I say, I've tried to be even-handed about the
British. But when you start going down the road of the British being bastards, then they have to be
bastards. The book starts with the English making mistakes, and going on to make more mistakes... So
it could be seen as anti-British, but I'm sorry to say they are the villains in this
particular book. And they settle into it very easily!
There's a book called Queen Victoria's Little Wars – they had a war for every year of her
reign, like the War of Jenkin's Ear. And they always won them, because they were shooting at people
who didn't have guns!
The Brits had an easy job, they expanded at a time when expansion was easy to do, and they made a
better job of it than the French and the Germans. They got to the right spots, they got to India.
This is one of the reasons I had the Brits ruling the world in A Transatlantic Tunnel,
Hurrah! Because I'd lived in Mexico I knew that the rotten Spaniards had not only destroyed the
religion there, they'd destroyed an entire culture. Whereas the Brits went in and took a bit of
civilisation with them: they tried to get rid of things like the Thugees and wife burning, they
changed the rules of society, but they left the religion and culture alone. I thought that was a
good idea, so I made them the heroes in that book. So they can let me make them the villains now!
But, having lived in Ireland for twenty-odd years, I think the British made a very bad job there.
PT: I thought there was quite a nice irony there, because the real-life United States
actually became what the 'evil Brits' are in the book...
HH: The American Empire, yeah.
A Healthy Constitution
PT: This book's ideal for the American market, isn't it? Stars and Stripes Forever! They'll
lap that up...
HH: Yeah, but you know my politics. Tom Doherty, publisher at Tor books, said: Harry, you're
putting me on, you're not going to write this book about America running the whole world! I said to
Tom: It's a historical novel: I'm just showing an alternate world which might be better than the
one now. The fact that America's running it is totally beside the point.
Also – I don't know whether you know this or not – I'm a student of the Constitution. The
Constitution is what keeps America working, even though it's full of crooks and dirty politicians,
the Constitution will hold up. I'm a Constitutionalist, I believe very much in the Bill of Rights,
and I'm writing about the good stuff in it that could have come out of American history if
American politics hadn't been so full of crooks. The bribe-taking crooks then were even bigger than
they are now.
There's a book which I have a copy of about bringing the American Constitution back to Britain,
because much of it is based on British la. He's an English lawyer, a student of the American
Constitution, and he wanted to bring the American Constitution back to England because it was
English in the first place!
In a way I have written a utopian novel – and as for the fact that it's an American utopia, that's
totally beside the point.
A New United States
PT: In Stars and Stripes Forever you've gone back to the Civil War, which is one of
the most critical points in American history...
HH: It was a defining point in history, the point at which America actually became a
country, as opposed to a union of states. Until then they felt it was a voluntary association which
they could leave if they weren't happy with it. When it became the United States of America, then
they couldn't leave it. America defined itself at that point.
PT: You're changing things at this defining point, and it seems – at least after reading the
first book – that you're now going to develop a new model of the United States, a better one...
HH: Yes, absolutely. I'm trying to develop a successful, operating, decent, United States,
without the corruption of the politicians, which will bestow democracy on the world – but not in
the way they did in the Philippines, where they threw the Spanish out and put their own hegemony in
and ruled it as a colony. There's too much of that in the American way.
By invading Canada in the first book, they let the Canadians develop their own democracy, separate
from Britain. In the second book the same thing happens in Mexico, it becomes a democratic country.
Also in the second book I try to do the same thing for Ireland.
So I'm dealing with topics of world-wide importance, cast in the form of fiction which should
interest you as fiction, but which also adds to the field of global knowledge. I have tried to show
a better route for the world to follow, something that might be easier on everybody. A bad example
of this kind of book is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead which has a society based on her
Capitalist, fascist theories.
PT: The alternative you're presenting in this trilogy is based on the theories of the
'natural philosopher' John Stuart Mill?
HH: Yeah. I have his books here, he's pretty good. I didn't alter much of what he says, I
use about 95% directly. I put a few advanced words in his mouth where I had to. Otherwise it's
pretty much Mill's own words. If you dig into the stuff as I do... I'm having a problem because he
believed very much in the women's vote: I can't get that in quite yet, it's a little early for
that. I mean, you know when the women's vote came to England: 1918. Do you know why? All the
Suffragettes didn't achieve a thing before the war, but after the war one third of the British
workforce was women, and they said: If we're good enough to do your work, we're good enough to have
the vote!
Military Technology
PT: Another important historical aspect of this novel – aside from the events of the Civil
War – is that of military technology, which is an area which you also seems to enjoy.
HH: I love technology, and I've worked with technology – computing gunsights and power
turrets in the army. I love the history of technology, and this book is dead perfect for it! All of
those inventions were there to be utilised, even if they weren't actually used in reality.
The stuff existed, but they didn't use it for all sorts of complicated reasons.
Ericsson did build the Monitor in 100 days, designed it from scratch. He did invent
the screw propeller.
I'm accelerating history a little bit in the second book by bringing in the 1863 model of the
Gattling Gun which was invented in 1858; it was patented, but they thought it was no good and the
idea wasn't taken up until 1869. So it's not a big deal, I'm using it only a few years earlier.
The technology was there: the observation balloons were there; the telegraph was there;
utilising trains for troop movements was there; there was trench warfare – the American Civil War
really was the first modern war.
I'm accelerating just a few things by just a few years. I'm not inventing technology, I'm
just having it come on stage a few years early, which is not that bad a crime.
PT: Are there real-life instances if iron-clad steam warships going into battle?
HH: The Americans did it first. The French had floating armoured rafts. But there were only
little wars in the world then, there were no big wars. They started building bigger and bigger
ships, but they never... well, the Japanese sank the Russian fleet, you know. So they came on very,
very slowly.
So I accelerate it and actually use it, which they never really did. Most of the iron-clad ships
that were built were sunk as targets! They kept improving on them, but not until the early 1900s do
you get them using the ships like I'm using them now.
La Gloire – the French ship – was the first wooden-hulled, iron-clad warship. The British
copied it and made Black Prince and Warrior. And then the Monitor sank the
Merrimac. And then ten or fifteen years later the British started making larger ships with
turrets. So it was really 1898 before they had armour plating and turrets on battleships. But there
was no war to use them in. They existed, and I'm just putting them to work.
Looking Back at the Future?
PT: The American Civil War was a major crossroads in the country's history, and we're
currently at another one, aren't we?
HH: It is a big turning point, which is one of the reasons why I wrote this novel.
Since Winston Churchill went to Madison, Wisconsin and gave a speech about an iron curtain dropping
over Europe – that's a quote from Goebels, by the way, he didn't make it up, it is German
anti-Communist propaganda! Churchill started the Cold War, and from 1945 on it shaped American
politics, and was used whenever they needed an excuse. They went into South America and killed
President Allende in Chile, and they said they were 'fighting communism'. He was a mild socialist
who was elected by the people: the CIA killed him and gave us that endearing murderer, General
Pinochet.
All American politics since the end of the Second World War has been 'anti' – but now the Commies
are gone! So what do they stand for? They don't stand for very much, there's nothing they
can think of!
PT: So they could pick a fight with China...
HH: They've already lost a war with the Chinese, so they won't do that again.
PT: They could pick a fight in the Islamic world...
HH: They're too disparate, there's no focus. No, they just can't be 'anti' anymore. They
aren't 'pro' anything, they have to find something to be 'pro' about. They haven't paid their
United Nations dues, even though it's in their hands, but NATO is expanding. Why? NATO was a block
united against the Soviet Union, how can it be expanding? If they abolished NATO, that would
be a good idea!
They haven't really got a clue what they want to do. Most American's don't vote anyway, and those
that do are influenced by the slick commercials which the candidates pay for.
I'm not anti-American – I spend most of my time in Europe defending America: most Europeans
knock America for the wrong reasons. I am very much anti the 'actions' which America carries
out in Vietnam and places like that.
So in the back of my head was the idea of trying to give America a decent role in the world,
instead of stumbling around. That's what most of my Republican friends can't understand.
PT: You've written elsewhere that Stars and Stripes is a way of looking at a possible future
by looking into the past...
HH: Right.
PT: But we're not very good at learning from past mistakes, are we?
HH: What I'm doing is leaving out the mistakes and showing a good alternate path into
the future, which is our present. If you never have those mistakes happen, there's a chance you
might end up with a more equitable world, which is what I'm trying to postulate. I'm trying to
create this model and disguise it as a science fiction novel by using character and narrative,
conflict, action and readability. No one wants to read a lecture, no one reads Erewhon
anymore. But Stars and Stripes is a utopian novel.
The trilogy is really one novel, broken into three parts.
PT: There's a lot of ground work being laid in the first novel isn't there?
HH: There was so much I had to get established in the first book, I had to recapitulate the
origins of the Civil War.
There were three things I had to do time wise: I had to have the Battle of Shiloh to show you what
was happening in the Civil War. I had to have the Battle of New Orleans, mainly because it became
so important to have the steam-driven ironclads. Then the North invades up the Mississippi River.
Captures New Orleans and divides America in half . And the battle of Monitor and
Merrimac to start ironclad sea warfare.
At that point the story really gets going, and veers away from history, and it never veers back.
Stars and Stripes in Peril
HH: Doing the second book was harder because I had to invent a whole new history.
PT: There's less research to draw upon?
HH: Well, there's a lot even now: American reconstruction comes into the second book, but I
can't call it 'reconstruction' because it wasn't deconstructed. And I have to bring in the whole
thing with the Negroes and the trouble in the South. And in the next one the whole thing with
Emperor Maximilian in Mexico becomes important – Mexico is very important in the second book.
Ireland too. All that about the Fenians which you're going to read about in the second one is all a
matter of history – again I'm quoting everybody, and the newspapers.
So I am really, again, using known history.
PT: When will Stars and Stripes in Peril be published?
HH: The UK hardback is due April 2000.
The American hardback is due October 2000 – October last year was the hardback of Stars and
Stripes Forever, this October will be the paperback, October next year will be the hardback of
the second book. I work on them about eighteen months ahead, there's a very long lead time.
© Paul Tomlinson, August 1999
