Tor Forge, 2001, 127pp $19,95

Tor Forge, 2001, 304pp, $24.95

reviewed in Vector 222, March-April 2002

In 1959 MacKinlay Kantor was approached by Look magazine to write a piece for the centenary of the start of the Civil War. What would it have been like if the South had won? they asked him. Kantor hesitated, he had already written two classic novels about the Civil War, Long Remember (1934) and Andersonville which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956, and did not want to return to the subject. But the question intrigued him, and eventually he wrote the story that took up the majority of the November 1960 issue of Look. If the South had Won the Civil War was published as a book shortly afterwards, and immediately recognised as a classic of alternate history. Now, after too many years out of print, it has been republished, complete with Kantor’s essay, ‘An Historical Inversion’, illustrations by Dan Nance, and a rather too short introduction by Harry Turtledove. Even with all that and set in rather large type, the book only amounts to 127 pages, but those pages are packed with enough detail to satisfy anyone as to why this is such a star in the alternate history firmament.

I suspect that Kantor, a highly respected mainstream novelist with a taste for history, would not have been familiar with much in the way of alternate history, but he may well have known Winston Churchill’s curious essay-story ‘If Lee had not Won at Gettysburg’. Certainly that is the model that Kantor’s piece follows. This is not a story in the conventional sense of following characters and discovering their world. It is, rather, a brief history lesson that begins with Ulysses S. Grant being thrown from his horse and killed not long after embarking on his campaign to capture Vicksburg. (Grant was indeed thrown from his horse, but in New Orleans about a month after the fall of Vicksburg and suffered nothing more than a broken leg.) By right of seniority, Grant’s command descended not to Sherman or McPherson who merited it, but to the incompetent political general McClernand, who did not. Grant’s daring plan fails. Kantor is practically unique in choosing events in the Western theatre as the starting point for his alternate history, but he backs this up with changes in the East where, at Gettysburg, Lee writes an uncharacteristically forthright order which ensures that Culp’s Hill is actually captured by the Confederates at the end of the first day’s fighting. Thus Meade is not able to anchor his line, and the Union suffers a devastating defeat.

From this point on, Kantor takes us briskly through the history of divided America, and as in any alternate history much of the fun comes from seeing what changes and what doesn’t. Lincoln is still assassinated, the slaves are emancipated under Confederate President Lee (as they were in Turtledove’s The Guns of the South), the Cuban war occurs much as it did in reality. America does not lose its international standing (as Churchill imagined) nor does either section suffer economic collapse (as Ward Moore suggested in Bring the Jubilee), the First World War sees both Americas enter on the same side (unlike Turtledove’s American Front). In fact, it soon becomes clear that North and South are running on converging tracks, and If the South had Won the Civil War concludes with their inevitable reunion.

If Kantor’s hesitation before taking on the project is understandable, so is his eventual agreement. The prospect of a divided Union has had a powerful effect on the American imagination, and stories of the war continue to be written at an extraordinary rate. The most recent example is Ed Gorman’s anthology of stories about spying during the war, which brings together the usual ‘B’ list of genre writers, crime writers like Brendan DuBois, Edward Hoch and Loren Estleman, science fiction and fantasy writers like Kristine Katherine Rusch, Ray Vukcevich, Jane Lindskold. None of the stories are in the least fantastic, some aren’t in the least interesting, and most are predictable. Estleman’s ‘South Georgia Crossing’ is curiously reminiscent of one of Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War stories without the sense of actuality that Bierce gave it. Generally the best stories are those which step outside the familiar incidents of the war, Rusch’s ‘The Dead Line’ which shifts the scene between Andersonville and 1911, Vukcevich’s ‘The Swan’ which somehow incorporates the invention of roller skating, and Marie Jakober’s ‘Slither’ set in a Confederate prison and not at all to do with espionage.