S.M. Stirling's Drakhaverse

[MKSheppard]

Anyone read it? I've been taking a closer look into this, and I've found
it to be the most shoddily constructed AltHist possible, with the Drakha
getting every tech advance all the time, and their enemies as stupid
as a box of rocks.

To wit; Marching in Georgia, opens with the Drakha about to land 2
Airborne divisions.....in the Caucausus mountains....yes, that's right
anyone else would get their airborne troops chewed up in a mountain
drop....except the Drakha.

It proceeds to get more absurd, especially the parts about the Russian
population liking the Drakha better than the Nazis. You
are talking about a bunch of people who enslave people, commit atrocities
at the drop of a cuff, and consider raping the women in the area the
rightful spoils of war, and the Russians like them more than the Nazis?



It's just a fucked up universe.....

[SirNitram]

A nice little attempt to make the Draka Timeline slightly more realistic:

Click Me!

[18-Till-I-Die]

Never read it, but i can easily believe it's screwed up. Most Alternate History stories are. Thats why i try to veer away from them, weather i'm reading or writing. It's hard to come up with good ideas for AltHistory, and as you can see it can be rather...bland when done poorly.

[MKSheppard]

A nice little attempt to make the Draka Timeline slightly more realistic:

Read that.

[SirNitram]

A nice little attempt to make the Draka Timeline slightly more realistic:

Read that.

Now go read the ASVS STGOD, and the nation Marina made that was Russia beating the living shit out of the Draka.

Commies In Spaaaaaaaaaaace....

Both histories are far more plausible.

[frigidmagi]

I like Nitram timeline more than I like the story itself.

Where can I find the ASVS STGOD?

[SirNitram]

I like Nitram timeline more than I like the story itself.

Where can I find the ASVS STGOD?

GoogleGroups might still have it all on record.

[Anhaga]

Never read it, but i can easily believe it's screwed up. Most Alternate History stories are. Thats why i try to veer away from them, weather i'm reading or writing. It's hard to come up with good ideas for AltHistory, and as you can see it can be rather...bland when done poorly.

I agree that it's bad when it's done poorly. The Draka series is probably Stirling's worst. Try The Peshawar Lancers. Or for some well thought out alternate history scenarios, try here: http://www.alternatehistory.net/discussion/

[NecronLord]

You are talking about a bunch of people who enslave people, commit atrocities at the drop of a cuff, and consider raping the women in the area the rightful spoils of war,

And what about the Draka?

[Pablo Sanchez]

Now go read the ASVS STGOD, and the nation Marina made that was Russia beating the living shit out of the Draka.

That was a fun one to read.

Commies In Spaaaaaaaaaaace....

And Trotskyites to boot!

[Setzer]

You are talking about a bunch of people who enslave people, commit atrocities at the drop of a cuff, and consider raping the women in the area the rightful spoils of war,

And what about the Draka?

The Nazis have not tried remodeling societies as radically as the Draka have.

[Pablo Sanchez]

Never read it, but i can easily believe it's screwed up. Most Alternate History stories are. Thats why i try to veer away from them, weather i'm reading or writing. It's hard to come up with good ideas for AltHistory, and as you can see it can be rather...bland when done poorly.

I liked the Belisarius series from Drake and Flint, it was rather fun and it abandoned the pretense of being "hard" alt-hist. Full on Mutant Space Bats in the form of a time-travelling supercomputer... it's a pity the third book is apparently out of print, I had to order it from the internet

[MKSheppard]

And what about the Draka?

That's just the problem! Even the Nazis had standards, the
Japanese Rape of Nanking sickened even their advisors in
the area.

The Drakha on the otherhand glorify atrocities, and don't
even try to hide them.

[MKSheppard]

For wit; their method of pacification:

A "successful" revolt in a compound, mine or factory would usually be dealt with by gassing or napalming the area in question, and impaling any survivors.

Even the Nazis were never this cruel and sadistic

[frigidmagi]

Mostly because they didn't have time to work up to that level. How long had the Draka exisited has a slave owning militant culture?

I bet you had gaven Hilter and his boys a few generations to work, that the Nazis would have reached that level real quick.

Actually now that I think about it, has far I know the Draka never ran concenration camps with the ideal of pursuing genodice, so maybe the Nazis are closer to the Draka than I thought.

[The Yosemite Bear]

you know, my average civ. civilization would probably be able to hand the Draka their asses. Come to think of it, I once posed what would happen if the first colony draka had been relocated near both Shaka and Temunjin......

[The Yosemite Bear]

erm, of note:

Warworld: SM Sterling and Jerry Pournel, the Neo-Spartans, and Indigs repetably hand the Saurons (Draka x20 nanotech cyborgs, from Niven & Pournel's "A Mote in God's Eye") their asses, worse yet the Sauron conquered indigs are made up of everyone that the Sauron's consider inferior, and have been living on a "Hellworld" for so many Generations that they are just as bad assed if not more so. Also the "Spartans" are mercs who are far more democratic then the orginal spartans would ever consider....

[MKSheppard]

Posted this in Soc History What iF:

I've just finished reading Marching through Georgia, and I have to say that the
entire timeline is very very inplausible, particularly the part's where the Draka
are assumed to never make mistakes, and their enemies are all bumbling fools.

Some of the major problems I have are that the Draka are equipped with
5.56mm Select Fire weapons, Squad Automatic Weapons, autoloading
mortars, recoilless rifles, 84mm Carl Gustaf ATs, tanks mounting 120mm
main guns with 150mm sloped armor, and 1,200 hp engines, and the
elite Liebstandarte is equipped with Kar98Ks, and of course, regunned
KV-1s with 88mm guns, despite being at war for the last three years,
no real advances have been made, and the germans bravely fly
into death in FW-190s, Me-109s, and Ju-87s, despite by this time
they should have a lot of paper projects like the Go-229 Flying
Wing ready, amongst other things.

Hasn't Stirling ever heard of technology diffusion? The USSR
OTL was always able to keep up with the technological advances
that the US and it's allies could throw at them, albeit with a
lag time of a few years or more due to the more primitive state of
the USSR's electronic's industry.

And of course, Stirling ignores the fact that the Germans
were leaders in several fields OTL, such as recoilless guns,
having begun developing them in the 30s for airborne troops,
and they became very useful, because as tank's armor became
thicker, the guns needed to kill them became much heavier
and a bitch for the infantry to move. Recoilless weapons restored
this mobility to large calibre guns. OTL, the Germans deployed
a 75mm recoilless gun with their airborne troops in 1940, and later
on they built the 105mm LG 42.

And of course, we're not even at the best part of the entire
Draka timeline; the reaction of the Russian peasantry to the
Draka and their attempts to enslave them as serfs, or more
precisely, the lack therof of any reaction at all.

Yes, the Russians are going to forget all about how they were
serfs for hundreds of years under nobles before they were finally
liberated in the 1860s by the Tsar.

Yes, they're going to roll over and let the Draka march all
the way across Russia and put them all under the Yoke
of Serfdom.

Lets not even get into the entire idiocy of using 6,000 tanks
and 20,000 other vehicles to try and push spearheads through
the Caucasus mountains, and relying on an airborne operation
in mountanous terrain to open roads. I'm just at a lack of
words to describe that kind of stupidity. But of course,
the Draka pull it off, along with their other improbable shit
because......they're the Draka, and the writer wants them
to win!

[CaptainChewbacca]

*to Shep*

*STANDS UP APPLAUDING*

What did the fanboys over there say to this?

[EmperorSolo51]

You know Shep, the Draka book are not supposed to be taken as serious alt history. The Books are actually a social comentary on how bad it could get on a dystopic Earth. If you want the foil of Draka, try reading The Two Georges or For Want Of A Nail. Both earths in the Books have conflict but they are relatively tame in comparison with our TL or the Drakaverse.

[MKSheppard]

You know Shep, the Draka book are not supposed to be taken as serious alt history. The Books are actually a social comentary on how bad it could get on a dystopic Earth.

The writer wrote not one, but THREE books, as well as an anthology
on that universe, so I'd say he thought of it as realistic.

Elsewhere in the Draka series he does lay out some arguments to your
objections. As to what I've quoted above, I'd say he portays 'the
rest of us' not so much bumbling as realistic, and the Draka are
merely the ultimate in bad ass villins.

Seriously, the Germans who were the epitome of badass villians
made fucking stupid mistakes; Werner Heisenburg's calculation
that you would need HUNDREDs of pounds of uranium to make
a nuke, effectively doomed the german bomb program.

The Draka never make those kind of mistakes that everyone else
makes, which tends to reduce the series of novels into juvenile
fiction.

I especially love how the Draka conquer most of China following
WWI, and manage to:

"By 1940 twenty years of effort were bearing frut.....Most of all. from
a strategic liability, the new serf populations had become a source
of docile labor and reliable recruits"

Yes, that's right, the Draka achieve what no one else, not even the
Japs of OTL, who were probably the biggest sadists to walk the earth,
do, they conquer China and pacifiy it into a nice docile serfdom, without
needing massive numbers of troops there to keep Chinese guerillas down.

And another point I noticed:

One of the objectives of their Post WWI program was to conquer Alma-Ata,
etc, all the Russian "Stans" before pushing into China.....here's an interesting
point; Alma-Ata is at the end of a Russian railhead, while the Draka have to:

"The spearpoint legions were being supplied by dirigible, every round of ammunition
and gallon of fuel brought six thousand miles from railheads themselves ten thousand
miles from the industrial cities of central Africa."

So not only do they ignore the rule about a land war in Asia, they also ignore the rules of
logistics, and still triumph.

[consequences]

You know Shep, the Draka book are not supposed to be taken as serious alt history. The Books are actually a social comentary on how bad it could get on a dystopic Earth.

The writer wrote not one, but THREE books, as well as an anthology
on that universe, so I'd say he thought of it as realistic.

Four. The anthology is worth reading, if only for the short story tearing apart Erik Von Shrakenburg, and his performance in MTG.

[Anhaga]

The writer wrote not one, but THREE books, as well as an anthology
on that universe, so I'd say he thought of it as realistic.

I don't know if I'd be so sure. Stirling has proved elsewhere that he can write more realistic Alternate history. Stirling's work, however, does tend to blend AH with other genres like fantasy (Island in the Sea of Time) or post-apocalyptic sci-fi (Peshawar Lancers).

For more plausible AH try Harry Turtledove's Great War: American Front series although I'm not too fond of his style of writing and the fact that he likes to parallel real history a bit too much.

The Two Georges is a fun read especially with all the historical figure cameos.

[CaptainChewbacca]

For more plausible AH try Harry Turtledove's Great War: American Front series although I'm not too fond of his style of writing and the fact that he likes to parallel real history a bit too much.

Also it bothers me how EVERYONE in his books has sex at some point, and he's one of the most repetetive writers of all time. If you don't believe me check out his worldwar series.

[Anhaga]

It's strange though- if you read his earlier fantasy work, he has no problem with keeping a tight, clear and unrepetitive storyline backed up by excellent conceptual work.

Unlike in his later books where every time he introduces a character we get a recap of their life story almost...
I find his later stuff interesting conceptually but I tend to get bored by it and end up dropping off the series (I read the American Front books up to American Empire and then really couldn't be bothered any more)