Customer Reviews

Stars & Stripes Forever (Stars & Stripes, Book 1)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(29)

 

 

I have been a big fan of the alternate history genre for years, and this probably comes from the fact that I love history and have the kind of mind that always asks "what if?" The premise of this book is an excellent and plausible one - Britain and the United States going to war in 1862 following the "Trent Affair". However, as I read along in the book I was disappointed by how improbable some of the twists and turns in thestory are.

- Would the British have dared to mount an invasion of the US from Canada when they had only a few thousand troops whereas the US could send tens of thousands and still have plenty to face the Confederates (even if they had to go on the defensive vs. the CSA)?

- If the British had accidentally attacked a Confederate fort and gone on to sack the town nearby, wouln't they have tried to patch up relations with the CSA who were, after all, their allies. Even if they were overly confident, it is extremely improbable that they would have just thrown up their hands & said "what the heck, we'll just go to war against the CSA too!"

- The USA and CSA would not have been able to resolve their differences so quickly, even if they were up against a common enemy. This is the most improbable point in the book. Having a common enemy does not necessarily make nations (or people) friendly toward each other. Also, the Confederacy agreeing to give up slavery so readily - not likely! Harris seems to think that all the US needed to solve its sectional and racial hostilities was a good foreign enemy for everyone to fight! Its never been that easy.

- Even if US ironclads like Monitor had better armor and could beat anything in the Royal Navy, the Union only had 1 or 2 of them at the time (same for the CSA and its ironclads). Furthermore, these ironclads could only operate in coastal waters. In any deep water, the US had only wooden ships which were greatly outnumbered & outgunned by the British. The US got a couple of deep ocean ironclads by the end of the Civil War, but that would take quite a while to build and by the time they were finished the British could have built better oceangoing ironclads to match the US.

- Would French/Quebecois in Canada rise up in favor of an invading US army? They didn't much care for the British but they hadn't shown any interest in supporting the US cause in the American Revolution or War of 1812, so why would it suddenly be different? The English speaking Canadians would certainly have been against the US, considering that many of them were descended from Loyalists in the American Revolution who had all their property in the US confiscated for supporting the British cause.

I don't think that the author is anti-British in the sense of being against the whole British people, but he definitely has a hstrong hostility to the elite aristocracy. He portrays them almost universally as extremely arrogant, overconfident, anti-American, and completely ignorant of the technological changes going on in warfare. No doubt there were quite a few who matched the above description (all you have to do is read a little about the Crimean War!), but not every officer/gentleman in the British army was a pompous, drooling moron. The USA and CSA had their share of officers who were ignorant and owed their commission to social background & political influence too. In short, the premise is fascinating and certain parts but the direction the story takes is too improbable and too slanted against the British to make this a really good work of alternate history.

I enjoyed everything else I have read from Harry Harrison, and am fascinated by alternative history, so I expected to like this book. I didn't.

I think it does credit to the American reviewers who have criticised this book that it went down nearly as badly with them as it did with Brits. They have demonstrated that one comment by a British reviewer - that this book provides an insight into the American mind - is unfair to most Americans.

The starting premise - Britain blundering into war with the North in the American civil war - is horrifying plausible, which is not surprising as this very nearly happened. The first part of the book, up to that stage, is well done.

However, the author then abandons any attempt at either a realistic attempt to work through what might have happened, or to look sympathically at how the situation might have developed from the viewpoint of all sides. Instead, looking for a way to turn both the USA and CSA into heroes, he casts the Brits as utterly incompetent and evil cretins who both sides can unite against.

Although it isn't a positive for me to read a book in which my country is shown in a bad light, this doesn't usually make it impossible for me to enjoy a work of fiction. Heaven only knows Britain has had it's share of reverses and like every other country in the world has been responsible for some stupid or wicked mistakes. However, the increasingly implausible idiocy through which this book has the British blundering into war against both parties in the American civil war is way over the top. The idea that a Commander in Chief of any civilised nation could simultaneously be moronic enough to commit the acts attributed to the Duke of Cambridge in this book, and clever enough to prevent his own government finding out what he had done and sacking him, is ludicrous beyond belief.

Harry Harrison is almost the last writer on earth I would have expected to prostitute his enormous talents with such chauvinistic rubbish. One-sided nationalism is not usually his style at all, and he has written another book about a set of events which might have changed the course of the US Civil War/War between the States - "Rebel in Time" - which is far superior to this.

The market for this book is people who like America, hate the British, and are not too bothered about historical plausibility. So it may sell some copies in the USA, and probably a few in Ireland (though as I'm married to an Irish catholic girl I think I'm qualified to say that not everyone in Ireland falls into these categories.) In the rest of the world most of those who don't like the Brits don't like the USA either, and would be even less sympathetic to the CSA.

For anyone who is looking for a good account of how the American Civil war might have gone wrong, try Harry Turtledove's "The Guns of the South," or "How Few Remain" and the "Great War" and "American Empire" trilogies which follow it. Or indeed Harry Harrison's "Rebel in Time".

Harry Harrison's alternate history novel "Stars & Stripes Forever" begins by contending that following the removal of two Confederate commissioners from the British steam packet Trent in November 1861, war between the United States and Great Britain over the incident was averted because Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria, toned down the language of the dispatch sent to the American government. By having Prince Albert stricken by his terminal illness a little bit earlier, Harrison sets the two nations on the path to war. However, this one slight alteration is not enough for Harrison. He is not alone in pointing out that the Civil War was the first "modern" war, and can point to numerous military advantages invented during that time (ships built of iron, breech loading cannons, observation balloons, etc.) to support his claim. Ultimately, Harrison wants to show the Americans taking full advantage of all such new technology to wage full out war against the British. For this reason Harrison manipulates events a bit further (e.g., the general who delayed mass production of the Sharps rifle conveniently dies) to ensure the American army and navy are truly formidable entities.

All this is well and good, and certainly great fun when it comes to "what if" speculations, something I have always enjoyed ever since SNL did their "What if Napoleon had a B-52 at the Battle of Waterloo" skit. But where Harrison goes a bit too far is the little twist of fate he comes up with to reunite the North and South. Things progress to the point where the British invade New York from Canada and launch another attack on the Gulf Coast. However, the British confuse Biloxi Mississippi with Mobile Bay, mistake the Stars & Bars for the Stars & Stripes, and end up attacking the Confederates instead. But that is not enough for Harrison, who then has the British troops get drunk and start... all the women. Because of this outrage General Beauregard asks for an armistice with General Sherman (Grant has gone with most of the Army of Tennessee to repel the British Invasion from the North), who decides to send a Federal regiment with the Confederates to avenge Biloxi. This becomes the catalyst for reunion, along with a lesson in economics from John Stuart Mill and other interesting events.

By this point we have certainly gone far a field from Harrison's initial premise. The political reunification of the country is even more fanciful than the military maneuvers, which at least have the charm of being grounded in the technology of the time. His characterization of the political and military figures of the time do not ring especially true (I never got used to Lincoln and Davis calling each other Abraham and Jefferson, or Lee calling Sherman "Cump"), the British are a collection of egotistical idiots, and in the end you get the feeling that this would have worked better as an essay rather than a novel. All the salient points could be sketched out just fine without needing to be presented in narrative form. This story continues in "Stars & Stripes in Peril" where General Lee proposes to free Ireland to get the British to stop trying to invade the United States, which has the same strengths and weaknesses as this volume. A provocative ideal, but not a compelling novel.

I wish this rating system had a lower ranking then one star because even this suggests a book is partially acceptable when this book would not even make a good doorstop.This is probably the worst book, let alone novel, that I have ever read. It is stilted formula writing geared for jingoistic morons who know or care nothing about history. Given the fact that it is supposed to be "alternate history" the only similarity to actual historical events are the names. All the Americans are demigods the British fools and you wonder how these same Brits could have won and maintained the largest empire ever seen. Harrison would have us believe that Queen Victoria was a frumpy old drunk and that the English people lived in downright slavery under their aristocratic lords. That John Mills was a traitor and after one bloody battle both the North and South are willing to settle their differences where in reality they were to suffer ten times as many casualties and fight for three more years until the South finally quit. The Royal navy attacks the Union without the foresight of having attached Confederate officers that can distinguish between the Stars and Stripes and Stars and Bars. Then Mr Harrison has the audacity to say : this "could be a true story" and yes pigs might fly. The only thing that I can consider worse than this book is that there might be two more. Come on you environment lovers stop these books and save some trees. Mr Harrison stick to space where you can delve into fantasy to your heart's content. Readers,if you want real alternate history read Harry Turtledove skip this turkey.

I am a 36 year old reader from England, who has had an interest in the Civil War period for most of that time. More recently, particularly in the wake of Ken Burns' excellent series, I had become affected by the vast scale of this tragedy and, after a visit to Civil War sites, by the strong feelings which remain in the USA about this unprecedented war. The author is evidently an expert on the Civil War, and I'm sure he must have felt the same way and for much longer. I think this is why he came around to thinking how much better it would be to transfer all the grief of a civil strife onto a likely external aggressor: England! I have to say that I am not convinced that there really would have been such a war, and Harrison is absolutely wrong when he suggests that there would have been popular support for one here: feelings against slavery were running high and, as British author Paul Johnson recently pointed out in his 'History of the American People' President Licoln wa! ! s greatly moved by letter from impoverished Lancashire cotton workers, backing his cause against pro-southern voices in England. But that is real history, and Harrison prefers to have great fun with his 'what if' scenario: what if the 'Trent' incident had led to an immediate war? Actually he cannot resist the tempation to go much further and have England, the imperialist aggressor, act as a kind of lightening rod for all the true horrors of the Civil War: here, there are no prison 'death' camps, no massacres of black Union soldiers. Nor are any incompetent Union generals in charge (Sherman takes over immedeately: McClellan is indisposed). Better still, the British Navy make a frightfully useful strategic error of navigation which ends up uniting North and South against them: so now the 'good' generals like Lee and Grant are prevented from having to feed thousands of their countrymenmen into terrible 'meat grinder' battles against their own countrymen like Antietam, Gettysburg ! ! and Spotsylvania Court House. Instead, they revive their pr! e-war friendships and get stuck into their (irredeemably callous) foreign enemy, who is not averse to rape and pillage in order to gain the objective (and that is something which isn't really clear..). These British are uniformly terrible: they are lead by a permanently hysterical Queen Victoria, her callous cousin, HRH the Duke of Cambridge, and the gout-ridden war-hawk Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston. The British army has a particular hatred of foreigners including French Canadians (who rebel) and Irish American soldiers (whom they massacre). They also rape southern women, and joyfully conduct unprovoked attacks on civilians and their property. After their inevitable defeat, we hear that the better ones (and all the Irish ones) decide to stay on in America. If youre suffering a glut of all those plummy types in 'Masterpiece Theatre', this could be your antidote! Of course this is 2 dimensional twaddle, but Harrison is very god at driving his narrative forward. Sometimes his ! ! dialogue looks as if he has just inserted quotation marks around a book of Civil War facts (perhaps he has) but occasionally he does write racy prose and, particularly in the accounts of sea battles, both fictional and factual, he writes it excitingly and convincingly. For all his knowledge, Harrison has put in some terrible howlers. There were no Feninans in 1842: that movement wasn't formed until 1858 (in USA). Lord Palmerston's government in 1862 was not a Tory one. Queen Victoria had no 'castles' in London (however draughty). And as a resident and avid reader of the history of my country, I have never come across any accounts of an English annexation of Cornwall, our westernmost county ('Cornish nationalists', driven to extremes of rhetoric by the antics of summer holidaymakers in their balmy outreach may say otherwise...) At the end of the book, Harrson tells us that it is all true which, of course, it isn't. At this point I really began to wonder whether this might not j! ! ust be a bit of fun, and that he really is just a little bi! t, well, Anglophobe! Should we be getting worried on this side of the pond? Interestingly, Harrison keeps the Duke of Wellington alive into 1862 (he died in 1852): is the Iron Duke to be our instrument by which we will be able to avenge ourselves over you 'colonial' wretches? We will all have to await the second part of the trilogy to find out, although I for one will probaly be borrowing it from the library, prior to some idle hours on a beach -in Cornwall!

Mr. Harrison embarrasses himself with the constant stream of inaccuracies he portrays in the story, with very little prior to the timeline shift being close to the way things really happened. The two Confederate commissioners did everything they could to get caught, and still almost failed at that task. They had deliberately wanted to provoke an incident, so they made their itinerary publicly known and even delayed their trip a couple of times to make sure a USN ship would attempt to capture them. The British government did not want to go to war against either American "country", as they were trading with both. Mr. Harrison also forgot to mention the fact that the Confederacy had, of its own accord, deliberately shut off the supply of its cotton, to force the Europeans to acknowledge their status as an independent nation. The "Northern blockade", especially in late 1861, was more of a joke than a reality. Another "fact" that really puzzled me was when Lincoln was reading some of his "State of the Union" address to Attorney General Bates, Bates mentioned "the draft rioting among the Irish immigrants in New York...", which did not take place until the middle of 1863! These historical errors I mentioned were found after only reading 45 pages of the paperback copy. If the other reviews are anything to go by, these errors will continue to compound, until my suspension of disbelief will be impossible to maintain. I heartily recommend to Mr. Harrison that he stick to writing stories that are more thoroughly researched and executed, instead of this incredible travesty, which is far below his abilities.

Leaving aside the excessively period prose, leaving aside the utter predictablility of everything (except the Trent affair), leaving aside even the impossible perfidy and incompetance of the British (let me see, just how was it they ended up ruling 1/4 of the world?), this book is simply poorly researched. And, to any Civil War buff, the research is off in the most appalling ways imaginable. Simple things...how many rounds in a Spencer (7 not 20). In a Sharps (1...I repeat, 1). What was Meagher's rank in 1862 (he was not a captain)...a general (Sherman) in command of an army takes a mere regiment with him to battle (hmmm, was it a battle?) the Brits. Bah! This was such a waste of money I may never buy a Harrison book again.

But wait...No, Harrison isn't a bad writer. This is impossible. Ah, I know. He wrote it as satire on the other alternate history book available on the subject. Yes, that MUST be it because NO ONE is this bad a writer. It's satire, great satire. I take back everything I said.

A biased and ludicrous tale written with the sophistication of a 10 year old. In this book it is shown clearly that the only battle plan that survives contact with the enemy is an American one. Nothing can go wrong for them, and nothing can go right for the darstadly British.

The British are all incompetent and moronic, and make decisions totally devoid of logic. Especially grating was the way a British general who lands in the south decides to march inland to conquer everybody... North and South. His modest force assigned for a coastal assault is subsuequently destroyed. No kidding!

The other ridiculous thing was the way in which North and South conveniently solve all their problems in one conversation. Harrison evidently believes that the participants just needed to have everything explained clearly to them, and they would of course see the light. This lacks any credibility, and shows a rather immature grasp of the emotions involved. Perhaps Harrison would like to try his method in Israel or Northern Ireland, and see how far he gets.

Each chapter made me cringe anew, as I wondered what next could happen to bring glory to the saintly Americans and downfall to the wicked British. Alas, I kept hoping the British would get one lucky break, but it never happened. Canada is "liberated" though of course USA never considers actually keeping it! They are just helping a fellow state... yeah right. America was still in a thoroughly expansionist frame of mind, and would have happily added Canada to their list of possessions.

If any reader wants a truly engrossing alternative version of the civil war, I'd suggest Turtledove's "Guns of the South". Despite a completely ridiculous timetravel element, it manages to convey an air of realism and truth that Harrison never comes close to matching.

Harry Harrison starts out with a interesting idea. What if Prince Albert was dead when a U.S. warship stopped a British ship and seized two Confederate emissaries on their way to England? In our history Prince Albert was able to defuse the crisis. But what if Queen Victoria responded like the rest of England with outrage and declared war on the U.S. of A?
Things become A LOT more interesting. Soon Lincoln and the North finds itself fighting both the South and an English invasion from Canada. That, in itself would of made for an interesting novel.
But Harrison can't let it go at that. Right when you think the North might lose with too many fronts to fight on the British Navy invades the WRONG city. Instead of saying, "OOps, sorry, you Yanks all look alike." it decides to continue to fight BOTH sides. Of course, the North and the South join up together and the tide turns again.
BESIDES the fact that I don't picture the British Navy landing troops on the wrong coast, I don't believe that either the British navy nor the British army would be so easy to defeat. I also don't see the British officers as being so stupid. True, it would of been a costly battle for the British, with the USA and CSA having more local ironclades to defend their coast, more Americans would of joined the army on both sides and the defenders would have shorter supply lines, but still it would not have been so easy.
I'm not saying the Americans would not win, bit it would of taken longer and frankly, I still don't think the British would of attacked the South by accident. They HAVE maps.
Also the book shows British troops as looters and murders. Which they were, but they were also DAMN tough fighters!

Harrison is not a historian. It shows. Badly. His writing is okay -- if you happen to enjoy his somewhat unique style -- but gee whiz: there's hardly a single historically plausible idea in this whole book after the point of divergence (the British go to war over the Trent Affair). It was *drudgery* reading it after about 40% of the way through, because everytime you turned around, something else was happening that would NEVER have happened, even in an alternate world where everyone routinely did LSD. Just pitiful. The whole idea of alternate history is to show -- in an entertaining way, of course -- what *could* have been. This *never* could have been, period. If you know any more history than the average junior high student, this book will tick you off.