About Doug Hoff's Empty America

[james_davis_nicoll]

I can't seem to find the first entry. What prevented anyone from migrating to the New World before the Vikings?

[Answered in comments: It's not specified in the initial post]

If you prevent anyone from coming over the top of the world it won't prevent the Polynesians from colonizing the Americas (Sweet potatoes got to Polynesia from the New World Somehow). Well, it won't unless you have extremely well aimed butterflies, able to use the secondary and tertiary effects of whatever the barrier to colonization is up north to prevent anyone from using the trans-Pacific route.

Comments

[srogerscat.livejournal.com]

A lot of people thought that was creepy. Cracking good read, though.

I posted links to that TL to a number of friends who did not follow SHWI. One of them was initially convinced that you were, in fact, a Lost Causer. Not just you, but Noel Maurer and Bernard Guerrero for there favorable comments on the thread. I think the sight of me laughing too hard to breathe disabused him.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Even though I'm no longer on SHWI, I haven't stopped thinking about that setting. I mean that in the OCD sort of way.

It's interesting, though: how does one distinguish it from the work of some godforsaken Lost Causer? There are people who thought that Fitzpatrick's War wasn't an incredibly brilliant satire of conservative military SF, but instead an example of it.

I don't think a writer necessarily has a moral obligation to spell out right and wrong. You kind of hope the reader brings that to the table already. But my experiences with fandom have suggested that this isn't the case for many science fiction readers. It's dispiriting.

[srogerscat.livejournal.com]

How to distinguish it? Easy for me. I've never met you - to my regret - but I know you (to a limited extent) through your writing. I got a pretty good idea of where you are coming from during my years on SHWI. So as soon as you started the TL I knew there would be no rose colored glasses involved in you view of what the Confederacy would have become.

That's why the sneering dismissal of the "I know Doug Hoff" defense falls a bit flat, I know him through his writing as well. It's not like he does not have an electronic trail revealing his thoughts. EA is on the web, an earlier poster even put up a link. You don't have to read the whole thing. Hell, just reading chapter headings tells you that EA is not an example of Europa Triumphalism.