How Few Remain (1997)

How Few Remain (1997)
Harry Turtledove
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Finished reading How Few Remain today. It took me a while but that wasn't because I wasn't enjoying it. Quite the contrary. This is the second of Harry Turtledove's alternate history novels that I've read (the first also being Civil War based, The Guns of the South) and I love just how historically authentic feeling Turtledove is able to make the various characters and period settings while at the same time spinning them off into completely different directions from what actually occured in "real life".

How Few Remain is about (another) alternate history in which the Confederate States won the Civil War. The "point of divergence" (as alternate history fans call the exact historical point at which the work diverges from actual history) is covered briefly in the book's prelude, which shows a Confederate courier *not* accidentally losing General Robert E. Lee's Special Order 191 which detailed Lee's plans for the invasion of the North. In reality, this order was recovered by Union forces allowing them to defeat the Army of Northern Virginia at the Battle of Antietam. In How Few, the order is not compromised and Lee's forces succeed in capturing Philadelphia, which convinces Britain and France to side with the Confederate States and effectively ended the war.

Aside from the prelude (which takes place in 1862), the novel takes place entirely in 1881. After nearly twenty years of having to share the North American continent with the Confederate States of America (and also twenty years of Democratic presidents following Abraham Lincoln's electoral defeat in 1864), the United States of America, at the order of Republican President James G. Blaine, launches a second war with the CSA after the Confederate States purchase from Mexico two key territories (Sonora and Chihuahua) which expands the CSA's overall territory all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

Turtledove's novels are especially rich in the amount of characters he includes. In this one we have Lincoln, much older than he lived in real life and now a man general disdained or outright hated by most as the man largely responsible for the USA's losing the "War of Secession". Lincoln by this point has turned the focus of his attention to crusading for the working man against the powers of big business.

Military figures include U.S. Lt. General George Armstrong Custer, Confederate General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson (head of the Confederate General Staff), General John Pope (commander of U.S. forces in Utah), Confederate General James Ewell "Jeb" Stuart, and a young Theodore Roosevelt, who leads a U.S. volunteer cavalry unit (Roosevelt and Samuel Clemens are especially fun characters in this novel).

Other key characters include the President of the Confederate States James Longstreet, Frederick Douglass, Geronimo (who first works with Jeb Stuart's forces to ambush U.S. troops in Mexico but after which Stuart must somehow keep from waging war with the local Mexican people in what is now Confederate territory), Colonel Alfred von Schlieffen (here, the German military attache to the U.S.), Mormon leader John Taylor (the Mormons decide to take advantage of the war between the USA and CSA to attempt to break away from the U.S.; Custer and his men are sent into Utah to put down the Mormon rebellion), and Samuel Clemens (who never went on to write under the pen name, Mark Twain; instead, Clemens is a San Francisco newspaper editor).

How Few Remain is a stand alone novel but it establishes what fans have come to refer to as the "Timeline-191" series, of which Turtledove went on to write nine more novels (three separate trilogies) in. Following How Few Remain is The Great War: American Front, which picks up in 1914 and the start of World War I (which, in this timeline, will include the additional plot element of there still being *two* American nations in existence: the United States of America and the Confederate States of America). (Finished reading 4/11/2010)