"S. M. Stirling - Draka 05 - Drakas!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

So a thought came to me; suppose everything had turned out asbadly as possible, these last few
centuries. Great changes make possible great good and great evil. The outpouring of the Europeans
produced plenty of both.

The great free colonies of North America were perhaps the best, for it was here that the great
18th-century upsurge of popular government began, and here the power that broke the totalitarians was
founded. My friend Harry Turtledove has imagined a world in which America broke apart in its Civil
War, and no strongUnited States was ready to come to the aid of the beleaguered Allies against the
Central European aggressors.

Imagine a change even more fundamental. Perhaps the worst product of the great wave of European
expansion, before this century of ours, was the South Atlantic system of slaves and plantations.
Eventually it faded awayтАФor was blown away by the cannon of Grant and Sherman, although we still
feel the aftereffects.

What, though, if a fragment of that system had fallen on fertile ground, and grown? Say that the potential
of South Africa, so neglected by its Dutch overlords, had fallen prey to it . . . a base for that deadly seed
to grow, unchecked by free neighbors, until it was too strong to stop. An Anti-America, representing all
the distilled negatives of Western civilization.

From that thought was born the alternate history of the Domination of the Draka. I've chronicled the rise
and transformation of that dystopia in four novels.

But a world can be a playground big enough for more than one imagination to run in. Here are stories
others have set in that anti-history, a funhouse mirror held up to our own.




Custer Under
the Baobab
William Sanders
William Sanders is a Cherokee; maybe that has something to do with the sardonic irony in the eye he
trains on history. Maybe not; how could anyone doubt all is for the best in the train of events that
produced we our glorious selves?

Will has produced science fiction and fantasy storiesтАФmany of them alternate historyтАФhighly regarded
by the critics and by his peers. His novelsJourney to Fusang ,The Wild Blue and the Gray , and latest
The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan have shown a wild inventiveness worthy of
Jonathan Swift, plus an encyclopedic knowledge of history, and a combination of high literary skill and
crazed, gonzo abandon that could only have been born on this continent.

Herein we have a George Armstrong Custer who escapes the arrows of the Sioux, only to find that even
in another history and on another continent, some things never change . . .

The baobab tree is one of the world's most remarkable vegetable productions. Its soft, swollen-looking
trunk may be as much as twenty or thirty feet in diameter; its grotesquely spindly limbs may reach up to
two hundred feet toward the African sky.