The Guns of the South

This author is the master of alternative history. I love where he takes me. I enjoy his humanization of characters often seen as wooden or stone.

He examines the “what-ifs?” of the historical record. I find the twists and turns remarkable. Small events could so easily have altered major social, political, and cultural evolutions. Imagine a South victorious in our civil war. Imagine if there were no Lincoln assassination. Imagine Robert E. Lee as the newly elected President of the Confederacy with a platform of ending slavery.

As a historian, I am well aware that the smallest alterations in the… show more.

Turtledove is best known for his alternate histories, in which one fateful act changes and all of history is different from that point. But this book, which predates those works, is straight-up science fiction: what would happen if time travelers went back to the Civil War era and gave assault rifles to the South? The ramifications are huge, but what sucks you into this book is the characters, both fictional and historical, whose story enthralls as they deal with a gruesome conflict made bizarre by this technological wrinkle.