Drakon - bioweapon/superwoman

Jabbrwock wrote:

brantley wrote: Stirling has a history of nasty alternate history, going back to the Draka series (1988-2000). The first book in that series made me want to NOT read anything else of his.

--Brantley

It's not that it's disturbing, it's bad. The world building just fails on pretty much every level. There is no way the Draka would have been allowed to survive, much less conquer the world, given their provocative behavior toward enemies who had the power to crush them at various times.

Optimistically, they would have been nuked to oblivion in the 1950's. Very likely, their power structure would have been disassembled after the Wilberforce reforms in the British Empire, of which they were still a part at the time.

I won't go into the implausible technological progress after WW2 - or the Eurasian war as it was called in the universe. But that's a plausibility issue too.

Jabbrwock wrote:

AuGoose wrote: ((looks out window)) You're suggesting its highly unlikely the world could be overrun by Nazis or similar racial supremacists?

Lets just say we have VERY different impressions of S.M. Stirling's world-building skills.

He may have been trying for Nazis, but what he build was the Confederate States of America, only based in South Africa. A society based on slave labor will have no ability to compete in even a semi-modern world, which is why the CSA lost in the real world. Had they been Nazis, wiping out the native African population to raise their own people as both warriors *AND* industrialists, it would have been much more believable, and even more horrible. But the power of the slave economy was completely played out by the 1900's.

Edit: poorly conceived argument about the way Europe at the time would have perceived Draka "morality" removed.

The Draka repeatedly provoked every major power and got no response. They violated the colonial territories of every imperialist country, and nobody noticed. By 1900 at the very least, they should have been number 1 with a bullet on a list of global threats, and nobody took any serious action to prepare themselves, much less actually stop them. They were an obvious threat, and yet WW2 started pretty much the same way it did in the real world - with German aggression. Not gonna happen in a world with the Draka, sorry - at that point they already had conquered the whole of Africa and the Middle East. *NOBODY* would be making military plans that looked even remotely like what we had in our own WW2. Nor would anybody have any delusions by then that the Draka absolutely and forthrightly intended to conquer the entire world, and enslave everybody in it who was not them.

Somehow they were able to do this while maintaining a degree of police state surveillance and militarized police presence that would be impossible to maintain even in Stalinist Russia. Their society as presented cost enormous amounts of resources just to sustain without collapsing, and yet they somehow were able to spend those resources *AND* build the world's best military force by a huge margin, conquer and pacify two entire continents, and achieve technological progression in the 1960's that we still can't figure out in 2017, while using inferior computers.

It's a well conceived and hauntingly horrifying but absurdly implausible alternate history. And it's worse because it could have been much more believable without being any less horrible.