Talk: Leland Newton

Newton and Stafford took the field. Of course they did. In any generation, Atlanteans prefer their military to be led by amateurs.

Yes, I suspect the book will end with the revision of the Atlantean Charter so Consuls do not directly act as generals during warfare. TR 20:44, December 10, 2009 (UTC)

Really? Well you're worlds ahead of me in this book, but it seems like an odd direction for a story of the end of slavery to be taking. Turtle Fan 23:09, December 10, 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm about halfway through. Overall, very good. Possibly best in the series. Certainly better than TUSA. I did like TUSA, but this isn't so in your face with the parallels. A couple of ACW references make their way in (Stafford asks the leading officer as a joke "If you are not using the army, I'd like to borrow it for a while"), but HT isn't basing much of anything on that. Structurally also a departure for HT. Book 1 is exclusively Radcliff. Book 2 is exclusively the consuls first in New Hastings, then in the field. Book 3 integrates the POVS.

Hmm, I like it. I haven't had much time for reading in general. I'm currently in the middle of a novella in Foundation's Friends. I'm hoping to be able to sink my teeth into Atlantis next week. Turtle Fan 00:00, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

As for Stafford's line--I wouldn't mind HT's tweedoms if they were done in ways that make sense. When Lincoln used that line, he was in the opposite situation from Stafford's. He was sarcastically telling McClellan to stop lollygagging and do what the government had mandated he do. Stafford is sarcastically telling the leading officer (now there's a shitty job) to do what the government was expressly forbidding him from doing! Turtle Fan 00:00, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

Actually, no, the line comes well after the Army has been sent in. TR 00:33, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

As far as the direction--it's not a primary issue, but Stafford and Newton are so often arguing about slavery that it is almost certainly impacting the army's overall effectiveness. So as a collateral issue, I won't be surprised if there is at least some talk about amending the Charter. TR 23:25, December 10, 2009 (UTC)

Now does the Charter require the heads of state and government to take the field, or just fail to discourage them from doing so? Because even if you do think you need a civilian politician in overall command, there must be better ways of going about it. We know they have a war minister, make this the war minister's duty, huh?

Requires. And they each have control every other day. There is a senior officer who can advise, but the Consul is the decider. Yes, more proof of the stupid army system and paranoid. TR 00:33, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

Oh my God. Every other day? What is this, a joke? And do they even bother calling the "senior officer" "general" (or colonel might be more appropriate, the way this tinpot outfit is run) or just "senior officer"?

Perhaps I shouldn't've been informed of this nonsense before I started reading about the war. Now I'm going to go in annoyed. Even if HT wanted to stress deliberately that the Atlantean army was run ridiculously, and have them come to disaster because of it, this goes too far even for that purpose. This is a "What the fuck was he thinking??" moment the likes of which HW and especially TGS gave me so many of. I hope the story's good enough for me to overlook this. Turtle Fan 04:31, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

Finished it tonight. Actually, the alternating command had very little to do with the failure of the overall Atlantean offensive and the success of the rebels. I'd encourage you to step back a bit. The Atlantis HT depicted, with its inefficient system, is perfectly consistent with the overall history of the timeline. TR 07:12, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

And here I started before you--You certainly put me to shame. What can you do.

I'm not going to declare this a fateful flaw, but I can't deny I'm annoyed at it. This sort of command structure is so counterproductive to anything you'd need an army for that I can't help be irritated that HT has had his characters let it stand. Talk all you want of Atlantis the oddball nation, irrational is still irrational. And speaking of which, "Wow, these Atlanteans are goofy" may have worked in AiA and TSB when the POV characters were outside observers, but when they're Atlanteans themselves it gets trickier. "Here, read this book in which the protagonists, the people you're supposed to be rooting for and sympathizing with, have motivations that make no sense to you." Should have dialed it down.

I still intend to read the book and enjoy it for whatever other reasons it has, though.

I thought of this, by the way: Since their lame-ass constitution requires that both heads of government be away from the capital in time of war, did it think to make provisions for who is in charge of making political decisions at such times? If not, who does make such decisions? Or are they just ignored altogether? I know which way I'd bet. Turtle Fan 12:12, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

Never addressed.

Of course not. Turtle Fan 20:07, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

How did the Romans do it? TR 15:35, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

You're asking the wrong guy--Roman history has never been more than the most casual of passing fancies for me. I'm far more likely to read a historical novel about the Romans, or to watch a drama like HBO's Rome, than to do real research into it.

As a sign of my ignorance, I would point out that they had what's always struck me as a superfluity of officials. Consuls and proconsuls and praetors and God knows what all else--I believe, however, that they divided the responsibilities in a very ad hoc fashion. Sometimes both consuls went out, and usually left some crony or other in charge during their absence, perhaps bestowing upon him one of those undefined titles. Sometimes one went out and one stayed--Pompey never went to Gaul, after all.

But again, I fake nothing remotely resembling expertise here. Turtle Fan 20:07, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

Another thing, if a politician were to demonstrate military genius and lead the army to victory, earning the soldiers' undying loyalty--I would think that rather more dangerous in his hands than in an apolitical career officer's.

Again, the power is spread, so I don't think any one Consul can look like a genius exclusively. TR 00:33, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

We're assuming two equally powerful consuls working at cross-purposes (and who wouldn't want to run an army that way). Couldn't two who work well together be in, and set up a duopoly? Or one strong consul and one who's so completely beholden to him that he's just an extension of the greater consul's political will? The latter happened from time to time in the Roman republic. Turtle Fan 04:31, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

There's also the question of basic competence. What's to guarantee the consuls will know what they're doing when they get into the field? I'm amazed that this has never come up in an Atlantean war before. Sort of, at the Battle of the Strand--I'm growing convinced that was the best story of the bunch. Certainly it was the tightest, most sensible. Almost everyone knew what year it was, they thought about difficult decisions rather than buying a pig in a poke, bird-brained governmental decisions could be explained by the fact that they were a fledgling colony which had only so many options open to it. Turtle Fan 00:00, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

Well, again, the only real war we know of wherein Consuls took to the field before this was the War of 1809. That was short and sweet, and evidently unified in purpose. TR 00:33, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

No wonder their towns got massacred if they were trying to run the army so shittily.

And to think, we had been wondering what the USA's role in a world war analog would be. I suspect the rival camps' diplomatic leaders would play a game of "You take these dipshits!" "No, you take these dipshits!"

Speaking of which . . . I suppose their geography makes this unlikely, but what would happen if they were to find themselves in a two front war? Turtle Fan 04:31, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

Now certainly I'm all for the military being subordinate to civilian government--I've seen firsthand what can happen when it's not--but that only extends to making the social and political decisions that set parameters for military action. As far as command of operations goes, that should be left to professional officers, like any other skilled craft. The Atlanteans have valued expert labor in other areas--we've seen that ever since Edward was assembling his first ship of colonists--why do they have so little faith in military officers?

Tangent 14 years later. The above link to Burma was created in 2009. The Burma article in this wiki was renamed Myanmar in 2010. TF is referring to the junta of 21st-century Myanmar, not pre-1989 Burma, so the change is appropriate.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 04:20, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm surprised and not a little disappointed to hear you say this. You've never passed up any of the many opportunities to condemn authoritarian regimes that our talk pages offer, I would have assumed you believed SLORC's legitimacy expired after their crackdown on the 8888 activists. Turtle Fan (talk) 05:54, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Myanmar is actually the native name for the country. Burma was the British colonialist appellation. Both names come from Mranma, so Myanmar is the Beijing or Mumbai to Burma's Peking or Bombay. (Or possibly Gojira to Godzilla.) So the etymology of Burma is actually worse than Myanmar.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 06:15, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

I will comment on Myanmar / Burma elsewhere. On the issue at hand: DO NOT EDIT TALK PAGES UNLESS SOMETHING IS BEING DELETED. Talk:Myanmar makes it clear Burma is not being deleted. IMHO Talk Pages should remain unedited whenever possible since they may contain the decision record for various changes. TF was referring to what he was referring to and you do not have the right to change it. ML4E (talk) 15:44, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Fear of authoritarianism. No absolute military leader=no dictatorship ever. It sounds utterly silly, but perfectly in character for this oddball little island nation. TR 20:44, December 10, 2009 (UTC)

This oddball little nation is based on our oddball little nation, the one that avoided giving even lieutenant generalships to all but a fistful of the most extraordinary soldiers for a long lifetime. We've never had a general come remotely close to setting up a military government--Not counting retired generals who were elected fair and square (well, actual mileage may vary, but Jackson and Grant, the two most problematic, were no less democratic than their civilian contemporaries) the closest we ever came was Hooker publicly ruminating on the possibility of marching on Washington after beating Lee. It sounded as ridiculous then, before he got clobbered at Chancellorsville by an army a third the size of his, as it does now. Jefferson Davis was a military man, but he didn't govern as one; he believed in civilian government himself, even if he considered the military an appropriate venue for political advancement.

Not having a general with overall command to whom every soldier answers should satisfy even the most paranoid believer in the importance of the civilian government's supremacy and the military's ulterior motivation. Why knock it all the way down to the level of field command? With an army the size Atlantis seems to have, a couple of competent but unimaginative workmanlike senior officers who've given no thought to higher office could handle things, especially given that, with such a half-assed army, the military is surely not a career path that attaches itself to a lot of political prestige. Turtle Fan 23:09, December 10, 2009 (UTC)

Especially if they have a standing army which allows for extensive training. And by the way, why does a country which occupies the entirety of the very isolated island it's on, has no near neighbors, and has no hostile indigenous population within its borders need a standing army? As a plot convenience to give Newton something to agonize over, perhaps? Turtle Fan 20:23, December 10, 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps a plot device. The War of 1809 sounds like it wreaked havoc on the civilian population, plus this isn't the first slave uprising, plus Spanish Atlantis was a potential enemy for a little while, plus it's so damn hard to mobilize it, the Atlanteans probably got used to having a standing army, and since the checks and balances were in place, they probably didn't see much reason to disband it altogether. I don't get the sense it's really all that big. TR 20:44, December 10, 2009 (UTC)

You've identified three threats against which the army might be standing. Two of them are long gone by the time of LA, and one, apparently, is a political football against which mobilization is anything but certain. If the army's not useful it seems like paying for it would wear thin rather quickly, unless it's so severely underfunded its soldiers go about half-starved. And what's the point of that? And anyway, it seems to me that "Let's not have a standing army" would occur as a sensible solution to people who feared military government than "Let's have a standing army, but no one in it can rise above the rank of captain."

I can see only two ways such a half-assed army would exist: either as some asinine compromise between pro- and anti-military factions (in which case I absolutely refuse to believe a democratic Atlantean government managed to stand for a century or more) or because Atlantis doesn't want to rely on it, but in the event of invasion--remote as long as they don't go around shitting in other people's food, ie openly fomenting active rebellion in another government's sovereign territory--will instead raise an emergency force of citizen-soldiers, as they did in NH, A, NR, and USA. But they know that, if their citizen-soldiers have no experience or training, they'll get beaten like a rented mule in the early campaigns, and their geography doesn't really allow them even to trade space for time effectively. So the army is something everyone has to do for a short time, so that in the event of an emergency a huge reserve force exists which can be called up--like Israel does, or Korea, or Switzerland of all places, and so many others. However--and since you've read far more of this book than I have, as well as the two short stories, I'm more than prepared to concede to your expertise if you disagree, but I get the distinct impression that most citizens of the United States of Atlantis have done no such thing.

In short--My God but they have this army of theirs set up all stupid. Turtle Fan 23:09, December 10, 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I don't dispute that. Having two heads of state share power and have absolute veto over one another is just as stupid.

That's got to be the dumbest setup for a fictional republic I've seen since the Star Wars prequels came out. It's still a considerable cut above "The Senate can't be persuaded to let Palpatine to raise a clone army, but they can be persuaded to vote him unlimited emergency powers which he can use to subvert them--and with which the first thing he'll do is raise a goddamned clone army!"

I should probably also point out that this is how the Roman Republic did it...and we know how well that turned out. TR 00:38, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

But while the political system doesn't make sense, I can see where it would seem to make enough sense to people of a certain mindset to be worth a try. I know the Atlanteans are all weird and shit (I'm scratching my head as to why you would take the people whose motivations don't make sense to outside observers and make those your protagonists) and I'd look for something like that from them. I could also accept them hamstringing their own army, for the same reason. But the way they've done the latter is so jaw-droppingly stupid that I can't imagine anyone with a brain thinking it was a good idea after having examined the alternatives. Turtle Fan 00:00, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

There's no evidence for or against the Israeli-Korean systems that I recall. I do get the sense that fear of uprisings may have been a primary factor in maintaining it, as you suggested. But, no it's bizarre. And at the same time, fairly in character with what we know about these people. "Hey, we might need an army, but we hate centralizing authority, so let's make it a really half-assed army." TR 23:25, December 10, 2009 (UTC)

See above. Turtle Fan 00:00, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

I read a line about how, when the army is not in the field, it's none of the consuls' business what it does. That seems to compromise our working theory that the writers of the Charter were obsessed with keeping the Army firmly under the civilian government's control. "The military shall operate independently of the civilian government, provided it does not find itself in a situation in which military expertise is called for; at such times, it shall cede command to untrained civilians." My head hurts. Turtle Fan 16:25, December 13, 2009 (UTC)

Thoughts

The discussions here, written 7 years ago, are quite thoughtful.

Thanks. I enjoyed rereading them; I'd completely forgotten most of it. Turtle Fan (talk) 23:22, March 16, 2016 (UTC)

I just read the whole Atlantis series in a about a week, and was let down by the shoddy plot construction and far fetched character motivations. It seemed like HT had a good idea which never went anywhere. The idea started out with North America breaking up in the past, apparently to set up a Dougal Dixon biosphere scenario which could be really cool, but hardly anything is done with the make believe species. The story then turns into a lame rehash of movies like Braveheart and The Patriot (after a bit of Captain Jack Sparrow?) with repetitious battle maneuvers scenes and gratuitous scenes of cruelty. (That also put me off the last two volumes of Southern Victory, which felt like they were ghost written by Quentin Tarantino.) And the US of Atlantis is set up so poorly that it's hard to suspend disbelief, unless HT wanted it to take place in Alice's Wonderland or one of the kingdoms in Queen Zixi of Ix, which were always doing stupid crap like that, for comedy. The Star Wars prequels have been invoked; I also think of the Ministry of Magic that hamstrung Harry Potter's world by ignoring danger when it was under their noses.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 07:42, March 16, 2016 (UTC)

I enjoyed each story on its own merits, except the not-Sherlock Holmes one, which combined HT's half-assed mystery writing with his quarter-assed efforts to write a fictional theology. This time he told, rather than showed, us that HUD is kind of weird. That makes the pathetically simplistic disputes over Phos's true nature seem by comparison like the subtle, intricate Byzantine doctrines for which they clumsily stood in.

LA was my second-least favorite because of how obviously stupid the political system was. However, it was an interesting AH riff: sticking close, on the one hand, to the parallel of a costly mid-nineteenth-century war to end slavery, hampered by vicious sectional political disputes and, frankly, amateurish generals (though in OTL that was born of necessity--if the number of soldiers increases 2000% in the amount of time it takes a professional officer to complete the military academy's curriculum, you're just not going to have enough qualified leaders to fill every post). At the same time, you have slaves not waiting for outside liberation, nor even allying with liberators and hastening their progress against a common enemy, but seizing control of the situation, liberating themselves, and rapidly evolving from desperate self-defense, to gleeful revenge, to the discipline to stand against a . . . well, a pseudo-professional army, at any rate, and on to the political wisdom necessary to secure some lasting benefit from it all. The growing pains are so frightening and violent that the slaves' natural allies are forced to support the planters instead, but are thus able to exert a moderating influence that ensures that, once the slaves finally attain wisdom, they'll be able to find a somewhat receptive negotiating partner. Good stuff, despite the dopey Atlantean leadership and the irritating reliance on serendipity, and rather blah characterization, among other problems.

But taken as a whole, the series lacks direction. I had hoped that an uninhabited land mass roughly equidistant from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and drawing immigrants from all three, would become a kind of racial and cultural no man's land, offering a model for developing an early global system that was vehemently _not_ eurocentric. But no. The Europeans came as imperialists, the Africans and Terranovans came as slaves.

Also, Atlantis kept becoming less important to the world as time went on. In the fifteenth century it was Shangri-La; in the seventeenth, a valuable prize, but a nuisance to hold; in the eighteenth, a piece worth acquiring cheaply in the imperial game, but with its resources rapidly depleting, not worth fighting very hard for; and by the nineteenth, a barely relevant backwater best avoided by outsiders, unless they'd fallen too far to be welcome anywhere more respectable. Just as well we never saw them in the twentieth. Turtle Fan (talk) 23:22, March 16, 2016 (UTC)

The part about the cultural no man's land was the worst squandered potential. One of the other talk pages pointed out that England, Brittany and Basqueland could have become powerful late-15th-century empires, making European history very different than in OTL, i.e. a truly alternate history. But instead we got a history that is a carbon copy of OTL (substituting Atlantis for North America), and the basic plots of the two longer novels were just half-assed scripts for generic Mel Gibson period movies. Had HT gone the logical route from OA, there could have been an epic Basque and Breton War in the 18th century. OTOH, since he wrote the short stories first, he'd written himself into a corner in that regard.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 23:41, March 16, 2016 (UTC)

Breton and Basque empires? I don't know. European history is pretty consistently clear on this point: If a small local power carves out enough of a continental empire to make its neighbors resentful, its position becomes hideously vulnerable. See the experiences of, among others, Portugal, Holland, Friesland, all three Scandinavian countries, etc. Even the French and Spanish empires were eventually savaged at home by still bigger fish. The only European-based overseas colonial empire that was both vast and durable was the British, and those imperialists had the Channel to shield them from continental envy.

Say, here's a thought: replace Edward Radcliffe with Èadbhàrd Ratliff. The 1450s were a long time before the Tudors subdued Ireland into an English vassal; pump the wealth of an empire into Ireland before that, and England could well be in over her head. The Irish could either achieve independence (and form an alliance with Scotland that will prevent England from ever developing designs on either the European continent or well beyond) or stay in the union till they become the tail that wags the dog. The United Kingdom of Great Ireland and (Southern) Britain: That would be a change. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:37, March 17, 2016 (UTC)