Memorial Day weekend coming up & it is terribly hot here in middle Georgia. I'm thinking it'll be a good time to read and read.
Now I'm listening to another of the series. Very confusing trying to figure out what order these books are in; Flynt has used several co-authors and they go spinning off in all possible European directions it seems. I'm on my second one, who knows where it fits into the series, The Baltic Wars.
But I've gone in other directions and thoughts with this, too. I remember reading, decades ago, For Want of a Nail, a work of fiction written as a scholarly book, complete with footnotes, as the author imagines the world if Lee had won at Gettysburg.
Maybe even my favorite sf novel, Alas, Babylon, written in 1959, could be considered alternative history now since it imagines a world that suffered a 1960 nuclear "Day" when Russia and America attacked each other with nuclear weapons.
I'm reading an anthology now of alternative history stories (with each story followed by a historian's view of its likeliness). Kim Stanley Robinson's story, "Lucky Strike", is well-known: the world if the strike on Hiroshima had not been accurate because of pilot scruples, had been seen then as a "demonstration of power" and how the rather than the devastation it was.
And then, thanks to the power of the Internet and database searching, I came across a fascinating interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. I read his novel, New York 2140, last year and have to admit I was plowing through, not truly enjoying. But now, several of his books sound fascinating and I got off on a tangent with his musings about journal writing. Says that Thoreau and Virginia Woolf were the best.
He keeps a "calendar", a 2 line record of his day and has for 20 years. I've been thinking about that but have yet to try it, for even one day, much less a year.
