How Few Remain

A Novel of the Second War
Between the States

By Harry Turtledove
Del Rey Books, $25

ISBN 0345416619

Review by James Neal Webb

What if Hitler had been stillborn? What if San Salvador had been populated by cannibals? What if Lee Harvey Oswald had missed?

History has its pivotal points, and Harry Turtledove has made his living thinking about questions such as these. In his World War saga, he landed an alien invasion force during World War II. His most famous novel, "The Guns of the South," brought South African time travelers to Civil War Virginia with AK-47s for Robert E. Lee and company. He returns to the same milieu in "How Few Remain."

This is a depressing world Turtledove paints -- full of honor, to be sure, but filled with a wistfulness for things as they used to be.

This is not a sequel to "Guns," however. Instead, Turtledove has found an equally important point in the conflict to force a different conclusion -- the loss of Lee's Special Orders 191 in 1862, found by Union troops, enabling McClellan to win the battle of Antietam. What if those battle plans had never been lost? This is our jumping-off point. In 1881, 20 years after the South won the Civil War, the Confederate States of America purchase two of Mexico's northern provinces, giving them transcontinental access, and in the process touch off a second conflagration with an enraged United States.

Turtledove's brand of alternate history means that he can use anyone who ever lived as a character. His perspectives on what might have happened to familiar figures make this book particularly entertaining. We have J.E.B. Stewart allied with Geronimo in the desert Southwest, Teddy Roosevelt charging against Canadians instead of Cubans, Sam Clemens dodging Redcoat bullets in San Francisco, and most astonishing of all, Abraham Lincoln as a Marxist leader.

Despite the neverending controversy over the reverence Southerners have for the brave men who gave their lives for the Confederate cause, I think most would agree that, in the end, it was for the best that the South was not allowed to secede. This book certainly solidifies that feeling in me. This is a depressing world Turtledove paints -- full of honor, to be sure, but filled with a wistfulness for things as they used to be. You can almost see the USA and the CSA sliding into a fractious future similar to Europe, while those self-same Europeans look on in pity, concern or greed.

While "How Few Remain" is not a sequel, it almost begs for a sequel itself; like any second chance, it has the power to do things better.

James Neal Webb lives and writes in Nashville, Tennessee.

©1997, ProMotion, inc.

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