Neil Fein's Blog

Stars & Stripes Forever
Del Rey, 1999

Stars and Stripes in Peril
Del Rey, 2001

Stars and Stripes Triumphant
Del Rey, 2003

by Harry Harrison

Am alternate history, asking, what if the British, interfering in the American Civil War, united the North and South against them? The details of technology and strategy take center stage in this trilogy. While these are important, the cultural differences between Americans and English of the 1860s could have used some more fleshing out.

While these three books are great fun to read, in some ways they're fluff for alternate history buffs. I'm not qualified to judge if they're historically accurate -- at least at in the first book, before history starts diverging into Harrison's vision -- but in many ways the outcomes of these three books is American imperialist wish-fulfillment.

The first book, Stars and Stripes Forever is the best of the lot. The British are shown as having a different agenda than the Americans, not evil as they are shown in the third book. Perhaps Harrison's message was meant to be that any country can be led into evil actions by the right set of circumstances, but this doesn't come across as clearly as it could.

If Harrison had written this as one large book, instead of three smaller novels, he might have had the time to develop characters better, the same problem that plagued Harry Turtledove's Colonization series. But Trilogies seem to sell well, so three small books it is. The Gee-whiz what-if quantity doesn't overpower the tepid characterizations; the creator of the Stainless Steel Rat and of the Hammer and the Cross books has done far, far better in past works than this tragic attempt.