historical figures in an alternative history;
a John Buchan character;
a Merseian weapon (by which I mean a knuckleduster-handled knife);
comments, e.g., on English public schools, applicable to our history;
a reference to ERB's two concurrent series about air pirates - alternative fiction;
an accurate rendition of a particular English regional accent;
characters harmed and changed by the Great War.
We wonder what kind of later twentieth century and early twenty-first century this 1922(b) will lead to. Will time tell?
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Time will tell if I can keep selling the books -- I'm enjoying writing them.
(Sandy Arbuthnot and Narayan Singh show up towards the end of the next one, THE WARLORD OF THE STEPPES, too.)
I haven't decided if Buchan is still around in 1922b, yet. If he is, though, he may well have stayed in military intelligence, which was his Great War job. I doubt he could stop writing, though. It's addictive!
Incidentally, knuckle-duster knives were also a common trench weapon in WW1; they were usually made from cut-down bayonets in the British and German armies, with the brass knucks added.
I have my grandfather's Lee-Enfield bayonet, the one with the 18-inch blade, by the way. By the time he became a lieutenant in 1917, junior officers usually carried rifles too, partly to avoid being singled out by snipers and partly because they were far more useful than pistols except in close-range fighting, tho' there was a fair bit of that.
In 1914, by contrast, part of the mobilization instructions was for officers to sharpen their swords, which they were expected to carry in action. That didn't last long!
In general, some things won't happen at all (particularly in the arts), some things will happen earlier or later, and the politics will be completely different as time goes on.
Glad I got the Brummie accent right!
There are gross and subtle influences on things like the course of the arts in an alternate history.
A gross one: no Paris, no France. Besides the French contributions, there's the effect of, for example, no Hemingway in Paris. No Gertrude Stein or Alice B. Toklas, either.
A subtle one: there's no "return to normalcy" or Harding/Coolidge period after 1918 in the US.
The "progressive" element isn't alienated by "Babbitry". Instead it identifies strongly with the Progressive Republican Party. That's assisted by the much-reduced role of Marxism -- without a Soviet revolution, it isn't an alternate pole of attraction.
Put them together, and you get a much different intellectual and artistic climate post-1918. New York and Chicago and San Francisco are the artistic centers of the Western World, not Paris or London - neither of which exist.
Differences which were mainly political in 1912-1914 grow and ramify into cultural spheres as time goes on.
Other things proceed as they did with us, but with differences of emphasis. Changes in women's clothing, which between 1910 and 1920 were greater in the Western world than they had been for many centuries before go in the same direction but a bit further and faster.
SF writers imagine not only other planets but also other histories of this planet. Details count.
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