The edition that I have opens with:
front cover, blank inside
title page
publication information
contents
dedication
quotation
blank page
p. 1 of the text
The quotation is from Theodore Roosevelt:
"The best leader is one who has good sense enough to pick the right people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it."
Poul Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn would share this sentiment. His Solar Spice & Liquors prospers because he picks people with initiative.
I googled and confirmed that Roosevelt did say this or something like it in OTL (our timeline).
An author has to convey what it would be like to live in another timeline and must sometimes show his characters reflecting on the turning points, e.g.:
"V-gas. Vernichtungsgas. Annihilation gas. Horror-gas. The devil's instrument and the devil's own luck. Without it, we would have won the Great War, beaten Germany to powder by 1918 at the latest. With it... the world we have instead. Stalemate."
-SM Stirling, Daggers In Darkness (Eric Flint's Ring of Fire Press, 2021), PROLOGUE, p. 4.
The key concepts here are the lost possibility of winning the Great War by 1918 and the phrase, "...the world we have instead." That is how life would feel to a US President in 1922(b).
9 comments:
Some causal chains are visible; others not.
Eg., Roosevelt can see that V-gas made an enormous difference, and he's accurate about the consequences of it not being there.
But the causal chain that produces the V-gas is very complex, and the actual crucial causal difference is one Irish emigrant fleeing the Famine dying or not dying of typhus ("ship fever", aka jail fever, lice-born) on a 'coffin ship' headed from Cork to Boston in 1848.
That was Luz O'Malley's great-grandfather.
In OTL, he died.
In the Black Chamber history, he lived, and recovered after landing.
That made no immediate or obvious difference and affected little -- one more Irish laborer in Boston, carrying mortar in a hod up ladders at construction sites.
But he became a bricklayer, a skilled trade, saved his money, bought a horse and wagon, and prospered in a modest way as a building contractor.
His son did better, and became (by South Boston standards) a prosperous small businessman.
His son, Patrick O'Malley, went to MIT in the 1880's and got an engineering degree, moved to California, did very well as a consulting engineer in many places, and eloped with the daughter of a Cuban sugar-planter while building plantation railways and sugar-mills near Santiago de Cuba in 1890.
Luz was born in 1891.
And in 1897-98, Patrick O'Malley volunteered for the Rough Riders -- and was accepted because he's strong, fit, experienced in running large projects in rough places the tropics and a crack shot and horseman, speaks Spanish and knows Cuba, and because he personally impresses Theodore Roosevelt. TR loved that sort of scholar-frontiersman-adventurer, and finds his Cuban wife charming and the story of their elopement (and he father's attempted killing of them both) intensely romantic.
O'Malley's a company commander in the Cuban-American War, known as Pat "Follow Me!" O'Malley, goes up San Juan hill in the famous charge, and becomes a personal friend of Theodore Roosevelt. He and his Cuban wife visit the Roosevelts, and they visit him in Santa Barbara.
His daughter becomes a favorite of Roosevelt, and calls him "Uncle Teddy".
Again, the changes are very subtle -- Roosevelt had many friends, and liked that sort of adventurous type in particular.
But in 1911, Pat O'Malley and his wife are killed by Villistas in Mexico, and Luz barely escapes.
One of the first places she goes is to the old family friends, the Roosevelts -- she's fairly close friends with most of their children too.
TR's blood boils as she describes what happened and how she escaped (which also impresses him further with her, btw).
So he pushes President Taft that extra little bit in 1912, when he battles for the Republican nomination, and Taft's heart gives out under the stress.
Now the changes are snowballing. One of the things that TR does as President is launch an American equivalent of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, an organization aimed at coordinating and intensifying scientific research, pure and applied. He'd originally aimed at a career in the sciences, and was very conscious of the links between science, engineering, industry and national power and well-being.
Kaiser Wilhelm, whose envy of Roosevelt is amplified by his spectacular return to power, among other things pushes for more R&D spending in Germany in turn; Germany, already the leader in industrial chemistry, does even more along those lines.
And -that- produces V-gas, among other things.
All the result of one nameless peasant refugee not dying...
That is one amazing causal sequence.
So we really don't know why events happen or what would have happened if something else hadn't.
Paul: yes, causation is very complex and, IMHO, utterly contingent. When you examine historical events in detail, little things are immensely important and their consequences can snowball unpredictably.
We can see that in individual lifetimes. I am happy with the way things are now - on a personal (not global!) level - but I could have wound up in all sorts of bad places.
Paul: me too.
Just one example: When I met my wife (at a party at an SF convention) there were two women I thought were interesting. I decided on her -- and we were extremely happy together for 33 years. The other lady became a friend of us both, but she developed a mental illness (it ran in her family) and met a very unpleasant end about a decade later.
I could tell similar stories about big consequences of small chance events - although not with that kind of outcome. Maybe everyone can but not everyone reflects on life in quite this way.
An obvious historical example is Kaiser Wilhelm's father dying relatively young, after a very brief reign lasting only 99 days, of cancer.
If he hadn't had the cancer, he'd have been Kaiser for a long time, probably; he was only 56. If he'd lived as long as his father, he'd have been Kaiser until around 1920.
And Frederick was a liberal in 19th century terms, pro-British and (probably) wanted a constitutional monarchy.
Anything like our WW1 would have been vanishingly unlikely if he had lived. No naval race with Britain, for instance.
Some of us have historical outcomes that we would like to see but it seems that it is impossible to know how to bring them about. Somewhere there is someone dying now who, if he had lived, would have made a very big difference.
Paul: yes, very true. Historical chains of causation are generally impossible to spot except in retrospect.
We can anticipate -some- things beforehand, but we can never anticipate -everything- that's significant, especially those small hidden contingencies.
Incidentally this is why von Molkte the Elder, a very competent head of the German General Staff, once said:
"Planning is everything. But the -plan- is less than nothing."
Meaning that you had to be able to alter plans flexibly to take contingency into account.
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