See also Interview With S.M. Stirling about Black Chamber.
The Letter
Dear Colleague,
With last year's Black Chamber, New York Times bestselling author S.M. Stirling set the stage for a new Roosevelt mythos and kicked off a series that had history buffs, sci-fi fans, and thriller readers all talking. In this alternate history series, Teddy Roosevelt is serving his third term as president right before WWI breaks out, and he's not afraid to use the Black Chamber, a secret spy network determined to keep America safe. THEATER OF SPIES (Ace Trade Paperback Original; $16.00; On-sale May 7, 2019), is the second installment, and it drops right back into the action with the badass agent Luz O'Malley and budding technical genius Ciara Whelan.
After foiling a German plot to devastate America's coastal cities from Boston to Galvestan, Luz and Ciara have earned a break. But before they can kick back in California, they discover a diabolical new weapon that could give the German Imperial Navy far too much control. Forced to go deep undercover and travel across a world at war, Luz and Ciara find themselves in Berlin attempting to ferret out the project's secrets. German agents are close on their trail, eager to get revenge - and Luz and Ciara's false identities can't hold up forever. From knife-and-pistol duels on airships, to the horrors of the poison-gas factories, to harrowing battles in the North Sea, the fight continues - with the world as the prize.
Wonder Woman meets The Man In The High Castle with a splash of James Bond in this thrilling series - besides the fascinating time period, it boasts stunning exotic locales, death-defying feats and battles, dangerous-yet-sexy agents of foreign powers, and the highest of stakes.
Please enjoy this copy of THEATER OF SPIES. I hope you will consider it for review/feature attention and summer reading roundups. S.M. Stirling is also available for interviews. We're happy to provide a copy of Black Chamber if you haven't read it. Thanks so much for your attention and happy reading!
Best,
Alexis Nixon, Assistant Director of Publicity Lauren Horvath, Publicity
ABOUT S.M. STIRLING
S. M. Stirling is the author of many science fiction and fantasy novels. A former lawyer and an amateur historian, he lives in Santa Fe with his wife, Jan. Find out more about Stirling online at smstirling.com.
Well, after copying out all that, I am even more enthusiastic to continue reading the book.
20th Century Villains
WWI and II: Germans
Cold War: Russians
James Bond: SMERSH, then SPECTRE, also former Nazis and North American gangsters
Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner: ambiguous
Stirling's retro-sf: back to WWI!
32 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Many thanks for copying this cover letter from Penguin/Random House about Stirling's new book THEATER OF SPIES. I read it with keen interest and immense regret that I will have to wait till May for a copy.
Maybe no one else will be interested, but I hope we see more about Austia-Hungary in THEATER, esp. since Kaiser Karl would have succeeded his grand uncle Francis Joseph by the time THEATER opens.
And will we see more about Wilhelm II? He WAS capable of thinking more STRATEGICALLY than Hindenberg/Ludendorff, with their excessive focus on short term military problems.
I agree, SF fans should be more likely to think of Anderson's Dominic Flandry when it comes to fictional spies. To say nothing of how my view is that Flandry was more competent at intelligence than was James Bond.
Sean
There is a mention of Emperor Karl...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And the biography I read of Blessed Kaiser Karl (who was beatified by Pope John Paul II) made it plain he disliked how Germany was dominating the Central Powers and disagreed with Berlin's tendency to stake everything on reckless throws of the dice.
Sean
Yup, he did, though his position was terminally weak. Austria-Hungary essentially broke its own army in the opening phase of the war, in the Galician and Carpathian campaigns, and the country never really recovered.
Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Chief of the General Staff of the A-H army, wasn't exactly stupid, but he was a prime example of a theorist colliding with reality. He'd been a notable military writer and closely involved with officer training; unfortunately all of his reasoning was wrong and his influence with the officer corps enabled him to embody it in his army's doctrine.
His reputation for brilliance was largely due to his logical and eloquent advocacy of the "supremacy of morale" school that was so prominent in all European armies before 1914; that battlefield were largely a conflict of wills, with psychological factors paramount.
For a whole raft of institutional and cultural reasons (for example, the turn away from philosophical positivism towards idealism was one part) many, many people desperately wanted to believe this at the time, and you'll never go wrong telling people what they already want to be true.
A whole raft of armies convinced that war was a matter of "human spirit" above all entered a war ruled by industrial-scale attrition and firepower, much more like a meat-packing plant than what they'd anticipated. The Dual Monarchy's army suffered more for it than most, because it was weaker to start with and had been starved of resources by the internal political paralysis of the Austrian state.
(The weakenss of the "morale school" in 1914 was that all the major armies had high morale. That threw everything right back on the material and doctrinal factors that the prevailing school of thought had relegated to subordinate status.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I mostly agree with what you wrote here. ESP. on how far too many grossly misunderstood what modern war was going to be like.
While NOT denying how the Austro-Hungarian armies had serious weaknesses, some of the due to the political reasons you cited, I would not totally dismiss them. They did hold the Italians at bay for years and nearly broke Italy at Caporetto.
But, yes, Kaiser Karl had a poor hand of cards. Pity!
Sean
There's an old Hungarian joke -- Luz mentions hearing it from a schoolmate from Budapest -- that goes: "Why did God create Italians?" Answer: "So there would be someone even -Austrians- could defeat."
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
But I can't agree with that joke! I think I know just enough about Austrian military history to say they were as valiant as anybody else. Koniggrattz, for example, was a VERY hard fought and only narrowly lost battle for the Austrians in 1866. Victory then would very likely have changed history drastically. Because Austria, rather than Prussia, would have unified the German states.
Sean
Come to this blog and learn history.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree! And I can't help but think an Austrian victory at Koniggratz would have been better for the world than a Prussian victory.
Sean
Sean: I agree that it would probably have been better if the Austrians had won the war of 1866, but very unlikely. They fought bravely, but courage is cheap -- it's simply not a rare quality.
Skill, organization and weight of metal win.
Note that in 1866, the Italians attacked the Austrians in concert with the Prussians;.
The Austrians promptly beat them like a drum.(*) They accomplished their territorial gains by grace of Prussian largess, just as they'd won independence originally on the points of French bayonets. The uneasy consciousness of this -- that the only people Italian rebels had beaten were other Italians -- accounts for a lot of the tinsel bravado of Italy in the generations after unification.
As Bismark said, "Poor Italy -- such a large appetite, such weak teeth."
There's another joke, a North German one this time: In Berlin, the situation is serious but not desperate. In Vienna, it's desperate but nobody is taking it seriously.
(*) in the crucial naval battle of that war, it turned out the Italian flagship had been firing blank training ammunition all day -- someone had forgotten to get the real stuff onboard.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Again, I mostly agree with you. And I even thought of how the Austrians had been forced to divide their forces to face both Prussia and Italy in the Seven Weeks War. The Austrian army at Koniggratz, even reinforced by their Saxon allies was actually slightly smaller than the Prussian army. It does make me wonder if one or two extra divisions would have given the Austrians a winning edge there.
Yes, the Austrians soundly defeated Italy on both land and sea. The Italians had a considerably larger force at Custozza than the Austrians and STILL lost. And the naval battle at Lissa was truly astonishing. With a smaller and more antiquated fleet, the Austrians should have lost, but did not. Amazingly, the Austrian ships CHARGED the Italians to fight them point blank. And routed the Italians. One Navy officer I discussed Lissa with said Austrian TACTICS made up for an inferior fleet.
I agree Italy didn't quite had or have what it takes to be a truly MAJOR power.
Sean
You might say that the Italians are too civilized -- and too rational and too individualistic -- to make a really formidable military power. Mussolini thought so, in private.
There's winning, there's losing, and then again there's getting humiliated by your own screwups. The Austrians were beaten fair and square in 1866, but not humiliated -- they gave it a good hard try and lost. The italians, on the other hand...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Interesting, what you and Mussolini thought, re the Italians. Yes, it's possible the Italians were not seriously INTERESTED enough in being a really major imperial power.
Yes, the Austrians fought so hard and well in 1866 that Bismarck was satisfied with agreeing to mild peace terms: no territorial cessions, no demands for money, not even a victory march thru Vienna. Austria also insisted that Saxony would not be devoured and annexed by Prussia, which Bismarck agreed to as well. So, unlike Italy, Austria kept its self respect.
Sean
Bismarck had a realistic attitude to war aims. His aim in 1866 was to exclude Austria from Germany, making possible a "Little German" unification dominated by Prussia, which didn't include too many non-Germans or Catholic Germans.
That required beating the Austrians hard enough for them to accept the loss of their influence in Germany (particularly southern Germany -- places like Bavaria) but not turn them into eternal enemies.
In this, he succeeded brilliantly. By the 1870's, it was politically practical for Vienna to seek an alliance with the new Germany.
Then it was the turn of the French, whose foreign policy had screwed up bigtime during the Austro-Prussian war.
Bismarck was tactically opportunistic and supple, but strategically consistent. From the 1840's on he'd accepted that some sort of German unification was inevitable and desirable (unlike many Prussian conservatives) but he was determined that it would be -his- sort of German unification.
Bismarck was sort of the Platonic ideal of a Prussian statesman -- ruthless, cunning, patient, but ready to take big calculated risks when he saw an opening to increase Prussia's long-term power. This was the sort of policy that had turned Prussia from an inconsequential, backward and impoverished eastern border-state, the "Sandbox of Europe", into a Great Power.
It was also sort of a dead end.
After him, there was nowhere to go -- but the tradition he represented made it very difficult for his unified, Prussian-dominated Germany to become a "satisfied" power. That's what he tried to do after 1871, but he failed there. The Prussian tradition of restless, relentless ambition was too ingrained.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Thanks for your very interesting comments.
Several points comes to mind. I was interested at you saying many Prussian conservatives felt no need for there to be a German unification. Which reminded me of how some, including the King himself, Wilhelm I, felt some lingering sense of reverence for the Habsburg Emperor as the heir of the old Holy Roman Empire.
Yes, Bismarck, having achieved his ambition of Prussia unifying a "small Germany," would have preferred that the new Reich be satisfied with what it had gained and eschew any further ambitions. But he failed to instill that idea into his successors (altho Wilhelm II, in his more thoughtful moments, understood the danger in trying to push too hard). It was simply not possible for a Prussian dominated Germany to expand further without clashing with MAJOR powers.
And it would have been smart of Napoleon III to have decided that if the unification of Germany could not be prevented, it was better for France's long term welfare it was Austria which did the unifying.
Sean
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
My comments immediately above were too hasty and incomplete. Your mention of how Otto von Bismarck strove to limit the number of Catholics within the "small Germany" he unified reminded me of how anti Catholic he was. A prejudice which eventually took the form of open persecution of the Catholic Church within Prussia during the Kulturkampf of the 1870's. And that extended to the Prussian state deliberately favoring the Q hypothesis and the theory of Markan Priority as a means of cutting down the influence of the gospel of Matthew, esp. because of Matthew 16 supports Papal authority.
So we see how the quarrels and controversies within German politics included dragging in opposing theories of Biblical exegesis, as William Farmer contended in works like THE GOSPEL OF JESUS (Westminster: 1994).
By 1878, the year Pius IX died, Bismarck was wearying of the Kulturkampf. The May Laws had utterly failed to bring the Catholic Church under Prussian state control and was causing vehement protests in the Reich at large. The struggle stimulated the rise of a new party, the Center, opposing many of Bismarck's policies. So, when the new pope, Leo XIII, gave Bismarck a chance to back down without losing too much face, the Iron Chancellor was eager to do so.
Hmmm, if the Austrians had won the battle of Koniggratz, the Q theory and the hypothesis of Markan Priority might well have faded away! It became so "dominant" with many Biblical scholars mostly for political reasons, not because it was CONVINCING.
Sean
Sean,
I studied Philosophy, with an interest in the Philosophy of Religion, and later read Biblical commentaries only because I became a school Religious Education teacher. I accept the Q theory and Marcan Priority because I am informed that the overwhelming majority of Biblical scholars have good reasons to accept this. Matthew and Luke do look like expansions of Mark. I also know James Crossley who argues that Mark was written while the church was largely law-observant. See:
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Date_of_Mark_s_Gospel.html?id=5gfUAwAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But after I read David L. Dungan's A HISTORY OF THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM, I could no longer accept Q/Markan priority. I found the arguments and evidence against that theory to be overwhelming. And the late William Farmer's THE GOSPEL OF JESUS, where he expounded the neo-Griesbachian hypothesis, strengthened that. And he also discussed how the Prussian state and Bismarck deliberately favored Q/Markan Priority. At least partly from anti Catholic prejudices.
No, I believe Matthew was written first and is older than people like Crossley believe. And that Luke came next, with Mark drawing on both Matthew and Luke. We even have PHYSICAL evidence of Matthew being older than most claim: in the Oxford Fragments of Matthew. These fragments were found in Egypt with legal documents dated to the twelfth year of Nero's reign (AD 65-66). Assuming ten years for Matthew's gospel to reach Egypt, that dates its composition back to the early/mid 50's at least.
I recommend reading the Farmer and Dungan books to get an overview of the opposing view of when the gospels were written.
Sean
Sean,
Crossley thinks that Mark was written no later than the mid-40s.
I agree that, if Matthew were 1st, then it would make sense to see Mark as drawing from Matthew and Luke. So Matthean Priority also does not preserve the traditional order.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
That does interest me, that some Biblical scholars, like Crossley, no longer hold to a late, post AD 70 dating of all the synoptic gospels. But I didn't understand your last sentence, it seems to contradict the second. Unless you meant that Luke drew on Matthew and Mark. And I see both Matthew and Mark being written before AD 50.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I was as bit unclear. Briefly, I think Matthew was written first, and then Mark. Last, Luke used Matthew and Mark as some of the sources he used for his gospel.
Sean
Sean,
OK. I thought you had said Matthew, Luke, Mark. So you still uphold the traditional order. I still get the impressions (a) that the Q/Marcan Priority theory is strongly based and (b) that Crossley might have successfully challenged the consensus that Mark was written 3 or so decades after the events it describes.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Apologies for being unclear. Yes, writers like Dungan and Farmer have convincingly, to me, demonstrated the most likely way the synoptics were composed. Because the neo-Griesbachian hypothesis is SIMPLER than the Q/Markan priority theory. For one thing, this mysterious, hypothetical document called "Q" has never been found, no Mss., no fragments, nothing. It's mere speculation. The simple existence of the Oxford Fragments of Matthew alone makes that glaringly obvious, to me. Because the Fragments gives support to Matthean priority.
Sean
Sean,
Why is the overwhelming consensus Q/Marcan Priority?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I thought that was plain from some of my earlier comments. Artificial support by the Prussian state under Bismarck for an opposing theory that would reduce the influence of Matthew's gospel. Bluntly, anti Catholic prejudice. But that does not mean I believe all or most adherents of Q/Markan priority were Catholic hating bigots. Not at all!
I do think many supporters of Q/Markan priority have become so emotionally invested in that theory that they find it very difficult to take the neo-Griesbachian alternative seriously.
Sean
Sean,
But I don't think that Bismark's influence can be affecting current Biblical scholars! My impression is that, while of course they might be mistaken, they can give good reasons for their views. And emotional investment can happen on both sides of the argument, of course.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Of course the now long dead Bismarck can't be said to be DIRECTLY affecting Biblical scholars today. But I do say the TYPE of Biblical exegesis he had Prussian and German universities favor would have CONSEQUENCES. One of them being how many Biblical scholars were "trained" into uncritical acceptance of Q/Markan priority. And of course I agree adherents of Q/Markan priority can give arguments for their views. I simply believe those arguments to be too complicated and depending too much on hypotheticals to be convincing, when critically examined from the neo-Griesbachian POV. And ditto, what you said about emotional investment.
If you recall my "Markan vs. Matthean Priority" piece, I gave some quotes from Dungan's book illustrating both points. Dungan's A HISTORY OF THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM shook me out of my former acceptance of Q/Markan priority.
And this has wandered a long way from the original discussion over Austria-Hungary and the unification of Germany! (Smiles)
Sean
Sean,
That is what this blog is for.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Another thought I had was this: Luke wrote a TWO part work, the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. One "indication" of its pre-AD 70 dating being how Acts ends with St. Paul's First Roman Captivity, circa AD 62-62. If this two parter had been written after AD 70, why was there no mention of such things as Nero's persecution of the Christians, the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, the Jewish Revolt, etc.? It would have been so natural for Luke to have mentioned such events if he had written after AD 70.
I agree that merely internal evidence of that kind is not CONCLUSIVE proof, but it is intriguing, and indicative. But things like that were among the many which made me conclude the Q/Markan prioroity theory was too complicated to be convincing.
Sean
Sean,
I also thought: if (as some believe) Matthew's Gospel is important as backing up Papal authority, then it does not matter whether it was written 1st or 2nd. All 4 Gospels are believed to have equal authority.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Exactly! Even during the time when I accepted as true the Q/Markan priority theory, it did not undermine my belief the Papacy was divinely instituted, because all four of the canonical gospels were divinely inspired and of equal authority and value in doctrinal matters. They supplemented and complemented each other--NOT contradicting each other. That was the stance of Catholic Biblical scholars, such as Fr. Raymond Brown, who did accept Q/Markan priority.
Sean
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