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In which a ridiculous fictional setting by S M Stirling is discusssed

Vashon

Active member
Banned
"The Domination of the Draka did nothing wrong."
-Actual said by real life human beings to the author of the series.

I owned all the books at one point at had a select group of fanfics on a certain bookmark group, WAY back when, however I "defended" them years before I acquired the books, largely just to be an edgelord. "Drakon" would be the best of the lot, its genetically engineered Uberfrau vs cybernetically enhanced Assassin set in a "Modern World". Perfect Sci Fi/HBO minseries schlock. "The Stone Dogs" being 2nd place for transforming into Slower then Light Space Opera. Anyways, point being, I'd usually say something like "read the books" to fully understand a comment I'm about to make, but the books are hard as diamond to come by. Been out of print for decades. Which made me regret donating them to a library after a single read, or at least, to the library I donated them to. I have reread the Discworld at least once, Worldwar series twice, HP too many times, and other unrelated books a few times. Only read those once. For a reason. It wasn't actually a good read, it wasn't....well yes they were in fact horrible, but the quality wasn't bad. It's just....heartbreaking, and the titanic cultural shift is never properly explained or supported, its one of the serious weaknesses that isn't given enough attention.

You have to understand something. As written, exactly as written, no implications and suppositions or theory crafting, you have to understand something. The humans in Drakaverse, other then the titular villain protagonists themselves? They are dumb, DDUUUUUMMMMBBBBB. It is hard to feel bad for them, they are that fucking dumb. A proper and well written PoD that results in a decent by plot suggestion "stomp" would involve the proto AFD waging a nuclear war when India gets attacked, and fighting to the hilt. The series could strongly benefit from a remake, but it would start with the British Parliament turning EEEEEEE VOOOL during the Revolutionary War and go from there. Because if there is one thing far too many an Alt History community completely forgets, is that prior to 1914 inverse, the "Domination" is literally just the biggest chunk of the British Empire. So you would be going to war with the British Empire.

Of course thats assuming one was going for something as close to the original series as possible, otherwise you would end up writing the backstory for a Super South Africa with Apartheid being a long present caste system, instead of something formalized post 2nd World War, the gets nukes and an ICBM delivery system by the 60s/70s, draw some lines on a map, and you call it a day.

From Angola to Mozambique( yes I know, it was Portuguese), then lump in what the British had in Eastern Africa short of Egypt and Sudan, and add all the bits on the Eastern Coast they didn't have. Add a few more colonists over time until the Revolutionary War, then dump some of the Canadians there, then say fuck it to developing Australia for British interests and dump convicts there, and without Canada or Australia, only one place to go if you want to stay British, unless you write New Zealand as a British colony anyways. Add a little paying EIC members in African land and paying some Hessian mercenaries in the same and recruiting for wives(Ads for dating and marriage are fairly old), mix them together as a megacorp mercenary company that sticks around, mix it in with corrupt money politics, with an added bit of racism and "encouraged" labor, throw crazy women with Naldorrsen as their last name in the loony bin, and Poof!

Racist Africa land, now with fewer fucks to give, and more nukes. A lot more nukes. Jesus, thats a lot of nukes. And where did they get all that state of the art ICBM tech? Fuck it, we'll just blockade them forever and keep a satellite watch on them for anything that looks off while garrisoning in Egypt, the borders of the Congo and the Middle East just in case they try something.
 
I'm replying to this here to prevent a derail.



Because the entire meta-point of the Draka is the to be a dark mirror of America, so yes? The Draka reject moral ambiguity, realised they were evil according to contemporary moral standards, and thus rejected said morality in favour of neitzschian nationalist solipsism. Being honest and abandon the golden rule out of national self interest, declaring internationalism to be dead and the lives of foreigners to be nothing, and worshiping power and military, makes the drake an embodiment of the worst traits of the political right and merely take them on a train ride to their nightmarish conclusion...

And due to Drakan ideology, they are an evil reflection of any empire founded up national self-interest of the dominant ethnicity at the expense of it's conquered peoples. Most empires if they honest and could get away with acting like the drake would do so.
I didn't even realize this thread was here before my splurging. Well ok then.

That sort of is the meta purpose, with the other being "Invincible Hero that over comes all odds, no matter how obscene, outrageous, and braindead dumb" tropes applied the other way around, to the kind of people that invented the Ubermensch ideals that Superheroes embody to the man and woman.

And there were in fact, several empires that did act as evil and depraved in part, and a few that felt temptation to go that rout. All of those relented because that kind of effort is hard, inconvenient, and a permanent security risk of internal instability that can't be afforded when you have powerful enemies on the borders. The Draka combined not having particularly powerful enemies on the borders, along with going several steps further, aided by modern technology such as barbed wire and machine guns, to see systems such as the CSA, Sparta, and part of the Czarist Russian Empire to the logical end point.

Im going to post this here, and in the thread I made for this.
 
Didn't Sterling openly admit that the Draka just got a plot shield the same way the "good guys" usually do, with everything going their way to make the assholes win in the end?
 
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Didn't Sterling openly admit that the Draka just got a plot shield the same way the "good guys" usually do, with everything going their way to make the assholes win in the end?
Yep. Half the meta point too. It wasn't just a plot shield, it was a plot sword and a plot horse.

Saturday Morning Super Villains should, typically, in many many instances, win and win HARD. Everything from Skeletor to the Goauld, and in some cases, its the other way around where the Villains have zero business even getting to fight, Exosquad being one of these. In order to avoid this, you have to make miracles occur for the heroes, and slap the antagonists with the Dumbass stick, and the Cripple stick, and the Unlucky stick.

He openly, and obviously, just took a WWII map, and inserted an Africa and Middle East dominating superpower and worked his way backwards from there. And then he went with Pulp Sci Fi hyper tech advancement, and old dirty mags of sexual slavery ala Gor. The first in the series, Marching Through Georgia, is typical run of the mill military action adventure fiction. Its the context around it thats shocking. Under the Yoke is an uncensored look at a society of villainous, vainglorious and victorious slavocracy that has a hi risk, dramatic, thrilling cloak and dagger spy plot running through it. It is also the darkest, and most gruesome of the books. Stone Dogs takes that and is more of the now classic "Timeline" layout that was popularized on AH.com when it was in its prime. Its an overview of the post war world and developments culminating in an apocalyptic struggle that nearly exterminates mankind.

Drakas! Is a short story anthology mostly written by other authors, and there were fanfics around the internet, a handful, that had Stirling's blessing, one of which was a cross with Anno Domini Dracula rules in Victorian Britain. Drakas! is alright. I *think* Drakas! has a canonical short story where its confirmed that the Domination starts expanding into other timelines, intentionally and accidentally. Or that might be a fanfic in that list.

Then there's Drakon, with the infamous Gwendolyn Ingolffson, an immortal, supremely intelligent and adaptable superhuman warrior with a vast storage of advanced technology from a Drakan society that evolved past is former weakness into a strange, somewhat alien form who finds herself in "A World Like Our Own", and threatens to conquer it, bringing all of humanity Under the Yoke!:eek:

Its Terminator esque action movie schlock bait, and the only one that could ever be brought to the big screen.

I mean, the only way you could get something like the setup that starts the series wouldn't be a "Domination of the Draka", it would just be the British Empire. But its EVIL and ran by Super Villains. Otherwise, its nearly impossible to get a polity like the OG Domination on the map, all the way to Egypt and into the former Ottoman Empire. The best you could do is either South Africa but larger, including Angola, Mozambique, Botswana and parts of Zambia, going well past the Zambezi river OR literally all of British Africa that wasn't Egypt or Nigerian, plus extra bits. And even that involves a historical rewrite which nopes Canada(Which is part of the original story, but the American Revolution isn't sufficiently different given....anyways), and probably averts the development of Australia, and before 1800 ANYWAYS, a small buttload of extra people get dumped there to start with.

It would have to focus almost all British settlement that went to Canada and Australia into Africa, and generally requires Cape Town to be a magnet for immigration even before THAT.

It is a cartoonish geopolitical power in its mere existence, given that America is right over there, is pretty far away already but not TOO far away, isn't chockfull of deadly diseases and the natives are thin on the ground from our deadly diseases, and Australia and New Zealand were both easier to deal with than Africa. Logistically. Less plateaus once you got off the boat.

It would honestly warrant two 400 page books that at first just look like "What if the Dutch bothered to try and attract more settlers there, and were thus better at doing exactly that?" before it even starts to touch the primary story.

In Exosquad, the Humans had to get stuck with the Blind and Stupid Nerf so the 2nd Neosapien war could kick off. I mean, it did one thing right, it had its specially designed species of tall muscles also have the same huge muscles on the women, but thats not relevant.
 
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Didn't Sterling openly admit that the Draka just got a plot shield the same way the "good guys" usually do, with everything going their way to make the assholes win in the end?

Remember that Drakas were stand in's for the Soviets - whole series was one of that books for strenghting hearts. I actually liked it.
But on the other hand, if we look on past 2 years and see COVID-19 crisis management, and in 2015 people voting Trump, Johnson and PiS into power . . . idea of the "good" guys winning, well is drastically undermined.
 
But on the other hand, if we look on past 2 years and see COVID-19 crisis management, and in 2015 people voting Trump, Johnson and PiS into power . . . idea of the "good" guys winning, well is drastically undermined.
You strangely seem to assume that there is an end to the Game, with winners and losers.
 
You strangely seem to assume that there is an end to the Game, with winners and losers.

There are always winners and losers, in a great Game, lossers end up as serfs or history. That is why Draka do everything to be in the winners camp - it is simple realy, they represent totalitarian social Darwinism, everything is a struggle with claws and talons, victor takes everything, and in that contest loser is extermianted. While writing a story, especially mil s-f, we try to wargame scenarios according to the set up rational plan. That is why many people see Draka verse as illogical, given the demise of the Alliance. Treat that as an analogue to the forshadowing of the demise of USA and rise of China - the Alliance have grown complecent in their thought that they are on the top, they have better technology and will be victorious in a potential coming fight.
How it ended we all know.
 
Actually no I see it as illogical because you know, their society doesn't explode. These sound like the imperial japanese or germany. More interested in politics rather than actually winning the war. Mistaking cruelty for strength.
 
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