The Guns of the South: Difference between revisions
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* [[Shown Their Work]]: Very much so, as Turtledove is quite the expert on the [[American Civil War]]. An appendix describes the history of the real 47th North Carolina Infantry, and the contemporary characters are mostly drawn from real people.
** Not to mention the fact that he calculated out the election results in the United States of the novel (1864; just after losing the Second American Revolution), and that of the Confederacy in 1867. ''And'' explains how he calculated it, state-by-state.
* [[Society Marches On]]: [[Your Mileage May Vary]]. Some think that the time-travellers more resemble the pro-apartheid South African ultra-right of the late-eighties/early-nineties (when the book was written), rather than the 2014 they claim to come from; others point out that the one time traveler who is given an age is in his early forties, and as such of just the right age to have joined a pro-apartheid militia when apartheid fell. Its even Lampshaded in the book when Lee muses wonderingly whether or not the men of the AWB are "fanatics as out of place in their time as John Brown was in ours".
** It has also been claimed that choosing the AK-47 instead of for example the M16 is an anachronism; set against this is that AK-47s are so cheap a small extremist group could buy a hundred thousand of them, and so easy to use it can be taught to a ten-year-old who's never seen anything more technologically advanced than a knife - a point that is made in the book itself. (Indeed, this is the reason the AK-47 was created, and still remains in use all over the world.)
** Additionally, the AK-47 is very easy to maintain and can handle a lot of abuse, whereas an M-16 will exhibit significant wear just in routine cleaning and disassembly. An important factor to consider when one's supply base is 150 years in the future and could potentially be cut off at either end.
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