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The Guns of the South: Difference between revisions
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(Import from TV Tropes TVT:Main.TheGunsOfTheSouth 2012-07-01, editor history TVTH:Main.TheGunsOfTheSouth, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license) |
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* [[More Dakka]]: The very first scene of the book. And the cover. And, well, the whole premise....
* [[My Friends and Zoidberg]]: The Confederates repeatedly refer to the Federal commissioners as "Our honored guests, and Gen. Butler." They feel they are [[Justified]] in doing so, given their reactions to some of Butler's actions during the war.
* [[Nice Job Fixing It, Villain]]: The inauguration massacre not only fails to kill Lee, but hands him the trump card he needs to get the manumission bill passed, meaning this South will likely have better race relations than its real-world counterpart.
* [[Only Known By Their Nickname]]: The only times Nathaniel Caudell's full name is used is when he musters out of the army, and when he goes to vote. When in uniform, he's Sergeant Caudell, when teaching he's Mr. Caudell, and otherwise everyone calls him Nate.
* [[Our Time Travel Is Different]]: The time machine used is a square platform, a few square meters in size, that travels forwards and backwards exactly 150 years. It dematerialises travellers in much the same way as the transporter in ''[[Star Trek]]''.
* [[Politically
* [[Punch Clock Villain]]: Benny Lang is racist like the rest of the Rivington men, but he treats his slaves decently enough, fought valiantly for the Confederacy, and treated Mollie nicely when he [[The Oldest Profession|calls upon her services]]. At the end of the novel when Lee offers the captive Rivington men a form of amnesty in return for sharing their future knowledge, he asks Lang first for these reasons, thinking him the most likely to honestly consider the proposal and pass it along to his fellows.
* [["The Reason You Suck" Speech]]: Robert E. Lee gets a couple of [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|Crowning Moments Of Awesome]] for doing this, once by [[Shaming the Mob]] (mentioned above) and once when he calls out Rhoodie after learning about AWB's deception and true intentions.
* [[Retired Badass]]: When the Rivington men attack Lee's inauguration, several civilians pick up weapons dropped by slain bodyguards and shoot back. When Jefferson Davis calls for a guard for Lee, the narration remarks that it's probably the highest-ranking guard in history since several generals came in order to see one of their own take office.
* [[Rock Beats Laser]]: And strategically placed TNT can beat a whole passel of future weapons.
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* [[Schizo Tech]]: ''[[The Guns of the South]]'' gets this on purpose.
* [[Shaming the Mob]]: One of Lee's most effective weapons against the Rivington men is [[Time Travel Tense Trouble|future historical documents]] that show how negatively the modern world views the South because of slavery, shattering the notion held by many slavery proponents that they would be [[Vindicated By History]].
** Happens more literally in one scene where a mob, egged on by a Rivington man, attempts to lynch a free black blacksmith. Lee comes upon the incident and [["The Reason You Suck" Speech|gives the men holy hell]], defusing the situation, though the Rivington men later try to use [[Manipulative Editing]] to make Lee look bad.
* [[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.
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