Shitty Alternate History Thread - If only the Romans had AK-47's they would've survived...

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Has anyone read Eric Harry's book Arc Light? That's another good one. It starts out as a limited nuclear war, then turns conventional. It's really good writing, but I have zero idea how realistic it is.
 
I know in the past people have posted about Ian/AH.com drama in this thread, but I wonder if Ian or his toadie CalBear have read this thread given defending Kiwifarms is now an auto-ban.
iannolikekiwifarms.png
It's ironic since by the logic of today's world, Ian and his site should be dropped for antisemitism (just show his posts to some Zionists lol), racism (Ian's famous "slavery gets shit done" shirt), transphobia (he claims to have apologized for it, naturally the AH.com troon squad doesn't buy it), and who knows what else given he set all Chat threads older than one year to read only because he's so paranoid of being cancelled.
 
I know in the past people have posted about Ian/AH.com drama in this thread, but I wonder if Ian or his toadie CalBear have read this thread given defending Kiwifarms is now an auto-ban.
View attachment 3686998
It's ironic since by the logic of today's world, Ian and his site should be dropped for antisemitism (just show his posts to some Zionists lol), racism (Ian's famous "slavery gets shit done" shirt), transphobia (he claims to have apologized for it, naturally the AH.com troon squad doesn't buy it), and who knows what else given he set all Chat threads older than one year to read only because he's so paranoid of being cancelled.
HAHAHA I REMEMBER THE SHIRT, I almost forgot about it, damn, wish I had it somewhere.
 
Without going all Peshawar Lancers, the asteroid that caused the Tunguska Event apparently would have hit St. Petersburg smack on if it had been an hour off.

It's a small thing, but a major European city getting Sodomized like that at that time would have to be an epic event.

Also like the idea of something involving the Knights Hospitallers' real life colonies in the Caribbean. Crusader knights versus pirates. It's nuts that a crusader order owned property in the New World and it never gets talked about.

Edit: Fuck it, another topic:
You believe what you want about the USS Liberty incident, I read "Blood on the Water" a while back and I'm going to take it at its word that it's honest scholarship/trustworthy, though it makes some huge claims.
Blood on the Water claims that not only was the USS Liberty deliberately attacked by Israel (no shit, you'd have to be an idiot to think otherwise), but it was done with the collusion of CIA/Lyndon Johnson gay-ops to try to inveigle us in the Six Day War to remove Nasser, which would have potentially sparked WW3. The alarming part there (and she makes a really strong case) is that the US was IN ON IT.
Anyways, there are so many Cuban Missile Crisis plots, and a fair number of 1980s late Cold War plots, but for WW3 I don't think anybody has ever done the Six Day War as the flashpoint.



Something I've been toying around with - just thinking on - is if the Indians hadn't been conquered. That's not particularly original, but I don't recall as anybody ever has really tried doing something serious with the American Indian, when it is it's usually a cliche Aztec Empire (often a monolith, as if an "Aztec Empire" was a real thing) and an Inca Empire, which is a shame because a big part of the draw for me of American Indians is not their noble savage character but the way they carried on in their own little, Neolithic/Copper Age civilized world that had glimmers of bigger things to come. They were a civilization just starting to come online that got murdered in its cradle.

A lot of the Indian tribes remind me of specific Old World cultures. The Pueblo people are obviously Nabateans (or, since I knew of the Pueblo long before Petra, for me it's more that the Nabateans are Old World Pueblo). The Haida, up in the Pacific Northwest, were described as the "Vikings of the Pacific" because they were huge on raiding from canoes, and even had naval battles involving things like swivel guns and big stones tied to the ropes that they would throw to crush enemy craft. Haida also had this wonderful wooden armor (who does that?). Plains Indians, particularly Comanche, are obviously Mongols. The Mississippians are obviously Egyptians mixed with Chinese, like China they had to contend with a nasty river that's devoted to drowning people and requires considerable hydraulics to make tolerable, and like Egyptians they loved building mounds, though instead of their best marvels being pyramids, it's shapes (mostly snakes). Cherokees to me feel like the Greeks, more intellectual race, with their semi-independent invention of writing (Sequoyah knew of writing from Whites, but was himself illiterate) and their general propensity for adopting outside learning, fine oratory, slave economy, and such. Iroquois are the Romans, warlike republic with very strong civic institutions, excellent siege engineers, systematically expansionist. Navajo are kind of like ancient Hebrews or Scottish Highlanders or any other essentially sedentary pastoral people. I can picture them being the cradle (not for real reasons, but just parallelism) of a major religion.

The best justification I have for the Indians not being conquered is a scenario where Western Rome survives, my justification (Based on "Escape from Rome") being that large hegemonic empires tend to be too conservative and dysfunctional to do much of anything but sit and rot where they are. So in a setting where Western Rome dominates the Atlantic coast and China the Pacific coast, you would inevitably get settlement and exchange with the New World, but potentially at a small scale where it buys the Indians time to not lose everything and still retain most of their unique character.

The only problem with all that junk I wrote is that to a large extent the Indians of American history were what they were because of the ways Whites actively interacted with them. No civilization program and the Cherokee are simply another tribe of corn-farming barbarians like any other, for example. So stereotyping the tribes and then translation them to Old World equivalents is kind of indulgent, there, as opposed to trying to conjecture what they would have become based just on geography. And the Stone Age world of America was plenty early enough that it's hard to say. I figure some regions that didn't really have interesting Indians would have actually wound up being very important, like the backwards Cree/Ojibwe/Chippewa would become extremely important as soon as the copper and iron ages hit.
 
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My favorite Alt-history is the GURPS setting Aeolus, what if the "Divine Wind" didnt blow in William the Orange's favor? Turns out liberalism dies temporarily strangled in the crib and the great liberal revolution didn't happen until 1939 in eastern europe with the Austro Hungarian Empire, also liberalism is a catholic phenomenon and pro clerical also the first aircraft are jet planes developed by Coanda and the MiG guy, its really cool, and i love heckin wholesome liberal revolutions(democratic germany is unironically my favorite HOI IV playthrough) if trove was still up I'd link it but *sigh*
Finally found a mirror of the trove all the gurps alternate earth stuff was top notch in both unusual divergences and interesting settings Midgard is a pretty based one as well.
 
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I know in the past people have posted about Ian/AH.com drama in this thread, but I wonder if Ian or his toadie CalBear have read this thread given defending Kiwifarms is now an auto-ban.
View attachment 3686998
It's ironic since by the logic of today's world, Ian and his site should be dropped for antisemitism (just show his posts to some Zionists lol), racism (Ian's famous "slavery gets shit done" shirt), transphobia (he claims to have apologized for it, naturally the AH.com troon squad doesn't buy it), and who knows what else given he set all Chat threads older than one year to read only because he's so paranoid of being cancelled.
Ian is a turbo leftist, Calbear is basically a centrist democrat, and Burton is just a janny.

(I've had the misfortune of being on AH.com in the past).

I recall an incident a few years ago when he got insulted by some feminist(or tranny) on discord and had a massive spergout, banning like thirty people in a single thread.

But yeah, Ian is somewhat hypocritical, he makes a lot of enemies because he's both very Anti Zionist and doesn't automatically bend over whenever a troon is talking.

Thread Tax: I fucking hate the Falcon Cannot Hear. Its an FDR cocksucking Jewish fantasy-with a revenge fantasy against Southern whites being literally exterminated, and the country becoming ultra liberal in the fifties.
 
Thread Tax: I fucking hate the Falcon Cannot Hear. Its an FDR cocksucking Jewish fantasy-with a revenge fantasy against Southern whites being literally exterminated, and the country becoming ultra liberal in the fifties.
An AH.com timeline where the US turns socialist? How unusual and strange.
 
An AH.com timeline where the US turns socialist? How unusual and strange.
Its not even that, its the clear authorial axe grinding. The servile worship of FDR-the outright genocide of White southerners, (the original constitution being outright lost in the fighting), somehow Nazi Germany still losing and the Soviets getting to fucking Paris. (I'm sorry what...did the author ignore lend-lease, oh right he's a Jewish soc dem so...)

The country somehow legalizing homosexuality in the fifties and Kinsey leading an earlier sexual revolution-put a nasty taste in my mouth, somehow there is no communist vs soc dem struggle (as the communists and the more moderate socialists are basically the last two factions standing-they come to a contrived peace because the author set the title as ending in 1944).

The author is basically writing a long grievance against modern American politics, a worship of social democracy over outright Stalinism, and sucks off FDR so hard, it makes me outright sick.

(Btw the author was banned I think over disagreeing with Ian over Israel...go figure).

Here is a link to the thread, note that you need an account to view it

Not sure where else to put this, but something hilarious has just happened to alternatehistory.com. Apparently the owner, Ian the Admin, was doxxed on a discord and his doxx had an imagine of him wearing a pro-slavery shirt.

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The thread went well for about three seconds until someone posted the actual message from the discord
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The man who posted this was immediately banned

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The thread very quickly went downhill from there as Ian started sperging and banning almost everyone in the thread

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:story:

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BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD

If anyone knows how to archive a webpage that requires an account to view like this website or resetERA, that would be great
I was on another forum and discord at the time, pretty much everyone had cooked the popcorn and we were watching the fireworks. You had Ian go on a rampage, discord trannies come back under socks to provoke him again and get banned(again), and so much salt from all parties.
 
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Its not even that, its the clear authorial axe grinding. The servile worship of FDR-the outright genocide of White southerners, (the original constitution being outright lost in the fighting), somehow Nazi Germany still losing and the Soviets getting to fucking Paris. (I'm sorry what...did the author ignore lend-lease, oh right he's a Jewish soc dem so...)

The country somehow legalizing homosexuality in the fifties and Kinsey leading an earlier sexual revolution-put a nasty taste in my mouth, somehow there is no communist vs soc dem struggle (as the communists and the more moderate socialists are basically the last two factions standing-they come to a contrived peace because the author set the title as ending in 1944).

The author is basically writing a long grievance against modern American politics, a worship of social democracy over outright Stalinism, and sucks off FDR so hard, it makes me outright sick.

(Btw the author was banned I think over disagreeing with Ian over Israel...go figure).


I was on another forum and discord at the time, pretty much everyone had cooked the popcorn and we were watching the fireworks. You had Ian go on a rampage, discord trannies come back under socks to provoke him again and get banned(again), and so much salt from all parties.
God, that must've been something. When did that whole thing happen again?
 
God, that must've been something. When did that whole thing happen again?
AH.com fic. The Falcon Cannot Hear: The Second American Civil War 1937-1944.
 
Are you guys following 'Roses, Tulips & Liberty'?
It's an althis project that's mostly told through visual media (little narrative text, but a lot of usually very well crafted maps) and that has really grown on me - it's not as in depth as I usually like, but it's got an intriguing premise and spins it out in a way that leads to some really interesting ideas. It's also not just used as a vehicle for the author's politics, which is a nice change of pace.

The Project's Wiki and it's Plebbit page.

View attachment 1895 - The World.jpg

The basic premise of the timeline is that the Netherlands don't lose their North American colonies in the 2nd Anglo-Dutch war, and instead go on to eplore and colonise the American exterior, resulting in a Dutch-dominated but overall multipolar North America. As usual this snowballs into a bunch of alternate developments around the globe, and by the 20th century the world looks completely different from ours.
1915 - Tussenlandt.png


Some particular highlights:

- The Dutch colony on the East coast (New Netherland) declares independence during the French revolutionary wars, but most of the American interior (named the 'Tussenland') remains a thinly settled Dutch colony until slowly gaining independence similarly to Canada. The main language is Amerikaens, a Dutch dialect with slight differences in orthography and vocabulary.

- The Iroquois are closely allied to the Dutch, but the independent New Netherlands kick them out of their homelands, so the Netherlands gives them a piece of Tussenlandt to the Southwest to migrate to and in turn expulse the local natives further west. The Iroquois are culturally dutchified and turn into a mixed race 'Irokees' creole population. The natives kicked out from Irokesenlandt are resettled in OTL Oklahoma, which eventually gains independence as a patchwork native-majority petrostate called Opdamsland

- The American West is settled by Dutch pioneers (the 'Voortrekker'), who initially squat on territory claimed by Mexico and are thus influenced by Spanish culture, but eventually gain their own state (the Amerikaens Free State in OTL Oregon, basically a Redneck Boer Ethnostate).

- The Dutch do a bunch of slavery in the American South, which eventually results in a slave rebellion assisted by Spain and an 'Afro-Amerikaner'-majority country in OTL Louisiana, which becomes dominated by a crackpot black nationalist religion and devolves into a theocratic shithole for a while. Imagine Black Hebrew Israelites, but they speak a creole based on Dutch.

- Britain just straight up buys Argentina for some reason, and it's now an English-speaking country called 'Carolina'.

- Italy never unifies, and Venice and Genoa continue being banker-run merchant republics, with the latter getting in on the colonialism business and financing the Panama canal. Also, the Sovereign Order of Malta is in exile on the Virign Islands.

- The Netherlands ally with the Qing and basically gain a monopoly on trade in East Asia, which the British counter by astroturfing a Taiping-style rebellion that establishes a Christian monarchy in Southern China. Instead of Japan, Korea goes through rapid westernization and industrialization, annexes Manchuria and invades China, but ultimately gets their asses handed to them by Russia.

- Russia invests a lot more in their Pacific holdings, retaining Alaska and colonizing a bunch of islands including Hawaii, but falls to a civil war in the 1920s which is ultimately won by the National Republicans, a movement of populist anti-imperialist authoritarians.

- France undergoes a communist revolution in the late 19th century, which slowly devolves into increasing tyranny similar to the USSR until it's a full on Stalinist dictatorship. France, Austria and the Ottomans start a world war against Britain and Russia, end up losing and getting partitioned. Afterwards, a Cold War begins between the victors, liberal Britain and National Republican Russia.

There's lots more interesting stuff, so I definitely recommend eploring - it's definitely one of the better alt history projects I've seen around lately.

1935 - The World.png
 
I know in the past people have posted about Ian/AH.com drama in this thread, but I wonder if Ian or his toadie CalBear have read this thread given defending Kiwifarms is now an auto-ban.
View attachment 3686998
It's ironic since by the logic of today's world, Ian and his site should be dropped for antisemitism (just show his posts to some Zionists lol), racism (Ian's famous "slavery gets shit done" shirt), transphobia (he claims to have apologized for it, naturally the AH.com troon squad doesn't buy it), and who knows what else given he set all Chat threads older than one year to read only because he's so paranoid of being cancelled.
LMAO that was me.
I think another thing you missed is Calbear's now 180 on Israel, also the current politics thread, the ukranians one, it's all very funny since they use blatantly biased sources.
There's even one faggot who thinks he's some sort of spy by bringing "opposition research" which is basically going on counterpunch, z telegrams, leftist sites and other who think russia isn't the both dumb and loosers, that somehow also present a gigantic threat to world democracy.
Or some other who basically goes on gen pol to say "see this biased clickbait article about recycling, or how about cars are dumb or how electric cars solve all the problems, or how we're about to see the fusion power breakthrough"

Also on post 1900, there's a shittons of "what if we had more trainzz threads" where everyone cums at the thought of banning cars and how passenger trains in a continental country like the USA make more sense than air travel, or how about the UK is so badass and awesome it could had fielded m1 garands in ww1 without issues (better rifle at halloween) or how the 1956 suez crisis was completely legit.


Most of the good folk left, Wiking and company, who gave up making threads to the replies of :"Germany dumb and can't change, also if they win, somehow america nukes germany, forgetting germany air defenses and jet aircraft would make such premise, optimistic, to say the least)
Also UK colonialism good, all others bad and evil, Southerners should had been genocided cause niggers, and other tropes i fucking hated.
i don't know much about alt history forums, but if you guys have alternatives, i'm listening.
ww2aircraft.net is great but it's dead.
 
Started reading The Difference Engine.
It's a greatly detailed setting but so far I don't like it much to be honest, having real life characters in it feels goofy and it's not a great style of writing.
 
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Started reading The Difference Engine.
It's a greatly detailed setting but so far I don't like it much to be honest, having real life characters in it feels goofy and it's not a great style of writing.
I personally really enjoyed The Difference Engine, but I'm a worldbuilding autist who can tolerate mediocre writing and characters if the setting is intriguing and detailed.
One thing I liked is the meta-story that connects it all together.
 
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I personally really enjoyed The Difference Engine, but I'm a worldbuilding autist who can tolerate mediocre writing and characters if the setting is intriguing and detailed.
One thing I liked is the meta-story that connects it all together.
Same i loved the difference engine it was fantastic also it gets props for one of the most uncomfortable sex scenes ever committed to print
 
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LMAO that was me.
I think another thing you missed is Calbear's now 180 on Israel, also the current politics thread, the ukranians one, it's all very funny since they use blatantly biased sources.
There's even one faggot who thinks he's some sort of spy by bringing "opposition research" which is basically going on counterpunch, z telegrams, leftist sites and other who think russia isn't the both dumb and loosers, that somehow also present a gigantic threat to world democracy.
Or some other who basically goes on gen pol to say "see this biased clickbait article about recycling, or how about cars are dumb or how electric cars solve all the problems, or how we're about to see the fusion power breakthrough"

Also on post 1900, there's a shittons of "what if we had more trainzz threads" where everyone cums at the thought of banning cars and how passenger trains in a continental country like the USA make more sense than air travel, or how about the UK is so badass and awesome it could had fielded m1 garands in ww1 without issues (better rifle at halloween) or how the 1956 suez crisis was completely legit.


Most of the good folk left, Wiking and company, who gave up making threads to the replies of :"Germany dumb and can't change, also if they win, somehow america nukes germany, forgetting germany air defenses and jet aircraft would make such premise, optimistic, to say the least)
Also UK colonialism good, all others bad and evil, Southerners should had been genocided cause niggers, and other tropes i fucking hated.
i don't know much about alt history forums, but if you guys have alternatives, i'm listening.
ww2aircraft.net is great but it's dead.
AH.com has both a large contingent of online communists and the like-hence the radical reconstruction/southern genocide fantasies, and a lot of British liberals who with some gusto still defend the British empire. You also have some euro left nationalists-the guy that wrote the 2002 Spain Morocco war got banned for attacking the catalan independence referendum, and Worffran(an american online communist) was demanding Europe take in a billion niggers because well...its like a Nazi not too! People were getting kicked responding with a "this is ridiculous and unreasonable" for disagreeing with him.

So you get this weird mixture of outright communist/anarchist fantasizing and Euro liberal centrism where trains and empire were good, or at least-not bad.

Its really interesting from a sociological perspective-seeing American communists and European/british liberals interact. Ian's anti zionism and the fact he did a heckin transphobia or homophobia just over a decade ago-creates dissension with a lot of the leftists on the site. Calbear is a moderate(for a California) dem that rages non stop against Nazis, and Burton is just a janny that enjoys the power trip.

I would guess the average AH.com user is an overweight 27-year-old autistic male that uses they/he pronouns and thinks american conservatism could have been destroyed if you genocided the south and made it a nigger republic who votes a straight democrat ticket and has generally liberal acquittances.

Its an ugly milieu but they are the only game in town.
 
The Difference Engine sucked, was boring, didn't go anywhere, and eventually went up its ass at the end.

The world-building was actually pretty sophisticated for steampunk, mostly it's just that like in any genre the original foundational works are well thought out and everything afterwards is dreck. Almost everything I see that's steampunk is basically fantasy with a top hat on, no attempt at all to represent Victorian social mores or society (just costumes), ridiculous technology like clockwork robots, kind of a childish thing. I used to like airships a lot, but at some point I read a ton about zeppelins (for a WW1 history essay) and now I can't really enjoy fantasy airships anymore because I know too much about real-world zeppelin doctrine (they're flying submarines that used the cover of dark and extreme altitude to survive) to not cringe when they're flying around like little ships shooting each other with cannons.

Anyways, the book is nothing like that, the crazy future technology is basically things like extremely shitty steam cars that existed OTL in the late 1800s (but were quickly outcompeted by internal combustion engines) and of course the eponymous engines that perform the same tasks as mid-1900s computers (scientific research and record-keeping) but instead of being the size of rooms are the size of entire buildings and are measured in yardage. I thought hacking would be a much bigger part of the story than it was.

I do think the book did a good job, much better than I would have expected, of depicting an alternate history ideological conflict. That's very hard to do, it's just way too easy to play off existing ideologies. Basically it seems there's a melange of Luddites, Victorian-era socialists and anarchists including utopian socialists (the phalanstery movement survives), and then some sort of early technocratic/progressive movement. I don't understand why Byron is supposed to be a Radical when he was a Romantic, didn't they usually sympathize with agrarianism? I googled it and it seems he even defended Luddites in real life. Maybe the authors were just going for a role-reversal, but everywhere else they use real life people, it's in a way that makes sense (like Vallandigham ruling the rump-US). The role of the shattered US at first looked like a cliche, but a big deal is made out of Britain having used espionage to completely derail their industrial rival.

The book mostly revels in a celebration of heroic Victorian science, like Peshawar Lancers revels in British colonialism. One of the main heroes is a paleontologist and references are made to lots of different disciplines of science and controversies of the era, which, interestingly, are not all resolved yet like we would (the authors don't presume that any smart guy would just obviously realize the world is billions of years old just because technology is somewhat more advanced). It's an interesting vibe.

But I just dont' find the plot interesting or the prose enjoyable. It was a chore to slog through by the end. I've also come to find it tedious how many authors have a fixation on whoring, especially Victorian London, it's everywhere in fiction.
 
The Difference Engine sucked, was boring, didn't go anywhere, and eventually went up its ass at the end.

The world-building was actually pretty sophisticated for steampunk, mostly it's just that like in any genre the original foundational works are well thought out and everything afterwards is dreck. Almost everything I see that's steampunk is basically fantasy with a top hat on, no attempt at all to represent Victorian social mores or society (just costumes), ridiculous technology like clockwork robots, kind of a childish thing. I used to like airships a lot, but at some point I read a ton about zeppelins (for a WW1 history essay) and now I can't really enjoy fantasy airships anymore because I know too much about real-world zeppelin doctrine (they're flying submarines that used the cover of dark and extreme altitude to survive) to not cringe when they're flying around like little ships shooting each other with cannons.

Anyways, the book is nothing like that, the crazy future technology is basically things like extremely shitty steam cars that existed OTL in the late 1800s (but were quickly outcompeted by internal combustion engines) and of course the eponymous engines that perform the same tasks as mid-1900s computers (scientific research and record-keeping) but instead of being the size of rooms are the size of entire buildings and are measured in yardage. I thought hacking would be a much bigger part of the story than it was.

I do think the book did a good job, much better than I would have expected, of depicting an alternate history ideological conflict. That's very hard to do, it's just way too easy to play off existing ideologies. Basically it seems there's a melange of Luddites, Victorian-era socialists and anarchists including utopian socialists (the phalanstery movement survives), and then some sort of early technocratic/progressive movement. I don't understand why Byron is supposed to be a Radical when he was a Romantic, didn't they usually sympathize with agrarianism? I googled it and it seems he even defended Luddites in real life. Maybe the authors were just going for a role-reversal, but everywhere else they use real life people, it's in a way that makes sense (like Vallandigham ruling the rump-US). The role of the shattered US at first looked like a cliche, but a big deal is made out of Britain having used espionage to completely derail their industrial rival.

The book mostly revels in a celebration of heroic Victorian science, like Peshawar Lancers revels in British colonialism. One of the main heroes is a paleontologist and references are made to lots of different disciplines of science and controversies of the era, which, interestingly, are not all resolved yet like we would (the authors don't presume that any smart guy would just obviously realize the world is billions of years old just because technology is somewhat more advanced). It's an interesting vibe.

But I just dont' find the plot interesting or the prose enjoyable. It was a chore to slog through by the end. I've also come to find it tedious how many authors have a fixation on whoring, especially Victorian London, it's everywhere in fiction.
What you didn't like it when the protagonist boffed a squaw? I'm in a different boat than you I really enjoyed the book and I thought it stuck the landing quite well, but then again im a huge a cyberpunk fan and DE is basically a proto-cyberpunk society in tophats and waistcoats.
 
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