2025 - 11/2025 Meeting

Page Created:  11/09/25.  Last Updated:  12/04/25.

HARRY TURTLEDOVE

ONLINE

Website:  <https://www.stevenhsilver.com/turtledove.html>

Meeting Date: November 8, 2025.

Meeting Site: Zoom Video Conference.

Attendance:  44.

Meeting Program:  Talk / Q & A w/science fiction / fantasy writer.

Notes:

Eleven people attended the post-meeting Virtual Diner Run.  There was talk about Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, rocket punk, and the White Wolf Story Telling Game System.

Newsletter Account:

The following account is reprinted with permission from  THE STARSHIP EXPRESS  Copyright 2025  Philip J De Parto:

The Saturday, November 8, 2025 General Meeting of the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County was held by Zoom Video Conference.  Science fiction / fantasy author Harry Turtledove was our speaker.

Mr Turtledove has written over 80 nnovels and numerous shorter works, including the 1994 Hugo Award Winning novelette, Down in the Bottomlands, which is set in a world in which the Atlantic Ocean never broke through the Gibraltar highlands to flood the Mediterranean Plain.  His best-known books are THE GUNS OF THE SOUTH, THE TWO GEORGES (co-writtend with actor Richard Dreyfuss), and his Worldwar series.

He always liked the weird stuff, reading THE ENORMOUS EGG and THE WONDERFUL FLIGHT TO THE MUSHROOM PLANET at an early age, moving up to Andre Norton and the Heinlein juveniles, and then discovering the book that would change his life, LEST DARKNESS FALL by L Sprague de Camp.  The book features a modern man, an archeologist and historian, who finds himself in 535 AD Rome.  Armed with foreknowledge, Yankee ingenuity, and a dose of luck, he is able to prevent the fall of Rome and the Dark Ages.  Our speaker was fascinated by the novel and discovered that almost everything de Camp had written was true.

Like all science fiction fans of his era, he wanted to go to space, but calculus was not his strong point and he flunked out of Caltech.  He enrolled in UCLA where he earned a BA, MA, and PhD (Byzantium History).  Upon graduation he worked for 11.5 years as an administrator for the LA School Board.  He hated it, but it paid the bills and had good benefits.  During this time he was being published and developing a following in science fiction, particularly alternate history.

Our speaker stated that Livy had written the world's first alternate history (What if Alexander the Great went West instead of East).  The genre became popular after the defeat of Napolean (continued on the club website at 2025-11/2025 Meeting).

Notes:

Books & Stories

CITY IN CHAINS

..........Epic Fantasy.....Based on Occupied France

DOWN IN THE BOTTOMLANDS

..........1994 Hugo Award for alternate geography novelette set on Mediterranean sea bed.

EVERY INCH A KING

..........Fantasy book modeled on Otto Witte's quasi-kingship of Albania for 5 days

..........Impersonated Turkish Prince (he was a dead ringer)

..........Declared war on Montenegro

FIRST NOVEL

..........Wrote first awful novel at 14.  8pt single space.

GUNS OF THE SOUTH

.........Accidental novel.  He was corresponding with Judith Tarr who was bitching about an artist who had given Robert E Lee weapons resembling AK47s.  "Who would give Robert E Lee AK47s?"  And a light went off.

..........Pressure from my bank account

MUST & SHALL

..........Alternate history in which Lincoln is killed by a stray bullet, VP Hannibal Hamlin takes hard line on Confederacy, resulting in a Britan / Northern Ireland type conflict

POWERLESS

.........Dystopian Science Fiction.

.........Inspired by Alexander Dubcek & Vaclav Havel in Czech Republic / Czechoslovakia

RULED BRITANIA

..........The Spanish Armada won

..........William Shakespeare recruited for the resistence.

SOMETIMES A STORM

..........Half million words no one will ever read.  Sometimes a writer make mistakes.  You make lots of mistakes.

THE CASE OF THE TOXIC SPELL DUMP

..........EPA (Environmental Perfection Agency) agent David Fisher

..........Magic / spell waste causes magic pollution

..........Came out of a World Fantasy Convention panel with Alexandra Honigsberg about techno and magic pollution

THE TWO GEORGES

..........Richard Drefuss called Turtledove's wife while Harry was picking up the kids.  "Guess who called while you were out?"

THREE MILES DOWN

..........Aliens & a sunk Russian nuclear submarine

..........UCLA college student Stieglitz is stand in for Turtledove

..........Modeled by real Project Azorian in which US tried to retrieve sunken USSR sub at bottom of Pacific

TWICE AS DEAD

..........Urban Fantasy

..........PI hired by a vampire femme fatale

..........Climax held at a former real LA Tire Dealership that was modeled on an Assyrian Palace

WE HAVEN'T GOT THERE YET

..........Accidental time traveling actors put on Rosencratnz & Guilderstern Are Dead in 1606 with William Shakespeare in the audience

WORLDWAR SERIES

..........Had idea for Worldwar in 1978 but did not feel ready to write it until he was more experienced.

ATLANTIS TRILOGY, an alternate geography series in which the eastern part of North America split into a new continent, was a lot of fun.]

.....Opening Atantis

.....The United States of Atlantis

.....Liberating Atlantis

BYZANTIUM-FLAVORED BOOKS

..........Agent of Byzantium.....Alternate history

..........Justinian..... Historical novel about Emperor Justinian

..........Videssos Series.....Caesar Legion transported to then-future Byzantine Empire

COLLABORATIONS

..........Richard Dreyfuss.....The Guns of the South

..........Judith Tarr................Household Gods

..........James Morrow & Cat Rambo.....And the Last Trump Shall Sound.....Donald Trump is reelected in 2020.  Harry wrote first part, then handed it off to the other

OPTIONED BUT NEVER PRODUCED

..........How Few Remain

..........The Guns of the South

..........World War

MISCELLANEOUS- Books & Writing

.....Next book will be sequel to TWICE AS DEAD

.....Screenplays are a different animal

.....Kipling poem.....In the Neolithic Age

.....Prescient - The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

.....Writes nonfiction as H N Turtletaub.  Uses pseudonym because nonfiction is a smaller market and he did not want to hurt his sales

EARLY BOOKS READ

.....The Enormous Egg

.....Voyage to the Mushroom Planet

.....Andre Norton

.....Robert Heinlein Juveniles

AUTHORS HE ENJOYS

.....Poul Anderson

.....L Sprague de Camp

.....Edgar Pangborn

.....H Beam Piper.....Space Viking.  Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen

.....Charles Sheffield

.....Cordwainer Smith

.....Theodore Sturgeon.....underrated

ALTERNATE HISTORY

..........Wrote nonfiction article, Alternate History, the How-to of What Might Have Been

..........Livy wrote the first alternate history - What if Alexander the Great had turned West instead of East?

..........Lots of post-Napoleonic alternate fiction after Waterloo

..........Very few people know anything about history.

..........Alternate history research - you are going to make mistakes.

..........You try not to be deliberately stupid.

WRITING PROCESS

..........Writes first draft in longhand.  Writes slower than he types, so he has to think and make it tighter as he's writing.  This results in a very clean first draft.

..........Wrote 800 - 1300 words every single day for 2-1/2 years

..........No idea where most of his ideas come from.  Ideas are small change.  Going rate for an idea is a dinner.  Ideas are easy, stories are hard.

..........Not a plotter.  He tells himself the story as he goes along.

GETTING STARTED

..........Read L Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall and it changed his life.  He researched how much was real and how much was made up.  Most of it was real.  De Camp was pleased and appalled that he had such an influence on him.

..........Flunked out of Caltech because of Calculus.  Has BA, MA, and PhD (Byzantine History) from UCLA

..........Worked for 11.5 years for the LA School Board.  He hated it, but it paid the bills and had paid benefits.

WRITING & FANDOM

..........All science fiction is about the world we live in.  It's a funhouse mirror.

..........Best advice he was given- Don't quit your day job.  

..........Does nt read as much sf as he used to.  He doesn't read it the way he used to.  Now he sees the writing as a writer.  He does read nonfiction.

..........Hasn't attended a convention since Covid.  Finds them exhausting and stressful, requiring a recovery period.

..........What you put in the book may not be what others take out of it.  He has received praise from Nazis and Confederates for his sympathetic portrayal of them.

..........How Fandom Has Changed - More Women.  Two wives were in fandom.  Wife # 1 was a big mistake

MISCELLANEOUS

..........Fact is weirder than fantasy.  Phrase "Holy shit" is found in Brittany in ???

..........He is a baseball gamer.

..........Scariest Moments.....# 1.....Proposing to his 2nd (current) wife.....# 2.....Quitting his day job to become a full time writer.