2025 - 11/2025 Meeting

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

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:

Notes:

1994 Hugo Award for alternate geography novelette set on Mediterranean sea bed, Down in the Bottomlands.

Screenplays are a different animal

Guns of the South.....Pressure from my bank account

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

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.

Kipling poem.....In the Neolithic Age

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

NEW WORKS

.....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

.....City in Chains.....Epic Fantasy.....Based on Occupied France

.....Powerless....Dystopian Science Fiction.....Inspired by Alexander Dubcek & Vaclav Havel in Czech Republic / Czechoslovakia

.....Next will be sequel to Twice as Dead

Childhood reads included The Enormous Egg and Voyage to the Mushroom planet.  Moved onto Andre Norton and Heinlein juveniles.

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

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

Guns of the South was an 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.

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

Does 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.

Is a baseball gamer.

Prescient - The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

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

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

Author / Books he likes

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

Theodore Sturgeon.....underrated

Edgar Pangborn

Cordwainer Smith

L Sprague de Camp

Poul Anderson

Charles Sheffield

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

Conventions - hasn't attended since Covid.  Finds them exhausting and stressful, requiring a recovery period.

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

Lots of post-Napoleonic alternate fiction after Waterloo

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

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.

Alternate history research - you are going to make mistakes.

Several books and stories (World War, How Few Remain, Guns of South, more) optioned but never produced.

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

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

Very few people know anything about history.

You try not to be deliberately stupid.

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

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

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 others

Ruled Britania

.....The Spanish Armada won

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

Must & Shalll

.....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 conflice

We Haven't Got There Yet

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

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

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

Byzantium-flavored books

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

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

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

Sometimes a Storm

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

How Fandom Has Changed - More Women

.....Two wives were in fandom

.....Wife # 1 was a big mistake

Scariest Moments

.....# 1.....Proposing to his 2nd (current) wife

.....# 2.....Quitting his day job to become a full time writer.

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

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.