The Stone Dogs

Any book exists upon two levels: the story, and the stories within. Where this book shines for its plot, its slow, careful setup, it's rich world, in short - it's story, it is truely the glimpses into the lives of the characters - the stories within - that cause this work to stick in your mind, years after reading it.On the surface, this is an alternate-future fiction that any player of Diplomacy would be proud of. A nation of slaveholders, the Domination of the Draka, is founded in southern Africa. Because they are hated by their primitive neighbors, they are forced to expand and become more warlike. When World War I breaks out, they already own all of Africa. By their existance, they create a second front for the Ottoman Empire. Because the Turks fight a two front war, they are smashed, and assimilated. When WWII comes around, Russia now has a potent adversary on their southern border, and are unable to protect against Germany, or threaten Japan. As a result, the Germans pound the Soviets, the Japanese rule the Pacific, landing on the US west coast. After Russia falls, the Draka are able to press into the overextended Germans, pushing them back, and back again. Each step in this history derives from the previous step, clearly, simply.So the history works. It is believable, the way a carefully explained chess match is believable. Each move makes sense.This story takes place at the end of this history. The world is now divided into the Alliance for Democracy (the Americas, Japan, some parts of the far east, england) and the Domination of the Draka (Africa, Europe, almost all of Asia - in short, the other 3/5 of the world), and the two sides hate, fear, and totally fail to understand each other. Eventually, inescapably, this failure of understanding leads the world into total war, a total war started for the most personal of reasons.So the _Story_ holds up, is gripping and engrossing.But it is the _Stories_ inside, the tales of individual heroism and cowardice, brilliance and stupidity, the thousand tiny thoughts and decisions that make up the tide of history, that will make you remember this late at night. Not the stories of the main characters, the little stories: the mother who keeps her starving children alive on 'soup', she tells them, soup she made with her blood; the captain of the orbital battleplatform set to self-destruct, closing his eyes and remembering himself a small child (written well enough to bring tears just _recalling_ the passage); the general who, infected by a hallucinogenic virus, cuts off his own testicles with a fire axe. These are the images that will stay with you, long after you put down this book. These are the images that make a book worth reading.Indra

In his gripping conclusion to the "Domination of the Draka" trilogy Stirling takes the conflict between Alliance and Democracy developed in the second book to new levels. The two opposing systems race to colonize space, research computer viruses and vicious biological plagues in preparation for the final apocalyptic war. In between, the secret service agents of the Alliance and the Draka aristocrat Yolande Ingolfsson, a main character of such depth as rarely encountered. The background as well is developed to such a degree that you have no problems immersing yourself in this strange world of theirs. And Stirling is not afraid to actually let the Final War happen - For the Draka, it never was a question anyway. Those last chapters have been someof the most riveting I have ever read. Buy it !

Stirling creates a wonderfully thought out alternate universe where a virulent society manages to dominate Africa, Europe, and Asia in an eminently believable way. The Draka are only reprehensible in the cruelty they show towards their slaves, the rest of their society sounds significantly better than ours. The most chilling part of the series for me is when the Draka are finally able to create genetic changes in their slave classes to ensure their submission to the Dominion. All through this book I kept looking for a way out for the Alliance.... The claustrophobic feeling of impending doom was the most skillfully created element in the book and I take my hat off to Mr. Stirling for his ability.

Urgent: this is the conclusion to the first Draka trilogy, and must be read last. These books--the first is Marching Through Georgia, the second Under The Yoke--are the most compelling and disturbing alternate history I have ever read, and most people have the same response to them. Although the Draka books are already the subject of thousands of Net messages and debates on various lists, they deserve to be far more widely known. Stirling's alternate history branches in the 1770s, with defeated American Loyalists founding a Cape Colony(Drakia, after Francis Drake) and subsequently reinforced by defeated French Royalists and American Confederates, plus the likes of Carlyle, Gobineau, de Maistre, etc., and founding a kind of Anti-America in South Africa, expanding north, grabbing the Ottoman Empire during WWI, and poised for the conquest of Europe as Germany bogs down in Russia in 1942. This sets the stage for Marching Through Georgia, and all the rest follows. It is impossible to overpraise Stirling as a writer of altrnate military history, but he is much, much more: his Anti-America is a brilliant and disturbing provocation to rethink the contours and possibilities of American political culture and history. I have never read anything remotely like these books: they are mostly criticized by people who cannot bear their implications. They are, incidently, hypnotically interesting pageturners, and you'll be cursing when they end--out of frustration that the intoxication of reading them must be suspended. Buy 'em now. This is as good as AH gets.