American Empire (Harry Turtledove) - American Empire

American Empire

Following the Great War, the United States and German Empire are the dominant world powers. The United States has occupied Canada (less the Republic of Quebec, a U.S. puppet state) and Sequoyah (Oklahoma), has annexed Kentucky and portions of Texas, Arkansas, Sonora and Virginia, and has placed the rebellious state of Utah under military occupation. Having led the U.S. to victory, Theodore Roosevelt now faces a challenge to his third-term bid by the Socialist candidate Upton Sinclair, and struggles to maintain order in the occupied territories as rebels and terrorists strike.

Meanwhile, in a defeated Confederacy wracked by inflation and despair, a former Confederate Army sergeant named Jake Featherston and his Freedom Party are preaching a message of hate, blaming the southern aristocracy and the "niggers who stabbed us in the back" for the Confederacy's defeat.

The European situations mirrors North America: the aging Kaiser Wilhelm II and his victorious Germans fight to hold onto captured Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Ukraine, and their vassal state of Poland. The Roman Catholic monarchists of Action Française wish to topple the Third Republic and enthrone Charles XI, while Oswald Mosley's Black Shirts are a growing power in the British Parliament.

As the 1920s draw to a close the world economy crashes and the Great Depression begins, paving the way for fanatics and demagogues the world over to seize power.