For Want of a Nail (novel)
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LC Class | E46 .S62 1997 |
For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga is an
Background
In the alternate world it describes, For Want of a Nail is a history of North America written by Robert Sobel, a business historian. North America is divided between two nations: the
Plot
For Want of a Nail opens in 1763, after the end of the
In 1780, seeking to prevent further rebellion, the Parliament of England passes the "Britannic Design," a bill that reorganizes the North American colonies into the partially self-governing
In the CNA,
After clashing with each other in the
The USM gives rise to a monopolistic corporation, Kramer Associates, and enters into a period of imperialistic expansion and dictatorship in the late 19th century that sees it conquer Central America, part of South America, Alaska, and Hawaii and ultimately create a puppet state in Siberia that destabilizes the Russian Empire into collapsing. A clash between the Mexican government and Kramer Associates in the 1920s and 1930s results in the latter relocating to the Philippines in 1936.
A
The Kramer Associates detonate an
The final section is a critique of the history by USM historian Frank Dana, who complains that Sobel's central thesis was the simplistic notion that the North American Rebellion represented a conflict between moderation (CNA) and extremism (USM) and that Sobel is a beneficiary of Kramer Associates, allowing readers to possibly see Sobel as an unreliable narrator of the history.
Writing and publication
Sobel wrote the book in the summer of 1971 to keep himself occupied in between book contracts. Sobel's original title for the book was Scorpions in a Bottle, but his agent persuaded him to change it. The inspiration to write a counterfactual history came from Jeff Weinper, a former student of Sobel who later died in the Vietnam War and to whom the book is dedicated.[2] Another aim of the book was to spoof the growing trend in academic history for heavily footnote-laden, unreadably dense prose (the more outrageous the assertion made in the text, the denser the footnotes). Each chapter was written in the style of a different academic historian, and the final critique by Frank Dana was based on the savage reviews commonplace in historical journals. Sobel took the names of historical characters and academic historians from friends and current and former students.
A hardcover edition of For Want of a Nail was published in March 1973 by the Macmillan Company. The book was reviewed in several newspapers and in Time. For Want of a Nail was eventually republished in hardcover in 1997 by Greenhill Books of Great Britain, a publisher of military histories, after Greenhill's publisher heard about the book from the editor of the Military Book Club at a lunch in New York. Also in 1997, Sobel was awarded a Special Achievement Sidewise Award for Alternate History for the book. A softcover edition was published by Greenhill Books in 2002.
Publication history
- Macmillan Company, March 1973 (hardcover). LCCN 72084742
- Greenhill Books, September 1997 (hardcover). ISBN 1-85367-281-5
- Greenhill Books, August 2002 (softcover). ISBN 1-85367-504-0
See also
- H. Beam Piper's 1948 short story, "He Walked Around the Horses", has the same divergence point from our history, but views events from a 19th-century European perspective, told around the disappearance of Benjamin Bathurst.
- The Two Georges, a 1995 alternate history by Harry Turtledove and Richard Dreyfuss that features a similar premise and a fictitious alternate loyalist North American state called the North American Union
References
- ^ "Uchronia: For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga". uchronia.net.
- ^ Sobel, Robert (1973). For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga. New York: Macmillan.
- Hand, Judson, "If Washington Hadn't Been the Father of His Country," New York Daily News, 18 February 1973.
- MacGregor, Martha, "The Week in Books," New York Post, 31 March 1973.
- Skow, John, "Parlor Games," Time, 9 April 1973.