Literature / Separated at Birth: America and Drakia

To say that The Draka by S. M. Stirling, and its shameless Alternate History Wank and Space-Filling Empire tendencies, are controversial would be a vast understatement. Much digital ink has been spilled over the series, and attempts to Deconstruct the series— where the Draka receive their comeuppance, or where a more realistic eye is applied and the Draka are limited to southern Africa at the most— have become a very popular sub-genre in the Alternate History fandom.

Separated at Birth: America and Drakia by Ephraim Ben Raphael on AlternateHistory.com is one take on this sub-genre, and is at once very similar but very different from the above. Although it is a more realistic take on the Draka, it's better to say that it's more of a Reconstruction of the series that tries to make the rapid rise to power of the Draka (or Drakia, as they're known in this timeline) more believable. Another major theme in this timeline, as its name suggests, is how Drakia is the Evil Counterpart of America: being created as a result of the same war, both expanding rapidly across the continent and demanding the assimilation of everything in their way into their own way of life...

The story can be read on Alternatehistory.com or on Sufficient Velocity.

Separated at Birth: America and Drakia provides examples of:

• Apocalypse How: The Final War causes Global Social Disruption at the best and a Global Social Collapse at the worst, leading to the death of billions and severe damage to Earth's ecosystems. However there are still small nation states holding on and trying to rebuild.
• Allohistorical Allusion:
  • Elvira Naldorssen is an immigrant to Drakia who embraces its culture wholeheartedly, writes essays fiercely defending its culture against outside attacks, and eventually writes a story that's a thinly-veiled Author Tract, which gives rise to a new political ideology. Sound familiar?
  • The Pobladisto Revolution in Spain, where a revolutionary group overthrows the monarchy, sets up a state under a new ideology, and launches purges of its enemies, invokes both Red October and the Spanish Civil War.
  • The Russian Rodina Zemlya ("Mother Earth") government engages in the "Peremesheniye" ("Re-settlement"), a system of relocating people to government-made agricultural communities which results in the deaths of millions— reminiscent of Cambodia under Pol Pot.
• The Assimilator: A more mundane example: "Fascism" in this timeline is the name given to the US ideology urging assimilation into Anglo-American culture, while remaining multiracial.
• A Lighter Shade of Gray: America is expansionist, never quite shook its Manifest Destiny phase, and is fond of showing off its own military might. Compared to the slave-holding, warlike, fundamentalist Christian Drakia, however, the US looks downright saintly.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Thanks in no small part to the Stone Dogs plague, the Drakians are able to destroy the Alliance for Democracy in the Last War and impose the Final Society across much of the Earth. For all of fourteen months before it collapses into civil war and mass bondsmen rebellions as its few allies turn on it.
• Bittersweet Ending: Billions are dead and the environment is devastated, but Drakia has collapsed and the survivors have the freedom to rebuild.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: None of the great powers in the Separate-verse are clean. The USA is expansionist, forces minorities to culturally assimilate, and holds Manifest Destiny as part of its creed. Japan is similar, but with the Manifest Destiny replaced with Starship Troopers-style military franchise. The Rex Movement is a fundamentally conservative reaction to American, Radical Geoist, and Drakian ideologies, willing to kill millions in the name of morally purifying Europe. However, they are still somewhat better than the authoritarian radical Geoists willing to starve their own people and destroy their factories. And even they are better than the Drakian Empire, a slave-holding, totalitarian, eugenicist and racist society.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Just as in the Draka series, Drakia maintains a form of slavery by any other name based off indentured servitude, though they're known as "bondsmen" rather than "serfs".^note  In the original series, it's noted that the Draka did initially call their serfs "bondsmen" before "serf" won out However, the slave-like nature of the system is a point of contention between Britain and Drakia, and the potential abolition of the bondsman system is one of the reasons why Drakia declares independence.
• Chummy Commies: The Situationist revolution that rises up in China pushes for decentralized government via regional councils and Soviet democracy, creates kibbutz-style communes for farming and light industry, and presides over an explosion of artistic and architectural creativity. While they don't put all their ideas into practice thanks to geopolitical pressures from rival power blocs, things work out fairly well.
• Decon-Recon Switch: Initially begins as a reconstruction of the Draka, examining how a massive slavery-based empire centred on South Africa could become a world power. However, the premise does get a classic deconstruction later on, as it becomes apparent just how brutal and inefficient the bondsman system is. This eventually cumulates in both the Drakians taking over the world and their "Final Society" collapsing in just over a year.
• Dirty Communists: With socialism a minor ideology in-universe, the equivalent of this trope are the Radical Geoists of Spain and Russia. Seeking a back-to-the-earth ideal, they dismantle most heavy industry, purge political enemies, and institute repressive policies to shape their country according to their ideals. In Russia, this goes so far that tens of millions die not just from the forced labor and purges, but from the "Peremesheniye" ("Re-settlement"), a system of forced relocation to government-made agricultural communities.
• The Dog Bites Back: Drakia's attitude towards its allies and collaborators leads to the final fall of the "Final Society" (after fourteen months) being from Japan, Rhomania, and Russia turning on it and a massive uprising of the Muslim Princely States.
• Eagle Land: Word of God says the Americans ITTL were modeled after another Alternate History.com timeline, A More Perfect Union, where the United States lived up to its ideals of freedom and democracy to a greater extent than in our own, while still expanding to a far greater extent throughout the Western Hemisphere. Despite its assimilationist tendencies, most of the country's reactionary elements are excised early on to Drakia, allowing America to become an exemplary beacon of freedom to the world practically since its inception. Tragically, it doesn't save them from the Final War.
• Evil Counterpart: The imperialistic, expansionist Drakians are this to the USA, so much so that it's in the title.
• The Fundamentalist: The Drakians, in contrast to the Straw Nihilist Draka, are Christian fundamentalists who view themselves as crusaders bringing the light of Christ to the heathens with their wars of conquest. When they declare independence from the British Empire, they go so far as to make Jesus their head of state, to the outrage and condemnation of the vast majority of Christendom.
• Handicapped Badass: Brigadier-General Evan Pharrish of the US Army was rendered quadriplegic during the American Civil War, but still led the defense of Chicago, using his uncanny strategic acumen to defeat the invading Confederates and becoming a war hero. He spent the remainder of his years speaking on behalf of disabled war veterans and advocating for disability rights as a Fascist. (Note that Fascism ITTL does not mean A Nazi by Any Other Name.)
• Istanbul (Not Constantinople): A meta-fictional example: rather than Draka, the expansionist South African empire is called Drakia.
  • In addition, the Greek state, claiming descent from the Byzantine Empire, calls itself Rhomania and not Greece.
• Lensman Arms Race: This is another feature shared by this work and the original Draka series by Stirling. In Separated at Birth, it's justified as being the result of an alternate, later Napoleonic Wars leading to accelerated technological development. As an example, the 1850s sees the the WWI-like proliferation of breechloading rifles, poison gas and primitive machine guns in most European armies, while by the 1870s, heavier than air aircraft have already been developed. By the end of the 20th century, there are space colonies and space bombers and genetic engineering including making artificial plagues, though genetically engineered human-wolf-baboon hybrids did not make an appearance like in the original novels.
• Master Race: The Drakians claim their new Homo drakensis are this when they're "created" in the late 20th century. However, in reality, these claims are merely government propaganda, with drakensis being little more than test tube babies (a commonplace technology in this universe at this point) who underwent large amounts of particularly brutal indoctrination and education, making them, at the most, sociopaths with entitlement issues by the time they reached adulthood.
• Mirroring Factions: While America and Drakia hold very different values and express them in distinct ways, at the end of the day they both want to impose their ideals on the world, by force if necessary.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name:
  • Societism, the ideology followed by the readers of Elvira Naldorssen's The Final Society, is this. It rejects democracy and the concepts of equality, natural rights, and consent of the governed; instead embracing the ideals of eugenics, state-enforced religion, enslavement of "inferior" peoples (read: Black Africans), and single-party rule aimed at creating the "Final Society" and the Master Race of Naldorssen's book.
  • Averted with the actual ideology called Fascism in this timeline. While it forces people to assimilate into the dominant culture, TTL's Fascism is civic nationalist instead of ethnonationalist, is multiracial and in favor of religious freedom, and champions women's rights and disability rights.
  • Also averted with the German National Socialists: unlike the real Nazi Party (which was socialist In Name Only), the National Socialist Party of Germany is Exactly What It Says on the Tin as a coalition of German socialist parties from every region of the country.
• Nightmarish Factory: The industrialization of Drakia was even more brutal than the real life industrialization of Europe and America. The timeline mentions that child bondsmen were forced to work in sweltering, 40 degrees Celsius work environments.
• Nuke 'em: Free China is the first country to develop nuclear weaponry, which remains an elusive superweapon to the rest of the world. In the Final War, they launch nuclear strikes on Drakian tactical sites, but not strategic sites; preferring to sue for peace so they can rebuild instead.
• Shout-Out:
  • Elvira Naldorssen's book, The Final Society, is a mix of Anthem and Atlas Shrugged— appropriately enough, Naldorssen is TTL's version of Ayn Rand.
    • The novel's antagonist faction is a decadent anti-individualist republic called the Machine State, where "physically inferior" and oft-seditious citizens are treated like replaceable cogs and wars are won through numerical superiority.
  • A couple of parts reference the long-running AH.com timeline Look to the West:
    • As in LTTW, a young general by the name of Boulanger plays a major role in innovating French tactics— only this time, he's doing it under the Bonapartist regime, not the Jacobins'.
    • Societism, the totalitarian racist ideology of Drakia, is a reference to a similarly-named ideology in LTTW.
  • A couple of entries reference The New Order Last Days Of Europe:
    • Turkey, scarred from the Last Crusade, becomes a paranoid, isolationist, militarist state readying itself for a final cataclysmic war against its enemies, which they call the "Great Trial"— echoing TNO's Black League. The chapter on post-Crusade Turkey even opens on a quote from a book called "A People Under Siege: The Last Days of Turkey", echoing the mod's full name.
    • Omsk becomes the capital of an ultranationalist regime led by a general, similar to the Black League.
  • In the wake of the successful Situationist uprising in China, the revolutionaries offer the Chinese people "truth, justice, freedom, and reasonably-priced love". It's not mentioned if they offered them hard-boiled eggs, though.
  • The Homo drakensis eugenics program is called the Human Instrumentality Project.
• Silly Reason for War: Every major conflict in this timeline from the 1850s onwards occurs due to a trivial incident in the Levant involving a piece of furniture. The consequences, however, are not so silly.
• Space Cold War: After the Great Wars of the mid-20th century, a "Silent War" breaks out between the American-led Alliance for Democracy (as per the original books) and the Drakian-led Pact of Blood (original to this timeline). By the 1980s, tensions between the two spheres leads to the Last War breaking out.
• Space-Filling Empire: Drakia, of course. By the 20th century, they've conquered all of Africa plus the Middle East. The US too owns most of the North American continent.
• Synthetic Plague: Drakia eventually develops the Stone Dogs plague to guarantee an edge over its enemies. Unlike the original Draka series, it does not drive people insane. Instead, it's an extremely deadly variant of influenza, with multiple strains to stretch enemy medical infrastructure. Like the original Stone Dogs, however, its deployment leads to the ultimate Drakian victory in the Last War.
• Tannhäuser Gate: A New York housing complex called Tannhäuser Gate becomes the site of the Last Stand of the United States against invading Drakian forces.
• Turncoat: Zig-Zagged and Exaggerated with Admiral Arthur Klein. During the Great War he goes from being a US Admiral to a Drakian collaborator, then defects back to the US through a series of middlemen and becomes an elder statesman for the US government. When the Drakians conquer America in the Final War, centenarian Klein declares himself "Caesar" of the puppet American Empire before finally flipping the Drakians off on his deathbed.
• Vestigial Empire: When the "Final Society" collapses after just fourteen months, a Drakian general manages to establish a rump state in southern Africa. They're pretty much despised by everyone.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Societist Britain borrows elements wholesale from both Nineteen Eighty-Four and V for Vendetta.
  • 1984: Societist Britain calls its own spin on its ideology "English Societism" or "EngSoc" for short, and attempts to promulgate a simplified version of English called "Newspeak".
  • V for Vendetta: Societist England is led by a totalitarian dictator with the surname Susan, who uses a supercomputer called FATE to assist him in running the nation. The inciting incident for the Situationist uprising in Britain is the burning down of the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales in London using fireworks. The accompanying visual is a screenshot from the film adaptation of V for Vendetta. However, unlike the movie, the Situationists are crushed by the Susan regime, though it damages the EngSoc regime's prestige and power enough that it has to join the Drakian Pact of Blood.
• War Is Hell: The Last Crusade (this version of the Crimean War, which merges into the American Civil War) is far closer to World War I than its Real Life counterparts. The accelerated technological development of this timeline means that breechloading rifles and primitive machine guns are far more widespread, while even poison gas is used towards the end of the war.
• White Man's Burden: The Drakians see themselves as bringing civilization to Africa and its "barbaric" populace.
• Won the War, Lost the Peace: While Drakia wins the Final War, their victory proves to be this as Japan, Rhomania, and Russia, unhappy with Drakia's treatment of their allies, turn on them. Worse still, Dart's plans to impose Christianity on Drakia's Muslim subjects leads to the Muslim Princely States declaring jihad and the Martial Races rising up, leading to the collapse of the "Final Society" after fourteen months.
• Work Off the Debt: The "Bonded Labor System" of Drakia is a form of debt slavery where Bondsmen are put under a master to work off any debts they may have. In practice, however, crooked book-keeping can keep Bondsmen under their masters for generations, and non-whites can become Bonded just by falling into regular debt. This was in fact very similar to what the system of serfdom in the original Draka books evolved from.
• Zeppelins from Another World: Airships are first used by Drakia for aerial reconnaissance before being adopted by every other nation. They are later used to bomb cities during the Schleswig War, prompting the development of drachenfliegers (an ornithopter-like craft) to counter them.