Book of the Week: Conquistador.

Ah, Conquistador. Picked it up to look up something about farming, reread the whole thing. Alternate history, in which an officer (and Virginian fighting-man) discovers in 1946 a stable dimensional portal to a North America undiscovered by Europeans. It’s a great book, visibly showing the influences of Silver Age science fiction (particularly H. Beam Piper), but it’s also telling that S.M. Stirling needed to quote Niven’s Law* in the foreword. I imagine some of the hate mail was epic.

#commissionearned

*Well, one of Niven’s Laws:

There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author.

The term is ‘idiot.’