Settling Accounts

The "Settling Accounts" tetralogy is an alternate history setting of World War II by Harry Turtledove in North America, presupposing that the Confederate States of America won the U.S. Civil War. It is part of the Timeline-191 series.

Novels

* "" (2004) ; first book in the series and eighth in the overall timeline
* "" (2005) ; second book in the series and ninth in the overall timeline
* "" (2006) ; third book in the series and tenth in the overall timeline
* "" (2007) ; fourth book in the series and eleventh in the overall timeline

Settling Accounts

As of the beginning of "Return Engagement", North America is a continent divided. Canada, minus the independent Republic of Quebec, is under U.S. occupation — which, as the Confederacy re-arms and the United States redeploy forces south to meet them, has come to mean occupation by U.S.-allied Québécois soldiers. To the south, Kentucky and northwestern Texas have recently been returned to the Confederacy by popular vote (Sequoyah — Oklahoma — having been flooded by US citizens, and its original Native American inhabitants outnumbered, has voted to stay in the United States), but other formerly Confederate territories occupied by the United States after the Great War remain "unredeemed". In total, Virginia north of Fredericksburg has been annexed to West Virginia, a sliver of northeastern Arkansas is attached to Missouri, and a U.S. salient into the state of Sonora (purchased by the Confederacy along with Chihuahua in 1881) is part of an outsized New Mexico that also contains the real-life state of Arizona. The United States also control the formerly British island territories of the Sandwich Islands (including Hawaii), Bermuda and the Bahamas; Cuba, purchased by the Confederacy in the 1870s, remains Confederate.

On the international scale Britain has reformed itself around conservative Winston Churchill and fascistic "silver shirts" led by Oswald Mosley. In the wake of another defeat from the hated Germans, the French Third Republic has collapsed under popular support for the hard-line Catholic and monarchistic Action Français. Both countries are politically allied with the Confederacy, as are Japan (though it openly threatens Pacific European possessions) and Tsarist Russia (Russia remains Tsarist; as mentioned in the American Empire series, the "Great Man" and the "Man of Steel" are defeated by the Tsar's forces around Tsaritsyn, a.k.a. Volgograd (Stalingrad)). The United States are allied with the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, while Quebec stays officially neutral but continues to supply occupation soldiers to the United States for now-exclusively-English Canada. Ireland, with some material support from the United States, won its independence from Britain at the end of the Great War, has been invaded by British forces and there now exists a state of guerrilla war.

On June 22, 1941, Confederate dictator Jake Featherston launches the war with a bombing attack on all major U.S. cities within reach of the border, quickly followed by an invasion of Ohio from Kentucky. At home, he continues his campaign of genocide on the Confederacy's black population. Under Socialist President Al Smith, the United States must quickly gear up and attempt to prevent the CSA salient from reaching Lake Erie and dividing the country, though some (risky) lake shipping and the Canadian rail network north of Lake Superior would remain available in that event. Both Confederate and U.S. scientists are aware of the potential for atomic weapons, though one side appears to have an operational edge. In the United States, Smith must put down yet another Mormon rebellion in Utah, which is surreptitiously aided by the Confederacy just as the United States aid black retaliation in the Confederacy.

Timeline-191

It follows Turtledove's book "How Few Remain" (set in the early 1880s) and trilogies "Great War" (World War I) and "American Empire" (interwar period).