Inconsistencies in Turtledove's Work

Harry Turtledove has periodically been criticized for inconsistencies within a given series or novel, and, more rarely, with the OTL historical record.

Inconsistencies in Southern Victory
1. In Walk in Hell, the flag of the United States is mentioned to have thirty-three stars in one scene and thirty-four in another. In Blood and Iron, it is mentioned that on July 4, 1918, Houston would become the 36th state in the Union, and Kentucky was the 35th. However, the maps at the beginning of each novel in the Great War series reveal that there could not have been more than 33 states at the time of the Great War (Starting with the 48 continental U.S. states of our timeline, taking away the 13 states of the Confederacy - the 11 original states, plus Kentucky and Sequoyah/Oklahoma - and taking away two more for the combinations of North/South Dakota and New Mexico/Arizona).

2. In The Center Cannot Hold, Return Engagement, Drive to the East, and The Grapple, Sam Carsten frequently mentions visiting Ireland during the Great War as part of the U.S. Navy's campaign to smuggle weapons to Irishmen participating in the Rising. Carsten undertook no such mission during the war, though George Enos did.

3. Jake Featherston runs for President of the Confederate States in 1921. In 1924, it is mentioned that he has just turned thirty-five, the minimum age requirement to serve in that office.

4. In The Center Cannot Hold, Abner Dowling speaks with "a distant relative of the last Democratic President [who was Theodore Roosevelt]" who is wheelchair bound as a result of poliomyelitis, a secretary in the Democratic Hoover Administration. Presumably this refers to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In Return Engagement, however, Roosevelt debuts as a lifelong Socialist official.

5. In The Victorious Opposition, Armstrong Grimes attends a high school history class in which the question "What happened to the border between the United States and the Confederate States between the end of the War of Secession and the end of the Great War?" is "correctly" answered "Nothing." In fact, the border was extended in 1881 with the Confederate purchase of the states of Chihuahua and Sonora from Mexico.

6. The Emperor of Mexico during the Second Great War is alternately referred to as Francisco Jose and Maximillian IV.

7. In How Few Remain, Thomas Jackson mentions that Jeb Stuart Jr. is seventeen years old. Stuart was born in 1860 and would therefore have been twenty-one at the time.

8. In The Grapple, a US military installation in Utah is named Fort Custer, and reference is made to George Armstrong Custer having been the commander of US forces in Utah during the Second Mexican War. In fact he was second-in-command to John Pope.

9. George Patton and George Herbert Walker are both Confederate nationals in the Second Mexican War. In fact they were born in California and Connecticut respectively.

10. Josephus Daniels is said to have served as Secretary of the Navy in Theodore Roosevelt's administration during the Great War. Daniels was born in North Carolina and should therefore have been a Confederate national. Also, he was a socialist, making it even more unlikely he would have served in a Democratic Cabinet at a time when the Democratic Party was not seriously challenged by Socialist Party.

11. At the beginning of The Grapple, Hipolito Rodriguez reflects that his son Miguel is serving in Virginia and his son Jorge is serving in New Mexico. When Jorge debuts as a viewpoint character later in the novel, it is he who is assigned to the Army of Northern Virginia.

12. In The Center Cannot Hold, the Confederate state of Tennessee is reported to have voted for Calvin Coolidge in the 1928 US Presidential election.

13. In American Front, Woodrow Wilson is described as having been "a widower for twenty years," meaning that his wife, presumably Ellen Louise Wilson, died in 1894. In OTL she lived until 1916.

14. In Walk in Hell, Reggie Bartlett and Ralph Briggs hear US soldiers singing "Roll Out the Barrel" in 1915. The song was first composed in 1927 and the original lyrics were written in 1934.

15. Winston Churchill is Prime Minister of Britain. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was an American citizen, and thus there is at least a fair chance she would not have moved to Britain and married Churchill's father, as Britain was very clearly considered an enemy state at the time, a fact which has never been addressed.

16. In American Front Jake Featherston implied that he could remember the slaves being manumitted, which is unlikely given what we know about his age and the timeframe of manumission.

17. In Blood and Iron, Abner Dowling considers George Custer's use of the word "Reb" to refer to Confederates anachronistic in the extreme. However, during the Great War, just a few short years earlier, the term was used universally among US characters, including those as young as Mary Jane Enos--and by Dowling himself.

18. In The Center Cannot Hold, Mary McGregor Pomeroy is introduced for the first time as a viewpoint character, and her age is stated to be 13 (in 1924). In Drive to the East, she is said to be 35 (in 1942). If the first age reference were correct, she would have been born in 1911 and would only be 31 in 1942. If the second were correct, she would have been born in 1907.

19. In Blood and Iron, Hosea Blackford is stated to be 15 years older than Upton Sinclair, which implies that Blackford was born in 1863. However, in The Victorious Opposition, Blackford is said to be nearing his 74th birthday, which implies that he was born in either 1860 or 1861.

20. In How Few Remain, Ophelia Clemens is said to be four years old, which implies she was born in 1877; in Drive to the East, Clemens is revealed to be 15 years older than Flora Hamburger, which implies that Flora was born in 1892. However, Flora ran for Congress in 1916, which, if the age reference were correct, would have made her only 24 years old at the time of election, and would have made her ineligible to run at all (25 is the minimum age to run for Congress).

21. In American Front, it is stated that Eugene V. Debs had twice run unsuccessfully for president before the Great War. However, in Blood and Iron, it is stated that Debs had lost to [[Theodore Roosevelt twice in 1912 and 1916 (the second election coming during the Great War), and that Debs was not running for a third nomination.

Inconsistencies in Worldwar
1. In Upsetting the Balance, Heinrich Jager remembers destroying five of the Race's landcruisers in France. Earlier in the book he destroyed six in the battle referred to.

2. In In the Balance, Atvar is addressed as "kinsmale of the Emperor." We later learn that the Race does not keep track of kinship except for those in direct line of succession of the Ssumaz dynasty, and does not practice nepotism.

3. In In the Balance, Teerts destroys a British Spitfire and very casually describes it as "easy as a female in heat." In Second Contact, Nesseref mentions that even thinking of mating behavior in the absense of the appropriate stimuli is indicative of severe hormonal imbalances.

Inconsistencies in Ruled Britannia
1. During an Easter Mass, William Shakespeare thinks of his deceased father, a Catholic who did not live to see his religion restored under Queen Isabella and King Albert and who therefore presumably died before the novel's 1588 point of departure. John Shakespeare lived until 1600.

2. In the same scene Shakespeare mentions that his father often spoke nostalgically of the reign of Mary Tudor and also of Henry VIII prior to the English Reformation. The Reformation was finalized by the Act of Union in 1531. Shakespeare's father was born in 1530. Presumably, he would not have many memories of the pre-Reformation period.

3. Robert Parsons is intensely suspicious of William Shakespeare's possible associations with Edward Kelley and professes to know nothing of Shakespeare's religious or political sentiments. In 1580-81, Parsons travelled through England with his fellow English Jesuit, Saint Edmund Campion, ministering to the country's persecuted Catholic populace. The two visited Stratford-Upon-Avon and there is a great deal of evidence that they met with John Shakespeare, and possibly with William himself. If the elder Shakespeare was indeed a devout Catholic even in the face of persecution, the meeting should have assuaged Parsons' concerns about his son somewhat.

4. Shakespeare's play Prince of Denmark is performed in 1597, and Christopher Marlowe mentions that it had debuted on the stage one year earlier. The play copies Shakespeare's OTL Hamlet in every particular. Hamlet was written in 1600.

5. Lope de Vega encourages Shakespeare to represent an episode between Philip II and Pope Sixtus V in which Sixtus encourages the Spanish King to invade and conquer Protestant England by offering the King one million ducats to be paid the minute a Spanish soldier set foot on English soil at the van of an invading army. In fact, that offer was made to Philip by Sixtus's predecessor, Pope Gregory XIII.

Inconsistencies in War Between the Provinces
1. Throughout the series, characters who are direct analogs to OTL historical figures are both met and referenced. In Sentry Peak, reference is made to the Northern unicorn-rider commander Jeb the Steward, presumably a reference to Jeb Stuart. In Marching Through Peachtree, however, another obvious reference to Stuart calls him Jeb the Beauty.

2. Similarly, California is at different points called Baja Province and The Golden Province.

Inconsistencies in The Guns of the South
1. Robert E. Lee meets with Senator William Barksdale of Mississippi in 1868. Barksdale was killed at the Battle of Gettysburg nearly a year before the novel's point of departure.

Possible Explanation
In the historical novels and series, some of these inconsistencies, such as the apparent gaffes over Hamlet and Woodrow Wilson's widowhood, may be explained by the butterfly effect; however, if this is the case, no such causality is given.