User blog comment:Historygeek1/Continuation of Southern Victory/@comment-21519-20100718010644

I think of Homeward Bound as the model HT would follow. He resumed work on one of his longest and most popular series after taking a number of years off from it (four). The result was a book that was just okay. A few old favorite characters were there, and others were killed off by exposition.

Of course, in the final books of Worldwar HT had built up to the question he answered in HB, a question that hadn't really been asked earlier on: Since Tosevites develop faster than the Lizards, what will happen when they catch up? When they take the lead? When Tosevite starships visit Tau Ceti? These questions are very unlike what the series started as, but they emerged naturally as it went along.

By contrast, there was no evolution of focus in TL-191 from North Ameria-oriented to globally oriented. Japan is still out there and is a threat but it was never enough of a presence in the story to have any hope of capturing the focus or driving the epilogue. And if not the Japanese, then certainly not anyone else. And besides, the US doesn't have much in the way of extracontinental territorial interests, anyway. There are no zones of conflict left to it except the borderlands with Mexico and some Pacific outposts, and neiter has any potential for taking on the storytelling mantle.

Consolidation of the new American mega-nation is capable of carrying the story, but it already has, from VO on. From AF on, really, when Cincy started up with his tangled web of conspiracies, but in VO it really came to the forefront of the story. There's just nothing new that can be done with Canada, and the former CS can only do so much. There will be no withdrawal from the South by US forces, the danger to them if they do so is too real, too immediate. Bomb US soldiers for a hundred years, it's not going to work. I think part of the reason HT played with his counterinsurgency story in MwIH instead of TL-191 Volume 12 is because there was the potential for some tension (well, actual mileage may vary) given that withdrawing looked like a real possibility to US politicians. So you could have multiple ways in which to take the story, believably, and the reader wouldn't be able to tell which was likeliest (though the execution and the story's other objectives telegraphed the ending effectively enough on their own). In TL-191 there's only one result that can emerge, so once you got past the novelty of another 191 story and being reunited with characters who've gotten a lot older since we saw them last, it would pretty much be roughly the same as drawing a straight line and trying to get an audience interested in when you'd stop drawing it.