With In at the Death, Harry Turtledove brings closure to the Settling Accounts series, and, ultimately, to an alternate history timeline that spans eleven books. Truly, this is a masterwork of alternate history, every bit as colorful and nuanced as our present-day history, even if somewhat less mutable. History, after all, is written by the victors and revised with time. Mr. Turtledove gives us a few words on the end of a saga, and a hint at what may be coming next.

When I first asked myself what would happen if Lee's courier hadn't lost the three cigars that led to the Battle of Antietam and the history we know today, I wasn't looking that far ahead. I thought, What happens a generation later, when many people who took part in the Civil War (the War of Secession in the new timeline) are still around. The result was HOW FEW REMAIN.

That book raised as many questions as it answered. If the Confederates, in bed with Britain and France, humiliated the United States for the second time in a generation, what would the USA do about it? The obvious answer seemed to be, Look for European allies, too. Which, of course, led to the GREAT WAR books.

Halfway through the GREAT WAR series, one of the characters began thumbing his nose in my general direction and yelling, "Hey, look at me! Look who I am! Look what I could be!" As I recall, Jake Featherston was drunk in a Richmond gutter on leave when I started seriously listening to him . . . and the rest is alternate history.

Yes, there are parallels between the CSA after the Great War in the invented timeline and postwar Germany in the real world. They seemed appropriate. Both were traumatized by defeat, their economies wrecked. Both had opponents who were almost as traumatized and wrecked, and lacked the will to oppose them as they rebuilt. Both had a handy internal group on whom they could blame everything that had gone wrong: the Jews in Germany, blacks in the Confederacy. And so, once the economy collapsed in the late 1920s, both had extremist groups, previously regarded as crackpots, who suddenly looked much more reasonable.

And both sets of extremists longed for revenge, not only against their foreign enemies but against internal foes as well. Jake Featherston isn't quite Hitler. He's a little more clever, a little less . . . well, monomaniacal is a word that springs to mind. Jefferson Pinkard's later career is modeled more explicitly on that of Rudolf Hoess (not Rudolf Hess), the commandant at Auschwitz. After the war, Hoess never quite seemed to figure out why people wanted to hang him--and did. Same holds with Pinkard: he was doing what his higher-ups told him to do, and to him it was a job that needed doing anyway.

As for the race for the bomb, well, scientific talent is distributed differently in the alternate from the way it was in real history. For one thing, the alternate Germany, absent the Nazis, didn't make life too hot for its Jewish physicists. For another, the Confederacy is a new center, one that didn't really exist. The result was—well, you'll see.

There's a nasty postwar resistance in the occupied Confederate States. We were lucky that that didn't happen in Germany after the 1945 surrender. There was a resistance there, but it was poorly organized; too many organizational cooks spoiled that broth. It also started late, because the Germans didn't want to see what was coming their way. They could have given us much more trouble than they did if they'd geared up sooner, started salting away weapons and pulling out key men to continue the struggle after the Wehrmacht went out of business.

How would we have responded if they did? How would the Russians? If a GI couldn't drive down a road without worrying about a guy with a Panzerfaust in the bushes, if truck bombs and suicide bombs were common, how would the Allies have handled them? Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Makes me wonder, too.

(Note: What might have happened if Germany had mounted any kind of insurgency will be explored in Harry Turtledove's next book, The Man With the Iron Heart, coming in 2008 from Del Rey.)

"Forget every thing you ever read about Tolkien's orcs, because these beings are nothing like them," says reviewer Harriet Klausner of Morgan Howell's new trilogy, Queen of the Orcs. "What Anne McCaffrey and Naomi Novik have done for dragons, Morgan Howell has done for orcs." King's Property, on sale now, is the first in the trilogy. Morgan Howell offers a few words on how the Orc culture was developed.

"When we are gone, who will remember us? To humans, we are only monsters." —Kovok-mah, in Clan Daughter (Book 2 of Queen of the Orcs)

Orcs evoke powerful impressions. In The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien described them as so malicious that they hated their own kind: the epitome of cruelty and savagery. Tolkien's orcs have set a literary standard. In much of fantasy fiction, orcs are portrayed as crude, bloodthirsty warriors—often green and fanged—with massive muscles and tiny brains.

But in Queen of the Orcs, they are sympathetic characters. To explain how orcs could be so different from their accepted image, I turned to history's example. After every conflict, the victors write the losers' story. If orcs were a defeated race, their conquerors would naturally malign them. Such was the fate of Native Americans in the nineteenth century. The settlers and soldiers who slaughtered them to seize their lands considered them devils. The proverb "The only good Indian is a dead one" reflected the prevailing sentiment. In 1894, William Nye wrote in his History of the United States: "The real Indian has the dead and unkempt hair of a busted buggy cushion filled with feathers. He lies, he steals, he assassinates, he mutilates, he tortures."

I envisioned orcs as in a similar situation. Dispossessed of their traditional lands, they buy a measure of peace by fighting in the armies of their oppressors. There, they are feared, despised, and misunderstood.

One Native American tribe in particular inspired my depiction of orcs. Haudenosaunee means "people of the longhouse," and they once dominated central New York. The tribe is more commonly called the Iroquois, which is a French mispronunciation of an enemy's term for them meaning "black snakes." In a similar fashion, "orc" is a human distortion of "urkzimmuthi," which means "children of the Mother."

The concept that orcish females possess authority within their society derives from the Haudenosaunee example. The tribe's women owned the dwellings and the crops in the fields. They also determined which men governed the tribe. With orcs, I took matters further and had them ruled by matriarchs and a queen. Orc clans are modeled after Haudenosaunee ones, which were matrilineal. All the women in a longhouse belonged to the same clan. When a man married, he moved to his wife's hearth, where he lived surrounded by her female relatives. Children belonged to their mother's clan.

The Haudenosaunee practice of adopting outsiders into their tribe is also reflected in Queen of the Orcs. Such persons were accepted so wholeheartedly that even former captives often refused to leave when given the chance. The most famous of these was Mary Jemison, who was captured as a teenager in 1758. In her later life she recalled being treated as "a long lost child" upon her adoption. Mary became Dickewamis, and her descendents are still members of the tribe.

The Haudenosaunee were formidable warriors. Both the French and British sought them as allies in their struggle for the continent. The tribe preserved their territory by playing each side against the other. Though skilled diplomats, the Haudenosaunee misjudged the nature of the American Revolution and remained loyal to the British. Thus, like the orcs, they fell to a more numerous foe whose approach to warfare was far more systematic and ruthless.

My orcs are fictional, but their creation was influenced by fact. Studying Haudenosaunee history and culture showed me how two races come into conflict. Like the heroine in my story, I found that understanding can lead to respect and even love.

—Morgan Howell