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wedrifid comments on How would you take over Rome? - Less Wrong Discussion
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L. Sprague de Camp wrote Lest Darkness Fall, in which a historian took over Rome a few centuries after this. Taking over wasn't his main priority, but rather ensuring that the dark ages got skipped. I'm not going to ROT13 the spoilers because similar ideas are going to be presented here.
Basic strategy was, 'invent' distilled liquor and base 10 arithmetic to gather capital. Use this to produce the printing press and the semaphore. By this point, he was influential, and used his foreknowledge of history to prevent a royal assassination and gain favor with that king. He never actually took over, but he was the man behind the throne for that king and the next.
And he didn't even need to be super-smart, though he did need to know the language, be reasonably lucky, and better at hand-to-hand combat than one would expect (if he had been super-smart he wouldn't have needed that).
Ah, that sounds like an interesting book -- would you recommend it?
I'll give it a moderate recommendation-- it's been at least twenty years since I've read it, and I don't know how it would look to me now.
However, I've read it several times, and enjoyed it as a light-hearted and moderately realistic (not everything Padway tries succeeds) account of rationality winning.
One other reason to read it if you haven't read golden age sf-- it moves. It's quite a short novel, and compared to modern sf, it's astonishing how much story can be well told in how few words.
Thanks -- any other alternative-history involving classic times you would recommend?
I'm exceedingly fond of Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters about an AH where the Greek theory of elements is true. Greece has become a superpower (the background is still pretty classical, but I think it's set five or six centuries later) in opposition to China, because feng shui is also true. Unfortunately, the feng shui isn't worked out as well as the elements, but who can argue with an expedition to the sun to get some primal fire?
Not quite AH, but David Drake's Birds of Prey is fun. It's a noirish story about the last honest man is corrupt Rome. It's kitchen sink science fiction, full of good things. To list them would be spoilers, so I'll rot13. Gurer'f n cyrfvbfnhe va gur Gvore, n fvqr rssrpg bs gur gvzr geniry sebz gur sne shgher jub'f pbzr gb Ebzr gb fgbc na nyvra zranpr.
Yes. It's not perfect, but good.
Thanks -- perfection is too much to ask for anyways.. I really like the description of injecting some 'simple' concepts like base-10 arithmetic are so important - I can see really see changing such a 'simple thing' changing many, many things.
Just think about multiplying XCV by MCII...
A predecessor was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, whose influences (past and future) are currently detailed on Wikipedia. [Edit: typo, actualy mouso.]