Talk:The Domination

Oceania/1984 & Alliance

Is it just a coincidence that 'Oceania' from Nineteen Eighty-Four and the 'Alliance for Democracy' in The Domination occupy almost identical territories?

Oh, and by the way, wasn't "Drakon" also a Draka novel? That makes it a four-book series, not a trilogy.

Isn't it odd how in real life, the nations with the greatest appetite for conquest are invariably those with the least ability to conquer? Pretty convenient the way that works out... Iceberg3k 23:23, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)

Marie Curie's maiden name

The article originally claimed that "Sokolowska is the maiden name of Marie Curie". Well, it's not Sokolowska, but Skłodowska (not even Sklodowska). The problem here is that that remark was about a character in the story - a certain "Marya Sokolowska"; the note goes on to say that "it is not clear whether the fictional character is intended to be an alternate-history version of the chemist, but from the description of her intelligence, it seems likely".

Well... was Marya's last name Sokolowska or Skłodowska? If it was Sokolowska, does the note still make sense? How should it be phrased now, in the case it should still be there?

I've corrected it to look like this, but I'm sure there is a better way of putting it:

Her slaves include Marya Sokolowska and Chantal Lefarge, formerly a Polish nun and a French Communist respectively. (Note that Skłodowska is the maiden name of Marie Curie; it is not clear whether the fictional character is intended to be an alternate-history version of the chemist, but from the description of her intelligence, it seems likely).

--Fibonacci 08:19, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

There's also the fact that Marie Skłodowska/Sokolowska/Curie was born in 1867 and would have been over eighty by the time this novel was set in (in reality, she died years before even the first book in the series began). The character is several decades younger. MK2 01:19, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Plus, something called the Curie Institute is mentioned in Under the Yoke. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.154.33.187 (talk) 21:30, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Ending

Can someone clue me into what happened at the end of The Stone Dogs? I've reread it atleast a dozen times and I don't understand. The U.S. President gets the message from LeFlarge and that's it. Thanks.

A handful of Yankees are allowed to leave the solar system in exchange for the information on how to stop the computer virus that is causing havoc with the Draka. Those Alliance scientists and specialists that're left behind are offered Draka citizenship. The spaceship with the colonists was intended to ensure that the Alliance doesen't vanish since it is expected that eventually the Draka will win. Thunderbuster (talk) 16:20, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I'd word that a little differently. Both sides saw a "Final War" as inevitable. While the spaceship was a last-ditch backup project in case the Alliance lost the war, both sides knew that the odds for an Alliance victory were slowly improving. The Alliance lost because a) the Draka learned about the existence of its computer virus and was able to prepare for it to some degree, and b) that knowledge triggered the war before the odds for an Alliance victory improved further. YLee (talk) 04:46, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Biological superiority

There's a great deal made in the later books of how the Draka superclass are biologically engineered to actually become supermen. User:Zoe|(talk) 23:22, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Pointless trivia

In Marching Through Georgia the author has a prop-driven plane taking off on coarse pitch. This is a big no-no especially given that Draka planes don't have a massive power edge over the Luftwaffe - fine pitch exerts maximum leverage and is mandatory for take-offs. It's like pedalling a bicycle uphill - no matter how good your muscles, no sane person uses high gear from a standing start.

In both Under The Yoke and The Stone Dogs, Stirling flagrantly abuses chess notation - neither "Knight to Queen's Pawn Four" nor "King's Pawn to Knight Four" are actually possible (and the first is a grammatical nonsense in descriptive notation). Captain Pedant 20:00, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Dystopia or Utopia?

One key feature of a dystopia is that the author and his intended audience see the society it depicts in strongly negative terms - I however see very little evidence that Stirling is repulsed by the Draka and there are certainly a great many neo-Nazis who would see it as a positive utopia - and some of them have published articles saying so.

This comes across most strongly in Drakon where on multiple levels the Drakan visitor is able to contrast the happy state of the world in her future (with even the slaves being well-fed cared-for and genetically selected to be content with their lot) to the chaotic and degenerate real twentieth century.

Arguably the series is nothing more than racist and fascist propaganda very thinly-disguised as alternate history SF and should be criticised as such.

If you feel strongly about this then why no signature? --Thunderbuster (talk) 17:22, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

What, no signature?

Arguably so. But it can also be viewed as another literary device - the reader is invited to remind himself that he is seeing the world through Drakan eyes and observe the smug conceit and bias of the Drakan viewpoint, and reflect on whether it is really better to be well-fed cattle with no real will for self-improvement, or to live in an admittedly imperfect world where, for all its faults, it is still possible to strive for self-improvement. Sort of like the case Captain Kirk makes out for disposing of Vaal in the Star Trek episode "The Apple" (q.v.) - a sterile Utopia in which the people (or a majority of the same) are merely existing without ambition or hope of advancement is no utopia at all. Captain Pedant 12:47, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Draka military hardware in the Eurasian War

I think a couple of the points of comparison slightly overstate Draka technological superiority: while the Hond III is a superb tank, it may be a stretch to put it on a par with the Abrams, given that it is stated that the German Elefant is almost on a par with it for firepower and armour, and that American tanks of the same era saw the introduction of the gyrostabiliser. True, it is a better piece of kit all round than any real-world tank of the mid-1940s, but perhaps not decades more advanced.

• I would tend to agree. If gun caliber and mass of armor are the only metrics under consideration, then a Chieftain Mk II from 1964 is "roughly equivalent" to an M1A2 SEP Abrams. This neglects the dual-axis gyrostabilized gun and 21st Century sensor suite and fire control system the Abrams has: laser rangefinders, ballistic computers, and, perhaps most significant, thermal imaging sights allowing the latter to see and fight in fog, smoke, dust, total darkness, or other conditions that tend to confound the "Mark One Eyeball" target acquisition system of the Hond III. One also wonders whether the Hond III has Chobham armor or ERA tiles; I do not think so, given a scene in "Marching Through Georgia" in which an SS trooper with a Panzerfaust is killed an instant before he can fire at a Hond III, and the tank commander notes that he had come within a fraction of a second of killing them all. Is a Panzerfaust rocket a significant threat to a modern Western AFV?

Similarly, though the Rhino ground-attack aircraft is good, it shouldn't be forgotten that, say, the Beaufighter could deliver cannon, machine-gun and rocket fire all in one handy package, that some marks of B25 mounted twelve forward-firing .50-cals, that other aircraft like the Hawker Typhoon, Il-2 and Ju87 and even some marks of Hurricane had either anti-tank cannon or unguided rockets (and the Il-2 in particular was well armoured). Comparisons with the A-10 aren't quite warranted - excellent as the Rhino's firepower is for the era, it doesn't match up to the Warthog's vicious Gatling gun, and a Rhino is seen to be downed after a single head-on pass with a Fw-190, which an A-10 would probably have shrugged off. Captain Pedant 13:12, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Stirling Copied Draka Tech From American Gulf War 1 Hardware

The Hond III tank was said in Stirling's book to be armed with a smooth bore, high velocity 120mm gun firing an APFSDS (armor piercing fin-stabilized self discarding sabot) with a depleted uranium penetrator. This happens to be exactly what the Abrahms M1A1 was firing in 1991! The APFSDS wasn't fully deployed in our timeline until the late 1950s. The APDS (without the fin-stabilizer) was first developed by the Brits in 1943 and used for its famous 17 pdr anti-tank gun (found on the equally famous Sherman Firefly). While it had excellent penetration, it was inaccurate beyond 900 meters because it didn't have the fin-stabilizer (which would have spun it around like an arrow in flight making it more accurate). Depleted uranium penetrators weren't developed in OTL until the 1970's by the USSR and the US. Also, the gyrostabilizers some advanced Shermans and the Pershings had in WW2 only had a single axis stabilization, not the X and Y axis stabilization of today's gyrostabilizers. The single axis stabilizers were only useful on low speed on terrain that's not too rough. This didn't appear to be the case with the Hond III.

In Stirling's books, the Draka also had air cavalry and attack helicopters in the late 1940s, early 1950s. In OTL, the helicopters of the Korean War could barely lift one pilot and one wounded soldier, which was why it was only used to ferry wounded to the MASH or rescue downed pilots. The UH-1 Hueys and Apache helicopters didn't appear OTL until the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s.

I find it hard to believe that a Spartan society like the Draka could be ahead technologically in any front. The original Spartans also had an approximately 10 to 1 ratio slave/serf to citizen. The Spartans dominated at first with their small but highly disciplined and very ferocious hoplite phalanxes. However, they were brought down by the Thebans because the Spartans, not a people of great innovators, stuck to tried and true military tactics and technology while the Thebans innovated by developing combined arms tactics with cavalry, missile troops, and infantry all fighting together. Societies like the Draka and the Spartans would be weak at improving their tactics and technology because they make most of their citizens into soldiers and prize excellence in warfare over science, technology, trade, and innovation. Also, keeping the vast majority of their population dirt poor and uneducated kept both these societies from harnessing the full power of their entire population. Who knows what brilliant tacticians, strategists, and inventors those slaves/serfs would have become had they been given the opportunity? The Spartans overspecialized in warfare at the expense of flexibility and adaptability. They paid the price in the end, and so would have the Draka, had they been living in a real world, instead of Stirling's fantasy world.

True, that's why Samothrace may beat them in the end. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.76.251.107 (talk) 11:59, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

• I would tend to agree, as would many critics of the books. The Draka have the Power of Authorial Fiat, and they just keep grinning and pressing the big "I WIN" button. No one takes their threats seriously, no one organizes against them until it is too late, everyone facing them has a severe case of the stupids. Stirling supposedly does this deliberately in order to create his fictional dystopia.

I guess Stirling created a race of Supermen and he wanted them to win. Despite the odds. I don't know why though there has been alot of speculation as to his motivation over the past twenty years. --Thunderbuster (talk) 23:39, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Merge proposal

I'd like to propose merging this article with Draka, with the latter article the survivor. Information in each article is pretty much the same.--Wehwalt (talk) 08:05, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I have seen this and I agree. Both articles are pretty much the same. Zombie Hunter Smurf (talk) 17:08, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, then, I suggest we start cannibalizing the Domination article of any disparate content and merging it into the Draka article. When we are done, put in a redirect.--Wehwalt (talk) 17:25, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Should we rename the Draka article to the Domination of Draka article? Zombie Hunter Smurf (talk) 17:31, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

No, I think Draka is good enough.--Wehwalt (talk) 17:49, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Fine by me. Zombie Hunter Smurf (talk) 17:52, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

OK. Well, it may take me a little time to get started on it. I need to read through both again and start moving stuff.

Historical Background

"The Draka books were written and published shortly after apartheid South Africa succumbed to intensive international pressure and was forced to adapt itself to the rest of the world's current norms of racial equality. Though Stirling never made an explicit connection in any public statement, what the series clearly depicts is a diametrically opposite scenario - implausible in the view of many critics - whereby a "Super South Africa", founded upon manifest, utter inequality, eventually succeeds in imposing its own norms on the rest of the world and extinguishing the very concepts of democracy and equality."

We really need a citation for something like this. We can't assume this is what Stirling intended. Rojomoke (talk) 22:43, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

Military hardware

The article claims the Germans use Tiger and Panther tanks. I find no references to these vehicles at all in the novels. The only named German vehicles are the "Elefant" tank destroyer (not the same as as the real one), 20mm autocannon-armed "Puma" armoured car (again not the same as the real one which had a 50mm gun) and "Leopard" tank (mentioned in "Under the Yoke", and certainly not the same vehicle from OTL). The KV-derived "SS Panzer" in "Marching through Georgia" is never given a name.

I also disagree that the Draka anti-tank aircraft is described as resembling an A-10. It sounds like a completely conventional WW2 era twin-engined aircraft. The closest real aircraft might be an Hs 129 (with better engines).

If no one objects I'll edit the article to reflect these. Colin Johnston (talk) 13:48, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Who made the stupid map?

The map that shows Draka world in 1942 is stupid, it shows Peru as part of Gran colombia dispite 1.Perú never being part of Gran Colombia and 2.Gran Colombia never described as conquering PeruUndead Herle King (talk) 04:30, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

On a second thought, I'm just going to delete that image for its inaccuracyUndead Herle King (talk) 04:36, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Can't find supposed George Ward citation

This paper doesn't seem to exist: Twenty Years of Post-Apartheid South Africa, as reflected in Mainstream Western Media and Popular Culture. I can't even find The Journal Of Post-Colonial Studies. Is this a defunct journal without a searchable archive, is this made up, or am I just bad at finding things?

Awesomeideas (talk) 16:44, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

@Awesomeideas: I'm having trouble, too. Jouvert: A Journal of Post-colonial Studies isn't it, as its issues are too old to match the given date of Fall 2014, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies yields nothing for a search for "Ward Apartheid" (without quotation marks). Nor does the purported article's title show up on JSTOR: ti:("Twenty Years of Post-Apartheid South Africa"). —DocWatson42 (talk) 09:58, 17 March 2022 (UTC)