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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: Jan Christian Smuts, general and statesman, spent most of his life arguing and fighting for just resolutions to conflicts, helping to found the League of Nations, and being one of the first world leaders to suggest a Jewish homeland in Palestine along side an Arab Palestinian state. In this story, Berliner takes the reader on a journey through Smuts' life as he tries to discover the task he's left undone.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Alternate Generals, ed. Harry Turtledove, Roland Green and Martin Harry Greenberg, 1998
Fictionwise Release Date: June 2003

7 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [82 KB], eReader (PDB) [33 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [20 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [19 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [69 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [92 KB], hiebook (KML) [77 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [53 KB], iSilo (PDB) [17 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [22 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [49 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [32 KB]
Words: 5899
Reading time: 16-23 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

I was not quite eleven and living in Cape Town, South Africa, when Jan Christian Smuts, "Oom Jannie" (Uncle John) as we called him, died. As his son wrote, "The gallant mountaineer had crossed his last Great Range."

That day--September 11th, 1950--was a sad one for every Liberal, every Jew, every South African concerned about the future of what was then my country. We all felt that we knew him personally. I was too young then to fully comprehend the sadness that surrounded his passing, but as I grew older, as I began to understand more and rebelled against the system, I developed a reasoned fondness for the Oubaas, The Old Master.

Fondness became respect when I found myself at school in Stellenbosch, walking the riverside paths that he and Isie--his wife-to-be--walked in their salad days, talking of the Shelleys, Percy and Mary, and properly avoiding physical contact. Being a dreamer, I often imagined myself to be Sybella Margaretha Krige (Isie), blue eyes sparkling, curly brown hair lifting on the breeze, wandering with Jannie beneath Simon van der Stel's magnificent oaks. I imagined sharing a passion for Shelley and for Shakespeare's tragedies, and I swear I heard him say, "You are less idealistic than I, but more human," as he compared me to "...the spirit of poetry in Goethe." What I do know, with the wisdom born of hindsight, is that he said of me--of Isie--later, "...(she) recalled me from my intellectual isolation and made me return to my fellows."

General Jan Christian Smuts, founder of the League of Nations, proponent of Freedom, Prime Minister of South Africa, lived a long and statesmanlike life. Though he kept journals, and wrote speeches and even books, he refused to write an autobiography. He would, he said, live life and create memories, leaving to his family and to history the task of writing about the events that shaped his life and about the events he helped to shape.

As the years passed, those books were written. The best of them, or at least the one which closest captures the spirit of the Old Master, is by his son, Jan Christian Smuts II. However, since he was not present to hear all of his father's conversations, since he could not enter his father's mind or body, the General's personal history remains incomplete and open to speculation by historians and writers of fiction alike.

The events as written here are historical fact. The details, the embellishments, the links between the events--the texture and the metaphysics--are, for the most part, mine. I offer them into the record as my view and mine alone of the unrecorded--the alternate--history of Jan Christian Smuts.