The Draka (Literature) (original) (raw)

"The Draka will conquer the world for two reasons; because we must and because we can. And yet of the two forces the second is the greater; we do this because we choose to do it."

"Gather 'round, lads and lasses, and we shall tell ye a story of a good republic and an evil empire where the bad guys are vanquished and truth, justice, and the American Way prevail."

Science Fiction author S. M. Stirling said "Screw that." Apparently tired of seeing the same cliches being used again and again, he created the Domination of the Draka, an Evil Empire that doesn't intend to lose… ever.

The Draka timeline diverges from our own during The American Revolution, where American Crown Loyalists, due to the Dutch intervening in the war, are shipped to the new British Crown Colony of Drakia—named after Sir Francis Drake—on the southern coast of Africa. They are joined shortly by French Royalists, defeated Confederate troops, and generally the other losers of history. Burning with a desire for revenge, they founded the Domination of Draka: an Empire forged on conquest and slavery. Their goal is nothing less than world domination. Standing in their way is the United States of America and the Alliance for Democracy. And you just know this is going to be bloody.

The main trilogy consists of:

• Marching Through Georgia, released May 1, 1988 (set in the opening hours of the Drakan entry into the Eurasian War, the alternate equivalent of our World War II)
• Under the Yoke, released September 1, 1989 (covering Europe's incorporation into the Domination after the Eurasian War)
• The Stone Dogs, released July 1, 1990 (covering the "Protracted Struggle" between the Domination of Draka and the remaining democratic nations, now joined into the "Alliance for Democracy")

There are also:

• Drakon, released January 1, 1996 (a Draka from the 25th century is hurled back to 1990s Earth by a space-warp experiment)
• Drakas!, released October 31, 2000 (a collection of short stories set in the Draka timeline, edited by S. M. Stirling but written by other authors)

The Domination is an abridged omnibus of the main trilogy, not a separate book.

The series contains examples of:

• Affably Evil: A lot of Draka characters, when you get past the slavery and the warmongering and the rampant amorality, are actually surprisingly pleasant people. However, it only really serves to make them even more unsettling.
• The Alliance: The Alliance for Democracy, the timeline's analogue to the Allies of the Second World War. Led by the United States and established at the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro in 1943, the Alliance is a defensive and free-trade pact between the US, Australasia, SE Asia, Japan, South America, India, and Britain. It is made permanent at the Second Treaty of Rio in 1945, and made into The Federation after the 1975-76 Indian Incident.
• Alternate History: And not the nice kind either! The author describes it as "suppos[ing that] everything had turned out as badly as possible, these last few centuries", and he's not kidding - the series starts with the Nazis successfully conquering Russia, and only gets worse from there. note This "Eurasian War" is the seventh generation of the Draka, and in broad strokes their history goes like this:
  • First Generation: Founding generation. Unlike OTL, the Netherlands joins the American Revolution along with France and Spain but loses the sparsely populated Cape Colony, and in 1783 the British decide to relocate the 90,000 or so Tories there who in OTL resettled in Canada. Most of these were slave-owners from the American south. They were joined by about 10,000 Hessians. The under 10,000 Dutch Boers were absorbed through intermarriage. They were soon joined by 25,000 Icelanders fleeing the volcanic eruption that year. Isolated, surrounded by enemies, constantly staring extinction in the face, this new nation becomes brutally militaristic and willing to cross any moral horizon. They conquer the Zulus through sheer ruthlessness and utter willingness to commit any atrocity. Each conquest fuels the next, so that with a standing army only 20,000 men strong, within 20 years they conquer north from the Cape to modern Zimbabwe - due to a combination of technological superiority, liberal use of torture, and mass genocide which would make OTL's Belgian Congo squeamish.
  • Second Generation: The Napoleonic Wars. With Europe busy fighting itself they crucially ignore the Draka while they industrialize on their own, and snap up several far-flung Franco-Dutch possessions: Egypt, Ceylon, several French colonies on the west African coast. The increased trade through Ceylon to India leads to a fad for Mughal art and culture during this period. A new wave of immigrants boosts Draka numbers, coming from the losing royalist sides: first 11,000 slave-holders from the French Caribbean, later joined by fleeing French royalists. The Ottomans try and fail to take Egypt from the Draka, resulting in new conquests of Cyprus, Crete, and Tunisia, and by 1815 in the peace of Vienna they actually purchase Angola and Mozambique from the Portuguese. Meanwhile, the USA conquers Canada.
  • Third Generation: The conquest of North Africa, ~1820 to ~1840. This takes twice as long as the founding conquests, despite having a better organized and equipped army five times as large, because they face peoples who have basic firearms. They push west from Egypt, and also along the eastern mountain ranges from the north and south to eventually link up - but they avoid a push into the central jungles for fear of mass casualties from tropical diseases. In the process, in 1820 an expeditionary force in the Sahara discovers a trove of nearly all the Classical works that were lost in OTL. This leads to a major fad for Greco-Roman culture, particularly because it is already adapted for a slave society.
  • Fourth Generation: The Draka grind down the last holdout regions in Africa and starting in the 1850s the Draka military gains more experience in foreign military expeditions, to the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny. The USA conquers all of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America down to Panama. As in OTL rapid expansion drives a wedge between pro- and anti-slavery power blocs leading to the Civil War from 1860 to 1866. The Draka send vast amounts of clandestine aide to the South but this is counterbalanced by resources from the USA's other conquests and the Confederacy is defeated. Obsessed with breeding due to their small population, from 1840 to 1870 the Draka Citizen population mushrooms from 1 million to 10 million.
  • Fifth Generation: Perhaps the oddest generation of the seven: After Louis Pasteur discovers mosquitos as the disease vector of malaria there is a large push to drain swamps and bring the central jungles under the yoke (relying on expendable slave soldiers rather than risk exposing Citizens to lingering tropical diseases). By 1870 the Draka had conquered all of Africa from ocean to ocean, except the interior jungles, and ran into something of an existential crisis as for a race that defined itself on conquest there were no more easy lands to conquer. No longer able to rely on a pure plantation model for all their slaves, they had to shift at least a portion of the slave population into urban indentured servitude in factories. This required a new police system to control the urban slaves, hence the secret police known as the "Security Directorate" was formed. This coincided with the last immigration wave incorporated into the Draka: 150,000 ex-Confederates, who disproportionately joined the rapidly expanding Security Directorate. Faced with a changing world and crisis of identity, this generation sought to define their burgeoning nation: there was an attempt to revive the Old Norse religion, but it faded out after this generation and its only lasting influence were a few Nordic-inspired curses and slang terms. Of more impact was that Nietzsche immigrated to the Draka, who co-opted and incorporated many of his views to support what they were already doing.
  • Sixth Generation: The Draka side with the Allies during World War I as a convenience to fight their only direct land rival, the Ottoman Empire. Relying on waves of Janissary slave soldiers they break through and take Constantinople. In another windfall, the Russian Revolution and Civil War drag on longer than OTL, and as a calculated gamble the Draka attempt to fill the vacuum with a push into Central Asia. This works better than even the Draka anticipated, extending their borders north to Khazakstan and east through Afghanistan into western China. They don't have to deal with reaction from China's core territories in the east due to a full Japanese invasion that ends their last dynasty. Afghanistan bitterly resists at first and becomes known as a hardship posting, but with generations of conquest and lack of guilt the Draka respond with mass genocide. After achieving this victory the Allies order the Draka to return conquered lands but they refuse and openly declare independence from Britain - so that despite conquering all of Africa and more, only by 1920 do the great powers of the world start seriously considering the Draka as a rival power. The USA openly controls all of North America down to Panama, also Hawaii and the Philippines, with South America (divided into only four large countries in this timeline) functionally controlled as puppet states.
  • Seventh Generation: the Draka wait for Nazi Germany to defeat Soviet Russia, then exhaust themselves with a push all the way to the Urals. A key Draka offensive launched through the Caucasus cuts off their main armies in the east from the Nazis' home territories in the west. Meanwhile, the USA has its hands full with a much more powerful Japanese empire. After defeating the Nazis the Draka push west into the rest of western Europe, then later conquer the remnants of Russia and the Japanese in eastern China. At grievous loss the USA is able to capture Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and Japan itself. The USA and its remaining allies join into the "Alliance for Democracy" against the Draka. The Alliance has a drastically stronger navy than in OTL from fighting a stronger Japan, so the Draka do not attempt to mount new invasions across the oceans against the Alliance. The Draka are left as masters of Africa, all of Europe except the British Isles, and all of Asia except for a border running along the Himalayas and dense jungles of Southeast Asia. Both sides settle into a 50 year long cold war.
  • Eighth Generation: Late 1940's to 1975 - The Draka slowly consolidate their massive conquests from the Eurasian War. They firmly control the major cities but the hinterlands are not fully pacified for years: so long as the Draka control the large-scale infrastructure and means of production they're willing to starve out partisans on a longer time scale. Only Finland puts up meaningful partisan resistance and is regarded as a hardship posting much as Afghanistan was a century before: the Draka are content to send in waves of now broken and loyal Afghan Janissary soldiers to grind down the starving Finns. An uprising in Barcelona manages to seize control of the city, after which the Draka make an example of them by detonating an atomic bomb. Even the Draka themselves later note that had the Alliance for Democracy made a push to go to war with the Draka in these consolidation decades they would have won, but with heavy losses and atomic destruction of many major cities. The space race rapidly advances, so that by the 1960s most major planets have been visited and new colonies have been founded on Luna.
  • Ninth Generation: 1975 -1999. The Indian Republic secedes from the Alliance, after Draka operatives reveal secret Alliance meddling in their elections. As a result, the Draka invade and conquer the Indian subcontinent within a week - except for Burma, which counter-seceded back into the Alliance. The "India Incident" spurs the remaining constituent nations of the Alliance for Democracy to formally unite into one sovereign super-state. While this was a major blow to morale, in many ways India was "the poor man of the Alliance" and a drain on resources, and the Draka commit to spending another generation consolidating their gains there rather than force the final conflict they intended to start as soon as they had consolidated Europe and the rest of Asia. On the other hand, this gives the Draka over one billion new slaves. Mass colonization continues in space: on Luna, Mars, the asteroid belt, and orbitals. The Alliance's advantage at technological advancement starts to slightly edge out the Draka, though the Draka's focus on biological experimentation (with no ethical constraints) results in functional transgenetics by the 1970s. This culminates in the Final War in 1999.
• Alternate History Wank: A textbook example thereof. A lot of this story rests on various world powers refusing to get involved with intervening against a growing fascist empire until it's way too late.
• Alternate Universe: In the fourth book, the Draka were experimenting with wormholes for FTL travel and instead opened a gateway to another Earth. Luckily, their first portal was stopped...but it's assumed they'll eventually try again.
• Amoral Afrikaner: While the Draka aren't, strictly speaking, Afrikaners (the Boers get assimilated early on, though their influence survives in some loanwords in Drakan English), their empire is centered in what is now South Africa.. . and they are very much amoral.
• Ancient Grome: Not literally, but the Draka love for the ancient classics leads to a lot of Greek, Roman, and Indian themes in the names of their cities, architecture, and even military ranks.
• Author Appeal: S.M. Stirling seems to like lesbian or bisexual female characters. Johanna, Rahksan, Yolande, Myfwanwy, Gwendolyn… you can't throw a rock in any of the books without hitting at least two. Mind you, he does try to handwave it a couple of ways—primary education is sex-segregated, and prior to the development of the drakenses the Race Purity Laws create a variation on Really Gets Around in that it's acceptable for male Draka to have sex with any serf woman they like, but for a female Draka to have sex with a male serf is a capital offense (diluting the Race, presumably) well until the 70's (Ironically, around the age of Civil Rights era in Real Life), with a side of Family Versus Career for female Draka, who are required by law to produce a minimum number of offspring (the actual pregnancy eventually being off-loaded to host mothers after the 60's)—but it still feels heavy-handed at times.
  • Stirling also seems to have a thing for Afrikaner villains—they also show up in The Peshawar Lancers and Conquistador.
• Badass Army: The Draka Citizen army. Due to training from childhood and a cultural obsession with fitness, it's mentioned that one of them equals several elites from another nation. While the Janissaries - their slave army - aren't quite on the same level, they're still extremely well armed and trained.
• The Bad Guy Wins: The point of the series, a setting in which the most evil faction possible ends up winning. The Draka are slaving, raping, conquering, sadistic tyrants, and they unltimately end up taking over the galaxy and starting on the route to becoming Multiversal Conquerors
• Battle Cry: The Draka use "Bulala" as a battle cry, appropriating it from one of the Bantu peoples who were their first conquests. It means kill in various Bantu languages in South Africa, like Zulu.
• Battle Thralls: In Under The Yoke, Alliance infiltrator Frederick Kustaa thinks some European Janissaries might've fought against the Draka — the pan-European government was taking soldiers pretty young toward the end. More generally averted — the usual Draka practice seems to be to execute enemy prisoners of war or send them to destructive-labor sites. In Marching Through Georgia, Eric specifically brings up phosphate mining in the Sahara. Soldiers are viewed as too dangerous to sell as ordinary serfs.
• Beautiful Slave Girl: Eric's teen concubine was taken from occupied Circassia as a child and basically raised to be this. Eric's sister said that her and Eric's daughter Anna would face trouble in her teens due to her looks (aka be a sexual target) and doesn't mind his having broken the law to send her to America.
• Berserk Button: Eric von Shrakenburg once had a child with one of his serfs, who died in childbirth. Some years later he covertly had the child smuggled away to the United States. Bringing the serf-woman up in a negative light around Eric is not a good idea. In a flashback, Eric's father scolds him for crying over a dead serf, and sending the girl away—which caused a scandal for the family. When he goes to whip Eric, the latter snatches the switch out of his father's hand and calmly tells him that if he ever hits him again, he's a dead man.
• Bio-Augmentation: The New Race and the servus
  • Homo drakensis is the human genome with several genes modified (allowing drakensis to produce powerful pheromones, have a hyperactive metabolism, or stopping aging) or introduced from foreign sources (feline genes are mentioned as being introduced to impart night vision, and canine genes for supersensitive smell).
  • Homo servus is almost identical to Homo sapiens, but psychologically mind-gelded to be incapable of resistance and to derive pleasure from service to their Race overlords.
• Black Site: In The Stone Dogs the Alliance is building an antimatter-fueled starship in one.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Stirling went to great length into suggesting the alien nature/otherness of the Draka in everything pertaining to their social life, until they could just as well be an extraterrestrial species. Many readers and critics have even praised this aspect of the series, arguing that it is intended to be less a plausible Alternate History and more of an exercise in showing an example of people operating under a form of ethics and psychology completely alien to that of normal humanity. In Under The Yoke, some contrasts between Draka and Frenchmen or Finns are obviously deliberate:
  • Language: Tanya von Shrakenberg talks (especially about sex) almost exactly like a young male from Real Life, although with no rough words. Funnily, males (even Draka) are more conservative in their language, more typical to a Real Life man from the 1940s.
  • Body Language: The Draka are not called 'snakes' in order to make a bad Pun. They practice extreme conservation of body movement, making no gesture or expression that is not completely intended and betraying nothing with their mannerisms. The effect on Alliance citizens who interact with the Draka is described as extremely unsettling.
  • Architecture: Draka buildings are so colorful and pimped-out they might just as well be from a fairy tale. European designs of the time were exactly the opposite, neat, clean, marble everywhere, or older gray masonry.
  • Clothing: also colorful and tacky for civilians, almost BDSM for troopers. Real Life fashions of the time (to fit the rather polluted European and American cities and muddy countryside) used strong fabrics, dull colors, rougher designs - unlike what a modern person may believe, Film Noir characters wore their coats and suits for practical reasons.
  • Staging: Draka use the parades and other public events in a disconcerting manner, like some 20th century Ancient Romans or Ancient Persians complete with naked female captives holding resource bundles of respective countries' specialty. By comparison, Third Reich public events were conceived to impress foreign observers and prove the strength of the regime. Draka public events were designed by Draka for Draka, without care for what someone else may understand (or if someone else understand them or not at all).
  • Attitude: The Draka do not act like typical invaders, who "merely" occupy land, settle themselves, capture supplies and production facilities and interrogate prisoners. They show no interest in European cities or edifices, simply moulding the landscape to fit them. note The only exception is fine art, especially Greco-Roman and Renaissance work. They systematically looted the Vatican specifically for its art collection, and preserved some monuments like the Arc of Triumph in France, albeit overgrown with vines.
• Brutal Honesty: Marching Through Georgia has a scene where Karl von Shrakenberg (the father of the book's Draka protagonist, Eric) tells an American journalist that any partnership of between the Domination and the USA will be "a temporary alliance of convenience". He then adds that it's only to keep the United States out of the Domination's hair while they conquer and enslave Europe… in pretty much those exact words. All in a gentlemanly, conversational tone. The American is understandably shaken by how brazen Karl is, and outright terrified that his country is already being sized up for conquest.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Due to the different (sometimes very different) technological development, technology often ends up with very different names. PCs are "perscomps" and ubiquitous steam-driven cars are "steamers", to name two.
• Les Collaborateurs: The "chain-dog" serfs who serve as the muscle for the Security Directorate qualify. They are resented by the Citizens and utterly detested by their fellow serfs (particularly those who are highly-placed, or attached to powerful Citizen families).
• Crapsack World: The raison d'etre of the series. Before the stories even begin, the Draka enslave the entire native population of Africa and much of Asia's. The Drakaverse version of World War 2, made worse by the radical nature of Drakan tactics, including arbitrary starvation of resisting cities, unflinchingly brutal punishment of partisan activity, and much more liberal use of atomic weapons, kills off approximately one-tenth of humanity, and ends in a majority of survivors going into slavery. Out of self-defense, the United States and her allies become massive armed camps. Eventually, a nuclear holocaust ensues in which The Bad Guy Wins, and most Americans who aren't killed or enslaved are treated as hunting game for the Draka. Then, of course, the Draka create two posthuman species, and the Serfs are engineered into a pliant, non-resistant slave race which happily serves the Draka masters. The Draka then develop interstellar and interdimensional travel, attempting to enslave sentient alien races and alternate timelines. So far their first attempt is stopped by a human cyborg. For now.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: India secedes from the Alliance for Democracy, figuring it is big and strong enough to stand up to the Draka alone. Their independence lasts one week before the Draka war of conquest is over.
• Curb-Stomp Cushion: The Draka victory in the Final War does conquer Earth, but at heavy cost - they don't simply roll over the Alliance, but when the prize is final conquest of the entire planet that doesn't count for much. Due to a combination of (clean) nuclear bombs and biological weapons, the Alliance loses 400 million people; the Draka lose 300 million - 22% of their serf population, and 15% of their Citizen population. These are staggering Citizen losses, as there weren't that many of them to begin with. The Alliance's counter-part to the Stone Dogs virus, a computer virus meant to trigger the self-destruct systems in Draka vehicles, actually worked very well - just not enough. The Alliance nuclear strike on Archona fails, but they do manage to destroy Cape Town - the mother city of the Draka (though this is largely a symbolic act). The Alliance also has a better space fleet, so they actually win control over trans-Lunar space (despite the loss of their Ceres base). Vast ecological damage has also been done to Earth with a mini-nuclear winter, meaning the Draka need the infrastructure of the space colonies to rebuild, so they have to offer a truce with the Alliance survivors. Given their infrastructure damage and the extreme difficulty of establishing a permanent occupation force over half the planet at a stroke, the Draka themselves estimate they won't fully secure the planet for fifty to a hundred years - giving time for the Alliance colony ship heading to Alpha Centauri time to set up their own planet.
• Cyborg: Alliance heavily invests in cybernetics as opposed to Drakan Bio-Augmentation. The fruit is an extremely skilled and resourceful operative, Kenneth Lafarge, descendant of Chantal, the serf girl saved from Draka yoke who travels to the alternate universe where Gwendolyn Ingolfsson, Chantal's rapist's descendant has gone to subvert the world and build a quantum gate for the Drakan invasion. At that point, Alliance operatives can craft items and clothings from scratch that push the limits of laws of physics, from bulletproof suits to antimatter minigrenades and plasma rifles, and play as a foil to Drakan technology which take the form of genetic re-sequencing, biological bulletproof implants in the form of a painful symbiotic virus and biological weapons.
• Decadent Court: Although the Draka are too disciplined to be truly decadent (Alliance infiltrator Frederick Kustaa even remarks on this in Under The Yoke), dueling is "the ultimate argument" in Draka politics. In The Stone Dogs it's stated that Eric's rival Louise Gayner has killed several other politicians in duels.
• Defector from Decadence:
  • A Draka defector who concluded that all the people he cared about had serf numbers on their necks and he was grinding them down. He defects to the Alliance and helps the OSS train spies to infiltrate the Domination.
  • Downplayed with Eric von Shrakenberg: he never "defects" but relative to the Draka he's something of a Progressive...which isn't saying much. He wants to institute reforms to elevate serfs from true chattel slavery into something more like a "traditional" Stalinist state, gets upset when his own men are killed (instead of buying into the rhetoric that they died "for the glory of the Race"), and does not eagerly look forward to the idea of an apocalyptic war with the Alliance if victory means killing half of his own people. It's stated that if it weren't for his highly decorated military service the secret police would have silenced him long ago.
• Distant Finale: Upon closer reading, it can be ascertained that the Draka Empire is in severe danger in Drakon. Humanity has finally lead a Roaring Rampage of Revenge by teleporting a Fleet above Earth, being stopped by a hair's length. Since Lefarge blew up the gate to Alternate Earth, it is possible that humanity may win this struggle.
• Dread Zeppelin: Airships are one of the Draka's signature forms of transportation.
• Duel to the Death: Draka Citizens still practice dueling, and it is considered "the ultimate argument" in their politics. This becomes less and less common later in their history, although young Yolande Ingolfsson recalls her mother killing a visitor who had insulted her in a duel.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Project Fenris in the third book: a secret Draka project concerning enough explosives to dislodge the Moon from its orbit and smash into the Earth in event of a Draka defeat.
• Easy Logistics: One of the complaints that gets brought up is that the Draka are seemingly completely unaffected early on by the logistics of waging war in what was historically, for Europeans, a medical nightmare, on a continent that, for anyone, lacked the necessary fundamental infrastructure to create or maintain a continent-spanning empire.
• The Empire: The Domination of the Draka, a slaver empire dedicated to conquering all they can.
• Even Evil Has Standards: For all that the Draka are vicious and tyrannical, they still have some moral standards once they conquer the world:
  • Technically you are at liberty to inflict whatever you like on a slave that you own. However, if you insist on persistently torturing someone just because they killed someone you loved in a war, your family will get around to having a word in your ear until you see the error of your ways. Even if you would kill the serf with no repercussions, the Security Directorate may investigate the reason to find dirt on the citizen, as no one in their right mind would kill a serf for no reason.
  • Using slaves for sex is fine, but if you've an ounce of humanity in you then at least you will make sure that the slave will find it a physically enjoyable experience.
  • Raping nuns during a war is technically OK too, but if the nun resourcefully finds a way to kill you then your commanding officer may just figure that you were asking for it—pureblood Draka or no—and that you should have been smart enough to see it coming.
  • Serfs can complain about extremely abusive overseers if enough support amongst the abused can be amassed. After the Final Society, serf tribunals exist to solve issues from abuse and misappropriation of resources thanks to Shrakenberg's efforts.
  • The Draka have legal standards for maintaining serfs properly; serfs must be adequately fed and cared for or they can be seized by the State. Can't have malcontent serfs starting an uprising, after all...
  • The homo servus species are designed to feel joy, comfort and happiness when living next to Draka. Granted, it is evil, yet the servus' sexual freedom, genetic improvement, incredible living standards and the lack of oppression after "Final Society", they live happily, and produce immense research projects.
• Everyone Is Bi: The genetically-engineered New Race—"Homo drakensis"—portrayed in Drakon, is all bisexual. But male bisexuals are almost never shown.
• Evil Counterpart: The Draka can be seen as an evil counterpart of the United States of America. Both are world powers that started as colonies. Both expanded by taking over other colonies and native lands. Both originally had very slavery-dependent economies. But whereas the USA ultimately rejected slavery, the Domination embraced it.
• Evilutionary Biologist: At the Virunga Biocontrol Institute, the Draka manage to crack the human genome with horrible experiments, allowing them to create a literal Master Race, a literal Servant Race, and other breeds of mutant creatures as soldiers or game. Drakon makes reference to centaurs, goblins, and other mythical/prehistoric creatures being created to populate Draka hunting preserves, as well as "a few hundred American test subjects, ranging from prepubescent to adults used up fast in a secret project." Virunga Biocontol is also responsible for weaponizing HIV for use against the Alliance in the Final War.
• The Federation: The United States. After the Draka conquer India in The Stone Dogs, the remaining Alliance states fully merge their sovereignty. This bites them hard when the Alliance's peacenik leadership overrules the U.S. President's demand for a preemptive strike on the mobilizing Draka, allowing the Domination to activate its superweapon first.
• Fling a Light into the Future: The New America Project, an antimatter-powered sleeper ship that takes the Alliance survivors of the Final War to Alpha Centauri, away from the Draka Yoke, to continue the war against the Domination.
• Foreign Ruling Class: The Citizens, from a British, Icelandic and Dixie background, are ruling over Serfs from across the lands they conquered.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The Draka as a whole. Their ancestors principally consist of American Loyalists, Hessians from the American Revolution, Icelanders who fled the volcanic eruptions of the 1780s, French aristocrats, white Haitians, and American Confederates. Once they've become powerful enough to declare independence from Britain, they seek the most horrifying revenge that they can. They started out as a British colony in what is now South Africa in the late 18th century. By World War II, they've all but taken over Africa and Eurasia, and the series ends with them having completely overrun the world.
• Funetik Aksent: To the point a lot of readers feel it's overdone. The creole of the Draka slaves, in particular, is so weirdly spelled that at times it comes across as a genuinely foreign language.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: The Draka gain a massive lead over the Alliance in genetics and biotechnology due to their willingness to experiment on live human (serf) subjects, sequencing the human genome by the 1970s. Alliance characters bemoan how public opinion prohibits the Alliance from conducting its own research in genetics. Using their expertise, the Draka produce human-wolf-baboon hybrid "ghouloons" to serve as super-strong shock troops, as well as the New Race. They also produce the Stone Dogs, the bioweapon that wins the Final War for them.
• Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!: Eric seems to think the Americans have too much of this mentality to be successfully enslaved — he thinks to win the Protracted Struggle, the Draka will need to kill most of them.
• Go-Go Enslavement: In Under The Yoke, European concubines are seen on the action block wearing heels and jewelry and nothing else.
• Government Conspiracy: As it becomes obvious the Alliance's civilian leadership is not taking the increasingly-obvious Draka threat seriously, General Le Farge and some allies take more aggressive steps against the Domination without their superiors' knowledge. Le Farge flat-out says if they get caught, he could get shot and it would end the others' careers.
• Grand Finale: Book 3, The Stone Dogs: A nuclear and biological "Final War" stretching from Earth to outer space occurs between The Alliance and The Domination, with the latter able to reduce North America back to the Stone Age after activating the titular Stone Dogs virus: a covertly-transmitted, weaponized strain of HIV that also induces violent psychosis. What's left of the US is invaded and enserfed before being turned into a continent-wide game and "feral" hunting preserve by the Draka, who've successfully conquered the Earth. In a "Ray of Hope" Ending for the Alliance, an antimatter-powered sleeper starship New America is launched toward Alpha Centauri, in search of a new planet. By Book 4, Drakon, descendants of Alliance colonists finally begin to turn the tables.
• Gratuitous German: Especially the first (WW2-centered) book glories in misspelled and otherwise butchered German (as well as some bad Russian). For just one example, the SS division the Drakas fight is consistently identified as the "Liebstandarte"—Which, when spelled in this manner, translates into English as the "Regiment of Love"… (Stirling has since improved in this regard, presumably making this aspect of the Draka books something of an Old Shame.)
• Happiness in Slavery: Quite a few of the Draka Serfs suffer from this. And after the Draka master human genetic engineering, they all suffer from it. Crosses over with Even Evil Has Standards since Tanya von Shrakenberg, a Draka, openly expresses to her new captive serf, Chantal, that she would prefer her serfs to be happy here.
  • By the Great War, most of Africa had been Draka land for decades and knew no other way of life. The Draka had a hundred years to "perfect" their dark art and everybody was genre savvy in regards to the consequences of a successful slave uprising. Even worse, at the turn of the 20th Century, they knew the outside world would not tolerate them beyond necessity. The Domination is a Super North Korea which has an exacting knowledge of keeping the masses in-line and a extreme amount of incentive to keep doing so. And, unlike North Korea, the Draka have the resources to back up their threats, and enough sense to let their serfs keep pets, personal gardens and up to a point, rudimentary luxuries and entertainment, often enticing them to join in.
• Have You Told Anyone Else?: In Drakon, Gwendolyn Ingolfsson goes home with a stockbroker who, after sex, catches her reading his books and surfing his Internet with supernatural speed. Upon realizing she's being observed, Gwen asks him some questions that are pretty obviously this before she kills him.
• The Hedonist: Drakan society is very focused on pleasure, with sexual promiscuity a fact of life.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: A Turkish Janissary soldier in Finland is explicitly described in the likeness of Bülent Ecevit, and his name is Ecevit. Sadly said soldier is a child-raping psychopath, whereas Bülent Ecevit was a social liberal politician that kept OTL Turkey from barreling to chaos with his policies.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: By the 20th century, the timeline has changed so much that almost no real-world historical figures show up. Guess who is one of the few exceptions.
• Humans Are Bastards: Played *extremely* straight. The unflinching loyalty and the extent of the rapine the Janissaries inflict on the civilized world; or their casual laughter and enjoyment when 13 year old Finnish kids get impaled. Slavery or not, there is no excuse, abuse or not, virtually every ethnic group and social caste in and out of the Domination is full of it.
  • Hitler tacitly allowed Italy to be partitioned, letting his own race be taken as slaves.
  • The United States Government is completely unwilling to enter the war, preferring to roll in its riches and clearly ignore the atrocities the Draka inflicts until it became apparent Europe was going under. The threat of Draka support to the Japanese sounds unrealistic: a Japan at the brink of defeat, even when filled with Draka materiel, would not be a match for nuclear missiles the U.S had already started to bombard the Japanese fleets with.
  • The Jewish community of the United States may have single handedly let the Alliance lose. The financial clout the American Jews prevented an alliance of U.S, U.K and the Third Reich to ally against the Draka, and a constant series of attempts at blocking any cooperation. They simply let their brethren in Levant and Eastern Europe "Under the Yoke" due to petty hatred of Germany.
  • The Japanese go wild, implied to be even worse than OTL Imperial Japan concerning non-Japanese Asians. Even after a dozen nukes, their unending stubbornness and ego makes Draka overrun entire Asia whereas they could have surrendered to the U.S and stopped the Draka rush to the east.
  • The Finnish partisans openly declare that they make no difference between killing enemy Janissaries and their comfort women or noncombatant serfs in a patrol, and are heavily implied to be cannibals. Given their enemies have absolutely no mercy, it is understandable, but jarring nevertheless.
  • Security Directorate serfs (a.k.a Chaindogs) abuse and torture shiploads of captured Indian and other Alliance personnel and force them to thank for torturing a random captive to death to break them in early. The serf doing this is a heavily tattooed, bald-shaven woman who clearly enjoys the abuse she dishes on the captives, detailing they'll be sold separately to new owners.
  • Scientist Draka collaborators post WW2 are often quite morally bankrupt, or plain manbabies like Ekstein, a stereotypical nerd who simply defected to the Domination and sold his sapphire solar cell technology to get laid with scantily-clad Serf women.
  • The Shrakenbergs' newcomer serfs from warzones set out to bully and abuse their inferiors at the first opportunity. Such as Chinese Deng, who was saved barely from an execution, only to abuse, hit and deny cigarette breaks to his assistant after some experience. He doesn't get any better, only more tyrannical over the years.
  • A janissary under the Shrakenberg household abuses newly bought serfs who are in a transport, telling his stories of rape and plunder of their cities, until a still trauma-ridden French male snaps, only to be beaten to death. The Janissary is the father of one of the female serfs, and is widely respected in the household.
  • A Frenchman who is a plumber who lost his legs during the Drakan occupation of Europe is bought to improve the household's water system. He quickly marries a serf woman and sets out to slap and rain abuse on inferior serf workers who aren't well versed in his particular method of plumbing. The books clearly intend to show there are no differences in the morality of the oppressor and the oppressed.
  • American tourists to the Domination, implied to spend dollars for "pleasures not found in the Alliance territories." It's up to the reader to determine.
    * Considering how uptight and sexually repressed Catholic-dominated spartan Alliance is, pleasures we would find very mundane, such as strip club or casual swinging sex amongst the household serfs and Drana joining in, are likely to be a shocking draw for American tourists.
• Hope Spot: Archona gets targeted by 3 submarines' payloads-worth of nukes near the end of the war. All of them get intercepted.
• I Die Free: In Under The Yoke, Solange's father tries this. Tanya von Shrakenberg refuses to kill him or have him executed at the request of his daughter, whom she's been sleeping with.
• Insistent Terminology: The Draka have Serfs, not slaves.
• In Spite of a Nail: One of the major criticisms of the timeline. Despite radical alterations to history starting in 1783, we still get a US Civil War over slavery in 1860, a Great War in 1914 (which the US joins on the exact same date in 1917), and both Hitler and FDR still rise to power in 1932. Word of God says that these are different people, but they aren't given different names. Of course, the Draka is more of a thought experiment than an attempt at a plausible Alternate History.
• Invincible Villain: The Draka in a nutshell. They manage to industrialise faster than all of Europe, easily conquer Africa, and sweep aside European forces. Oh, and they're an empire of racist slave-traders so despicable that many readers unironically preferred the Nazis winning to them.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: In Drakon, Samothracian cyber-agent La Farge insistently refers to Gwendolyn, a drakensis, as "it." During a parley she complains about this, saying that she's at least a fellow hominid.
• Karma Houdini: An entire nation of them. In the end, homo drakensis even stop aging, ensuring they can enjoy the fruits of slavery forever, all the while hunting the descendants of Alliance humans for sport during holidays, keeping the atavistic feeling of unjust vengeance for an eternity.
• Master Race: The Draka consciously craft themselves into a master race by living The Spartan Way. The books contrast the Draka with the Nazis, who believed they were a master race because of an inherently superior genetic lineage. It is mentioned that the average Draka footsoldier could crush the skull of an SS trooper with his (or her) bare hands. Later, genetic tinkering accentuates this to the point that the Draka literally are a Superior Species.
• Might Makes Right: The impalement of rebellious slaves is referred to as "the ultimate argument" in Under The Yoke and dueling is "the ultimate argument" in Draka politics.
• Nested Ownership: Very high-ranking serfs might have servants of their own, although being slaves themselves they don't directly own them.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Draka never call their slaves slaves, instead they refer to them as serfs. This is ostensibly to get around British anti-slavery laws; the author attempts to justify this by saying the Draka were virtually independent by the mid-19th century.
• Nuke 'Em: The inviolable law is that no serf is to raise a hand in anger to any of the Draka, on pain of death. The crowning example was when a serf rebellion in Barcelona managed to overwhelm the local garrison, which made the Draka decide to suppress the riot by nuking the entire city, mentioned in passing in The Stone Dogs. This was probably a better death than the fate that would have awaited the rebels if the Draka had used conventional methods. Rebels they capture alive get impaled.
• Oh, My Gods!: Draka characters frequently swear by Norse deities. Subverted in that they don't seem to be actively worshiped (there's mention of a move to "revive the Old Faith", but it apparently failed), so this may more of an In-Universe pop-cultural quirk.
• One-Man Army: Taken to extremes with the drakensis. Gwendolyn slaughters twenty street thugs with ease mere seconds after she arrives in the present, killing many with her bare hands. Later, she faces dozens of cops and soldiers, some armed with Samothracian weaponry, and kills thirteen of them before escaping unharmed.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Ghouloons, genetically engineered by the Draka as shock troops, are wolf/baboon hybrids that resemble horror-movie werewolves.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Played straight in that, while a Draka citizen is technically allowed to practice a religion, it is considered at the very least tacky and, in general, politically suspect. Averted in that the Draka have absolutely no qualms about using (modified) religions as a means of control over their serfs. It appears, however, that by the time of Drakon, 400 years into the Final Society, both the servus and drakensis are uniformly materialist atheists, and for some reason, many Alliance personnel are still devout Catholics.
• Pet the Dog: In The Stone Dogs, Yolande Ingolfsson keeps a teen Alliance prisoner taken from the Pathfinder in her quarters to protect her from "bored horny Draka" and, much to other Draka's amusement, trades the Pathfinder prisoners back to the Alliance for a group of high-ranking serfs whose ship had suffered a malfunction and crashed in Alliance territory.
• The Plague: The Stone Dogs Virus is a genetically modified variant of HIV that causes homicidal fury before death. It's unleashed on the Alliance in the final war, and is a major component of their defeat.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: The first Drakan colonists are slaveholders from the American south. As the colony grows, the Draka go from simply viewing all non-whites as slaves to viewing anyone who isn't Drakan as slaves.
• Praetorian Guard: The Archonal Guard Legion, nicknamed "Boss' Brass Knucks" by Draka regular troops for their unit insignia—a gauntlet-wearing hand crushing a globe.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • The Draka are horrified at the Holocaust… because it was a tremendous waste of slave labor.
  • After the Final War nearly destroys the ecosystem, the Draka respond by invoking strict environmental standards to ensure stability. Nature preserves are created from entire continents and the population levels are kept low.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Draka Race, having been fighting since they first landed in South Africa, are extremely proud of their military heritage and traditions.
• Germanic Efficiency: The Draka are directly described as the Prussia of Africa: a militaristic marcher state which by necessity had to focus on conquest and rapid industrialization just to survive. They're very pragmatic and not Stupid Evil - because they consider it a waste of resources. A widespread feature of Draka society is that they're actually involved conservationists, turning entire provinces into nature preserves after depopulating them. One of the in-universe essays, however, points out that this isn't altruistic conservationism for the sake of nature: it's the conservationism of a plantation owner who wants to carefully shepherd his resources rather than let them go to waste.
• La Résistance:
  • The Finns are the only nation presented as waging anything like a determined resistance in the face of Drakan occupation. Under the Yoke seems to suggest that the free Finns will eventually simply die from attrition or lack of supply, never posing a serious threat to Drakan strategic interests.
  • According to the chronology given for the series, Switzerland apparently is considered a hotbed of resistance into the 1970's. And the French Resistance at the beginning of Under The Yoke is featured, but only as a shadow of its former self, its members forced into cannibalism to survive and generally considered little more than an annoyance by not only the Draka but also the serf population.
  • The Finns are the only ones we actually get to see in action. In addition to Switzerland and France, Russia is also said to have pockets of holdouts, Barcelona was nuked to stop an uprising, and as late as the 1960s some serfs in former Italy are trying (unsuccessfully) to resist the Draka (seen at the beginning of The Stone Dogs). Most of the rest of Europe has been so battered by war that the Draka are mostly picking up the pieces and rebuilding—many civilians are so worn-out and beleaguered that they're actually lining up for their serf tattoos just to get food and medical care.
• Really 700 Years Old: Common among the drakensis in Drakon, as they are immortal. Gwendolyn is one of the first generation of drakensis, so despite looking thirty-something she's actually around 460 years old, one of the oldest of her kind.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Humanity at the fourth book, Drakon, finally manages to settle Alpha Centauri, escaping the Draka yoke, and survive for 400 years and develop superior fleets to stymie Draka expansion, and even manage to open wormholes in Earth orbit to send a huge fleet that is "stopped barely".
• Schizo Tech: Until the last few years of World War Two the Eurasian War, this happened a lot because of the Draka tendency to be one or two generations ahead of everybody else. Somehow. At the end of the 18th century, the Draka regularly used lever-operated multi-shot rifles, steam engine trucks with primitive machineguns on them and dirigibles.
  • This trope reaches its apex in The Stone Dogs. At the end of the novel, the Alliance for Democracy launches a sublight starship powered and propelled by matter-antimatter reactions to Alpha Centauri. The starship contains 100,000 cryogenically-frozen Alliance citizens, enough to start a colony and continue the fight against the Draka. In what year does this happen? 1997.
  • Stirling goes into some detail about this in the afterword to the story, at least in some editions. He envisioned a world where the constant warfare forced all sides into taking the "Manhattan Project" approach—throw lots of money and resources at the problem right now, build something usable on the battlefield right now, expenses be damned, risks be damned, refinement or subtlety or elegance be damned. It gets results quickly, if you don't mind the results being big and crude and clunky and maybe a bit unreliable. It produces crude atomic bombs that weigh many tons, to be delivered by Mach 2+ ramjet bombers that are more dangerous to their own crews than any enemy air defense. He observes that a "Manhattan Project" approach to polio would have been far more likely to produce a "magnificently advanced iron lung" than a vaccine to prevent the disease in the first place. In one of the novels there is an in-universe book excerpt in which a scientist complains that an experiment using superconductive materials is producing anomalous results that were not predicted either by quantum theory or by Relativity—but no one knows what it means because no one will fund any large-scale research on anything that doesn't have an immediate obvious utility for blowing people up.
• Secret Police: The Draka Security Directorate monitors the serfs for any hint of uprising, and the Draka Citizens for any hint of sedition. The "distressingly liberal" Eric is a particular foe of theirs. There are some hints the Alliance for Democracy's OSS is trending that way as well — executions approved by secret courts, while Alliance officers of a sufficiently high rank have "the power of summary execution."
• Shout-Out: Recurring references to Nineteen Eighty-Four, most notably when a Draka characterizes their economic system as "oligarchical collectivism" as a reference to Emmanuel Goldstein's treatise The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
  • In The Stone Dogs, Doctor Harry Snappdove of the Strategic Planning Board is described as a balding man with a hooked nose and a brush of dark-brown beard, a description of Harry Turtledove, another well-known author of alternate-history fiction.
• Single-Species Nations: The trope comes into effect in the final book, The Stone Dogs. The Draka started out as regular humans, but later genetically engineered themselves into a Human Subspecies called Homo drakensis. The rest of humanity, meanwhile, had long since banded together into a super-state called the Alliance for Democracy. By the time of the book's Distant Finale, the war between the two nations is also a war between two species, with the Alliance being regular humans and the Draka being Homo drakensis.
• Slave Mooks: Although Janissaries — soldiers drawn from the slave population — have lots of privileges, this is their main function. In Marching Through Georgia, the fact they're used in attritional fighting, frontal assault, etc. is explicitly discussed.
• Slave Race: After they fully conquer the world, the Draka modify their serfs into Homo servus, a species that's psychologically incapable of revolt.
• Sleeper Ship: The New America, sent to set up a new colony for the Alliance once it's clear the Final War is lost. A few hundred years later, they've become a space empire able to fight the Draka as equals, and that nearly manage to reclaim the earth.
• Smart People Play Chess: The Draka play chess; unfortunately, the only moves quoted are complete nonsense ("Knight to King's Pawn Four" is syntactically invalid, never mind whether it would be a good move or not).
• Space Opera: The series becomes more and more Space Opera-ish as it goes on. The Draka rulers in Drakon dream of The Race eventually conquering the entire galaxy. It is wisely pointed out that there may be powerful species in space that could destroy the Draka if they are not cautious.
• The Lost Lenore: Tyansha for Erik and Myfwany for Yolande. The former mopes about her and illegally has their child smuggled to America, while the latter holds a grudge for literally decades, to the point she starts the Final War.
• The Spartan Way: The Draka train their children in military boarding schools from the age of 5. This program is called the Agoge, which fits with the Drakan obsession with Classical society.
• State Sec: The Draka Directorate of Security, or "headhunters", based out of Skull House, operate their own coastal defense forces, the serf-manned Order Police, and the Citizen-manned Intervention Squads to suppress serf revolts, and wield enough political clout to rival that of the War Directorate.
• Straw Nihilist: In this timeline, Nietzsche himself emigrates to the Domination and makes a huge contribution to their underlying philosophy (although even the Draka admit that he had to calm down a little first).
• Superior Species: Homo drakensis, the species that the Draka are eventually genetically modified into, is massively physically and mentally enhanced, can produce pheromones allowing limited mind control, and don't age.
• Super-Soldier: Homo drakensis, for one, but even as far back as Marching Through Georgia, the Draka citizen-soldiers were effectively these compared to everyone else. 400 years later, the Draka Archon (leader) wears a nanosuit with firepower reported to be able to destroy entire cities.
• Sympathetic Slave Owner: In order to have Draka protagonists readers actually like, this happens. The von Shrakenberg family in particular pride themselves on how benevolently they treat their serfs, with Tanya von Shrakenberg telling her daughter Gudrun that sadism is "a sickness" that she will not tolerate. That said, members of the family other than Eric often don't live up to this. In Under The Yoke, Tanya suggests her husband Edward repeatedly rape the French serf Chantal to break her spirit and pimps the nun Marya to whom she thinks is a disabled Draka veteran, while Edward himself can be downright nasty when his old war wound is hurting. In The Stone Dogs, Eric's sister Johanna forces the serf Ali — her own nephew and the son of longtime servant and occasional lesbian lover Rakshan — to beat his friend Marco to death with a shovel when she catches them trying to escape.
• Taking You with Me:
  • The book "Stone Dogs" has Project Fenris: Draka plan to destroy the world in the event of defeat. Drakon has Gwendolyn setting up a bio-bomb to destroy all the life in the world if she is suddenly killed.
  • Kenneth Lefarge does this to Gwendolyn Ingolfsson in Drakon
  • The Japanese also do this, on a much smaller scale, in the Final War, detonating fusion bombs on the Home Islands to prevent the Draka from enserfing them. Eric von Shrakenberg notes that the fallout will drift towards the Korean Peninsula and kill Citizens and serfs alike.
    The Japanese never liked the Koreans anyhow.
• Those Wacky Nazis: Marching through Georgia is set during World War II, with the Nazis as the protagonists. As is pointed out a few times, they're still less evil than the Draka.
• Too Dumb to Live: Discussed, then Played Straight. When India is considering seceding from the Alliance for Democracy, OSS officer Frederick Lefarge remarks upon how stupid it is for the Indians to believe they can survive outside of the Alliance, and how some Pakistanis are even considering mounting a jihad against the Domination. His superior, OSS chief Stoddard, replies that "human beings don't have to be stupid to act stupidly, they just have to feel strongly about something" and that the Hindu nationalists behind the secession movement have genuine grievances. Then India does secede, and the Draka overrun it inside of a week.
• Tragic Villain: As a teen Eric risked the wrath of the Security Directorate to send his daughter with his serf concubine to freedom in America and enters Draka politics with reformist goals, but in order to get high enough to actually accomplish anything he has to make more and more compromises with truly evil people, such as signing off on human experimentation to create the Stone Dogs and the Militants' aggressive off-Earth actions toward the Alliance. Ultimately it's he who initiates the Final War that leads to Draka conquest of the entire Solar System.
• Villain World: The Final Society, wherein humanity has either evolved to become superhuman (Homo drakensis) or been successfully domesticated (Homo servus). Earth has been largely depopulated and de-industrialized, with entire continents used as nature reserves and industry shifted into orbit.
• The War to End All Wars: The Final War of ''The Stone Dogs", where the Draka and the Alliance have their final battle for the future of the world. The Draka win, of course, but in doing so wreck the world, forcing them to spend a century repairing it before they can continue their goals, and the Alliance's survivors have rebuilt by "Drakon" to become a serious rival.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Eventually, the remaining countries not under Drakan control have little choice other than to band together under the American-led Alliance for Democracy.
• We Have Reserves:
  • The entire point of the Janissaries. It's a measure of how much life as a Draka serf sucks that they still get millions of volunteers for human wave cannon fodder duty, as while Janissaries are still serfs they're at least allowed to work off some of their anger by oppressing other serfs and "ferals" (i.e., the inhabitants of countries invaded by the Draka).
  • Put to diabolically good use with Jewish concentration camp survivors. Note that Zionism seems to have been averted when the Draka took control of the Holy Land after their universe's equivalent of World War I.
  • Furthermore, as genetic sequencing becomes easier, the Draka breed Ghouloons, gene-spliced Baboons with human and wolf genes, to provide massive numbers of obedient, cheap, and expendable shock troopers that can handle levers, buttons, rifles and simple tools. And like to eat shrimp.
• We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: In Drakon, the engineered Homo servus serfs still harvest crops by hand. The dimensionally-displaced Homo drakensis Gwendolyn tells an environmentalist from our world that it's "healthier" this way.
• Would Hurt a Child: The Draka gleefully burn mosques full of Afghan children when the Afghanis resist, with their least evil members like Karl Shrakenberg shrugging off as if it's a chore. To put it mildly, the scenes are horrifying.