All Anglo, no Saxon

[ffutures]

The Struggle for Empire has the world ruled by the Anglo-Saxon Empire. Basically Britain and Germany took out France, Russia and the other European great powers in the early years of the 20th century, as the empire expanded the USA joined and ultimately gave up being an independent nation to become part of the Empire. The Empire is so dominant that some nations (such as France and Turkey) no longer exist, and English appears to be the global language.

Ignoring all of the implausibility of this, the problem I have is that there is no hint of any German influence on this culture. Nobody has a German name, none of the spaceships have German names, etc. Yet it's consistently called the "Anglo-Saxon" empire and there is no hint that Britain has somehow swallowed up Germany in the 150 200+ years or so between the formation of the empire and the "now" of the story.

Basically I feel I have three options:

1. Explain it as the story being a translation of the Empire's Anglo-Saxon language, a mixture of English and German. It's just a coincidence that most of the story revolves around English characters.
2. Explain it as the Empire having decided (by vote or whatever) to use English as its only language.
3. Say that Germany has its own fleets etc., German is the second language of the Empire, they're also involved in the war but we don't see them because the viewpoint characters serve with the British fleet.

The third seems the most plausible explanation of this point, on the whole, anyone got any better suggestions?

Comments

[johnreiher.livejournal.com]

I'm good with #3, since for #1 you'd have to explain why all the names are rendered into English and not in Anglo Deustche. (Seriously, English is a variant of German, so I'm not sure what you'd call it if the two came back together.)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Good point. OK, 3 does seem the least problematic.

[pwilkinson.livejournal.com]

2a) Say that the Germans, as continental Saxons, were so intellectually overwhelmed by the inherent superiority of their *Anglo*-Saxon cousins that they all started speaking English exclusively and adopted English names. Also mention that it is now regarded as the height of bad manners ever to remind any of their descendants of the cultural inferiority of their ancestors.

(OK, I'm being somewhat tongue-in-cheek and it might not go down well with a modern audience - but I do wonder whether it's the explanation that many of Cole's original readers would have come up with if they had thought of the question at all.)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I agree that this might have been what they would have thought of, but I really don't think it would be entirely politic to go with that explanation.

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

Maybe the Empire's divided into German and British spheres of influence (and possibly American too), and they don't interact with each other much?

(If Germany and Britain are allies, not rivals, presumably they must have worked out some way to clearly and equitably divide the world between them early on, and the tradition continued as the Empire expanded...)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Maybe, but there's nothing to indicate it if so, and there are a couple of brief scenes set in America that don't quite work if they are separate nations.