The novel, which contains some delightfully bewildering passages ("The British Empire and the Franco-Spanish Holy Alliance were officially at peace, so skirmishes between the North American Union and Nueva Espana seldom made the newspapers or the wireless"), includes a description of the painting:

Bowing before the king, George Washington was made to appear shorter than his sovereign. The blue coat that proclaimed his colonial colonelcy was of wool like that of George III, but of a coarser weave speaking of homespun. Not all its creases were those of fashion; with a few strategic wrinkles and some frayed fringes depending from one epaulette, Gainsborough managed to suggest how long the garment had lain folded in its trunk while Washington sailed across the Atlantic to advance the colonies' interests on the privy council George III had established.

Turtledove told me by email that he had an "epiphany" when he traveled with his family to the World Science Fiction Convention in Winnipeg, Canada in 1994, shortly before he published The Two Georges.

As he read a book from the Little House on the Prairie series to his daughter at the hotel, he came upon a section about a Fourth of July celebration "on the plains in the late nineteenth century, with fireworks and with tub-thumping speakers talking about how the United States had broken away from British tyranny and was the freest country in the world as a result. And there I was reading this in the country next door to mine, a country as similar to mine as any two nations on earth, a country just as free as mine—and a country that had never broken away from Britain at all. It was a thought-provoking experience." Canada, of course, merely shares a queen with the United Kingdom at this point, but its relationship with Britain has certainly evolved differently than America's has.

Turtledove explained that he's toyed with the concept of the American Revolution in other works as well, including The United States of Atlantis, a book, as he described it, "set in a world where the eastern quarter of North America rifted away from the rest of the continent 85,000,000 years ago and got shoved into the middle of the Atlantic by plate tectonics different from the real ones." Atlantis, led by Founding Father-like figures, stages an American Revolution-style uprising against Great Britain.

Turtledove also pointed out that he isn't the only author to experiment with this genre. He cited the science-fiction writer H. Beam Piper and his 1948 short story "He Walked Around the Horses." In the story, European officials—living in a 19th-century world in which the American Revolution and consequently the French Revolution have failed, and the Napoleonic Wars never occurred—puzzle over the reports of a British diplomat named Benjamin Bathurst, who has somehow tumbled from our real world into this parallel universe.