A Neo-Atomic Tango Thru a World of Dreams

“Twenty-five years ago, on this day, the Hindenburg crossed the Atlantic for the first time. Today, it will cross for the last time. Six hundred times it has accomplished this feat, and in doing so has covered the same distance as more than eight round trips to the Moon. Its perfect safety record is a testament to the ingenuity of the German people.

  There is always some sorrow in seeing a thing of beauty age, decline and finally fade, no matter how gracefully it is done. But so long as men sail the open skies, none shall forget the glory of the Hindenburg.”

                              - John F.Kennedy, March 31, 1962, Berlin 

The Long Haul... by Ken Liu

                                                      103                                                        Lr                                               Lawrencium                                                     (262)

Lawrence of America

The archaeologist, scholar, author, and military genius E. T. Lawrence was assigned to Earth during the First Galactic War and charged with finding a way to stymie Axis forces which were using the planet as a staging area preparatory to the assault on Centaurus. There he conceived the unorthodox plan of undermining the Axis's Chinese allies by encouraging the tributary nations of North America to rise up in rebellion against their conquerors.

Lawrence in colorful native garb, his necktie flying over his shoulder as he leads the Americans into battle, is one of the most romantic images in all Galactic War One. His vision of a revived American nation (rather larger than the original, for it would encompass the entire continent), combined with his valor, endurance, and promises of extraplanetary gold, united the self-serving politicians for a time and led to the conquest of Toronto and New York, the sterilization of vast stretches of Asia, and ultimately to a triumphant, if somewhat bloody, drive on Mexico City itself.

Alas, with the conclusion of the war, Lawrence's American allies proved themselves unworthy of self-government and turned upon each other in savage factionalism. Disillusioned, this being of rare parts fell upon hard times. Refusing all honors, he had a full-body change and enlisted as a Denebian slitherer and served with distinction in the Mud Wars, but ultimately found no true satisfaction in the Semisolid Corps. A tragic accident while nova-surfing put an end to his unhappy life.

Earth is today administered by the Hegemony with the greatest respect for and altruism toward its native peoples. Despite what cynics say, our presence there has nothing whatsoever to do with the slave trade.

                                                   The End

The Periodic Table of Science Fiction by Michael Swanwick

  Levi Horovitz - Leggy, to his friends, of which he had few, at least inside politics - was short and rotund. He was rarely seen in public, and never without a soggy cigar clamped in his teeth. For nearly twenty years, Horovitz had been the hidden power behind the Republican party - since 1884, when, with the aid of a handful of carefully paid newsmen, he had orchestrated his candidate Jimmy Blaine into the Republican nomination over the incumbent Chester Arthur.

  Horovitz was bitterly aware that he would never serve in office himself. He could never get elected, not in this century, not in the next. Not a Jew. Not even in America, the most enlightened country in the world. But he had adapted, and presidents and generals danced to his orders.

  "Roosevelt's not much good to us now, six feet under," Hanna said. In Hanna's private opinion, Roosevelt had never been any good for the Republicans; the damned cowboy had been unsafe and erratic. But there was no percentage in talking against a war hero, especially a dead one; Hanna had learned that lesson well. "Better come up with somebody else."

  "Damn that anarchist," Horovitz muttered again. "Damn him to hell."

  "That's redundant; he's there already," Hanna said. "Now, who have you got?"

  "Damn that Bryan, too."

  "Bryan's got the masses behind him," Hanna observed.

  "Swine." Horovitz spit out his cigar and ground it under his foot. "They're all a bunch of swine."

  That was the problem facing the Republicans, all right. With Theodore Roosevelt dead, shot by a drug-crazed anarchist, who did they have? William Jennings Bryan was mobilizing the country yokels with his damned populist talk. The man was tireless, crossing and recrossing the country by rail, stopping at every cow-flop town on the tracks, talking about American imperialism as if it were a bad thing, asking the people whether they had ever seen the "full dinner pail" that McKinley had promised them. With his high-flown diction and rash promises, Bryan was raising their expectations - and harvesting their votes. He could motivate the rabble, old Bryan could; Horovitz would give him that. What a silver-tongued peacock he was at oration, with his talk of America "crucified upon a cross of gold" and his avowal of "plowshares of peace!"

  If only the man had been a Republican, a true patriot, instead of a Democrat - one step away from being a communist. Or worse.

  "Here's my thought," Hanna said. "We run John Hay."

  "Against William Jennings Bryan?" Horovitz dismissed him with a wave, and pulled a new cigar from his vest pocket. "You're joking. Bryan would crumple him up like a page from last year's Sears & Roebuck catalog and wipe his ass with the man."

  "Henderson, then?"

  "Wouldn't stand a chance. None of those old guys can stand against Bryan. We need somebody new."

  "Then who?"

  "The boy genius," Horovitz said. "The hero of America, the maestro of electricity." At Hanna's blank look, he said, "The wizard of Menlo Park."

  "You mean"—Hanna gasped—"Edison?"

  Horovitz pulled a newspaper from his valise and dropped it onto the desk. The headline said, EDISON ANNOUNCES REST, HE IS TIRED OUT AND WILL STOP INVENTING FOR A WHILE. "He's not tinkering," Horovitz said. "He might as well run for president."

  "But—the man has no knowledge of politics."

  Horovitz lit his cigar, drew deeply, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and smiled. "So much the better."

excerpt from The Eyes of America by Geoffrey A. Landis

Men now talked of airships that would fly to the moon, and of telephones to breach the vapory wall between worlds. And yet another Xenophone TRUFAX post to The Alt-Historian? It was 1904. Who knew what marvels would be next?

  Wilson is sitting cross-legged atop a boulder on the outskirts of a mountain village in northern Iraq, gazing west over a barren valley, a position directly across from the field of flowers. He's shirtless, wearing desert-camo fatigue pants and a helmet, the optics of its faceplate magnified, so it seems he's looking at the flowers from a distance of fifty feet and not, as is truly the case, more than a mile. Wilson loves his helmet forever and happily ever after. It looks dangerous-robot slick with the tiger stripes he painted on the sides. It has a TV mounted above the visor so he can watch his favorite shows. It feeds him, dopes him, keeps him cool, plays his tunes, tells him when to fire, where to hide. An hour before, it reminded him to record messages for family and friends. He sent love to his parents, talked dirty to his girlfriend, Laura Witherspoon, and to his best friend back in Greeley, he said, "Yo, Mackie! I am the magic! My boots store energy—I can jump twenty-five feet straight fucking up, dude! Tomorrow we're gonna kick some brutal ass! Talk to ya later!" Now he's in a more reflective mood. The thought of invading Paradise is fresh, but he's not too sure, you know. Intel is promoting the idea that the flowers are a terrorist hydroponics experiment. That sounds bullshit to Wilson. There's little doubt the ragheads believe it's Paradise. If the village wasn't cordoned off, the entire population would go running into the darkness under the mountain, even though the ones that did so before the Americans arrived never reappeared.

excerpt from A Walk in the Garden by Lucius Shepard (1943 - 2014)

Xenophone, having recently learned of this criminally underrated author's death, shall leave this TRUFAX post to The Alt-Historian sarcasm free.

from The Difference Engine (1992) by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling

original image via

  Memorandum to the Foreign Office

  On this occasion, our distinguished guest, the ex-president of the American Union, Mr. Clement L. Valladigham, got as drunk as a fiddle. The eminent Democrat showed that he could be as profligate as any English Lord. He fumbled Mrs. A., kissed the shrieking Miss B., pinched the plump Mrs. C. black and blue, and ran at Miss D. with the flagrant intent to ravish her!   Finally, after throwing our female guests into hysterics by behaving like an elephant in must,the noble beast was captured by main force, and carried upstairs, all four feet in the air,by our household staff. Within his room, Mrs. Valladigham was awaiting him, in shift and mobcap. There and then, to our considerable amazement, this remarkable man satiated his baffled lust on the unresisting body of his legitimate spouse and copiously vomited during the operation. Those who have seen Mrs. Valladigham would not think this latter incredible.   News has now reached me that the former President of Texas, Samuel Houston, has died in Veracruz, in his Mexican exile. He was, I believe, awaiting any call to arms that might have brought him back to eminence; but the French alcaldes were likely too wily for him. Houston had his faults, I know, but he was easily worth ten of Clement Valladigham, who made a shrinking peace with the Confederacy, and has allowed the vultures of Red Manhattan Communism to gnaw the carcass of his dishonored country.

                                                                                      - LORD LISTON, 1870.

excerpt from The Difference Engine by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling

It is clear from this TRUFAX post to The Alt-Historian that Xenophone has made a habit of cutting the bumblepuppy as too low! 

..."We must recall the historical circumstances in which the decision was made to develop the Azathoth Bomb. Giant Japanese Majins and Gojiras crashing through Asia. Vast squadrons of Nazi juggernauts blitzkrieging Europe...And their undersea leviathans, preying on shipping..."

  "Have you ever seen a modern leviathan, Elwood?"

  "Yes. I witnessed one...feeding. At the base in San Diego." Doughty could recall it with awful clarity - the great finned Navy monster, the barnacled pockets in its vast ribbed belly holding a slumbering cargo of hideous batwinged gaunts. On order from Washington, the minor demons would waken, slash their way free of the monster's belly, launch, and fly to their appointed targets with pitiless accuracy and the speed of a tempest. In their talons they clutched triple-sealed spells that could open, for a few hideous micro-seconds, the portal between universes. And for an instant, the Radiance of Azathoth would gush through. And whatever that Color touched - wherever its unthinkable beam contacted earthly substance - the Earth would blister and bubble in cosmic torment. The very dust of the explosion would carry an unearthly taint.

excerpt from The Unthinkable by Bruce Sterling

It is with but the last few remaining shreds of my sanity that I, Xenophone, am able to write this TRUFAX post to The Alt-Historian...

                - ADVERTISING SECTION -

MISCELLANEOUS

WANTS

Required immediately, for East Africa, a thoroughly competent Plane and Dirigible Driver, acquainted with Petrol Radium and Helium motors and generators. Low-level work only, but must understand heavy-weight digs.

Mossamedes Transport Assoc.

84 Palestine Buildings, E. C.

Man wanted—Dig driver for Southern Alps with Saharan summer trips. High levels, high speed, high wages.

Apply M. Sidney

Hotel San Stefano. Monte Carlo

Family dirigible. A competent, steady man wanted for slow speed, low level Tangye dirigible. No night work, no sea trips. Must be member of the Church of England, and make himself useful in the garden.

M. R.,

The Rectory, Gray's Barton, Wilts.

Commercial dig, central and Southern Europe. A smart, active man for a L. M. T. Dig. Night work only. Headquarters London and Cairo. A linguist preferred.

Bagman

Charing Cross Hotel, W. C. (urgent.)

For sale—A bargain—Single Plane, narrow-gauge vanes, Pinke motor. Restayed this autumn. Hansen air-kit. 38 in. chest, 15½ collar. Can be seen by appointment.

N. 2650.    This office.

________________________________________________________

excerpt from the 1909 Doubleday, Page & Company edition of With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D. by Rudyard Kipling

This Xenophone TRUFAX post to The Alt-Historian has been certified by the Aerial Board of Control.

  One of the new Sikorsky gunships, an element of the First Air Cavalry with the words Whispering Death painted on its side, gave Mingolla and Gilbey and Baylor a lift from the Ant Farm to San Francisco de Juticlan, a small town located inside the green zone, which on the latest maps was designated Free Occupied Guatemala.  To the east of this green zone lay an undesignated band of yellow that crossed the country from the Mexican border to the Caribbean.  The Ant Farm was a firebase on the eastern edge of the yellow band, and it was from there that Mingolla - an artillery specialist not yet twenty-one years old - lobbed shells into an area that the maps depicted in black-and-white terrain markings.  And thus it was that he often thought of himself as engaged in a struggle to keep the world safe for primary colors...

excerpt from R&R by Lucius Shepard

This Xenophone TRUFAX post to The Alt-Historian is cleared to fire for effect.

The City of Angels burns in the opening scenes - set in 1996 - of Demolition Man (1993) directed by Marco Brambilla and starring Sylvester Stallone, Sandra Bullock and Wesley Snipes. The majority of the film's action sees Stallone's brutish police officer and Snipes' giggling psycho killer clashing (by way of cryogenic sleep) in the gleaming, futuristic city of San Angeles in the year 2032.

This Xenophone TRUFAX post to The Alt-Historian is not only cinematic, it knows what the three shells are for... 

The "FALSE DAWN," 1960-1970

Transatlantic rocket flight, 1960

First rocket to the Moon,   1978

Page from a timeline delineating notable events in Robert A. Heinlein's Future History, the backdrop to a series of stories written between 1939-1941 and 1945-1950. An early version of the Future History timeline was published in the March, 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

This Xenophone TRUFAX submission to The Alt-Historian wonders whether TANSTAAFL.

 A Brief History of the Colonisation of Space by Professor Sir William Coxton (University of Oxford Press, 858 pp, £75.00)

                     an excerpt of a review by Paul McAuley

...the Space Age began in the ruins of Europe at the end of the Second World War, when the Brits won the race to capture the secrets of the V-2 bunkers. Winston Churchill cannily arranged a swap of a few of the debriefed German personnel and a number of V-2s for American atomic technology, while spiriting much equipment, several half-completed V-3s, and a large contingent of technicians led by the formidable Wernher Von Braun, to the new rocket ranges at Woomera in the Australian outback. One of Churchill's last acts before the postwar election was to secure the future of the Woomera facility by encouraging engineering luminaries such as Barnes-Wallis, Christopher Cockerel and Frank Whittle to work with the Germans and, in Churchill's words, "extend the British ideal of freedom and fair play towards the stars". What he was about, of course, was building a new British Empire.

The next half dozen chapters dig deep into the crazy stiff-upper-lipped heroics of early Brit space pioneers, who defied death atop barely tested rockets for the glory of King and country. Sir Bill is no sentimentalist, but it's easy to detect a sneaking admiration for those rocket boys in his account, which in taut, laconic prose captures the reckless mood of volunteers who, like Battle of Britain Spitfire pilots, made almost inevitable death seem like no more than an awfully big adventure: boys who could never grow up. The most famous of them all, Maurice Gray, now retired and tending his beehives and rose garden in Devon, still sounds like a fey mix of Peter Pan and Christopher Robin, a boy laughing lightly at inconceivable death, the British version of a zen master...

This boy's own ripping book review has been a Xenophone TRUFAX submission to The Alt-Historian. 

There's a blurry photograph of a concrete box inside the file, snapped from above by a high-flying U-2 during the autumn of '61. Three coffin-shaped lakes, bulking dark and gloomy beneath the arctic sun; a canal heading west, deep in the Soviet heartland, surrounded by warning trefoils and armed guards. Deep waters saturated with calcium salts, concrete coffer-dams lined with gold and lead. A sleeping giant pointed at NATO, more terrifying than any nuclear weapon.

Project Koschei.

.....

After a few minutes, Roger's hand is still. He leaves his cigarette in the eagle-headed ash tray and picks up the intelligence report again. It's a summary, itself the distillation of thousands of pages and hundreds of photographs. It's barely twenty pages long: as of 1963, its date of preparation, the CIA knew very little about Project Koschei. Just the bare skeleton, and rumours from a highly-placed spy. And their own equivalent project, of course. Lacking the Soviet lead in that particular field, the USAF fielded the silver-plated white elephants of the NB-39 project: twelve atomic-powered bombers armed with XK-PLUTO, ready to tackle Project Koschei should the Soviets show signs of unsealing the bunker. Three hundred megatons of H-bombs pointed at a single target, and nobody was certain it would be enough to do the job.

And then there was the hard-to-conceal fiasco in Antarctica. Egg on face: a subterranean nuclear test program in international territory! If nothing else, it had been enough to stop JFK running for a second term. The test program was a bad excuse: but it was far better than confessing what had really happened to the 501st Airborne Division on the cold plateau beyond Mount Erebus. The plateau that the public didn't know about, that didn't show up on the maps issued by the geological survey departments of those governments party to the Dresden Agreement of 1931 -- an arrangement that even Hitler had stuck to. The plateau that had swallowed more U-2 spy planes than the Soviet Union, more surface expeditions than darkest Africa.

excerpt from A Colder War by Charles Stross

This Xenophone TRUFAX submission to The Alt-Historian is readable by personnel with GOLD JULY BOOJUM clearance only.

  "We have some transmissions from the Persian Gulf," Pickney said. "We can unscramble them. Captain, would you like to listen in?"   "Let's hear them," Kirchner said.   A man's voice, sounding almost mechanical after the processing of the signal, said, "One Kill that is Kill Seven, One K that is Kill Seven, have smoked the circle; repeat, have smoked the circle. Vampires, fourteen count, range fifty klicks, source Turgenev small platform. Repeat, fourteen vampires. Six down. Sweep two commencing. Smoking circle, up with directed fry, nine down, up with knives, eleven down. Three vampires, twenty klicks. Priests out. Priests and vampires engage. Advising salamander crews. Starfish launched. Sea Dragons alerted. Two vampires, six klicks. Sweep three commencing. Foaming now. Short eyes out, blades out, Guardians out, knives inboard." A pause. "Two vampires, three klicks."  Another pause, then, softly, "Good-bye, Shirley."   "That's the cruiser House," Kirchner said quietly, rubbing his eyes with his hands. "She's gone."

excerpt from Eon by Greg Bear

This 1985 glimpse of naval warfare in the year 2005 is a Xenophone TRUFAX submission to The Alt-Historian

'Are you really Dillinger?' the kid asked.

Johnny nodded, 'the same.'

'And you've been hiding out here for ... how long?'

'Since before everybody got the same idea, son.'

The kid beamed and shook his head. He was a handsome pug, this long-legged hobo. He'd have done good in the movies before they went to hell. Not really a kid, either. His name was Jimmy Stewart.

They were up around the fire that burned most nights in the middle of Agry. It'd been a ghost town five years ago, when Johnny came to get away from the G-Men. Now its population was up to gold rush numbers.

As American servicemen were poured into the so-called Holy War in Mexico, more and more kids drifted in. Inverting W.C. Fields' catch-phrase, the draft-protesters cried 'give this fucker an even break'. Nearly a million young men disappeared from the record books. They aped Henry Fonda and Woody Guthrie in Blowin' Down This Road, gathering in abandoned railroad sidings and backwoods towns. Several states had chosen to tolerate these shadow communities, but there were still Sheriff's Deputies with baseball bats.

'Don't you want to be a soldier-boy, son?'

'Not in this war, Mr Dillinger. I don't mind what Cárdenas does in his own country. It's not the fight I care for. That one's in Europe and the Pacific.'

Most Americans felt that way. The war was Coughlin's crusade and plenty, of all political persuasions, wanted out of it. The President was just a jumped-up radio preacher filling the shoes of a martyr. Some wanted America to tend its own garden and win back its lost children; some thought it'd need all its armies for the big war that seemed more likely every day.

In the firelight, Stewart's face was set. Johnny thought he looked a little like a hero. Hollywood had missed something.

excerpt from The Pierce-Arrow Stalled and... by Kim Newman

The Hays Office has not approved this Xenophone TRUFAX submission to The Alt-Historian

  The front cover was decorated with a hand-drawn swastika, and while it is not uncommon to find swastikas on notebook covers - they make for entertaining doodling - the sight of this one gave me a chill. I leafed through the pages, noticing that though the entries were in English, there were occasional words and phrases in German, these having question marks beside them; then I went back and read the first entry.

    The Führer had been dead three days, and still no one had ventured into the office where he had been exposed to the poisoned blooms, although a servant had crawled along the ledge to the window and returned with the news that the corpse was stiffened in its leather tunic, its cheeks bristling with a dead man's growth, and strings of dessicated blood were hanging from its chin. But as we well remembered his habit of reviving the dead for a final bout of torture, we were afraid that he might have set an igniter in his cells to ensure rebirth, and so we waited while the wine in his goblet turned to vinegar and then to a murky gas that hid him from our view. Nothing had changed. The garden of hydroponic roses fertilized with his blood continued to lash and slather, and the hieroglyphs of his shadow selves could be seen patrolling the streets...

excerpt from A Spanish Lesson by Lucius Shepard (1943 - 2014)

This has been an SFnal and literary Xenophone TRUFAX submission to The Alt-Historian