"What Madness Is This?" Redux: The Union Forever
Otherwise known as WMIT 2.0 is a timeline that is 5 years in the making, and even longer than that if you trace the first ideas I had that led to it. It originated as a very short story I wrote in junior high about John Adams suspending the Constitution, and my love of Harry Turtledove's Disunited States of America, but has grown into something much, much different. I believe it's potentially the darkest mostly-plausible dystopia you'll read (though liberties are taken with names and characters to enhance entertainment value and their is a definite stylized pulp flavor) and it is a world truly at its worst, yet eerily reminiscent of our own.
The year is 1801, and John Adams and Alexander Hamilton have been executed for treason in a world where the Articles of Confederation are kept rather than a new Constitution being agreed to. The USA, thereafter referred to as the Old Republic, is now a "Republican Union" led by a consulate of weak power while the South elects to go its own way. Aaron Burr, who ITTL lived with his grandfather Jonathan Edwards for his entire childhood, is a PTSD-ravaged lunatic who believes that he was specially chosen by God and the "Angel of Destiny" when Benedict Arnold accidentally takes a bullet for him at Valley Forge. As the Old Republic collapses in America, Napoleon the Great is solidifying his control with a more successful Continental System. Faced with defeat, British Canada torches the Union back to the stone age before finally being crushed. America now has a chip on its shoulder and blames the South for not coming to its aid and France for ignoring their alliance and sending troops far, far too late. In the post-apocalyptic aftermath of the Canadian Invasion of 1812, the Reverend Burr enjoys new and great popularity, leading a booming cult known as American Fundamentalist Christianity and publishing the Four Books of Manifest Destiny. A young and very different Charles Goodyear founds a Rockefeller-style economic empire in the Union and helps restore the economy in the 1820s. "Father Abe" forces the South back into the Union in the middle of the 1800s but his assassination leaves a massive power vacuum and a deep-seated fear of collapse without his steady guiding tyrannical hand. Enter Custer and the Manifest Destiny Party who come to power and establish Custer as President for Life. The current year in the timeline is 1912, and the Great World War is underway, and the Canadian Influenza is just rearing its ugly head.
Please vote WMIT and make my dreams of a Turtledove for this massive project finally come true.
It's basically a second job to me. It honestly means a lot to me to even see as many people vote for it as they have already. Thanks to all who read and vote! And good luck to all the terrific competition!
Otherwise known as WMIT 2.0 is a timeline that is 5 years in the making, and even longer than that if you trace the first ideas I had that led to it. It originated as a very short story I wrote in junior high about John Adams suspending the Constitution, and my love of Harry Turtledove's Disunited States of America, but has grown into something much, much different. I believe it's potentially the darkest mostly-plausible dystopia you'll read (though liberties are taken with names and characters to enhance entertainment value and their is a definite stylized pulp flavor) and it is a world truly at its worst, yet eerily reminiscent of our own.
The year is 1801, and John Adams and Alexander Hamilton have been executed for treason in a world where the Articles of Confederation are kept rather than a new Constitution being agreed to. The USA, thereafter referred to as the Old Republic, is now a "Republican Union" led by a consulate of weak power while the South elects to go its own way. Aaron Burr, who ITTL lived with his grandfather Jonathan Edwards for his entire childhood, is a PTSD-ravaged lunatic who believes that he was specially chosen by God and the "Angel of Destiny" when Benedict Arnold accidentally takes a bullet for him at Valley Forge. As the Old Republic collapses in America, Napoleon the Great is solidifying his control with a more successful Continental System. Faced with defeat, British Canada torches the Union back to the stone age before finally being crushed. America now has a chip on its shoulder and blames the South for not coming to its aid and France for ignoring their alliance and sending troops far, far too late. In the post-apocalyptic aftermath of the Canadian Invasion of 1812, the Reverend Burr enjoys new and great popularity, leading a booming cult known as American Fundamentalist Christianity and publishing the Four Books of Manifest Destiny. A young and very different Charles Goodyear founds a Rockefeller-style economic empire in the Union and helps restore the economy in the 1820s. "Father Abe" forces the South back into the Union in the middle of the 1800s but his assassination leaves a massive power vacuum and a deep-seated fear of collapse without his steady guiding tyrannical hand. Enter Custer and the Manifest Destiny Party who come to power and establish Custer as President for Life. The current year in the timeline is 1912, and the Great World War is underway, and the Canadian Influenza is just rearing its ugly head.
Please vote WMIT and make my dreams of a Turtledove for this massive project finally come true.
It's basically a second job to me. It honestly means a lot to me to even see as many people vote for it as they have already. Thanks to all who read and vote! And good luck to all the terrific competition!
