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I definitely like the Oprah-revelation scene. But I'm thinking it takes place on Oprah's super-villain yacht off the Somali coast (some pirate plinking possibilities there) just before the Black Rats are unleashed on the janjaweed. Our hero is present on the ship when she makes her televised...

I hate to say it, but I've given way more thought to both these scenarios (as assuredly unrealistic action movie scripts) than they deserve, so I'll bore you by fleshing them both out a little. 1. The Susan B. Anthony Brigade really isn't a "brigade" at all, but sort of a feminist-ninja...

I've had two thoughts about this over the last few years. Both are spurred by what I consider to be how the Western Left looks today versus how it looked in the 1930s when the Abraham Lincoln and other volunteer brigades fought in Spain. Both are envisioned as action movie scenarios: 1...

Thanks. I put a lot of research and writing effort into this back when I was originally banging away at it. I do hope to get some feedback on both the "hard history" questions and the issues that made me abandon it before, namely the balance among the story elements (plot, action, theme...

I didn't know about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skLTMziYQow&feature=related when I was writing this piece.

I just finished reading "Shattered Sword," a very detailed history of Midway from the Japanese POV. I'm afraid "success" at Midway would have been just as bad if not worse than the failure they experienced. As said above, the airfield could be destroyed by heavies from Hawaii, and then the...

It does. They're just not quite economical to produce yet with current technology.

Potentially one of the most fruitful things the US could have done but, unfortunately, the purge of Sinologists from the State Dept. and CIA in the wake of "losing China" had decapitated US foreign policy acumen with regard to China. By the end of the 1950s and early 1960s there was almost no...

CHAPTER NINE (Continued ...) An hour later, Gerry and Li stepped out onto the street in front of the city government’s offices. Gerry squinted up into the early afternoon sunshine. Li had brought the impromptu celebration to an early close by gently reminding Wang that cables had to be sent...

Don't underestimate how truly screwed up things were in China at the time. There had been open street fighting in some places with armed factions on both sides -- Wuhan was a war zone for weeks during this time. China's economy was a shambles, and the factions that were trying to establish...

BOOK TWO ------ THE SILK ROAD ------ CHAPTER NINE April 28, 1962 Dear Danny: I'm sorry it's been so long since I've written. As hard as I worked in law school and then even harder after, that was nothing compared to what I've been doing these last few months. But I'm...

Thanks, and, yes, it's definitely "dystopistic" in the sense that the US economy hasn't really recovered from the depression of the '30s (although it's now gone on so long that people have stopped thinking of it in those terms), and the bi-polar global strategic balance of the post WWII world in...

CHAPTER EIGHT Aviation Week March 8, 1952 CIVIL AVIATION BILL STALLS IN COMMITTEE A package of amendments to the Federal Aviation Act once again failed to come to a vote in the House Transportation Committee last week. Despite repeated efforts by a bi-partisan group of members from...

First, thanks for your feedback. I was wondering whether anyone was reading this! Second, yes, one of the basic premises of this TL is that, without the spur of WWII as we knew it in OTL, technological development is mainly slower -- in some cases much slower, in others just a little bit and...

GREAT idea!!! As an "Apollo kid," loss of Skylab before STS was one of the things that should have (but didn't ... then) blunt my enthusiasm for STS. Question: Your use of a modified Apollo CM as a CEV is interesting, but I'm not aware of any discussion of that in OTL. Do you have any...

CHAPTER SEVEN Atlanta Constitution Editorial Page January 28, 1952 When South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond testified last week at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings about Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey's proposed legislation to integrate the Navy as a first step toward...

CHAPTER SIX (continued ...) Gerry stumbled a little as he stepped into the open area at the front of the Quonset hut. “You look like shit,” Stone said, his voice raw. He was wearing the same loud print shirt he’d had on the night before at the New Year’s Eve party, and still had on the...

Totally agree. One of the most interesting cultural impacts of the events in TTL will be how the left in the West won't have the injection of "countercultural" and passivist elements that it did in OTL in the post WWII period. In just the way that the left made an abrupt turn away from the...

Your first point is well taken -- I guess I was exaggerating the time in my mind, thinking about how terrible those years would have been. Which raises another interesting question, though: What would the age demographics of a post-war France look like? In OTL, France didn't have the...

As bad as Europe looks in 1959 ITTL, I'm not sure the "Somalia for decades" prognosis for the situation after the war is necessarily accurate. Places like Somalia have never had any kind of working civil society and have no tradition of a functioning society above the tribal level. While the...