Part #201: Spoilers
(Dr. David Wostyn)
I am glad you agree that this opportunity cannot be wasted, gentlemen...of course I will not be cutting down these books to digitisable extracts as in the past but passing the whole lot through. It is up to you on the other side to reduce them to a hopefully at least somewhat coherent narrative for those studying this timeline’s history.
In the past, Dr Lombardi and Dr Pylos of Team Alpha and then myself for Team Beta have tried to preface each segment with a quote: initially one of at least partial summative relevance to the topic of the segment, and then for the last fifty updates I have hunted out quotes from Pablo Sanchez to try to illuminate the ideological conflict that so underlines everything in this world. However because I am now just passing on complete books over the space of a few short minutes or hours, there is no time for this. If you wish to preserve continuity of style with the earlier segments when these reports are collated, I suggest one of the Thande Institute analysts on the Our TimeLine side search through the books to come up with suitable ones. Whatever you do, though, don’t give that job to Dr Lister, if the abstracts on his papers are any guide he just picks a random paragraph from anywhere and pastes it in—
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“...considerable improvement over the Neptune-II, which was a purely French domestic project. The Neptune-III however saw input from Italy and England, as its primary role was to launch the Pèlerin (AKA Pellegrino in Italian or Peregrine in English) suborbital threshold bomber, itself a joint project between the three nations. The precise armament of the upper stage remains classified but it is believed that the three countries’ threshold programmes have remained separate, with a different domestically produced warhead loadout for each nation’s bombers. The rocket and upper stage bomber were both authorised in 1976 and the prototype saw its first flight in 1984, with full operational capacity reached for France in 1987 and Italy and England in 1988. When the Last War of Supremacy broke out, all three countries held to the Ratisbon Convention and did not deploy threshold weapons on European soil, but seven attacks were made against Combine forces in the American theatre by a total of five Pèlerins. The French were responsible for four of the bombings, the Italians for two and the English for the remaining one. As a consequence of the Venice disarmament talks of 2011, each country is now limited to three operational Pèlerins, with the French additionally having two more in a disassembled state that may be reassembled within a timescale of weeks…"
-- Taken from Finch’s Complete Militaria of the World, 19th Edition (2013)
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From : “Great Men and Women of World History” by L. H. Hodgkins and P. T. Rendell (2000)—
James FitzGeorge and Alistair Wesley were two very brave men who were the first to fly an aerodrome. The boys knew each other from childhood. James’ grandfather was William FitzGeorge who saved the Republic of Bengal in a war. Alistair’s father was Liam Wesley, who saved the President of England’s life. But the boys became more famous than even these relatives.
When James and Alistair were young, the only kinds of flying machines were steerables and balloons. These were slow and clumsy machines. James and Alistair were sure that they could do better. In a place in Cygnia called Jinjin[1] in the year 1888 they tested their first aerodrome. An aerodrome is a flying machine that is heavier than air, but works by the air passing faster over the curved wings than it does below them. (See Diagram). The first test ended in disaster. Alistair broke his leg and took months to recover. The young men studied their design and learned from their mistakes. They needed a rudder to steer the drome and to better stabilise their design.
In 1889 they tried again and successfully flew for just 18 seconds. But now they knew it could be done. Many more inventors followed in their footsteps. Some people even think the French inventor Grégoire Perret flew his aerodrome before Alistair and James did. They are wrong, but it is right that they think differently, for it would be a poor world if we were all the same. And we can now look down on all the wonders of that world from Alistair and James’ invention, and all the other ones that have sprung from it.
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(Dr David Wostyn)
Yes, apologies, the children’s books were closer to hand, I will start on the adult ones in a minute. In any case you will of course want to get the proper historical context rather than leaping straight into a subject without first laying the groundwork.
Hello?
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From “A Young Person’s Dictionary of Science” by O. R. Kavanagh (1999)—
CARYTIC PHYSICS is a special branch of physics to do with the interior core of the atom, sometimes called the
caryus from the Greek word for nut. By definition carytic physics began in the year 1929 when the famous McElroy and Wang experiment at Cometa University found that most of the atom’s mass was concentrated in this caryus and not evenly distributed as the former geometric atom theory had held. It was found by further experiments that the caryus was made up largely of particles with an electric charge deficit.[2] The long-established physics of electricity held that deficit particles attracted surfeit particles and repelled those of the same balance. Therefore there must be some greater force holding the deficit particles together in the caryus. Men wondered at these great forces locked inside the atom and whether they could be unleashed. But it would not be for thirty more years that this would be seen, in the triple tragedy that ended the Sunrise War. It has taken time for the peoples of the world to accepted that carytic physics can be used for good as well as ill, to produce paradox engines to heat our homes and free us from dependence on combustible fuel sources. But the development of the threshold bomb in the 1950s will always be inextricably linked with the history of carytic physics...
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(Dr. David Wostyn)
What do you mean, ‘more twentieth century stuff’? I told you, you need to see it in context! It’s no use reading about the Last War of Supremacy unless you know where the conflict comes from—
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From “A Review of Global Defence Capabilities, 2018” by the National Register Institute of Global Politics (2018)—
Since the first deployment of threshold bombs in Russia in 1959, the technology behind the weapon has proliferated worldwide but has also been subject to severe international controls, helped by the sheer levels of global public revulsion for the weapon and its original users. As of 2018, in total 49 threshold bombs have been used in anger, the vast majority (38) in the Last War of Supremacy. A further 122 bombs have been used in test firings, but these have been heavily restricted by disarmament treaties over the years and the Assembly of Sovereign Nations is now hopeful that tests may be subject to a comprehensive international ban from a tentative date of 2023.
Currently a total of 14 nations worldwide have access to threshold weapons, discounting those which lack their own native programme but have mutual defence treaties with threshold-armed countries. Excluding the forced disarmament programmes following the Last War of Supremacy, the only country to have voluntarily given up a threshold weapons programme is Panchala, following the democratic revolution which overthrew the despotic Ram Kumar regime there in 1982.
Two particular taboos associated with threshold weapons are the use of them against civilian targets and the delivery method. The former has been explicitly banned by international treaty following their first use against cities in 1959, and this treaty has never been violated (barring some borderline cases during the Last War of Supremacy due to military forces digging in too near to urban centres). Delivery has been somewhat more controversial. Traditional deployment has been made either from ground-based forces or from the air (or indeed suborbital craft in more recent years). The controversy ultimately stems from the strength of feeling over the former factor, and that the maximum avoidance of civilian casualties necessitates a high level of precision that only a human targeter in close proximity to his target can deliver. Long-range suborbital military rockets (first tested in the 1960s) could in theory deliver threshold bombs just as they deliver conventional warheads, but the fact that their targeting is insufficiently precise to strike a moving army has led to a near-universal ban. Shorter-range rockets have been more up for debate, but the prospect of interference with their ypologic brains leading to a mistargeting incident has meant they have only been used in combat twice, both incidents during the more desperate moments of the Last War of Supremacy. Finally of course there is the delivery method used in their first deployment in 1959, which has naturally been subject to considerable stigma from official state forces but there is always the possibility of history repeating itself. This has been another factor supporting the severe limitations of the numbers of threshold weapons in existence at any given time: certainly there is enough pitchblende ore in the world to produce xanthium and hesperium sufficient to destroy the world many times over...
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(Dr. David Wostyn)
Look, if you skip all the years in between you’ll be stuck when you find a word you don’t recognise and you don’t have any context! How do you think I did all those footnotes?
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From “Freedom in Focus: Global Politics 2017” by the National Register Institute of Global Politics (2017)—
If we may be disappointed with the backsliding of one or two nations on our biennial Liberty Index compared to 2015, we should not lose sight of the bigger picture that compared to 25 years ago the world is a much freer place. Even countries like the Russian Confederation has made considerable progress in press freedom and freedom of speech, doubtless due to the removal of the existential threat of so many adjacent Societist powers providing an excuse for the ruling classes there. For the same reason it may be disappointing but it is perhaps not so surprising that Corea is one of the cases where there has been a noticeable decline, with the arrests of journalists and closure of some papers in April 2016 being justified as a ‘patriotic action’ against the threat to the east.
The ENA is particularly to be praised for the relaxation of restrictions on free speech, to the point that some of its more rambunctious Traditionalist Patriot Vote politicians have complained it is ‘turning into California’. To which our response would be we would only hope that would be the eventual case: as such men are decidedly a minority, it might not be a vain hope.
Another example which we have naturally watched with great expectancy over the past twenty years, and which has thus far defied the expectations of pessimists by undergoing quite the recovery towards a state of freedom, is of course the Republic of—
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From “Vanity Fayre, Issue 1,502” edited by Mary Mannington (2019)—
Who’s little Miss Pauline Hartington stepping out with now? The cunning young fellow’s kept his masque on but our intrepid reporter says she detected the distinct odour of whisky and haggis. Can it be that our own Foreign Secretary’s daughter is consorting with the enemy? Is good honest roast beef no longer enough to satisfy her? And what will Mrs Hamilton think, left at home all alone in Govan north of the border? [cont. page 22] Is Your Man More Scared Of Congress Than Premier Tukhachevsky Is? Use These Ten Simple Tricks To Find Out!”
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(Dr. David Wostyn)
There, I thought that would make you pay attention. Now do it properly or there’ll be more of that, Mrs Batten-Hale’s got quite the stack here...
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From: “The Nations of India, 1700-2000” by Jason Hume and Krishna Haidar (2004)
Bengal undoubtedly came through the Great Jihad in as intact a state it did thanks principally to the efforts of two men. The first of these was President William FitzGeorge,the son of the former ‘Richard IV’ usurper of Great Britain—who himself lived through the bulk of the Jihad and died in Bengal aged 76 in 1855. Despite his father’s disgrace (albeit rather reduced in scope by him getting along quite well with Frederick II) William worked his way up through the ranks of the East India Company and had achieved the presidency of British Bengal by 1846, when the Jihad began to grind towards the nation’s borders. The second of the two was of course Nurul Huq, who matched the Mahdists with his own Islamic authority, rallied Bengalis to a reluctant support for the British as the lesser of two evils (achieved due to Huq’s longstanding personal opposition to the British, meaning his support carried more weight) and would eventually be martyred by Mahdist mujahideen in 1850. Nonetheless we should not ascribe the entirety of the victory to these two. Commodore Edward Cavendish’s reinforcements (actually intended for California) helped turn the tide and the Commodore himself fought on land, being instrumental in the victory at Burdwan in 1851. Many Bengali officers earned great feats of victory, some of whose names are recorded because of the influence they went on to have in post-Jihad Bengal, though sadly due to the prejudices of the time many are not known. One such man, Ranajit Chatterjee, is particularly well known in the British Isles due to his close friendship and alliance with Liam Wesley, the so-called Bad Duke, who fought against the mujahideen from 1852 onwards as one of his worldwide adventures. The two saved each others’ lives numerous times, were responsible for slaying the key Jihad commanderSelim Arif after he had burned the village of Silda and killed Chatterjee’s uncle, and after the threat to Bengal subsided they went on adventures deep into the hostile Jihad-held lands to the west.
In the British Isles (especially Ireland) their adventures are remembered with Wesley as the leader and Chatterjee as the sidekick, while of course in Bengal their positions are reversed. The reality is that the two men considered each other equal partners. Their positive reputation in their homelands is rather lacking in countries such as Berar and Panchala, where they are painted as thieves for having ‘retrieved’ a number of valuable pieces of art and Hindu religious manuscripts before they could be destroyed by the rampaging mujahideen with their hardline iconoclastic interpretation of Islam. Many of these works are still exhibited in museums in Europe or Bengal despite the modern countries’ attempts to get them back. Some were donations but Chaterjee and Wesley made a tidy profit off of others. All of this helped finance the spectacular wedding of Wesley to Chaterjee’s sister Priya (also sometimes known by the English form of her name Freya) in 1859. This was primarily a Hindu ceremony, as Wesley’s own religious beliefs only extended to a sort of vague acknowledgement of the Church of Ireland.
Though this marriage represented a considerable settling down of Wesley from his youth which had left a trail of broken hearts across Europe during the Democratic Experiment era, it scandalised large parts of society (such as it was after years of Populism) when he returned to Europe in 1861 and bought a large townhouse in London. The whole affair illustrated the somewhat confused and Legion-syndromic nature of the British public’s attitudes towards Indians: the Orientalist art and cuisine craze of a generation before contrasting with the simple xenophobia towards treating those of a different skin colour and faith as equal, then overlaid with the vague sense that this was treading too close to Linnaeanism and thus was itself a suspiciously foreign idea. Certainly the small number of Burdenists tied themselves in knots in debates over whether Bengalis qualified as ‘black’ or could be numbered among Eveleigh’s Asians which he considered equal to white Europeans.[3] The continuation of some boorish and outrageous habits by Wesley generally tipped the scales towards society’s ostracism in general and he would not recover his position until the Russian Embassy incident of 1868.
However, though Wesley and Chaterjee were heavily involved in the 1855 mission to support the embattled French in the Carnatic by sea, it is worth remembering that this operation was ultimately the brainchild of William FitzGeorge, displaying his genius for logistics. Though the financial losses of repelling the Jihad ultimately led to the Privatisation of Bengal and the breakdown of lines between European and native in that country, in the short term the solidarity between Europeans first created by the India Board decades before would continue. At least between the British and the French. With Portugal badly weakened and then falling to revolution itself, the Portuguese possessions in India mostly fell to the Jihad in the short term, as did the weakened, Portuguese-influenced Maratha confederate states and British Bombay. Neither Britain nor France was in a position to take advantage of the chaos when the Jihad began to collapse in on itself from the mid-1850s onwards. Persia did gain greater influence in the northern Maratha states such as Gujarat and Rajputana (building on its extant position in Kalat) but Goa itself, the ancient fortress of the Portuguese, would eventually end up in the same hands as much of the old Portuguese empire: those of the UPSA...
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(Dr. David Wostyn)
There, isn’t that much better? Now, shall we continue?
[1] Spelled Gingin in OTL.
[2] Reflecting a thematic revival of the monist theory of electric charge in the early 20th century, TTL terminology generally refers to surfeit and deficit of charge rather than negative and positive charge respectively.
[3] A somewhat similar debate happened in 1888 in OTL after Lord Salisbury referred to Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Asian to be a British MP (winning his seat in 1892 after an earlier failed attempt) as ‘a black man’.
