Fantastic stuff as always, JE! Your discussion of earlier civilian automobile usage got me thinking. Will we see fewer streetcars TTL? Industrial cities will require mass transit, to be sure, but I assume it will be more *bus oriented and that city-planning will be more road-based. Also, how have subways developed?
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Please tell me Doyle wrote those two stories with a happy ending, or at least one that is ‘half-full’.
Say, now that the vampire genre of this world is codified by Conan Doyle, and the Lovecraft-ish genre will come from west Africa, and the high-fantasy genre is still going to be in England, who will be the next alt-J.K Rowling? Or is it too early to put an influential light-fantasy author like her yet?
For some reason, I'm really interested in how this timeline's fiction develops. Just by reading from all the literature narratives and seeing them differing from our own fiction, I really get the sense of just how similar yet different this world is to ours. Maybe it's the literate side of me speaking, but it really feels that way. These authors had careers, jobs, and personal (as well as public) battles, but they live also live in a world where colonialism, futurism, spiritualism, and faith are seen and interpreted differently compared to ours, and the works that they wrote based on those factors gives an almost strange alien/human-like insight into how they understood their world; like seeing yourself in a mirror, but your reflection has a few bits to it that you don't have; that kind of strange and similarity.
And for some reason, I kinda like that.
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By the way, Jonathan, how have the Roma been doing? The Roma were freed from slavery in Romania and Moldova around the time of the initial POD, probably too early for Abacarist thought to have much effect on that. On the upside, with a more successful and much more inclusive Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, the Roma of Bulgaria, Macedonia and Bosnia are probably doing better. I could see Abacarist and Belloist ideas being very appealing among the Roma. Belloism's withdrawal from politics and an unjust society would work especially well with the Roma Traveller ethos. You might also see significant conversion to Islam, if this means more social acceptance and if Islam is seen as a religion of greater social equality than the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. On the downside, the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire and the Hungarian war probably did not turn out well for Roma communities.
Perhaps Roma will move in significant numbers to Germany to fill their empty assembly lines? It will be interesting when the Roma run into Indian veterans of the war and realize that they share some traditions...
Perhaps Roma will move in significant numbers to Germany to fill their empty assembly lines? It will be interesting when the Roma run into Indian veterans of the war and realize that they share some traditions...
I don't think that advancing civilian automotive use by a few years will derail streetcars (pun intended), given that electric streetcar systems already existed by this time and that they had certain advantages such as being able to use centralized power from an existing grid. My guess is that there would be more use of buses in smaller towns and in cities that don't yet have streetcar systems, but that cities with existing streetcars would continue to expand them.
Keep in mind also that passenger cars are still an expensive luxury at this point, and that early automotive growth in TTL is centered on delivery trucks and farm vehicles.
Subways are developing much as OTL - most European capitals have them at this point, as does New York.
The endings are half-full; it's hard to get a truly happy ending to a vampire story, but *Doyle's stories aren't grimdark.
Whether there's a Rowling analogue will depend a great deal on how children's literature develops in TTL, and particularly on whether such literature starts taking on adult themes. In the early 20th century, children's literature still tended to be wholesome and didactic (there was Lewis Carroll, of course, but that kind of genius isn't easy to imitate), and something as morally ambiguous as Harry Potter would have a hard time finding a publisher. I think we'll have to wait and see what happens to Victorian ideas of childhood innocence and how much the adults of the later 20th century are willing to let children be exposed to grown-up ideas and issues.
That's what I'm trying to do with the literary updates, and I'm very happy that you're experiencing them that way.
Hmmm, hadn't thought about that. Prejudices against the Roma are very deep-seated, but on the other hand, the spread of ideologies of social equality would almost have to affect them. I agree that they wouldn't be doing well in Hungary and probably not in Romania, but there might be movement toward social acceptance in the lower Balkans, especially if some of them fought on the Ottoman side during the war.
The idea of conversion to Islam is interesting - I could see Belloism being attractive for the reasons you state. There is a related "gypsy" people, the Dom, that is already mostly Islamic and lives in the Middle East; if many Balkan Roma start becoming Muslim, then they and the Dom might merge.
In the long run, the Roma will have the problems of any nomadic people in an increasingly settled world, but maybe the early 20th century will give them something to build on.
That's an amazing idea - so much so, in fact, that it's going to happen.
At any rate, the Ottoman update will probably be finished at the end of this week - I was out of town for the long weekend and have some catching up to do at the office. In the meantime, I'll post an interlude that I wrote on the flight home.
Interlude: July 28, 1914
Omar’s office was in a block of wooden houses in a working-class part of Tokyo. It wasn’t a neighborhood where a university-trained doctor would be expected to set up shop, but it was where his patients lived – patients that he’d sought out just as much as they had him.
One of them, Hayashi-san, was in the office now, sitting cross-legged on the other side of a tatami mat. He’d come with a stomach complaint, which Omar had diagnosed as an ulcer; they’d discussed a plan of treatment, and now they were talking about the war. Like many of his patients, Hayashi was a veteran, and sometimes all he needed was to talk to someone who didn’t think he was shamed by his army service. Even many of his fellow veterans had come to believe that the defeat in Korea was shameful, and someone like Omar, who was from another country and another tradition, could provide the sympathetic ear that he would otherwise lack.
“I’ve taken enough of your time, Umaru-sensei,” Hayashi said at last – it still amused Omar that the Japanese pronounced his name the Malê way, although he would never let it show. “You are busy, and I have work to do at home.”
“Are you feeling better?”
“Much better, sensei. I’ll send my daughter around tomorrow with the payment.”
“Whenever you can,” Omar answered, although he knew that Hayashi’s daughter would be there when he opened for business the next morning. They rose, exchanged a few final greetings and bows, and Omar went to open the door.
Hayashi was supposed to be the last patient of the day, and Omar almost closed the door before he saw the other man standing in front of the office. It took only another second for recognition to replace surprise.
“Kishida-san! Come in!” The other man was fifty, and looked little like the army officer he’d once been. His black kimono was patterned in the samobaru style, with Russian folk designs, and he’d let his beard grow long and thick as Tolstoy’s. His bearing was what gave him away; it was as sharp and military as ever.
Omar motioned him to a spot on the tatami. “I wasn’t expecting you,” he said. “I thought you were still in jail.”
“No, they let me out a week early. Good behavior.” Kishida barked an ironic laugh; his behavior, both by the standards of the Japanese government and his own one-time lights, was rarely good. His call for justice for the veterans was one that a surprising number of people shared, but his insistence that the defeat was the politicians’ and officers’ shame rather than the soldiers’ wasn’t popular with the powers that be, and his taste for public protest rather than private negotiation was even less so.
“You can start earning your next sentence sooner, then.” Few would have spoken so to Kishida, but he and Omar had known each other since the latter’s medical school days; the ex-major had been one of those who’d convinced the medical faculty to study the complaints of war veterans, and Omar had been student, researcher and test case all at once.
“No, something different from that,” Kishida answered. “I see you were ready to close for the day. Let’s go to the baths, and I’ll tell you what’s happening.”
Omar agreed readily enough, and the two men walked out onto the street. Even after four years in this district, the doctor still drew attention; most of the neighbors were used to him by now, but a half-Senegalese doctor in a kimono was unusual enough to attract curious eyes. He didn’t mind, or at least not much; after all, one of those who’d looked at him that way was now his wife and the mother of his two children.
The onsen on the next block was a simple affair, a small house with a heated wooden tub that catered to the neighborhood’s workers and small shopkeepers. Omar was a regular visitor; as a doctor, he approved of daily baths, and seven years in Japan had tamed him quite thoroughly. The owner smiled and bowed as he accepted the fee and motioned Omar and Kishida to the washing-bucket, and a moment later, the two had settled into the tub.
“So what was so important that you took a break from crime to come see me?”
“I’ve been in touch with some businessmen – merchants, part of the navy faction, but men who are ashamed of how we’ve abandoned the soldiers. They’re ready to give some money to set up a veterans’ trust – medical care, housing, jobs for those who can work. All the things we’ve been doing since the war ended, but now we’ll have millions of yen to do it with rather than having to scrape together what we can.”
“And you want me…”
“To be one of their doctors, of course.”
“And you will be the trustee? You can send the patients to me?”
“The donors will be the trustees, but…”
Omar held up a hand. “Businessmen, politicians, suddenly coming up with money so long after the war? Don’t you think they have reasons of their own?”
“Of course they do!” Friend or not, Kishida was shouting. “I wasn’t born yesterday, Umaru-sensei. I know they want the veterans’ votes. But what they don’t realize is that the soldiers won’t listen to their money, they’ll listen to me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure, Kishida-san. That money can buy many people to talk to the soldiers, to mobilize them. We both want to help the veterans, not to sell them.”
“Then I need you there all the more, to talk sense to them.”
“I’ll think about it,” Omar said. “But I need to know more about who these people are. Much more.” He’d had enough experience with demagogues in France that this offer rang alarm bells; maybe one of these donors was a would-be Leclair.
Kishida nodded, acknowledging the point. “I’ll get you that information. And now we go home – I need dinner, and so do you.”
They dressed and took their leave, and Omar walked past the shrine on the corner and toward his home. He concentrated on taking his shoes off at the door; it was the one thing he always forgot, and Mariko wouldn’t like it if he wore them into the house.
The dibiterie was crowded at eight o’clock, the air was rich with the smell of roast lamb and mustard and the sound of conversation, and the tables were full of West Africans, Algerians and more than a few Frenchmen. Paulo stood in the doorway and scanned the tables, but it seemed impossible to pick out any one person from the mass. And he might not have, if she hadn’t seen him first.
There was a cry from across the room, and then a woman in a forest-green suit disentangled herself from a nine-year-old girl with delicate half-Vietnamese features. She crossed the room faster than Paulo would have thought possible in her fashionable clothes, and embraced the brother she hadn’t seen in years.
As she broke the embrace to give a more restrained greeting to Mélisande and the children, Paulo regarded his sole remaining sibling. She’d put on weight and added maturity and distinction, and sometime since he’d seen her last, she’d started wearing reading glasses. She looked the very model of a nineteenth arrondissement matron, with only her eyes betraying the revolutionary beneath. That was startling to Paulo, who’d heard all the stories of Funmilayo’s stormy first marriage and her series of affairs with Parisian artists, but everyone got older, and everyone had been living more quietly since they’d found out about the Congo disease.
She led them back to her table, threading her way expertly through the crowd, and made the introductions quickly. “Amadou” – the imposing man of fifty in a grand boubou who sat next to her empty chair; “Youssou” – the two-year-old he was holding; “Noura” – a grave-looking girl of twelve who looked strikingly like Funmilayo herself had at that age; “Abdoulaye” – the child of four who sat on Noura's lap under her careful eye; “Madeleine” – the girl with the long hair and part-Asian features who had happily resumed her place in her mother’s arms. The family wasn’t what Paulo would have envisioned for Funmi when she was younger, but they fit her, and she seemed completed in a way she hadn’t been before.
“This is even more of a meeting-place than you’d told me,” he said.
“The owner” – she gestured toward a graying, one-legged man who was holding court at the table nearest the kitchen – “has been mayor of the arrondissement for twenty years, and his woman is an essayist and a power in the RSP. All the politicians and writers come here, and most nights there’ll be music.”
“His woman?”
“Everyone thinks they’re married, but they never.” There was no trace of disapproval in her voice, as there might have been before the war; she’d grown tolerant of the arrangements men and women made, and their father had finished his life in the same kind of partnership with Sarah Child. That more than anything may have made the difference; she worshipped Father and would never hear a word against him.
A change of subject was in order nevertheless. “The writers come to observe the politicians in their natural habitat?”
“Half the time they’re the same people. Politics, poetry and song – you can’t always tell them apart here.” She looked at him again, her eyes absorbing his features greedily. “So you’re in Berlin now?”
“We are. Mélisande got a fellowship in the university hospital. Respiratory diseases.”
“The Congo?”
“Yes,” Mélisande answered, her spoken French still carrying a reminder of her Gabonais father. She, too, had changed; she would never be matronly, but she’d put aside prophecy and vision when she quit Rwanda, and years of study had made her worldly and methodical, albeit no less driven. “We know how people catch the Congo disease now” – she’d been at medical school in Ilorin when the German doctors had figured it out, and she’d sent a dispatch home with their findings – “but we still don’t know what causes it or how to cure it. Maybe we can find that out, or at least learn how to treat the symptoms.”
Funmilayo nodded her approval. “And you, brother mine?”
“I help Mélisande. I take care of the children.” Now a look of dismay did cross her face; Paulo knew from the letters she’d sent him in Ilorin and Charleston that she disliked the way he’d drifted since being cashiered from the diplomatic service. “I teach a couple of classes at the university,” he added quickly, “and I sometimes consult for the German government on East African affairs. The Court of Arbitration offered me a place in the Congolese administration, but I told them they’d need to abolish forced labor first.”
“Good for you.” Funmi might disapprove of Paulo not having a steady job, but there were some compromises that no one in their family should make. “If you have time, I’ll let you take the draft of Diana’s Kingdom home. I’d be interested in what you think of it.”
“That’s the one about women on the moon?”
“If you want to reduce things to lowest terms.” In fact she’d told him something of it in her letters; it was set some time after the earth had conquered a lunar nation, and it dealt with the relationships between the earth women and the Moon women they had enslaved. Not everyone who’d seen the manuscript had approved of the fact that some of the conquerors came from an advanced West African nation, but he very much doubted she would change her mind.
“I’m sure I’ll like it,” he said, “and that the British won’t.”
“The Imperial Party won’t, anyway,” answered Amadou. Paulo could only nod; a novel that was both anti-colonial and feminist would represent two of the things the Imperials disliked the most.
“That might be the same thing before long,” Funmilayo said. “There’s likely to be another election this fall...”
“What would that be, four in three years?”
“… and if the economy keeps going the way it’s been, then they might win it. Even some of the Times letter-writers are saying that Britain has exhausted the other alternatives.”
“It hasn’t even started to…” Paulo began, but he bit back the rest of the sentence as he realized that these weren’t the people he needed to convince. He hadn’t thought the Imperials were that close to power, and he could only imagine what that might mean for Oman, or for Ilorin. Now he was the one who cursed himself for drifting. If he were still an Omani diplomat or a member of the British colonial service, he might be able to fight them somehow…
“Or maybe you’ll find another way,” Amadou said. Paulo realized he must have spoken out loud. He nodded slowly, and something passed between him and the other man. Amadou was someone else he’d never have guessed would become part of Funmi’s life – he was a businessman, conservative in his politics, with none of the artistic flair of her previous paramours – but he had unseen depths, and they’d complemented each other for seven years now. Enough to keep them together through two children living and two dead…
Whatever he might have said next was cut off when one of the owner’s ubiquitous grandchildren had come up to Madeleine and whispered something urgent in her ear. “Maman, can I go play ball with Théophile?” she asked. “I’m finished with my lamb.”
“Go on, but don’t leave this block and come find me before ten o’clock. Ask Tante Mélisande if you can take Tiberio with you.” At Mélisande’s quick nod, Madeleine took the oldest of her and Paulo’s children by the hand and led him off.
“You too, Noura?” Paulo asked, but the twelve-year-old girl stayed where she was; like Funmilayo at her age, she thought herself far too old for ball games, and was determined to follow the adult conversation. And if she’s as much like Funmi as she seems, she’ll be pretty good at it.
Might as well give her the chance. “Then who do you think will win the election?”
Omar’s office was in a block of wooden houses in a working-class part of Tokyo. It wasn’t a neighborhood where a university-trained doctor would be expected to set up shop, but it was where his patients lived – patients that he’d sought out just as much as they had him.
One of them, Hayashi-san, was in the office now, sitting cross-legged on the other side of a tatami mat. He’d come with a stomach complaint, which Omar had diagnosed as an ulcer; they’d discussed a plan of treatment, and now they were talking about the war. Like many of his patients, Hayashi was a veteran, and sometimes all he needed was to talk to someone who didn’t think he was shamed by his army service. Even many of his fellow veterans had come to believe that the defeat in Korea was shameful, and someone like Omar, who was from another country and another tradition, could provide the sympathetic ear that he would otherwise lack.
“I’ve taken enough of your time, Umaru-sensei,” Hayashi said at last – it still amused Omar that the Japanese pronounced his name the Malê way, although he would never let it show. “You are busy, and I have work to do at home.”
“Are you feeling better?”
“Much better, sensei. I’ll send my daughter around tomorrow with the payment.”
“Whenever you can,” Omar answered, although he knew that Hayashi’s daughter would be there when he opened for business the next morning. They rose, exchanged a few final greetings and bows, and Omar went to open the door.
Hayashi was supposed to be the last patient of the day, and Omar almost closed the door before he saw the other man standing in front of the office. It took only another second for recognition to replace surprise.
“Kishida-san! Come in!” The other man was fifty, and looked little like the army officer he’d once been. His black kimono was patterned in the samobaru style, with Russian folk designs, and he’d let his beard grow long and thick as Tolstoy’s. His bearing was what gave him away; it was as sharp and military as ever.
Omar motioned him to a spot on the tatami. “I wasn’t expecting you,” he said. “I thought you were still in jail.”
“No, they let me out a week early. Good behavior.” Kishida barked an ironic laugh; his behavior, both by the standards of the Japanese government and his own one-time lights, was rarely good. His call for justice for the veterans was one that a surprising number of people shared, but his insistence that the defeat was the politicians’ and officers’ shame rather than the soldiers’ wasn’t popular with the powers that be, and his taste for public protest rather than private negotiation was even less so.
“You can start earning your next sentence sooner, then.” Few would have spoken so to Kishida, but he and Omar had known each other since the latter’s medical school days; the ex-major had been one of those who’d convinced the medical faculty to study the complaints of war veterans, and Omar had been student, researcher and test case all at once.
“No, something different from that,” Kishida answered. “I see you were ready to close for the day. Let’s go to the baths, and I’ll tell you what’s happening.”
Omar agreed readily enough, and the two men walked out onto the street. Even after four years in this district, the doctor still drew attention; most of the neighbors were used to him by now, but a half-Senegalese doctor in a kimono was unusual enough to attract curious eyes. He didn’t mind, or at least not much; after all, one of those who’d looked at him that way was now his wife and the mother of his two children.
The onsen on the next block was a simple affair, a small house with a heated wooden tub that catered to the neighborhood’s workers and small shopkeepers. Omar was a regular visitor; as a doctor, he approved of daily baths, and seven years in Japan had tamed him quite thoroughly. The owner smiled and bowed as he accepted the fee and motioned Omar and Kishida to the washing-bucket, and a moment later, the two had settled into the tub.
“So what was so important that you took a break from crime to come see me?”
“I’ve been in touch with some businessmen – merchants, part of the navy faction, but men who are ashamed of how we’ve abandoned the soldiers. They’re ready to give some money to set up a veterans’ trust – medical care, housing, jobs for those who can work. All the things we’ve been doing since the war ended, but now we’ll have millions of yen to do it with rather than having to scrape together what we can.”
“And you want me…”
“To be one of their doctors, of course.”
“And you will be the trustee? You can send the patients to me?”
“The donors will be the trustees, but…”
Omar held up a hand. “Businessmen, politicians, suddenly coming up with money so long after the war? Don’t you think they have reasons of their own?”
“Of course they do!” Friend or not, Kishida was shouting. “I wasn’t born yesterday, Umaru-sensei. I know they want the veterans’ votes. But what they don’t realize is that the soldiers won’t listen to their money, they’ll listen to me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure, Kishida-san. That money can buy many people to talk to the soldiers, to mobilize them. We both want to help the veterans, not to sell them.”
“Then I need you there all the more, to talk sense to them.”
“I’ll think about it,” Omar said. “But I need to know more about who these people are. Much more.” He’d had enough experience with demagogues in France that this offer rang alarm bells; maybe one of these donors was a would-be Leclair.
Kishida nodded, acknowledging the point. “I’ll get you that information. And now we go home – I need dinner, and so do you.”
They dressed and took their leave, and Omar walked past the shrine on the corner and toward his home. He concentrated on taking his shoes off at the door; it was the one thing he always forgot, and Mariko wouldn’t like it if he wore them into the house.
*******
The dibiterie was crowded at eight o’clock, the air was rich with the smell of roast lamb and mustard and the sound of conversation, and the tables were full of West Africans, Algerians and more than a few Frenchmen. Paulo stood in the doorway and scanned the tables, but it seemed impossible to pick out any one person from the mass. And he might not have, if she hadn’t seen him first.
There was a cry from across the room, and then a woman in a forest-green suit disentangled herself from a nine-year-old girl with delicate half-Vietnamese features. She crossed the room faster than Paulo would have thought possible in her fashionable clothes, and embraced the brother she hadn’t seen in years.
As she broke the embrace to give a more restrained greeting to Mélisande and the children, Paulo regarded his sole remaining sibling. She’d put on weight and added maturity and distinction, and sometime since he’d seen her last, she’d started wearing reading glasses. She looked the very model of a nineteenth arrondissement matron, with only her eyes betraying the revolutionary beneath. That was startling to Paulo, who’d heard all the stories of Funmilayo’s stormy first marriage and her series of affairs with Parisian artists, but everyone got older, and everyone had been living more quietly since they’d found out about the Congo disease.
She led them back to her table, threading her way expertly through the crowd, and made the introductions quickly. “Amadou” – the imposing man of fifty in a grand boubou who sat next to her empty chair; “Youssou” – the two-year-old he was holding; “Noura” – a grave-looking girl of twelve who looked strikingly like Funmilayo herself had at that age; “Abdoulaye” – the child of four who sat on Noura's lap under her careful eye; “Madeleine” – the girl with the long hair and part-Asian features who had happily resumed her place in her mother’s arms. The family wasn’t what Paulo would have envisioned for Funmi when she was younger, but they fit her, and she seemed completed in a way she hadn’t been before.
“This is even more of a meeting-place than you’d told me,” he said.
“The owner” – she gestured toward a graying, one-legged man who was holding court at the table nearest the kitchen – “has been mayor of the arrondissement for twenty years, and his woman is an essayist and a power in the RSP. All the politicians and writers come here, and most nights there’ll be music.”
“His woman?”
“Everyone thinks they’re married, but they never.” There was no trace of disapproval in her voice, as there might have been before the war; she’d grown tolerant of the arrangements men and women made, and their father had finished his life in the same kind of partnership with Sarah Child. That more than anything may have made the difference; she worshipped Father and would never hear a word against him.
A change of subject was in order nevertheless. “The writers come to observe the politicians in their natural habitat?”
“Half the time they’re the same people. Politics, poetry and song – you can’t always tell them apart here.” She looked at him again, her eyes absorbing his features greedily. “So you’re in Berlin now?”
“We are. Mélisande got a fellowship in the university hospital. Respiratory diseases.”
“The Congo?”
“Yes,” Mélisande answered, her spoken French still carrying a reminder of her Gabonais father. She, too, had changed; she would never be matronly, but she’d put aside prophecy and vision when she quit Rwanda, and years of study had made her worldly and methodical, albeit no less driven. “We know how people catch the Congo disease now” – she’d been at medical school in Ilorin when the German doctors had figured it out, and she’d sent a dispatch home with their findings – “but we still don’t know what causes it or how to cure it. Maybe we can find that out, or at least learn how to treat the symptoms.”
Funmilayo nodded her approval. “And you, brother mine?”
“I help Mélisande. I take care of the children.” Now a look of dismay did cross her face; Paulo knew from the letters she’d sent him in Ilorin and Charleston that she disliked the way he’d drifted since being cashiered from the diplomatic service. “I teach a couple of classes at the university,” he added quickly, “and I sometimes consult for the German government on East African affairs. The Court of Arbitration offered me a place in the Congolese administration, but I told them they’d need to abolish forced labor first.”
“Good for you.” Funmi might disapprove of Paulo not having a steady job, but there were some compromises that no one in their family should make. “If you have time, I’ll let you take the draft of Diana’s Kingdom home. I’d be interested in what you think of it.”
“That’s the one about women on the moon?”
“If you want to reduce things to lowest terms.” In fact she’d told him something of it in her letters; it was set some time after the earth had conquered a lunar nation, and it dealt with the relationships between the earth women and the Moon women they had enslaved. Not everyone who’d seen the manuscript had approved of the fact that some of the conquerors came from an advanced West African nation, but he very much doubted she would change her mind.
“I’m sure I’ll like it,” he said, “and that the British won’t.”
“The Imperial Party won’t, anyway,” answered Amadou. Paulo could only nod; a novel that was both anti-colonial and feminist would represent two of the things the Imperials disliked the most.
“That might be the same thing before long,” Funmilayo said. “There’s likely to be another election this fall...”
“What would that be, four in three years?”
“… and if the economy keeps going the way it’s been, then they might win it. Even some of the Times letter-writers are saying that Britain has exhausted the other alternatives.”
“It hasn’t even started to…” Paulo began, but he bit back the rest of the sentence as he realized that these weren’t the people he needed to convince. He hadn’t thought the Imperials were that close to power, and he could only imagine what that might mean for Oman, or for Ilorin. Now he was the one who cursed himself for drifting. If he were still an Omani diplomat or a member of the British colonial service, he might be able to fight them somehow…
“Or maybe you’ll find another way,” Amadou said. Paulo realized he must have spoken out loud. He nodded slowly, and something passed between him and the other man. Amadou was someone else he’d never have guessed would become part of Funmi’s life – he was a businessman, conservative in his politics, with none of the artistic flair of her previous paramours – but he had unseen depths, and they’d complemented each other for seven years now. Enough to keep them together through two children living and two dead…
Whatever he might have said next was cut off when one of the owner’s ubiquitous grandchildren had come up to Madeleine and whispered something urgent in her ear. “Maman, can I go play ball with Théophile?” she asked. “I’m finished with my lamb.”
“Go on, but don’t leave this block and come find me before ten o’clock. Ask Tante Mélisande if you can take Tiberio with you.” At Mélisande’s quick nod, Madeleine took the oldest of her and Paulo’s children by the hand and led him off.
“You too, Noura?” Paulo asked, but the twelve-year-old girl stayed where she was; like Funmilayo at her age, she thought herself far too old for ball games, and was determined to follow the adult conversation. And if she’s as much like Funmi as she seems, she’ll be pretty good at it.
Might as well give her the chance. “Then who do you think will win the election?”
Kaiphranos
Donor
E. Nesbit, who was one of the first to do that type of literature, was born in England in 1858, so she might have a ATL-sister here. Then again, she began writing children's books about the time the War was breaking out in this world, but I suppose there might be opportunities for realistic children's fiction in that as well...
Looks like Omar may never visit his home now, seeing that he has settled in Japan. I was a bit surprised that he married a local, but with TTL’s mixing of cultures it shouldn’t really be a surprise by now. But what Kishida said though… if the navy was truly intent on splurging millions of yen on the army veterans now, then that means something’s waaaay up in the Diet and in the warships, and I don’t think it’s just the election.
And looks like Paulo the Younger will have to make some choices now. The Imperial Party will most definitely try to impose their rule on the Empire (which was already imposing its rule as it is on their locals) and if all the discussions in the previous pages come to forth, then the sun may well be setting on the British Empire soon.
Speaking of which, how’s sleepy Brooke Sarawak doing? Has the Dayaks and tribes form a coherent force yet, in parliament or in the field? For some strange reason, I kinda want the Brookes to stay there and rule peacefully and by themselves in isolation; it’s going to be a rough time ahead. Better a Brooke than direct rule.
Oh, and by the way, has the whole language term mix-up in the Spanish-British-Sulu-Annexation-Treaty been butterflied yet? If not, that could be another flashpoint for the region. It certainly did became one earlier this year.
EDIT: Agree with Chirios, how will organized crime develop ITTL? I assume the Sicilian Mafia as how we know it has been butterflied, but how about the Triads and the Tongs?
And looks like Paulo the Younger will have to make some choices now. The Imperial Party will most definitely try to impose their rule on the Empire (which was already imposing its rule as it is on their locals) and if all the discussions in the previous pages come to forth, then the sun may well be setting on the British Empire soon.
Speaking of which, how’s sleepy Brooke Sarawak doing? Has the Dayaks and tribes form a coherent force yet, in parliament or in the field? For some strange reason, I kinda want the Brookes to stay there and rule peacefully and by themselves in isolation; it’s going to be a rough time ahead. Better a Brooke than direct rule.
Oh, and by the way, has the whole language term mix-up in the Spanish-British-Sulu-Annexation-Treaty been butterflied yet? If not, that could be another flashpoint for the region. It certainly did became one earlier this year.
EDIT: Agree with Chirios, how will organized crime develop ITTL? I assume the Sicilian Mafia as how we know it has been butterflied, but how about the Triads and the Tongs?
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Sulemain
Banned
You have a gift for writing JE, I'll say that again
A couple of points though: what ever happened to Dreyfuss?
And, btw, slightly meta here, but I've been watching Stargate SG-1 again recently, and the bit with the Gou'ld demanding people to "Kneel!!" gave me an idea: an Ottoman Stargate program, and a CMOA when a Muslim soldier refuses to kneel .
A couple of points though: what ever happened to Dreyfuss?
And, btw, slightly meta here, but I've been watching Stargate SG-1 again recently, and the bit with the Gou'ld demanding people to "Kneel!!" gave me an idea: an Ottoman Stargate program, and a CMOA when a Muslim soldier refuses to kneel
.He'll never come home to live - he might visit, but Japan to France is a long trip in the 1910s and 20s.
He doesn't know it, but a couple of his patients helped arrange the marriage to make sure that he'd stay.
They've got something up their sleeve, but they aren't planning a war - they're looking more for a street army than a combat army. You'll find out whether they succeed a couple of updates from now.
You'll find out about Sarawak also, when we get to the British Empire's part in this decade.
Interesting character, and the Wikipedia entry also reminded me of Kenneth Grahame, who was probably more of a spiritual father to Rowling than Carroll was. To get someone like Rowling, we need a combination of Grahame's non-didactic fantasy and Nesbit's realism.
It could happen - more of the roots were there at the time than I'd realized. And I kind of like the idea of Nesbit's ATL-sister writing realistic war stories for children, although that would attract the moral guardians' condemnation like little else.
He was promoted to colonel after the incident with the emperor and to brigadier during the civil war. He's still in the army as a staff officer; he doesn't have much sympathy for socialism, but he's apolitical and competent enough that he hasn't been sidelined.
Quite a few more "ethnic mobs," more international in scope, and (as in OTL) very tied in with legitimate business. Not all the Coasters, for instance, are completely above board.
Kaiphranos
Donor
Seems like she might have some interesting conversations with Funmilayo about blended families and political activism, too. (Though her ATL counterpart might not necessarily share that experience...)
I don't know that straight-up war stories would necessarily be her thing, but the War would definitely provide opportunities for stories about unsupervised children having magical adventures, like many of her OTL works. (Father's at the front; Mother works in an munitions plant; a mysterious package arrives from their uncle in Africa, which turns out to contain some sort of wish-granting creature from Malê folklore; hilarity ensues!) I suspect it would be the sort of escapism that might appeal strongly to the children of Britain, who would have been facing the uncertainty and disruption to their home lives at the time.
To say the least.
Of course, as you say, *Nesbit might not make the same marriage in TTL - all it would take is for her family to settle somewhere else after their years abroad, or for Hubert Bland not to knock her up. But on the other hand, Bland was, er, popular with the ladies, so if they moved in the same social circles (and they might, if *Nesbit is still attracted to Fabian-type socialism), they might end up together. And the progressive literary circles were small enough that she and Funmilayo might well meet, or at least know of each other.
I like this idea a great deal. Her work wouldn't all be African or Indian, of course - many of the stories would be homely English countryside adventures - but creatures from African folklore would certainly suit her taste for flights of fancy, and a generation of British children growing up with such things might have its own effects.
Thanks! There was some discussion of population figures at post 2448. The populations of the Malê successor states would be somewhat higher than OTL due to greater urbanization, better nutrition and longer life expectancies. My estimate was seven million total in the three Malê states (two million each in Ilorin and Sokoto, three million in Adamawa), two or three million in the Oyo Confederation outside Ilorin, and maybe 20 million in all British West Africa.
The population of the Malê as a people is tricky - at this point, "Malê" means anyone from the Sudanic-speaking, Abacarist-influenced states rather than only the direct descendants of the original Brazilian freedmen. Counting the diaspora, there might be eight or nine million people who call themselves Malê, but only some of them (probably less than 10 percent) will have Brazilian ancestry - most will be Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba or a mix thereof, and the balance of cultures will vary depending on the place
.
The mayor and his woman. Not wife?.....
Errr... they ARE speaking French here, since a comment was made about someones accent, right?
In French, the usual word for wife is simply «femme» or woman. It's the same in German, too, although thats irrelevant here.
Since she likely wasnt making a point of it, she probably didnt say mistress or girl friend or such, both of which have direct equivalents in French....
Errr... they ARE speaking French here, since a comment was made about someones accent, right?
In French, the usual word for wife is simply «femme» or woman. It's the same in German, too, although thats irrelevant here.
Since she likely wasnt making a point of it, she probably didnt say mistress or girl friend or such, both of which have direct equivalents in French....
Oh hell. I vaguely thought that "mari" had a female equivalent (or had become a unisex term, which is something a socialist France might do), but upon checking, I see that isn't the case.
To cover my crass mistake, I'll assume that the French language is slightly different in TTL, and that "mari" has become a unisex term among progressive Parisians, or maybe that époux/épouse are used exclusively to refer to married couples with "femme" having the sole meaning of "woman." Language use in the countryside and among older people is more conservative, but a futurist/feminist like Funmilayo would use the new meanings and her brother would understand them that way.