"Power Without Knowledge...": President Haig and the Era of Bad Feelings

[generalurist]

1. Harvest- The Flower War, a combination of televised live fire naval and aerial wargames and small squad gladiatorial combat to demonstrate new innovations in experimental military and medical technology at both the tactical and the individual level.

Just to make sure, that "gladiatorial combat" has steps taken to make it non-lethal right?

Televised naval wargames sounds hella cool- though I imagine they also have some untelevized ones to avoid giving away all their military strategy.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Just to make sure, that "gladiatorial combat" has steps taken to make it non-lethal right?

Televised naval wargames sounds hella cool- though I imagine they also have some untelevized ones to avoid giving away all their military strategy.

To the first it's certainly possible to die in the Flower War, but there's things like time outs and player substitutions and it's last man standing so it doesn't need to devolve to a fight to the death if everyone on the other team is injured, captured or surrenders. Combatants use actual bullets but that's considered practical but somewhat unsatisfying, and each Commonwealth has its pet weapons hypercorps producing new generations of nonlethal weapons, exoskeletons* and good old wetware and chemical enhancements so each region of the country produces a differently specialized wetworks kill squad. Is it a risk to compete? Absolutely, but if you have a winning career you'll become essentially a propaganda superhero with legions of fans and the best access to cutting edge healthcare for the rest of your life.

As to the second there is absolutely secret weapons tests behind the scenes carried out by the Army, with the public spectacle of the Flower War existing mainly to test out new design theories, keep soldiers sharp with the selection process and serve as a widely publicized deterrent to those outside the Cosmintern. While each Commonwealth funds and equips their ground squad, the naval portion of the exercise is considerably more conventional, using small regional battlegroups drawn from the ARC Navy.

*No Iron Man-style flying around but exoskeletons are a very mature technology in the ARC. The military even has the Dragoons (sadly barred from the Flower Wars), specialized mechanized infantry units based on the RDA Marines from Avatar and equipped with larger scale versions made possible by advances in materials science and the development of sophisticated systems to properly control balance and locomotion.

 

[Born in the USSA]

I've been busy with the things but I promise I haven't forgotten about this TL! No promises on the next update but if anyone has any questions about life in the ARC or something feel free to ask! In the meantime here's a couple of things to give some idea to the aesthetic and design philosophy in Antarctica and the Cosmintern more broadly:

 

[245]

How is this world a mirror universe?

 

[Born in the USSA]

How is this world a mirror universe?

Aesthetically. The US spends a good deal of time as the "militaristic ideological empire" (even supporting a Caribbean North Korea analogue) before politics become much less tightly controlled in the 1990s (albeit through reform rather than regime collapse). Meanwhile Russia undergoes a market revolution while China transforms into an oligarchal capitalist state, and Cuba gets an analogue to Aum Shinrikyo while Japan is battered by a weak economy. Radical environmentalism becomes the terrorist boogeyman just like all the thriller novels of OTL predicted. Europe gets a standing army but no common currency while Yugoslavia has a truth and reconciliation commission and South Africa reaps the whirlwind of a race war.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The ARC in the wake of the Revolution, like the US before it, suffered something of an inferiority complex in its early years, derided by other more established nations for a supposed lack of distinct cultural heritage or refinement. With the absence of an indigenous population to draw influence from the new government took to appropriating place names and concepts culled from northern fiction about the continent, but alleged inferiority in cultural matters would require more than new names and individual fumblings for national meaning- they would require nothing less than robust government support and enthusiastic citizen participation.

While the structure of labor and leisure in Antarctica created a large and stimulating space for free expression and experimentation in the arts, with government at all levels offering grants and workshops to foster and develop creative skills and personal passions, the ARC and the member Commonwealths would also develop a far grander plan to foster a collective national mythology for the new nation. Inspired by open source shared universes from Wuxia to the Cthulhu Mythos, under this plan the government would hold the rights to specific shared worlds in trust, funding artists, writers and filmmakers to contribute to them and profit from their unique contributions while the state maintained final oversight on broad-strokes canonicity and international distribution rights.

While Sutter's Demimonde novel would become the basis for a wide ranging New Weird alternate history fantasy setting and the Athame superhero universe would be broadly popular, by far the best regarded and most robust would be a space opera scenario simply called Separate Spheres. Taking place millennia in the future in the wake of a Cosmicist final victory, the setting follows citizens, statesmen and outlaws at all levels of the Gestaltgeist as the newly discovered faster than light engine allows the Terragen Commonwealth to reach out from the solar system and establish a truly united humanity among the stars. The Cosmintern answer to franchises like Star Trek, in the series' backstory after expanding to encompass the entire solar system the Commonwealth had sent out repeated waves of Von Neumann probes and generation ships in accordance to the specific guidelines of the Cosmicist Manifesto, and much of the narrative thrust of Separate Spheres revolved around bridging the cultural gaps that have evolved among the far flung human outposts and bringing them back into communion with the home star and the Gestaltgeist. Other frequent topics included the meaning of existence and the exploration of Cosmicist cultural norms and social mores.

One innovation would be a considerably more focused and realistic approach to technology, with sophisticated 3D printers shackled with many more limitations than the Star Trek replicators, for example, and a greater focus on realistic ship design, weaponry and orbital mechanics outside of the necessary liberties taken with FTL travel. In keeping with this greater emphasis on harder science the vast majority of characters and factions on the show are culturally distinct humans, followed by a much smaller percentage of realistic human subspecies and uplifts enabled by genetic engineering, followed in turn by sapient machines developed through a variety of methods. Sapient extraterrestrials are quite rare in contrast, and show radical deviation from anthropomorphism in form and morality in the rare event they do appear.

With a vast canon of novels, films, and television series and thriving fan participation in expanding the project, Separate Spheres has more than validated the collective mythology program on its own, giving citizens of the Cosmintern a sense of boundless possibility and the oppressed precariat of the north an avenue of escapism even as their governments denounce the project as degenerate propaganda.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Think Lancer (minus the societal collapse in the backstory and heavy mech focus) coupled with the realistic ship design and orbital physics of The Expanse, the uplifts and Factors* of Eclipse Phase and things like Invisible Republic and Simon Roy's First Knife and Habitat (as examples of worst case scenarios).

*Sapient slime molds, i.e. radically unhuman aliens

 

[Born in the USSA]

The neofederalist/regionalist divide in the small-r reform movement had grown into a chasm in the twenty-first century, and nowhere was that more apparent than on the issue of the Electoral College. Although the three presidential elections after it had produced clear winners there were plenty of people still nervous that a repeat of the obscenely contentious 2000 election would turn into the norm rather than the exception, especially as the three party system seemed to be entrenching itself permanently into the American political landscape*.

2000 had produced a crisis of legitimacy and paved the way for an open-ended counterinsurgency and for many the thought of even one more election going in that direction was too much. The only issue was what to do about it. The most straightforward, of course, was to simply abolish the Electoral College entirely. The powers and authority of the body had degenerated continuously for 200 years so it seemed like common sense to just get rid of it all together. But then again nothing is so misleading as common sense, and the daunting task of a constitutional amendment seemed to take the issue of the table. Compacts between the states seemed like the logical next step.

The favorite choice of the neofederalists was the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, or NPVI. Launched in the wake of the 2004 election, the NPVI stated that, in the event the member states made up a majority of the Electoral College, the system would activate automatically, pledging the electors of those states to the winner of the national popular vote. Many neofeds and sensible people saw this as an excellent dodge around the EC, guaranteeing a way to avoid contingent elections without any human involvement after the initial adoption.

Manifest Destiny! had another opinion. Founded as a response to the Department of Heartland Security domestic surveillance policies, the bastion of the regionalist school saw the NPVI as the ultimate nationalization of the political process. Many in the group feared that it would take a potential lever of influence away from the people, and so the group set about making that potential lever a reality, resulting in the Regional Accountability Coalition.

An attempt to carve out a space for ticket fusionism while preventing contingent elections, the RAC relied on passing a boilerplate law in as many states as possible allowing the winner of a given state's electoral votes to essentially gift them to another of the top three presidential candidates. The theory behind the project was that the lesser of the major party candidates would be more likely to give their smattering of votes to an ideological ally rather than an opponent, creating an incentive for the candidates closest aligned on the issues to compromise and make concessions without inviting the potential chicanery of the Congress, avoiding the spoiler effect.

Although the NPVI and the RAC continued to grow through the Mosely-Braun presidency, neither system would have enough participants going into the next presidential cycle, to the belated horror of all involved.

*womp womp

 

[Born in the USSA]

Reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Martian constitution and all the Reds! Organic Laws has got me thinking I should make a serious go at writing one for the Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealths 🤔

 

[Born in the USSA]

In the process of writing my ARC Basic Law I had to come up with an anthem for the nation so here it is, adapted from an old Georgist song set to the tune of "Marching Through Georgia". I originally had something modern picked out but figured it would sound weird even if it's being used a century from now in-universe.

​

The Land (Cosmicist)

​

Sound the call for freedom all and blast it far and wide!
March unto our Destiny for Fate is on our side!
While the voice of Nature thunders o'er the rising tide-
"We claim the land for the People!"

Chorus:
The land, the land, it's we who make the land!
The land, the land, the Commons where we stand!
Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand?
We claim the land for the People!

Hark the sound is spreading from the East and from the West-
Why should we beg work and let oppressors take the best?
Make them take their chances in the world like all the rest!
The world was meant for the People!

Chorus

Clear the way for liberty, the world must all be free!
Partisans can't falter from the fight, tho' stern it be!
'Til the flag we love so well shall fly from sea to sea-
A world set free by the People!

Chorus

The army now is marching on, the battle is begun!
We'll fight past System's icy Rim and to the burning Sun!
The Standard now is raised on high until the war is won!
The stars made free for the People!

Chorus

On foreign worlds, in later days, when quiets the battle din-
There among the Coming Race let real work begin!
Kept alive in thought and deed by one vast human kin,
The Struggle for the sake of the People!

Chorus

 

[andry2806]

I finally recovered this TL and I must say I'm really impressed! Really curious to see where this develope. To which date you're planning to bring this? In which year the Antartic Revolution happen?

The Flower War is a really interesting concept, but it really weirds me out that those who partecipate can really die, this seems so out of place with the general morals and aesthetic you made for Cosmicism. I'd honestly see them incorporating point-scoring methods from things like soft-air and paintball, plus the whole arsenal of new high-tech non-lethal weapons is a really could part, that could make this like the Formula 1 of the military-industrial complex; a widely popular and followed competition with a high level technology base which various companies in the business use to develop new technologies in their sector and to bring attention to their brands and products.

May I offer criticism on the Europe part? The Kaliningrad Oblast has been depopulated of German residents right after WWII and was repopulated by Soviet citizens. By the 90s it was just a regular Russian city in a weird position. Them deciding to rise up, rename the city Konigsberg and request German intervention is reaallly improbable and anachronistic. Overall, the development of Germany in general is quite anachronistic. After the post-WWII reconstruction Austria developed a strong national identity, and Germans became really anti-nationalist. So the Second Anschluss and the Underground seems a lot out of place, Austrians would never have wanted to be annexed by Germany and Germans would have never wanted to annex Austria and then support a militaristic, nationalist party as the Underground. AfD is the first kinda nationalist party in the Bundestag since WWII, they got most of their support from former East Germany and they've already reached their maximum outreach with the population at 12%. Also I have a pair of points about the European parties. Aren't they...few? You have a leftist party that opposers don't want in government because they think they're Soviet puppets, a centrist "natural party of government", and a German-only thing. Where is everybody else? Also, the names seems pretty weird, especially compared to how the new American parties, even if they're the expression of a really original series of movements you created, have pretty conventional names.

Great work BTW!!

 

[Born in the USSA]

I finally recovered this TL and I must say I'm really impressed! Really curious to see where this develope. To which date you're planning to bring this? In which year the Antartic Revolution happen?

I wasn't planning on taking it too much further into the twenty-first century to be honest, I was planning on updating probably to 2018 or so to show the complete collapse of the three major parties in the run up to the unseen 2020 election and then filling it out with more Antarctic updates.

The Flower War is a really interesting concept, but it really weirds me out that those who partecipate can really die, this seems so out of place with the general morals and aesthetic you made for Cosmicism. I'd honestly see them incorporating point-scoring methods from things like soft-air and paintball, plus the whole arsenal of new high-tech non-lethal weapons is a really could part, that could make this like the Formula 1 of the military-industrial complex; a widely popular and followed competition with a high level technology base which various companies in the business use to develop new technologies in their sector and to bring attention to their brands and products.

Oh brand awareness is certainly a big part of the Flower War, all their equipment is prominently labeled and the competitors record ads for local products to boot. Essentially its the "sports as ritualized bloodsport" thing taken to its logical extreme- the structure of the Cosmintern as a trade and defense pact and the necessity for drills and joint exercises made the gamification of the whole affair with points systems and time-outs an elegant solution given the fact that the rest of the alliance already attends and contributes to the Festival as it is. Like I said it doesn't have to go to the death and almost never does, and the sophistication of Antarctic medicine makes injuries that would range from serious to life-shattering today much easier to treat since the soldiers of the Flower War are contractually entitled to the best cutting edge medical treatments. Is it still savage to some degree? Of course it is, but Cosmicism sets out to embody human nature rather than to engineer human souls, and so is laboring to create a system that can simultaneously be stable without ossifying and dynamic without spasming. And part of that means giving the people a bit of blood every now and again.

The important thing to realize about Cosmicism is that in a lot of ways it revolves around a multifaceted union of opposites. The core responsibility of the movement is to ensure that humanity and the Earth more generally survives the Anthropocene to spread into space, and as such the Cosmicists take an enormous amount of effort to both experiment with new technologies and social structures and to catalogue and preserve history and traditional social strategies from around the world. The movement also balances a drive for incredibly strong central governments against a commitment to create a populace that, at the individual level, are essentially free to live how they want within certain clear limits, something even seen at the (at this point hypothetical) global scale in the dynamic contrast between the drive for a truly global world state and for national and regional autonomy within existing states. A citizen of the ARC would be the first to tell you that all they really want is to save the world and the human race but they have absolutely no qualms if it comes down to the wire and they need to get their hands dirty to do it. The stakes are too high for anything else.

May I offer criticism on the Europe part? The Kaliningrad Oblast has been depopulated of German residents right after WWII and was repopulated by Soviet citizens. By the 90s it was just a regular Russian city in a weird position. Them deciding to rise up, rename the city Konigsberg and request German intervention is reaallly improbable and anachronistic. Overall, the development of Germany in general is quite anachronistic. After the post-WWII reconstruction Austria developed a strong national identity, and Germans became really anti-nationalist. So the Second Anschluss and the Underground seems a lot out of place, Austrians would never have wanted to be annexed by Germany and Germans would have never wanted to annex Austria and then support a militaristic, nationalist party as the Underground. AfD is the first kinda nationalist party in the Bundestag since WWII, they got most of their support from former East Germany and they've already reached their maximum outreach with the population at 12%. Also I have a pair of points about the European parties. Aren't they...few? You have a leftist party that opposers don't want in government because they think they're Soviet puppets, a centrist "natural party of government", and a German-only thing. Where is everybody else? Also, the names seems pretty weird, especially compared to how the new American parties, even if they're the expression of a really original series of movements you created, have pretty conventional names.

Konigsberg is absolutely still Russian-speaking, the name change (when translated into English, kinda like how Côte d'Ivoire insists on how its name is presented in other countries) and the whole protection thing with Germany is very much a geopolitical move on the part of both of them to irritate the USS. The unification of Germany and Austria on the other hand is extremely unlikely I'll admit, but take it in the context of a Soviet Union that spent decades radicalizing on their borders instead of weakening combined with a US that's so thinly spread during the Haig years that the Paneuropean Community forms with a standing federal army. Germany and Austria are the front line of a potential European land war with the hardening of the Iron Curtain and sheer proximity to an existential threat is enough to make strange bedfellows in international relations, though Austria still maintains a distinct cultural identity and gets a lot of concessions on autonomy and spending out of the merger.

When it comes to the political parties, the PEC is governed by fairly big tent coalitions of national parties that may go by different local names and have different peripheral concerns and policies. Hence the names at the continental level bring nondescript except in some sort of vague "centralization v. nationalist" sort of way. The Underground is actually a derogatory name for Eurosceptics in general, there just happens to be a larger share than average in Germany that have appropriated the name, upset that the rest of the PEC is (in their view) coasting on Germany's outsized focus on defense to excuse shirking their own contributions to collective security. It's not strictly true but we've seen OTL that small committed groups can use spin to accomplish all sorts of ridiculous things.

One thing I tried to do with both the PEC and the Seventh Party System is to recycle the names of preexisting movements, with the PEC coalition names chosen given the roots of the entity in an Anglo-French project. In Europe I wanted the primary divide to be between a centralized and slightly authoritarian coalition and a more decentralized but fiercely nationalistic one, so the political spectrum at the continental level is in some ways on an authoritarian-libertarian axis rather than a more conventional left-right one that still exists within the national political systems.

Great work BTW!!

Thanks! I really appreciate the feedback and I'm always happy to clarify! Answering questions like this sometimes helps me come up with new angles to approach things I've only vaguely described previously, I hope this helps 😂

 

[Born in the USSA]

I'm still plugging away at my ARC Basic Law and I've got to say, trying to map my Cosmicist ideology onto an actual constitutional framework is giving me plenty of food for thought but I've been able to extrapolate facets of it that changed my assumptions going in. For example, I wanted to keep some version of Kim Stanley Robinson's Martian bicameral judiciary and pair it with a balanced tricameral legislature, but I realized that given the different sizes of the chambers it would just create the exact same gridlock the US has given enough time. So, with that in mind I kept my plans for the judiciary and retooled the legislature into one enormous chamber split into a large central elected body that actually approves things and a series of smaller committees elected or appointed by various means that generate legislation within specific areas of responsibility but are unable to pass it unilaterally🤔

 

[Born in the USSA]

I made a thread on crafting AH constitutions and discussing specific constitutional mechanisms and documents, I promise I'm still working on my Basic Law 😂

Inspired by a thread on whether it's necessary to replace the US Constitution (and given my own project writing a Basic Law for my timeline), I decided to create this thread! Create amendments and constitutions (or at least parts of ones) for your AH projects and ideologies, talk shop over the art of constitutional framing, discuss innovative mechanisms and features of real life constitutional documents (or even the rare fictional ones 🤔), describe government structures, whatever takes your fancy! I know it's a bit in the weeds even by the usual standards of the site but I can speak from firsthand experience that it's an interesting and enlightening field of the hobby.

In other news I recently rewatched Fight Club and it occured to me that, in-universe, the movie wouldn't be an adaptation of the book (which still exists TTL), but rather a Ken Burns documentary on the Regressive movement. It also occurred to me that my mention in the Y2K chapter about the Superpredator cyberterrorist cell could be soft-retconned into a broader wave of Regression inspired by Palahniuk's book. In-universe he regards it in about the same way Stephen King does that book about school shootings, given everything in the aftermath 🤔

 

[Born in the USSA]

How did I not find out about this movie until today 😱 given this timeline's inordinate amount of militant primitivism and the fact that the Covid analogue was fungal it's right in my wheelhouse!

I finally got around to watching this and really enjoyed it! Both Gaia and In the Earth are on Hulu, so I did a fungal horror double feature. In other news I found this little beauty:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/the-unabomber-ted-kaczynski-new-generation-of-acolytes.html

 

[Born in the USSA]

Writer's block is really frustrating me on my Basic Law but I've had some ideas to revamp the story structure for the novel this TL is laying the groundwork for so it's not a complete loss 🤔

 

[Born in the USSA]

In the meantime if anyone has any questions about either the modern or future settings I'll answer if they're not too spoilery 😅 it might shake something loose 🤔

 

[Born in the USSA]

What is the status of the movie industry in the modern setting? Do we see anything like the MCU that pretty much killed several genres in favor of superhero movies? Like, the MCU is a very unique cinematic juggernaut (no pun intended), and it would be really interesting to see what the film industry sometime around the 2000s to 2020s in this timeline looks like without it.

We do not. The film industry in general is a lot more experimental as a knock on effect to positive response to Ridley Scott's take on a Dune series and the butterflying away of Star Wars so we see a lot less fallback on established IP. There's still a lot of it, don't get me wrong, but aside from a fairly successful set of Lovecraftian horror comedies and a project by del Toro that'll get its own update the concept of the massive shared universe is very much theoretical. There's still comic movies but they're relatively self contained (especially with the stuff from the big two) and the superhero movie market is diluted by offerings from Image and Valiant. Audiences TTL have demonstrated a willingness to experiment more in their movie choices and so we have more options- niche stuff is still niche but it gets better exposure than it would if it was competing against a lowest common denominator superhero action comedy.

 

[Born in the USSA]

I don't put much stock in leaks but rumor has it the next BioShock game takes place in an Antarctic city and I swear to God if the plot revolves around an agent of the state injured in a Fringe-esque act of science terrorism who gradually grows more physically inhuman even as he comes to doubt the foundation of his society I demand nothing less than a moderate cash payment and a writer's credit 😂 Just wanted to get that in writing, since my original ideas for the Writing on the Wall portion of my proposed novel owe a thematic debt to the franchise and I had them first 😅

 

[Born in the USSA]

Having given some more thought to my original Heartland ideas I had the idle thought to combine it with my The King in Yellow scenario, so as of now Heartland in-universe would roughly consist of a combination of these three posts:

*A Note From the Author: I originally set up The King in Yellow to be a single self-contained Timeline in a Week scenario but the idea has grown increasingly more complex the longer I considered it. I planned to create several distinct TLIAW threads of ambiguous canonicity to this one, each relatively self contained but with enough connective tissue to be rewarding to completionist readers. Until it occurred to me that to the best of my knowledge I've never seen an AH shared universe made up of several interlocking but distinct week long timelines! I put it up to a vote and will be centralizing these new timelines in this single thread, and I hope the end result will be a rewarding and entertaining scenario for readers! This will still serve as the first post for The King in Yellow: A President Lovecraft TLIAW but all those that follow will have their own threadmarked anchor post separate from the timeline updates proper for ease of navigation. Hope you all have fun reading!*

- The Yellow Sign, electoral symbol of the Independence Party​

"Even with the benefit of hindsight the life and times of Howard Lovecraft are a study in contrasts. To his enemies the thirtieth president was a veritable king in yellow, a godless tyrant out to drown the nation's proud heritage of faith and rugged individualism under a tide of socialism. To his friends and supporters he was always affectionately known as the Old Man, whose bracingly clear eyed materialism was softened by a keen awareness of the unseen broader forces at play in poverty and other social ills and by a consistent willingness to offer firm support and sound advice. Whatever our picture of the man it is beyond dispute that he shaped the century, bringing the American people through the ravages of the Depression and the Second Clash of Civilizations and making the critical early moves that would come to define the US posture in the Strange Aeon. Whether his contributions were for good or ill I leave to the reader."
- Excerpt from Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: The Lovecraft Presidency in Retrospect, considered the most thorough historical analysis to date in light of newly declassified Comintern documents.

Hi all! Some of you may have seen that I've been puzzling over the concept of a Lovecraft presidency here and there over the last few days, so I decided to finally give it a shot! I've decided to structure the thing as a Timeline In A Week, with this little teaser followed by six updates delivered daily covering most of the twentieth century.

1. The King in Yellow: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
2. The Maker of Moons: The Fall of the Cruel Empire
3. The Mystery of Choice: The First Clash of Civilizations
4. In Search of the Unknown: Israfel Over the White House
5. The Tracer of Lost Persons: The Masque of the Red Death
6. The Tree of Heaven: The Second Clash of Civilizations
7. Police!!!: Life in the Strange Aeon
8. The Slayer of Souls: Seven Minutes in Eternity

I've updated the two general lore posts in the other threads and I'll be linking them below, and of course questions between updates are more than welcome!

For my part I've been tinkering with a New Weird setting on and off just for fun and I approached constructing it in several stages:

1. Setting- I knew pretty early on that I wanted to set it in a midcentury ASB alternate history rather than some sort of recognizably modern masquerade or wholly constructed world. Localizing it in the US sent me down the path of looking at folklore, pseudohistory and esotericism relevant to my location and POD.
2. Metaphysics- Based on that research I came up with an alternate elemental schema tying together Aztec and Norse cosmology combined with alchemy, some Plains directional symbolism and good old Western mysticism to sort of undergird the magic the setting runs on. Starting with the east and rotating counterclockwise I settled on Death, Ice, Earth (in the Aztec "synonymous with life" sense) and Fire, heavily tied to the stages of the alchemic Magnum Opus and creating two opposing axes with Vril as the negentropic motive force for the cycle and ultimate source of magic.
3. Magic system- Based on some research into modern PODs to lead to the rebirth of magic or whatever I settled on a scenario where Crowley parleys The Lesser Key of Solomon (which he published as a grimoire in real life) into a system of industrialized magic fit for the modern age. Under this system, rituals would be automated through a process of prerecorded invocations, with specific incense and ritual materials incorporated into the assembly line machinery itself. The end result would be commercial items stamped with seals far weaker than full-fledged goetic summonings but perfectly adequate to make all sorts of things work better than they strictly should.
4. Bestiary- No fantastical setting is complete without one after all! As with any heavy industry goetia on a grand scale produces environmental contamination, creating magically mutated animals in a process very similar to Shadowrun. In search of something uniquely American and plenty strange I settled on taking fearsome critters and trying to work out how they would look and behave as real, plausible animals. The fact that quite a few would be terrifying in the flesh certainly helps!
5. Splats- For lack of a better term the magical races that spring up as a result of goetic contamination. For these I took the basic White Wolf approach where the groups are differentiated by elemental affinity and worked in a deliberate attempt to subvert the classic fantasy "5 races" structure. Humans, being by far the largest and most versatile group, technically exist outside of the elemental cycle that governs the other races but this is rationalized as an innate human mastery of Vril as exercised through goetia. In the order mentioned above the other races are-
   1. Koreshans- In this world Cyrus Teed really does come back to life as promised, with his "electro-alchemy" evolving into a form of Re-Animator style necromancy. With undead immortality, marble smooth skin and heads like Horus they fill the High Men niche most typically filled by wizards.
   2. Jotun- Combining classic Norse frost giants with the 19th century theory that a race of biblical giants built the Native American mounds, the Jotun fill the Stout niche usually filled by dwarves, being builders and craftsmen, but subvert the usual expectations by being large, being the ancient progenitor race (and none too pleased to wake from their slumber and see what's happened in their absence), and by having access to a powerful magic of their own ("wild" water and ice magic, in their case).
   3. Tzitzimime- In Aztec mythology the Tzitzimime are a race of star demons with snakes for genitals and mouths at their joints, though as female entities they have an inherent connection to the Earth and fertility as well. I decided to keep the mouth joint thing but fold in some medieval ideas about demons that had a similar body plan and replace the genital thing with a classic devil tail that just happens to appear snakelike when it opens its mouth. They also have hooves, horns and wings, but I decided to give them a classic Nightgaunt faceless look to better contrast with their whole joint deal. By default they fill the Cute, Hobbit type niche, being separate from the other races and of considerably less certain origin. They are widely feared for being able to drain life vampirically but they can also use that energy to heal people and make plants grow so it's a mixed bag.
   4. Sphinxes- Representing fire and combining traditional ideas of sphinxes with manticores, they have thumbs and are considerably better groomed though still undeniably leonine. The first generation were humans who pupated but now they can breed true among themselves. Their most formidable weapon is their barbed tail and they have enough motor control to use their tails to write magically potent things using their venom as ink. They fill the Fairy niche (aka the most inherently magical race. It's usually elves) and more potent ones can duplicate this effect by speaking, and specialize in generating passion, frenzy and good old fire balls.

I'm on a short holiday hiatus from my The King in Yellow TL to focus on another project but it idly occurred to me that a synthesis of that timeline with my Weird Fiction ASB setting concepts could produce a really interesting scenario 🤔



Since TKiY diverges in the first decade of the 1800s and my ASB scenario diverges roughly a century later anything in the former during that interval would remain unchanged but as the 20th century unfolds I came up with some geopolitical changes flowing from the spread of industrial goetia:

1. The Populist Party swallows the Democrats whole, becoming one half of a two-party system with the Independence Party. By the time of the World War II analogue the former favors the FBU while the latter supports an alliance with the Comintern.
2. President Lovecraft's paramilitary would be a reborn version of the Knights of the Golden Circle and would be considerably more occult and esoteric. Think yellow quasi-Masonic dress uniforms and featureless white masks while active duty wear would still be an olive drab military uniform/Yellow Sign armband/gas mask combo.
3. The Second Clash of Civilizations would be against the Franco-British Union instead of the Comintern, only inflaming domestic tensions in the aftermath.
4. The Church of Starry Wisdom would be an actual religious organization rather than the name of the Independence Party paramilitary force, with the Church born of a strange synthesis of Theosophy and Xiguandao under the messianic leadership of Jiddu Krishnamurti.

As for ASB changes, in keeping with my commitment for making the mystical consequences unusual I think the rise of magic would see the spread of creatures from things like bestiaries over more conventional fantasy fare (at least in Europe, Africa and the Middle East). In Asia meanwhile the spread of yōkai as incredibly dangerous invasive species could be a consequence of Japanese adventurism in the region for the first half of the century. For now I'm settled on nonhuman races being a firmly North American thing as a consequence of early extremely heavy use of the technology.

I'm also mulling over changes to the in-universe title of Sutter's novel 🤔