The confusion is natural, since Lovecraft himself used "fascism" to describe his ideal political system but it was vastly far removed from the movement in Europe, looking in practice closer to Technocracy if it was actually hyper-concerned with cultural output instead of just material output.There's so much here that I love, but I think it's clear that I need to actually start reading the thing before speculating further. But yeah, I'm super-jazzed! Tirra lirra for now
The King in Yellow and Other Stories: A President Lovecraft Weird Fiction Timeline in Several Acts
- Thread starter Born in the USSA
- Start date
And just like that I know what minor role I'm going to set aside for Orwell! Aside from his writing he'll be Labor leader for awhile, though the party will by that point be fairly boxed in by the New-Conservative alliance. He'll likely get more coverage in Illuminatus!
My choice to make Tolkien the PM was inspired by this wikibox
(And the DBWI that inspired it)
I promise he won't nearly be this bad but I was still taken by the idea 😂
Also ngl the Age of Fear is going to be SO. GODDAMN. WEIRD. And given everything so far that's saying something! I've been doing tech research for the upcoming TLIAW and extrapolating it all out to the present day when the kinks will be worked out produces a lot of really interesting advancements to play with in Act VI. Our dislocation from the last forty years of technology will have nothing on this Sure it's only six acts but The King in Yellow and Other Stories is going to go out on a high note.
Sure it's only six acts but The King in Yellow and Other Stories is going to go out on a high note.
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Veracruz- Praise the Lord, Pass the Ammunition
-Francisco I. Madero, President of Mexico and leader of the Constitutionalist faction of the Mexican Civil War.
Without a Zapatista insurgency to help spark a patchwork of regional revolts the faction calculus of the Mexican Civil War would be drastically changed, with the Nationalists under Victoriano Huerta recast as the rebels and Madero's Constitutionalists as the federalist forces. These changes on the ground are largely the reason the conflict is most commonly called the Mexican Civil War rather than the Mexican Revolution in this timeline, though whatever it was called, Bryan was content to offer aid to the Madero government short of direct US involvement even as he remained blissfully unconcerned with the storm clouds even then gathering over Europe.
Without a President Roosevelt there could obviously be no Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, though something similar was promulgated under President Fairbanks, albeit almost entirely tailored to the protection of American corporate property abroad. Even though Bryan was not keen on enforcing it it would be the legacy of the Fairbanks Doctrine that would drag the United States militarily into the Mexican Civil War through the perfect storm that was the Tampico Affair. Tampico was home to relatively robust facilities for processing crude oil and the McKinley and Fairbanks administrations had seen the growth of a large and entrenched community of American expats who worked in the Tampico oil industry.
Unfortunately it also hosted a large population of unreconstructed Diaz-era military officers who wasted no time declaring for Huerta. Given its crucial infrastructure seizure of Tampico was a coup for the struggling Nationalists but it was not without its problems. While the oil companies themselves demanded intervention to protect their investments, the largest concern of the Bryan Administration and the Populist congressional majority would start and end with the protection of the Americans living in Tampico, and several ships of the American Atlantic Fleet would be deployed to the besieged city, most critically the USS Skeered O'Nothin.
-The USS Michigan had been renamed the USS Skeered O'Nothin in 1910 at the insistence of Populist Speaker of the House John S. Williams as a jab at the pretensions of British dreadnoughts.
Originally designed solely as a battleship, the Skeered O'Nothin had become something of a playground for the Office of Naval Intelligence as they sought to test out modernization strategies on the fleet, and what was the Tampico adventure if not a grand field test? While the Army's Aeronautics Signal Corps jealously guarded its monopoly on military airships* and fixed-wing aircraft the agreements between the branches said nothing about helicopters. Helicopters have a surprisingly long history in this world and in ours, with the first crude designs appearing in the 1860s. While accelerated advances in materials science as a result of a 19th century airship arms race would likewise accelerate the development of the helicopter, by 1914 they had not yet been deployed offensively in a war, something the Skeered O'Nothin was set to change.
Helicopters were a practical as well as a politically expedient choice, given that the conversion of the warship from a battleship to an aircraft cruiser still demanded a delicate balance between a launching surface for aircraft and the ship's preexisting big guns. Deployed for scouting and targeted firebombing these offensive helicopters would prove a resounding success, even successfully destroying the Veracruz, a crucial gunboat in the Nationalist fleet. The display had worked like a dream, with the eventual surrender of the city's Nationalist forces even partially attributed to the sinking of the Veracruz. While the Tampico Affair had proven the viability of aircraft cruisers paired with helicopters, further advancements with the advent of the First Clash of Civilizations would prove the deciding factor that would secure aircraft cruisers as the warship of choice well into the Strange Aeon. That invention was the ramjet.
-The first combat-ready ramjet-equipped helicopter TTL was developed by ONI in 1921 (three decades ahead of schedule), though fuel consumption issues would not be totally worked out until roughly a decade later.
Invented (both TTL and OTL) in 1915 by Hungarian Albert Fono, the ramjet had initially been devised as a means to extend the range of artillery through a combination of initial gunbarrel propulsion and a ramjet-equipped projectile. Given the far better showing of the Austro-Hungarians in this timeline they were actually able to bring some of his proposed projectiles to the testing phase before the war ended. The postwar proliferation of the ramjet would prove the crucial missing ingredient to the helicopter aircraft cruiser, with new generations of propelled projectiles able to achieve much greater ranges and the combination of the ramjet and the helicopter producing a wide variety of the designs that would culminate in the famous thrustwing aircraft of the Second Clash of Civilizations and the compound helicopters and tiltrotors that would come after, leaving a legacy of VTOL aircraft and ballistic missiles in their wake.
*Even as they had begun to fall from grace as a result of the Third War of the Conflagration.
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The in-universe belief that the territorialism of the Army ASC retarded the development of civil aviation technology* is going to be one of the major factors behind consolidating HASTUR. As for the aircraft cruiser/helicopter/ramjet perfect storm, the fact that all three were being seriously worked on at the same time suggested to me that the right inciting incident could bring them all together at just the right time to compensate for the major advantage of battleships, namely force projection. The fact that conversion of existing battleships is cheaper played a significant role. The Triebflugel was historically developed to take advantage of otherwise unusably small takeoff surfaces so it seemed like a natural evolution to capitalize on the timeline's existing technology curves.
*Incorrect, as it turns out, they're about where we were at the same time with fixed wing aircraft, but the fact that the navy already has primitive ballistic missiles and attack helicopters by the late 20s feeds that impression.
*Incorrect, as it turns out, they're about where we were at the same time with fixed wing aircraft, but the fact that the navy already has primitive ballistic missiles and attack helicopters by the late 20s feeds that impression.
Oh it's in no fit state for that, I'm just glad that the readers are having as much fun as I am. Tomorrow is going to be focused mainly on the NIB and the history of the American intelligence service (singular, no duplications of functions here). Hoover's movers are going to be busy.
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Just found an excellent quote that could completely sum up A Bolt From the Blue: "[T]he inventiveness of Americans should not be restricted in the development of new weapons." It was a quote from Alfred Thayer Mahan when he (representing the US) was the sole dissenting vote against the proposed chemical weapon ban during the 1899 Hague Convention. Truth is stranger than fiction but in any case any version of that ban proposed TTL would have more than one dissenter, though in the wake of the Congo Crisis chemical warfare will finally be reigned in. I also stumbled upon an excellent POD to further accelerate artillery in the 19th century so that'll get a mention in the chemical weapon chapter, since it turns out the same officer prevented the mass adoption of
- chemical weapons
- lever-action rifles and
- Gatling guns
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Gotta help my sister move but I'll still try to have the next part up tonight
Lawyers Guns and Money: The Black Chamber
-Though politically close to the National Union Party, William John Burns, the "American Sherlock Holmes", had made a name for himself as a tenacious and evenhanded investigator during the post-Great Upheaval period and was a natural choice to serve as the first Chief of the National Investigation Bureau.
Grassroots energy for national prohibition had been growing for decades by the time William Jennings Bryan assumed the presidency and after the passage of the so called "Suffragette Amendment" it became a question of political inevitability, instituted with the passage of the 17th Amendment* in early 1908. But it was one thing to moralize from the pulpit and the lectern but quite another to actually enforce such an order. And what was a law without teeth, after all? The answer would come in the form of the National Investigation Bureau, formed that same year with buy-in from not only the reigning Populists and National Unionists but also some factions of the slowly growing Independence Party.
The new agency would be formed through the reorganization of the NBCI, with the added infusion of veteran members of the Marshals Service and the Secret Service** to create an all-purpose agency not only to enforce the Prohibition Amendment but also to continue the preexisting suppression of Rational Anarchists, criminal and dissident elements and "unassimilable" minorities (including Germans). All that being said, Prohibition turned into just as much of a boondoggle as the one we had to deal with, with the added strain of the fact that the First Clash of Civilizations happened smack-dab in the middle of it, raising even more questions about the utility of enforcing a moral issue during a period of national emergency, rising crime rates and surging radical and ethnic unrest.
The repeal of Prohibition after the war would free up the NIB to focus on these "more pressing concerns", and 1924 would see a massive sea change in the organization with the appointment of J. Edgar Hoover as Chief of the Bureau and the absorbing of the Cipher Bureau, more commonly known as the Black Chamber. Originally a joint project between the State Department and the Army after the war focused on cryptanalysis and intelligence-gathering, disagreements over funding would cast the Chamber adrift before its temporary incorporation into the NIB, though its more illicit activities*** would continue uninterrupted under its new management.
-Hoover would go on to be the longest-serving Chief in the Bureau's history, and although his abuses of power would result in a bevy of restrictions on the agency (and on the position of Chief especially) following his death in 1972, he had an undeniably lasting impact on the state of American foreign intelligence and domestic security that persists in the agency to this day.
One of Hoover's major contributions to the work of the Black Chamber would be an aggressive policy of securing foreign nationals with cryptanalitic experience as covert operatives, the most famous of which would be Alan Turing, who had been turned into an asset as early as 1935 during a visit to Princeton University and would defect in the aftermath of the Second Clash of Civilizations after providing intimate details of the state of the Entente cryptanalysis program for the entirety of the conflict and the theoretical computer projects formed in the early years of the FBU. Hoover would also be an early and avid adopter of the British closed-circuit television system, itself a revolution in the physical application of the panopticon philosophy in that country and later in the FBU and its empire and client states more broadly. The Second Clash of Civilizations would see two other broad changes, including the expansion of the Bureau into not only a domestic but also a foreign intelligence service with the creation of the subordinate Office of Strategic Services and the almost symbiotic working relationship between the NIB and the American Hussar Corps, all the better to skirt posse comitatus laws and military restrictions when administering federal justice within and outside the United States.
*The women's voting amendment (16th here/19th OTL) was the first of the so called Bryan Amendments, followed during his tenure by amendments to enforce Prohibition (17th/18th), authorize an income tax to replace the loss of liquor taxes (18th/16th), and popularly elect senators (19th/17th). The 20th amendment (21st OTL) would repeal Prohibition under President Winthrop but the rest stuck around, with different wording to the income tax amendment providing cover for the Independence Party's push for LVT.
**Treasury actually forbid the transfer of agents to the infant BOI OTL for fear of creating a secret police. Womp womp.
***OTL the Black Chamber was secretly harvesting the communications of allied embassies in the United States, one of the factors in its historical dissolution. Here that policy not only continues for quite awhile under Hoover but also contributes to the Entente-American Split when the program is revealed in the 1970s.
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Turing's defection is the result of the fact that several factors had dramatically transformed the attitude of the American government and a significant portion of the population toward homosexuality by the time Lovecraft got into office and the Second Clash of Civilizations began.
- The failure of Prohibition and the scandals of the later Harding administration demonstrated the folly (and hypocrisy, in the latter case) of intensive government moralizing and attempts at social engineering to the exclusion of practical kitchen table issues.
- AG James Morton's discretionary unwillingness to pursue such cases would eventually be justified under the Supreme Court's decisions enshrining bodily autonomy. The right to suicide and contraception were constitutional after all, so why not same-sex relations?
- Lovecraft himself began his term agnostic on the issue, though his friend Samuel Loveman would eventually persuade him to support decriminalization, with the later Supreme Court decision eventually leading to the outright repeal of those by then unenforced laws.
- Hoover pointed out that homosexuals serving in the government could only be a threat to national security if the government would penalize them for being outed. Without the social stigma the threat vanishes, with Turing's defection elegantly proving his point. Undoubtedly made for self-serving reasons but a positive step nonetheless.
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Ironically the fact that Lovecraft decriminalized homosexuality had a delaying effect on the formation of the modern distinct gay culture TTL. For example, one of the reasons that San Francisco became a hotbed for it OTL was the fact that gay men were drummed out of the Navy there and decided to stick around. By the time the counterculture really takes off during the Congo Crisis the next generation is more experimental and nonconformist and in the modern day they're one of the many vibrant and distinct subcultures in the American fabric.
I'm so glad I decided against putting these in separate threads, putting them all together keeps the conversation going, helps the project build and makes it far easier to check my work 😂
@The_Persian_Cat as you're reading through the timeline be sure to read the comments along with the updates, there's tons of setting details scattered throughout the thread that would have interrupted the flow if I'd tried to jam them into the updates proper
Got it! I'm still close to the beginning, so it's mostly pretty easy to follow so far. I love the God-Builders -- the Cult of Progress becoming an actual cult!
I gotta ask, out of my own interest: how much are you planning on putting the Middle East into the story? The collapse of the Ottoman Empire saw many competing mysticisms -- secular and religious -- take hold. From the weird Kemalist occultism of folks like Ziya Gökalp, to the collapse of the Caliphate and the resurgence of Wahhabism, to Zionism and more conventional Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystical traditions -- it seems like there's a lot you could work with. Plus, there's the new oil interest. And the scholastic adventurism of folks like Lawrence of Arabia. And Canaanism -- a weird avant-garde fascist movement in Mandatory Palestine, which attempted to unite the Jews and Arabs. One way they wanted to do this was to abandon Abrahamic monotheism, and restore the pagan cults of Baal, Ishtar, etc. You've got plenty to work with, is what I'm saying, and I'd love to see the Middle East featured
The Middle East is actually pretty sleepy TTL, I won't spoil it 😂 I decided it would be an interesting change of pace to have it stay peaceful in a TL for once, though if I can find a place for it the region might get fleshed out a bit more in part V or VI. If you haven't read it check out Separated at Birth, literally every major war after like the 1850s starts over a piece of furniture in Jerusalem.Got it! I'm still close to the beginning, so it's mostly pretty easy to follow so far. I love the God-Builders -- the Cult of Progress becoming an actual cult!
I gotta ask, out of my own interest: how much are you planning on putting the Middle East into the story? The collapse of the Ottoman Empire saw many competing mysticisms -- secular and religious -- take hold. From the weird Kemalist occultism of folks like Ziya Gökalp, to the collapse of the Caliphate and the resurgence of Wahhabism, to Zionism and more conventional Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystical traditions -- it seems like there's a lot you could work with. Plus, there's the new oil interest. And the scholastic adventurism of folks like Lawrence of Arabia. And Canaanism -- a weird avant-garde fascist movement in Mandatory Palestine, which attempted to unite the Jews and Arabs. One way they wanted to do this was to abandon Abrahamic monotheism, and restore the pagan cults of Baal, Ishtar, etc. You've got plenty to work with, is what I'm saying, and I'd love to see the Middle East featured
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Accidentally Like a Martyr: The Demon Core
How best to measure the worth of a president, by the things they accomplish while in office or by the second- and third-order consequences that follow in the wake? By the first metric President Lovecraft would score quite well, with a Depression ended and a Clash of Civilizations won under his banner. By the second measure, however, his legacy would far outstrip his firsthand accomplishments, a shadow out of time stretching forward into the present. The National Health Service, the public works, the professionalization and integration of the civil service and the education system, all these things have contributed to creating an America strong and smart and free, striding the Earth like a colossus. But perhaps most of all it was his creation of HASTUR, the last major achievement before his resignation, that has gone on to resonate through every corridor of American life. In one hand an olive branch, in the other a burning sword.
At the instant of its inception the Reserve absorbed, in their entirety:
While the different Science Cities all had their quirks and particular specialities, City Zero distinguished itself for its focus on high energy physics, much of it an outgrowth from the life and work of Nikola Tesla. Tesla would die in 1943 but, as previously referenced, the fact that he had had a serious patron for the last decade of his life had made all the difference in arresting his mental decline, with City Zero left with a vast collection of ideas, prototypes and files dictated by the man himself during that time. Some ideas were impractical, some were unworkable, some were even impossible, but all were investigated as a possible edge against the Comintern as the Strange Aeon came into full force.
Although Tesla's dream of a World Wireless System would prove to fall within the third category, it was sustained work in this area through the 1960s that would eventually perfect so-called "near-field" wireless power transfer, with most modern home and work surfaces actually capable of charging or outright powering appliances and devices without the need for external wires. Likewise, while his so-called "earthquake machine" would prove a failure, his dreams of geothermal power generated with his bladeless turbine were closer to the mark, providing a valuable avenue toward energy independence with the eventual push to eliminate fossil fuel use later in the century in the face of climate change. And then we have the weapons.
Aside from the constant work of improving and expanding the nation's nuclear capabilities** City Zero would devote considerable time and energy to the investigation of the Teleforce proposal and its derivatives. There is a common misunderstanding (both in and out of universe) that the Teleforce system was a type of death ray. Rather, Teleforce actually functioned as a very early proposal for a mass driver weapon, accelerating metal slugs to high speeds using electromagnetic force, and Teleforce persists as a class of weapon encompassing what we would call railguns and coilguns today, forming an integral tool of the modern armed forces.
Another area of interest was the so called electrolaser, a device that could deliver a massive electrical charge over a distance by using a laser to generate a conductive plasma channel between the operator and the target, lightning in a bottle that would ironically prove its value through a horrible tragedy. At the center of City Zero was the original Carcosa Projects complex, unofficially known as the Demon Core among the staff given Tesla's now famous remark at the first successful nuclear test. While fine tuning an electrolaser testing array in the complex on September 15, 1945, researcher Harry Daghlian would be gruesomely killed when the device activated prematurely while he was in the line of fire, burning him from the inside out and killing him instantly.
-He was only 24. The complex would be renamed in his honor but there were no plans to stop his project.
*Insidiously some that dabble in pure theory would appear functionally identical to generic small towns, even using actual names to disguise themselves, though of course there are never homes on the market and visitors are obviously disincentivized from sticking around.
**Neutron bombs are an important arrow in the quiver.
-Leslie Groves would serve as first Chief of the Reserve following the incorporation of the Carcosa Projects into the new agency. Though he would retire from the Army to ensure civilian control of the agency given unease in some quarters regarding its paramilitary components he would be retroactively promoted to Lieutenant General, backdated to the Sultan nuclear test.
HASTUR was created in 1943, a collection of factions and competing interests excised from their home agencies and service branches and brought together under a central authority, in some cases the better to ensure civilian control in the face of a rapidly expanding military-industrial complex. From its inception the Reserve was divided into well-defined silos, each with its own purview but all sharing data and personnel as required. Unlike DARPA of our own world HASTUR would retain the patents on any work-product developed, even in collaboration with educational institutions or private firms, with the agency more than financing itself with royalties and the remainder pouring into the government's coffers, year after year, all the better to prevent Lovecraft's political enemies from attempting to dismantle it.
At the instant of its inception the Reserve absorbed, in their entirety:
- The Office of Naval Intelligence
- The Army Signal Corps
- The Cipher Bureau
- The Carcosa Projects
- The Army Chemical Weapon Corps
- The Fortean Society
While the different Science Cities all had their quirks and particular specialities, City Zero distinguished itself for its focus on high energy physics, much of it an outgrowth from the life and work of Nikola Tesla. Tesla would die in 1943 but, as previously referenced, the fact that he had had a serious patron for the last decade of his life had made all the difference in arresting his mental decline, with City Zero left with a vast collection of ideas, prototypes and files dictated by the man himself during that time. Some ideas were impractical, some were unworkable, some were even impossible, but all were investigated as a possible edge against the Comintern as the Strange Aeon came into full force.
Although Tesla's dream of a World Wireless System would prove to fall within the third category, it was sustained work in this area through the 1960s that would eventually perfect so-called "near-field" wireless power transfer, with most modern home and work surfaces actually capable of charging or outright powering appliances and devices without the need for external wires. Likewise, while his so-called "earthquake machine" would prove a failure, his dreams of geothermal power generated with his bladeless turbine were closer to the mark, providing a valuable avenue toward energy independence with the eventual push to eliminate fossil fuel use later in the century in the face of climate change. And then we have the weapons.
Aside from the constant work of improving and expanding the nation's nuclear capabilities** City Zero would devote considerable time and energy to the investigation of the Teleforce proposal and its derivatives. There is a common misunderstanding (both in and out of universe) that the Teleforce system was a type of death ray. Rather, Teleforce actually functioned as a very early proposal for a mass driver weapon, accelerating metal slugs to high speeds using electromagnetic force, and Teleforce persists as a class of weapon encompassing what we would call railguns and coilguns today, forming an integral tool of the modern armed forces.
Another area of interest was the so called electrolaser, a device that could deliver a massive electrical charge over a distance by using a laser to generate a conductive plasma channel between the operator and the target, lightning in a bottle that would ironically prove its value through a horrible tragedy. At the center of City Zero was the original Carcosa Projects complex, unofficially known as the Demon Core among the staff given Tesla's now famous remark at the first successful nuclear test. While fine tuning an electrolaser testing array in the complex on September 15, 1945, researcher Harry Daghlian would be gruesomely killed when the device activated prematurely while he was in the line of fire, burning him from the inside out and killing him instantly.
-He was only 24. The complex would be renamed in his honor but there were no plans to stop his project.
**Neutron bombs are an important arrow in the quiver.
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Thanks! I'll go into how power-sharing between the armed forces and the necessary portions of the Reserve in the field actually works in practice when I get to the Congo Crisis. Meanwhile the centralization of the entire nation's civilian and military SIGINT within one agency was seen as a way to not only put an extra control mechanism in place against adventurism in the military and intelligence service but also to avoid missing anything through interagency or interservice squabbling. That's part of the reason all the different intelligence agencies were centralized into DHS in real life and I figure it's good policy even though that's a terrible example. It helps that Congress and HASTUR both have a vested interest in transparency (behind closed doors, of course) about what its working on considering its profits fall under the purview of "power of the purse" and have to be calculated into the federal budget.
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