The King in Yellow and Other Stories: A President Lovecraft Weird Fiction Timeline in Several Acts

[Born in the USSA]

YOOOOOOOOOOOO IS THAT A MOTHERFUCKING MONUMENT MYTHOS REFERENCE????!!!!!111

Just for that, I'm going to ask how James Dean is doing ITTL.

lol

Still an actor but there's no car crash 😂 He's the first actor to play Stardust the Super Wizard in a live action movie.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Needless to say I was quite surprised to see vacuum tubes are getting a second look IRL so I decided to run with it. The Fascist focus on rapid automation paired with a social safety net that actually provides a tremendous amount of material stability really helps prevent the sort of dislocation we had to suffer through. In the narrative present the government subsists on a combination of progressive personal and business taxes, LVT, Reserve royalties and now a large share of the profits of Maize Machines. Rather than pay out a dividend as in orthodox Georgism this gigantic pool of money is used to keep taxes low on most people and businesses while still paying the government's bills, though with the onset of the Age of Fear in the 80s a president I guarantee none of you suspect will make the push for a universal basic income to supplement the safety net even further given the accelerating pace of change.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Just got done watching Crimes of the Future! It's a lot to think about 🤔

 

[Born in the USSA]

Sorry again for the delay, I got roped into digging a hole for an egress window at my parents' place and it's slow going

 

[Born in the USSA]

-Patrice Lumumba, first president of the Republic of the Congo. ​

The different lessons taken by the superpowers in the wake of the Congo Crisis were a study in contrasts that would only accelerate the burgeoning Entente-American split that would fully blossom during the Thompson administration and the shift toward rapprochement between the Providence Pact and the Comintern that would begin in earnest under the Jackson* presidency that would follow. For his part Thompson pursued a peaceful foreign policy focused on continuing the rebuilding of the Congo and the phasing out of chemical weapons in the Providence Pact, facilitating several arms control agreements between Pact and Comintern member states to further that goal.

These policies were broadly popular with the war-weary public** over the protestations of hard liners in both parties opposed to anything that could limit American war capabilities or be seen to give a single inch to Marxist-Trigonism. Several attempts were made on his life and although none succeeded they no doubt played a role in his decision not to run for reelection, though he admitted in interviews that it was as much due to the difficult electoral math— his election had been a perfect storm unlikely to repeat itself. Following his term Thompson would retire to Amarillo, contenting himself with voluminous public editorials not unlike Lovecraft and (the first) Smith before him.

While the Providence Pact pursued peace on the world stage the Alliance for Democracy had taken the opposite lessons from their withdrawal from the Congo. The Franco-British Union had made South Africa and Rhodesia*** fully independent members of the AfD in the aftermath of the Crisis but still found itself dragged into a supporting role in the sectarian conflicts of the ensuing Bush Wars, which saw Comintern-backed rebels in the former Dominions and an attempt by the Estado Novo to support Fascists in the newly independent states of former Portuguese Africa. When Versailles demanded answers Thompson had argued that Brazil was pursuing unique cultural-historical prerogatives rooted in Lusotropicalism and that the actions of the Estado Novo neither represented the Pact as a whole nor set a precedent for any other member. It would prove to be the final straw, sundering the anti-Comintern axis that had persisted since the First Clash of Civilizations.

The Bush Wars provided the Franco-British with a pyrrhic victory of sorts. While the Alliance for Democracy had successfully prevented the states of southern Africa from falling to Communism or Fascism that status quo seemed balanced on a knife's edge and its unraveling would play a crucial part in the oncoming Age of Fear. The conflicts had also distracted the Alliance at a crucial moment, allowing the Second Great Revolt to gain unassailable momentum in India. The instability would also see the rise of the Rhodesian Renewal Front, a virulently racist regime even by the standards of the region, though they would at least have the decency to rebrand their Esoteric Fascist ideology "Vitalism" to avoid raising the ire of their imperial patron.

-Ian Smith, Prime Minister of Rhodesia, leader of the Rhodesian Renewal Front, avowed Vitalist. ​

While the Franco-British were hip-deep in blood fighting in the bush the legacy of the Congo in the United States was almost entirely cultural throughout the seventies, with several major films dramatizing the horrors of the war released during the decade. Often shot on location in the Congo with the support of the new government, the most famous and critically acclaimed would be Francis Ford Coppola's Heart of Darkness, loosely adapted from the novel of the same name and released in 1979. The film would take several liberties with Conrad's novel, shifting the action from the Free State ivory trade to the Congo Crisis and changing the names and roles of several characters given the geopolitics at play (and the demise since the novel of the Belgian state itself), though this would allow metacommentary by characters relating their situation directly to the novel itself.

-A reinterpretation of the Kurtz character, Van Owen as portrayed by David Robert Jones had the bearing of a "thin white duke", aristocratic, cruel and empty. Controversially Coppola's adaptation would retain the human sacrifice only implied by the novel as the ultimate symbol of the character's disdain for and detachment from his "subjects".​

The film would center on Roland Deschain, an American Hussar played by Harrison Ford, dispatched up the Congo River to assassinate a Franco-British holdout. The character of Kurtz was renamed Van Owen, with his new backstory making him a British-born commandant of a black site. After the withdrawal of Franco-British troops from the country he sets himself up as a brutal and cruel god, using his ragtag army and remaining stores of chemical weapons against Communist partisans and Pact forces with equal savagery. Played by noted character actor David Robert Jones, Van Owen would become one of the most famous film villains of the latter 20th century, with several memorable speeches and his infamous last line in the film ("The horror! The horror! Drop the bomb, exterminate the brutes!") After being shot in the neck in an ambush by Van Owen's forces that sees the last of his unit massacred Roland famously reaches the man himself despite a gaping neck wound, killing him and slowly dying himself as Van Owen's Montagnards seem to accept him as the new leader of the band.


*"Only Scoop could go to Petrograd", after all. I'll be diving deeper into this in Invisible Amendments.

**Polarizing it may have been but the Congo Crisis had been a victory for the United States, with the new Republic of the Congo proving a dependable US ally in the region and giving the Providence Pact its second foothold on the continent after Liberia.

***South Africa + Namibia and Southern + Northern Rhodesia, respectively.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Sorry that took me so long 😅 also unfortunately work wants me in a week early to get situated so I'll have to put off Illuminatus! though I'll start it as soon as I can! At the very least it gives me more time to flesh it out and figure out just how I want the family trees of the British and French royal families to grow, so hopefully it'll be a richer experience overall. TTL's version of Apocalypse Now takes cues from "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner", a song from the Warren Zevon album Excitable Boy that also provided this act with its chapter titles. Let me know if you all have any questions!

 

[Born in the USSA]

I also had an idea for a one and done epilogue post set late in the 21st century that should be pretty cool! It'll be called The Emerald Tablet but I won't spoil the actual context for that name 😂

 

[John Spangler]

The film would center on Roland Deschain, an American Hussar played by Harrison Ford, dispatched up the Congo River to assassinate a Franco-British holdout. The character of Kurtz was renamed Van Owen, with his new backstory making him a British-born commandant of a black site. After the withdrawal of Franco-British troops from the country he sets himself up as a brutal and cruel god, using his ragtag army and remaining stores of chemical weapons against Communist partisans and Pact forces with equal savagery. Played by noted character actor David Robert Jones, Van Owen would become one of the most famous film villains of the latter 20th century, with several memorable speeches and his infamous last line in the film ("The horror! The horror! Drop the bomb, exterminate the brutes!") After being shot in the neck in an ambush by Van Owen's forces that sees the last of his unit massacred Roland famously reaches the man himself despite a gaping neck wound, killing him and slowly dying himself as Van Owen's Montagnards seem to accept him as the new leader of the band.

I wonder if he found the tower, in the end.

 

[Born in the USSA]

I wonder if he found the tower, in the end.

A lot of the black sites were panopticons so I suppose he did. Stephen King still writes some horror but his output skews more heavily toward lit fic. He'll be Scoop Jackson's Secretary of Fine Arts.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Even though I likely won't be able to start the next act for a for a few weeks I'll be posting some aesthetics extras with images to give a better visual for things like architecture and transportation in the Strange Aeon. There's plenty of retrofuturism to wade through 😂 The Age of Fear is going to have its own weird developments but I want to set a baseline before we get to that point.

 

[Born in the USSA]

There was a snafu with my onboarding so I'll actually have another week or so before I leave and Illuminatus! is back on the menu I guess depending on whether HR can get it ironed out In the meantime I've made a trio of images that will become relevant later so I don't need to take the time while I'm working. I'll post them with no context so they're easier to insert when I get to the relevant updates but aside from the one obvious one I'll avoid spoiling any details.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Spoiler: A logo

Spoiler: A poster

-Base image credit included

Spoiler: A flag

 

[Born in the USSA]

By the 21st century the hamsa has become the generally accepted symbol for the global Fascist movement given the fact that the fasces proper is considered a singularly European symbol, though the name of the ideology remains unchanged in most languages. In the popular imagination the Hamsa is conflated with the Abhayamudra to create symbolic continuity between the eastern and western halves of the movement.

 

[Born in the USSA]

-In my experience the existence of the Illuminati is a highly overrated phenomenon.
​

Given the sheer amount of cultural baggage the Illuminati have been saddled with in the modern popular imagination it's difficult to truly conceive just how irrationally afraid of the group the powers-that-be were following its founding. I was pleasantly surprised while researching that there was a persistent wild-eyed conspiracy in Britain from the 1790s on that the group was the power behind the throne in both the French Revolution and the Napoleonic system that followed despite the obvious contradictions between those two political projects. There, as here, it was nothing but baseless conjecture but we see plenty of examples in the modern historical record of reactions to similar hysteria producing concrete changes on the world stage. And so we come to this, the divergence for the timeline and all that follows!

1. Polaris- The Covenant of Perfectibility ​
2. The White Ship- Lightning in the Air​
3. The Doom That Came to Sarnath- Company Man!​
4. The Cats of Ulthar- Plum Blossom Fists​
5. Celephaïs- Black Youth, Dark Ocean​
6. Ex Oblivione- The Union Forever​
7. Nyarlathotep- The Star of the East​
8. The Quest of Iranon- A Brave New World​

 

[Born in the USSA]

Until I hear otherwise I'm operating under the assumption I'll be able to finish this act before I move. Afterwards I'll content myself with aesthetics posts until I'm settled and I can move on to Invisible Amendments.

 

[Bbone91]

How many sub-timelines will be in this timeline, exactly?

 

[Born in the USSA]

How many sub-timelines will be in this timeline, exactly?

Six plus an epilogue. This one will bring the rest of the world up to the late seventies, Invisible Amendments will cover the life and times from the 1980s through the 2020s and The Emerald Tablet will be a single post script giving a peek at the late 21st century.

 

[Born in the USSA]

I had an edit I was considering to change the stars on the flag to six-pointed ones like those used in the Drakia flag, what do you all think?

https://imgur.com/5pLaAe5

 

[Born in the USSA]

-Sophie Blanchard, "the mother of aerial warfare", would pioneer a concept called "guerre d'éclair" focused on aerial bombardment.
​

Few things dent imperial pride faster than an aerial bombardment of the metropole. It was a lesson the British would learn well, though at great cost, one that would inform British planning for a century and give the Wars of the Conflagration their name. The state of war between Britain and France had continued essentially uninterrupted since the start of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1793, only coming to a temporary respite in 1802 with the Peace of Amiens. This state of affairs was always tenuous at best and by 1803 the two countries were at war again, this time as part of what has alternatively been called "the Great War", "the Napoleonic Wars", or "the War of the Third Coalition". Realizing (correctly) that Britain and her monarchy would always seek to foil his Continental ambitions Napoleon would embark on a grand strategy to invade the British Isles, an invasion backed by the sale of Louisiana to the United States, a purchase only made possible by a loan from a British bank in a fitting bit of irony.

-Napoleon inspecting the troops at Boulogne. OTL choppy water sunk a good deal of the invasion force during a test of the new ships, costing many lives and dooming the planned invasion. Marginally better weather allowed the French to revise their designs without the loss of life and materiel, serving as the timeline's POD.
​

For the planned invasion Napoleon had raised an army of 200,000 men and commissioned a flotilla of new ships under the command of Eustache Bruix* and a large number of war balloons designed by Sophie Blanchard, the first female air force head in world history. The war balloons were a far cry from the proper airships that would come to define aerial warfare through the century, with the long narrow baskets supported by primitive leaf springs** suspended from conventional hot air balloons. Though primitive by any standard the war balloons would prove their worth defending the encamped French forces from a British raid on Boulogne in 1804 with the aid of favorable winds. Earlier in the year than the historical raid of that name, the failure of the British attack left the French with a closing window of relatively calm waters and a gap in the British blockade and Napoleon was keen to seize both, launching his grand invasion in late July of that year.

Napoleon's plans had been obvious to the British since the naval test the year before, with equal amounts of panic and caricature circulating in the government and among the public for almost two years by the time the invasion reached the British coast. Under Prime Minister Addington an army of 50,000 had been raised and the south of England had been fortified, a policy his successor Pitt the Younger had continued. British planners suffered from two unforseen complications:

• The first was a serious underestimation of the effects of air power on their defenses, with the war balloons considered a fanciful novelty rather than a potentially grave threat.​
• The second was the routing of the Boulogne raid, which had opened up a brief gap in the British blockade and given the French the opportunity they needed.​

By any metric the invasion of the England was a failure. Though the French were able to land troops and the war balloons proved effective at going around the defensive Martello towers to strike directly into the interior of Southern England they were unable to hold the Channel, cutting the invasion force off from resupply and dooming it to erosion by attrition. Some particularly able units were able to evade capture to continue disrupting life behind the lines but the only real victory the French could claim was a psychological one, with the (relative) success of the actual landing and the firebombing by the war balloons sparking widespread mass panic throughout the country, even in areas too far afield to ever see a Frenchman or a balloon on the horizon.

The French were far more successful in Europe with the British temporarily sidelined with internal unrest, unable to again break the Coalition blockade but able to successfully shepherd the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine. This stage of the conflict would see Prussia wade into the fray, inaugurating the Fourth Coalition. The French would continue to make liberal use of guerre d'éclair throughout the continental campaign, though the First War of the Conflagration would only end in 1815 with the death of Napoleon I at the battle of Tannhausen on the border of the Confederation. Despite the loss of troops in the British venture the French were in a superior military position compared to their historical one, with the deaths of Louis XVIII and Charles X*** making the dreams of a Bourbon Restoration in France an impossibility.

With Napoleon II all of four years old France would undergo a shift away from the sheer power it had afforded to his father, instituting a modified proposal inspired by the Sieyès plan that would more or less transform the French Empire into a complicated constitutional monarchy. Under the new system the Emperor would gain the official position of Grand Elector and be advised by two Consuls, one for the interior and another for war. While he would enjoy broad appointing powers once he came of age he would be stripped of them for the duration of any military campaign, while the actual business of legislation would be left to a three chambered body. The Tribune had the sole power to debate and propose laws, the Legislature had the sole power to ratify those proposals, and the College of Guardians would sit above both as a combination artificial aristocracy/constitutional court charged with not only deciding on the legality of the laws but also absorbing any person they found threatened the new constitution, forcing them to give up all other powers in the process.

The French experiment notwithstanding the end of the First War of the Conflagration left very few actual winners. While the Confederation of the Rhine would survive, the Holy Roman Empire was forced to shamble on as a vehicle for the competing aims of the Prussians and Austrians (though the two competing Holy Roman hegemons did manage to get along long enough to erect the Tannhausen Gate as a monument to Napoleon's death so there's that). The French invasion of Russia hadn't progressed as deeply so that's something, I suppose. All told the British saw themselves as the biggest losers, not only did that Corsican's spawn still technically sit the French throne but they had suffered a humiliating attack, no matter how futile it may have been. There were plenty in the Navy and the halls of power that had wanted to see Paris burned to the ground. It's here where we see the impact of the Illuminati conspiracy theory. There was no shortage of powerful people who saw the workings of a secret society at the root of their humiliation. And what better way to counter a secret society than with one of your own?

-Source. Founded secretly in 1816, the Esoteric Order of Dagon would devote itself to British military and political supremacy, by whatever means necessary.


*Who survives his historical bout of tuberculosis.

**Refinement of this design would be accelerated by the subsequent aerial arms race, eventually refined and miniaturized enough to provide the Jersey Devil with his fantastic leaps.

***The former when his ship sank in the Channel and the latter as an indirect consequence of the panic during the invasion when his house burned down.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The Napoleonic constitutional monarchy is a huge slog, honestly, and it'll provoke quite a bit of resentment (for lots of different reasons) among factions of the general public and the House of Bonaparte both.