That's the beauty of a two-round system for ya, as long as one of the finalists isn't viscerally repellent.
Right?
The King in Yellow and Other Stories: A President Lovecraft Weird Fiction Timeline in Several Acts
- Thread starter Born in the USSA
- Start date
"Current" politics? Let's be happy we dodged "Copyright" politics
Yes "Born" I got the reference
Randy
I credited the quote I lifted from Metal Gear so I should be fine 😂"Current" politics? Let's be happy we dodged "Copyright" politics
Yes "Born" I got the reference
Randy
"Current" politics? Let's be happy we dodged "Copyright" politics
Yes "Born" I got the reference
Randy
I'm talking the candidate not the quote
If Scudder had been elected in 2016 we'd be looking at a "Revolt in 2100" (And a possible lawsuit
) Still be a fun ride ...Randy
like tears in rain...
Washington was undoubtedly blessed in many ways, at least one of which he could never have fathomed while he was alive. While the modern era had seen two more independent presidents, no independent since the formation of political parties in America could be said to have governed with a majority, forced to cobble together support issue by issue, case by case, in an ironic fulfillment of what the Framers had actually intended for their grand document. The contours of Rational Anarchism had seen most of that support drawn from the Independence Party, aside from the Populist-supported nonintervention that Thompson had espoused in the waning days of the Strange Aeon.
Graeber's predicament was far stranger, with the majority of his voters merely changing their choice at the top of the ticket. This was the natural result of two problematic Independence candidates, a Populist far outside the mainstream, and a growing base of support for his own vice president. While a lesser man may have been threatened by this, Graeber was not one of those. He fully intended to make use of "his" majority, even if it had only come to him by the transitive property. The first and greatest item on his agenda was the Twenty-Fourth Amendment. The course of the twenty-first century had made clear to many that their rights were on the ballot, and from the new crop of independents to the wavers of the Yellow Sign to those few Sojourners ready to put the issue to rest once and for all, the enshrinement of the hard-won rights of the twentieth was what their voters had demanded of them.
Section 1. The United States, and any component thereof, shall make no law infringing on the individual freedom of association in matters of family structure or sexual or romantic selection between consenting adults.
Section 2. There exists a universal right to personal privacy absent a compelling public interest as certified in a court of law, and an equal right to bodily autonomy except in cases of a legitimate public health emergency.
Section 3. Congress shall have the power to enforce this amendment through the passage of relevant legislation.
-The Twenty-Fourth Amendment
Despite opposition from some of the more socially conservative Southern states that had been recalcitrant bastions of Populism for over a century, change was in the air, and supporters began the arduous task of passing the amendment. Passage would ultimately be secured thanks to two organized and motivated groups. The first was the Legion, made up of dedicated Rational Anarchists that had cohered into an organized and effective pressure group in the wake of Graeber's original announcement of his then-longshot bid for the Executive. The second was the reborn Church of Starry Wisdom. While it had never truly gone away, the passage of the second Klan act had seen it go into a long dormancy, reduced from a stunningly effective paramilitary to "merely" an influential fraternal and sororal organization, one joined less out of a desire for self defense and pitched street brawls than for the allure of strange rituals and the opportunity to network.
While the Legion could be counted on where it mattered, the very nature of a Union of Egoists left their organizing principle too loose and horizontal to accomplish the task alone. Roused by a Lovecraft on the ballot, the Star Spawn were a different story. Rumors spread that the Moon Beasts of the nation had even approached her to fill the post of Nameless Priest that had remained conspicuously vacant* since the death of her illustrious forebear. The ultimate passage of the amendment would prove Graeber's greatest success, though he committed his four years to a broad electoral reform agenda that was only slightly slowed by a modest Populist rally during the midterms. Seeking to create an America more responsive to the people before the rapidly approaching census and redistricting, the coalition assembled behind the president was able to force through such reforms as a limit to the federal campaign season along with universal nonpartisan redistricting and ranked choice voting**, though a compromise to add states or further enfranchise the nation's various territories and dependencies unfortunately fell through.
Graeber's successes and those of the Comintern's Nihilists were not being ignored on the international stage. The Empire of Japan had grown increasingly alarmed at events and had redoubled its efforts to crush the last embers of the Heiminshugi movement. Ironically, this would backfire spectacularly, with those remnants that had been driven underground by the brutality of the Special Unit forged by the pressure into a new and more active form inspired by the gains being made in distant Moresnet*** and Washington. Led by a figure or figures calling themselves Uzumaki, the Heiminshugi had grand plans to liberate the peoples of the Empire, and all they needed was the proper opportunity to cast of the Liberal's yoke. The uzumaki, translated to "spiral" or "whirlpool" had grown into the unique symbol of the Japanese Rational Anarchists, since it is in the nature of both to draw the observer toward the center, a perfect metaphor for drawing focus toward the individual that was the only basis of legitimate authority in the doctrine.
-President Lovecraft on election night.
2020 was by comparison a quiet election year, with Lovecraft achieving the Independence nomination practically by acclamation and trouncing Senator Shows, put forward as the last dying gasp of the Dominionist Caucus. Shows' loss had the positive aftereffect of pushing the Populists to finally abandon winner-take-all primaries, following in the wake of the Independence machines that had done so several years prior. Campaigning on a bold promise to help America transform itself to meet the brave new world of the twenty-first century and on a robust effort to be the president of all Americans, Lovecraft used her victory speech to expound on a broad expansion of the nation's infrastructure and the outline of what would become the "Grand Bargain" on the issue of territorial representation to a sea of supporters waving the Yellow Sign and wearing tongue-in-cheek "Make America Sane Again" hats. While the first year of her term would finally see the admission of Alaska and Puerto Rico as states, the rest of the territories would require a different tack. Although she had become president on a promise of peace and transformation, the Third Clash would see her as every bit the wartime president her ancestor had been.
Section 1. Those Federal Districts, as created by Congress, shall not be considered States, but shall be analogous to the same, entitled to popularly elected self-government in accordance with a republican constitution and to representation in the Congress, with a number of Representatives proportional to their permanent population and to one Senator each.
Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this amendment through the passage of relevant legislation.
-The Twenty-Fifth Amendment. The District of Columbia automatically qualified, while an Act of Congress reforged the three INSS dependencies into the singular District of Ophir and the remaining Pacific territories into the District of Micronesia.
-The Stars and Stripes c. 2022.
Image credit- u/--Droid--, imagine it's more symmetrical
*Lovecraft the Elder's position as Nameless Priest was only conjecture, of course, since those in the know remained conspicuously silent on the matter, though the fact it was never filled after his death speaks volumes.
**At the federal level where possible, at the state level through a large base of incredibly animated activists and allied partisans.
***Neutral Moresnet is the seat of the capital of the Comintern as a whole, serving as a metanym for the body more broadly.
Graeber's predicament was far stranger, with the majority of his voters merely changing their choice at the top of the ticket. This was the natural result of two problematic Independence candidates, a Populist far outside the mainstream, and a growing base of support for his own vice president. While a lesser man may have been threatened by this, Graeber was not one of those. He fully intended to make use of "his" majority, even if it had only come to him by the transitive property. The first and greatest item on his agenda was the Twenty-Fourth Amendment. The course of the twenty-first century had made clear to many that their rights were on the ballot, and from the new crop of independents to the wavers of the Yellow Sign to those few Sojourners ready to put the issue to rest once and for all, the enshrinement of the hard-won rights of the twentieth was what their voters had demanded of them.
Section 1. The United States, and any component thereof, shall make no law infringing on the individual freedom of association in matters of family structure or sexual or romantic selection between consenting adults.
Section 2. There exists a universal right to personal privacy absent a compelling public interest as certified in a court of law, and an equal right to bodily autonomy except in cases of a legitimate public health emergency.
Section 3. Congress shall have the power to enforce this amendment through the passage of relevant legislation.
-The Twenty-Fourth Amendment
Despite opposition from some of the more socially conservative Southern states that had been recalcitrant bastions of Populism for over a century, change was in the air, and supporters began the arduous task of passing the amendment. Passage would ultimately be secured thanks to two organized and motivated groups. The first was the Legion, made up of dedicated Rational Anarchists that had cohered into an organized and effective pressure group in the wake of Graeber's original announcement of his then-longshot bid for the Executive. The second was the reborn Church of Starry Wisdom. While it had never truly gone away, the passage of the second Klan act had seen it go into a long dormancy, reduced from a stunningly effective paramilitary to "merely" an influential fraternal and sororal organization, one joined less out of a desire for self defense and pitched street brawls than for the allure of strange rituals and the opportunity to network.
While the Legion could be counted on where it mattered, the very nature of a Union of Egoists left their organizing principle too loose and horizontal to accomplish the task alone. Roused by a Lovecraft on the ballot, the Star Spawn were a different story. Rumors spread that the Moon Beasts of the nation had even approached her to fill the post of Nameless Priest that had remained conspicuously vacant* since the death of her illustrious forebear. The ultimate passage of the amendment would prove Graeber's greatest success, though he committed his four years to a broad electoral reform agenda that was only slightly slowed by a modest Populist rally during the midterms. Seeking to create an America more responsive to the people before the rapidly approaching census and redistricting, the coalition assembled behind the president was able to force through such reforms as a limit to the federal campaign season along with universal nonpartisan redistricting and ranked choice voting**, though a compromise to add states or further enfranchise the nation's various territories and dependencies unfortunately fell through.
Graeber's successes and those of the Comintern's Nihilists were not being ignored on the international stage. The Empire of Japan had grown increasingly alarmed at events and had redoubled its efforts to crush the last embers of the Heiminshugi movement. Ironically, this would backfire spectacularly, with those remnants that had been driven underground by the brutality of the Special Unit forged by the pressure into a new and more active form inspired by the gains being made in distant Moresnet*** and Washington. Led by a figure or figures calling themselves Uzumaki, the Heiminshugi had grand plans to liberate the peoples of the Empire, and all they needed was the proper opportunity to cast of the Liberal's yoke. The uzumaki, translated to "spiral" or "whirlpool" had grown into the unique symbol of the Japanese Rational Anarchists, since it is in the nature of both to draw the observer toward the center, a perfect metaphor for drawing focus toward the individual that was the only basis of legitimate authority in the doctrine.
-President Lovecraft on election night.
2020 was by comparison a quiet election year, with Lovecraft achieving the Independence nomination practically by acclamation and trouncing Senator Shows, put forward as the last dying gasp of the Dominionist Caucus. Shows' loss had the positive aftereffect of pushing the Populists to finally abandon winner-take-all primaries, following in the wake of the Independence machines that had done so several years prior. Campaigning on a bold promise to help America transform itself to meet the brave new world of the twenty-first century and on a robust effort to be the president of all Americans, Lovecraft used her victory speech to expound on a broad expansion of the nation's infrastructure and the outline of what would become the "Grand Bargain" on the issue of territorial representation to a sea of supporters waving the Yellow Sign and wearing tongue-in-cheek "Make America Sane Again" hats. While the first year of her term would finally see the admission of Alaska and Puerto Rico as states, the rest of the territories would require a different tack. Although she had become president on a promise of peace and transformation, the Third Clash would see her as every bit the wartime president her ancestor had been.
Section 1. Those Federal Districts, as created by Congress, shall not be considered States, but shall be analogous to the same, entitled to popularly elected self-government in accordance with a republican constitution and to representation in the Congress, with a number of Representatives proportional to their permanent population and to one Senator each.
Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this amendment through the passage of relevant legislation.
-The Twenty-Fifth Amendment. The District of Columbia automatically qualified, while an Act of Congress reforged the three INSS dependencies into the singular District of Ophir and the remaining Pacific territories into the District of Micronesia.
-The Stars and Stripes c. 2022.
Image credit- u/--Droid--, imagine it's more symmetrical
*Lovecraft the Elder's position as Nameless Priest was only conjecture, of course, since those in the know remained conspicuously silent on the matter, though the fact it was never filled after his death speaks volumes.
**At the federal level where possible, at the state level through a large base of incredibly animated activists and allied partisans.
***Neutral Moresnet is the seat of the capital of the Comintern as a whole, serving as a metanym for the body more broadly.
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A constitutional amendment was seen as the compromise between status-quo nothing and full statehood. Although the combination of the Voting Rights Amendment and the reform to the presidential elections gave citizens of the territories de-facto "one person, one vote" for president they've been really agitating for home rule and representation.
This timeline's electoral laws continue to be a dream come true. And of course all the other civil rights now enshrined. Who would've guessed a timeline where Lovecraft became president would be so much more progressive that OTL? 😂
And of course we now have the newest Lovecraft President. Who is the first to neither be white nor a man. I really do like that. A one two punch against convention. And just in time for the Third Clash. If she ends up being half as influential as her ancestor the Lovecrafts really will be American Royalty.
Considering the general nature of this timeline I'm guessing Uzumaki is Junji Into. Are there subversive political cartoons in Junji Ito's signature nightmarish style? Because if so that is incredible.
Also, what exactly is the difference between a state and a territory now? Because from what is said here it seems like the only difference is the names.
Finally, great flag. I love a well made flag. And this one does a fantastic job of being distinctly different but still similar enough to be at least somewhat believable as an alternate flag of the US. Although I have to ask, what made them move from the traditional look just with more stars to this more major redesign?
And of course we now have the newest Lovecraft President. Who is the first to neither be white nor a man. I really do like that. A one two punch against convention. And just in time for the Third Clash. If she ends up being half as influential as her ancestor the Lovecrafts really will be American Royalty.
Considering the general nature of this timeline I'm guessing Uzumaki is Junji Into. Are there subversive political cartoons in Junji Ito's signature nightmarish style? Because if so that is incredible.
Also, what exactly is the difference between a state and a territory now? Because from what is said here it seems like the only difference is the names.
Finally, great flag. I love a well made flag. And this one does a fantastic job of being distinctly different but still similar enough to be at least somewhat believable as an alternate flag of the US. Although I have to ask, what made them move from the traditional look just with more stars to this more major redesign?
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Ya I have to ask too even though I also like the flag, because a 'triangle' is a bit of an odd duck to use as is the 'separation' of the 'current' nation (blue background and stars area) from the "original nation" (red and white stripes) by an obvious white border around the blue area. I mean it could make a 'statement' about a "new" United States but it's a bit uncomfortable in a heraldic sense plus the triangle looks to be aggressively "penetrating" the old nation which looks to flow and fall away around it. (The border also acts as a 14th "stripe" and one that, again, separates the two fields in a way that is 'unnatural' for the US flag because it's "open" which would seem to indicate as I noted an aggressive "replacement' of the old US with the new US)
Randy
Also, in case it's not something you have planned to address in a future update, how is Kumari Kandam doing? Will we see what Objectivism has wrought when allowed to run a country?
Little shout-out to the great, yet sadly unfinished, The Fountainhead Filibuster: Tales from Objectivist Katanga.
Little shout-out to the great, yet sadly unfinished, The Fountainhead Filibuster: Tales from Objectivist Katanga.
The funny thing is that I included James Morton as Lovecraft's AG as a one-off joke and was able to backfill an entire transformative movement of individualist anarchism and libertarian socialism 😂
They'll be very well regarded, that's for sure!
It's a collective identity but he does use it for incredibly disturbing political cartoons so it checks out.
The 25th amendment didn't blur the line between states and territories, only between states and federal districts. The Virgin Islands remain a territory and they can vote for president, though the only representation they have is a nonvoting token one in Congress. For the rest of the territories to qualify they had to be consolidated and reorganized by Congress and reclassified as federal districts.
I didn't make it, hence the asymmetrical arrangement of the stars, but it was the nicest 55 star flag I found that suited my sensibilities. Aside from the aesthetic choice of creating a flag that was more symmetrical when hung vertically (this is a US that loves victory parades don'cha know— it helps they've never lost a war 😅) the triangle represents a sort of vector moving forward into the new century while the new white stripe represents the Vermont Republic, since its peaceful (hence the color) acquisition was the first step in a United States spanning a continent and reaching all the way to a sea border in Asia. That meaning is best seen vertically, since it goes from an arrow to a field of stars blossoming out of the original 13 colonies. As to the heraldic implications, although the UK flag is the only one IRL officially designed based on those principles the rule of tincture only applies within a demarcated section of a design in any case and the field of stars/14th stripe are considered spatially distinct from the original 13.
We'll definitely get to see the aftermath, it won't be pretty.
Loved that one!
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I'm willing to accept that
The problem is that having a flag that "looks right" in one position always leads to problems when it's NOT used in that position. (As an example hanging it vertically now makes it look like the "nation" is taking a nose dive And then when worn as a 'patch' on a uniform it looks like it's going backwards ) Again I like it anyway.Randy
My bad. I meant federal districts. So is there a difference? Or are they basically states but aren't called that to appease those who didn't want them to be? Like before marriage equality how some people suggested letting gay people get married but call it civil unions as a compromise which pleased no one?
I know that civil unions aren't the same as marriages, but I think I remember at least a couple of people suggesting changing civil unions so they were marriages in all but name as a compromise, and as I said no one was really pleased with it.
That's taken care of by the flag having two meanings depending on how it's hung 😂 it also has the bonus of being really difficult for reactionaries to show the Union is in distress, since it's hard to tell from a distance it's being hung upside down, so they mostly fly the old one like in the Watchmen series.I'm willing to accept that
Randy
Pretty much. If they were states they'd get two senators by default so a workaround was needed. There were also a handful offended by the US capitol becoming a proper state so it's basically a fig leaf for those people. As an aside DC never shed Alexandria so it retains its original beautiful square shape.
Should that not be either "Make America insane again" or even better, "Make America Sanity Check again!"
This, this is on par with any modern Lovecraft fiction, and reminds me of Ruthanna Emrys' "The Innsmouth Legacy" Series, which I find rather good a modernized version of the Mythos. Keep up the good work, I'm really enjoying this timeline!
That would've been hilarious but brevity is the soul of wit and I found the irony funny 😂 for the sake of further fun "take/taking a sanity check" has all the makings of a good bit of modern American slang in the wake of the 2016 election.Should that not be either "Make America insane again" or even better, "Make America Sanity Check again!"
I'm thrilled people are having fun! Unfortunately I've had a migraine that's been hounding me from every angle all day so I'll have to do the last update tomorrow so I can think clearly. In other news aside from my thrilling planned epilogue I've also got at least three one and done addendums to further flesh out the world!
- The Silver City- An exploration of a tabletop RPG that fills the niche for Call of Cthulhu/The Yellow King but is far more mainstream.
- The Brazen Bull- A dive on the history of the Third Bank of the United States and probably some stuff about the Virgin Islands.
- The Gray Ghost- The alternate history of the Confederacy, complete with a much better flag and weirdness with Albert Pike and Oliandar Bedford Hume!
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As an aside I really liked the Sixth Gun comic, check it out if you want to see Hume as a hellish Confederate lich as opposed to TTL's version, where he only amounts to Pike's Rasputin/Himmler.
I just realized that with that, I'm assuming completely unofficial and joking, slogan the acronym would be MASA. Considering Emily Lovecraft's race how much do you want to bet the nastier racist elements of American society who opposed her pronounced it "massa" as part of their attempts to discredit and disparage her. Regardless of it being unofficial or not.
I really hope the District of Ophir becomes a state someday as is. I think it would be hilarious to have a state whose territory is split up and surrounded by other different states. Is that likely? I'd guess not, but I'd like it all the same. Also, what was the reason they called it Ophir?
Sorry to hear about your migraine. Hope your doing better today. Also excellent addendums! Very nice worldbuilding details and I look forward to reading them once they come out. Especially the Silver City, alternate pop culture is always super interesting, and the Gray Ghost, the Civil War is such an interesting and important event for US history and I am super excited to see the Yellow King version of it.
In the darker corners of CyberSyn maybe, but the fall of the Workingmen's Party really put a stake through that sort of thing in the mainstream of the major parties.
That would be pretty fun 😂 Ophir was taken from a wealthy African port city in the Bible and was chosen (aside from the nature of the population) because all three of the dependencies had river and coastal access by definition and were able to build up pretty solid ports with federal money that helped them make money as regional transportation hubs. The District of New Afrika was seen as too divisive a choice anyway.
Thanks! I'm feeling a bit better so I'll definitely try to have it out tonight. By the time I get around to it I might rename The Silver City 🤔 Maybe something like The Prismatic Dynasty after @TwiliAlchemist's excellent wikibox concept? Basically since CoC builds on the Cthulhu Mythos and TYK combines Chamber's weird fiction with Clark Ashton Smith and a few odds and ends, it would be an attempt to combine the creations/innovations of Chambers/Machen/Hodgson/Pelley into a coherent mythos revolving around eldritch beings with color associations. The Gray Ghost will be interesting, since there's this misconceived conflation of the Confederacy/Nazi Germany (of which TL-191 is only the most obvious example) so I set out looking into changes that would make that case more organically. No final solution, of course, but there's room for all sorts of occult weirdness and an actual group I could turn into an SS analogue, creating all sorts of interesting interactions with the decentralized nature of the Confederacy.
Act I: The first act sets the stage for the Cerulean Queen Nitha, her affair with Neaqure, and the plotting of Sryphe and the Alchemist to overthrow the monarchy and establish a Dutch style republic in her kingdom. Sryphe begins to manipulate Neaqure and the Alchemist begins working to create a poison that will cause Queen Nitha to sleep forever.Are you aware of the Cerulean Sigil?
The Tragedie of the Cerulean Queen is a play that was written by an unknown author during the Jacobean Era. The play is set in 21st Century British America, mostly in the city of Jamestown. The play is divided into three acts that depict the downfall of Queen Nitha of the Kingdom of Lydesh during her visit to the comparatively backwater of Jamestown, Virginia, British America.
Act II: This begins with Neaqure agreeing to help Sryphe and the Alchemist to put Queen Nitha to sleep after they threaten to reveal everything to their father, a powerful Duke and opponent of the Queen. Act II ends with the perfection of the poison by the Alchemist and he gives it to Neaqure to poison the Queen.
Act III: Neaqure approaches the Queen during a feast that is occurring right before they are all to leave back for the Kingdom of Lydesh. With much hesitation and soliloquy, they poison their love. The poison doesn't set for another hour after Queen Nitha retires to her chambers and takes Neaqure with her. Right before it sets in, Neaqure comes clean to the Queen. Nitha laments that she wished that Neaqure would have just spoken to her, before she falls into her eternal slumber.
The play ends with Sryphe and the Alchemist celebrating their victory with bottles of wine. Sryphe claiming that the Queen is dead and Neaqure will be blamed, a victory for them all.Sryphe begins to choke and the Alchemist gloats about how there is only one reason to kill the Queen was to puppet her heir, a young prince. A republic would get in the way of his plans. The Alchemist then throws the choking Sryphe overboard.The two men exit the stage confident in their victory.
There is much superstition surrounding the play. Its unknown author, the early science fiction elements present in the play, but most importantly is how it fits with the other "Color Tragedies". Academically called the Prism Dynasty, the Tragedie of the Cerulean Queen is only one part of a much large theatrical cycle. It includes The King in Yellow, TheHangedKing's Tragedy,and theEmperor of Despair. All plays within the Prism Dyansty are fragmentary, with Cerulean Queen being the most complete out of all of them. The is also multiple legends about the plays causing actors, directors, and audience members suffer at-
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The rest of this article has been redacted by the Bureau of Extranatural Affairs. Further investigation into these matters will result in immediate action.
We will now be issuing you an amnesic. Please do not resist, resident of Appleburg, Kentucky.
Time to die.
"The basic purpose of Operation MORDRED is an enormous chemical attack on the enemies of the Empire, without advance warning of any kind."
The fundamental issue with a world war in the modern day is the thorny question of why the nukes don't end up flying. It's a valid question, one that can fatally wound the suspension of disbelief, a wound worlds that diverged from our own in the relatively recent past are particularly vulnerable to. Despite the implausible occurrence of real people, however, The King in Yellow is not one of those worlds, with over two centuries of wildly divergent social, political and economic movements altering the inertia of the mushroom cloud. As with chemical weapons, the use of nuclear weapons followed a completely alien doctrine to our own historical experiences. Although they had not been used in anger since the Second Clash, the first President Lovecraft's directives on their use had firmly established them as a tactical weapon rather than an apocalyptic one. Although there had been a fear of nuclear war in the Strange Aeon, the wide proliferation of bunkers and the allure of the glamor of the Great Race had cultivated a scenario where the average citizen had at least an inkling they might survive such an exchange, with all the biggest rockets pointed up and disarmament efforts eventually reducing the bulk of the stockpiles to so called c-beams, continental ballistic missiles aimed at targeted attacks.
-What profit a man if he should gain the world but lose his soul?
It's a stunning stroke of fate that the long-awaited adaptation of The Man in the High Castle was greenlit before the Clash was even on the horizon. Adapting Philip K. Dick's novel (and adding material from its sequel), MitHiC imagined an alternate world, where Lovecraft's death and an America under Longist isolationism had seen the early bastions of Fascism either fall into the orbit of the Comintern or return to the fold of the Franco-British world order. The Second Clash had seen the defeat of the Comintern under the combined might of Oswald Mosley's Franco-British Empire and the surging Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Set in 1962, a generation after the secession of New England and the creation of the treaty ports, the series followed a cast of characters across the former United States of America as they plotted to rebel against the Pelley regime or schemed to undermine any threats to his legitimacy, all with the specter of direct colonial occupation by the superpowers hanging overhead like a sword of Damocles.Although none too pleased with the depiction of his ancestor, Mosley bid his time, only willing to unleash MORDRED at the proper moment and he wouldn't have to wait long. The world of the early 2020s was a tinderbox, with the only question being where the first spark would catch. The Japanese crackdown on the Heiminshugi had drawn the Republic of China deeper into supporting them. The Indian Union was opining that perhaps intervention was needed to stop the flow of starving and dispossessed refugees pouring out of Kumari Kandam. Tensions between ASEAN and Oceania had never been higher, the result of lingering bad blood over the withholding of the Hendra vaccine. In the Middle East saber rattling between Persia and the Ottoman Empire threatened to spill over into war at any time. Portugal, South Africa and Rhodesia were well on the way to a second set of Bush Wars over Brazilian support for local Fascists. The Doomsday Clock edging toward midnight. Tick tock, tick tock.
The instigation of the Third Clash was anything but impulsive. Even the wildest-eyed zealots of the Empire knew that final victory was either outright impossible or fleeting dust in the cosmic wind. From the outset Mosley was convinced that the best possible outcome was to fortify the Alliance for Democracy in Western Europe and the entirety of Africa in preparation for further future wars against the alien throngs massing on the borders, and that would mean the painful but necessary sacrifice of those hinterlands of the Empire still precariously perched in North America. Plans were drawn up, infiltrators activated, and allies who saw things correctly brought into the fold. The Third Clash would begin in late February, 2022, with the outbreak of three simultaneous proxy wars. The first was a resumption of the Bush Wars in southern Africa. The second was the outgrowth of a skirmish between the Ottoman Empire and Persia in the Persian Gulf. The third, and riskiest of the three, was an escalation of Japanese repression of Heiminshugi partisans in Korea, and implicitly their Chinese backers.
Under a program called "Case: Green Knight", MERLIN sprung into action, censoring and editing Minitel traffic in real time and generating a narrative where the Alliance was the aggrieved party and where all outliers were dupes at best and traitors at worst, all the while GALAHAD implemented a series of secretly placed anti-satellite weapons to jam Pact and Comintern signals or destroy space-based infrastructure all together. And finally MORDRED and "Case: Black Knight", a global wave of suicide bombings aimed at critical personnel, carried out by fanatical Dagonites armed with what we would know as Novichok. Then came the invasions of the German Council Republic and the People's Republic of Hungary. Despite the initial shock of the deadly nerve agent and the resulting loss of telecommunications and no small number of government and military officials officers on the ground acquitted themselves well as the Pact and the Comintern were forces to rely on degraded communication hardlines dating back to the very outset of the Strange Aeon.
President Lovecraft had herself narrowly escaped an attempted assassination that nonetheless left the National Mall too toxic to live in without heavy decontamination, announcing from an undisclosed location her belief in the resolve of all free peoples and a need to pull together in the face of such barbarism. The Fascist military machine sprung into action in the New World, quickly cutting off and invading every outpost and ally of the Empire. It was, unfortunately, just as Mosley had planned. The territories involved did not know they were intended to be sacrificed as a mass of poisoned chalices. Of course not, they'd have never gone along with it. And so the citizens were met with horror as the second phase of Black Knight began. Infrastructure had been discretely laced with explosives in the years leading up to the Clash, the better to slow the Fascists as high level Imperial collaborators gassed invaders and citizens alike and set out to poison fisheries and other critical resources*. If the New World possessions were to be sacrificed, the thinking went, there would be nothing left for the Pact to draw on.
Faced with massive losses in men and materiel and compounded by the sheer scale of the humanitarian crisis that had come from Black Knight, the bastion of the Pact in the Western Hemisphere was critically delayed during a second wave of invasions that would see the invasion of Liberia and the Republic of the Congo along with a massive Oceanian barrage of chemical warheads aimed all throughout ASEAN. The mention of chemical weapons used against civilians in The Man in the High Castle had been seen at the time of the novel's release as a flight of fancy, one that had been grimly validated by the discovery of the black sites in the Congo less than a decade later. The concept had survived the transition to a TV series, making a final product more relevant to current realities than anyone involved in the series could have fathomed in their most perverse nightmares. Despite the strictures of the transition to war production ratings continued to climb, with Lovecraft herself calling on the production company to speed the creation of new episodes as a crucial bit of theater to inspire the populace and remind them why they were fighting. This would reach beyond the United States, beyond the Pact itself, with those areas under the Franko-Norman yoke adopting the magenta crescent moon of VALIS and the tarot motifs of the novels and series as secret signals and spontaneous organic acts of defiance.
Despite their obscene illusions there was simply no way for the Empire and her allies to actually win the war they'd started, with the initial shock of Green and Black Knight dissolved into righteous fury instead of acquiescence, mass mobilization by the United States*, the rest of the Pact, and the Comintern in a grand United Front, and a massive boost to those rebels still active in the Alliance. If integral parts of the Empire could essentially be gassed as a military exigency, what hope did any of them have for anything better. The Third Clash would end a year and a day after it had started, owed as much to a crushing series of invasions as to a massive outbreak of popular revolutions. The Prime Minister held out hope even unto the American invasion of the United Kingdom. And then there was fire in the sky. In only the fourth use of atomic weapons in warfare***, Versailles was no more, and with it the central bureaucracy that had prosecuted the war.
-The Celtic League (made up of Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany) was one of the first groups to revolt in the leadup to the inevitable American invasion, and would be granted recognition as one of the post-Imperial successor states, along with the Pact-aligned Britannic Union and the Comintern-aligned Commune of France.
As the Franko-Norman Empire collapsed in a tide of suppressed dissent and revolutionary violence the question came about how to handle the aftermath. For her conquest of Kumari Kandam and crucial military and humanitarian support of the Pact and the Comintern alike, the Indian Union had been invited to participate as a full partner. Although Lovecraft initially opposed the planned executions, the United States stood firm with the rest of the world on the issue of what to do with the Alliance:
- Though the integrity of the new Franco-British successor states would be respected, the Rhineland would be returned to Germany, Belgium would be recreated under Comintern authority, and Portugal and her colonies would become subject to the authority of the Estado Novo.
- There would be no more monarchies in the reformed Alliance, with new republics established under joint authority, the Minitel network pulled up by the roots, and the remains of the Alliance recentered around the Indian Union. Oceania would be occupied and forcibly disarmed by ASEAN, with the United States and the Estado Novo performing a similar role in southern Africa and China doing the same in Japan. Danubia in turn would fall under the mandate of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Second Atlantean Empire.
- The Providence Pact, the Comintern, and the newly Indian-led Alliance would establish the first truly global peacekeeping body between them, the grand dreams of the World State movement finally a reality.
The first was the former Empire of Japan, where a massive revolt by the Heiminshugi and other dissenters against the war succeeded with Chinese backing in toppling the government and forcing the abdication of the Emperor. The resulting Uzumaki of the East Sea, as it came to be called, would see Korea and Japan remain united under the world's first wholly Rational Anarchist system of government. Having learned the lessons of over a century of experimentation, the UES would adopt a labor voucher system modelled after the one in the Comintern, as well as a system of universal services supported by a Dividend inspired by the American system. Land ownership would be based on usufruct, and all forms of patents and tariffs were abolished outright. The formal military was disbanded in favor of militias loyal to local democracy and the newly privatized Commoners' Free Navy. Unwilling to put their faith in a strong central government, no matter what the bourgeois reformists and fellow travelers said, the UES would become the first nation to be governed by an AI, an experimental panopticon project begun in the last days of the regime and repurposed to catalogue and quantify the new labor systems while devolving almost all other authority to local communities acting in concert with one another. It was not a pure Union of Egoists, but it was as close as could be hoped for given the circumstances.
And now we come to the black spot on the map. The Dominion of Ireland had been a core area of Empire loyalists for nearly two hundred years, and unlike the rest of the Franko-Norman project had remained loyal until the end. With little evidence of direct Irish complicity in either Green or Black Knight, an unwillingness to purge or occupy the entire island, and a forceful case made on the behalf of the Empress that she had been essentially a figurehead with no direct say over anything, the Last Dominion would become a dumping ground for Alliance exiles and unreconstructed royalists. Although theoretically independent, the Kingdom of Ireland was functionally blacklisted, with no allowance for a military and extremely onerous trade and travel barriers put in place and maintained indefinitely by the might of the World State.
-Officially a pretender to the throne of Great Britain, France, and Portugal, Queen Napoleona is even more of a figurehead in the Last Dominion than she may (or may not) have been in the Empire. There is concern in the World State that her son may prove a problem given his provenance but many are content to let the matter lie while the rebuilding is underway.
*Novichok is incredibly difficult to break down in nature and tends to linger.
**And you thought the Independence Party had a majority under Graeber! The midterms would see a massive surge in participation that filled the Congress and the statehouses of the nation with Independents and Rational Anarchists, with even the most principled pacifists in the Populist party agreeing to abstain rather than vote against war measures.
***Emily is the second person (and the second Lovecraft!) to use atomic bombs offensively. It's a dubious honor to say the least.
Sorry for the delay, I had a bit of writer's block and had an incident at work I had to deal with. Hopefully people liked the ending!