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

Should I create new threads for a series of related TLIAWs?

  • Yes, they're Schrodinger's canon and should be enjoyed separately

    Votes: 6 33.3%
  • No, they work best as one interconnected narrative and should be concentrated in the same thread

    Votes: 12 66.7%

  • Total voters
    18
  • Poll closed .
I just had a great idea out of the blue for Invisible Amendments! It was originally going to be an alternate take on the War on Terror focused on Rhodesia but now I think that doesn't go far enough :evilsmile:
 
Extra- Future flags III
Inspired by my idea I decided to make another pair of relevant and related flags! I love how weird this timeline has grown since I first came up with it!

FBU.png

-Flag of the Franco-British Union (1943-1999), combining the Cross of St. George and Cross of Lorraine to represent its two largest nations and the symbols of the French and British governments. Component parts retain their original governments, flags and territories, though there is freedom of movement between them.
FNE.png

-Flag of the Franko-Norman Empire (1999-20XX), legal successor to the FBU and self-proclaimed successor to several members of the Alliance for Democracy as declared by FBU Prime Minister and AFD Secretary-General Narendra Mosley*

*No relation to the similarly-named world leader.
 
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Special points to anyone who can guess where Mosley's maternal line comes from, since he comes by his Indo-Anglo-French heritage and deeply weird mystical sensibilities honestly. He popped into my head fully formed on a walk today and I knew I had to use him and in any case I had planned to include his maternal ancestor in Act II but couldn't quite make it fit.
 
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Inspired by my idea I decided to make another pair of relevant and related flags! I love how weird this timeline has grown since I first came up with it!

View attachment 737231
-Flag of the Franco-British Union (1943-1999), combining the Cross of St. George and Cross of Lorraine to represent its two largest nations and the symbols of the French and British governments. Component parts retain their original governments, flags and territories, though there is freedom of movement between them.
View attachment 737234
-Flag of the Franko-Norman Empire (1999-20XX), legal successor to the FBU and self-proclaimed successor to several members of the Alliance for Democracy as declared by FBU Prime Minister and AFD Secretary-General Narendra Mosley*

*No relation to the similarly-named world leader.
And here I thought the Union was the least interesting of the main blocs...
 
And here I thought the Union was the least interesting of the main blocs...
Originally they were going to be, but when I moved back the POD it really gave them room to breathe and their situation has been influenced by the steps I've needed to take to flesh out the US in the 19th century and the Fascist sphere more broadly the way I wanted to. They're still "small-c conservative" as I originally described them (at least during the Strange Aeon) but the zeal to preserve their respective empires and broader Union over that period (and the institutions and praxis they empower to do so) really does end up driving them a bit insane by the new millennium. Still, from the Franco-British perspective everything outside their zone of influence (aside from the Ottomans and the Japanese-Thai alliance) has gone from "a few economic competitors and a rabble of upstart colonies" to "deeply alien ideological enemies" that are rapidly outcompeting the AFD sphere while approaching rapprochement with each other at the same time.
 
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Special points to anyone who can guess where Mosley's maternal line comes from, since he comes by his Indo-Anglo-French heritage and deeply weird mystical sensibilities honestly. He popped into my head fully formed on a walk today and I knew I had to use him and in any case I had planned to include his maternal ancestor in Act II but couldn't quite make it fit.

At first I'd thought it could be Gandhi, but I'm not so sure.
 
Special points to anyone who can guess where Mosley's maternal line comes from, since he comes by his Indo-Anglo-French heritage and deeply weird mystical sensibilities honestly. He popped into my head fully formed on a walk today and I knew I had to use him and in any case I had planned to include his maternal ancestor in Act II but couldn't quite make it fit.
Savitri Devi?
 
Hey, I've finally catch up with this timeline (and Power Without Knowledge)
I really like the interwined slightly weirds ideas, and the attention given to niche politicals movements. It give a very peculiar aesthetic to the TL, something like the WMIT TL, but with a more serious feeling.
 
Hey, I've finally catch up with this timeline (and Power Without Knowledge)
I really like the interwined slightly weirds ideas, and the attention given to niche politicals movements.
I'm a slave to my passions 🤔
It give a very peculiar aesthetic to the TL, something like the WMIT TL, but with a more serious feeling.
I take that as a high compliment! As for the tone I think it's because black comedy isn't a major feature but plotwise The King in Yellow was inspired by WMIT and Separated at Birth, particularly how they constructed really entertaining and out there worlds by tying together and accelerating historically unconnected details and using that foundation as a springboard for divergent ideologies and alliance structures. Are they realistic? Not remotely, but they offer a really stimulating reader experience.

As for Power Without Knowledge that's a deliberate exercise in constructing a mirror universe that has similar trends to OTL around the same time but still comes off as warped and alien, the better to birth the Cosmicist ideology that devours the future history of the timeline. I was toying with a future history media update but it isn't quite there yet, the next substantive update on that one will be the alt-2016 election. At some point I've got to go through and edit it, since parts of it have been retconned or modified as I've gone along.
 
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Sometimes I think writers of this forum are overly conservatives, some madness isn't bad and add depth (and realism !) to AH stories.
I mean real History is crazy, nazis are already an ASB faction, with very stranges ideas and with unrealist success...
 
Sometimes I think writers of this forum are overly conservatives, some madness isn't bad and add depth (and realism !) to AH stories.
I mean real History is crazy, nazis are already an ASB faction, with very stranges ideas and with unrealist success...
My philosophy is that it's a hobby so there's no excuse not to have fun.
 
Great now this TL has me imagening Lovecraft not as a country leader but a cult/ religious one in some strange alternate dimension out there o_O
 
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Great now this TL has me imagening Lovecraft not as a country leader but a cult/ religiosu one in some strange alternate dimension out there o_O
Honestly it'd probably be anti-nihilist sort of thing. After all, if there is no conceivable higher order or grand purpose the only structure is the one generated by people, even if it is inherently transitory. On the other hand I had an ASB scenario awhile ago I haven't got around to doing anything with yet where Zealandia and Keguelen are A) above water and B) moved, with the resulting continent settled by a mix of Polynesians and Chinese and Incan explorers, resulting in a Lovecraftian-inflected cosmology that is portrayed positively. I was going to have an industrial-strength butterfly net until World War II when Lovecraft and some friends end up there and join the anticolonial revolution.

I had an intrusive idea of a @DValdron-style extra continent ASB story as I was trying to fall asleep last night. Basically it would be a Lemuria* story where a continent made up of a combined Zealandia and Kerguelen plateau is A). above sea level and B.) moved to the South Pacific Gyre. Despite the fact that the combined land area would be roughly double that of India and Lemuria is settled by diverse cultures over the centuries and carved up into a stew of colonies there are basically no drastic changes on the world stage until the twentieth century, when a set of nationalistic revolts break out and the vastly different successor states have to forge a unified government to keep from becoming a battle ground in the Cold War.

My main bit of fun would be that real life weird fiction writers from around the world would be massaged into Lemuria's modern history in other roles, with the group that would eventually come out on top in the new government an alternate version of the "core" Lovecraft Circle**, here a political clique rather than a writer's group. Lovecraft would have a lot of his racism knocked out of him earlier in his life by joining the Army like he wanted during World War I. Newly self-assured he spins his wartime writing into a career as a reporter and culture columnist, journeying to Lemuria and building a deep bench of friends who in real life became Cthulhu Mythos collaborators, so when the ravages of World War II break out and the continent breaks free of the foreign yoke what steps up to fill the void isn't Communism or an American-backed regime but rather a version of the ideology he describes in "Some Repetitions on the Times", except without any of his OTL lingering racism.

Any plot, as such, would be a story of the development of the newly unified society told in primary sources, from the roots of the Lovecraft Circle and the new Lemurian state to the aftermath of Lovecraft's death (in the fifties due to better medical care) on the regime's nuclear and space programs at the height of the Cold War.

*With the name as a pun on "phantom island" rather than named for the actual animal as in OTL.
** Plus this guy and Sonia Greene

Thanks! I'm not sure if I'll do anything with it yet but I've got tons of ideas. For indigenous place names I was thinking of cribbing from Lovecraft's Dreamlands, Howard's Hyborian Age and Smith's Zothique, since they're politicians and revolutionaries instead of writers TTL.

I had an idea for an initial settlement by Polynesians a la your own Mu timeline, but with later waves from China and Peru. Rather than being colonized by any one Great Power I like the idea of having it basically carved up like an unholy hybrid between the scramble for Africa, Princely States under the Raj and the spheres of influence in China, with a later influx of Russian Whites thrown into the mix. It's too far away to be conquered by Japan during World War II but they also manage to stick their oar in through the Green Dragon secret society.

Although the war ends just like OTL the Green Dragons linger in Lemuria as a destabilizing group of lost cause bitter enders. Naturally decolonization results in an intricate patchwork of different states, nations and culture histories, but with a tremendous amount of potential the Lovecraft Circle hopes to harness to prevent the continent from becoming a proxy war battlefield. And of course the best way to show you mean business is to have A) nukes and B) a space program.

(Aboriginal) Lemurian*

Although nearly eighty percent of the size of Australia and today very densely populated, the Lemurian continent was the last to be discovered and settled by early peoples. Settled first by Polynesian groups during their expansion through the Pacific, Lemuria would later see significant populations established by Chinese and Tewantinsuyu explorers in separate, ultimately unsuccessful colonization ventures that would nonetheless shape the demographics of the continent and introduce strains of religious and political thought that continue into the present.

Discovery by the Spanish in the seventeenth century would mark the beginning of the Lemurian Colonial Period as the culturally fractious continent became a dynamic collage of native states, European colonies and free republics and city-states. With the last vestiges of colonialism cast aside in the twentieth century, the newly independent successor states faced the truly daunting task of establishing a unified society for the first time in the continent's history, predicated on full legal equality for the aboriginal Lemurians and with a focus on preserving native cultural history even as the new nation set itself on an ambitious agenda of modernization.

In addition to Esperanto and the historical colonial languages, the aboriginal Lemurians traditionally speak a variety of languages in the Lemurian language family, a group that shows the variety of influences on the region. Aside from the vast adherence to the imported Baha'i faith the Lemurians have traditionally followed a pantheistic belief commonly called the Kn'tiki Mythos. A blend Polynesian and Andean archetypes and myth structures combined with a coopted form of Buddhism, the Mythos is centered on the octopus-headed creator god Kn'tiki, a conflation of Tangaroa and Viracocha. God of the sea, magic and the underworld, the Lemurian conception of Nirvana involves exiting the cycle of reincarnation through time and space, becoming subsumed into Kn'tiki's dream as he rests on the sea floor waiting for the end of the world.

Ancestry: Polynesian, Chinese, Andean, various European admixture
Language: Lemurian language family, English, Esperanto, other languages
Religion: Baha'i, Kn'tiki Mythos
Population: ~450 million (57% of the broader Lemurian population)
*It's ASB but inspired by an idea that's consumed me for the past couple of days 😅

I've given my hypothetical Lemuria TL some more thought in a post on the fictional ethnic group thread!

Tl;dr- The dominant indigenous Lemurian religion is centered on Kn'tiki, a Cthulhu-esque figure combining the Maori and Inca sea gods and giving him an octopus for a head. In a similar vein to fellow Tangaroa derivative Kanaloa, Kn'tiki is a god of magic and the underworld as well as a sea creator god. The Lemurian religion believes in a Yithian cycle of reincarnation through space and time adapted from Buddhism, and defines nirvana as a state of absorption into the dream of the sleeping god.

As for other developments, I'm thinking that rather than try to work in a huge pile of weird fiction authors it'd be more manageable to stick to the core Lovecraft Circle I've defined, with the addition of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa in an antagonist role as an agent of the Green Dragons and maybe Franz Kafka as a background character 🤔 Lovecraft is going to have a longer life and, to balance the cosmic scales, his early death and place in weird fiction gets filled by William Dudley Pelley and his Silver Legion Cycle*, since I just learned today they were born in the same year.

Also I'm trying to visualize the colonization pattern on the continent, with my current conception being a surviving native polity of quasi Holy Roman Empire levels of division and complexity hanging on in the mountainous core of the Zealandia portion, with the outlying fiddly bits and the Kerguelen part in their entirety dominated by foreign powers, either de jure or de facto. Client states, settler colonies, free ports, the works.

*Think a suitably modified Lord of the Swastika if the "heroes" were given mystic powers by hypo-dimensional space Jesus.
 
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I've got to wrestle with my health insurance and shop for a new car this week but hopefully I'll be able to start A Bolt From the Blue before too long! It'll revolve around the 20th century American technology programs. I found some really interesting real life discoveries I can have adopted earlier 🤔 It's gonna be cool.
 
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