What are the plotlines of The Serpent , Radioactive Ghost, The Empty Square, and The Green Coda?
What exactly happened to the British press after the First Great War?
I was also wondering what happened to General Lavr Kornilov, the fellow who failed to otherthrow the Petrograd Soviet, in your timeline?
The title of
The Serpent referred to the novel’s antagonist, a shadowy figure who commits horrific crimes for the purposes of world domination. The character was inspired by the character of Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes stories, but unlike Moriarty, is strongly hinted to possess malevolent supernatural powers. Although Hamilton originally planned for the novel’s antagonist to be killed off at the end of the story, he ultimately reused to character for the other novels in the
Serpent series.
The post-apocalyptic novels
Radioactive Ghost,
The Empty Square, and
The Green Coda were written by Hamilton in despair after the German superbomb attacks against London, Norwich, and Brighton in 1944, and the British defeat in the Second Great War.
The plot of
Radioactive Ghost centers on the ghost of a man who dies in a future Third Great War that destroys civilization through nuclear war. The ghost watches how the world changes following the fall of civilization as he reflects on his own life. The plot of
Radioactive Ghost is analogous to the plot of the novel
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut from our world.
The plot of
The Empty Square concerns a bitter feud that destroys an unnamed village, as a deadly fog originating from a great disaster slowly approaches. The plot of
The Empty Square is analogous to the novel
On the Beach by Nevil Shute from our world, with elements of its plot analogous to the novel
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding from our world.
The plot of
The Green Coda concerns an alien plant that arrives in Australia, which turns every environment that it spreads to into a lush paradise, but at the cost of preying on humans. The plot of
The Green Coda is analogous to
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham from our world.
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I don’t have information on the development of journalism in the United Kingdom after the end of the First Great War.
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The analogue in TTL to Lavr Kornilov, of the same name, was born on a slightly different date compared to our world. He served in the Imperial Russian Army in the First Great War, and was killed while fighting on the Eastern Front in 1916.