by Tom Anderson
Look to the West
A Counterfactual History
by Dr Tom W. Anderson MA MSci (Cantab)
Cover artwork by Jack Tindale
This is a work of fiction. While ‘real-world’ characters may appear, the nature of the divergent story means any depictions herein are fictionalised and in no way an indication of real events. Above all, characterisations have been developed with the primary aim of telling a compelling story.
Published by Sea Lion Press, 2016. All rights reserved.
Acknowledgements
This volume of Look to the West contains contributions by Nick Bieter (whose work formed the basis of Interludes #8 and #9) and this is reproduced with permission.
As before, my thanks go to Alex Richards for producing yet more fantastic maps to illustrate this work.
A special note of thanks to Edward Feery for tackling the gargantuan task of proofreading this work.
As I noted in the Acknowledgements for Volume I, this opus would not have hit the virtual shelves without constant support from my loyal beta readers, my family, God, those AH writers whose works first inspired me, and the staff at Sea Lion Press. My thanks go to all of them.
Foreword
“For want of a nail, the horse was lost…” is a commonly cited rhyme when discussing alternate history. Indeed, a very small change can produce a huge impact. A kingdom can fall for want of a horseshoe nail. But while the aphorism ends there, the allohistory need not. What happens to the world the day after that kingdom falls? A year later? A century later? What powers rise to fill the vacuum, what new artistic works are inspired by the fall and which will never be, which people fail to meet and have descendants (instead, finding different soulmates and producing different children)?
This is the daunting but exciting challenge for any writer of counterfactual history who begins his work almost three hundred years before the present day and attempts to track the impact of that change through the years and generations. Seemingly inevitable ideas can be knocked off course, obscurities from our timeline (OTL) can be thrust into the spotlight, and even when the familiar appears it may do so with a name and in a context that is utterly alien. L.P. Hartley wrote “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”; but how much more true is that of an alternate present? We are not surprised that a Victorian of 1866 would not have a smartphone, but we are shocked when someone from a different 2016 pulls one out and uses an app to find his nearest public hanging. And shock makes one think. Counterfactual history is not simply an intellectual parlour game, but a tool to make us re-examine how we view our own history. Are we being too deterministic in our historiography, reducing a vast, complex tapestry of individual human decisions to a mathematically pre-programmed tide of inevitability?
This volume of Look to the West does not presume to answer that question, but perhaps it will make the reader think on it. And, hopefully, on the way to an answer it will be a fun ride.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Prologue: The Story So Far…
Map: Europe in the Year 1800
Chapter #51: Viennese Waltz
Chapter #52: The Arandite Plan
Chapter #53: Three Stripes of Neapolitan
Chapter #54: Der Führer und der Kleinkrieg
Chapter #55: A Delicious Irony
Chapter #56: Pin the Zion on the Eurasia
Chapter #57: Go-Nanboku-cho
Map: The United Provinces of South America in the Year 1800
Chapter #58: The Sons of Inti
Chapter #59: Pope, Austrians and Neapolitans Knot…
Chapter #60: Meanwhile in the Dementia of Spain…
Interlude #8: Goede Hoop
Chapter #61: These Isles
Chapter #62: The Monroe Doctrine
Chapter # 63: Borussia Delenda Est
Chapter #64: Le Crabe ennemi géant
Chapter #65: A Series of Unfortunate Events
Chapter #66: L’Otarie
Chapter #67: So Here It Comes, The Sound Of Drums…
Chapter #68: Gunpowder, Patriotism and Plot
Chapter #69: By Inferno’s Light
Chapter #70: In Sad Affliction’s Darksome Night
Chapter #71: For Want Of A Burned House
Chapter #72: A More Perfect Union?
Chapter #73: «Impossible» n'est pas français!
Chapter #74: To Loose the Fateful Lightning
Chapter #75: The Battle of Britain
Chapter #76: The Turn of the Tide
Chapter #77: The Spirit of Germania
Flags of the War of the Nations
Chapter #78: Vive la Contre-révolution
Chapter #79: The Last Gambit
Chapter #80: For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee…
Chapter #81: To the Victor the Headaches
Map: Europe in the Year 1809
Chapter #82: Tarnished Silver
Chapter #83: Hairline Cracks
Interlude #9: The Hamiltonian Operation
Chapter #84: Antipodean Antics
Map: Antipodea and Autiaraux, c. 1825
Chapter #85: Natisk na Vostok
Chapter #86: How the West Was Wrangled Over
Chapter #87: Maintain Your Raj
Map: The Indian Subcontinent in the Year 1820
Chapter #88: Breaking the China
Chapter #89: Building Babylon
Chapter #90: Back in the U.P.S.A.
Chapter #91: The South Rises Again
Chapter #92: Watching the Watchers
Chapter #93: The Thais That Bind
Interlude #10: Yes, But Is It Art?
Chapter #94: In America
Map: The Empire of North America in the Year 1815
Chapter #95: The Celestial Vampire
Chapter #96: Nichibotsu
Chapter #97: The Root of All Evil
Chapter #98: Lighting the Fuse
Chapter #99: Mehmedic Mutination
Chapter #100: ___NO TITLE ENTERED___
APPENDIX A: LISTS OF RULERS
APPENDIX B: CHRONOLOGY OF “LOOK TO THE WEST”, 1688-1814
Part 1: Before the Point of Divergence (1688-1726)
Part 2: The Exile (1727-1749)
Part 3: King Frederick (1750-1760)
Part 4: Frontier George (1761-1778)
Part 5: The Age of Revolution (1779-1799)
Part 6: The Administration (1800-1809)
Part 7: The Watchful Peace (1810-????)
VOLUME TWO:
UNCHARTED TERRITORY
When I was a little boy,
I wondered ‘what is Revolution’?
For all the children in the park
spoke of nothing else.
I asked my father and he said
“Revolution is an affront to human nature, a challenge to God and Kings!”
I asked my mother and she said
“Revolution is a sad tale of blood and suffering.”
I asked my brother and he said
“Revolution is the glorious overthrow of everything in the world that oppresses us!”
I asked my sister and she said
“Revolution will set us free.”
I was very confused
so I got out the big dictionary from over the fireplace
And I looked it up.
It said:
“Revolution. Noun.
‘To go round in circles’.”
- Anonymous
Prologue: The Story So Far…
26/08/2019. Temporary headquarters of TimeLine L Preliminary Exploration Team, location classified. Ca
ptain Christopher G. Nuttall, seconded from British SAS, commanding officer.
Addressed to Director Stephen Rogers of the Thande Institute for Crosstime Exploration, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Director Rogers:
I am pleased to receive your message expressing support for the continuation of our mission. I am also happy that you and the majority of the Committee appear to recognise the arguments advanced by my team that it is necessary to develop a fuller historical grounding of the world we find ourselves in before attempting to analyse its present day. A misstep would be disastrous: we have already come too close to discovery more than once. Social norms can seem almost identical to those we know at one moment, and then the next could be those of some alien planet. Frankly, we have frankly done well to achieve the limited interaction we have restricted ourselves to, aided by the fact that we can portray ourselves as foreigners – though, for reasons which will become clear, this is less helpful than one might expect.
I also received Dr Wostyn’s helpful suggestion that we should begin our second volume of correspondence with a summary of what has come before. I therefore consult what Dr Lombardi has referred to as ‘The Short, Short Version’. Ahem. I thought interpreting some of the terminology the locals use here was hard, but that was before I saw Dr Lombardi’s handwriting. One moment…
In the year 1727, at the coronation of King George II, the king tripped on his coronation carpet and his estranged son Prince Frederick laughed at the incident. The king took revenge by exiling his son to the American Colonies. However, Frederick built up a power base there, marrying the woman who would go on to be George Washington’s aunt and declaring for the crown when his father was killed at the Battle of Dettingen. Frederick fought a brief civil war with his brother William, who was slain by underhanded methods, and returned to Britain. As a consequence of this, the American colonists were drawn more directly into affairs of government as a whole, and they had a partisan on their side on the throne. The American Revolution never happened, and instead the colonies became the self-ruling Empire of North America, a federation composed of five subdivisions called Confederations.
Consequences from these actions spread across the world like ripples from a stone tossed into a pond. France never withdrew from Madras and Robert Clive died in captivity. Britain would not have everything her own way in India, with France and Portugal remaining powerful rivals. The pattern of wars in the eighteenth century was short-circuited and a different clash of Spain and Portugal eventually produced a successful revolution in the Spanish colonies, leading to the United Provinces of South America. Dakar became British, and with it most of West Africa. Australia, on the other hand, was discovered and colonised by the French explorer La Pérouse. Maria Theresa’s Austria defeated Prussia, whose King Frederick was never ‘the Great’, slain on the battlefield at Kunersdorf. Saxony gradually rose in power and Poland-Lithuania was split between Prussia and Russia, with the latter producing a new independent Lithuania. One of the citizens of that land, Moritz Benyovsky, went on to lead a world-changing mission to the Russian Far East. The monarchies of China, Corea (Korea), Persia and northern India have all taken different paths to our timeline as the ‘butterflies’ of the divergence have spread and collided.
Not all significant changes are so grand and immediately apparent. The great scientist Carolus Linnaeus chose, for whatever reason, to posthumously publish ideas on human evolution which he remained silent on in Our TimeLine (OTL). Linnaeus’ ideas were distorted into ideologies of racial supremacism with ‘scientific’ justification. The controversy over this led to European intellectuals learning Swedish and becoming aware of Carl Scheele’s work on gases, which was not forgotten as in OTL. The research of Scheele, together with that of Joseph Priestley (who fled to the UPSA) and Antoine Lavoisier, led to new breakthroughs in the understanding of gases and chemistry in general. A different Louis XVI came to power in France and chose to continue the work of Cugnot on steam-driven vehicles.
And these things, together with the examples of the republics of the UPSA and Corsica, fed into the pool of ideas that produced a very different French Revolution. A good man named Jacques Tisserant, representing the legitimate grievances of the people, was gunned down in an accident and France exploded like a powder keg. The megalomaniacal Jean-Baptiste Robespierre seized power and began a Reign of Terror in which the King was only one of thousands upon thousands to be slain in the terrible asphyxiation of the chambre phlogistique, a perversion of Lavoisier’s gas research.
The new French Latin Republic, energised with both republican fervour and Linnaean racial supremacism, went to war with most of Europe. The great proletarian General Boulanger developed new tactics using innovations like steam artillery tractors, balloons and attack column formations, leading to the defeat of the armies of the Hapsburgs and their allies. Following the engineered neutrality of the Low Countries and the withdrawal of Saxony and Prussia from the war to fight a war over the Polish Succession, the French invaded most of Germany but were stopped at the gates of Vienna by the Austrian General Mozart. Western France rose in counter-revolutionary rebellion, the Chouannerie, and Britain together with French Royalists under the Dauphin landed to support them. This conflict became a stalemate, with the Prince of Wales slain on the battlefield and Robespierre deposed by his lieutenant Jean de Lisieux. A small remnant ‘Royal France’ of Brittany and the Vendée has been allowed to enjoy an unofficial existence, in which a certain Corsican-born British captain named Leo Bone has become an instant celebrity under the name Napoleon Bonaparte. Britain now faces the dawn of the nineteenth century with an inexperienced young King Henry IX and his radical Prime Minister, Charles James Fox.
At the same time, a civil war in Russia produced a return to the status quo, but with many social upheavals in the process. In a related conflict, Denmark fought Sweden and has now reformed the Union of Kalmar following the assassination of the King of Sweden. Meanwhile the French General Lazare Hoche has conquered northern Italy, but now refuses to acknowledge Lisieux’s new regime – the Administration. Undaunted by this, the French have invaded Spain, which collapsed into civil war, and puppetised the country under one claimant Infante. The rival Infantes have fled to the New World…
And I believe that is the point we had reached. I should add that Dr Lombardi expresses thanks to Dr Pataki for the paracetamol he sent and adds that his nose is almost healed. I should point out that the healthcare system in this Kingdom does not distinguish between prescription and over-the-counter drugs as ours does, and we would require a valid ID card to purchase even simple painkillers. That is not on the cards at present, so we must remain dependent on the Insitute dropoffs for many basic supplies.
So, there is no time like the present. If Dr Pylos has quite finished trying to sketch that gendarme standing on the corner underneath our window, we can resume our attempt to summarise the history of this Earth…
Map: Europe in the Year 1800
Chapter #51: Viennese Waltz
Mediatisation. Reorganisation. Call it what you will. For those of us who still remember those times, no sweet-sounding word could ever justify it. The days when an insane Empire turned on itself and opened the doors to the most barbarous work of conquest and force since the death of Tamerlane. Did Leroux truly lose at the gates of Vienna? It might have been better for the German people if he had won.
- Pascal Schmidt, in an 1829 speech
From: “Austria in the Jacobin Wars” by V.A. Rostopshchin (1951, English translation 1964)—
Austria’s position for the campaign season of 1800 was an unenviable one. The nineteenth century dawned inauspiciously for the Hapsburg monarchy, which had already seen so many ups and downs throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth. From the humiliation at the hands of the Swedes in the Thirty Years’ War, to the successes of the War of the Spanish Succession, to the rise of Prussia in the War of the Austrian Succession, to the collapse of Prussia and the temporary restoration of a
Holy Roman Empire worthy of the name after the War of the Diplomatic Revolution – Austria’s fate seemed impossible to predict from one moment to the next, though of course it did not prevent commentators from trying.[1]
Even within the Jacobin Wars, Hapsburg fortunes had risen and fallen with dizzying speed. After the limited successes of Mozart and Wurmser in the opening phases of the war, the defeats in Italy by Hoche, and then the unexpected unleashing of the War of Lightning under Leroux and Ney, anything seemed possible. When Mozart, to the cost of his own life, managed to stop Leroux’s army before the gates of Vienna, he secured the survival of the Hapsburg monarchy if nothing else.
Some speculative romantics [counterfactual historians] may have written reams on the subject of what might have happened if the claimant Emperor Francis II had turned the full force of his remaining armies on the disintegrating French position in Germany; but let us not indulge ourselves in the pursuit of the ‘what-if’, thankless as it so often is. In any case, regardless of how dark Austria’s position had been prior to the Battle of Vienna, Republican France was still a new and strange enemy to face. Turkey, though… existing as a bulwark against Turkey was in many ways Austria’s raison d’être. The Hapsburgs defined themselves by opposition to the Ottoman Empire: everything else, whether Protestant rebellions in the Thirty Years’ War or the rise of Jacobinism, no matter how objectively serious a threat to Austria, could only be perceived as a sideshow to the court in Vienna.