Wasn't Phil K Dick the first writer to go down that road? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle
Alternate History
- Thread starter Orleander
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Wasn't Phil K Dick the first writer to go down that road? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle
Most definitely not.
There's a long history (Hah!) of alternate history fiction.
Possibly the earliest (known) is Livy ((59 BC – AD 17) who wrote a story based on "What if Alexander the Great had gone West instead of East?"
Yet you have devoted considerable effort into refuting these claims on every hand.
If they truly had "zero foundation" in the basis of reality and no real history to support them, why devote any energy at all to refute them?
There are those in this brave new world of the information age that take the "Snopes" attitude and let others do their thinking for them.
Then there are those, howbeit their numbers may be few, who prefer to think for themselves.
I wonder which side of that fence you might consider yourself falling on? Or are you still teetering on the fence itself?
As you can see by this simple example, often there is an unseen third party.
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It's quite simple: for the same reason I would devote energy to someone claiming 2+2=5 while attempting to convince others that this is so.
Correct. You, unfortunately, have decided I'm not in that group and you are.
Not so. I merely posed the question and let you answer it for yourself.
The question was not even the point intended. The fact there is often a third party on an issue was.
The fact that there is often a "third party" on any given issue does NOT mean that there was third force in the Cold War.
Sorry D, I should have iterated that I was referring to the whole "Germans won The War" alternate history. He did win a Hugo for it so I thought maybe he was the first to go there?
There is another darker side to that time in America's past that's not told in the "official" version recorded in history. This involves a religious aspect to the Civil War.
The Church of Rome seeking to defeat the spread of it's Protestant rivals backed the Confederate South in an coup attempt.
There is also worth mentioning an effort to create something similar to an early form of NAFTA based on slavery.
This confederate alliance was to unite all South, Central and North America into something called the "Tropical Empire".
This story ties the assassination of President Lincoln into the Catholic - Protestant conflict of the time.
Before Lincoln was president he was a defense lawyer in Illinois who successfully defended a defecting Jesuit priest.
This priest named Charles Chiniquy, exposed the ongoing covert attempt by the Church of Rome to overthrow Protestantism and eventually the government of United States itself.
This story is the topic of a book written by Chiniquy himself titled "Fifty Years in the Church of Rome". Lincoln's story is detailed in Chapters 59, 60 and 61.
Lincoln was already a major thorn in the Church's side for that reason at the time of his election as President.
After successfully stopping the South's succession from the union and ending slavery, the Church had several Jesuit hit men assigned to the task when Lincoln was killed.
The story that Booth shot President Lincoln because he was "strongly opposed to the abolition of slavery", while perhaps a partial truth was in effect a lie of omission used as a cover story released in the interest of national security to conceal the coup attempt by the Church of Rome to overthrow the government of the United States.
The following is a quote from Abraham Lincoln describing the very reason the truth about the cause of the Civil War was hidden, sealed and never allowed in the official history books.
“This [American Civil] war [of 1861-1865] would never have been possible without the sinister influence of the Jesuits. We owe it to popery that we now see our land reddened with the blood of her noblest sons. Though there were great differences of opinion between the South and the North on the question of slavery, neither Jeff Davis [President of the Confederacy] nor anyone of the leading men of the Confederacy would have dared to attack the North, had they not relied on the promises of the Jesuits, that under the mask of Democracy, the money and arms of the Roman Catholic, even the arms of France, were at their disposal if they would attack us. I pity the priests, the bishops and monks of Rome in the United States, when the people realize that they are, in great part, responsible for the tears and the blood shed in this war. I conceal what I know on that subject from the knowledge of the nation, for if the people knew the whole truth, this war would turn into a religious war, and it would at once take a tenfold more savage and bloody character. It would become merciless as all religious wars are. It would become a war of extermination on both sides.
The Protestants of both the North and the South would surely unite to exterminate the priests and the Jesuits, if they could hear what Professor [Samuel B.] Morse [Ed. Note: U.S. inventor of the telegraph] has said to me of the plots made in the very city of Rome [i.e., at the Vatican] to destroy this Republic, and if they could learn how the [Roman Catholic] priests, the nuns, and the monks, which daily land on our shores, under the pretext of preaching their religion, instructing the people in their schools, taking care of the sick in the hospitals, are nothing else but the emissaries of the Pope, of Napoleon, and the other despots of Europe, to undermine our institutions, alienate the hearts of our people from our Constitution, and our laws, destroy our schools, and prepare a reign of anarchy here as they have done in Ireland, in Mexico, in Spain, and wherever there are any people who want to be free.”
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Hmm, I thought so too but...
Gonna be pretty hard to find one prior to 1946! Noel Coward. (Although there was a German book published in '37 - which doesn't really count)
I suppose the play and the german book didn't garner the international attention that Dick's book did. And there is always his ability to write. Have to say I haven't really gotten on with his writing. Though I do own a few of his books. Maybe I should re-dip into them.
I found "man in the high castle" slow and un-gripping so put it down. Should I persevere?
I think it's a "work of its time". I read it a couple of decades ago and it didn't do a great deal for me. Chacun a son gout, as they say.
Malta
FWIW, I think Hitler's biggest mistake was not to invade and take Malta.
The Me262 was too little, too late.
FWIW, I think Hitler's biggest mistake was not to invade and take Malta.
The Me262 was too little, too late.