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"Part #325: Blackout

“SEE THE EMPIRE FOR A DIXIE A DAY!*

The Rattlesnake Railcard – FOR AMERICA’S FAMILIES

From CHARLOTTE to CHURCHILL – From JAMESTOWN to JOHNVILLE

Step onto a train beneath the GLITTERING STEEL TOWERS of CHICHAGO and, after a night of comfort, alight beneath the STONE TOWERS of the NABEEHO![1]

Embrace the American Adventure – order yours today at any Imperial Railways kiosk!”

*Disclaimer: Rattlesnake Railcard subscription for a family of 4 costs I 1400.0.0 per annum, Imperial Railways operates a full service 358 days a year. No refunds.


– Advertising poster in Washington Railway Station, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Taken and transcribed by Sgt Dom Ellis, December 2020

*

(Dr Wostyn’s note)

It seems our time here is drawing to an end…um…you should receive that update from the Captains soon… (Mutters inaudibly to self) In the meantime, it is high time we draw a line under the so-called Electric Circus era, entertaining though it has been. Sadly, this world began once again to revolve, with a numbing inevitability, towards war. I’ll give a brief (coughs) I said brief, rundown of how it got there, though we may have to save some details for the next set of updates, once we have arrived – anyway, as I was saying…

*

Extract from recorded lecture on “Europe and the Second Interbellum” by Prof Dr Erich Möller and Magdalena Middleton, recorded October 14th, 2020—

It’s that curious thing, nein? You Americans are always so ready to say that the mother country means nothing to you, that you long surpassed them, that you are a better version of what they once were? And yet whenever your gaze crosses the Atlantic, where does it always land first? England. (Audience murmurs) What is your English phrase? Blood is thicker than water.

Maybe there’s some truth to that, Herr Doktor Professor…not that we would ever admit it! (Audience chuckles) So by all means, go on. You had just got up to when Stuart Lightfoot won the election of 1934?

Ja. Well, the English would insist that no one man wins or loses an election, of course…but that is of no important. Herr Lightfoot and his Democratic Party had secured a majority together with their Trade Union Alliance allies. Frederick Osborne was out, and for the first time in a third of a century, the Anglian Party that had dominated English politics ever since the Third Glorious Revolution was out, how do you say, on its ear.

So what happened then?

Well, Herr Lightfoot had been leading the opposition to the Anglians for a decade, having been the locus for English discontent during the Black Twenties. He had had plenty of time to decide on a plan for government, and he ruled the Democratic Party with unchallenged control. Of course, he also had to appease his, ah, TUA allies. He did so by making the TUA leader Russell Atkinson Secretary for the Interior and almost giving him a free hand over domestic affairs. His own interests lay more in the field of foreign policy, and so matters were carefully balanced.

How did that go down with the rest of the Democrats?

As I said, Herr Lightfoot had almost absolute control, at least at first, although discontent eventually grew among some of the Democrats who identified more with the old Watsonite Moderates from before the Revolution. At first, Lightfoot enjoyed popularity simply because he had finally removed the seemingly invincible Anglians from power, however.

There’s a story that Paul Lovett, then the Deputy Finance Secretary, was criticising the position in the House of Burgesses, only for Lightfoot to unexpectedly walk into the chamber and…well, let’s just say Lovett insisted afterwards that it had only been the sound of his cushion squeaking as it scraped the marble benches. (Audience laughter)

A crude anecdote, Fräulein Middleton, but it gets the point across, I suppose. (Coughs) While Atkinson and the TUA took revenge for President Howard’s ham-handed response during the 1928 Strike Wave and reformed workers’ rights, Lightfoot’s focus was overseas. He had a vision for England’s place in the world. He was heavily influenced by Douglas Bell, a Scottish geographer and historian who had been a disciple turned critic of the Belgian, Hendrik Wiegel.[2] While most Scots stuck to the patriotic line in celebrating their country’s independence since the Third Glorious Revolution, Bell courted controversy by critiquing the official narrative.

Now I think there were other such critics, but most focused on economics?

Ja. The fact that the Scottish government had had to scale back pensions and state welfare programmes after the Panic of 1917. Perhaps more relevant to the average person, but Bell was focused more on foreign affairs. He pointed to the fact that an independent Scotland had found it more difficult to avoid being subordinated as part of French-led alliances – as opposed to her more populous and economically weighty neighbour England, which had begun to assert herself more. Bell even claimed that Scotland would have ended the Black Twenties with nothing without England’s intervention – of course she gained authority over Rusa, a neighbouring town in Old Prussia to England’s Conisbrough.

Not much, but a prize of a sort at least.

It certainly upset the Bundeskaiser – but then, what didn’t? (Laughs to himself, audience doesn’t join in) But Bell wasn’t just a contrarian. He did not blindly idolise the past, when Scotland had been part of the Kingdom of the Britons, and before it the Kingdom of Great Britain. When he wasn’t getting his house burned down by an angry mob, he was analysing where, in his view, Britain had gone right as a country and where it had gone wrong. That grammar is, I’m sorry…

That’s aydub, Herr Doktor Professor, go on.

Danke schene. Bell was considered an iconoclast in the field of colonial history. At a time when European academia was split between either loud, post facto defensive declarations of the alleged civilising effects of colonialism, or else condemnation of it from a position increasingly influenced by natives of the colonised lands, Bell was something of a throwback. Some said he had been born in the wrong century and would have fitted in if he had been alive a couple of centuries prior. Bell was a ruthless mercantilist. To him, the purpose of colonialism, no, the purpose of all foreign policy, was simply to create wealth for the state in order to improve the lives of its own people. Bell argued that Britain, a thalassean island nation, had succeeded best when she had planted trade outposts across the world and then used her then-powerful navy to destroy any competition for them. He said that the rot had crept in when she tried to conquer and settle on land. Taking over Bengal had been a mistake not because of any suffering of the Bengalis, but because it embroiled Britain in a series of mainland problems – and never-ending frontiers – that had nothing to do with filling her coffers. (Some vague sounds of audience agreement) America had been a mistake – (Mixed audience laughter and sharp disagreement) – because its colonies just became another source of problems for Britain, never lived up to her hopes of tax revenue, and eventually became their own nation and effectively subsumed Britain. (Some sounds of agreement) In Bell’s world, colonial projects and military power projection should have no goal beyond moneymaking, and the role of government policy should be to rein in groups like the old East India Companies before they unilaterally exceeded that mission.

So did Mr Lightfoot feel the same way?

Not entirely. He did not share Bell’s zero-sum worldview. But he did agree that Britain, now England, was strongest when she focused on her advantages as an island nation, relying on her navy to join up and defend a series of isolated outposts around the world. Of course, the world was very different to what it had been in the 1700s, the era Herr Doktor Bell was writing about – and, to some, the era he was mentally living in, too! England could no longer claim to dominate the seas, and nor did she possibly have the resources to compete with powers like the Societists or indeed this ENA. (Loud audience reactions) But Lightfoot believed England could dominate one sea, one at a time, if she built and maintained her navy properly and focused in the right places. Every British and English government since 1807, even the Populist ones that had been sharply against a standing army, had been driven by a sense of paranoid introversion, a fear that one day England would be invaded again. As, indeed, some said the French had in the Third Glorious Revolution. But Lightfoot was the first to stand up and declare that he believed it was time to focus on using a newly reimagined navy to project power outwards, not simply defend the homeland. And with that power projection, he believed England could exercise disproportionate power against seemingly greater opponents.

Was he right?

In a sense. I should say that often popular histories speak – what is that word you used yesterday?

Er, bunkum?

Ja. They speak bunkum about Lightfoot. One often hears that he was the first English President to engage in the Mediterranean Sea east of Gibraltar. That started way back in 1867 when the British government of the day chose to support the Sicilians in the Peninsular War.[3] But it is true that Lightfoot, hmm, kicked it into high gear. In a time of peace, he expanded the Royal Navy considerably, focusing not on large ships but on medium-sized cruiser-frigates that meant there could be an English presence almost everywhere.

This was also the era of the Lineship Wars, wasn’t it?

Ja. Even here in the ENA, where you had helped pioneer hiveships yourself and seen how devastating they had been in Societist hands, you still had conservative admirals clinging to lineships for a while. Well, imagine how much worse it was in Europe, where hiveships had not been involved in the fighting in the Black Twenties. In my own Germany, the Admiralty refused to countenance the switchover. It became yet another political shibboleth for the French to be partisan about, whilst their two parties continued to have no coherent divide on anything actually important. Only the Romulans in Italy truly embraced hiveships, and thanks to their rocket mania they usually tried to fly rocket dromes off them…all the images of burning, sinking ships didn’t exactly sell the idea of hiveships to other nations, either.

So England was the exception?

Ja. England, North Belgium, Scandinavia. They were the only European nations that truly embraced the hiveship. Meanwhile the Societists had plenty in Spain. When one thinks of how close we came…

But you were talking about England. Didn’t England form an alliance with Belgium?

Was? No, that was later. As I was saying, while Atkinson reformed domestic policy, Lightfoot focused on foreign affairs.

With Eric Stafford as the titular foreign secretary…though they always say he was just a cipher for Lightfoot.

In that era, perhaps, though I will always defend gentlemen who share my name. (Chuckles) Stafford was either Lightfoot’s placeman or his protégé, depending on whom you ask. Anyway, with his Bell-influenced thesis, Lightfoot wanted to find a diplomatic way to withdraw from Natal, England’s last major colony, without losing face. As you may know, that didn’t happen in the end until the 1950s, but the groundwork was laid under the Lightfoot ministry.

Lightfoot led England into the ASN as well, didn’t he?

Yes, England was an early member. Stafford attended the Toulon Conference in 1941 and England joined soon afterwards, then hosted the follow-up Portsmouth Conference in 1942. Lightfoot had set England on the path he wanted by the time he retired in 1943 on health grounds. Stafford became President, though struggled to hold the coalition together. The opposition Anglians had begun to compare Atkinson and the TUA to the ‘Clackists’ of the old regime. In fact Atkinson did embrace the image of the old Populists of the 1830s and 40s like Llewelyn Thomas, which was a divisive decision with some voters. So long as the strong personality of Lightfoot was at the top, the Anglian attacks had not landed with voters, but Stafford was seen as a weaker figure. At the 1945 general election, the coalition lost its majority and the Anglians were the largest party.

But that didn’t last long, did it?

No. Robert Austin struggled on for eighteen months without a majority, but he was unable to shift England off the course that the coalition had set her on. The Anglians were also struggling for identity, no longer the, how do you say, large, you know, marquee–

Big tent?

Yes, no longer a big tent party, but trying to become a more coherent doradist party without alienating any of their current voters. An impossible task. Unable to govern, Austin called an early election in 1947 – and lost. The Democrats had taken the unexpected step of choosing a female leader, former Education Secretary Deborah Green. Here as elsewhere, the influence and image of Madame Mercier had been crucial, and now the English people were willing to accept the idea of a female President. The Democrats had chosen Mrs Green in place of the more doradist Paul Lovett whom you mentioned before.

Oh yes, old squeaky-

Yes, him. He wasn’t happy, of course, and Mrs Green had to appease him and his Watsonite faction by giving him the Finance Ministry. That also meant that, somewhat unexpectedly, the Foreign Ministry went to a TUA member, Kenneth Sefton. (Sounds of audience recognition)

One of the diplomatic superstars of the 1950s.

As you put it. It was Mr Sefton who was responsible for forging the alliance with Belgium and California, and for finally bringing English rule in Natal to an end. He gave England a new and coherent, if frankly hypocritical, geopolitial position of claiming to support the rights of small nations against domination by larger neighbours. By selling them weapons.

Of course, they were scarcely alone in that…

Quite. Domestically, Mrs Green brought back Mr Stafford, in the role of Interior Secretary. He was responsible for the controversial constitutional reform that shifted English House of Burgesses elections over to the Single Preferential Seat system.[4]

A peculiar one that – single-member seats would never fly here in the Empire, other than for the odd isolated island and so on…

Of course his motivation was to try to prevent conflicts between the sometimes-fractious Democrats and TUA when they refused to stand down for each other. The Anglians had won several seats in 1945 off the back of such a split three-way vote. Theoretically, preferential voting would prevent this problem. Naturally, the Anglians saw it as a corrupt power grab and protested. But the government made great use of the Communal Motoscopy that Mr Atkinson had begun to set up in the early 1940s…

*

Extract from recorded lecture on “The Media Revolution of the Electric Circus” by Jason Willis and Elizabeth Blackmore, recorded November 9th, 2020—

We’ve already looked at how significant of an impact the Electric Circus era had on how people consumed media, and how much – a trend spreading from richer countries to poorer ones, and to a wider audience of more modest means within countries, too. To briefly recap, so far I’ve talked about quality asimcony became more affordable for the average person and colour asimcons became the norm in the 1940s.[5] Relatedly, I also talked about how newspapers became cheaper and more accessible and were joined by a wider variety of magazines, and that same advancement of colour asimcony and printing suddenly made the world explode into colour. The same was true as colour films became the norm, both phanty-films and simmy-films, and soon the era of the soundless film was a vanished memory of the older generation.[6]

Let’s not forget that music is part of this as well, with more advanced parvogroove tapes and discs continuing to compete with each other. Better phakophones and augmentophones meant that a wider range of music could be captured, and process-produced grooveplayers could be sold to a wider audience. Suddenly there could be mass world music phenomena like zig-and-zag, lammens, Murria, Zachod Polka, Carnatique, Geli-gequ[7] spreading across the globe, a sharing of ideas like none before. (Audience murmurs) Some saw that as a threat, the first step down the road to Societist homogeneity, but the Societists themselves fruitlessly tried to keep out the influence of these wild musics on their young people. Yet Photel, which also had become ubiquitous, could not be kept out. Corruption of transmissions only went so far. If only there was a way, the Combine lamented, to keep the so-called unhealthy emissions of the ‘nationalistically blinded’ away from their pure population. (Mixed audience chuckles and oohs) Which, ultimately, brings us to the greatest media breakthrough of the age – Motoscopy.

Yes. Today we take Motoscopy for granted. It is just a natural part of our world, a part of the furniture, and to almost everyone here tonight, it always has been. It’s hard now to recognise just how profoundly the Motoscope changed our society. Probably some of you are here tonight because you remember my late father’s celebrated series, “12 Inventions that Changed the World”, over thirty years ago now. (Sounds of audience acknowledgement and a few muted cheers) The final invention that my father, and his collaborator Jennifer Hodgeson, covered in the series was the very medium on which it was being broadcast – the Motoscope. Now, I can only hope to follow in their footsteps!

The concept of Motoscopy is ancient. I don’t know when, or who, first speculated about the idea of moving images being sent great distances to be seen by viewers far away. But it was probably centuries or millennia ago. One could argue that the beginnings of Motoscopy even predate Photel, in a sense. In the 1820s, Isambard Brunel’s Le Colosse had been the talk of Paris.[8] Some of you may have seen the modern replica. It was a giant grid of shutterboxes capable of displaying a rather low-resolution image, based on data sent across the Optel grid. Something less showy and more practical would form the basis of sending early images across nations, split up into many small squares and then reassembled to be printed in newspapers.

Somewhat ironically, Brunel was ahead of his time here, because this was using discrete logic, before the surfinal world even! It was a code that was transmitted and reassembled. In that sense it resembles the direction Motoscopy is taking today, in favour of discretion and away from a pure analogue system.[9]

Perhaps. There have been many false starts in the field of Motoscopy, as in so many inventions. While encoded images were, similarly, sent over Lectel rather than Optel after the Telegraph Wars of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, no-one ever seems to have seriously speculated about the idea of sending moving pictures over Lectel. The concept of moving pictures at all was still a new one,[10] and did not seize the popular imagination until the advent of film – which is a totally different technology. Odeons projected images from film, either captured from real events with a simmy-camera or drawn by a phanty-artist. But the only way to show those images in multiple cities across a nation at once was to make multiple prints of that film, distribute it and have it shown in odeons simultaneously. Inevitably, even in the eras where film rage was at its height, one could not reach everyone. This process also took time, meaning there was inevitably a delay between an event being filmed and then being broadcast to the people. People of the 1920s, 30s, 40s were used to the idea that a newsreel was always in retrospect. Newspapers gave a much more current picture of what was happening, and for those who could afford it, Photel carried the lure of instantaneous information. But a newsreel was what one watched to see pictures of diplomatic superstars moving around at the latest conference, after the treaty had already been signed, read out on Photel and published in the newspapers. It added visceral reality to events but could never be the herald of them.

But the popularity of Photel and film naturally awakened the speculation that the two technology could be conceptually combined – that moving pictures could be broadcast as instantaneously across the nation as sound was. Scientific romance writers added it to their portfolios, and simulated Motoscopy broadcasts – even two-way interactive ones, a technology we still don’t have today! – can be seen in the 1942 sci-rom classic Ypolis by Dennis Frankleigh.

But how to achieve this technological wonder? Some inventors indeed became too fixated on making it work with the then-current film technology. I won’t go through all the dead ends, because really there were so many – even compared to other inventions. The number of brilliant minds working on the Motoscopy problem across the world meant that there were several different developments. Here in America, for example, in Mount-Royal, the Italian exile Federico Rosetti invented the first mechanical Motoscope as early as 1933.[11] Rosetti’s design used a giant rotating wheel with holes in it, which samples a scene one dot at a time – not the same as modern iotas! – and converts it into a transmission. This is then interpreted by a receiver with the same rotating wheel, which filters the display so that one scan-line, to use today’s terminology, is displayed at a time. The human eye and brain stitches the disparate lines together into a single moving image, with the smoothness of the motion related to the speed of the wheel’s rotation.

Rosetti’s design was a technical marvel but yet another technological dead-end. Nor did it come out of nowhere – it was built on the earlier work of others. Rosetti enjoyed some success as a novelty in Cubwick and parts of New York, but the high expense and low image quality stymied the success of mechanical Motoscopy. At least, in the free world. Behind the Frontier, in the Zones, Societist inventors continued to work on perfecting mechanical Motoscopy. Their systems used drums rather than wheels, allowing larger screen displays, and would eventually be refined to use photo-biodes that shone by their light rather than holes, allowing a much brighter display.[12] They took advantage of the refinement of small mechanisms that had been focused on in the Combine, in a fruitless attempt to make on-board mechanical ypologists work with rockets. Societist mechanical Motoscopy was nonetheless almost always inferior in quality and expense compared to the dominant SBT, or surfinodic beam tube , which became the basis of most Motoscopy in the free world.[13]

But this was not important compared to the Societists’ main aim. If our SBT broadcasts ran on a totally different principle to their mechanical ones, then their people could not intercept our Motoscopy broadcasts as they sometimes did our Photel ones. (Audience murmurs) Naturally, the Societists put out a propaganda message that Motoscopy was the future and Photel was atavistic, encouraging their people to abandon Photel sets in favour of Motoscopes. While we tend to associate Societist Motoscopy with dreary VoxHumana broadcasts, they did also provide extensive music, comedy and drama programmes to help encourage uptake, while severely reducing Photel output. Even the popular scientific romance film series Navis Estela eventually moved to Motoscopy, though this didn’t happen until the late 1960s when Motoscopes had entered more Amigos’ households.[14]

As for the free world…it’s only in the last few years that slim-form alternatives to SBT Motoscopes have come down in price enough to be purchased by the average family, and SBTs are still the norm in most countries. Your Motoscope works by aiming a small particle gun right at your face… (Audience reaction) Maybe the Sutcliffists are right, eh? The beam of surfinos comes from a surfinode at the back of the tube and a magnetic field bends it very precisely to sweep back and forth across the screen seventy-five times a second – on the American Motoscopic standard it’s 75, at least, back home in England it would be sixty-five. (Audience reaction) Yes, well, we have 720 lines on our screens to your 600, so shut up! (Audience laughter and catcalls) As the beam goes, it lights up the phosphors on the screen, varying the beam strength and therefore the brightness to match the image that was transmitted to the Motoscope via Photel-type transmissions. From this, the image is assembled and redrawn many times a second, far faster than the human eye can see. To use, it looks like smooth motion. I won’t go into how colour Motoscopy works, as that’s slightly more complex, but it’s the same principle.

SBTs were first developed on an economic scale in Germany, and Germany was the first country to begin a mass state roll-out of home Motoscopy broadcasts from 1945 onwards. In Europe, most of the Motoscope broadcasters were state-owned. France belatedly got on the bandwagon in 1949. But strictly, the English had been there before both, in 1943 – just not using SBTs or Rossetti’s mechanical Motoscope. The DUP government at the time had seen the potential for Motoscopy for public communications – some would say propaganda.[15] Russell Atkinson, the main political driver for the project, knew of the power of newsreels in odeons, but that they came with delays, and also was well aware that most English people would discuss politics in their local pub. (Some murmurs and chuckles) Not all stereotypes are false. Atkinson realised that if an odeon could be married to a pub, with a small screen displaying live broadcasts, it had the potential to set the tone of the nation’s political conversation. The first English Motoscopes were really small back-projectors, using an elaborate encoding and mask-filtering system to convert Photel-based broadcasts to images. The technology is quite interesting, but we don’t really have time to go into it here.

There were all sorts of problems with the English system – complexity, low resolution, prone to breakdowns or even setting light to pubs. But the novelty had hit home at the right time. The Communal Motoscopes helped change sceptical public opinion when the government wanted to change the voting system in 1948. Of course, concerns over abuse of the system by one party led to the setup of the neutral English Broadcasting Authority in 1952. Technology would improve, and eventually England would adopt Germany’s SBT-based system, but Communal Motoscopy was firmly established. Home Motoscopes would not be adopted in large numbers in England until the coronation of Queen Charlotte in 1965. Communal Motoscopy would also provide an example to poorer countries such as Guinea, Matetwa and Bisnaga, as well as the more rural and backward parts of lands like China and Mexico, where the tradition would persist long after it had ceased to be the primary way of Motoscope-watching in England.

Other nations approached Motoscopy differently. Here in America, perhaps because of Rossetti’s failure, initially there was public indifferent to Motoscopy. That one journalist on the New York Register, Augie Patterson, got into trouble for claiming Americans didn’t have the attention span to sit still and watch a box for half an hour. (Audience laughter and oohs) Well, quite. Motoscopy slipped in under cover, however, and by 1952 there were a dozen private broadcasters. The government was late to the party in regulating them. This, together with this nation’s huge size and diversity, is why you’ve never had the same kind of central, national broadcasting as most countries. The same was true in China at first, but the state seized control of their regional broadcasters in 1967.

Russia initially tried to ban Motoscopy, and there’s some evidence that the Tsar’s men even looked into trying to set up a wired alternative to the system, like the wired Dalekodeons they had used for some time in place of Photel. But, just as that system had ultimately been abandoned, eventually Motoscopy had to be let in. The Romulans in Italy tried to use it for propaganda in a way similar to the Societists and English – the Societists also used Communal Motoscopy in the early days – but much less successfully, not helped by their administrators frequently embezzling the budget.

And, of course, the English voting reform was not the last big political issue on which Motoscopy made a big difference. Not by a long shot. In fact, some have argued that without the visceral scenes in Prague broadcast worldwide on a relatively short delay, unlike the polished after-the-fact newsreels, the Sunrise War might not have started at all…

*

Extract from recorded lecture on “Siam’s Ugly Secret: The Unending Fight for Freedom” by Awar Po and David Lemand, recorded October 25th, 2020—

...but now we’re coming to a controversial topic, aren’t we? If we’re talking about the end of the Electric Circus, we need to tralk about Binhminh Tran.

Are any of the topics we’ve discussed not controversial, David? (Audience laughter) At least according to the Ayutthais, who petition the ASN to create a Heritage Point of Controversy every time one of their bullyboys shoots a Cham child or throws a brick through the window of a mosque and they deny it. (More mixed audience reaction) But you’re right. Everyone in Indochina has an opinion about Binhminh Tran, and they are likely to causefights – verbal or physical – around the dinner table at Songkran.[16] To the Viets of Annam, those who fight for freedom like my sisters and brothers of Champa, he is a particular conundrum. Was he a hero who humiliated the Ayutthais, or a craven who joined their side? Now that is a real Heritage Point of Controversy.

I think we’ve all probably heard the name of Binhminh Tran in passing, but I doubt many of the ladies and gentlemen here have an in-depth knowledge of his life. Could you please give us a brief summary?

I don’t think the Viets would be too happy about me doing that, either. (Laughs to herself) But yes, I’ll do it, and try to be as balanced as I can. Now.

Tran Binh Minh – or Binhminh Tran as he is often called in Western sources, as you said – was born around 1892 in a village in Tonkin, not far from the coastal city of Mau Le.[17] The early details of his life are not recorded, he was simply one more anonymous peasant from one more anonymous peasant family. Tran’s father was conscripted into the Pandoric War and died fighting the Chinese. When the Chinese defeated the Ayutthais in 1898, they turned Tonkin into their province of Jiaozhi and imposed their own ideas about governance. The Tonkinese Viets were a people caught between two careless giants, collateral damage. I am a Cham, and part of our history is resenting the Viets for conquering us and forcing their culture on us in the same way, centuries earlier. But I do not revel in what has happened to the Viets under Ayutthai rule, or gloat and call it poetic justice. It is always a tragedy when a culture is crushed in this way, no matter whose culture it is. (Murmurs of agreement from audience) You can see why we are so keen to ensure that the Ayutthais can no longer get away with claiming to be such valiant fighters against Societism when they themselves—

Er, yes, I see your point, Miss Po, but can we get back to Binhminh Tran.

Yes – yes. Later. Well, the fate of the northern Viets was mixed. Many remained under Chinese rule and simply got used to being lectured at in Chinese rather than Ayutthai. They had always been second-class subjects; what was the difference? Others were not so fortunate. The Chinese happened to select Tran’s village as part of an area which they bulldozed and built a military base there. Tran’s surviving family was evicted overnight and became part of a column of refugee stragglers fleeing south. Can you imagine being a seven-year old boy thrust into that nightmare, clinging to a weeping mother who is trying to remain strong, helping keep his two younger sisters alive? (Audience reactions) It’s small wonder that it had such a powerful effect on Tran. His mother poured all her remaining strength into getting them safely south to Hue, and passed away herself in 1904, when Tran was only twelve years old. He was forced to not only fend for himself, but to continue to protect his sisters. In this process, he fell in with a criminal syndicate in Hue which consisted mostly of members of the Red Sash Brigades who had been driven underground.

The Red Sash Brigades were...

A group of angry young men furious at their government, and its workshy aristocrats, for dragging them into the war and then losing it. They were mostly Ayutthais and no friends of me or mine, though there were some from the captive nations. The Emperor and Front Palace had cracked down on them and bought off public anger with some symbolic punishment of those aristocrats.[18] Many of the more extreme Red Sash stalwarts were sent to fight the Societists in Sumatra and the other islands. Others escaped the crackdown and turned instead to organised crime. Tran fell in with one such group, as I said. But though he was a capable thief, he always had a strong moral sense and was disgusted with the work, seeing it only as a necessary evil to fill his belly and those of his sisters’. He had strong memories of the refugee column being plagued by bandits, and hated to think he had become one himself. He always had a firm respect for strong men who only fought those who were also strong, and a visceral contempt for those who preyed on the weak and vulnerable.

I see. Which I suppose...

In 1908 he turned sixteen. He had managed to find his sisters positions in the household of a charitable Viet minor nobleman who had employed them as junior maids, a good man whom he could trust not to abuse them or marry them off against their will. Freed of his responsibilities – though he would continue to send money home to them – Tran decided to cut ties with the syndicate. In the reverse career pathway that many of its members had been on, he would join the armed forces, lying about his age.

You would think he wouldn’t have the best opinion of...

No, I know what you’re going to say. It was an act of necessity. A reliable job in which he could use some of the skills he had learned in a more respectable and legitimate – as it was seen – craft. That didn’t mean he particularly liked it. Some of those bandits who had raided his family’s refugee column had been demobbed soldiers, for a start. So were some of the criminals he wanted to get away from. And he had often expressed contempt for the Ayutthai soldiers who had failed to defeat the Chinese and led to his family’s eviction, though that’s confused his biographers because he said inconsistent things over the years. Remember his father died in the conflict, and he may have blamed that on the orders of an Ayutthai officer.

Regardless, whatever his reasons, Tran joined the Imperial Siamese Army in 1908. That was around the time that the Societist victory in South America had become apparent.[19] But there were still question marks over what would happen to the old Batavian Republic, which was in the process of collapsing into civil war. With Meridian Hermandad power removed and the fragile hierarchy of exilic Dutch rule coming apart, the Republic’s corpse was ready to be carved up by forces including the greedy Ayutthais, the vengeful Sulu Sultanate, the rebellious Mataramese, the opportunistic Filipinos, the French, the Belgians and, of course, ultimately the Societists.[20] The Societist Doctrine of the Last Throw was experienced in the Nusantara long before you would witness it in the world beyond. (Audience murmurs) After all those forces weakened each other, the Societists were able to sweep in and defeat all of them. All except the armies which are recorded in your history books as ‘Siamese’ but which included many non-Ayutthais like Sergeant Binhminh Tran.

He rise to a higher rank than...

Eventually, yes, but his worldview was shaped by his experiences as a noncom. He fought alongside fellow Viets as well as Chams like myself, Cambodians, Mons, Hmong, Malays, exilic Javanese and many more. And, yes, Ayutthais as well. While he had a reputation for featuring on battlefields where certain aristocratic Ayutthai officers who had got their men killed mysteriously turned up with a bullet in the back of their necks, (Audience reaction) there were other Ayutthais whom he respected. That’s another reason why he’s a complex figure. He was a great man and a great Viet, but can he be held up as a symbol for Viet freedom, especially as his own people from Tonkin have largely refused to join our crusade? But I won’t get into that.

That’s good, because...

No, Tran fought for almost a decade in the Nusantara islands. A little in Java, some in Sumatra – which was eventually a victory for the Ayutthais, so perhaps he might have turned out differently if he had stayed there. But instead he was assigned to a particularly unforgiving campaing. The isles of Bankga and Belitung, off the coast of Sumatra. They were sharply contested by the Societists, especially as the Sea Celatores became more and more experienced with their island-hopping tactics and use of small groups of elite Spekulador troops.[21] They learned from the Sea Dayaks, but adapted their raiding strategies for more modern technologies like celeriboats, minicings and even aerodromes. Some say Tran might even have fought Markus Garzius in his early days, learning his own craft on the other side.

The islands of Bankga and Belitung were desirable both because they were a potential hop-off point for an invasion of Palembang to open another front against the Ayutthai forces in Sumatra, and more importantly because of their precious tin reserves. Tran and his men fought in bitter conditions, easily as bad as those your own American soldiers and the Russians had a few years before in Noochaland, for about three years from 1914 to 1917, a time when most of the world seems to think peace reigned supreme. But not for Tran and his men. He saw good men, friends he had fought alongside for years, dying of disease in the mangrove swamps for the sake of tin. Tin!

I suppose that really would change your perspective on...

Then in 1917 came, well, the Panic of 1917. The Emperor, the Front Palace, even the new Grand Sapha parliament – dominated by Ayutthais of course! – they were certainly all in a panic. The economy had tanked and even the soldiers’ pay packets were in doubt. If the army mutinied, all was lost. So paradoxically the Front Palace recalled those same ‘unreliable’ soldiers who had been sent to fight the Societists in the Nusantra, the criminals, the conscripts, the Red Sash fanatics, in the hope that they could now be trusted more than the furious regular Ayutthai army on the streets of Ayutthaya.

...Did it work?

In a sense. But while some of those men thought no farther than their next meal, Tran was furious. Once his men were withdrawn from Bangka, of course, the Societists moved in without a fight. All their sacrifice had been for nothing. For now, Tran did his job, as he saw it. He put down discontent – another reason why we are reluctant to celebrate him today. But he remembered.

In the short term, the Emperor and the Front Palace were rescued when France decided to provide financial support to stabilise the economy, effectively bribing them into remaining neutral against China during the Black Twenties conflict. The French got their way, but then China turned around and refused to fight Russia, as you probably know. (A few audience murmurs) Tran was furious at this outcome, because the Treaty of Guiling effectively settled for reclaiming part of Tonkin whilst the rest – including his former village – remained under Chinese rule. He was angry with the French, with the Chinese, but most of all with the Ayutthai despots who had cravenly settled for such a deal and proclaimed eternal peace. Siam remained neutral throughout the Black Twenties, other than the ongoing low-level fight with the Societists.

The tempo of that conflict had reduced, hadn’t it? There was an unofficial conclusion that Sumatra would be Siamese and...

Yes, but I don’t want to overstate that – there was still plenty of skirmishing, raiding and proxy conflict well into the Second Interbellum. Anyway, as I was saying, scientists in Siam – including many non-Ayutthais who did not receive fair credit, of course – played a crucial role in the study of the plague and the development of some of the first vaccines.[22] That was a remarkable piece of prestige for the Emperor and the government. But it did not entirely paper over discontent behind the scenes. French money had bought off the immediate problems of the Panic of 1917, but now France had bigger problems. Ultimately, the people were unhappy. They chafed under plague quarantine, however necessary, and there was a sense that there was one rule for the Ayutthais – no, to be fair, the wealthy Ayutthais – and one for everyone else.

Er, so men like Tran remained in demand?

Men from a similar background as Tran, yes, enforcers of the Emperor’s will. But he was not cut from the right cloth to be a bullyboy enforcer for ever. In 1925 he helped save a Cambodian village that had been abandoned by the local authorities, cut off and expected to starve. He commandeered some aerodromes – and remember, Siam’s aero force was considered the best in Asia at the time[23] – and used them to safely drop supplies to keep its people alive. Tran was fêted as a hero, which made him a potential threat to the authorities. Of course, they could not openly punish him given his popularity, but what they did was still understood by the people for what it was. A lot of people have suggested that this was the original kernel of resentment among the Cambodians which led to a national awakening and means that their brave fighters for freedom have now joined us against the oppressor, and one day, inshallah, will—

Isn’t the start of the Cambodian national awakening usually attributed to the visit of Eljiso, about thirty years later?

To you in the western world, perhaps – but then, you can never concede that we have agency for ourselves, there must be a saviour from without. (Audience murmurs) Regardless, Tran was effectively kicked upstairs by being appointed a military attaché in the diplomatic corps. He was first assigned to Mexico, just in time for the War of 1926, and joined Guatemalan troops on the front lines against the Societists. Supposedly neutral, he shared with them the tactics he had learned fighting some of the same Celatores a decade before. The regime’s tactics had backfired, because Tran’s legend was kept alive, with the Guatemalans awarding him a medal for his work. He was then hastily reassigned to Spain, but that country had effectively ceased to exist by the time he arrived. Once again he helped oppose the Societists, this time by advising the French. Much as he had dislike for some French government policies after the Treaty of Guiling, his opposition to the Societists came first.

As it should...

He was sent on to Italy in 1929 almost as an afterthought and served as military attaché at the Siamese Embassy in Rome for twelve years, his longest stint anywhere. During that time, he witnessed the transformation of Italy by the Romulans.

Some people say he was inspired by their practices in how he...

Then some people are fools. The Romulans were nothing more than an inferior, European reflection of the Red Sash movement, which Tran was already more than acquainted with. How many times did he have to disparage the Romulans in his letters before you people will believe the contempt in which he held them? But that’s not important. Tran saw the money they wasted on prestigious rocket programmes or attempts to control the people through Motoscopy.[24] He saw how they seemed to be under the control or influence of Russia, behind the scenes. (A few audience murmurs) That Italy was being used as a proxy by Russia, a testbed both internal and external – was it worth trying to launch artimoons into orbit? Could the people be controlled in this way? Would the Alexandrine Empire collapse if challenged? Whilst smiling Strange Aleks and the Imperial Soviet made noises about peace and prosperity, behind the scenes other forces were already planning for the next war.

Didn’t Tran guess that the Russians were also...

Yes, exactly. He knew the Russians had been selling arms to recoup some of their earlier losses and get rid of some obsolete arsenals. In particular, whether by chance or design, many of the countries they sold weapons to were neighbours of China.

It’s still debated whether the Russians were knowingly trying to build an anti-Chinese alliance or not. All the records were lost when...

Conveniently so, yes. But if you ask me, no they did not do it intentionally. The whole Russian government suffered from Legion-syndrome, which no single central strong figure as it had been designed for. Their right hand did not know what their left hand was doing. But Tran realised he could use this to his advantage.

Didn’t he get himself reassigned to...

Initially to the Siamese consulate in Kiev, yes, in 1941. Then the consulate in Moscow in 1943 and finally to Petrograd itself in 1946. He made all the contacts he needed there. The Russians never realised how much they were being manipulated.

So this accidental anti-Chinese alliance became...

A real one. And he used other contacts he had built as well. Panchala ended up being armed by both France and Russia at the same time. Some people say it was an act of spite, French doradists who had opposed decolonisation now arming one of Bisnaga’s enemies after Bisnaga finally became independent in 1951. But it wasn’t. All of them were manipulated by Tran, on a global scale. Not bad for a refugee turned thief from a tiny village.

Well, that’s what some people claim...

He finally returned to Siam in 1953. All his enemies’ attempts to deal with him had failed, for his legend had been kept alive and he was more popular with the people than ever. Just in time. For soon the Crash of 1955 would come, and the new Red Garuda Party was looking for a charismatic leader to reawaken the public anger over inequality and lead them to victory. Victory, and then war with China to avenge the humiliation of Guiling...

Extract from recorded lecture on “The Imp in Your Pocket” by Michael Mantarakis, recorded November 16th, 2020—

As I said before, the Passau System secured economic prosperity and stability for most of the world for a full two decades of sustained growth, from 1935 to 1956. Some nations experienced growth for some years before that as well; the move to the Gold Standard was driven by the way the wind was already blowing. Even more so than the electrum-based Antwerp System of the late nineteenth century, Passau represented a recognition by the leaders of all powers, both small and great, that cooperation on building global economic stability was in the interests of all. The great irony is that, then and now, advocates for such economic hegemony were accused of being crypto-Societists (Audience murmurs) whilst, in reality, the Combine was the only significant power which opposed Passau! And came to regret it, as I discussed near the start of this lecture with the ‘Oil Standard’ errors of Kalvus which ultimately precipitated the Silent Revolution.

There is another irony here, however. For all the chaos unleashed by Kalvus’ policies, he had been quite right to conclude that control of oil – black gold – would be more important for the world’s future than control of gold itself. It is easy for us now, surrounded by evidence of climatic amelioration, to condemn past generations for their reliance on the seductive kiss of the subterranean treasure which has threatened to destroy our environment and turn our oceans to acid.[25] At the time, though, even before the science of climatic amelioration was widely accepted,[26] oil represented as much a problem as an opportunity. Nations that had enjoyed self-sufficiency of power in the age of King Coal and Queen Steam, such as England, Belgium and Germany, were now stymied by the growth of oil-derived engines. The tables were turned as oil fields were sometimes discovered in nations poor in coal, as well as in the Combine of course. However, not all of the nations that discovered a bounty in black gold would enjoy a happy fate, for it often only made them targets for outside exploitation – occasionally freewheeling corporate entities, but more commonly national actions. For example, Burma – where oil had been discovered way back in the eighteenth century – did not see the profits of her bounty trickle down, if you’ll pardon the expression, to her people; it all went to Siamese and Bengali companies under national auspices.

The fate of the Combine after Kalvus’ disaster had made it clear to everyone that fluctuations in the price of oil made it a dangerous commodity. The global economy might be based on gold, whose price could be maintained by transoceanic agreement as new gold fields were slowly discovered, but oil was far more volatile. Vast wealth could suddenly be discovered by a surveyor, perhaps beneath an international border which then would become a potential spark for war. For example, discovery of oil in the Caucasus added a new layer of tension between Russia and the Alexandrine Empire and Eternal State, just as the coalfields of the Ruhr had influenced the foreign policy of past generations of Germans and Belgians. At least the Caucasus oilfields were far from such rivals under the borders of the era, but the same could not be said of those in Manchuria, which straddled the Sino-Russian border. Suddenly, that border, seemingly settled after 1922, became a source of tensions again – the real source of the shift in Chinese policy, not all that nonsense you may hear about that Ayutthai dictator, Tran!

Where was I? The oilfields of the Caucasus, as well as the Caspian Sea and the Ural region, meant that Russia was one of the few major powers that could be reasonably be said to be self-sufficient in oil in the event of war. The Empire and the Combine were the other two. Here in the Empire, there were plenty of small oilfields across the nation, but the biggest ones were in Nueva Irlanda, and some New Irish people grew rich off that. California also had some independent reserves which helped the country maintain its neutrality, less subject to outside pressure than she might have been. China’s more limited fields constrained her foreign policy, while France – now stripped of her colonies – found herself on the back foot when it came to independent action. The same was true of other European powers, some of which tried to cling vainly to coal and steam, preferring self-sufficiency over efficiency. Phew, that was a tongue-twister! (Audience chuckles) Not that France’s colonies proved to have much oil regardless. Neither the formal loss of Pérousie in 1946 – though she didn’t fill her empty throne till she elected Francesco of Venice in 1948 – nor Bisnaga in 1951, was the cause of France’s troubles. The focus on oil had simply shifted the economic battlefield, just as the discovery of paradox engines would bring xanthium reserves to the fore in turn. Conversely, and almost uniquely in Europe, Societist Danubia enjoyed a kind of independence due to the oilfields of Civitatem Oleum (formerly Ploești) which were, again, uncomfortably close to the border with Russian-controlled Romania.

What’s important to understand was that the architects of Passau, and especially their successors in the boom years of the 1940s, understood that the volatility of oil was an unpredictable threat factor and one that must be managed. There was little sense in competitive use of oil as an economic weapon, as Kalvus had envisaged that the Societists might try. Any short-term gain at damaging an opponent could just as easily rebound on oneself. A fluctuating oil price meant that a nation or company might pay thousands to set up rigs and refineries in a region, only for them all to suddenly become uneconomical as the price fell. Then, six months later, the price might rise again and make the oil economical again, but by this point the infrastructure had fallen into decay and the workers had moved on. Meanwhile, of course, the whole economy could slow down because vehicles powered by spirit or sun-oil suddenly become more expensive to run, and so the supplies they would have transported for other industries became more pricey, leading to a spiral of decline. It was in the interests of no-one to allow such a situation.

As such, regular economic conferences – like those under the Antwerp System that had corrected the gold-to-silver ratio of the Electrum System – led to the finance ministers of the great powers agreeing limits on exploitation and reserves to maintain a (roughly) steady price point. If a refinery in Nueva Dublin burned down, Petrograd might release a portion of her reserves to help maintain the price of oil, and vice versa. Conversely, if new oil fields were suddenly discovered, or a new refining technique made previously uneconomic ones now exploitable, Fredericksburg might agree to change the ratio of oil going to reserve storage in order to prevent a glut on the market.

Despite requiring agreements between mutually-suspicious powers, this system was maintained for two decades with little incident. The latter part of the period was the age of the ‘celebrity diplomat’, but the real important work happened in the backroom with the finance ministers and corporate leaders of the oil firms. Such men – and in this age they were nearly always men – worked to keep the playing field even as new discoveries, both of oilfields and technology, changed the landscape. The biggest of these, in the early 1940s, was the increase in oil exploitation in Guinea following the development of new offshore drilling techniques. The discovery of oil in the former Russian America also shifted the balance. Persia’s oil had been known for a while, but early estimates of her reserves – largely exploited by the Russians in this era, of course – kept being revised upwards. It took frantic activity, like that of a juggler keeping a dozen plates spinning, if you’ve seen that political cartoon, to maintain the deceptively rock-like stability of the Passau System. Those in the know called it the Oleic Equilibrium.

In the end, of course, that stability came to an end. There are a number of reasons for that, not all of them purely economic. However, probably the biggest factor behind the Crash of 1956 was the Arab Oil Shock. The first oil in the Arab lands – as opposed to Persia – was discovered in 1953 on the southern coast of the Persian Gulf.[27] However, early wild rumours were dismissed by flinty-eyed economists who’d heard all the wild tales before. One only has to look at films like 1951’s The Ice Rush, itself based on a pulp novel of two years earlier, which imagines a scramble for Australia based on oil reserves being discovered beneath the ice! The writer was thinking of a number of similarly exaggerated claims that had done the rounds in this new and increasingly-interconnected world of Photel and quisters.

Not this time, though. It slowly, too slowly, became apparent that the oilfields of Araby and Mesopotamia were vaster than anything that had been seen before. The so-called ‘Empty Quarter’ turned out to be anything but. Both Araby and Mesopotamia were under the rule of the Alexandrine Empire, yet had already been increasingly restive about it. Now, the thought that the Mesopotamians and Arabs might see no more of their oil bounty’s profits than the Persians had of that extracted by the Russians, was the spark needed to ignite full-on revolt. The rallying-cry of the people was ‘Arab Sand, Arab Oil!’

Yes, it wasn’t only the sudden and unexpected appearance of huge amounts of oil that upset the Passau System. It was also that, as the architects of the system desperately starved the world markets of oil in order to accommodate the speculative future shock of the new refineries, they were then snatched away in turn as the Arab peoples rose in revolution against their Egyptian rulers. The pendulum had been swung violently in one direction and then hurled back in the order, and that was enough to crack the foundations of the Passau System. The stock markets of New York, Paris and Beijing all crashed, while Petrograd pre-emptively suspended interconvertibility of gold and triggered a wave of copycat protective measures that worsened the slump. The comfortable image of eternal economic boom had been shattered. The golden years were ended.

Perhaps the Crash of 1956 could still have been fended off, after a few years of managed recession, if it had not coincided with transoceanic political events that triggered a climate of nations jealously guarding their oil and gold reserves, now preparing for war. But the world was not so fortunate, as a fateful bullet wended its way to its fatal destination in the streets of Prague…

*

Extract from recorded talk at the Chinese Aerospace History Exhibition in Philadelphia by Aero Major Liang Yaqin, recorded December 2nd, 2020—

And now we come to this mighty machine, from the days when the rumbles of global war again began, sadly, to be heard. This is the Fuzhou Mechanics FZ-51, as it was named when it was first produced. After the merger following the economic crisis in 1956, it better became known as the Fumei FM-520, or more commonly as the Jindouyun. (A few sounds of recognition from audience) Some of you may know that term. It is sometimes translated as Cloud Trapeze or Cloud Somersault. In Journey to the West, it is the spell that the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, uses to leap 108,000 li – about thirty-three thousand American miles – in a single bound. This Jindouyun is not quite that fast, but it certainly left most other aerocraft of its day behind – and left a trail of clouds behind it, so it’s not surprising that nickname caught on.

Yes, the Jindouyun is China’s first surgecraft. But not the first in the world, of course. That’s a whole Heritage Point of Controversy in itself, with every nation claiming its own inventor. It all comes down to which stage of the process one considers to be a ‘true’ surge engine, for there was certainly early theoretical work going on in many nations as far back as the 1930s.[28] As with rockets and ypologists, the other wonder technologies of the age, though, there were profound limitations which bottlenecked progress on practical surge engines. Materials, aerodynamics and more remained problems. It wasn’t until the end of the 1940s that surge engines moved from the minds of theoreticians to the more practical ones of engineers.

I will be quite humble and not try to claim the first surge engine for China. (Audience chuckles) But there are many possible claimants, of course. Should we recognise Étienne Bouvard, the Franco-Pérousien inventor who crashed his prototype Icare into the side of Ouloureux in 1952 during a test run which may or may not have succeeded?[29] What about José Fonseca, the brilliant Guatemalan, whose designs were proved to have worked when some enthusiasts finally built them in 1983, but who lacked for funding and wherewithal to do it himself in his lifetime? Or your own Dame Bellissa Mattersey, one of the first female aerospace engineers, who created a prototype design in 1951 but was turned down by the Imperial Aeroforce? (Mixed audience cheers and boos) Any one of them could be argued to be the first.

The one which really made a splash, however, was Germany’s Alaric Meitner. Meitner did not work alone, of course, but he is the one history has remembered – certainly in Germany. Having obtained funding from the Luftkorps for what was supposed to be a secret project, the audacious Meitner then smuggled it into the Paris Aero Show of June 1953 and showed off his Feuervogel craft. Meitner was immediately at the centre of controversy in Germany, especially when he was arrested for his breach of secrets, was offered a pardon by the Emperor, and then contemptuously turned it down – part of the cavalcade of disaster that the German monarchy was going through at the time.

More importantly, though, the world had been wowed and shocked by the feats that even the early and unreliable Feuervogel was capable of. While some conservatives dismissed the idea of surge engines as a gimmick, aero forces were still a new enough idea that they weren’t as choked with such deadwood as admiralties were with those wedded to lineships over hiveships. No, much of the world immediately began researching their own surgecraft. It was only four years before the Sunrise War broke out, but it was enough for early surgecraft to displace their aeroscrew predecessors in most of the great powers’ aero forces. Thus all the beautiful aerodromes I showed you earlier mostly never saw active service. There was a perception that they had all become obsolete overnight. In the long run that was doubtless true, sadly, but there is some evidence from the war that the early, less than perfect surgecraft did always beat their refined aeroscrew counterparts in a one-on-one. Nonetheless, surgecraft were ‘the thing’ and enjoyed frantic funding even throughout the financial crisis of the Crash of 1956. It’s not clear whether the Combine was working on them before 1953 or not, but certainly embraced them alongside the nations.

It’s interesting to speculate how the world of aerocraft might have been different if surgecraft had first been developed in wartime. Perhaps they might have been kept a secret for longer, rather than rapidly proliferating across the world – perhaps held back for use in a grand offensive, like the rockets of Operazione Fulmine. If they had had to compete with aeroscrew craft in combat immediately, maybe the naysayers would have had their day, for – as I said – those early craft certainly had their problems. In other circumstances, the high-profile crashes whilst attempting to land navalised versions on hiveships might have scuppered their reputation, too, before the lessons were learned.

One of the reasons why surgecraft were seen as so vital at the time, of course, was the perception that a new weapon had emerged that threatened to shatter the sense of invincibility of aerodromes – and rockets. Speed was everything, for suddenly, nations had more warning of attack than ever before. Photrack had arrived…

*

Extract from recorded lecture on “The Physics Revolution” by Alan Holmes and Dr Mackenzie Todd, recorded October 28th, 2020—

Photrack is said to have first arrived on the scene in 1942, but earlier experiments date back much farther. In the 1920s, experiments with Photel showed that waves reflected and rebounded in a manner superficially similar to echoing sound. Back in 1930, the Lithuanian inventor Antanas Almenas developed a means of detecting ships in Koronagrad Bay when it was obscured by mist and fog. Almenas’ device used a Photel beam which would be reflected from an invisible ship and be received by a parabolic detector, setting off a signal bell. His ‘Obscuroscope’ was not directional, needing to be steered and aimed in a particular direction, but still sparked enough interest among the Russian military to receive funding.[30]

Russian interest in rangefinding with Photel was picked up on by Scandinavian intelligence agents, and soon it had leaked out as an area of interest. It wasn’t until 1942 that the technology was sufficiently perfected to be usable, however. There was some secrecy in the early days before that rapidly fell apart, but in the English-speaking world we regard Photrack as being invented by Eric Lenihan of the St. Lewis Institute of Technology. Many more were working on it, however, and it soon emerged as one of the technological wonders of the age.[31]

Photrack, to simplify greatly, works by bouncing Photel bursts off aerocraft, or anything else, detecting the burst as it ‘echoes’ back, and measuring the time in between the pulse being sent out – at the speed of light – and its echo arriving.[32]

Really, the term ‘echo’ is misleading. Photel is not sound. Nor is it really comparable to the sonolocation of the bat, as is often stated. If anything, that is more analogous to Echotrack beneath the waves…

Yes, right. I make it sound simple, but the effectiveness of Photrack was highly dependent on the quality of the Photel signal used.

Be more specific than ‘quality’…

All right, being able to produce short-pulselength signals, especially from Photel systems that were small and portable. That proved challenging. There were a number of early technological breakthroughs in Photrack, but what really made the difference was the development of the hollow magnino by the Belgian scientist, Karel Snieders, in 1947.[33] I won’t go into the details of how it works, but suffice to say that all such systems set up an oscilating current in which surfinos eddy and rotate, in a way similar to howe they do in a modern Ring of Gordias.

Well, ‘all’ is a bit of an exaggeration…

According to the laws of electrodynamics, they emit light, and the quantity of energy produced by the process means that that light falls in the right Photel range. The magnino was widely copied, and the arms race in further development of Photrack continued.

One can only wonder what horrors might have been visited upon the world if Photrack had been developed in wartime, or kept secret until war came. Imagine one nation with the ability to see the aerodrome bombers of the enemy coming, yet the reverse not being true. Or worse! The nations had all stockpiled vast reserves of death-luft-armed rocket missiles in the deceptive peace of the Electric Circus age, especially after 1950 when the Romulans proved that the problems that had held back rocket development could be overcome. What held them back from being used? Decency, a sense of common humanity? Perhaps. But far more so was the horrible calculation that one would be retaliated against. But if one nation had Photrack and the other did not, its leadership might convince itself that it could counter or stop the other’s missile arsenal before it launched, and then…

Well, I think that’s reading too much into it. Regardless, it’s an irrelevant question, for soon practically every nation had Photrack. And, of course, it would play a vital role in the Sunrise War…

*

Extract from recorded lecture on “The Road to the Sunrise War” by Stephen Gresham, recorded November 20th, 2020—

In 1956 India was a subcontinent transformed. On the surface, it might seem like a bright new dawn for its nations, newly freed from the shackles of colonialism. Indeed, for the first time in a staggering four hundred and fifty years, no part of the subcontinent was under the rule of European empires.[34] (Impressed reaction from audience)

Yet this moment of hope concealed a powder keg. The borders dividing the land had been drawn by outsiders according to arbitrary requirements, and bore little resemblance to either the long-obsolete subdivisions drawn by the Paleo-Mughals or any attempt at rational, geographic natural borders.[35] Many of them were also little-defined, especially in the lands of the former Aryan Void in the north which had gradually, inconsistently, fallen under the sway of various powers in their aftermath. India’s nations had achieved the independence they possessed in 1956 by a variety of means. Some, like Bengal and, more recently, Bisnaga, were former colonies whose people had achieved control of the existing colonial power structures. Others, like Gujarat and Rajputana, had originally been set up as client states (in their case by Persia) from the wreckage of the Mahdi’s reign, and now had drifted into greater freedom – though still influenced by Kalat. Then there were the states which had won independence through revolt, albeit still sometimes taking on infrastructure and systems set up by their former colonisers. These include nations like Pendzhab, the Gorkha State, and of course Panchala. There were even countries that did not quite fit into any category, like Kandy, or Ceylon as it was called at the time. That’s really illustrative of the sheer diversity of the region, making it difficult to come up with comprehensive classifications.

However, you’ll notice I’ve left out some critical nations of India which you’ll be familiar with today. Much of the Deccan Plateau in central India was taken up by two ramshackle entities which, even more so than colonial possessions like Bisnaga and Bengal, had been set up purely for moneymaking purposes – and not just by Europeans.

In the west, between Bisnaga and Gujarat, lay what had become known as the Concan Confederacy. One Bisnagi historian called it ‘a land of ashes built upon ashes’. It had existed in a perpetual cycle of revolt, partly driven by defence of the Hindu religion and partly by refusal to be ruled by outsiders, going back to at least the 1400s. The Sultanate of Bijapur revolted against the Bahmanis, Shivaji overthrew the Bijapuris to found the Maratha confederacy, then that was weakened by the Neo-Mughals and exploited by the Portuguese. Then the Mahdi’s mujahideen drove a trail of destruction through the region and Portuguese power collapsed in the mid-nineteenth century. But Meridian corporate control replaced it, in the form of Senhor Oliveira’s Company. Indeed, it was here, in 1884, where the Meridian government first discovered it had lost control of the UPSA’s companies and become subject to them in turn. A fickle beast, the company then promptly abandoned the UPSA when facing American attack during the Pandoric War and turned to French protection instead.[36] That status quo, existing as a wild frontier appendage of Bisnaga with conveniently flexible legalities, had existed for the following five decades as the world changed around it.

To the east was the Guntoor Authority. This body had gradually taken shape in the 1870s after the Great Jihad had finally collapsed in on itself. It took the place of the former states of Guntoor, Haidarabad, the Circars and others, which had effectively been destroyed by the ravages of the mujahideen. Initially it was referred to as the International Guntoor Region and was ruled from the International Settlement in the city of Guntoor, which rather arbitrarily drew spheres of influence for national and corporate powers within the land. Everything was up for grabs to these ruthless exploiters, and this, of course, means that the Mahdi was ultimately responsible for instigating far more colonialism than he ever ended. (Audience murmurs) The people of the shattered lands had no way to resist, and after their cities had been burned and their lives ruined by the fanatical mujahideen armies, many were grateful even for a crust from the table of the Guntoor companies. Not all, or even most of, them were European. This was a new era for colonialism, with the presence of many Corean, Meridian, Californian – and, yes, American companies. (Audience murmurs). Sergei Voroshilov exposed the corruption and exploitation there in 1889, but all that resulted was the wild frontier being reconstituted as the Guntoor Authority, now a properly centralised entity with some semblance of a governing body. But nonetheless, the principle remained unchanged; it was merely that the corporations were now dominating land after paying lip service to that central authority.

Now, both the Concan Confederacy and the Guntoor Authority owed their existence to the continued presence of colonial and corporate forces, which could enforce their will either through the application of money or the cold steel of private sepoy armies. This was also true of the very different, much smaller state of Delhi in the north, between Panchala, Rajputana and Pendzhab. This state, formally if questionably claiming descent from the Paleo-Mughals and the Sultanate of Delhi, was home to most of the remaining Muslims and Buddhists who had formerly flourished under Chinese rule in ‘Jushina’ but were now facing persecution in decolonised Panchala. And Narayan Kumar, of course, claimed Delhi as a ‘historical’ Panchali territory.

All of this had held together during the years in which Bisnaga had been French, Panchala – or Jushina – had been Chinese, Ceylon had been Belgian, Pendzhab had been Russian, Bengal had still had the trappings of Anglo-America and Persia had been around to influence the west. A delicate balancing act had kept all those colonial powers around the edges of the subcontinent to their own spheres of influence, with Concan and the Guntoor Authority acting as carefully-undefined frontier zones in which they could jockey for position. In hindsight, it was dubbed the ‘Deccan Dance’ or ‘Deccan System’. But it was only recognised for what it was after it crumbled.

Bengal had already achieved effective independence, and its own identity, at the start of the Electric Circus era. Russia had been driven from Pendzhab during the Black Twenties, and failed to reconquer it in 1936, closing a chapter of history. China withdrew from an unwinnable war in Panchala in 1940. After years of wrangling, Bisnaga was granted full independence in 1951, but French control had started to break down long before that. The remnants of other colonial empires on the Malabar Coast, already effectively covered by French sovereignty, followed as little more than a footnote of history. Persia was under the Russian bootheel, and though her vassal of Kalat continued to exert influence over Rajputana and Gujarat, the balance had definitely shifted in the direction of rule from within, not without, the subcontinent.

All of this represented a wind of change unlike anything that had been seen before. It also dramatically destabilised Concan and the Guntoor Authority. In particular, the final lowering of the French flag in Madras was a signal that French regulars would no longer be there to back up the sepoy battalions (which now became the regular Bisnagi Army) if Bisnaga’s inherited authority in those regions was challenged.

India was a powder keg. It was also a landscape of contrasting visions. Bengal’s form of democratic corporatism, gradually reformed from within, is well known. States like Kalat, Gujarat and Ceylon remained traditional monarchies, but with pressure from within for reform. Pendzhab’s leaders attempted to build a federal republican form of government with religious tolerance, stymied by disagreements now that the external threat of Russia was seen as having retreated. The two kinds of ideologies that are usually held as being the definitive opposing poles, though, are those of Bisnaga and Panchala, at opposite ends of the subcontinent.

They are lands of contrast. Panchala, up on the Indo-Gangetic Plain and defined by the rivers, Hindu-supremacist, traditional cavalry warfare, light-skinned Aryan speakers of Old Eurasian languages, defined by revolt against foreign Chinese Buddhist rule. A land whose initial uncertainty over its form of governance had been replaced by a centralised, totalitarian, but effective, military dictatorship under the rule of Narayan Kumar. Conversely, Bisnaga. A coastal land defined by the sea, religiously pluralistic, infantry warfare, darker-skinned speakers of Dravidian languages, defined by pugnacious and patient but largely non-violent opposition against foreign French Catholic rule.[37]

Bisnaga accommodated the differences between the very different forces therein which had worked for independence. Half the land had been ruled by monarchies under French influence, most significantly Mysore, while the other half, mostly on the eastern Carnatic coast, had been directly ruled by France for well over a century. Many of the ordinary people who had organised for independence, including the trade unionists, wanted a republic. However, the labour leader Thomas Mathieu, a Syriac Christian, was worried about the possibility of a republic becoming an effective dictatorship of the largest religious group. Though he had no particular love for the various monarchs of Bisnaga, he saw them as a potential hedge against such domination. Note, by the way, that anti-colonial opposition in Bisnaga was pluralistic enough that Mathieu was able to join it, whereas previously Syriac Christians had been seen by the French as natural allies. A contrast to how, in Panchala, the fanatical Hindu-supremacy of the dominant rebels drove Muslims and Buddhists to continue their loyalty to Chinese rule.

The Bisnagi constitution, which came into force in 1952, enacted a new kind of governance built on compromise. To assuage the republicans, the monarchs were stripped of their former specific domains, and post-colonial Bisnaga would be divided up into multiple new provinces with consistent laws and equal rights, electing a single centralised parliament, the Natalumanran.[38] However, a new constitutional head of state position was created. This was organised on a rotating basis (Sharp audience reaction) No connection to the Societist practice! No, instead of rotating geographically, it’s more like calling a sub player to the diamondball pitch… Three years out of every ten, the head of state is the Wodeyar King of Mysore; one year it is the Venad prince of Travancore, one year the Varma prince of Cochin, and the remaining five it is a series of individuals appointed by the Natalumanran, who cannot be elected politicians. Usually they are great poets, writers, even actors and the like. From the start, the Bisnagis have taken the attitude that their governance must be pluralistic in tone. In a land like Bisnaga, there is little other option.

Thus, two very different visions for post-colonial society now sat on opposing sides of two collapsing entities that began to crumble without the colonial presence. Much of the Deccan was up for grabs. And so one front of the Sunrise War came to India…

*

(Dr Wostyn’s note)

Er...running short of time now, what with – I’ll explain later. Well, being organised, unlike some people, I did think to prepare a conclusion ahead of time – taken from the first lecture we drew material from, by Prof Greening, in his general summary of the Electric Circus period. He went on to explain how it ended...

*

Extract from recorded lecture on “The Second Interbellum: The Electric Circus” by Professor George Greening, recorded October 10th, 2020—

The age of plenty was long enough to lull people into a false sense of security. Surely history, that shelf of dusty books full of kings and dates and battles, was over. The world had changed. When the night was banished by the harsh, arrogant light of science and industry, the Spirit of Man, we could turn our backs on the mistakes of the past. Atlases were frequently updated to show new post-colonial nations, the legacy of past European domination now being swept aside. A woman sat on the American throne. A whole generation had grown up never knowing anything but artificial daylight on command, a global economy stabilised by the Passau Gold Standard and the Oleic Equilibrium, peaceful relations between nations old and new managed by the nascent ASN and a grab-bag of celebrity diplomats. Of course, even at the time, much of that was an illusion. When conflicts and disasters happened, there was a perception that they were comfortably far away from most of the people who defined the sense of the era. This was a popular age, as I’ve discussed, and the people were consumed with their own internal affairs, whether as high-minded as political reform or as trivial as the latest zig-and-zag record. It was as though the wealthy nations were insulated from the darker realities of the world by a warm layer of cotton wool, in the words of Elspeth Kennedy.[39]

In some ways it’s remarkable just how resilient that cotton wool was. Even well into the 1950s, which today in period fiction is usually presented as a period of misgivings and a gathering storm, in reality most people remained almost wilfully ignorant of those storm clouds. Events which might seem to strike a wrong note in the idyllic ‘symphony of summer’ – as the Russian writer Mironov put it – were ignored, or filtered through complacent newspapers and Photel broadcasts. The Societists were dismissed as yesterday’s news, having turned inward and consumed themselves with their own disagreements, while the proto-ASN was held up as having held them back in Africa. Counter-examples like the attempted Societist coup in Formosa in 1945 were allowed to slip to the bottom of popular awareness, or else brushed aside as being unimportant precisely because that coup had failed.

Probably the thing that came closest to penetrating the comfortable illusions of the people came in 1950, when Romulan Italy successfully launched Sol Invictus 1, the first artimoon. That was a sufficient shock, especially after years of failed rocket experiments and more years dismissing rockets as a dead-end technology, to topple major governments and radically shift scientific policy. This is probably the origin of the impression, as I just said, given in period fiction that the 1950s were a time of growing perception of trouble. But this is exaggerated. Even as the nations, and the Combine, raced to put their own artimoons in orbit, and began building up their war rocket arsenals anew, it was usually dismissed as just another kind of WorldFest or Global Games contest by other means. Obviously none of those would actually be used in a real war. That sort of thing didn’t happen anymore. Just as, because the Black Twenties were something from the last generation, clearly pandemics could never return. (Audience reaction) Exactly. I think all but the youngest of us in the audience will remember how foolish our assumptions lay a decade ago.

What was the trigger of the Sunrise War, as it later became known? There were several, from an anti-Chinese alignment in the East and reawakened border disputes, to the aftershocks of decolonisation in India, to the patient and long-term planning of revolutionaries in Persia seeking to free their country. The Arab and Mesopotamian revolts over ownership of oil, as well as other disputes concerning rule from Alexandria, were an enormous part of the war. So, of course, was the subtle return of the Societists as a threat, flying under the Photrack – another new dice-loading war technology – of all but the most insightful analysts across the world.

But, of course, the one that played the most central role in tipping the world towards war came in Europe.

In some ways, it had not been a surprise. It had been clear to everyone at the time in 1926 that the post-Black Twenties settlement, the Treaty of Vienna, was nothing more than an attempt to formalise lines of control at the end of a long and ruinous war that both sides were now too exhausted to continue. Madame Mercier cited in her diaries of the congress that, while she did not agree with a cobrist politician named Thierry Vachaud much, both agreed that this was not a true peace – merely an armistice for one or two generations.[40] In the end, it lasted longer perhaps than Mercier had feared. Long enough for Mercier to conclude her own long life, for she passed away in 1954 at the remarkable age of 86. All France, even her political opponents, turned out in a state funeral to mourn her passing. Few other than royals had ever enjoyed such a level of public mourning. She was recognised as, not merely France’s first Prime Ministress, but one of the greatest heads of government the nation had ever enjoyed. Perhaps she was lucky to rule during economic good times, but her legacy in helping to create the ASN is recognised far outside the borders of France.

It was as though Madame Mercier’s death heralded the end of an era, and finally removed the eerie frozen pause of the Black Twenties’ end. For a generation and more, there had been two Polands, divided by a fortified border known as the Frozen Front. At many points in the Electric Circus, tensions had fallen, and young French soldiers rotated into the lines would surreptitiously cross the increasingly overgrown no-man’s-land in order to trade their cigarettes with their Russian counterparts’ vodka on the other side.[41] There had been occasional ramp-ups and incidents of brief bursts of fire being exchanged across the fortress trenches, but nothing that had ever seriously threatened to disrupt the peace. The French had been fortunate that the Russians were still reeling from their defeat in Pendzhab in 1937 when the Duc de Berry passed away; before war could threaten, they seized the alienistic moment and installed the Duc de Broglie instead as King of West Poland. Some wondered if it would be a similar incident that would finally reignite conflict, as the Polish people suffered, hating both the status quo and anything that might end it.

In the end, those predictions were almost correct, yet had the geography slightly incorrect. It was not the Frozen Front through Poland that would herald the end of the Electric Circus, but the equally contentious situation in Bohemia.

Bohemia was founded as a Slavic state more than a thousand years ago, but had been bound up in the history of the Holy Roman Empire since 955. Nonetheless, for the next four centuries they were still ruled by their own native Slavic dynasty, the House of Přemyslid. I won’t go into the full details. In 1310, having died out in the male line, they were succeeded by the German House of Luxemburg, and Germans became increasingly important in the region. John the Blind, the first Luxemburg monarch, actually enters English-speaking history, as he fought on the French side at the Battle of Crécy and lost his life there in 1346. (A few audience murmurs) After a number of other incidents, including staging both the Hussite Rebellion and the start of the Thirty Years’ War, Bohemia became part of the Danubian Hapsburg crownlands and remained that way up until the Popular Wars in 1833. The people had become angry by the Hapsburgs’ failure to protect them either from Jacobin French invasion or the potato famine of the 1820s, and rose up in revolt. The character of the revolt was both Slavic and German (More audience murmurs) but the revolutionaries were uncertain whether to invite the High Saxons, Danubia’s enemy, in to protect them. The decision was ultimately made unilaterally by German-speakers in the mountainous Sudetenland region, and this dissonance would go on to define the tensions between the two groups in the country for the following century and more.[42]

Following the Congress of Brussels, Bohemia – also including Silesia – became part of the new German Bundesliga, which later evolved into the German Bundesreich after the Unification War a decade or two later. Prince Xavier Albert, who had originally been lined up as King of Bavaria (Audience reaction) Yes, well, at this time it seemed possible that Bavaria might become part of Germany...the prince became King Albert II of Bohemia instead. For a long time, Bohemia remained a fairly quiescent part of Germany. The number of German and Slavic speakers were comparable enough, with the latter given a substantial role in society, that tensions remained low. Increasing industry offered new jobs and urbanisation, which helped further mix the two groups. And, sadly, we must concede that there was the old strategy of divide and rule, pulling out other minorities to unite both groups against – most obviously the Jews.

What changed matters, principally, was the Kulturkrieg policies of Bundeskaiser Johann Georg. The Bohemian and Silesian Slavs were not his primary target, but they nonetheless suffered alongside the Jutes and others. The secret movement of Slovanská Vzájemnost – pardon my pronunciation – meaning ‘Slavs Together’, began to grow, aided of course by the Russians. Towards the end of the Pandoric War, the Russians – who had conquered Poland – managed to break through the Moravian Gate and the local Slavicists rose up in support of the invasion. King Charles III fled the country for his house’s native High Saxony. At the Treaty of Marseilles, not to be confused with the Marseilles Protocol, the Russians created a new, Slavic-supremacist Kingdom of Czechosilesia, to be ruled by John II (Ivan or Jonas), younger brother of the Grand Duke of Lithuania.[43] This encompassed most of pre-war Bohemia except a part of western Silesia, which Germany retained and appended to High Saxony.

Many German-speakers fled the new Czechosilesia, either from real persecution or fear it would come in time. But things were not exactly rosy for the Slavic Czechs as well. Any idealistic ambitions for Russian-backed Slavic rule in Czechosilesia soon received a rude awakening. 1904 saw the Prague Potato Riots as the people starved following a bad harvest, and the King had to temporarily flee to Vilnius to escape. Something that was not widely recognised at the time was that, despite the persecution of German-speakers, the ringleaders of the Potato Riots protests had been from both Czech and German communities, working together. It was ignored in Germany and Russia, but was noted by the leaders of the Vienna School Societists in Danubia, who would go on to eventually grow and dominate the country during the Black Twenties. (Audience murmurs) Of course, the immediate consequence of the Potato Riots was that the Russian army bloodily and indiscriminately cracked down, and Czechosilesia became the testbed for the Dalekodeon system of broadcasts which allowed the Okhrana to listen in on private conversations.[44] Any goodwill the Russians had obtained soon began to evaporate.

The disillusioned people of Czechosilesia thus granted their homeland a vulnerability towards attack when the Black Twenties came around. In a war mostly characterised by rigid, bloody fronts, it’s all the more remarkable that Czechosilesia, despite its mountain protections, fell so quickly. But let’s not forget that the Russo-German front of the Black Twenties was effectively an escalation of the Khivan War triggered by a failed assassination attempt on King John.[45] The German-speaking opposition leader Roderich Kreuz became a hunted man as the regime cracked down, but he was able to flee to Danubia, which refused to give him up. Danubia was able to maintain neutrality, forcing Russia to back down, and came under the control of the Grey Societists, as I said. This act of defiance began to influence how the state was seen elsewhere.

Anyway, as I said, Czechosilesia was mostly reconquered by the Germans by February 1923 following Case Charlemagne, with John fleeing to Bavaria.[46] But this is where the trouble started again. The Germans proclaimed a new Kingdom of Bohemia and, in revenge for the years of Russian-backed rule, began counter-persecuting the Czechs, even though many of them had refused to aid the Russians. Exiled Bohemian Germans who had fled to the rest of Germany were now moved back, sometimes against their will, with the Czechs who had moved onto their property now forcibly and publicly evicted. It was all another round of Kulturkrieg, and the people were sick of it. The exiled King Charles III had died during the First Interbellum and his son, Albert IV, suffered from a chronic illness which meant he was essentially just a cipher for whatever the German government wanted. Even with the forced returns of people, the German population of Bohemia had dropped so significantly that the German government implemented legally questionable restrictions on voting to exclude the Czechs from power. They could have guaranteed a larger German component if High Saxony had returned the western part of Silesia that had been annexed after the Pandoric War, but this was refused.

Post-war, industry and culture therefore failed to recover without a genuine Bohemian voice in the Bundesdiet. Bohemia was seen as a place simply to pack the Diet with sycophants elected in rigged elections. Despite the best efforts of some Hochrads and Niedderads, ultimately even the cobrist parties in Germany mostly felt it was more in their interests to make corrupt bargains with the unrepresentative placemen than to allow Czechs to vote and (it was thought) probably vote in Russian sympathisers. Bohemia never rose to its nineteenth century heights again under German rule, and once again the people were disillusioned – both German and Czech speakers.

In 1951 the chronically ill Albert IV died and was succeeded by Charles IV who, like his distant cousin Christian II of Germany, was something of a playboy wastrel. Public protests increased after his coronation, with ineffectual attempts to put them down – Christian even attempted to claim to that colourful figure Eljiso that the Societists were behind them. Ironically, what was a wild claim then...

In February 1957, both men were embattled. In the case of Christian, this was in the usual political sense, as he was seen as grotesquely unpopular in the country for his high living and fast mobiles at a time of economic crisis, the public failure of his marriage through his own adultery, and his general inability to live up to what the people expected from a constitutional monarchy. Since he came to the throne in 1940, politicians of all stripes had been increasingly working around him, and providing the money kept flowing, he did not seem to care. That had sufficed for a while in the days of plenty, where Christian was more of a public embarrassment than an object of envy. After all, Germany had enjoyed a golden age of art and entertainment, with German actors and artists being noted the world over for their innovative work in theatre, Photel-plays and now pioneering Motoscopy. It was simply that, rather than patronising and investing in such success as his predecessors might have done, or honouring those who contributed to it, Christian had been concerned only with wining and dining the prettier actresses at the public expense. No-one had approved, except possibly the tabloid press who sold more papers on the basis of endemic scandal. But now, amidst the economic del-para of the Crash of 1956, the German people began to openly question whether the country could afford such a liability as monarch.

Indeed, at a time when public welfare had become means-tested, the radical Darmstädter Komet newspaper published an editorial, playing on a recent speech by Vereinspartei Bundeskanzler Friedrich Renn railing at ‘scroungers’ falsely claiming benefits. The Komet stated that it agreed with Renn’s fiery rhetoric, but asked why the state did not act against the biggest scrounger of all, the one named Herr Christian Wettin squatting in a fine house named the Rezidenschloss? It was like something from the Popular Wars, and led to the Komet’s press being seized by the federal police – who were then promptly driven back by an angry mob of Grand Hessians calling on the name of their spiritual founding father, Pascal Schmidt. It was, the passing English writer Mary Wrekin observed, as though some scientific romantic with a chrononautic device had conjured the return of a past era into modern Germany.

Others, such as the theorist Matthias Lehman writing in the moderate Dresdner Zeitung, argued that by failing to live up to the example of his ancestors, Christian had allowed the lid hammered down on the Popular Wars spirit to be blasted aside by the increasing pressure – the old steam metaphor. He concluded his article, tellingly, with the same Biblical words from the Book of Daniel that had heralded the fall of Francis II of Danubia at the commencement of the Popular Wars: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting; your days are numbered; your kingdom is divided and given over to your enemies.[47] For such rhetoric to be found in the pages of such a mainstream paper was a shock to the system, and illustrative of just how few friends Christian had left for himself. Many of his fair-weather companions from his playboy days had quietly decamped for less volatile climes, such as the casinos of Navarre.

When I say they were both embattled, Christian and Charles, well in Charles’ case that was rather more literal! His ill father had been, at least, an object of sympathy among the Bohemian people of both stripes. Charles himself, meanwhile, discovered that once the Pandora’s Box of political assassination attempts has been opened, it is very difficult to close it again. To his credit, he did understand the important of publicly showing himself to be unruffled when a parcel bomb exploded near the Prager Burg in 1954, but he allowed himself to be swayed by advisors who told him to lock himself away. The chance to rescue public perception of him had been missed, and he was accused of showing insufficient sympathy to the inspectors and guards who had died whilst examining the bomb.

In fact, biographers have since reappraised Charles, arguing that he has been unfairly tarred with the same brush as Christian. While he had been a rake in his youth, it has since been widely recognised that he did settle down and attempt to govern as a more sober and serious monarch after acceding to the throne. But it was too little, too late. Furthermore, he was in an impossible position due to pressure from the German government – usually the elected government, I should say, not Christian. Uncomfortable as it may be for the simple historiographic pictures we like to paint for ourselves, the drive to persecute the Czechs came much more from the Bundesdiet, usually whitewashed by history, than any of the monarchs. (Audience murmurs) I gave the example of Charles’ attempt to recover from an earlier assassination attempt before. What about his attempt to marry a Czech noblewoman, Lady Žofie Czernin, in 1953 to try to bridge gaps with the estranged community? Lady Žofie had been a strident defender of the movement to protect Czech culture and celebrate the work of Czech-speaking poets. It might have made a difference, but the plan was vetoed by the German government – showing the influence that they could have wielded over the monarchs at this stage if they had chosen to.

By February 1957, it was too late. Bohemia was once again a seething mass of discontent. The Russians, who had been stoking the flames with their spies and sympathisers, sensed an opportunity. Colonel Gantimurov, consumed with his vendetta against the Imperial Soviet over his father’s legacy, had obtained Tsar Fyodor’s ear as a trusted advisor.[48] (More audience murmurs) He would go on to play a larger role in world history, yes, but for now Gantimurov was best known for his advocacy of aero power, a position that had been largely vindicated with the increase of aero flight’s importance both in the armed forces and civilian sphere during the Electric Circus era. After the Treaty of Vienna in 1926, Russia and its allies and vassals no longer shared a border with Bohemia, meaning that sending troops to support a revolt there was problematic. Whereas some generals advocated an attempt to quickly overrun West Poland – largely driven by wishful thinking, given the French fortifications there – Gantimurov, even he influenced by the values of the Electric Circus, believed that war could still be contained to a quick, self-contained coup de main that did not spread further. He argued for a mass flight of heavy transport aero craft bearing tens of thousands of aero marines, able to quickly descend and seize key locations and choke points in Bohemia to prevent a German reprisal.[49] While some early plans still envisaged an overflight of French forces in West Poland, with the hope they would not shoot first, Gantimurov instead drew up a plan by which the aero armada would stage from East Poland, take a long rounded course overflying neutral Danubian territory, and approach Bohemia from the south. Again this was influenced by Russian perceptions of Societist Danubia as Pacifist, and assumed they would not announce the operation as soon as it was detected by Photrack, but it was still more realistic than the other plans.

But it was not to be.

Bundeskaiser Christian’s stock was at a low point, even for him, in February 1957. After a loud and unconvincing public reactions campaign to persuade the people he had cut back on his lifestyle amid the economic downturn, he had then returned to the news for crashing his high-powered Sauerbronn Gepard mobile whilst returning from a drunken party. While the two young women whose mobile he’d collided with were dying in hospital, Christian’s off-the-cuff response of irately complaining that if they hadn’t made him dismiss his chauffeur, this wouldn’t have happened, served to drive even moderates among the German people to open protest.

At the same time, the government was growing even more concerned with the situation in Bohemia. Between 1952 and 1954, the Vereinspartei ministries in the Bundesdiet had been briefly interrupted by a minority Niederrad-led ministry under Gunther Köditz. Köditz, desperate to shore up his government and lacking scruples, had broken the cordon sanitaire in the Bundesdiet on Bohemia and had pushed through a law which liberalised elections there, allowing the Czechs for the first time since 1900 a free and fair vote.[50] As a ploy to remove the Vereinspartei’s pliable and reliable sycophants who ‘represented’ Bohemia in corrupt ‘elections’, it worked. However, if Köditz had hoped the Bohemian Czechs would elect Niederrad-supporting representatives out of gratitude, he received a rude awakening. Since the change was made in 1953, Bohemian Czechs – and some Bohemian Germans – began increasingly electing parties (and independents when those parties were banned) who criticised the federal government in Dresden and began arguing for greater autonomy. Greater autonomy, or even...

In 1956 the people of Prague, for the first time, were able to directly elect their Mayor. They elected Václav Stránský, a Bohemian Czech minor nobleman but one who enjoyed support across the people for his support of agriculture and good industrial relations. Tellingly, though something not picked up on at the time, he was married to a Sudeten German, Maria Magdalena von Dietrichstein. Stránský became wildly popular and, though he was a moderate on relations with the Dresden government, it was clear to the latter that he was beginning to enjoy more real authority among the people than either that government or King Charles.

The mobilecade of February 17th, 1957 was always an act of desperation. History students today may criticise it as horribly vulnerable. But Charles, at least, was fully aware of the prospect of assassination. He saw it as just one last final throw of the dice, an attempt to rescue Bohemia from an impossible situation of endemic unrest and nonfunctional government by rallying the people around him. Charles, Christian and Stránský shared an open-topped mobile – a Leupold Elefant, a grander and more stately vehicle than the ones Christian usually drope – and drove through the streets of Prague on a mission to open a new, modernised railway bridge across the Vltava River.

It would probably not have achieved its aims regardless. But we all know how it ended. It doesn’t matter how many cooler-headed analysts pointed out – even at the time – that Bundeskaiser Christian could scarcely have had time to see a bullet heading towards him and deliberately yank Stránský into its path to act as a shield for himself. (Audience murmurs) All that mattered was what the cameras at the time saw, and only still image asimcons, misleading still images, were available, for the film cameras had failed to keep up with the mobilecade. Who knows what would have happened if the Motoscopy live cameras had not broken down?

I don’t need to go into the aftermath. We’ve all seen the films, misleading as many of them are. In the space of a month, Christian was in hiding in Bavaria, Charles was missing, the German Bundesdiet had declared the throne vacated and appointed an Interrex to manage the succession – few would have dreamed that they would continue appointing Interrexes to this day, as de facto republican heads of state – and Bohemia was in open revolt against German rule.

Everything seemed to be going the way that Gantimurov and the other Russians had hoped. He was ready to launch his troops at the Tsar’s command. But then something unexpected happened.

Few commentators had noted how bipartisan, how bisectarian public discontent in Bohemia had become. The Bohemians, both German and Czech speakers, had experienced German rule and Russian rule and liked neither. Even when one group was theoretically privileged over the other, its actual experience was poor, constantly watching out for reprisals and struggling under a nonfunctioning state. Germans and Czechs were too intermixed for any kind of partition to work, at least without racial purging on a scale that not even extremists would countenance.[51] But another option remained.

Before it had been German, Bohemia had been part of Danubia. Now Danubia was ruled by Grey Societists. Yes, they publicly suppressed expression of distinct culture. But, unlike the Combine, they permitted it at home in private spaces, and did not actually prevent the teaching of Czech or German in schools, just alongside Martial Latin. Despite some criticism from the more hardcore Societists in the government, Danubia had also continued the practice of separate rotating ethnic court systems and parliaments, though the system had grown more centralised over time. Danubia was not a place where either a German could be solely German and surrounded by Germans ruling the place only for Germans, nor a place where a Czech could be solely Czech and surrounded by Czechs ruling the place only for Czechs. But given that both those prospects had been tried in Bohemia and had ended in misery for both, suddenly some people were advocating compromise. (Audience murmurs)

Not actually that suddenly. It just seemed that way to those who hadn’t been paying attention. Those Russian agents were widely outnumbered by Grey Societist sympathisers – not some sinister horde of Agendes and cadres from the Combine, but Czechs and German speakers who genuinely believed that the only way their homeland would enjoy stability and peace was as part of the Danubian Confederation. As such, the rebel Bohemian government that had seized power in the Prager Burg – led by Mayor Stránský’s brother Karel and his widow – now announced that they sought admission to become part of Zonal Rej Franziskus Habsburgus’ Zone 6. In fact, not all of Bohemia was even in what the Combine Societists regarded as Zone 6, showing how irrelevant that had become for how Danubia was governed.[52]

What came next...lies beyond the scope of this lecture. Perhaps, in the end, it did take a lot of things falling out exactly correctly – or wrongly – for the Electric Circus age to come to an end. Certain people were in the right, or wrong, place at the right, or wrong, time. Colonel Gantimurov as the Tsar’s confidante in Russia; Lucidonius Abramus as Zonal Rej of Zone 11, or effectively ruler of Spain; Luigi Garavaglia as dictator of Romulan Italy. And also people who weren’t there, the whole generation of titans that had shepherded the world through the Black Twenties, for the most part. Most were not simply retired like President Washborough, but had passed away altogether like Madame Mercier.[53] The lessons of the past had been forgotten, and the world was ready for war.

I will end with a condensed version of Jennifer Macallister’s famous poem of 1961, titled – after Elspeth Kennedy’s phrase – simply The Electric Circus. It is a bittersweet celebration of the time, told through the hindsight of what came later.

I lie before the fire and know
Mankind had vanquished every foe

The lamps are lit, the streets are bright,
The people wander through the night.

Never a care or fear, for today
Has banished the strife of yesterday.

In the city we dance and sing
With no more want for anything.

Photel sparks, Motoscope screens
War and plague are just bad dreams.

Tomorrow’s land is brighter still
Can the stars themselves meet our fill?

Yes, I lie before Science’s glow
And trust my troubles will never grow.

The lamps are dim, the streets are dark
How bitter now, how grim, how stark

My thoughts of yesterday now seem
These horrors are no waking dream.

The world has changed, but men remain
As fallen as they once became.

We fight, we die, as once we did
Our love of peace we now forbid.

The comforting glow of the surfino
Now illuminates only Death’s casino

And beneath it all, a new science yet
The Atom’s secrets are our final bet.​

Thank you. (Thunderous audience applause) Any qu—

FOOTNOTES:

[1] ‘Charlotte to Churchill, Jamestown to Johnville’ is a well-established advertising motto intended to take in all the territories of the ENA. Charlotte is the city in what was once the Province of North Carolina, also known by that name in OTL; Churchill is the outpost on Hudson’s Bay (in OTL Manitoba), named for the first Duke of Marlborough, and is intended to evoke the frozen north; Jamestown is chosen not only because it is on the east coast but because it evokes the founding of the American colonies that became the ENA; Johnville is a town on the Cygnian coast that was founded by Surcouf’s Jacobins (as Jeanville, near OTL Margaret River, Western Australia) but has recently grown and become a wealthy technology centre in TTL – it evokes the future of the country in contrast to Jamestown’s past. Note the highly characteristic TTL American habit of acting as though Cygnia is almost physically attached to North America’s west coast rather than separated by the Pacific. The Stone Towers of the Nabeeho (Navajo) are what we in OTL call Monument Valley.

[2] See Part #269 in Volume VII. Recall that Wiegel was responsible for the creation of something similar to OTL’s ‘World Island’ or ‘Heartland’ hypothesis by Halford John Mackinder.

[3] See Part #210 in Volume V.

[4] Referred to variously as Alternative Vote (AV), Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) and other names in OTL.

[5] Colour asimcony (photography) has moved at a more rapid pace than OTL, in part due to the influence of the advanced Meridian chemical industry in the nineteenth century.

[6] Recall that phanty-films means animation and simmy-films means live action – see Part #267 in Volume VII.

[7] Zachod Polka (a corruption/contraction of Zachodnia Polka, meaning Western Polka) is a term sometimes used for the popularisation of Polish and Czech music across much of the western world in this era – the original artists typically being refugees from either re-Germanised Bohemia or devastated and divided Poland. There was a particular group of of Zachod musicians associated with the Paris cultural scene in the 1940s.Carnatique refers to a form of music based on traditional southern Indian (Bisnagi) music which also entered European knowledge via France, and then developed further in France thanks to the work of both Bisnagi and French musicians. In TTL Bisnagi and Bengali music is much better known worldwide than that of northern or western India. Geli-gequ, ‘Songs of Isolation’, is a Chinese solo music style that developed during long periods of plague quarantine in 1920s and 1930s China. NB not all these were popular at the same time, there were repeated waves of fashion throughout the three decades of the Electric Circus era.

[8] See Interlude #16 in Volume IV.

[9] ‘Discrete’ or ‘discretion’ are the terms typically used instead of ‘digital’ in TTL, as opposed to ‘analogue’ (which is still called ‘analogue’). As in OTL, the distinction refers to whether the transmission or storage system directly captures an analogue of the original picture/sound/etc. or whether it first converts it into a data code and then back again.

[10] Remarkably – as mentioned in Part #267 – there is no evidence that flick-book animation existed (in OTL or TTL) until the nineteenth century, when it seems like the kind of invention that could easily have happened much earlier. The very concept of animated motion, though certainly not completely unknown (some have even argued that cave paintings use a simple form of two-frame animation!) seems to have been less obvious than it seems to us today.

[11] This is similar to John Logie Baird’s mechanical television from OTL (which first underwent test broadcasts in 1925).

[12] In OTL, drum-based mechanical television was tried by Léon Theremin (better known for his invention of the titular musical instrument) in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Similar, but more advanced systems, have since been produced by hobbyists in OTL using LEDs; ‘photo-biodes’ is the term in TTL for LEDs (light-emitting diodes). Note that LED technology in TTL is ahead of OTL – though electronics is usually behind, the limiting factor for developing blue LEDs (allowing white light and the RGB light pallette) in OTL was primarily metallurgical and chemical rather than electronic.

[13] The surfinodic beam tube is the TTL term for what we would call a cathode ray tube or CRT.

[14] See Part #287 in Volume VIII for more on Navis Estela.

[15] The speaker is being anachronistic here, as this is some years before the Democrats and Trade Unionist Alliance merged to form the Democratic Unionist Party.

[16] Songkran is the Thai new year celebration, which traditionally took place in April according to the Thai calendar. In OTL it was eventually moved in 1940 to coincide with the Gregorian new year on January 1st, but this hasn’t happened in TTL. Note the implication that Songkran has been imposed on other subject peoples part of the Siamese Empire, who traditionally would have celebrated a lunar new year like China or an Islamic new year in summer.

[17] Today in OTL called Hạ Long.

[18] See Part #255 in Volume VII.

[19] See Part #253 in Volume VII.

[20] See Part #267 in Volume VII. Note that the scale and role of these groups varied considerably – the Belgians in particular were only there because they had been ceded the already barely-notional German colony in New Guinea, and struggled to hold on to that even before the Societists eventually pushed them out, rather than being any kind of serious contender for expanding into more lands.

[21] See Parts #295 and #297 in Volume VIII for more on the Sea Celator tactics developed during these wars for control of the Nusantara.

[22] See Part #285 in Volume VIII.

[23] Because China had begun to lag behind in the late nineteenth century, see Part #269 in Volume VII.

[24] This is anachronistic as Italy had not rolled out Motoscopy by the time Tran left. He may well have seen them trying to do it with Photel (radio) though.

[25] Despite the emotive language, global warming (not all environmental damage in general) is slightly less severe in TTL. This is despite the more extensive demolition of the South American and African rainforests and an earlier-industrialising China (but a less industrialised and disunited India). The reasons for this will be explored later…

[26] As in OTL, some correctly predicted that increased carbon dioxide (or rather phlogisticated air) would lead to global warming as far back as the 1910s, but few paid much attention at the time.

[27] In OTL, oil was first discovered in Bahrain in 1932 and in Saudi Arabia in 1938. Things are lagging behind in TTL in part because of the Alexandrine Empire being more insular and suspicious of outside surveyors (as well as just the slower and less widespread adoption of petroleum in general). Some of the earlier work, not mentioned here, was done by Scandinavian surveyors in Yemen, which didn’t turn up much (hence the economists’ scepticism) but helped inspire others to look elsewhere in Araby proper.

[28] Colonel Liang is also making a value judgement here, as she is focusing on the earliest theoretical attempts at surge/jet engines in the context of aircraft (roughly equivalent to work done in the 1910s in OTL). It would be possible to push this back even further if one is focused solely on the engine itself (which in OTL could be considered to have first been a theoretical possibility in the 1900s).

[29] Oulereux is the name in TTL for Ayers Rock / Uluru. Note the somewhat tempting-fate choice of the name Icare (Icarus) for the prototype!

[30] A similar device, referred to as the Telemobiloscope, was developed by the German inventor Christian Hülsmeyer in 1904 in OTL.

[31] Remarkably, in OTL radar was independently and secretly developed in eight different countries in the leadup to the Second World War – Britain, Nazi Germany, the USA, the Soviet Union, Japan, the Netherlands, France and fascist Italy.

[32] Terms like ‘burst’ tend to be used instead of ‘pulse’ in TTL because ‘pulse’ is already commonly used in the sense that we would often use ‘wave’.

[33] Known in OTL as the cavity magnetron, and developed at the University of Birmingham by John Randall and Harry Boot in 1940.

[34] The speaker is using the Portuguese conquest of Goa in 1510 as a standard date, which is 446 years.

[35] Of course, historiographers in TTL start from the assumption that India is ‘naturally’ divided into distinct cultural regions and then wonder what the magic solution to drawing borders that would prevent wars would be.

[36] See Part #222 in Volume V and Part #229 in Volume VI. Note there is some misleading language here: the speaker makes it sound like the Sultanate of Bijapur was Hindu when it was Shi’ite Muslim; it was the united Durranis that preceded them rather than the Neo-Mughals who weakened the Marathas at the Third Battle of Panipat; and it was not primarily an ‘American’ force that tried to attack Goa during the Pandoric War.

[37] Obviously, at best a lot of this is a simplification, and some of it is outright wrong.

[38] This is a Tamil name, reflecting the dominant position of the Tamil language within Bisnaga due to it being the primary language of the Carnatic coast where the French had their power base. Though not mentioned here, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada are also official languages, as is French itself – much to the Bisnagis’ annoyance, even in the 21st century it is less controversial to use French than Tamil as the lingua franca for official documents.

[39] The author who coined the name ‘Electric Circus’, as said in the first excerpt from Prof Greening’s lecture in Part #325.

[40] See Part #300 in Volume VIII. Mercier would probably be quite pleased to learn that Greening has to tell people in 2020 whom Vachaud was!

[41] ‘No-man’s-land’ is an authorial translation, as the term is not used in TTL.

[42] See Part #141 in Volume III. Note some anachronisms here like referring to Hapsburg Austria at this time as ‘Danubia’ and the term ‘High Saxons’.

[43] See Parts #246 and #247 in Volume VI, and Part #255 in Volume VII.

[44] See Part #261 in Volume VII.

[45] See Part #278 in Volume VIII.

[46] See Part #280 in Volume VIII.

[47] Daniel 5:25-28. See Part #127 in Volume III.

[48] See Part #280 in Volume VIII for General ‘Black Ivan’ Gantimurov’s actions in suppressing the Tatar revolt during the Black Twenties.

[49] ‘Aero marines’ (named by analogy to strike marines i.e. commandos or special forces) is the TTL term for paratroopers.

[50] Note the significance of ‘since 1900’, i.e. they certainly didn’t have a free and fair vote under the Russians either. Of course, before 1900 not everyone would have had a vote either due to the more restrictive franchise of the time.

[51] Again, the fact this is considered beyond the pale, or simply unrealistic regardless of its morality, should serve as an indicator for some different paths TTL has taken compared to OTL.

[52] Archking Francis III, AKA Zonal Rej Franzikus Habsburgus, succeeded his father Leopold in 1941. Some expected this to lead to a resurgence of core Societist values at how blatant this was only paying lip service to Societist terminology whilst actually being a straightforward monarchical succession, but this didn’t materialise – partly because the Combine was still consumed with the Silent Revolution at the time. What’s a particular headache for the Combine is that Zone 6 (based mainly on the Balkans) now technically has two Zonal Rejes both claiming authority over it, in the form of the Danubian Archking and the head of the Eternal State, neither of whom really take orders from the Kapud (especially the former) or are interested in rotation.

[53] Of course Washborough was not President during the Black Twenties, but this is a common ellision due to him being seen as ‘the only political leader worth his salt’ of the time in hindsight."