Dale Cozort’s
Alternate History Newsletter
Volume 13: Number 1 --- February 2010
What Is This?
For the last fourteen years I’ve participated in an alternate history APA (Amateur Press Association) called Point of Divergence (POD). POD is a cross between a snail-mail forum and a writers’ workshop for people who are seriously into alternate history. We share stories, ideas, facts and reviews on alternate history. This is a subset (about 40%) of the zine I did for POD in February 2010. I stripped out most of the fiction, but there are a few snippets and excerpts of fiction in here. This is one of several dozen alternate history newsletters that I’ll eventually make available in e-book formats, so if you like this one, watch for more.
Who Am I?
I’m Dale Cozort, novelist, alternate history buff, and computer guy. I’m married, with two grown daughters. My first novel, Exchange is available in trade paperback and a variety of e-books formats. I also have a book-length compilation of American Indian-related alternate history essays called American Indian Victories out in trade paperback. If you like what you see here, feel free to stop by Amazon.com or Smashwords and do a search on my name. You can also stop by my website, www.DaleCozort.com, or my blog at http://dalecoz.livejournal.com.
So What Have I Been Up To?
I have three completed novels so far, and two at around seventy percent of the rough draft done. Here is the status of the five novels:
Exchange is done. Edited. Ready to be printed. Will be published by a small press called The Armchair Adventurer in late June or early July. Official print date is July 6, 2010. Yay!!! Author’s note: By the time you read this, Exchange should be available on Smashwords at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/53028. The first few chapters are available for preview in a variety of formats. If you like what you see in this newsletter, feel free to stop by and see if you like the novel too.
Char (An alternate reality/police procedural cross-over) rough draft is done, as you know, and it has gone through numerous edit passes. It still needs yet another edit pass. That’s coming as soon as I get a couple of other things out of the way.
All Timelines Lead To Rome: rough draft is done, and I’ve done one complete edit pass. I went ahead and entered it in the ABNA contest, but it still needs more work. I’m looking for Beta Readers in case any of you are interested in seeing the whole thing in one swell foop.
Mars Looks Different: Rough draft still not done—probably at about 80%. There are some good things in there, but it’ll need a lot of work once I finish it.
Snapshot: Rough draft maybe three-fourths of the way done. This is my top priority for the rest of February. My goal is to get it finished by my birthday, February 25. That will take some doing.
As you may have noticed, I’ve gotten serious about this being a novelist thing. I have a big birthday (one with a five or zero) in about 16 days, and I feel like time is wasting. If I’m going to do this thing now is pretty much the time to do it.
Of all the stuff I’ve written, I think Snapshot has the most potential. I could easily write twenty novels in the “world” and barely scratch the surface of the possibilities.
What are the highlights of this issue? I have quite a bit more Snapshot. I also unenthusiastically included more of Mars Looks Different. This section definitely needs work. There is a large section of Scenario Seeds this time, which I hope will inspire you, and an AH challenge which I hope you accept. There is also a short story fragment that I wish I knew the rest of the plot for. It’s called Martian Upload, and has nothing to do with Mars Looks Different.
This last paragraph is a bit of a cheat. I’m writing it after I’ve seen all of the zines for this distro. Based on what I’ve seen, it looks as though a lot of people took my advice on the way to approach reading Snapshot, were totally baffled about what was going on, and gave up on it. If that was the case, please do give it another shot. It will grow on you as you figure out what is going on. I honestly believe that it is the best thing I’ve ever written by far. If you’re baffled by what is going on, try reading page 44 of my zine for last issue first, then see if the story makes sense. I’ll have to figure out some way to make the first part of the story more accessible.
Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s latest, got cancelled. Grrrr. Aargh. I was getting into that show. I’m going through the first four seasons of Supernatural and enjoying it. Surprisingly good stuff. I like the fact that they show up in non-generic places outside of New York and LA. There was an episode in Rockford Illinois and a couple in Lawrence Kansas
Fiction Section
Martian Upload
Note: Fair Warning-this is a fragment that may or may not go any further than it already has. This first part came to me all in one swell foop at one sitting. There are no guarantees that I’ll figure out a rest of the plot. My subconscious is still working on this, but I don’t know where it’ll go with it if it goes anywhere.
I’m not really on Mars. The real me is probably asleep now, snoring softly. It’s two in the morning back there, on a cool January morning, with the blankets pulled up around my neck. If the me back there wakes, the bed will be warm and comfortable and the room cold. He/I will stir, snuggle closer to Elaine, savoring the feel of warm, soft female flesh next to him and go back to sleep, never opening his/our eyes.
It’s cold here too, frigid, Antarctic by earth standards. The sun is rising, dim and distant in the eastern sky. My core functions switch from battery power to solar, and the batteries begin to recharge. The batteries are still young and strong. As they get older, my consciousness will go away entirely during the depths of the night, stored in non-volatile memory, and be rebooted when the sun comes up. For now I have the luxury of something very like human sleep, with dreams functioning to edit memories and choose the ones to store semi-permanently.
I cling to the tactile memories, of fingers touching, of toes squishing in the mud or arms and face caressed by soft breezes, of chocolate or tart candies on the tongue, the pleasant fatigue that comes from a long run, the warm sun on my body on a cool morning. Oddly, it’s the little everyday sensations I miss most, not highs of danger or sex. The hard metal and plastic of my current body is coated with sensors that give a crude approximation of those feelings, and I try to imagine them as the real thing.
I try to imagine myself with a human face, with legs and arms, with nose and mouth, with hunger. I’m just like the others I see roaming the Martian surface around me, though. Twelve thin, insect-like legs. Long, sensor-filled antenna front and back to feel the ground, test the winds, and feel the heat, or more likely the frigid cold. Faceted eyes like an insect, eight of them scattered on my head and body, though I can only focus on two of them at the same time. Look mom, I have eyes in the back of my head. They tried models where the input from all of the eyes went to central processing simultaneously. The uploaded minds quickly did the cyber equivalent of curling up into a fetal ball and sucking their thumbs. Info overload.
They say the Mars survey and preparation robot bodies are cute, and from a distance, from the perspective of the me back on Earth I can see that. Mars exploration has to ultimately pay for itself, either financially or politically, and putting our uploaded minds into cartoon insect bodies works. It’s a mesh of the practical and public relations. There is a reason why insects are so common. Their body plan works, and works with low processor overhead. Of course the program managers back home did make a few modifications to the design. More legs for better traction on the treacherous Martian surface. More eyes so that I can record more of the surface as I wander. Retractable hand-like appendages, though I can vouch for the fact that they don’t hold a candle to a real hand. A beetle or armadillo shape to cut heat loss and shield the vital bits from the many things that can go thud on Mars.
And I volunteered for this. At least my original did. The one safely asleep back on earth. The one who sometimes wishes he could spend a day or two in my place, exploring and building over here. Tell you what, dude: let’s swap for a day or two. I promise I’ll swap back. Yeah right. Of course I would. In reality, swapping isn’t an option. The upload is one-way, and apparently a subset of the original. So, they sent a subset of my mind to Mars in a two-foot long plastic beetle and I didn’t even get a lousy T-shirt. Well, maybe the original me did, the one sleeping back home.
When I say that Mars is cold, dim, and windy I’m understating the issue. When I say that the work here is ninety percent boredom and ten percent terror I’m exaggerating only slightly. There is the one or two percent where Mars shows a cold and alien beauty. No Dejah Thoris. None of those tentacled thingies with death rays and crappy immune systems. Just a harsh, dry, cold, dangerous landscape shaped by wind and chemical processes. And maybe the things that flit at the corner of our eyes, the things that move at night but never close enough or clearly enough for us to identify them.
Of course they could be a mass delusion, something that we see, or rather half-see because we expect to. If they really are there they leave no signs behind them, and so far they have not interfered with our transformation of this tiny corner of Mars into a logistical base for the true humans that may or may not eventually follow us.
The broadcasts from home haven’t talked too much about that lately, which I take as a bad sign. I worked until my batteries went dead building a house on Mars, and nobody came? Not too catchy, but it could happen. The program isn’t subject to the whims of congress, thank god, but the whims of a corporate bottom line can be almost as bad. Oh well. We’re building to last. If someone comes in fifty years or a hundred years they’ll still find a nicely constructed, pressurized greenhouse with carefully tended rows of partially Mars adapted plants. They’ll also find living quarters, along with arrays of Mars-built solar panels, and tanks for hydrogen, oxygen and purified water. That all assumes that we get our jobs done, which is a struggle, but not an unwinnable one.
We’re the best of both worlds from the point of view of the people back home, the ones snuggling in bed with their wives. Put a human brain with human experience right at the construction site all those millions of miles away on Mars. Do it without having to ship the fragile human body and all of the expensive consumables—food, water, air. Takes a lot of the expense out of building here. And if no real human ever sets foot on Mars to take advantage of that building, oh well. Nothing much lost. Not too much expense.
Do you detect a tiny note of bitterness in what I’m saying? Don’t dwell on it. At worst what we’re doing is a tiny insurance policy. If something really bad happens back on earth—a dinosaur-killer asteroid of the like—there will still be a tiny remnant of our earth on Mars until the Martian winds grinds the last of our tough bodies and our works to dust.
Mars Looks Different (Continued)
Note: Near future Earth has suddenly found itself it’s self in a different and more interesting solar system, one with terraformed and inhabited moons, Mars, and Venus, and a history of interplanetary travel that may stretch back over a million years, with rises and falls, civilizations and dark ages that stretch over a solar system. We’re a little over halfway through the novel at this point.
“I don’t know.” Henry said. “I think the bad guys are time jumbling us.”
“Huh?”
“Think about it. No cars on the road. No tractors in the fields. A new roof on a house with no electricity and no indoor plumbing. It doesn’t fit together. So it doesn’t belong together. We may be the only living humans on this world.”
“There’s got to be some other explanation. You’re scaring me.” Katrina looked at him more closely. “And you’re trying to keep from laughing. What’s funny?”
“You! I finally had you going and I couldn’t keep it together,” Henry said. He laughed out loud.
Katrina punched him on the shoulder. “That was mean.”
“You don’t get geek humor. You should have seen the look on your face. Priceless. Absolutely priceless. Actually you can see the look on your face. I got it on my cellphone.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to see. That never happened. So how do you really explain all of this?”
“Someone’s sentimental. Doesn’t want to see the place they grew up in fall down. They probably know someone in the area and have them come by a couple of times a year to make sure the place doesn’t fall down.”
“What about the pump?”
“Whoever farms the land probably uses it when they need to wash up.”
“You are mean.”
“Yeah. But I’m funny.”
“And I’ve got to call in so I don’t get fired.” Katrina paced through the dusty house, looking for cellphone reception. She found nothing. “I’m going to check upstairs.”
Henry nodded.
“Come with me.”
He shrugged and followed her. There was no reception, not even by the upstairs windows, but it was several degrees warmer on the second floor, so she found a worn out old broom and swept the worst of the cobwebs out of a corner of the upstairs. She sat down with her back against the wall, turned so she could see out the window
Henry sat beside her and thumbed through the law book. “It’s copyrighted in 1930.”
“I’m not buying the time-jumble thing again.”
“I know. I’m not trying to set you up for it.”
Katrina watched the raindrops hitting the window. The sky got darker and lightning flashed, followed closely by thunder that seemed much louder in the silent house. Raindrops hit something metallic out in the yard, making a surprisingly pleasant rhythmic sound. “I wish a car would go by.”
****
Stan and Ward wandered back to the room in back of the wall. Stan moved another of the stones away from the other and played his light on it. A sound like nails on a blackboard filled the room. He shifted the light and suddenly spheres seemed to appear near the ceiling of the room, spinning slowly and revolving around--
"The sun," Stan said. He pointed to a much smaller ball. "And Jupiter. And debris. If we didn't live on one of the pieces of debris that's how we would see the solar system.
Ward cautiously approached the globe that represented the earth. He ducked involuntarily as the moon swung by, just over his head. The earth-globe seemed to get disproportionately larger as he approached it. "Does it look bigger to you too?"
"What?"
"Earth. Did it suddenly get bigger?"
Stan shook his head. "Nope. Not from here."
The blue and green ball of earth rotated slowly in front of Ward, seemingly the size of a baseball. The illusion of a miniature earth seemed startlingly lifelike, down to clouds obscuring part of Western North America. A narrow band of water separated North and South America. He moved closer and the ball seemed to get even larger. Now he saw Greenland, mostly ice free and green.
"This isn't exactly our planet." Ward looked over at Ardith. "Are your North and South America separated by a couple of dozen miles of water?"
"No."
"Were they at one time?"
"Yes. But they connected around two million years ago."
"They aren't connected on this globe." Ward shifted his attention to Mars. The large moon emerged from behind the planet, rotating slowly toward him.
Stan slid his flashlight in the path of the moon. It went on in its course with no apparent change. "Holograms or something like them, but more sophisticated."
Ward kept moving his head toward Mars. As he got closer, the globe seemed to expand until the curve filled his vision. The view abruptly shifted to ground level, and he seemed to be in a city--a subtly inhuman city of overhead walkways too narrow for a human to comfortably walk. He came face to face with one of the inhabitants, seemingly so close that he tried to move aside to let the being pass. It was slightly shorter than him and lightly built. It resembled the giant spider monkey they had seen earlier, but the forehead was higher and the face somehow more expressive. The monkey, if that's what it was, didn't react to him. It moved along on its business, followed by hundreds and then thousands of its like. Some of them rode on large open carts. Ward saw no sign of what was moving the carts.
"Turn it off!” Ardith said. “Turn the light off. This is dangerous. It's OldTech and we don't know what it will do."
Ward reluctantly backed away from the Mars globe. "It looks like BuilderTech to me. But you're right. It may be dangerous."
Stan held the flashlight to the rock a while longer. "You're asking a lot when you ask an Astronomy geek to turn something like that off." He finally moved the flashlight away, but quickly moved toward the outer solar system. "I'm going to catch a quick look at the Kuiper Belt before it fades out."
The globes slowly faded. Ward turned to Ardith. "Do you know what this is? Have you run into this kind of thing before?"
"Not exactly. Any OldTech and especially anything BuilderTech is hoarded, so I wouldn't necessarily know if there was something like this."
"Fabulously valuable," Stan said. "I saw your eyes when you looked at the. We saved your life and you saved ours. Are we still on the same side?"
Ardith didn't say anything for a long time. Finally she said, "For now. My loyalties are to my people and that may bring us into conflict."
Stan nodded. "Thought so. At least you're honest about it. At the moment it won't be a problem because we're a long ways from getting out of here. Do you have any reason to think these things are dangerous or are you just reacting to them being something powerful that you don't understand?"
"I have no knowledge that tells me they're dangerous."
"I was watching our little captive and she didn't look like she expected anything dangerous to happen," Mallory said. "You might want to question her about where she came from and what this stuff is. How to handle it information would be good too. We need the information in those rocks or holograms--survival of Earth-type need it."