There actually seemed to be a bit of interest in the idea I posted a few days ago for an alternate history book idea I’ve been tinkering with for a while. So I’ll take it off the “nice, but probably never gonna happen” list and bump it up to “Hmm. Maybe…”
This is planned to be an official history, with the (tentative, subject to change) title: “Pax Orionis: A History of the Third World War and Its Aftermath.” Written in the alternate history 2014, it focuses on nuclear pulse propulsion, how it began in the fifties, turned into a reality as a result of a small nuclear war in the sixties and became a dominant force in geopolitics until the Third World War in the 1990’s (currently scheduled for 1994, so the book is a “20th anniversary” thing). This alternate world is quite a different place due to some very small changes that quickly spiral into massive consequences. WWIII is as bad as it gets; somewhere in the history will be population tables from before the war, right after and as of 2014, with discussions of the possibility that within the next X years the planetary population might make it back up to one billion. But on the other side, the war leaves translunar and interplanetary infrastructure largely intact; while Earth is trashed, the universe is now open and the ships are there.
In looking at what I have already put together, I’ve got about 30 pages more or less cribbed from my Nuclear Pulse Propulsion book, and a fifteen page outline of the alternate history. The history will be changed considerably from what I originally wrote; the original scribblings were in support of a collaboration with another feller, but now it’s a one-man show and a lot of stuff I’ve written will be dumped or greatly altered.
Being an official history, the usual form of third person fictional narration doesn’t work, and there are some aspects of the story where I’d really like to include that (some of the war events, for example). An idea I’ve been playing with is having the authors of the official history including snippets from autobiographies, diaries, novels and screenplays. This is not how official DoD histories are usually put together these days… but Pax Orionis is a whole different world. It is of course a very, very bad world with a whole lot of dead folk, blasted cities and whole nations that have been simply erased; but history shows that massive devastation is often an opportunity for new things.