Showing results by author "Philip James" in All Categories

The Cuban Missiles Crisis didn't end peacefully and the '"swinging sixties" didn't happen. On Saturday, October 27, 1962, American and Soviet geopolitical brinkmanship resulted in the most terrible war in human history. The forever changed world that remained when the thermonuclear fires had burned themselves out is the world of Timeline 10/27/62.

The Great Society is the third verse of the American story of Armageddon. To its friends and enemies, alike the United States seems to have emerged from the October War battered, bruised, but invincible. However, 13 months after the cataclysm terrible wounds remain unhealed and the nation of liberty is riven by conflict. The United States is a country desperately looking to re-find its way; to re-discover its sense of nationhood and purpose.

New York - July 1976 - in a world in which New England remains the sparkling jewel in the crown of the British Empire. It is the day before Empire Day - July 4 - the day each year when the British Empire marks the brutal crushing of the rebellion dignified by the treachery of the 56 delegates to the Continental Congress who were so foolhardy as to sign the infamous Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on that day of infamy in 1776.

In the alternative timeline of the post-Cuban Missiles War the swinging sixties never happened. "Ask not of your country" is the fourth verse of the American story of Armageddon. To its friends and enemies alike, the United States seems to have emerged from the October War battered, bruised, but invincible. However, 20 months after the cataclysm, terrible wounds remain unhealed, and the nation of liberty is riven by conflict.

In the aftermath of the October War, Armageddon rumbled on. The war had been fought, won, and lost in less than a day, but regionally and locally, the fighting and the settling of scores went on for years. It was hardly surprising that the fate of three ships of the Royal Netherlands Navy should be, if not forgotten, then allowed to slip under the ‘radar’ of the world. However, no history of the October War is complete without at least a footnote about that "lost fleet". This, insofar as anybody can know at this remove, is its story.

A decade ago, the challenge was accepted: to send a man to the Moon and to return him safely to the Earth, and now a giant rocket ship designed by Wernher von Braun stands ready on the pad and the clock is counting down. Ten years ago, nobody thought it was possible. But that was then, and this is now. Mankind has chosen to sail the new sea of space, to quest after the knowledge and the dreams of the star-filled abyss, to climb the infinite ladder to the stars.

It is April 1964 in a world in which the "swinging '60s" never happened. Two Soviet tank armies have fallen on Iran and are pouring down from the Zagros Mountains onto the Iraqi floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers like wolves upon the fold. In the United States, the overwhelming popular mood is one of "America first". The "victory" of the October War has never seemed more pyrrhic, or all the death, destruction, and grief more futile, than it does in the second week of April 1964. Only one thing is certain: The world is about to be turned upside down again.

James Baldwin reading from Another Country and Giovanni's Room; WIlliam Styron reading from Lie Down in Darkness; James Jones reading from From Here to Eternity; and Philip Roth reading from Letting Go.

Fame, fortune, and beautiful models - Howard Chandler Christy had them all. Christy was the most famous American painter of the Jazz Age, a time when an elite brotherhood of New York artists dominated the publishing world. Christy had eclipsed all of them with his ''Christy Girl'', an idealized woman who redefined beauty, influenced fashion, and inspired generations of women.

It is April 1964 in a world in which the ‘swinging 60s’ never happened. War is chaos; and chaos is war. The post-October War world is at a bloody crossroads; betrayal and confusion preoccupies and distracts the West to the disasters about to befall newly remade, desperately fragile alliances as long kept secrets surface. The impenetrable fog of war spreads across the Mediterranean. Even while Malta burns and the survivors of the savage naval battle off its coast fight for their lives in the wreckage-strewn iron grey waters....

Isaac Fielding knows exactly where he stands: Things were not looking good. Upon that, at least, everybody could agree. The other thing that everybody seemed to agree about was that when, eventually, I had my day in court it was likely to be a short, bittersweet experience and that the main topic of discussion would be the manner of my subsequent execution.

The British Empire has sleepwalked, unprepared into war with the Triple Alliance, the Spanish colonies of the Caribbean and Central America. But this is not to be a war like those which have gone before it; wars decided by crushing British sea power and eventually, on land by the superiority of the logistics and tactics of relatively small colonial armies in the South Western badlands. Remember Brave Achilles becomes the call to arms.

It is November 1963 - 13 months after the Cuban Missile Crisis went horribly wrong. In this timeline the swinging sixties are not going to happen and the survivors, far from counting their blessings are beginning to wonder exactly what sort of world they have created.

It is the late spring of 1978 in a world in which the American Revolution failed in 1776 after George Washington was killed and the Continental Army was destroyed at the Battle of Long Island. The rumbling aftershocks of the Empire Day atrocities which reverberated through Two Hundred Lost Years are threatening to come to the boil. While in Philadelphia the politics become ever more fractious in Spain the Royal Alcazar is a citadel besieged in a country which might as well still be stuck in the 19th century.

August 1940 - Chief Inspector Guy Winter has been Fleet Street's favorite detective for over a decade. Dubbed the "Mystery Man" by his friends and enemies alike, for all his fame he cuts a lonely figure at Scotland Yard, where every newspaper story is fresh grist to an already tired mill. Laid low by personal tragedy, there are many who suspect that the great detective's career is over.

Christy was the most famous American painter of the Jazz Age, a time when an elite brotherhood of New York artists dominated the publishing world. Christy had eclipsed all of them with his "Christy Girl", an idealized woman who redefined beauty, influenced fashion, and inspired generations of women. In Romantic Illusions, Christy once again comes to life through the eyes of Nancy Palmer. Christy, his wife and former model, as she recounts her first Christmas with Howard and his family at his Ohio mansion, the Barracks, in 1912.

Exhausted and tormented by his own demons, Adam Chantrey discovers, amidst the chaos of war and loss, love and an unlikely inner peace up on the high wold of Lincolnshire while all around him the world is enveloped in madness. Bomber Command's hour of greatest trial - the Battle of Berlin - is approaching, and its long, dark shadow hangs over the young men who ride the heavies of the Main Force to Germany in the knowledge that a tour of bomber operations is a death sentence for two out of every three men.

In Winter's Spy, the Mystery Man is under arrest, suspected of having been an enemy agent for his whole career in the Metropolitan Police and throughout all his years working for MI5. Dammed by the evidence of a German spy whom he encountered in Paris before the war, it seems as if he must literally fight for his life. Then, transported to Camp 020, MI5’s South London interrogation center, and confronted by his accuser, the Mystery Man begins to suspect that nothing is quite what it seemed.

Guy Winter and his faithful sergeant, George Ransom, are heading for the English Midlands, where on a country estate a few miles south of Coventry, Helen Chase, the nation's most famous actress, has been grievously wounded in an apparent orgy of mindless violence that has claimed several other lives in the most bizarre and gruesome of circumstances.

In Winter's Exile the Mystery Man is exiled to the country to recover and recuperate from his injuries. Inevitably, there is no escaping the war. When the son of the local Squire is found dying within hours of a German bomber crashing in a nearby field Guy Winter is suddenly back in his element.