A bad AH parody
B-S Day
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B-S Day
- Location
- Arlington, Virginia
I originally wrote this story last October for a vignette competition on the Sea Lion Press forum themed 'mockbuster,' where we were tasked with making fun of a preexisting work of alternate history. Those well-read in the genre may well recognize the parody.
I can say with confidence that this is the second-worst thing I've ever written. For those curious - the worst thing I've ever written will be published in an anthology in October.
Without further ado:
The rocket stood erect on the platform, poised to thrust a man into the dark regions of virgin space. It was a day that all these men had waited for: to consummate the dream, the fantasy, that man could penetrate the stars.
The hull of the craft moaned as the ship quivered, almost as if in delight. Ground control was an orgy of excitement.
"FIVE..." ejaculated the loudspeaker. Launch was inevitable. The entire species was on the cusp of manhood.
The announcer counted the strokes toward the coming of the space age.
"FOUR..."
"THREE..."
"TWO..."
The bland suburbanites parked their bland suburbans in the parking lot of the vacation house in Maine. It was almost idyllic; it had the cozy intimacy of a murder mystery and the quaintness of a Stephen King novel.
The old codgers sat in the living room, surrounded by children and grandchildren, who were as cute as they were cause for these old men to yearn for the sweet kiss of death.
These old coots were united by one thing and one thing only: their service, hidden until now, during the War. Which war? THE war. Come on. You know this. When they refer to THE war, you know which war old people are talking about.
It was when men were men, women were women, and nonwhite people were treated like children. It was the war that grandparents stereotypically fought in.
The little ones were playing 'make Timmy a piñata.' Using rope and papier-mache, they decorated Timmy and strung him to a tree. As was tradition, they used Bobby's little league bats to make Timmy's teeth fall out.
Joseph, one of the older grandchildren and his grandfather's openly declared favorite, asked the four old men, "why did you have this reunion?"
The parents of the little ones, the sons and daughters of the old men, gathered around.
These men were Fred Harman, Peter Benson, Aubrey Roberts, and Jacob DiGiacomo. They were the four survivors of the Big Spaceship (B-S) Program, the way that America single-handedly won The War.
"You see, grandson" said Peter, Joseph's grandfather and font of inheritance, "it was a different time. It was a heroic time. It was a time when people cared about each other-"
The solemnity of the moment was interrupted by the sound of moaning. The group looked around, and determined that the noise emanated from the iPad held by Fred Harman.
One of his daughters, used to his … proclivities, said to him "you really shouldn't be watching that sort of thing when family is over."
"My account was hacked! I swear!"
The smells of snails, cheese, and condescension wafted through the air of Paris. The quiet, uncharacteristic for the city at this time of night, was punctured by the whirr of a motorcycle engine.
The conventionally attractive Frenchwoman abandoned the motorcycle at the entrance to the cemetery. It was in Montparnasse, the snobby part of Paris where the French liked to look down upon Anglophones with characteristic scorn. Even here, the ghosts of the deceased turned their incorporeal noses at anything so unfortunate as to be not graced by la belle France.
She whisked through the graves. She could hear the cackling of the SS officer tasked to catch her.
The cackling was close. Too close. She crouched behind a tombstone to wait out the terror.
Angry men in feldgrau uniforms marched through the cemetery, laughing maliciously as they did so. One of them held the cardboard box of infants upon which they feasted; that is how Nazis ate, after all. They confiscated babies from the lands they occupied, and would rip their heads off with their teeth.
It's because they're evil, see?
The laughing gradually abates. The Nazis are gone.
She darts out of the shadow of the tombstone and makes her way to the agreed location.
It is another tombstone, emblazoned with the name PRATIQUE MACGUFFIN (pronounced Mac-goo-FAH, with plenty of congestion, thank you very much!). She saw the bouquet of flowers at the grave.
She slipped in the piece of paper she had hidden in her … dress. Let's go with that (we can't be too tasteless, after all! It would bring bad publicity!).
On that paper was the schematics for the weapon that would save the world. She could only hope that the British would take it (they took damn near everything else!) and pass it on to the Americans.
The Germans had a wonder weapon. They were trying to get to space to bomb any enemy they had from far beyond the range of any gun. In doing so, they would create a plot, and thereby justify the existence of this story.
Megalomaniacal schemes are fun, aren't they?
The assembled scientists sat in a circle in the physics classroom at South Hampden Institute of Technology (SHIT), located in a prestigious-looking speck of dirt not far from the most generically-named town in Western Massachusetts.
They were Fred Harman, Peter Benson, Aubrey Roberts, and Jacob DiGiacomo. They were white, anachronistically pudgy, bespectacled, and socially awkward. They were, in short, the perfect symbols upon which twenty-first century white male nerds could project their deepest fantasies.
The stern government officer stood before them; behind him were a number of other faceless bureaucrats. He said, "the four of you have been chosen for your resemblance to what socially isolated adolescents fascinate about in another world. Here, you will work to create something world-changing and epic, the sort of thing your grandchildren will boast about to make other children feel inferior in the next century. This is a task that is rock hard, one that will be a great thrust of technology and science."
He gestured to a presentation easel. The projector displayed what looked like a pulp magazine cover, only without the naked women. There was a photograph of a rocket blazoned with a swastika.
"This is what the Germans are working on. We have received decent intelligence to suggest that they are going to arm it to the teeth and bomb America. Your job will be simple: build the rocket that will take it down."
The scientists' eyebrows all cocked. This is why they had been plucked out of whatever town they had come from and brought to this frigid campus.
"You will be provided with time, generous salaries, and nubile, fertile coeds, as well as all equipment needed to produce a working prototype of such a rocket within the next year. We do not know when the Germans will send their rocket spurting into space, but we have evidence to suggest it will not be ready by then."
One of the assistants wheeled up a cart with a record player on it. He put a disc on the turntable, and put the needle on the disc. An aristocratic voice began to emanate from the speaker:
"You have been chosen to win this war for us. The Nazis are evil because they are America's enemy. We need peace, because this is America. The Germans are the enemy of peace. Do what is good, for America.
"By the way, it is Roosevelt."
The scientists got to work. They stayed in a basement from sunup to sundown, not unlike the adolescents who idolized them, plugging away at numbers and formulae to spurt mankind into space.
They had all their needs catered to them. They had plenty of food delivered to them by the help, and the nubile coeds for their … other urges (it's the fantasy of the target audience, geddit! What fourteen year old boy wouldn't want this?). These women, played by desperate wannabe starlets, whispered sweet nothings in the ears of the scientists even as their eyes pleaded "please kill me."
Even so, Fred Harman had a mountain of pinups.
The rocket stood erect in the New Mexico desert. This was not the final product, no; this was the very first rocket design to have matured to this girth.
They had decided on a pilot. His name was Joseph McPherson. He was from Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Against what anyone involved in the program had expected, Joseph was black.
Joseph entered the rocket, clambering up the shaft to the cockpit.
The loud speakers blared their countdown. The scientists looked on in anticipation.
Without much ceremony, the rocket exploded.
The anticipation of ground control was reaching its climax.
"ONE. WE HAVE LIFTOFF."
The launchpad shuddered. The ground crew panted in relief. After the thrust could no longer be felt, an overwhelming clarity came upon them. The tension was released.
Man and space had had their first conjugal visit.
The great fiery shaft had to encircle the big blue ball upon which humanity lived. It was stalking for prey, German prey.
The O.M.T, Offensichtliche Maschinelle Übersetzung, or "Offensive Flying Machine," was powered by the burning corpses of infants. It was armed with a bomb that could destroy New York in a single explosion. Where did the Germans get this technology? Nobody knew. Nobody cared, especially not the writers.
The offending craft appeared on the American rocket's radar screen. This craft was the crown jewel of American ingenuity. It had some dignified patriotic-sounding name, but everyone involved with its erection called it the Eggcracker. The Germans were going to lay an egg on America; this craft was ordered to break that egg.
The moment of ecstasy came all too soon. The chiseled idealization of adolescent male fantasy that piloted this flaming rod pulled the trigger. The missile ejected from Eggcracker's hull. The O.M.T exploded.
There wasn't much more to say.
"And that, kids, is how we defeated the Krauts," remarked Peter Benson. He looked about, yearning to see the admiring eyes of his compatriots' progeny.
There was no such thing. All of the children's eyes were glued to tablets and smartphones.
So were their parents' eyes.
So was Fred Harman's eyes.
There was more moaning from his tablet.
"To hell with it," Peter mumbled, and looked onto Fred's tablet with sickened curiosity.
On this screen, he could see a variety of people copulating energetically. Strangely, they all bobbed around like fish in a tank as they formed the beast with two backs.
Then it became clear: in the background of this scene of debauchery was a window. That window looked down upon the blue pearl that was Earth.
The climax came. The credits rolled:
I'll be frank with you; I'm afraid that this story might not land well. It's certainly odd, and the main theme may not be obvious.
If it wasn't clear, this is a parody of Allen Steele's wonderful alternate history novel V-S Day, which I have reviewed for the Sea Lion Press blog. It is a World War II alternate history about space travel and space combat that is reminiscent of The Rocketeer or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in that it has a pulpy optimism about the world, and about human beings. Despite the cruelty of the enemy, Steele believes that there are good people in the world, and that they can do great things.
When I saw the prompt for this month, the titular pun came to me almost immediately. The first scene that came to me was actually the ending, and from there I endeavored to write the story that such an ending naturally concludes.
That story is a cynical one. V-S Day is ultimately optimistic; many in low-budget film studios are not. All too often, their work has no faith that humans can be anything other than vicious, and no faith that their audience can be anything other than base. That's what this piece is: V-S Day as written by the dregs of Hollywood writers. They are a crass, misogynistic, misanthropic bunch, and this story tries to reflect that.
For example, let us look at the ending. It is a direct parody of the ending of V-S Day. Up until that point, the alternate timeline's 2010s are not explicitly described as being hugely different from our own. That is, until one of the old engineers gets a notification on his iPad that his son is on a rocket to a city on the Moon. This is a scene with two interesting components: the humanist nature of its view of technological progress, and the odd anachronism of the real-world company (Apple).
I took out that humanism and replaced it with B-movie cynicism. I bolstered that by drawing from a story I heard years ago on the internet (I think - it's been years) that's almost certainly an urban legend. It is of how Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, was allegedly approached by a porn studio to film the first porn in space. Branson declined, saying that it would turn his company's name into a joke.
The end result is the strange story you have just read. Every scene is a direct parody of a similar scene in V-S Day.
Underneath all the innuendo, this story is ultimately an angry lament about how some people just have an awfully low opinion of other people.
I can say with confidence that this is the second-worst thing I've ever written. For those curious - the worst thing I've ever written will be published in an anthology in October.
Without further ado:
FROM THE PRODUCTION COMPANY BEHIND DADDYLAND
DIRECTED BY
A C STUDENT FROM A SECOND-RATE FILM SCHOOL
WRITTEN BY
NERDS WHO HAVE NEVER TALKED TO WOMEN
THOROUGHLY MASSACRING A NOVEL BY
ALLEN STEELE
WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO:
HAIRY TURTLEDOVE
S&M STIRLING
AND
ROBERT CONROY
COMES THE YEAR'S MOST MIDDLING ALTERNATE HISTORY FILM
B-S (BIG SPACESHIP) DAY
. . .
DIRECTED BY
A C STUDENT FROM A SECOND-RATE FILM SCHOOL
WRITTEN BY
NERDS WHO HAVE NEVER TALKED TO WOMEN
THOROUGHLY MASSACRING A NOVEL BY
ALLEN STEELE
WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO:
HAIRY TURTLEDOVE
S&M STIRLING
AND
ROBERT CONROY
COMES THE YEAR'S MOST MIDDLING ALTERNATE HISTORY FILM
B-S (BIG SPACESHIP) DAY
. . .
The rocket stood erect on the platform, poised to thrust a man into the dark regions of virgin space. It was a day that all these men had waited for: to consummate the dream, the fantasy, that man could penetrate the stars.
The hull of the craft moaned as the ship quivered, almost as if in delight. Ground control was an orgy of excitement.
"FIVE..." ejaculated the loudspeaker. Launch was inevitable. The entire species was on the cusp of manhood.
The announcer counted the strokes toward the coming of the space age.
"FOUR..."
"THREE..."
"TWO..."
. . .
2013
2013
The bland suburbanites parked their bland suburbans in the parking lot of the vacation house in Maine. It was almost idyllic; it had the cozy intimacy of a murder mystery and the quaintness of a Stephen King novel.
The old codgers sat in the living room, surrounded by children and grandchildren, who were as cute as they were cause for these old men to yearn for the sweet kiss of death.
These old coots were united by one thing and one thing only: their service, hidden until now, during the War. Which war? THE war. Come on. You know this. When they refer to THE war, you know which war old people are talking about.
It was when men were men, women were women, and nonwhite people were treated like children. It was the war that grandparents stereotypically fought in.
The little ones were playing 'make Timmy a piñata.' Using rope and papier-mache, they decorated Timmy and strung him to a tree. As was tradition, they used Bobby's little league bats to make Timmy's teeth fall out.
Joseph, one of the older grandchildren and his grandfather's openly declared favorite, asked the four old men, "why did you have this reunion?"
The parents of the little ones, the sons and daughters of the old men, gathered around.
These men were Fred Harman, Peter Benson, Aubrey Roberts, and Jacob DiGiacomo. They were the four survivors of the Big Spaceship (B-S) Program, the way that America single-handedly won The War.
"You see, grandson" said Peter, Joseph's grandfather and font of inheritance, "it was a different time. It was a heroic time. It was a time when people cared about each other-"
The solemnity of the moment was interrupted by the sound of moaning. The group looked around, and determined that the noise emanated from the iPad held by Fred Harman.
One of his daughters, used to his … proclivities, said to him "you really shouldn't be watching that sort of thing when family is over."
"My account was hacked! I swear!"
. . .
IT IS 1943
WORLD WAR II RAGES IN EUROPE
ON A RETREAT TO HIS MOUNTAIN GETAWAY IN BERCHTESGADEN, ADOLF HITLER IS UNCEREMONIOUSLY KILLED BY A STRAY MOUNTAIN GOAT
SHOCKED BY THIS TURN OF EVENTS, THE NAZI LEADERSHIP MAKES THE EARTH-SHATTERING DECISION TO BECOME HALFWAY COMPETENT
MILLIONS OF REICHSMARKS ARE POURED INTO WUNDERWAFFEN
MOST FAIL
ONE SUCCEEDS
. . .
IT IS 1943
WORLD WAR II RAGES IN EUROPE
ON A RETREAT TO HIS MOUNTAIN GETAWAY IN BERCHTESGADEN, ADOLF HITLER IS UNCEREMONIOUSLY KILLED BY A STRAY MOUNTAIN GOAT
SHOCKED BY THIS TURN OF EVENTS, THE NAZI LEADERSHIP MAKES THE EARTH-SHATTERING DECISION TO BECOME HALFWAY COMPETENT
MILLIONS OF REICHSMARKS ARE POURED INTO WUNDERWAFFEN
MOST FAIL
ONE SUCCEEDS
. . .
The smells of snails, cheese, and condescension wafted through the air of Paris. The quiet, uncharacteristic for the city at this time of night, was punctured by the whirr of a motorcycle engine.
The conventionally attractive Frenchwoman abandoned the motorcycle at the entrance to the cemetery. It was in Montparnasse, the snobby part of Paris where the French liked to look down upon Anglophones with characteristic scorn. Even here, the ghosts of the deceased turned their incorporeal noses at anything so unfortunate as to be not graced by la belle France.
She whisked through the graves. She could hear the cackling of the SS officer tasked to catch her.
The cackling was close. Too close. She crouched behind a tombstone to wait out the terror.
Angry men in feldgrau uniforms marched through the cemetery, laughing maliciously as they did so. One of them held the cardboard box of infants upon which they feasted; that is how Nazis ate, after all. They confiscated babies from the lands they occupied, and would rip their heads off with their teeth.
It's because they're evil, see?
The laughing gradually abates. The Nazis are gone.
She darts out of the shadow of the tombstone and makes her way to the agreed location.
It is another tombstone, emblazoned with the name PRATIQUE MACGUFFIN (pronounced Mac-goo-FAH, with plenty of congestion, thank you very much!). She saw the bouquet of flowers at the grave.
She slipped in the piece of paper she had hidden in her … dress. Let's go with that (we can't be too tasteless, after all! It would bring bad publicity!).
On that paper was the schematics for the weapon that would save the world. She could only hope that the British would take it (they took damn near everything else!) and pass it on to the Americans.
The Germans had a wonder weapon. They were trying to get to space to bomb any enemy they had from far beyond the range of any gun. In doing so, they would create a plot, and thereby justify the existence of this story.
Megalomaniacal schemes are fun, aren't they?
. . .
The assembled scientists sat in a circle in the physics classroom at South Hampden Institute of Technology (SHIT), located in a prestigious-looking speck of dirt not far from the most generically-named town in Western Massachusetts.
They were Fred Harman, Peter Benson, Aubrey Roberts, and Jacob DiGiacomo. They were white, anachronistically pudgy, bespectacled, and socially awkward. They were, in short, the perfect symbols upon which twenty-first century white male nerds could project their deepest fantasies.
The stern government officer stood before them; behind him were a number of other faceless bureaucrats. He said, "the four of you have been chosen for your resemblance to what socially isolated adolescents fascinate about in another world. Here, you will work to create something world-changing and epic, the sort of thing your grandchildren will boast about to make other children feel inferior in the next century. This is a task that is rock hard, one that will be a great thrust of technology and science."
He gestured to a presentation easel. The projector displayed what looked like a pulp magazine cover, only without the naked women. There was a photograph of a rocket blazoned with a swastika.
"This is what the Germans are working on. We have received decent intelligence to suggest that they are going to arm it to the teeth and bomb America. Your job will be simple: build the rocket that will take it down."
The scientists' eyebrows all cocked. This is why they had been plucked out of whatever town they had come from and brought to this frigid campus.
"You will be provided with time, generous salaries, and nubile, fertile coeds, as well as all equipment needed to produce a working prototype of such a rocket within the next year. We do not know when the Germans will send their rocket spurting into space, but we have evidence to suggest it will not be ready by then."
One of the assistants wheeled up a cart with a record player on it. He put a disc on the turntable, and put the needle on the disc. An aristocratic voice began to emanate from the speaker:
"You have been chosen to win this war for us. The Nazis are evil because they are America's enemy. We need peace, because this is America. The Germans are the enemy of peace. Do what is good, for America.
"By the way, it is Roosevelt."
The scientists got to work. They stayed in a basement from sunup to sundown, not unlike the adolescents who idolized them, plugging away at numbers and formulae to spurt mankind into space.
They had all their needs catered to them. They had plenty of food delivered to them by the help, and the nubile coeds for their … other urges (it's the fantasy of the target audience, geddit! What fourteen year old boy wouldn't want this?). These women, played by desperate wannabe starlets, whispered sweet nothings in the ears of the scientists even as their eyes pleaded "please kill me."
Even so, Fred Harman had a mountain of pinups.
. . .
The rocket stood erect in the New Mexico desert. This was not the final product, no; this was the very first rocket design to have matured to this girth.
They had decided on a pilot. His name was Joseph McPherson. He was from Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Against what anyone involved in the program had expected, Joseph was black.
Joseph entered the rocket, clambering up the shaft to the cockpit.
The loud speakers blared their countdown. The scientists looked on in anticipation.
Without much ceremony, the rocket exploded.
. . .
The anticipation of ground control was reaching its climax.
"ONE. WE HAVE LIFTOFF."
The launchpad shuddered. The ground crew panted in relief. After the thrust could no longer be felt, an overwhelming clarity came upon them. The tension was released.
Man and space had had their first conjugal visit.
The great fiery shaft had to encircle the big blue ball upon which humanity lived. It was stalking for prey, German prey.
The O.M.T, Offensichtliche Maschinelle Übersetzung, or "Offensive Flying Machine," was powered by the burning corpses of infants. It was armed with a bomb that could destroy New York in a single explosion. Where did the Germans get this technology? Nobody knew. Nobody cared, especially not the writers.
The offending craft appeared on the American rocket's radar screen. This craft was the crown jewel of American ingenuity. It had some dignified patriotic-sounding name, but everyone involved with its erection called it the Eggcracker. The Germans were going to lay an egg on America; this craft was ordered to break that egg.
The moment of ecstasy came all too soon. The chiseled idealization of adolescent male fantasy that piloted this flaming rod pulled the trigger. The missile ejected from Eggcracker's hull. The O.M.T exploded.
There wasn't much more to say.
. . .
"And that, kids, is how we defeated the Krauts," remarked Peter Benson. He looked about, yearning to see the admiring eyes of his compatriots' progeny.
There was no such thing. All of the children's eyes were glued to tablets and smartphones.
So were their parents' eyes.
So was Fred Harman's eyes.
There was more moaning from his tablet.
"To hell with it," Peter mumbled, and looked onto Fred's tablet with sickened curiosity.
On this screen, he could see a variety of people copulating energetically. Strangely, they all bobbed around like fish in a tank as they formed the beast with two backs.
Then it became clear: in the background of this scene of debauchery was a window. That window looked down upon the blue pearl that was Earth.
The climax came. The credits rolled:
SLUTS IN SPACE
FILMED ABOARD THE SPACE STATION
TRIMALCHIO
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
VIRGIN GALACTIC
Afterword:
FILMED ABOARD THE SPACE STATION
TRIMALCHIO
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
VIRGIN GALACTIC
Afterword:
I'll be frank with you; I'm afraid that this story might not land well. It's certainly odd, and the main theme may not be obvious.
If it wasn't clear, this is a parody of Allen Steele's wonderful alternate history novel V-S Day, which I have reviewed for the Sea Lion Press blog. It is a World War II alternate history about space travel and space combat that is reminiscent of The Rocketeer or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in that it has a pulpy optimism about the world, and about human beings. Despite the cruelty of the enemy, Steele believes that there are good people in the world, and that they can do great things.
When I saw the prompt for this month, the titular pun came to me almost immediately. The first scene that came to me was actually the ending, and from there I endeavored to write the story that such an ending naturally concludes.
That story is a cynical one. V-S Day is ultimately optimistic; many in low-budget film studios are not. All too often, their work has no faith that humans can be anything other than vicious, and no faith that their audience can be anything other than base. That's what this piece is: V-S Day as written by the dregs of Hollywood writers. They are a crass, misogynistic, misanthropic bunch, and this story tries to reflect that.
For example, let us look at the ending. It is a direct parody of the ending of V-S Day. Up until that point, the alternate timeline's 2010s are not explicitly described as being hugely different from our own. That is, until one of the old engineers gets a notification on his iPad that his son is on a rocket to a city on the Moon. This is a scene with two interesting components: the humanist nature of its view of technological progress, and the odd anachronism of the real-world company (Apple).
I took out that humanism and replaced it with B-movie cynicism. I bolstered that by drawing from a story I heard years ago on the internet (I think - it's been years) that's almost certainly an urban legend. It is of how Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, was allegedly approached by a porn studio to film the first porn in space. Branson declined, saying that it would turn his company's name into a joke.
The end result is the strange story you have just read. Every scene is a direct parody of a similar scene in V-S Day.
Underneath all the innuendo, this story is ultimately an angry lament about how some people just have an awfully low opinion of other people.