- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's cause to need it, you have to have done something to not deserve it. Bit of a paradox, eh!
Let's Read Fitzpatrick's War (The Only Steampunk with Rights)
- Thread starter DragonCobolt
- Start date
- SPOILERS Sci-Fi
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- Tags
- let's read
It's cause to need it, you have to have done something to not deserve it. Bit of a paradox, eh!
Kensai
我们都是中国人
- Location
- Hel
"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" Romans 3:23.
Mainstream Christian theology has it that no-one deserves God's grace, although all need it.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The Drakka Could have Built It
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We open chapter eighteen with a description...of the Universal Railroad.
On paper, it's fucking great. It's technically two railroad networks, with the New World system running from Nome to Tierra del Fuego and connecting to existing railroad lines. The Old World one would run from Scandinavia to Singapore and from Capetown to the Arctic Ocean, with grand lines over the Bosporus, under the English Channel, and through the Darren Gap. The newspapers are all a buzz with the possibilities - imagine going to sleep in Edenborough and waking up in Mesopotamia. Imagine! I'm sure we modern folks can't possibly conceptualize that kind of travel luxury, eh?
...now, meanwhile, in real life, what instead happens is a bunch of money gets funneled into shipments that never take place, to pay engineers that don't exist, and thousand of Yukon engineers sit in place, waiting for supplies that evaporated into the pockets of some lord or another, and the entire thing lasts about a year before being quietly taken out behind the shed and shot.
Now, I'm not an engineer, but this project seems...actually not that impossible, or even implausible compared to the whackadoo bullshit that the Draka are doing over in @Geckonator's thread. Still, one can't help but see the echoes of similar ambitious "state building" projects in the middle east. I remember reading somewhere that before the Iraqis even had easy access to drinking water Americans were trying to build "free market economics." Which, of course, was a fancy way to say "ways to line our pockets."
The more things change, eh?
Bruce's command in this particular exercise in peculation and taxpayer fraud takes him and his family to the Bandiagara Cliffs near the Sahara Desert. As he arrived to procede to sit there for several months doing absolutely jack shit, Professor Von Buren leaves a somewhat apologetic footnote that, unfortunately, Bruce isn't lying about the Universal Railroad Company and it was just as bad in the actual history. Oops.
The natives in the area are the Dogon, described as being "short as the Pigmy of South Africa" - lets get a picture!
Given nothing else to do, Charlotte immediately launches herself into trying to help the Dogon. WE love Charlotte, we stan Charlotte here, but she remains a Yukon - so her ideas of helping are, first, to cajole her husband into building a well for the Dogon. He sinks one kinda pathetic well near their village and they're like, "Wow, this is great!" While it provides not very much water, it's not what they could have built without more people and tools than they had. But Bruce, wanting to do better, hunts out another well and digs that one out and this one has a massive amount of water. He tells the Dogon that they just need to build several miles of aqueducts and they'd have water out their ears!
The Dogon are like, "That's...very nice, but we don't want to maintain several miles of ditches? we don't need this much water? we have enough water, thank you?
So, Charlotte offers to have her hubby build them a hospital, or a school!
And the Dogon are like, "We don't...need giant western style buildings? Thanks?"
Fortunately, Charlotte isn't so much a Yukon that she can't take a hint - and the Dogon see that while these strange visitors from the sky (they arrived on a zeppelin) are genuinely trying to be helpful, they take them down to show them where they bury their bodies. Charlotte and Bruce are very impressed by the countless bodies they've been burying there, including many they moved rom the Niger Basin, where they used to live. Bruce is impressed and writes that if the study of other cultures is revived, they would find much to learn among the Dogon.
Von Buren sniffs in the footnotes: "We Yukon do study other cultures - those worthy of study."
(I.E, the greeks, lol)
(...and the romans I guess)
Not too put down by her failures in "improving" the Dogon, Charlotte dearly loves the base: Not having anything to actually build means that Bruce gets to dote on Mary and their new daughter, Joan. Joan is a happy bubbly child and Mary loves playing hide and seek, having her father read her Piggy and I, and trying to run around naked like the Dogon children and I will tell you as an uncle, some kids just LOVE to go streaking. It's wild.
Unfortunately, Bruce is quite right. On December 2nd, 2424, Fitz orders Bruce back immediately, alone, right now, fast as he can. Charlotte and Bruce put their heads together on what this might mean, and Bruce is grimly certain there has been a coup attempt. He hurries back, terror and apprehension on the mind...and arrives to find that Neapolis has grown yet more. Remember that tent slum around it? Well, now it's a genuine shanty town called Pandemonium. Charming! And Fitz meets Bruce on the tarmac and tells him, immediately, the problem.
It's not a coup.
It's Hood.
General Hood has left to China.
"Is he building an army?" Bruce asks.
"No!" Fitz raves. "He's FEEDING PEOPLE."
Fitz is completely up in arms about this - he's terrified of what will happen if the newspapers get wind of it. His standing is shaky among the commoners and the popularity of the Four Points War is at an all time low. But worse than the threat of people having more reason to see his actions in China as evil by their contrast with Hood? This is Hood refusing to follow orders, refusing to obey him, refusing to do what he's told. You may recall, Fitz doesn't take this very well. It's not clear how actually concerned he is with Hood - but I do think at least part of him thinks that this charity might be some machination, some army-building goal, something. However, he sends Bruce off with two gunboats - steam engines, machine guns, driven by some of the most inept sailors that Bruce has ever been with.
Their destination?
Linil - upriver from Wuhan.
Bruce does learn, after the THIRD time he runs aground on some shallows and has to get towed off by the other boat, that the ships are crewed entirely by ex members of the S.A and House Karls.
(Me, screaming at the book: Bruce! No!)
Hey, you know when something horrible is going to happen and you can see its shape clearly in the future and time seems to slow down and there's nothing you can do about it? Like when the other car isn't slowing down, or you miss the step on the stairs while carrying something fragile, or you just said something stupid and hurtful and cruel and in the seconds between the words leaving your lips and them registering in your loved one's ears, you can see the pain start to spread across their face - and wish you could take them back?
This entire scene is like that. You know exactly how it is going to end, right from the beginning.
Hood shows Bruce his rice paddies, the medical center he's constructed, his efforts to care for the starving and the sick. From the tools and seeds and local help that he got over the past few months, he's up to making enough food for 300 people and plans to expand, bit by bit over time. His wife and him are planning to stay here, until they're able to feed everyone. Bruce asks after Hood's son, and Hood says he's safe, back in North America. A minister, like his father.
"If it helps," he says. "Tell Fitz I am insane. Some people say insanity forgives anything. In time, historians will call Fitz insane. But I don't think he was - any more than Nero or Ceaser or Hitler or Iz were. I think he just loved power too much. I almost loved it the same and it nearly destroyed me."
Bruce, near tears, begs him to go one last time. "Do not grieve for me, Bobby," Hood says. And then, a final bit...
We can only hope.
Bruce leaves. He's tired and withdrawn - but then he notices the other gunboat isn't accompanying his. The captain of his gunboat shrugs and refuses to turn back.
He draws his gun and aims it at his head. They turn back after that. They drive past - and wouldn't you know it?
The other gunboat has that motherfucker Zimmerman on it. He gives Bruce a mocking salute and aims a finger gun at him, then mimes shooting.
Bruce arrives back at Hood's farmhouse - and the Chinese civilians have fled and Hood and his beloved wife, Martha, are laying on their backs before the farmhouse, shot dead. Bruce weeps, screams, beats his head against the ground, then forces his S.A handlers to dig graves at gunpoint. Then he ties them up, drives the boat home by himself over a two day river voyage without sleep. He gets back to Wuhan, gets into a zeppelin, locks himself in his room, and finally lets himself sleep. Once he gets off at Neapolis, he charges towards Fitz's rooms. Buck Pularski, of course, is there to stop him.
"I'm going to kill him," Bruce says.
Buck grabs his gun, slams him into the wall, and says, "No. You are not. Do you really think Lord Newsom would be a better Consul? Or Valette? Hmm?"
Bruce, nearly losing his mind with grief and rage, breaks down and asks, through sobbing tears, asks: Will he ever pay? Will he always get away with this?
"God is watching him. Let God decide when his time has come."
God, fucking mood. I know that exact feeling, that exact question: When do the powerful people finally, actually pay for their crimes? The answer is, usually...never.
A few days later, after he has gotten his control back, Bruce is taken before Fitz for his orders. Fitz is full of deep sympathy: "Tragic," he says. "That Hood was killed...by Chinese pirates...so tragic..."
Bruce nods.
Then he says he has a message from Hood. Von Buren, helpfully, says that he's clearly lying, since Bruce did not actually get a message from Hood in the prior section. Bruce says that without enemies abroad, the friends Fitz have made will be his new enemies. Even now, they're plotting against him. And if they fail, the Timmermen will succeed. Fitz is living on borrowed time. Bruce throws this at Fitz, and Fitz, barely controlling himself, says: "Go back to Africa, Brigadier Bruce, and be glad I...still...love you."
"Like you loved Hood?" Bruce asks.
"GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!" Fitz screams, and Buck, following his orders, drags Bruce out. He tells Bruce to not be too concerned - Fitz forgets this stuff sooner than you think. Bruce, shaken and grieving, heads to the zeppelin port - only to get ambushed by Lord Mason, his old college friend, the only Baeselis who has managed to be a complete fuckup on every metric so far. He asks if Bruce wouldn't mind carrying a little secret private letter and Bruce looks at him like he's insane and goes, "Absolutely fucking not, I plan to survive the next week."
Because Bruce was dead on the money.
The coup happens next chapter.
FOOTNOTES
FOOTNOE 8: St. Mathews has no record of any book named Piggy and I and I find this faintly suspicious tone so fucking funny.
On paper, it's fucking great. It's technically two railroad networks, with the New World system running from Nome to Tierra del Fuego and connecting to existing railroad lines. The Old World one would run from Scandinavia to Singapore and from Capetown to the Arctic Ocean, with grand lines over the Bosporus, under the English Channel, and through the Darren Gap. The newspapers are all a buzz with the possibilities - imagine going to sleep in Edenborough and waking up in Mesopotamia. Imagine! I'm sure we modern folks can't possibly conceptualize that kind of travel luxury, eh?
...now, meanwhile, in real life, what instead happens is a bunch of money gets funneled into shipments that never take place, to pay engineers that don't exist, and thousand of Yukon engineers sit in place, waiting for supplies that evaporated into the pockets of some lord or another, and the entire thing lasts about a year before being quietly taken out behind the shed and shot.
Now, I'm not an engineer, but this project seems...actually not that impossible, or even implausible compared to the whackadoo bullshit that the Draka are doing over in @Geckonator's thread. Still, one can't help but see the echoes of similar ambitious "state building" projects in the middle east. I remember reading somewhere that before the Iraqis even had easy access to drinking water Americans were trying to build "free market economics." Which, of course, was a fancy way to say "ways to line our pockets."
The more things change, eh?
Bruce's command in this particular exercise in peculation and taxpayer fraud takes him and his family to the Bandiagara Cliffs near the Sahara Desert. As he arrived to procede to sit there for several months doing absolutely jack shit, Professor Von Buren leaves a somewhat apologetic footnote that, unfortunately, Bruce isn't lying about the Universal Railroad Company and it was just as bad in the actual history. Oops.
The natives in the area are the Dogon, described as being "short as the Pigmy of South Africa" - lets get a picture!
The Dogon are like, "That's...very nice, but we don't want to maintain several miles of ditches? we don't need this much water? we have enough water, thank you?
So, Charlotte offers to have her hubby build them a hospital, or a school!
And the Dogon are like, "We don't...need giant western style buildings? Thanks?"
Fortunately, Charlotte isn't so much a Yukon that she can't take a hint - and the Dogon see that while these strange visitors from the sky (they arrived on a zeppelin) are genuinely trying to be helpful, they take them down to show them where they bury their bodies. Charlotte and Bruce are very impressed by the countless bodies they've been burying there, including many they moved rom the Niger Basin, where they used to live. Bruce is impressed and writes that if the study of other cultures is revived, they would find much to learn among the Dogon.
Von Buren sniffs in the footnotes: "We Yukon do study other cultures - those worthy of study."
(I.E, the greeks, lol)
(...and the romans I guess)
Not too put down by her failures in "improving" the Dogon, Charlotte dearly loves the base: Not having anything to actually build means that Bruce gets to dote on Mary and their new daughter, Joan. Joan is a happy bubbly child and Mary loves playing hide and seek, having her father read her Piggy and I, and trying to run around naked like the Dogon children and I will tell you as an uncle, some kids just LOVE to go streaking. It's wild.
Bruce's Narration said:
Unfortunately, Bruce is quite right. On December 2nd, 2424, Fitz orders Bruce back immediately, alone, right now, fast as he can. Charlotte and Bruce put their heads together on what this might mean, and Bruce is grimly certain there has been a coup attempt. He hurries back, terror and apprehension on the mind...and arrives to find that Neapolis has grown yet more. Remember that tent slum around it? Well, now it's a genuine shanty town called Pandemonium. Charming! And Fitz meets Bruce on the tarmac and tells him, immediately, the problem.
It's not a coup.
It's Hood.
General Hood has left to China.
"Is he building an army?" Bruce asks.
"No!" Fitz raves. "He's FEEDING PEOPLE."
Fitz is completely up in arms about this - he's terrified of what will happen if the newspapers get wind of it. His standing is shaky among the commoners and the popularity of the Four Points War is at an all time low. But worse than the threat of people having more reason to see his actions in China as evil by their contrast with Hood? This is Hood refusing to follow orders, refusing to obey him, refusing to do what he's told. You may recall, Fitz doesn't take this very well. It's not clear how actually concerned he is with Hood - but I do think at least part of him thinks that this charity might be some machination, some army-building goal, something. However, he sends Bruce off with two gunboats - steam engines, machine guns, driven by some of the most inept sailors that Bruce has ever been with.
Their destination?
Linil - upriver from Wuhan.
Bruce does learn, after the THIRD time he runs aground on some shallows and has to get towed off by the other boat, that the ships are crewed entirely by ex members of the S.A and House Karls.
(Me, screaming at the book: Bruce! No!)
Bruce's Narration said:
Hey, you know when something horrible is going to happen and you can see its shape clearly in the future and time seems to slow down and there's nothing you can do about it? Like when the other car isn't slowing down, or you miss the step on the stairs while carrying something fragile, or you just said something stupid and hurtful and cruel and in the seconds between the words leaving your lips and them registering in your loved one's ears, you can see the pain start to spread across their face - and wish you could take them back?
This entire scene is like that. You know exactly how it is going to end, right from the beginning.
Hood shows Bruce his rice paddies, the medical center he's constructed, his efforts to care for the starving and the sick. From the tools and seeds and local help that he got over the past few months, he's up to making enough food for 300 people and plans to expand, bit by bit over time. His wife and him are planning to stay here, until they're able to feed everyone. Bruce asks after Hood's son, and Hood says he's safe, back in North America. A minister, like his father.
"If it helps," he says. "Tell Fitz I am insane. Some people say insanity forgives anything. In time, historians will call Fitz insane. But I don't think he was - any more than Nero or Ceaser or Hitler or Iz were. I think he just loved power too much. I almost loved it the same and it nearly destroyed me."
Bruce, near tears, begs him to go one last time. "Do not grieve for me, Bobby," Hood says. And then, a final bit...
Bruce's Narration said:
We can only hope.
Bruce leaves. He's tired and withdrawn - but then he notices the other gunboat isn't accompanying his. The captain of his gunboat shrugs and refuses to turn back.
He draws his gun and aims it at his head. They turn back after that. They drive past - and wouldn't you know it?
The other gunboat has that motherfucker Zimmerman on it. He gives Bruce a mocking salute and aims a finger gun at him, then mimes shooting.
Bruce arrives back at Hood's farmhouse - and the Chinese civilians have fled and Hood and his beloved wife, Martha, are laying on their backs before the farmhouse, shot dead. Bruce weeps, screams, beats his head against the ground, then forces his S.A handlers to dig graves at gunpoint. Then he ties them up, drives the boat home by himself over a two day river voyage without sleep. He gets back to Wuhan, gets into a zeppelin, locks himself in his room, and finally lets himself sleep. Once he gets off at Neapolis, he charges towards Fitz's rooms. Buck Pularski, of course, is there to stop him.
"I'm going to kill him," Bruce says.
Buck grabs his gun, slams him into the wall, and says, "No. You are not. Do you really think Lord Newsom would be a better Consul? Or Valette? Hmm?"
Bruce, nearly losing his mind with grief and rage, breaks down and asks, through sobbing tears, asks: Will he ever pay? Will he always get away with this?
"God is watching him. Let God decide when his time has come."
God, fucking mood. I know that exact feeling, that exact question: When do the powerful people finally, actually pay for their crimes? The answer is, usually...never.
A few days later, after he has gotten his control back, Bruce is taken before Fitz for his orders. Fitz is full of deep sympathy: "Tragic," he says. "That Hood was killed...by Chinese pirates...so tragic..."
Bruce nods.
Then he says he has a message from Hood. Von Buren, helpfully, says that he's clearly lying, since Bruce did not actually get a message from Hood in the prior section. Bruce says that without enemies abroad, the friends Fitz have made will be his new enemies. Even now, they're plotting against him. And if they fail, the Timmermen will succeed. Fitz is living on borrowed time. Bruce throws this at Fitz, and Fitz, barely controlling himself, says: "Go back to Africa, Brigadier Bruce, and be glad I...still...love you."
"Like you loved Hood?" Bruce asks.
"GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!" Fitz screams, and Buck, following his orders, drags Bruce out. He tells Bruce to not be too concerned - Fitz forgets this stuff sooner than you think. Bruce, shaken and grieving, heads to the zeppelin port - only to get ambushed by Lord Mason, his old college friend, the only Baeselis who has managed to be a complete fuckup on every metric so far. He asks if Bruce wouldn't mind carrying a little secret private letter and Bruce looks at him like he's insane and goes, "Absolutely fucking not, I plan to survive the next week."
Because Bruce was dead on the money.
The coup happens next chapter.
FOOTNOTES
FOOTNOE 8: St. Mathews has no record of any book named Piggy and I and I find this faintly suspicious tone so fucking funny.
- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm assuming the plan is to reopen or refurbish/expand the Chunnel after centuries of disrepair.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I wonder how well that tunnel would last? Also on a scale of one to ten how scary is it to drive through the Chunnel?
Vyslanté
The self is a prison
- Location
- European Union
Before the Ukraine war, it was in fact perfectly possible to take a (well, okay, several) trains from Edinburgh to Vladivostok. In the other direction it's probably still doable to go from Algeciras to Kiruna. So, yeah, "building rail everywhere" is not impossible (though while the others examples given of across the Channel and the Bosphorus were already a thing when the book was written, good luck trying to build in the fucking Darien Gap) ; but the dense network of railroads in Europe is the result of more than a century of building. Trying to do that kind of project in the timeline the Yukon have is another beast entirely.
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With steam trains or steampunk diesel trains? Depends on how much you like asphyxiation
I suppose in theory you could use a fireless locomotive, though the distance (just over 50 km for the current Chunnel) might be too great, and even if it worked it could probably only travel at much lower speed than 21st century trains.
CHAPTER NINETEEN & THE EPILOGUE: A Boot with a Gear On it
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We open the nineteenth and final chapter on March 14th, 2425. Bruce, writing from the advantage of decades in the future, takes a bit of an omniscent third person perspective to cover important events he's not there for...but knows exactly what happened. How could he not?
It's midnight and eighteen House Karls, led by the general of the Karls, Smythe, dressed in Uzbeki clothing and armed with automatic rifles creep into the Great House, with a plan to head to Fitzpatrick's bedroom, blast open the door with explosives, and gun the Consul and his wife dead in seconds. They might have wondered why the lights were still on, so late at night...but not for long. Their plan has already been betrayed, and Fitzpatrick stands on a hill miles away, watching through binoculars as loyalist House Karls perched in the rafters open fire.
Other traitor Karls head for Lady Joan's room - four of them. They get to the door, and one of them starts opening it, but before he turns to check and make sure his buddies are ready, three of them are killed by Buck Pulasrki, defendingher his lady.
Zimmerman - a loyalist piece of shit - leads gangs of other Loyalist Karls through the streets of Neapolis and they come to the conspirators houses...and to the shock of zero people, it is the majority of the rest of the Basileus: Shelley and his wife drink poison rather than be captured. Valette, a spoiled brat tot he end, thinks he's untouchable and allows himself to be captured while demanding to speak to Fitz. Stein is found by Buck and his guard. Buck, always a kind man, tells Stein that if he uses all the gold in his house, he can bribe the Uzbeki to sneak his wife and kids to Panslavia...but not Lord Stein.
He will get the mercy he showed Hood and O'Brian.
The conspirators and their families (sans Lady Stein and children) are taken before Fitz, who begins torturing them to get the name of the head conspirator out of them. Zimmerman, given the "General of the House Karls" title now that the former General is rotting in a shallow grave, takes the lead. It doesn't take long.
Fitz...is not very happy when he finds out who ordered his assassination.
The commoners involved in the plot are hanged.
The nobles are impaled.
Valette's last words before the spike gets rammed through his back - a truly awful, grisly, horrible way to die, I will note, easily on par with crucifixion for sheer hideous tortuousness - is: "But we were friends since we were six!"
Fitz...does not take any of this well. Hence why he begs Bruce to come to him, to protect him. When Bruce arrives, the bodies are still rotting on the spikes and Fitz is locked in his offices and looks a bit like a starving greyhound. His Rimmerfication is complete: He won't sleep, barely eats, sobs openly, and sees plots in every direction. The only person he allows to stay in the room with him is a completely terrified Dr. Flag, who cowers in a corner and shivers. Bruce takes over for managing his day to day life - turning down promotions to newer and more ridiculously exalted ranks. As Bruce points out, gently, his rank is already far, far, far in excess of his desire and his actual command - it would be absurd to be a Marshal with only 300 troops under his command.
Over the next month, a queer equilibrium establishes itself in the city as Bruce manages Fitz's security. He recruits Uzbeki guards (as the House Karls are not trusted by Fitzpatrick) and both Fitz and Lady Chelsea square off. While Lady Chelsea and her husband, Lord Newsom, weren't a part of the coup...they're definitely angling for power now that Fitz is weak and afraid. Lady Chelsea starts acquiring loyalist Karls via bribery and they take to wearing golden Chrysanthemums flowers to represent their allegiance to her (and thus, the beginning of her future sobriquet.)
It will probably not shock you that Zimmerman is one of the first to adopt that.
Bruce convinces Fitz to eat more, though Fitz is turbo-paranoid about poisons and will only eat fruits and veggies grown by his wife and her garden, and only after they're scrubbed to ensure no contact poisons have been sprayed on them. Bruce manages to get a doctor in from off-base who starts injecting Fitz with vitamins. He also discovers that Mason has been plying Fitz with laudanum which...that...that's not helping, Mason! So, Bruce burns the laudanum and forces Fitz to go cold turkey.
This all helps Fitz somewhat, and Bruce solidifies his control by removing the ultraviolet lens on the Blinking Star projector in Neapolis, only putting it back on when Fitz wants to send messages back to the capital - thus, ensuring that while Lady Chelsea has a lot of power in Neapolis, she can't give orders to her followers back in Yukon territories beyond smuggling letters out on supply zeppelins. So, Fitz starts intercepting those letters through the simple expedient of assigning a bunch of Uzbeki to just search every cargo container for letters and taking them to him.
With this leverage over the Shays, Fitz decides to finally meet with her to settle this standoff. Bruce and he discuss what to give her to make her side with him - though Bruce seems pretty sure that she'll be unsatisfied with anything short of ultimate power, because that's the kind of people Fitz has surrounded himself with. They agree that she can't get the dead conspirators lands, since that would be far too much power (and might cause the army to revolt in outrage - as remember, large sections of the army are loyal to the families those conspirators came from.)
Buck suggests giving her the Autonomous Zones - remember, the slave labor plantations that collapsed the Yukon economy? And here, we learn Fitzpatrick's real motivations for making those: He seems to think that they're involved in "uniting the world economy" which...Fitz, that's one...incredibly biased way to see that effort, you self delusional weirdo. Fitz admits that the AZs are all failures anyway. He will close them down and instead focus on uniting the world's "culture." Good luck, Fitz.
Bruce is the one who suggests the idea they settle on: Give Lady Chelsea the International Traders. Fitz agrees - he'll offer half, force her to bargain up to all, then settle on an agreement to divide the traitor's lands among the commoners, specifically the veterans of the Four Point War. That, he thinks, will get Lady Chelsea on his side AND get the commoners to love him again. He mockingly throws this suggestion by the still terrified and cowering Dr. Flag. "So, what do you think, Dr. Flag?"
And Dr. Flag's like, "I don't knowwww I wanna go hooooooome!"
We finally get to meet Lady Chelsea and her husband, Lord Newsom, and it turns out that Lord Newsom...is a complete moron. He's this tall, gangly, older man (30 years older than his wife, ew) with a deliberate suntan (something Bruce and other Yukons find disguising because...they're white supremacists and making yourself darker is obviously "disgusting") and a pencil thin mustache. He's so clearly not quite aware of what the fuck is going on that he actually walks across the courtyard they're meeting at (which is full of heavily armed guards of both camps glaring at one another) and goes, "Wow, what dry weather we're having, huh?" to Bruce, who just...gives him that look, you know?
Lady Chelsea, meanwhile, is...a lot like a girl version of Fitz, but without the pretensions towards creating anything but a big circular network of resources that funnel directly to herself. Fitz wants to make a grotesque "Yukon Unified Culture" that spreads over the whole world. Chelsea wants all the nicest stuff, forever. You decide which is worse, cause they both sound terrible in different ways to me.
With her allegiance somewhat secured, Fitz boasts: "Augustus had six secretaries to run the Roman Empire - I need only six to run the whole world!"
Charlotte and Bruce's family have arrived by now - and Charlotte immediately sets to actually talking to the natives and finds out that the Uzbekis have a tribal culture. Bruce brags a lot about how the Yukon and Uzbeki are very similar, in that they have clans with allegiances and loyalty to one another that is unbreakable and honorable and pure, very...Frank Herberty of him. He basically forms an alliance with the largest of these clans and soon, the fighting men outnumber the family-less, clan-less, honorless House Karls two to one. Bruce fully accredits Charlotte's diplomacy to this coup, even if Fitz only thanks Bruce for it.
Fitz launches the construction of a gaudy, hideous monstrosity of a "United Church" - with pagodas and minarets and Aztek pyramids and a cathedral all smooshed together to represent all the world's faiths being united under one umbrella. Lady Chelsea, meanwhile, begins using all of her money to throw even more lavish bacchanalias as Neapolis completes its final slide down into complete batshit insanity. As I said earlier, this is the Fascism Any% Speedrun: What Hitler and co would have done in, like, a decade after having somehow taken over the world, Fitz has managed in, like, two years. Impressive!
Bruce, Charlotte, Lady Joan, Buck, and Bruce's children basically stick to Fitz's part of the Great House, managing the guard and keeping their heads down.
The slumtown around Neapolis gets even more dangerous and, as a final piece of ironic punishment, the Aranov Brothers - the men who designed Fitz's deadly airplanes and bred his WMD locusts - are stabbed to death in a pointless, stupid street brawl over a card game. "A fitting end for Frick and Frack," is all Fitz has to say about the men directly responsible for his technological edge in the war that killed...maybe a billion people.
Meanwhile, back in the Yukon Confederacy, things are actually getting better: With the Autonomous Zones closed and foreign trade sinking back to prewar levels, and the land of the conspirators given to common families (many of whom had been suffering), the economy starts to make a slow, haltering recovery. The newspapers once more love Fitzpatrick - the blame all their woes on the Newsoms and the Shays. Fitz is pleased about this - but one evening in Neapolis, a minor conversation comes up that sets the stage for this entire book.
See, Fitz takes his morning runs to exercise. He does so in the gardens. While he runs, he has Dr. Flag and Bruce read him the Illiad.
This idea pleases Fitz immensely. Unfortunately, he quickly runs into the problem that if you change Homer, you'd need to change Virgil, then Chaucer and Shakespeare, and the Brad Pit movie, it's just a lot of work. Fitz is depressed. Then he brightens, "Ah! It's too late for Homer...but is it too late for us?"
And thus!
We finally get to the point where Fitzpatrick oversees the commissioning of Dr. Jonathan Gerald and the poet Mary Anne Collins and their staffs to write both The Age of Fitzpatrick (a 7,000 page long book made up almost entirely out of lies), and From the Atlantic To the Pacific - a poem version in case you're bored by Histories. Fitz seems to know his time is short...and the news comes, soon, that the Four Points themselves are falling apart. Countries keep showing up and sheepishly admitting that, um, they have no money anymore. Because everyone has starved and or died and or the infrastructure got incinerated by Fire Sticks. Only a few countries even manage to pay one tithe - China doesn't even manage that, nor does India.
One by one, the other nations of the world just stop paying tithes and stop protecting the I.T. The combination of economic collapse in the rest of the world and the resurgence of super-danger on the oceans makes the I.T a massive boondoggle rather than a moneymaker, which infuriates Lady Chelsea.
So, not to undercut the genuinely chilling, haunting imagery of that dream - which has stuck with me for years, but...
(well, that's a relief!)
On April 29th, Bruce comes to where his family is and finds his batman, French, alone. He says Charlotte went out to the Great House - an...odd man came to see her. An old fellow in a robe. And he gave French...a watch. A Timmerman watch.
Bruce arrives at the Great House with five of his most loyal guards and finds Dr. Murrey and Charlotte in a sitting room. Charlotte, sobbing, begs Bruce to not listen to him, to refuse to do anything he says. Dr. Murrey, amused, sends her off - the men have something to talk about. Once everyone else is gone, Dr. Murrey explains that if he doesn't come back, the Timmermen will send another agent and another and another until the job is done - but the first people on the chopping block are Charlotte and Bruce's children. Unless Bruce does something for him.
Specifically, Dr. Murrey says, he wants Bruce to kill Lord. Fitzpatrick.
Bruce is stunned to silence - and Dr. Murrey smugly describes how remarkable Charlotte was. He found her when she was just a saloon owner's daughter - an outsider, hated quietly by the Yukon for being Catholic, and yet, she spent every weekend going to old folk's homes to read books to the blind. "An outsider, and yet so in love with the world, she was perfect." Then he just needed to pick a member of Fitz's inner circle...and when Fitz chose Bruce, he knew he had his match.
"When I took her to watch you march on the parade grounds in your dashing cadet grays, that sealed the deal. You won her heart right then and there. You do love her, don't you, General Bruce?"
Bruce can't lie - it's too obvious.
Dr. Murrey lays out the plan: A shipment will arrive. Bruce is to place it under Fitz's throne, then he will set the chemical timer inside. A bomb will go off and take Fitz and his cronies straight to heaven. If he doesn't Charlotte dies. ~Ta Ta~
Bruce asks him why? Why now? And Dr. Murrey smiles and says: "His time is up. An old Timmerman joke. Now, get to work."
Pularksi and Bruce meet - and Pularski is in for the plan. Pularksi agrees to help. The fuse is a spring-loaded timer that shoves a magnesium spike into the explosives to trigger them. Buck, worryingly, notes that a very strong man could shove it in by hand. Buck, no. Don't you be saying things like that!
On May 6th, Fitz has a planned ceremony he's going to hold to celebrate the opening of his Universal Church. Bruce has the explosives planted - and in the hours before the ceremony, he and Fitz have a conversation. Fitz admits that he misses hamburgers, and rain, and the smell of the fresh world. He also admits something: He had finally realized what the dead in his dream are saying.
They're saying 'do you feel shame'?
Fitz goes on to admit that when he was a youth, he actually answered yes to that very question Dr. Murrey posed him. In response, Dr. Murrey slapped him and commanded him that no Yukon should ever feel shame, ever. He wonders at why Dr. Murrey changed his mind - but dismisses it. It is no matter.
The ceremony begins - and Buck Pularksi tells Bruce that he needs to tell the Uzbekis to be ready to move back before the bomb goes. Bruce steps out as Buck heads inside...
And then the entire church explodes, taking Fitz, Flag, Zimmerman, most of the Lords and Ladies and a bunch of House Karls up in flames. Bruce, stunned, watches - for Buck...but Buck doesn't come out. Bruce believes he can guess at what happened: Buck knew that if the bomb was set off at the ceremonies, Lady Joan would be there. So instead, he went inside...and blew it up early, by hand, to ensure that Fitz was sent to hell. I think, also, Buck Pularksi, like Bruce, knew his crimes needed some kind of penance and...
Well.
Suicidal ideation comes easy to some people, I suppose.
Bruce finds Charlotte, Lady Joan, and French. He tells them of the assassination of Lord Fitzpatrick - Lady Joan barely reacts. Then he says, sadly, that Buck died in the attack. That causes her to shriek and burst into tears. Which...oof...but as they're preparing to flee Neapolis as it descends into chaos, he finds four figures approaching: Lord Mason, his wife, Lady Chelsea and her husband. Bruce, who had EXPECTED them to all be rapidly expanding clouds of ash right now, gapes at them. Lord Mason says that Dr. Murrey warned them - they're part of the bargain. Get them to Tashkent or the Timmermen's threat falls like a hammer.
Bruce has no time to argue. They get into disguises, hop onto their horses, and ride, with Bruce holding his children before him.
Mason has a steam car hidden a ways off and they use it to drive off to the nearest non-compromised zeppelin port and they set sail to the nearest Yukon territory, Australia. Once they arrive, they tell the official story: Fitz was assassinated by the House Karls, but they managed to save his wife, making them heroes. When the Yukon Army arrives ten days later at Neapolis, they find a burned out wreck, the Uzbeki having left and the refugees having scattered, with a few hundred House Karls barricaded in the burnt out ruins of Fitzpatrick's old mansion.
Neapolis is as dead as Fitzpatrick and his dream of empire.
The epilogue begins with Bruce and co being questioned by the Sydney MPs - but soon, Bruce is sent to a chamber, private and alone...and sits across from a very pleased Dr. Murrey. Dr. Murrey tells Bruce that he should be overjoyed: He's fit, in good health, his rank is high, he has a wife that loves him. He has everything...and...
(lightly edited for brevity)
Which...that's not true. The whole book, arguably, is about how the Chinese are incredibly brave and dedicated. Like, you saw tens of millions of them being intensely, impossibly brave. But Dr. Murrey continues.
Knowing about Victoria and the Retroculture now makes this passage hit a lot different. Like...I think Judson just wrote William S. Lind into the book?
Bruce is horrified. Numbly, he asks what happens then? And Dr. Murrey says in a few hundred years, the Timmermen will have to do it again - after a new collection of Yukons have gotten powerful and rich via inheritance and time. Bruce asks...if...he feels any guilt, about the people who die. Dr. Murrey says, and I quote: "People die. That's History. Some die sooner; some die later. That's what makes the story interesting. You should be grateful for the Timmermen, Bruce."
Bruce is too polite to say what I'd say. So, Dr. Murrey continues.
And there...we have it!
This book is about a lot of things. It's about the bloody cost of imperialism and empire, the folly of the fascist worldview, about the vileness of white supremacy. It's about being a good man in a terrible, terrible society - and about guilt and shame. It is about speculative fiction and wry insight about the modern day. But at its core, the center of the book is about one thing and one thing only.
Steampunk itself.
Judson has given us a world of steampunk. Zeppelins ply the trade winds, and steam powered airplanes take to the skies in vast flights. Steam powered jets! Steam powered liners and trains and lamps and air conditioners. It's all so delightful and interesting - mechanical precision and hand crafted artistry bringing to life the dreams of the gilded age and Victoria. But then Judson shows us what he (and, to be honest, I) think that steampunk truly is.
Once, I asked my friend @StrigaRosa, what does she think steampunk is.
She said: "Nothing. It is bullshit. Put a gear on it. Call it Steampunk."
And i actually disagree a little.
I think Steampunk is this: Eternal dreams of empire, of fluttering Union Jacks, of hordes of heathen Chinese gunned down en mass.
You want Steampunk?
Imagine a human face.
Now, imagine a boot with a gear on it. Stamping on that face.
Forever.
But through the cracks left in the book, we can maybe imagine a better world. Dream of a better world. Because nothing lasts forever - and there are steampunk books, thank god, that actually do try and buck these trends. Though if any of you say Levithan by Scot Westerfield, I will instantly teleport behind you and say "nothing personal, kid" then cut you in half with a katana because Levithan is not steampunk, it's DISELPUNK, GODDAMN IT.
Ahem.
We can of course, look at Dr. Murrey's statements through the lens that the book has been preparing us for. He himself says that the electric age was not so bad - and look at his specific worries. It's not income inequality or climate change he's worried about. It's that men don't get free fucktoys anymore. "Every city was becoming the same city" yeah, sure, now go on and tell us about the Great Replacement, you fucking wanna-be Sargon of Akkad. And what a shallow, narrow view of love.
In the world of 2425 with electricity, I think Bruce would have found Charlotte. People manage, without machinations and design, to find love. They might find it in many people, or few, but it happens. I refuse to give Dr. Murrey the credit.
Bruce tells that he never again would rise in rank. He retired after a few quiet years, then kept his head down through the Shay Regime, until General Hood's son, following in his father's footsteps, led the rebellion against her. It was very easy, because the Timmermen immediately threw their full support behind the rebels. After the Shays were all dead and their followers executed en mass, the Confederacy returned to the country it had before. Though the first two points of the Four Points have fallen, the latter two about navies and airforces remain true.
Which
Like.
Lets be fucking honest here, if you go off my read of the book that the Timmermen were terrified of an orbital weapon taking down their Blinking Stars and Storm Machines, that was really what they were concerned about, not this bullshit about staying in a "heroic age forever." Bruce, though, does not want to end on the purges of the Shays, nor the quiet dominance of the Yukon Empire. He instead writes of himself walking out of his meeting with Dr. Murrey and seeing his wife, Mary and Joan, standing on the tarmac, waiting for him. His final line is simple in its pleas.
"Perhaps the reader will look upon my family and believe I did at least one good thing in those times, and if the reader cannot forgive the rest of what I did, he will concede I was not entirely a monster, but merely an ordinary man who did horrible things."
There is an afterward by Professor Von Buren, who has foregon citation or footnote for most of the finale, due to saying that Bruce has so far left the bounds of credibility that he will let his words say for himself: In a slightly nervous way, Von Buren lays out that this has to be wrong, otherwise...everything the Yukons do are meaningless. Their lives have no point or purpose beyond maintaining Timmerman rule and control over the world. He can't, and will not, accept that. He decides that Bruce must have been infuriated about the fact he "only" reached Brigadier General status and wanted to take that out on Fitzpatrick.
He also digs up an edition of The Confederacy Today from March 2575 - an interview with a man whose family knew Bruce a hundred years earlier. He says that this commentary will illustrate the "complete deterioration" of Bruce in his older age.
This old fisherman continues to lay out more details - Bruce would never tell stories about his fighting. When young men went to the army, he told them them to shoot over their enemies heads, or not to serve in a combat unit. When asked to speak on Lord Fitzpatrick's birthday, all he said was that it would have been better had Fitzpatrick never been born.
He was also sad. The fishman relates that many times, Bruce would sit on a rock by the sea as it rained, looking out at the waves, quiet and alone - and the only one who could bring him back in was his wife.
But there were two incidents that stuck out bright in the fisherman's memory: One time, a Nipponse sailing boat came ashore. The Japanese had been fishing in their waters. The villagers planned to kill the lot of them - but then Sir Bruce arrived in his motorcar and put himself between the Japanese and the Yukons. They couldn't stop him, and he paid the Japanese for their fish, paid to have their boat towed, and sent them on their way. He told the man they'd be glad, later in life, that they hadn't hurt them.
The other time?
Well.
And that is that, with one last footnote: This was from an editorial called The Eccentric Knight of Astoria.
I do love Fitzpatrick's War...it may be nostalgia because I read it young, but I think there's a lot here that is valuable and resonant to me - and every time I read it, I remember Dr. Murrey's speech.
History doesn't have an arrow. It's just what happens. This book shows us a world where certain people win and they create the world they want. These people love writing steampunk. Arguably, the Domination of Drakka has elements of steampunk in the earliest book - those damn steamcars. I know that other books by S.M Sterling do - the Peshawar Lancers, for example. And I remember that that book...seemed pretty blithe about how sometimes, a little genocide is necessary and you shouldn't feel too guilty about making other people die so you can have the world you want.
Hmm.
Lets dream of some better worlds, maybe?
It's midnight and eighteen House Karls, led by the general of the Karls, Smythe, dressed in Uzbeki clothing and armed with automatic rifles creep into the Great House, with a plan to head to Fitzpatrick's bedroom, blast open the door with explosives, and gun the Consul and his wife dead in seconds. They might have wondered why the lights were still on, so late at night...but not for long. Their plan has already been betrayed, and Fitzpatrick stands on a hill miles away, watching through binoculars as loyalist House Karls perched in the rafters open fire.
Other traitor Karls head for Lady Joan's room - four of them. They get to the door, and one of them starts opening it, but before he turns to check and make sure his buddies are ready, three of them are killed by Buck Pulasrki, defending
Zimmerman - a loyalist piece of shit - leads gangs of other Loyalist Karls through the streets of Neapolis and they come to the conspirators houses...and to the shock of zero people, it is the majority of the rest of the Basileus: Shelley and his wife drink poison rather than be captured. Valette, a spoiled brat tot he end, thinks he's untouchable and allows himself to be captured while demanding to speak to Fitz. Stein is found by Buck and his guard. Buck, always a kind man, tells Stein that if he uses all the gold in his house, he can bribe the Uzbeki to sneak his wife and kids to Panslavia...but not Lord Stein.
He will get the mercy he showed Hood and O'Brian.
The conspirators and their families (sans Lady Stein and children) are taken before Fitz, who begins torturing them to get the name of the head conspirator out of them. Zimmerman, given the "General of the House Karls" title now that the former General is rotting in a shallow grave, takes the lead. It doesn't take long.
Fitz...is not very happy when he finds out who ordered his assassination.
So, how did Fitz find out? Well, Shelley, in the stupidest possible move, trusted Mason at all. He brought Mason into the plot and Mason immediately started gathering evidence and then fed it all to Fitz at the last second. In exchange, Mason gets to be the new Foreign Minister despite gross incompetence and vile behavior.Bruce's Narration said:
The commoners involved in the plot are hanged.
The nobles are impaled.
Valette's last words before the spike gets rammed through his back - a truly awful, grisly, horrible way to die, I will note, easily on par with crucifixion for sheer hideous tortuousness - is: "But we were friends since we were six!"
Fitz...does not take any of this well. Hence why he begs Bruce to come to him, to protect him. When Bruce arrives, the bodies are still rotting on the spikes and Fitz is locked in his offices and looks a bit like a starving greyhound. His Rimmerfication is complete: He won't sleep, barely eats, sobs openly, and sees plots in every direction. The only person he allows to stay in the room with him is a completely terrified Dr. Flag, who cowers in a corner and shivers. Bruce takes over for managing his day to day life - turning down promotions to newer and more ridiculously exalted ranks. As Bruce points out, gently, his rank is already far, far, far in excess of his desire and his actual command - it would be absurd to be a Marshal with only 300 troops under his command.
Over the next month, a queer equilibrium establishes itself in the city as Bruce manages Fitz's security. He recruits Uzbeki guards (as the House Karls are not trusted by Fitzpatrick) and both Fitz and Lady Chelsea square off. While Lady Chelsea and her husband, Lord Newsom, weren't a part of the coup...they're definitely angling for power now that Fitz is weak and afraid. Lady Chelsea starts acquiring loyalist Karls via bribery and they take to wearing golden Chrysanthemums flowers to represent their allegiance to her (and thus, the beginning of her future sobriquet.)
It will probably not shock you that Zimmerman is one of the first to adopt that.
Bruce convinces Fitz to eat more, though Fitz is turbo-paranoid about poisons and will only eat fruits and veggies grown by his wife and her garden, and only after they're scrubbed to ensure no contact poisons have been sprayed on them. Bruce manages to get a doctor in from off-base who starts injecting Fitz with vitamins. He also discovers that Mason has been plying Fitz with laudanum which...that...that's not helping, Mason! So, Bruce burns the laudanum and forces Fitz to go cold turkey.
This all helps Fitz somewhat, and Bruce solidifies his control by removing the ultraviolet lens on the Blinking Star projector in Neapolis, only putting it back on when Fitz wants to send messages back to the capital - thus, ensuring that while Lady Chelsea has a lot of power in Neapolis, she can't give orders to her followers back in Yukon territories beyond smuggling letters out on supply zeppelins. So, Fitz starts intercepting those letters through the simple expedient of assigning a bunch of Uzbeki to just search every cargo container for letters and taking them to him.
With this leverage over the Shays, Fitz decides to finally meet with her to settle this standoff. Bruce and he discuss what to give her to make her side with him - though Bruce seems pretty sure that she'll be unsatisfied with anything short of ultimate power, because that's the kind of people Fitz has surrounded himself with. They agree that she can't get the dead conspirators lands, since that would be far too much power (and might cause the army to revolt in outrage - as remember, large sections of the army are loyal to the families those conspirators came from.)
Buck suggests giving her the Autonomous Zones - remember, the slave labor plantations that collapsed the Yukon economy? And here, we learn Fitzpatrick's real motivations for making those: He seems to think that they're involved in "uniting the world economy" which...Fitz, that's one...incredibly biased way to see that effort, you self delusional weirdo. Fitz admits that the AZs are all failures anyway. He will close them down and instead focus on uniting the world's "culture." Good luck, Fitz.
Bruce is the one who suggests the idea they settle on: Give Lady Chelsea the International Traders. Fitz agrees - he'll offer half, force her to bargain up to all, then settle on an agreement to divide the traitor's lands among the commoners, specifically the veterans of the Four Point War. That, he thinks, will get Lady Chelsea on his side AND get the commoners to love him again. He mockingly throws this suggestion by the still terrified and cowering Dr. Flag. "So, what do you think, Dr. Flag?"
And Dr. Flag's like, "I don't knowwww I wanna go hooooooome!"
We finally get to meet Lady Chelsea and her husband, Lord Newsom, and it turns out that Lord Newsom...is a complete moron. He's this tall, gangly, older man (30 years older than his wife, ew) with a deliberate suntan (something Bruce and other Yukons find disguising because...they're white supremacists and making yourself darker is obviously "disgusting") and a pencil thin mustache. He's so clearly not quite aware of what the fuck is going on that he actually walks across the courtyard they're meeting at (which is full of heavily armed guards of both camps glaring at one another) and goes, "Wow, what dry weather we're having, huh?" to Bruce, who just...gives him that look, you know?
Lady Chelsea, meanwhile, is...a lot like a girl version of Fitz, but without the pretensions towards creating anything but a big circular network of resources that funnel directly to herself. Fitz wants to make a grotesque "Yukon Unified Culture" that spreads over the whole world. Chelsea wants all the nicest stuff, forever. You decide which is worse, cause they both sound terrible in different ways to me.
With her allegiance somewhat secured, Fitz boasts: "Augustus had six secretaries to run the Roman Empire - I need only six to run the whole world!"
Charlotte and Bruce's family have arrived by now - and Charlotte immediately sets to actually talking to the natives and finds out that the Uzbekis have a tribal culture. Bruce brags a lot about how the Yukon and Uzbeki are very similar, in that they have clans with allegiances and loyalty to one another that is unbreakable and honorable and pure, very...Frank Herberty of him. He basically forms an alliance with the largest of these clans and soon, the fighting men outnumber the family-less, clan-less, honorless House Karls two to one. Bruce fully accredits Charlotte's diplomacy to this coup, even if Fitz only thanks Bruce for it.
Fitz launches the construction of a gaudy, hideous monstrosity of a "United Church" - with pagodas and minarets and Aztek pyramids and a cathedral all smooshed together to represent all the world's faiths being united under one umbrella. Lady Chelsea, meanwhile, begins using all of her money to throw even more lavish bacchanalias as Neapolis completes its final slide down into complete batshit insanity. As I said earlier, this is the Fascism Any% Speedrun: What Hitler and co would have done in, like, a decade after having somehow taken over the world, Fitz has managed in, like, two years. Impressive!
Bruce, Charlotte, Lady Joan, Buck, and Bruce's children basically stick to Fitz's part of the Great House, managing the guard and keeping their heads down.
The slumtown around Neapolis gets even more dangerous and, as a final piece of ironic punishment, the Aranov Brothers - the men who designed Fitz's deadly airplanes and bred his WMD locusts - are stabbed to death in a pointless, stupid street brawl over a card game. "A fitting end for Frick and Frack," is all Fitz has to say about the men directly responsible for his technological edge in the war that killed...maybe a billion people.
Meanwhile, back in the Yukon Confederacy, things are actually getting better: With the Autonomous Zones closed and foreign trade sinking back to prewar levels, and the land of the conspirators given to common families (many of whom had been suffering), the economy starts to make a slow, haltering recovery. The newspapers once more love Fitzpatrick - the blame all their woes on the Newsoms and the Shays. Fitz is pleased about this - but one evening in Neapolis, a minor conversation comes up that sets the stage for this entire book.
See, Fitz takes his morning runs to exercise. He does so in the gardens. While he runs, he has Dr. Flag and Bruce read him the Illiad.
Bruce's Narration said:
This idea pleases Fitz immensely. Unfortunately, he quickly runs into the problem that if you change Homer, you'd need to change Virgil, then Chaucer and Shakespeare, and the Brad Pit movie, it's just a lot of work. Fitz is depressed. Then he brightens, "Ah! It's too late for Homer...but is it too late for us?"
And thus!
We finally get to the point where Fitzpatrick oversees the commissioning of Dr. Jonathan Gerald and the poet Mary Anne Collins and their staffs to write both The Age of Fitzpatrick (a 7,000 page long book made up almost entirely out of lies), and From the Atlantic To the Pacific - a poem version in case you're bored by Histories. Fitz seems to know his time is short...and the news comes, soon, that the Four Points themselves are falling apart. Countries keep showing up and sheepishly admitting that, um, they have no money anymore. Because everyone has starved and or died and or the infrastructure got incinerated by Fire Sticks. Only a few countries even manage to pay one tithe - China doesn't even manage that, nor does India.
One by one, the other nations of the world just stop paying tithes and stop protecting the I.T. The combination of economic collapse in the rest of the world and the resurgence of super-danger on the oceans makes the I.T a massive boondoggle rather than a moneymaker, which infuriates Lady Chelsea.
Bruce's Narration said:
So, not to undercut the genuinely chilling, haunting imagery of that dream - which has stuck with me for years, but...
(well, that's a relief!)
On April 29th, Bruce comes to where his family is and finds his batman, French, alone. He says Charlotte went out to the Great House - an...odd man came to see her. An old fellow in a robe. And he gave French...a watch. A Timmerman watch.
Bruce arrives at the Great House with five of his most loyal guards and finds Dr. Murrey and Charlotte in a sitting room. Charlotte, sobbing, begs Bruce to not listen to him, to refuse to do anything he says. Dr. Murrey, amused, sends her off - the men have something to talk about. Once everyone else is gone, Dr. Murrey explains that if he doesn't come back, the Timmermen will send another agent and another and another until the job is done - but the first people on the chopping block are Charlotte and Bruce's children. Unless Bruce does something for him.
Specifically, Dr. Murrey says, he wants Bruce to kill Lord. Fitzpatrick.
Bruce is stunned to silence - and Dr. Murrey smugly describes how remarkable Charlotte was. He found her when she was just a saloon owner's daughter - an outsider, hated quietly by the Yukon for being Catholic, and yet, she spent every weekend going to old folk's homes to read books to the blind. "An outsider, and yet so in love with the world, she was perfect." Then he just needed to pick a member of Fitz's inner circle...and when Fitz chose Bruce, he knew he had his match.
"When I took her to watch you march on the parade grounds in your dashing cadet grays, that sealed the deal. You won her heart right then and there. You do love her, don't you, General Bruce?"
Bruce can't lie - it's too obvious.
Dr. Murrey lays out the plan: A shipment will arrive. Bruce is to place it under Fitz's throne, then he will set the chemical timer inside. A bomb will go off and take Fitz and his cronies straight to heaven. If he doesn't Charlotte dies. ~Ta Ta~
Bruce asks him why? Why now? And Dr. Murrey smiles and says: "His time is up. An old Timmerman joke. Now, get to work."
Pularksi and Bruce meet - and Pularski is in for the plan. Pularksi agrees to help. The fuse is a spring-loaded timer that shoves a magnesium spike into the explosives to trigger them. Buck, worryingly, notes that a very strong man could shove it in by hand. Buck, no. Don't you be saying things like that!
On May 6th, Fitz has a planned ceremony he's going to hold to celebrate the opening of his Universal Church. Bruce has the explosives planted - and in the hours before the ceremony, he and Fitz have a conversation. Fitz admits that he misses hamburgers, and rain, and the smell of the fresh world. He also admits something: He had finally realized what the dead in his dream are saying.
They're saying 'do you feel shame'?
Bruce's Narration said:
Fitz goes on to admit that when he was a youth, he actually answered yes to that very question Dr. Murrey posed him. In response, Dr. Murrey slapped him and commanded him that no Yukon should ever feel shame, ever. He wonders at why Dr. Murrey changed his mind - but dismisses it. It is no matter.
The ceremony begins - and Buck Pularksi tells Bruce that he needs to tell the Uzbekis to be ready to move back before the bomb goes. Bruce steps out as Buck heads inside...
And then the entire church explodes, taking Fitz, Flag, Zimmerman, most of the Lords and Ladies and a bunch of House Karls up in flames. Bruce, stunned, watches - for Buck...but Buck doesn't come out. Bruce believes he can guess at what happened: Buck knew that if the bomb was set off at the ceremonies, Lady Joan would be there. So instead, he went inside...and blew it up early, by hand, to ensure that Fitz was sent to hell. I think, also, Buck Pularksi, like Bruce, knew his crimes needed some kind of penance and...
Well.
Suicidal ideation comes easy to some people, I suppose.
Bruce finds Charlotte, Lady Joan, and French. He tells them of the assassination of Lord Fitzpatrick - Lady Joan barely reacts. Then he says, sadly, that Buck died in the attack. That causes her to shriek and burst into tears. Which...oof...but as they're preparing to flee Neapolis as it descends into chaos, he finds four figures approaching: Lord Mason, his wife, Lady Chelsea and her husband. Bruce, who had EXPECTED them to all be rapidly expanding clouds of ash right now, gapes at them. Lord Mason says that Dr. Murrey warned them - they're part of the bargain. Get them to Tashkent or the Timmermen's threat falls like a hammer.
Bruce has no time to argue. They get into disguises, hop onto their horses, and ride, with Bruce holding his children before him.
Mason has a steam car hidden a ways off and they use it to drive off to the nearest non-compromised zeppelin port and they set sail to the nearest Yukon territory, Australia. Once they arrive, they tell the official story: Fitz was assassinated by the House Karls, but they managed to save his wife, making them heroes. When the Yukon Army arrives ten days later at Neapolis, they find a burned out wreck, the Uzbeki having left and the refugees having scattered, with a few hundred House Karls barricaded in the burnt out ruins of Fitzpatrick's old mansion.
Neapolis is as dead as Fitzpatrick and his dream of empire.
The epilogue begins with Bruce and co being questioned by the Sydney MPs - but soon, Bruce is sent to a chamber, private and alone...and sits across from a very pleased Dr. Murrey. Dr. Murrey tells Bruce that he should be overjoyed: He's fit, in good health, his rank is high, he has a wife that loves him. He has everything...and...
(lightly edited for brevity)
Bruce's Narration said:
Which...that's not true. The whole book, arguably, is about how the Chinese are incredibly brave and dedicated. Like, you saw tens of millions of them being intensely, impossibly brave. But Dr. Murrey continues.
Bruce's Narratinon said:
Knowing about Victoria and the Retroculture now makes this passage hit a lot different. Like...I think Judson just wrote William S. Lind into the book?
Bruce is horrified. Numbly, he asks what happens then? And Dr. Murrey says in a few hundred years, the Timmermen will have to do it again - after a new collection of Yukons have gotten powerful and rich via inheritance and time. Bruce asks...if...he feels any guilt, about the people who die. Dr. Murrey says, and I quote: "People die. That's History. Some die sooner; some die later. That's what makes the story interesting. You should be grateful for the Timmermen, Bruce."
Bruce is too polite to say what I'd say. So, Dr. Murrey continues.
And there...we have it!
This book is about a lot of things. It's about the bloody cost of imperialism and empire, the folly of the fascist worldview, about the vileness of white supremacy. It's about being a good man in a terrible, terrible society - and about guilt and shame. It is about speculative fiction and wry insight about the modern day. But at its core, the center of the book is about one thing and one thing only.
Steampunk itself.
Judson has given us a world of steampunk. Zeppelins ply the trade winds, and steam powered airplanes take to the skies in vast flights. Steam powered jets! Steam powered liners and trains and lamps and air conditioners. It's all so delightful and interesting - mechanical precision and hand crafted artistry bringing to life the dreams of the gilded age and Victoria. But then Judson shows us what he (and, to be honest, I) think that steampunk truly is.
Once, I asked my friend @StrigaRosa, what does she think steampunk is.
She said: "Nothing. It is bullshit. Put a gear on it. Call it Steampunk."
And i actually disagree a little.
I think Steampunk is this: Eternal dreams of empire, of fluttering Union Jacks, of hordes of heathen Chinese gunned down en mass.
You want Steampunk?
Imagine a human face.
Now, imagine a boot with a gear on it. Stamping on that face.
Forever.
But through the cracks left in the book, we can maybe imagine a better world. Dream of a better world. Because nothing lasts forever - and there are steampunk books, thank god, that actually do try and buck these trends. Though if any of you say Levithan by Scot Westerfield, I will instantly teleport behind you and say "nothing personal, kid" then cut you in half with a katana because Levithan is not steampunk, it's DISELPUNK, GODDAMN IT.
Ahem.
We can of course, look at Dr. Murrey's statements through the lens that the book has been preparing us for. He himself says that the electric age was not so bad - and look at his specific worries. It's not income inequality or climate change he's worried about. It's that men don't get free fucktoys anymore. "Every city was becoming the same city" yeah, sure, now go on and tell us about the Great Replacement, you fucking wanna-be Sargon of Akkad. And what a shallow, narrow view of love.
In the world of 2425 with electricity, I think Bruce would have found Charlotte. People manage, without machinations and design, to find love. They might find it in many people, or few, but it happens. I refuse to give Dr. Murrey the credit.
Bruce tells that he never again would rise in rank. He retired after a few quiet years, then kept his head down through the Shay Regime, until General Hood's son, following in his father's footsteps, led the rebellion against her. It was very easy, because the Timmermen immediately threw their full support behind the rebels. After the Shays were all dead and their followers executed en mass, the Confederacy returned to the country it had before. Though the first two points of the Four Points have fallen, the latter two about navies and airforces remain true.
Which
Like.
Lets be fucking honest here, if you go off my read of the book that the Timmermen were terrified of an orbital weapon taking down their Blinking Stars and Storm Machines, that was really what they were concerned about, not this bullshit about staying in a "heroic age forever." Bruce, though, does not want to end on the purges of the Shays, nor the quiet dominance of the Yukon Empire. He instead writes of himself walking out of his meeting with Dr. Murrey and seeing his wife, Mary and Joan, standing on the tarmac, waiting for him. His final line is simple in its pleas.
"Perhaps the reader will look upon my family and believe I did at least one good thing in those times, and if the reader cannot forgive the rest of what I did, he will concede I was not entirely a monster, but merely an ordinary man who did horrible things."
There is an afterward by Professor Von Buren, who has foregon citation or footnote for most of the finale, due to saying that Bruce has so far left the bounds of credibility that he will let his words say for himself: In a slightly nervous way, Von Buren lays out that this has to be wrong, otherwise...everything the Yukons do are meaningless. Their lives have no point or purpose beyond maintaining Timmerman rule and control over the world. He can't, and will not, accept that. He decides that Bruce must have been infuriated about the fact he "only" reached Brigadier General status and wanted to take that out on Fitzpatrick.
He also digs up an edition of The Confederacy Today from March 2575 - an interview with a man whose family knew Bruce a hundred years earlier. He says that this commentary will illustrate the "complete deterioration" of Bruce in his older age.
From The Confederacy Today said:
This old fisherman continues to lay out more details - Bruce would never tell stories about his fighting. When young men went to the army, he told them them to shoot over their enemies heads, or not to serve in a combat unit. When asked to speak on Lord Fitzpatrick's birthday, all he said was that it would have been better had Fitzpatrick never been born.
He was also sad. The fishman relates that many times, Bruce would sit on a rock by the sea as it rained, looking out at the waves, quiet and alone - and the only one who could bring him back in was his wife.
But there were two incidents that stuck out bright in the fisherman's memory: One time, a Nipponse sailing boat came ashore. The Japanese had been fishing in their waters. The villagers planned to kill the lot of them - but then Sir Bruce arrived in his motorcar and put himself between the Japanese and the Yukons. They couldn't stop him, and he paid the Japanese for their fish, paid to have their boat towed, and sent them on their way. He told the man they'd be glad, later in life, that they hadn't hurt them.
The other time?
Well.
From The Confederacy Today said:
And that is that, with one last footnote: This was from an editorial called The Eccentric Knight of Astoria.
I do love Fitzpatrick's War...it may be nostalgia because I read it young, but I think there's a lot here that is valuable and resonant to me - and every time I read it, I remember Dr. Murrey's speech.
History doesn't have an arrow. It's just what happens. This book shows us a world where certain people win and they create the world they want. These people love writing steampunk. Arguably, the Domination of Drakka has elements of steampunk in the earliest book - those damn steamcars. I know that other books by S.M Sterling do - the Peshawar Lancers, for example. And I remember that that book...seemed pretty blithe about how sometimes, a little genocide is necessary and you shouldn't feel too guilty about making other people die so you can have the world you want.
Hmm.
Lets dream of some better worlds, maybe?
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Hm. Yeah, I see what Judson is going for, and I think it hits - if you want steampunk, you've got to keep the world trapped in this stasis, both technologically and socially, repeatedly beating down every attempt to move forward. This world is stagnant because it's kept that way, violently. This is the world the Retroculturalists want.
But I think this is also where you lost me. I just don't buy any narrative about a vast conspiracy guiding history from behind the scenes. And the Timermen seem very confident that they can keep doing this forever. When like...that's not how history works either?
Like, the Timermen are working with a very small pool of people selected for ideological purity, but they're just as human as the rest of us - they're no less driven by greed, ego, and lust for power, and they're just as prone to incompetence and cognitive dissonance, which should go triple for an insular ideologically-motivated organization like the one they're running. Sooner or later, someone is going to hit them in one of their blind spots, or there's going to be some internal fissure, or some big swinging dick is going to decide his vision of history is better than the one the Timermen have been doing. And then everything is going to blow up in their faces and something different is going to come out the other side, and history will roll on.
Maybe Dr. Murray is right, and there are no laws to history, nothing saying it has to happen this way. But history does have patterns, and there are no historic forces more powerful than entropy and human error. Nothing lasts forever.
Like you, I don't want to give Dr. Murray the credit.
But I think this is also where you lost me. I just don't buy any narrative about a vast conspiracy guiding history from behind the scenes. And the Timermen seem very confident that they can keep doing this forever. When like...that's not how history works either?
Like, the Timermen are working with a very small pool of people selected for ideological purity, but they're just as human as the rest of us - they're no less driven by greed, ego, and lust for power, and they're just as prone to incompetence and cognitive dissonance, which should go triple for an insular ideologically-motivated organization like the one they're running. Sooner or later, someone is going to hit them in one of their blind spots, or there's going to be some internal fissure, or some big swinging dick is going to decide his vision of history is better than the one the Timermen have been doing. And then everything is going to blow up in their faces and something different is going to come out the other side, and history will roll on.
Maybe Dr. Murray is right, and there are no laws to history, nothing saying it has to happen this way. But history does have patterns, and there are no historic forces more powerful than entropy and human error. Nothing lasts forever.
Like you, I don't want to give Dr. Murray the credit.
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I do think that the characters - Hood and Charlotte - who say that this can't go on forever, it has to end some day - are entirely correct as well. There's a reason Judson put that warning in those character's mouths, I think.
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
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- Wichita, Kansas
Honestly, from the sheer institutional disruption applied to the Yukon and the rippling effects of the collapse of global trade and the sheer gaping hole ripped out of the chest of human thought and memory thanks to all the genocides, etc..., etc... I feel like I could make a halfway decent argument that the "eternal heroic age" of the Yukon Confederacy settling down into an isolationist hermit kingdom has critically endangered the Timmermen and their ability to reproduce themselves as the closed technocratic priesthood at the core of the Yukon state and as anything more than purely a cargo cult able to operate and somewhat maintain the Blinking Stars until an actual major effort is needed to keep them in the sky.
The good professor Van Buren pontificating on the official histories and etiquettes of gentlemen in the glorious center of the world, and dismissing all tales of Timmermen plots because there's never really going to be the circumstances to be able to create another Murray, much as Fitz the last great Fitzpatrick, and then, fifty years after Van Buren becomes the great historical primer and I dunno Rudolphus Justice Calhoun is in the middle of writing up his Commentaries On The Annotated Edition Of Fitzpatrick's War, in comes the East African Federation and Neo-Andalus and Thailand to gunboat open Yukon's zepplin and water ports, and start carving up Australia and Britain with commercial concessions.
The good professor Van Buren pontificating on the official histories and etiquettes of gentlemen in the glorious center of the world, and dismissing all tales of Timmermen plots because there's never really going to be the circumstances to be able to create another Murray, much as Fitz the last great Fitzpatrick, and then, fifty years after Van Buren becomes the great historical primer and I dunno Rudolphus Justice Calhoun is in the middle of writing up his Commentaries On The Annotated Edition Of Fitzpatrick's War, in comes the East African Federation and Neo-Andalus and Thailand to gunboat open Yukon's zepplin and water ports, and start carving up Australia and Britain with commercial concessions.
Abby Normal
High Clerk of the Ymaryn
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Having just looked at the wikipedia page, is it Timmerman, or Timerman?
Or perhaps a gear with a boot attached, to automate the stamping
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I think it's Timerman, and I just spelled it wrong
Jenny
anonymous user
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I thought all this time you were spelling it wrong to mock them.
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...sure, we'll say that!
We can only hope! Also, like, all it takes is one serious fuckup in orbit and those storm machines are down. And I think the Four Points War would drive home the Chinese desire to keep their surviving schematics from the electronic age quite secure...just in case.
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Maybe they're joined by a conspiracy of generals and nobles who, like Hood and Bruce, think this whole thing is rather sad and disgusting and pointless, or even those who look at the electric luxury the Timermen live in and wonder why those smug pricks aren't sharing the bennies, and maybe there's trouble within the ranks of the Timermen as they enter a slow backroom struggle between Dr. Francolin's New Theory of History and the cabal of Top Timermen led by Dr. Smythe who envision an eternal succession of philosopher-kings reigning from their satellite base...
...or shit, maybe the whole struggle to reassert the march of history becomes moot when some rookie Timerman raised on blind obedience can't believe that the readings don't match the rote training they gave him and hits the wrong button, triggering Kessler Syndrome as a Blinking Star with a decaying orbit slams into its neighbor and scatters high-spped shrapnel...
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Coyote Niff
the most transbian obligate scavenger on the 'net!
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This collapse by Hood feels like, for lack of a better term, a deserved punishment, but also real in its cruelty: this is what fascism does when it seizes control of the military organs of a state that it has not already penetrated and uses career soldiers for uncountable evils. Hood is a product of a violent, racist, dominionist culture, and that is why he is the way that he is, but he is also an accomplished, capable soldier who cares about his troops and understands the vile cost of the wars he fights, and the total lack of reason for that cost is what drives him slowly mad. In the real world, without the rotten parts of his soul, Hood would be the kind of general you want running an army; the good in him is the good you see in a Butler or a Hansell or a Ridgway or a Bradley; dedicated, professional, skilled, clearly empathetic, able to draw lines between the requirements of combat and needless suffering. Hood's strong moral code, as blinkered as it is, as dependent on Calvinist destiny, as willing to initially bypass others as "subhuman" as it is, cannot survive the fascist world, or what he personally has done to bring that world about. He can't bring himself to crush his enemies like bugs in the fascist way because he knows they're just people like him.
This is what a "bad war" does to the good people who fight in it. It eats them alive.
Something something 2016-2021, and maybe again in November 2024. They've had their parades and their boredom, and now all that'll come if they have their chance again is pain. A grim thing.
This is the "permanent colonial" part of the Timmerman worldview; causing or allowing to cause internal collapses and financial panics to be so common and inevitable that life is always hard and emigration is always the best route for a Yukon family out of poverty. Every 100 years, just reset that clock with another Fitz, another war. It's like a fucked version of Hari Seldon's psychohistory.
HAHAHA! MY INCEPTION IS COMPLETE! I HAVE FOUND YOUR GIRL AND MADE HER COOLER JUDSON!
To be continued, obviously, because I have many thoughts.
Coyote Niff
the most transbian obligate scavenger on the 'net!
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Behold the one part of Catholicism my lapsed ass will fight and die for. You categorically can't look at a faith whose primary religious texts are about healing the sick and feeding the poor and physically halting the unjust execution of an innocent woman and say only praying real hard and being as xenophobic as humanly possible to all outside minority groups and those who trespass on your morals will get you to the heaven presided over by a working man's son. It's like the grail test in Indiana Jones; the cup of a carpenter; handmade with effort out of wood.
Anyway. Theological rant that's the equivalent of those big glowy weakspots in Dead Space in terms of "what does CN think about the world?" over. Back to dissection.
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It's a good thing! they should do it more.
Coyote Niff
the most transbian obligate scavenger on the 'net!
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This is something, not to again open my innards to y'all, that I see from a lot of military veterans from various nations I've lived with, met and read about; the ones who I can truly say I respect for what they've done or seen or had to do, whose moral centers recoiled at the right times to keep worse things from happening. They all end up wanting to grow things, to make something new-they farm or craft or build or teach, or a mixture thereof. With Hood, there's a more obvious element of atonement and penance, fitting with his religious convictions and with the horrible barbarity of Yukon war doctrine, but I think it's important to draw a line between him and something like Zimmerman or any number of real-world war criminals. Hood realized too late what he was doing, what the machine he was part of generated in the form of death; he didn't realize what kind of criminal death from famine and disease he was party to. Hood just thought he was fighting a war, and it's telling that when that mask is torn apart, he doesn't try to keep it on his head. The old general is trying to repair the world he helped destroy, and there's a lot of tarnished honor in that that is EXTREMELY fitting in light of conflicts like Vietnam and Soviet-Afghan and the GWOT and how those wars chewed up and spit out thousands of well-meaning soldiers sent off to fight for outwardly laudable causes: freedom, international solidarity, the rights of the oppressed, et al-and that's just the combatant cost.
This is all very Valkyrie/Fall of Berlin/Fall of Caligula/1979 Kabul Coup of Judson, and very true to how fascist dictatorships fall apart. The center fails, people claw desperately for power and prestige and pretty things, and then they slosh around in each other's guts trying to hold onto it all.
The next stage of the colonization plot falls into place; Yukon will have to go abroad for its commerce again, meaning that hardscrabble pioneering will go on for at least another century. Just as the Timmermen intended.
In a just world, Bruce would grab Dr. Murrey by the weird topknot/ponytail/periwig hairdo I've decided he has and
slam his head into the fine stone table until there's just pulp.
I hate being right about the attempt at artificial historical cycles by these weirdo accelerationist monsters, and @DragonCobolt is right on the money about it being a takedown of Retroculture idealism. I've literally heard people talk like this in public, normally about the idea that some kind of military conflict or other complex campaign of death, intentional or not, that creates change in society is not only necessary, but just/right and morally good and worth being excited about-and not just in a fascist/conservative lens. The boot that stamps the human face fits on any foot. Your job is to not put it on, and destroy it if you can.
GOD SAVE PRINCE ALEKSANDAR VON HOHENBURG!!!!!! Leviathan, I'd argue, is a world in transition from Steam to Diesel; the Victorian world died on the battlefields of the Somme, and the world of Leviathan by the end of the series is one that is freed from the stagnation of the Darwinist-Clanker dual paradigm and of Victorian society; the fusion society of the United States entering the war, for better or worse, represents a future where technology and biology work together, just as the central love story (and especially the peacetime genderbending bonus chapter that I was SO NORMAL ABOUT in high school) shows that the strict mores and social roles of the Victorian world, both the real ones and the pop-culture versions steampunk is often obsessed with, can be twisted, suborned, or outright rejected.
Man, what a heck of a ride this series has been. Thanks @DragonCobolt for putting this all together. It's been a pleasure to partake.
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I'm glad you enjoyed it!
See, now I want to do a Levithan lets read purely to do a "how many medals should Deryn earned by now" running gag.
See, now I want to do a Levithan lets read purely to do a "how many medals should Deryn earned by now" running gag.
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I really loved this one, and I hope you will
Depressing book but at the same time very good. The Timmermen, the real antagonists, are odd in a way. They exist to justify the story but exist removed from the main course of events, seemingly unthreatened over the course of the novel. DragonCobolt does a good job poking a hole in their seeming invincibility but at the same time they haven't lost control by the end of the novel. We never see things spinning out of their control. I sort of feel like the Timmermen represent the authors of all the bad works of military scifi that Fitzpatrick's War seems to condemn. Creating their little world and starting from scratch whenever the narrative would get away from them.