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Journey of a Dead Man: An Alternate History of 1945-1950.

“Alternate history” is a way of exploring the consequences of various actions in recorded by performing a sort of “what if” exercise with the events of the past. In human history, we see repeated examples of where the fate of millions rests on the acts of a few. For example, what if Churchill had been killed in his 1931 visit to New York? What if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been killed in the attempt on his life in February 15th 1933? What if Hitler had 300 long range U-Boats at the start of the war instead of the 22 that he did have, or what if his application to the Austrian art school had been approved, or if during his time in the trenches of WWI, he had been shot or severely wounded during his service to the German Kaiser.

It’s through this form of literary “thought experiment” that we can expose on the significance of seemingly small events in recorded history by shining light on the event from an angle that was not previously available. It needs to be understood that the history that is recorded is not the result of a guarantee, nor is it the product of precise planning or some form of pre-destination or subconscious collaboration on the part of the people living through that time. The history we live today and that we create today is often the flotsam and jetsam that results from of a thousand near misses and errors. For most of the events of our lives, our actions don’t seem like history, but they often are a part of history. We just don’t know them as historically significant at the time they happen.

The purpose of this literary exercise called “journey of a dead man” is to give the reader of this blog an understanding to the fluid nature of time and the role of individuals in establishing the tide of history as it ebbs and flows around our lives.

For this story, the readers of this blog should think of themselves as time travelers. You have been sent to retrieve the written journal of a person living at a key time in human history. What follows is the recovered written diary and journal of a man living in the confluence of two mighty rivers in history. This person who wrote this journal that we are reading is US Navy Commander Bartholomew "Bart" Abbott. In reading his journal, we shall explore the past together.

Since Commander Abbott lives on another timeline than we do, we can learn from his daily observations and thoughts what the key events were that will lead to both his version of history and that of our own.

The journey we are about to begin takes place in March 1945. The place? Alamogordo New Mexico, United States of America. As near as we can tell, Abbott’s timeline and ours are almost the same up until this point in time, with a few crucial differences. Our mission is to discover where the two timelines diverged from the world that Commander Abbott lives from that of our own and most importantly, what specifically were the events that caused the divergence.

Posted @ March 09, 2008 11:37 PM | Blog-novel

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Posted by: Vootie at March 14, 2008 08:02 AM