In honour of the posting of
my short story over at the
Alternate History Weekly Update blog I thought I’d post a bit about the
alternate history aspects of The Aether Age and the world Tommy lives in.
Originally I was going to wait a while until getting into the nuts and bolts of
my alternate timeline (mostly because I still have plenty of research to do)
but I’ll start by giving a vague run down of the key points that make The
Aether Age a bit different to The Jazz Age that existed in our own history.
There are only two key differences separating the Aether Age
from the Jazz Age but as every student of history knows, everything rides on
those key moments. And the key moment for The Aether Age occurs much earlier
than the 1920s. It occurs in 1803 with the signing of the Louisiana Purchase,
the contract by which the United States of America bought France’s claim to a
huge slab of land west of the Mississippi river for the paltry sum of 15
million dollars.
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| The original Louisiana Purchase superimposed over a modern map. |
In the Aether Age timeline the deal went ahead as planned
except for one minor detail – a line written into the contract stating that
France retained an option to buy back the land at a future date if they so
wished, at the going market rate. This small line of legal technicality just
sat there, and nothing happened for over a century.
The second difference in the Aether Age timeline was the
mysterious discovery of a new element – aether. This gas was first heard of
just before the outbreak of the Great War and was quickly exploited in order to
make zeppelin technology more efficient. This came both from its incredible
lifting power, which far outranks helium, as well as its ability to easily
transform from a gas to a liquid which allows for greater buoyancy and ballast
control. It also helps that the gas is inert except under extreme conditions.
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| Yep, that Aether is workin' pretty good. |
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| It better be... |
While the element was only just being utilised at the
outbreak of the war its influence was enough to bump flight technology far enough
along to drag out some of the worst battles in the conflict and allow
journalists greater access to the battlefields of the Western Front via private
aircraft. This became a propaganda nightmare for not only the English but their
enemies as well. The English press first began releasing unadulterated footage
and photographs of the European carnage which flew in the face of previously
upbeat military reports, then other European press agencies did likewise. Confronted
directly with the horror of the war, the public will for conflict began to
wane, the war dragged out, and The Lull of late 1918 ended with the Armistice
of late 1919, a ceasefire which resulted in an immediate cessation of
hostilities but not much more. By the 1920s large swaths of Europe are still
stretches of barbed-wired No Man’s Land and all sides warily eye each other off
as they rebuild their war machines.
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| This never happened in the Aether Age: The 1918 Armistice. |
For the French this meant a ruined nation with the threat of
an imminent return to warfare. With there being no end to the confrontation in
sight the French government looked to the English strategy of evacuating many
of its children to their colony of Canada in the hope of sparing them the
incessant zeppelin attacks that plagued the British Isles. In their desperation
the French explored all of their own options for a similar strategy. It was
then that they were able to find the long lost clause in the Louisiana Purchase
contract that would allow them to buy back a large slab of the United States.
Were this purchase a success they would be able to provide their most vulnerable
citizens with a refuge from the wars of Europe, as well as the economic base
from which to continue their Western Front defences.
Needless to say, their initial overtures were met with a
somewhat... muted reception. The United States was still divided about being
involved with the war in a production capacity, let alone joining, and large
rifts were forming between various states over the decision. However, no state
advocated the selling of a large portion of the country, even if it was on the
say so of a legal document of vague authority.
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| But along came some villains... |
But a large cabal of New York industrialists and bankers
were interested in the offer. At the going rate for property in the United
States the country would make a mint selling off a significant part of its land.
And if it was somewhere insignificant like – oh, Louisiana – then wouldn’t that
be a price worth paying to receive France’s gold stockpiles and become the bank
of the world, no matter what side of the Great War potential customers were
fighting on?
What followed was a backroom deal that scandalised the
nation. The consortium of industrialists and bankers sold the state of
Louisiana to the desperate French, received the French gold, and then were
amazed at just how outraged the rest of the country were. Outrage against New
York quickly led to threats from other states, the worst being from Chicago
which organised its own militia which in turn led to a tense stand off in which
the nation braced itself for potential civil war.
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| It was only Louisiana. Why are you all so angry? |
New York attempted to compensate by appealing to the citizenry,
especially the rural heartlands. However their actions, such as aggressively
backing the new and somewhat popular 18th Amendment instituting
Prohibition, backfired, further alienating certain states who went so far as to
threaten to secede if New York continued having so much say in political
matters. It did not help that New York also began to benefit greatly from its
newfound wealth and armed its own militia in case Chicago did attack.
In a turning point for the nation, a headline stealing threat
was made by Washington and Oregon senators to secede to Canada if New York did
not stop interfering via the Prohibition act. This was then met by disdain and
arrogant insult from a young New York industrialist during a newspaper
interview. The interview caused another scandal. And Washington and Oregon
promptly made good on their threat.
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| A Seattle resident from the Age of Aether. |
A call by federal authorities to use military action and
bring the states back fell on deaf ears and, while the potential for
reconciliation was high, further events soon made it impossible. Seeing the
Union crumble under the leadership of New York’s robber barons, other states
began to reclaim federal powers for themselves, including the ability to
institute standing militias.
Then, in a move that would irrevocably change the course of
the United States of America, Texas held a referendum concerning their
participation in the Union. By a slim margin the vote was won for independence
and Texas reclaimed its status as a republic, a move that saw California and
then the Midwest states quickly follow suit. Soon the powerbrokers of New York
and Washington DC were left ruling a ‘United States’ bordered by Canada to the
North, the MidWest Commonwealth to the west and the New Confederate Federation
to the south, which itself was making gestures of war towards the Nouveau
Republique de Mississippi to the south west. The Union was well and truly gone.
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| Viva Le Lone Star Republic. |
In the power vacuum that has followed the North American
continent has been in turmoil. Not only has there been a civil war in Canada
(which Churchill, in disgust, christened ‘the most polite civil war to have occurred
in this or any other age’) but the abundance of aircraft being manufactured on
the continent has prevented law and order forces holding sway on most of the
boundary territory far from urban areas. Everything west of the Mississippi and
north of Texas is now considered the ‘New West’ with the region falling into
economic turmoil thanks to constant skypirate raiding and a mass exodus from
urban areas, often west to California which now dubs itself CaliModerna. Both
highways and railways were soon torn apart in economic battles between airplane
armed groups until zeppelin cargo shipping became the only cost effective
method of transporting goods with any certainty that they would reach their
destination. And with the rise of criminal empires thanks to the Prohibition
act urban politicians cling to in order to appease their rural constituencies,
often police and militia forces are not the wielders of law and order they once
were.
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| This happens all over what was once the United States. |
Welcome to the Aether Age. Buckle yourself in :)
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