Recent content by Space Oddity

Wegener in the book is an enigma who presents the news that the Japanese need to hope the obviously awful candidate for Fuhrer wins because the alternative wants to blow up the planet. He's arguably a deconstruction of the heroic mole, because all Wegener has to offer from his lifetime of moral...

The Man in High Castle the book is an interesting case, since it is ultimately an early deconstruction of the genre, complete with characters realizing they must be fictional in the last few pages. It's also more interested in the feel of such a world than the nuts and bolts -- Dick's universe...

The Qing Dynasty glares at you from their self-created Manchu cluarchs in most major Chinese cities of their time.

I mourn the fact that The Bloody Man is now almost guaranteed never to be completed. I wanted to see Nicholas "Damnation" Barbon in the Commonwealth, damn it.

Pyramids and Small Gods do have some connections, both thematic and otherwise, and Hogfather does tie into Small Gods exploration of belief, but yes, that's a stretch.

Professional exhibition wrestling wound up fixed almost immediately, because an actual wrestling match is exceptionally long if it hits fifteen minutes, and most are considerably shorter, meaning it takes a prohibitively large number of them to actually fill a playbill.

Jeremy Thorpe's ghost whispers 'One more heave' from the balcony.

Fun fact--Barnum's Cardiff Giant wasn't merely fake, it was a fake of a fake. He couldn't get his hands on the actual Cardiff Giant, so he made his own.

That's pretty much old school fascism--the enemy is both decadent weaklings and a strong horde. What makes the Alt-Right and company interesting is the obsession with depictions of ludicrously over the top weakness. No worry must be allowed to exist about their inevitable triumph.

You'd think so, but the modern American Far Right prefers to spend a great deal of time explaining how their opponents are inferior scum and so they've already practically won before the fighting has even started. Why, one almost get the impression of people desperately compensating for something.

Air support was the most Nixon was going to add to the operation, outside of not holding it in the Bay of Pigs. And honestly, I rather doubt he would have, for all that he said he would have to Cuban exiles afterwards, when it was an easy drum to beat and cost him nothing. So no, Fidel remains...

It's part and parcel of ignoring the fact that Italy was involved in WWI. There's a tendency to make the Croix-de-Feu and the parties that grew out of it into "the Nazis, but French" because, hey look at all that marching and those scary symbols. This ignores much of the group's actual...

By all accounts, he was horribly polite to everybody (if frequently strained and nervous) in actual encounters. His racism was largely a weird intellectual exercise.

Time for another edition kicking the revolution another twenty years in the future!