Futue History

While I will not publish anything I'm trying to sell on here, for obvious reasons, I will occasionally use this format to narcisiticly ramble about my ingenious ideas for my latest story.

The last thing I submitted to Baen's Universe was a story about hunting werewolves in the Canadian Rockies. I got some decent feedback, a few people liked it pretty well. But after two revisions it's still getting as much criticism as praise and definitely no sign of getting picked up by the magazine. I am not disheartened by this, becoming a professional writer is a lifetime project, especially when you've got a real job and life to worry about in addition to your literary aspirations.

I'm not abandoning the story, but I'm tabling it to get back to science fiction for awhile. Though I am not a hard science major I want to write science fiction with PLAUSIBLE science. This is not to say I want to innundate readers with a bunch of technobabble; but one of the things that most appeals to me about science fiction is that it is the literature of the possible. The new gee-whiz gadgets are inconsequential next to the time honored elements of any good story, but the future offers magnificent backdrops that are all the more tantalizing because they just may be within our reach.

Several of the best science fiction authors have constructed what devotees have titled "Future Histories." More than just a series of books, Future Histories are webs of short stories and novels that may or not may be closely intertwined yet all fall within a singular coherent fictional universe running parallel to our own. Most of these Future Histories have identical or similar timelines to our own up to a few decades (or centuries for those authors who do not want to be around when their ideas are proven impossible) into the future. Michael Resnick has several dozen novels and short stories that all fall within the Birthright of Man universe. Isaac Asimov wrote the Foundation series as a Future History. Gordon R. Dickson wrote a series of novels and shorts known as the Childe Cycle (or more popularly as the Dorsai series) which included elements from as far back as the 13th Century in history and as far forward as the 26th century.

Justin, you haven't mentioned you-know-who yet!

Oh, of course the richest and perhaps best-loved Future History was written by... you guessed it, Robert Heinlein. His future history stretched from the 1970's (thirty years in his future at the time) to the 41st Century. Incidentally, the first future history story, Life-Line, was the first story he ever wrote and he sold it on the first submission- as he did everything else he ever submitted for the rest of his life- lucky bastard. Heinlein wove hundreds of characters and plots into a world that some times feels as real as our own, though always with a touch of Mark Twain-esque humor. And when it turned out that Mars and Venus were NOT inhabited by sentient life, the old rascal introduced the concept of time travel and parallel universes into his Future History. So, no wonder Mars isn't inhabited, we're just in the wrong universe.

Very nice, Justin, are we approaching a point?

Simply this; I'm infected with the same virus. I want to write not only good individual stories or series, but craft entire universes out of the ether. Everything I write either falls into an enormous history I'm constucting or spawns a new one, I'm incapable of writing something and then walking away from it. I have to wonder what happened a thousand years later or a hundred years before.

In the universe I've created the next century is dark. That's because that's how I see it unfurling. Fundamentalist Islam isn't going anywhere. And in the mean time Russia, China and others are increasing their military readiness. The era of peace and brotherhood is not at hand.

In this world the fundamentalists of the muslim world continue to gain support as conditions worsen and the Western powers make either half-hearted or ill-directed efforts to snuff them out. About half way through the twenty-first century a quarter the population of Europe is muslim (ridiculous? go check the birth and immigration statistics in Wester Europe for the last few years). A coalition of Arab nations assembles enough conventional military power to make a power grab, supported by local insurgents, in the Balkans. This goes unchallenged by Western Europe and the United States and the Russian expeditionary force sent to stop them is defeated in detail.

Inevitably the whole of Europe falls to the Caliphate. Russia stands on the sidelines this time, remembering the abandoment of the previous war. Israel and the United Kingdom stand besieged. Christians and Jews are placed under the dhimma, atheists, hindus, buddhists, and so on, are jailed or executed. From Portugal to the Ukraine only Switzerland stands sovereign thanks to bloody resistance in the Alps. The Pope-in-Exile proclaims the renewal of the Crusade from Geneva.

The Caliphate, whose willing members stretch from Mauritania to Indonesia, bites off more than it can chew when it goes to war with India and China simultaneously. The US military finally gears up enough to be a serious force in the conflict. Europe is liberated and the siege of Israel is lifted and the Caliphate's situation becomes desperate. As allied forces conquer first North Africa then Central Asia, the madmen in charge orders his affiliate terrorists to release the Green Plague, a biological weapon which kills twenty-five percent of the world's population before nano-scientists are able to design a nanite antibody to kill the virus.

The retribution is awful. The allied powers, save for Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States strike every Muslim medical center they can find with tactical nukes. The Muslim population suffers the worst for the plague. Islamdom shrinks from 2 billion in 2085 to 250 million in 2090 at the end of the Last Jihad.

In the ensuing chaos states are redefined. Devestated Mexico and Central America become protectorates of the United States. Israel stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates. Europe is gripped with a fundamentalist backlash against the brutal ten-year occupation of the Caliphate. The former European Union is reformed as the European Alliance under the acknowledged leadership of the Vatican. China and India are gripped by trans-national genetic socialist revolution and unite as the new Xiaoist Collective, named after the originator of eugenic-socialism. (Summary- Lennin, Mao and Marx mistakenly waited for the "new man," Xiao and his followers intend to engineer him). In Russia a brilliant general and his corps of disciplined troops emerge as the only thing saving the motherland from utter anarchy and he finds himself the new Tsar.

There are no Muslims left in Europe, the lucky ones were simply deported. In the United States, though legally protected, they are subject to racial violence in frequency and intesnity unheard of since the 1960's. Israel and the UK likewise. In China and India the eugenic socialists have used the same nano-tech cure to enslave the entire muslim populations of their countries.

This is the state of the world on January 1st, 2101.



Justin, do you really hate Muslims so much?

As a matter of fact no, I don't. Mohamed Al Muslim is no better or worse per capita than John Q. Christian or Herchel P. Jew. But right now there is a dangerous trend to underestimate the fundamentalist and violent elements within Islamic society. The vast majority of Muslims are not evil. The vast majority of Germans were not evil in 1939 too. It won't matter if they and we allow the cancer to grow to the point where we, either out of necessity or out of righteous anger, are forced to use extreme measures to defeat them.

I hope this future does not come to pass, yet I will write it in the hopes that westerners and moderate muslims alike will realize the need to oppose the fanatics before a greater conflagration becomes inevitable. All my stories will take place after the Green Plague and the Last Jihad. I've fought fundamentalist Islam for years now, I have no desire to write fiction about it except as background.

Okay... I should probably edit this, but it's freaking 2300. Time for me to call Michele and go to bed!