Alternate Political History

October 15, 2016: Hillary died in her sleep today. I was smoking a fat Cohiba when I heard the news. We were still talking about Hillary a couple hours later when we heard a rumbling and went outside to West Broadway. A great throng of Bernies was moving toward us from Prince Street. The crowd grew as we watched, swollen by new Bernies as it moved. An ad hoc Bernie rally. Someone carried a large effigy of Bernie’s hoary head before it. I saw something red and realized it was a red flag, the universal banner of revolution, unfurled by revolutionaries since the Middle Ages.

A Third Term is a speculative fiction by New York Times bestselling author Paul Greenberg in which a Democratic political operative snatches George Washington from his deathbed in 1799 and brings him to the present era. Riddled with pneumonia, possessing dentures fashioned from slave’s teeth, and an aristocratic sensibility tempered by war and religious faith, Washington will require considerable rehabilitation to pose a challenge to the man he only refers to as “The Tyrant.” But a wily, unorthodox campaign manager and a sexy, sympathetic personal trainer are up for the job.

Las trompetas de la guerra han sido silenciadas. Los aliados celebran la victoria sobre una Alemania aplastada. Entretanto, Estados Unidos y la Unión Soviética se disputan los territorios como botines de guerra, pero no todo es lo que parece: desde los confines del nuevo mundo la sombra del terror amenaza con extenderse de nuevo.

In Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s, the acclaimed Swiss film director Emil Nägeli receives the assignment of a lifetime: travel to Japan and make a film to establish the dominance of Adolf Hitler's Nazi empire once and for all. But his handlers are unaware Nägeli has colluded with the Jewish film critics to pursue an alternative objective - to create a monumental, modernist, allegorical spectacle to warn the world of the horror to come.

Ayn Rand’s dystopic science fiction novella takes place at some unspecified future date. Mankind has entered another dark age as a result of what Rand saw as the weaknesses of socialistic thinking and economics. Technological advancement is now carefully planned -- when it is allowed to occur at all -- and the concept of individuality has been eliminated.