Fifteen Minute Preview of HBO's "A Game of Thrones"

I found this today online and figured I'd post it for my loyal readers.  It's the first fifteen minutes of the first episode of HBO's adaptation of A Game of Thrones (Song of Ice and Fire) that I first found on the E! web-site and later got the embed HTML off YouTube.  For the record, this doesn't belong to me--it belongs to HBO and/or George R.R. Martin.



Although I've read the second book, I haven't actually read the first.  I believe the first book starts out with Lord Eddard Stark executing the deserter from the Night's Watch.  The scene depicting why he deserts is entirely new, although from what I know about the greater world, the evil powers beyond the Wall are stirring.

The costuming looks great and the Wall looks awesome.  It also establishes character pretty early on--thus far, we've got Catelyn Stark's resentment of her husband's bastard son Jon Snow, Arya Stark's tomboy ways (showing up her brother in archery practice), Sansa Stark's girly-girl tendencies, and Eddard Stark's honor.  We haven't yet met Tyrion "The Imp" Lannister (a nobleman with dwarfism whose virtues include compassion for the hurting and broken and military strategy and whose weaknesses include booze and prostitutes), but I fully expect him to be an absolute hoot.

I actually considering getting HBO to watch this, although I figured $10 per month to watch a few shows (it'd be this show, True Blood, and Boardwalk Empire) wouldn't be a good bargain.  The endless movies to watch on HBO would also be a distraction from my personal writing projects.

So I'll wait for the DVD and likely buy it.  I believe the show's already been green-lighted for a second season.  Hopefully it'll do well and pave the way for more adult-oriented fantasy--the series has been described as "The Sopranos in Middle East" and accurately depicts how a medieval-style kingdom would actually work.

(Massacring rival lords' peasants as a legitimate warfare tactic, girls who in our world would be in middle school being married off to middle-aged men for political reasons, and other assorted nastiness.  Lest we forget, the pre-modern era sucked.)

"A Dance With Dragons" Will Be Released on July 12

I got an e-mail from Borders yesterday afternoon stating that A Dance with Dragons, the next book in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, will be released on July 12.

At last!  Some people on my message-board said they remember reading in editions of the fourth book, A Feast for Crows, that "Dance" would be out in 2006!  People have wondered if the series would ever be finished and even speculated on Martin's health.

Someone theorized that this has been timed to cash in the upcoming HBO series A Game of Thrones, which is based on the first book in the series.  I'm seriously considering getting HBO just to watch that.  Someone called A Song of Ice and Fire "The Sopranos in Middle-Earth" and it actually depicts how utterly horrific a realistic fantasy world would be.  You've got massacres of peasants, women being passed around for political reasons, and to drive the point home, a nobleman makes the following comment about a woman he murdered:

"Catelyn Stark sleeps with the fishes."

(Maybe--I haven't read that far in the series, but I've heard this.)

Let's hope subsequent books come much faster now.

Movie Review: "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (SPOILERS)

I don't like seeing movies by myself, so I did not see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when it was in theaters.

However, I also don't like to iron without something to distract me, and the trailer for Deathly Hallows reminded me I needed to see the film, so I rented it from the video store last Friday to watch.

Now it's time for my review...

Overall, I felt that a lot of important stuff got left out.  For example, Snape's confrontation with Harry after Harry unintentionally nearly killed Draco with Sectumsempra would have been good foreshadowing of the revelation that the "Half-Blood Prince" whose Potions book gave Harry such useful advice (and a very spiffy combat spell to boot) was the teenage Snape, who'd devised so many interesting Potions techniques.

Instead, the only foreshadowing we get is Snape healing Draco, which does help a little bit (he knows how to undo Sectumsempra) but the book's sequence--in which Snape uses Legilimency to interrogate Harry to find out how he knew the spell and makes a serious attempt retrieve the book once he realizes what it is--would have been so much better.

In the books, the Death Eater flight from Hogwarts was accompanied by a major battle instead of the Death Eaters, after Snape kills Dumbledore, quietly processing out of the building and blasting one person aside, with the only real mayhem being some deranged cackling and scenery-destruction from Bellatrix.

The fact that Slughorn is a Slytherin is left out, although his speech about how he was surprised that Lily Evans (Harry's future mother) was a Muggleborn does hint that.

Also, the fact it was Snape who told Voldemort of the prophecy predicting that Potter would be the one to kill him--the prophecy that led to the death of Harry's parents and Voldemort's first defeat--got left out.  Given how big a role that plays in Snape's own back-story and the Snape/Lily/James high-school drama, that definitely should have stayed there.

Keeping the material about the Gaunts (Voldemort's maternal family) and how Merope Gaunt ensnared the Muggle Tom Riddle Sr. would further flesh out Voldemort.  In the movies, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets includes the teen Voldemort's rant about "my filthy Muggle father" who he believes abandoned his witch mother, but that's it.

Some of the stuff could have been put in if they'd cut the random Death Eater attack at the Burrow that did not happen in the books, although it does help develop Harry/Ginny some more.  See below..

On the other hand, the movie's version of Harry/Ginny is superior to that of the book's.  Harry makes some comments about Ginny's personality that indicate interest on his part beyond simple physical attraction and Ginny effectively backs him up when he's trying to organize the Gryffindor Quidditch team.  When the Burrow battle comes, it shows the two of them fighting together well enough to fend off not only Fenrir Greyback but possibly even Bellatrix Lestrange herself!

(The last part is pushing it--Bellatrix defeated Aurors Nymphadora Tonks, Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody, and Kingsley Shacklebolt in succession in Book Five, so she'd wipe the floor with the two kids.  Perhaps she was waiting out in the reeds for bigger targets like Remus Lupin and Tonks to show up and then engage them.)

Plus there's no idiotic "break up with Ginny to protect her" like at the end of the book.  After all, as a Weasley, Ginny is a target anyway.  Although the film ends the morning after Dumbledore's death--which, IIRC, is before the breakup in the book--it seems that Harry and Ginny are still an item and will be for the foreseeable future.

The only part of it that seemed a bit odd was Ginny tying Harry's shoes for him in one scene.  I didn't get that.

Luna is the one who finds Harry after Draco paralyzes him and leaves him under the invisibility cloak instead of Tonks this time. Given how they dumped the "emo Tonks" plotline of the books, which the train scene is the first hint of, this isn't so bad. Luna seems to be the sort to wander around aimlessly for reasons known only to her, plus the exchange between the two of them when she heals Harry's broken nose was pretty funny.

Slughorn's recollection of Lily's gift to him was a nice touch.

Miscellaneous...

The depiction of Narcissa Malfoy as being an overweight middle-aged Cruella DeVille (complete with the multicolored hair) instead of the attractive blonde she was in the books wasn't as terrible as I expected, probably due to the actress's performance.  However, a glimpse of the wizard paper describing her and Draco leaving Lucius Malfoy's trial didn't ring true--however odious the three of them are, they love and are loyal to each other in the books.

Lupin and Tonks apparently are already a couple, although Tonks' hair is brown, which is problematic (it was only brown for most of the sixth book because she was depressed over Lupin pushing her away, which apparently did not happen in the film series).  This eliminates the scene in the books in which Tonks publically argues with Lupin about their relationship, which some think made Tonks come off an obsessive pest trying to badger the spineless Lupin into dating her.

(My impression was that he liked her too and was trying to push her away for her own safety--he's a werewolf--but not everyone agreed with me.)

I'd score it around 6 out of 10.

Google, eBooks, and Independent Booksellers

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/business/30books.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1277910326-Fw4UDJlKI9ZqZTaJ/23WGw

Found this on the New York Times the other day.

If Google can overcome the advantage the other online booksellers have, this could be very interesting for the eBook market and very beneficial for the independent and small-town booksellers.

And I'm sure college students, who have to shell out a lot of money for books, will love Google providing textbooks in bulk, even in an electronic form.

Just Ordered Two Books

Just ordered Hiero's Journey and The Unforsaken Hiero off Amazon.com's ZShops, where one can buy used books cheaply.

I read both of these books when I was in high school, if I recall correctly.  Back then, I was a regular haunter of the Cobb County Public Library System.  I think I found Hiero's Journey at the Mountain View Public Library, where I went if the now-defunct Merchant's Walk library was closed (Mountain View was open on Sunday) or if I wanted access to more books.

The series takes place 5,000 years after "The Death"--a 1970s-era nuclear war--and follows Per (Father) Hiero Desteen, a telepathic Metis (mixed French and Indian) Catholic priest from present-day western Canada, as he travels into the post-apocalyptic US (which was affected much worse than Western Canada) in search of computer technology.  He needs this so his abbey can organize its hard-copy files (of which it has a lot) to glean militarily-useful technology and fight off the Brotherhood of the Unclean, a coalition of of evil descendants of defense-industry scientists intent on ruling the world.

(That this organization would maintain its purpose for 5,000 years is a bit ridiculous.  I would have set the story perhaps 100 to 200 years after The Death.)

Hiero's Journey was better than The Unforsaken Hiero, but they're both part of the same series (and the second book wasn't bad--there's an ancient intelligent telepathic giant snail named Solitaire who became self-aware as a result of The Death and is kind of cool), so I felt like owning the whole thing.  Both books have been out of print for a long time, so I was able to snap up two copies for around a buck each, plus shipping and handling.

It is unfortunate Sterling E. Lanier lost interest in the series, never finished it, and now will never finish it (he's dead). The second novel ends with Hiero and some friends setting off for present-day Florida, where some evil power has taken his girlfriend (priestly celibacy is no longer required) and some others captive. I would have loved to read a third book and it would be nice if some of his family members have access to his notes and can finish his story.

(Heck, the time may come where I may produce a movie based on those books.  The remnant technology depicted might need to be updated a bit, but it's doable.)

The first book exerted some influence over my novel Escape from the Wastelands.  I was at the Lawrenceville writing group once and, bored with a particular submission being discussed, wrote a scene for later in the story where my protagonist Andrew Sutter confronts a "thirsty ghost," some kind of post-apocalyptic nuclear mutant vampire, in the sandy ruins of an Old World city after he becomes separated from the army of Karras Merrill.

My inspiration for that scene was from Hiero's Journey, where Hiero encounters some kind of evil telepathic humanoid in the swamps and narrow escapes what is hinted to be a Fate Worse Than Death (a fate described as both physical pain and psychological bondage) thanks to the help of a bear with whom he'd telepathically established a friendship.  The Dweller in the Mist, the evil in question, was pretty creepy, and even the villainous Brotherhood of the Unclean fear it as something older and more powerful than they.

The "thirsty ghost" that Andrew encounters is a bit less tough of a customer than the Dweller in the Mist, but then, Andrew is on his own except for his horse, which is terrified of the creature and is little help.  I hope I can write a sequence as good as author Sterling Lanier did.

Unfortunately for my readers who are members of my Kennesaw and Lawrenceville writing groups, we won't meet the "thirsty ghost" until many, many chapters from now.  I just finished the first draft of Chapter Six, which will be my contribution to the 6/26 meetup of the Kennesaw group.

Productivity Update and Thoughts on Screenwriting

Just submitted my espionage/SF short story "Picking Up Plans in Palma," which is set in my Afrikaner alternate-history universe, to Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show.  Made some revisions to it, including removing some passive voice where appropriate and toning down some of the language to meet IGMS's content standards.

Said content standards include no sexual content likely to garner more than a PG-13 rating and no language that would get an R.  There does not appear to be a content-standard for violence, which is probably where my story is the worst offender. 

(A character gets detained at gunpoint and tortured, shoots another character twice, gets in a running gun battle with some police, buries his thumb into an armed frogman's eye, and to top it off, is attacked by a bull shark.)

As far as sexual content was concerned, two characters being in a sexual relationship (but not married) was a major plot point but nothing is depicted (beyond them being in bed together), so there shouldn't be any problems there.  I replaced the F-bomb with some lesser profanities or no profanity at all to meet the language standards, which is probably where my story conflicted with the content standards the worst.

Response time: Three months.  The story had gotten rejected by several of the higher-end markets like Analog and Asimov's, but several of the rejection letters were personalized.  Getting better and better.   :)  It's the first time I've submitted a piece of short fiction anywhere since March.

Yesterday, I had the notion that Palma might make a good film.  It's got the best character development of all my short fiction, at least where the protagonist is concerned, plus it doesn't lob expository bombs at the reader to explain why this world is different from our own. 

The only problem I can think of is that it covers too short of a time period--around an hour of real time--to adapt directly into a film.  I'd probably need to write some additional material covering the relationship between intelligence-analyst Connor Kelly and his Afrikaner emigre lover Katje de Lange (which would take place before he goes in-country) and probably covering her unhappy familial situation back home (her brother has joined the ideologically-extremist group driving the Afrikaner Confederation toward the eventual World War III with the United States and her emigration has estranged her from other family members).  That'd elaborate on the other characters--one member of the Lawrenceville group said other than Connor, the characters were flat--and take up more running time.

Perhaps I should get hold of the film Fatherland.  It's an alternate-history film (based on a novel by Robert Harris, IIRC) that drops the viewer directly into a 1964 where the Nazis turned back D-Day and managed to turn the tables on the Russians and are now trying to make peace with the US.  That could help me figure out how to explain the world without boring the viewer to death with history lessons.

(Based on reviews on Amazon, it seems there's some kind of opening montage with a voice-over.  Perhaps I could do something like the opening map-sequence of Enemy at the Gates featuring the expansion of the Afrikaner Confederation as opposed to the expansion of Nazi Germany.)

Hmm...here's an outline.  The opening montage with the map and voice-over, then the agent Bernstein hiding the titular plans in a public bathroom in the city of Palma before being shot by Afrikaner security goons, Connor getting the assignment, Connor "visiting" Katje and momentarily discussing her familial situation, a scene showing her father arguing religion and politics with her brother back home, an Indiana Jones-style map sequence showing how Connor got into the Confederation, and then we pick up with him going into the bathroom (the beginning of the actual story).  No flashback sequences for expository purposes, unlike the short story.

Sound good?

Wrote some additional material for Escape from the Wastelands while waiting for a friend to pick me up for my church's retreat last weekend.  Most of it covers the beginning of Chapter Six, in which Andrew and some of his friends attempt to contest the Flesh-Eater entry into Carroll Town (at the cost of most of their lives).  There's some material I inserted into Chapter Five, which elaborates on the political situation in the empire of the antagonist Grendel and just how much of an SOB he is.

(Given how Grendel brought peace to an area torn by warlordism for decades if not centuries, I expect some readers will think him the hero and Andrew--who will eventually bring him down--as the villain, the way some people think the Rebels of Star Wars and the Varden of Eragon are jeopardizing the peace and well-being of the common folk and provoking atrocities by not submitting to the villain's rule.  Grendel pondering a plan to backstab one of his vassals and replace the man with his son with the captive sister of the former ruler of the area will be a nice "Kick the Dog" moment.)

I'm not going to inflict Chapter Five on my Kennesaw group a third time (we're discussing it on Saturday), but I'll probably send it to the Lawrenceville group, since they've only seen it once.  After tomorrow, I'll try to finish Chapter Six for the next Kennesaw meeting.

Fallen behind some on The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot, since Escape takes precedence over fan-fiction.  In terms of the story, I'm at the equivalent of the point in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen where Sam and Mikaela have their talk about how perhaps it's too dangerous for her to be involved with him.  This is even more blatant in this story than in the actual film, since Mikaela, her dad, and Agent Simmons were briefly abducted by Starscream, who hoped to use them as hostages.

(In the film, it was Sam on the receiving end of most of the Decepticon shenanigans, to the point of coming either close to death or being killed off for real and then being resurrected.  Mikaela got mussed some, but wasn't in the same kind of peril she was in my story.  Upping the danger to her makes it clearer Sam is unselfishly concerned for her well-being when he makes his remarks about her being with him being dangerous.)

Still haven't figured out how to get the the college-age cast (Sam, Mikaela, Leo) to North Africa for the final showdown.  I'm thinking that perhaps the attempt to defend the Fallen's tomb against the Decepticons goes worse than planned and so they have to rush the reinforcement of the site.  The kids could get bundled onto the airplane by mistake in all the hubbub and it wouldn't be implausible.

Hmm...Simmons, being primarily an intelligence type, shouldn't be there either, but I did want to keep the scene from the film where he calls in naval gunfire on Devastator.  Perhaps he sees the kids being dragged onto the plane and chases after them, only to get stuck on the plane himself?

"The New Daughter" Trailer

Saw the poster for this at the Blockbuster the other day while renting the first episodes of True Blood: The Complete Second Season .

On one hand, the fact that Kevin Costner is now headlining a direct-to-video horror movie does not appear to bode well for his career, despite having won Academy Awards and other honors in the past.

On the other hand, this direct-to-video film is based on the short story "The New Daughter," which appears  in Nocturnes, an anthology of horror fiction by the Irish writer John Connolly.  I read the book back when I lived in Marietta and there are some very good stories in it. 

One of them, "The Erlking," even inspired me to put some allusions to Angela Carter's short story of the same name in one of my lesser novel ideas (basically a space-opera potboiler that might not ever see the light of day).  That one was pretty darn good and descriptive in its own right.  Another story, one about clowns, creeped even me out, and that's saying something.

So I might watch this movie, to encourage more films to be made off short stories.

Introducing...The Dragon

In the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf ,the titular hero's third and final enemy is a dragon, which he defeats at the cost of his own life.

Since I'm trying to tie in "Beowulf" with the sage of Andrew Sutter, whose tale will begin in Escape from the Wastelands and continue through several books, I needed three opponents for our hero. 

The first was the warlord Grendel who took his nom de guerre from a partial copy of "Beowulf" he found in a ruin.  The second, standing in for Grendel's mother, was a coalition of Grendel's sons waging an insurgency in their father's old homeland.

However, I hadn't fully nailed down the third opponent.  I mentioned several possibilities in an earlier blog entry, but I reviewed my "idea file" and those were for later stories that would cover the descendants of Andrew (or his sister Sarah).  I didn't have a third enemy for Andrew to die killing.

So I came up with a new one.  Decades after Andrew put down the revolt of Grendel's sons, long-sealed passes into the mountains north of the empire Grendel founded and Andrew took from him are blown open and new armies emerge from them to put an end to the post-apocalyptic technological renaissance that two generations of peace had brought about.

These armies are commanded, not by a human enemy, but an ancient artificially-intelligent war machine that had been dug up and managed to take control of the entire region and organize it into its own dominion.  Now, using ancient, forbidden weapons (possibly nukes?), it has blasted open the long-closed roads south and is moving out to rule the world.

The notion of an AI using armies of living soldiers is not entirely alien to speculative fiction.  The novel When Heaven Fell depicts most of the galaxy under the control of a cybernetic "Master Race" of AIs that entered the Milky Way 100,000 years ago and recruited armies from conquered species, including our own, to expand its control and eventually fight a new enemy that is strongly implied to have defeated them and has now coming calling.

Plus, if it turns out "the dragon" is really something resembling SkyNet, it could provide another hint as to just how a world technologically adept enough to build blacktop roads, use what I've hinted are M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles for war, and revive dinosaurs and create creatures that never existed (the "rippers" occasionally seen in the early chapters of Escape) using genetic technology could get knocked back to roughly (American) Civil War levels of technology.

(Imagine the Terminator universe if the Russian counterstrike on the US destroyed SkyNet's communications links outside its bunker.  Cut off from surviving human troops it can deceive or machine units under its direct control, it sits there waiting for centuries until somebody finds the bunker and, not knowing it's there, plugs it back in.)

Intertextuality and "Escape from the Wastelands"

Purchased Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition) from a local bookstore yesterday, probably the first new book I've purchased in years. 

(Thanks to Amazon.com's ZShops and Half.com, it's easy to find books I wanted used for much less.)

I intended to use it to add intertextuality to my novel Escape from the Wastelands, which will hopefully make it deeper and more financially successful.  Thus far, I've read read some of the introduction, but based on some passages quoted, I've already gotten some ideas for the early career of antagonist Grendel Black.

Grendel (the monster) is described as being a creautre from the moors.  Grendel Black's homeland is in the northwestern part of the world of Escape and I've given little thought to its geography other than making it somewhat similar to Scandinavia.  I think I'll add some moors there and make it so that he hid in the moors after his family was killed in a clan war.  In an Old World (pre-apocalyptic) ruin in the moors, he found a partial copy of Beowulf and, having read about the fell deeds of Grendel, took the name for himself.

(A member of the Lawrenceville writing group suggested this be a name he adopted for himself and this seemed like a sensible suggestion.)

The moors will also be Grendel's base for his early career as a mercenary and "regulator" (an Old West term for a hired gun cattle barons used to protect their herds), paralleling Grendel's raids on Heorot from the moors.

In the long run, the three-parted aspect of Beowulf can also provide a basis for the career of my protagonist, Andrew Sutter.  Andrew will first defeat Grendel himself (the planned first four books).  Then he will defeat an insurgency led by Grendel's sons in his old homeland (analogous to the Sunni Triangle in Iraq), with the land itself being an analogy for Grendel's mother.

The third foe, analogous to the dragon and like the dragon faced many years later, Andrew will beat but die in the process.  Not sure who that foe will be--I had pondered a cross-dimensional invasion (enemies more technologically advanced but significantly few in number--think the time-traveling South Africans of The Guns of the South, who aid the Confederacy but then betray it), one of Grendel's generals who had been turned into a vampire, or even a falling-out with the allies who helped make Andrew Emperor in Grendel's place.

(Considering how Beowulf ends on a rather ominious note--without Beowulf, the Geats have no king to protect them from their gathering enemies--the possibility of a renewed war and the fragile post-apocalyptic civilizational renaissance ending is nice and dark.)

I've been feeling a bit under the weather lately (had what might have been an attack of food poisoning early Wednesday morning), so I might sign off, lie down, and read more of Beowulf.  Then I'll have more of substance to add to this.

Productivity Update

I just added a new chapter to The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot, which I had allowed to sit unupdated for nearly a month.  The lead-up to the great battle in Morocco in which Megatron attempts to free the Fallen from his tomb (under Jbel Toubkal, a mountain near Marrakesh) and Starscream makes his bid for power has begun...

Unfortunately, I'm rapidly approaching an impasse.  In the film, Sam, Mikaela, and Leo end up in Egypt when Jetfire creates a "space bridge" (some kind of wormhole) and takes them there.  Since I replaced the "wake up Jetfire in a museum" plot with the plot I remember from the original Transformers animated series (Starscream digs Jetfire out of a glacier), this isn't going to happen.

At present, my plan to get the kids to Morocco (to have them there for the final battle, like in the movie) involves them accidentally getting swept onto an American military aircraft that's headed there.  Thing is, unless the soldiers boarding the aircraft are in a VERY big hurry, they'd get noticed and put off the plane.  I'm disinclined to have them stow away, lest Sam get "Flanderized"* into someone mindlessly self-sacrificing to the point of being a suicidal idiot.

(*A TVTropes term in which one character trait gets amplified to a ridiculous degree.  It comes from Flanders turning more and more into a religious zealot to the exclusion of other traits in The Simpsons.  It could also be applied to Quagmire's sexual perversity, which was less pronounced earlier in Family Guy.)

After all, I already had him attempt to trade himself to the Decepticons for a kidnapped Mikaela, Mr. Banes, and Simmons, in a move that other characters and readers recognized was idiotic to an extreme.

Any ideas?  I've only got six chapters left and hopefully I'll be able to finish it before July.

Also, I posted an author's note in The Wrath of the Half-Blood Prince that both provides a glimpse of what the Potterverse would look like 17 years after Voldemort's (permanent) defeat in that world's 1979 and linked back to this blog.  The note serves a dual purpose of expending my last ideas pertaining to that story and (hopefully) attracting more readers here, since this blog did not exist in 2008 when I wrote "Wrath."

My final piece of non-original work is another alternate version of the Draka timeline on my alternate-history forum.  In the novel Under the Yoke (second in the original trilogy), there's a scene where a Draka character states that if the Domination didn't have atomic weapons, the United States could have forced them out of Europe and Eastern China, which the Draka conquered in that timeline's version of WWII.

Thing is, the Draka's primary ability to threaten the North American mainland is via submarine and the Alliance for Democracy is dominated by the US, Britain, and Japan, all of whom have extensive naval-warfare experience.  The Alliance nuclear arsenal is also more powerful and more advanced than that of the Draka.

So, I figured in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Alliance could have launched a successful nuclear first-strike on the Domination, using their superiority in aircraft and ships to destroy the Draka sea-based nuclear deterrent before it could do significant damage.  It's improbable they could sell a "war to the death" to their electorates so soon after WWII, but driving the Draka back to their pre-war start lines with the aid of the still-not-entirely-enslaved populations of Eurasia would be an easier sell.

But after the war, with "frontline" Alliance states like Britain, India, and Japan taking worse nuclear damage than the US and the Domination truncated and with its ruling-class and slave-soldiery taking a severe beating, the Alliance might well weaken or even dissolve.  And the Draka, descended from history's losers, might well be inclined to revenge...

(Plus I'm thinking that post-Draka Europe might well be dominated by Communists and other extreme leftists and form a third power-bloc.  That'd be a real downer ending there--the rump Alliance and the resurgent Draka blast each other to bits and the world ends up going Red.)

Here's the link: Limited Alliance-Draka War.

I may update the timeline later tonight.  Right now, it's gotten 550+ hits on AH.com and considering how I've been posting blog posts there as well as on Facebook, I think I'm recruiting more and more of them as readers.

Now, as far as original fiction is concerned, I have submitted Chapter Five of Escape from the Wastelands to my Kennesaw writing group.  I have already tweaked it based on some comments received from two of my fellow writers.

Given my decision to get some serious intertextuality going with Beowulf, I think I might order a copy of the actual epic and see what I can glean from it.  Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos got a whole lot of critical acclaim through intertextuality with the Iliad and Shakespeare, so perhaps intertextuality with Beowulf will raise my planned post-apocalyptic-paperpack series to new levels of credibility (and hopefully, when the time comes, higher sales and movie deals).

I have also just gotten a rejection slip from Asimov's for my short story "Picking Up Plans in Palma," which takes place in my Afrikaner universe.  This rejection slip was rather different from older rejections I've gotten from that magazine.  It's still a form letter, but my name is handwritten into the salutation, editor Sheila Williams signed it herself, and the letter states that the story is "not quite right" but they'd like to see more fiction from me.

Considering how "Palma" is basically an alternate-history spy story with only vague science-fiction content (the "MacGuffin" of the story is plans for an orbiting battle-station and a character fears having an orbital projectile dropped on him), I think if I can get something as good as "Palma" that's more explicitly SF, I might have a good chance of selling it.

Awesome.