Moe Lane's Blog, page 58

04/09/2025 Snippet, IN THE HALLS OF THE LILY KING.

This is not the right title.

…

He took a swig of his beer. “So. Were you buying, or selling?”

“Buying,” Serenity immediately replied. “At least, I assumed I would be. The late marquis had a reputation for being able to find accurate, yet unflattering information. If he claimed to have uncovered something that would be worth my time to bury, he probably did. He certainly told me to bring plenty of gold.” She sniffed. “As if a bank draft from the Bank of Hershey would not be honored at any bank on the continent!”

“But you said you didn’t do for him,” Waylon noted. “No skin off my nose if you did, you hear me? I’m not the only man who’d say a blackmailer with a sliced throat got off easy. You play that kind of game, you win those kind of prizes.”

“Which is why I do not prefer that kind of game, Mister Salvager. Besides, the secrets he had loomed larger in his head than mine. I am far more interested in how he found the information to begin with. Blackmail is an inconvenience, easily solved with money. Telling secrets? Now, that is a betrayal of trust.” Serenity tossed back the shot of whiskey that she had ordered. “I had not yet informed the marquis that revealing who his seller was would have been part of the deal.”

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‘Safety Dance.’

Safety Dance, Men Without Hats

#commissionearned

Moderately dull day today.

Had to make umpteen billion phone calls straightening out several things. Then I had to jump on a call with my layout guy about how to make sure the pagination was going to work out properly for the worldbook. We were trying to figure out how the page flow was set up originally, and while he eventually came up with a workaround, we still had to make decisions on how the Special Thanks page would look. (One reason I was nagging people about surveys!)

Tomorrow I really need to block out the next story, and get started on finishing the last remaining Tobias/Asenath story that I am doing at this time. Busy, busy, busy…

The PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS Hulu Trailer.

My kid was interested in this one. Interested in the Predator series generally, in fact. PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS does seem like the kind of horror-tinged science fiction he’d be into.

Fill out your surveys!

(Reminder: the pre-order store for the Fermi Resolution Worldbook is open!)

We are at the finishing stages of the book layout process, and one of the steps in that process is putting up the ‘Special Thanks’ section. If you have not yet filled out your survey, fill it out now so that I can properly credit you! And, you know, so you can get your stuff.

Just finished Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House.

I do not score Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House as a political book, any more than I currently score Charlie Stross’s Laundry novels as being horror. I know what genres their respective authors think their books are in, but I couldn’t help but treat Fight as one of the funniest books I’ll be reading this year. The horrified bafflement! The nigh-tangible sense of DOOM that flooded This Town! The inability to decide just which rodent-fornicator was the most rodent-fornicating of all! And the uncritical willingness of the authors to let each of their interviewees – on both sides – have at least one poisoned knife each, to use on a target of their choice!

Heart. Of. Stone.

#commissionearned

The Consolidation Wars, Part Two. [Unlfiltered]

More stuff!

…

Empire Gained
North America arguably suffered least from the Consolidation Wars, at least in terms of raw casualties. The USA merely intervened in the Canadian civil war, shifting from peacekeepers to occupiers slowly enough to not provoke a revolt. Taking over the Caribbean did require a more vigorous divide-and-conquer method, but the population of the islands was too dispersed and easily isolated to put up an effective resistance. Mexico and Central America voluntarily sought annexation, because the alternative was West European kinetic energy weapons strikes from orbit. Taking full control of the North American continent went fairly smoothly.

The only drawback was that the United States of North America descended into imperial despotism for over a decade. The Constitution was thoroughly revised, creating a hyper-powerful executive at the cost of virtually everybody else. Complaining about the government was still permitted; citizens could even mock President Trevor Castaigne Lewis publicly. Actually trying to change the government got dissidents of all stripes and causes first casually detained, then sent to the colony worlds. Transportees went to Jefferson if they were lucky, and Bolivar if they were not. Very unlucky transportees supposedly went to the other two colony worlds, but that could not always be… confirmed.

There were three main revolts against the USNA during the Consolidation Wars. Canada’s low-key guerrilla campaign went on for the longest, eventually resulting in forty-five percent of the population being transported to Jefferson. Cuba’s outright insurrection in 2091 was largely handed over to National Guard units from the formerly-Mexican Expanded States, who used the war to demonstrate their loyalty to the new regime. It was claimed later that hispanic units were better suited than anglo ones to pacify the island without undue bloodshed. That claim is still being argued, even after the return of democratic norms in the USNA.

Finally, there was the Miskatonic Free State rebellion of 2095. That conflict was remarkable in its suddenness, and ferocity on both sides. It took a year of fighting before the Lewis regime finally resorted to their own KEW strikes, and by then most of the world simply wondered why the USNA waited that long.

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‘Eyes Without A Face.’

Eyes Without A Face, Billy Idol

#commissionearned

Got a little promo thingy going on over at PaperDemon.

The PaperDemon ArtRPG is run by a friend of mine. It’s a website that combines art and roleplaying, and they’ve very kindly offered to put up a prompt to help out with the Fermi Resolution Worldbook (that’s the preorder link). You hopefully will recognize the character that I had them put in slightly professionally embarrassing peril…

Moe Lane

The Consolidation Wars, Part One. [Unfiltered]

Practicing regular writing. Kind of necessary.

…

The Consolidation Wars
(2076-2102 AD)
Reach: Worldwide
Nations Involved: All
Casualties: 250,000,000 killed (estimated)

The Consolidation Wars were never called that by the nations that fought them. In fact, the great debate during that time period was over which individual conflict could properly be called “World War III.” The idea that later generations would instead see a quarter-century’s worth of insurrections, conquests, annexations, secessions, and folk-migrations as one vast, interconnected conflict would have been profoundly alien to the participants. There were no sides in the wars, after all. No sides, and no common ideologies; every fight was a local one, and only of concern to the actual combatants. Everybody else had enough of their own problems.

Origins
The true origin of the Consolidation Wars was Zeroth Contact in 2045 AD. Earth’s discovery of the Amalgamation’s automated beacon, coupled with its quick development of a prototype FTL drive, triggered a global era of optimism and idealism. The stars beckoned! Wonders and marvels awaited! Finally humanity could take its place among the other Galactic civilizations. Maybe not the highest place, but there was no shame in being students for a while. Earth was eager for revelations.

Earth did not handle well the news that Galactic civilization was now a collection of charnel worlds, with only bones and ruin to bear mute witness to the savagery that must have destroyed it. In fact, in the end that revelation proved too much for humanity to bear. It merely took several decades for the madness to erupt.

The War of ‘76
Mainland Europe in 2076 AD had been ostensibly united for decades. The inclusion of Eastern Europe (including the western territories of the former Russian Empires) had never quite been perfect, but societal inertia and a lack of crises had allowed the system to operate without much internal conflict. It had been decades since the last conflict in the European Union proper, and over a century since the last general war.Unfortunately, all of that meant that Europeans were distinctly unprepared when a civil war did break out.

The triggering event was the decision by the EU bureaucracy to finally consolidate all government agencies in France itself. This had been discussed for more than twenty-five years, only to be vehemently rejected each time by most of the EU’s eastern nations as a naked power grab. The EU’s western nations instead saw this as a petulant refusal to make the government more efficient, which inflamed them in turn. At no time did either side expect the dispute to become violent, and it is now generally agreed that, somehow, both sides attacked first.

The War of ‘76 lasted five years, killed seventy-five million people, and left a broad belt of destruction that stretched from Kiel to Venice. By its end the European Union had split into Europe de l‘Oeust and the Pakt Euroazjatycki, and celebrated their victories by immediately conquering North Africa and East Siberia. By that point, the rest of the world barely noticed.

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