Pavane was one of the first (and sadly, not the last) books that defeated me. I picked the book as part of a ninth grade reading assignment, and I found it dense, unclear, and just generally too much of a slog to get through. (Also, I was busy doing more important stuff, like procrastinating.) I barely got through 20% of the book but still managed to bluff my way successfully through the final assignment, which I imagine is mostly because my teacher knew nothing about it either. It wouldn't be until a couple years later that I made another attempt at reading it, and once again I found it dense, unclear...and brilliant.

But let me back up. The divergence at the heart of Pavane is compelling, if a bit Anglocentric. In 1588, Queen Elizabeth I is assassinated, and the Spanish Armada goes onto defeat the British fleet. King Philip of Spain senses an opportunity to seize greater power, and swiftly conquers all of northern Europe. The power of the papacy is restored, the Reformation is crushed, and Europe slides back into the Middle Ages. And then, four centuries later, the story begins.

The book takes its name from a courtly medieval dance performed in six parts plus a coda. Similarly, Pavane is divided into six "measures", the loosely connected novellas that move the story along, as well as a closing coda that throws everything that came before it into serious question. Keith Roberts originally wrote five of these stories for Science Fantasy, and then collected them in 1968, along with a sixth story and the coda, to create the book's current incarnation.

The world of Pavane is equal parts rich detail and maddening ambiguity. The dominant vehicles of England in 1968 are steam-powered traction engines, which haul goods from place to place in lieu of railroads and must evade the marauding thieves known as routiers. Messages are transmitted over great distances using semaphore towers, which can relay coded signals over hundreds of miles in a matter of hours. The Inquisition is still in full swing, and now requires artistically inclined monks to serve as court reporters.

But for all those clear pieces of information, there's at least as much that goes only partially explained. Multiple references are made to faeries and old ones and the remarkable abilities such beings have. Are they truly magical, or does Clarke's third law come into play? On multiple occasions, characters encounter bits of seemingly advanced technology, but Roberts refuses to describe them clearly, perhaps on the grounds that none of the characters in Pavane would understand them anyway. The coda in particular seems to push any chance of fully understanding the book out of reach, but that can be part of the fun.

As is to be expected of a story collection, Pavane is somewhat uneven. The opening entry, "The Lady Margaret", is probably the most straightforward, at least in part because it has to give the reader enough exposition to understand what the hell is going on. "The Signaller" starts out in a similar vein, as it traces its protagonist's journey from lowly commoner to signal operator, but it concludes on a mysterious note that sets the tone for the subsequent stories.

"Brother John" and "The White Boat" are two of the most opaque stories, and as such two of the most difficult, but the hints that they do parcel out are crucial to the overall mysteries surrounding the world of Pavane. "Lords and Ladies" and "Corfe Gate" pick up on the family first seen in "The Lady Margaret", and probably represent the greatest narrative successes of the book. "Corfe Gate", in particular, packs a major dramatic wallop, as the long-delayed rebellion finally begins and technology starts to come back into the world.

Pavane is neither a glorification nor vilification of the Catholic Church. Obviously, Roberts's entire premise rests on the assumption that a dominant Church would set back the progress of humanity by centuries, which isn't exactly a positive statement. But, as with most things in the book, there is more going on here, and at least one character articulates a fascinating counterargument, that maybe humanity needs to be protected from itself and its runaway technology every so often. It's a paternalistic argument, to be sure, and one you (or I) won't necessarily agree with, but there's no simple reading of the book's religious politics.

I'm fascinated by the idea of lyrical storytelling - something that doesn't exactly tell a concrete story, but keeps dancing around its point long enough for you to get the idea. This is both the great joy and great frustration of Pavane. It's entirely appropriate for it to take its name from the dance, as it is stately, complex, and somewhat obscure. This is a book to read once, get stuck, return to with a clear head, blast through, and then read again in search of deeper meanings. They are definitely there, and they are definitely worth finding.

Pavane goes in and out of print, but it is readily available from any number of secondhand booksellers, generally for rock bottom prices. That's not a reflection of its quality so much as its forgotten status. It never attained the stature of such other early alternate history works as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle or L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall. Its more historically obscure divergence point, heavily British subject matter, and dense writing style are three immediately obvious reasons why that might be, but that's no reason to keep ignoring it. If you're looking for a book that's actually worth the challenge of reading it, I'd recommend Pavane. I certainly don't regret coming back to it, even if I'm still not entirely sure what I read.

This is actually a trailer for the Half Life 2 mod Dino D-Day, but both the video and the mod present a bizarre, pulpy alternate history of the Normandy Landings. Although I sincerely doubt the troops would have had much success punching Nazi dinos in the face.

[via Discovery News]

Fresh off his hilarious role as the cheesy epic fantasy writer Ronald Chevalier in Gentlemen Broncos, Clement talked to Sarah Kuhn about what his TV series might have been in an alternate universe.

After being approached by HBO to develop a series, Clement said he and McKenzie were "sick of" singing. He continued:

We'd been playing our live show for a month, like, 30 nights in a row, and we'd been writing the month before that. So we were sick of that, and we were like, "It's going to be science fiction; there's no songs. It's set in 1970." They were like, "Where did the songs go?" [Laughs.] Different people had different ideas-we talked to lots of writers . . . Some ideas other writers pitched to us were, like, "You're a band and you play from town to town and you play those real-life gigs and then you go and save people in the town." Or, one of my favorites was, "Every episode's different. In one episode, you're racecar drivers and it's a musical about racecar drivers. And then the next time, you're astronauts. And the next time, you're dinosaur hunters." I really liked that one.

We really like that one too! Please let the next Clement/McKenzie joint be a swashbuckling musical series set in space with dinosaurs who race cars.

via Backstage

Bird's "Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels' Generous Offer" starts with the Fab Four accepting Lorne Micahels' joking offer to appear on Saturday Night Live. The performance reinvigorates the band and they start work on another album. For the next few decades, the Beatles collaborate with Michael Jackson (who ends up with a very different legacy), have faux press fights with the Rolling Stones, and protest the War in Iraq. Personally, I'm glad they managed to save The Muppet Show:

December 14, 1980. Having "had a sit back" (Ringo) after Eventually's staggering success and taken time to concentrate on their own projects and personal lives, the Beatles make their first televised appearance as a group since the SNL reunion, appearing on The Muppet Show. (Lennon leaves New York for the first time in six months to do the gig, eventually spending the entire month of December in England.) The episode is the highest rated episode of The Muppet Show in the show's history and the most watched television program of the entire year, beating even the news coverage of the 1980 American presidential election. The undisputed highlight of the episode is the "battle of the bands" between the Beatles and the Electric Mayhem (although Starr says his duet with Fozzie the Bear remains his personal favorite moment). Jim Henson would later say that the Beatles episode "rejuvenated" his joy in working on the show, which by that point he had begun to feel was growing stale: the show continues for another seven seasons.

Read it all the way to the end to see how Ringo pulled the whole thing off.

Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels' Generous Offer [Mightgodking — Thanks to Derek Pegritz]

Image by ~WickedAwsome.

Aircraft designer KA Kalinin designed the K-7, a massive and extremely expensive prototype plane that briefly carried passengers during 1933. However, the plane crashed in November 1933, causing the project to be scrapped before more prototypes could be built. These images imagine a battle-ready version of a plane similar to Kalinin's K-7, with enough firepower to take down another non-existent vehicle: the Nazi flying saucer.

Russian Flying Fortresses [English Russia via Metafilter]

According to Strange Maps:

Leighton suggested that the old borough boundaries should be altered to conform to a honeycomb pattern. Within a 5-mile radius of the General Post Office all the sprawling, differently sized boroughs were to become hexagonal-shaped areas, 2 miles across. There were 19 altogether with the City in the centre of the honeycomb. Each hexagonal borough would be identified by a letter, and the letter as well as a number would be painted or cut out of tin-plate to be visible by day and night on lampposts at every street corner.

Very efficient!

More weirdness via Strange Maps

Boneshaker takes place in an alternate Washington territory, where the Klondike gold rush ramped up decades earlier, making the Seattle of 1860 a bustling metropolis of 40,000 residents. To more efficiently extract gold from the ice, a Russian mining company contracts Seattle inventor Leviticus Blue to create the ultimate mining machine, Dr. Blue's Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine. But during the device's first test run, it malfunctions, leveling the city's banking district and tearing open an enormous crack in the earth. The destruction was bad enough, but what pours out of that crack in the ground is far worse: Blight gas, a deadly, invisible substance that kills the lucky and transforms the less fortunate into "rotters," undead creatures who hunger for living flesh. Blue and his Boneshaker vanish, Seattle is abandoned, and a high wall is built around the city to hold in the rotters and the Blight.

Fifteen years later, Briar Wilkes lives on the Outskirts of Seattle with her teenaged son Zeke, working at a factory that cleans Blight from the drinking water. Briar labors under a strange pair of legacies: she's not only the widow of Leviticus Blue, she's also the daughter of Maynard Wilkes, a lawman who became something of a folk hero after the first days of the Blight. Briar would rather forget the men of her past (if anyone on the Outskirts would let her) and focus on creating some semblance of a life for her son. But Zeke is curious about the father he never knew, and wonders if there is more to Leviticus than his reputation would suggest. So, one day while Briar is at work, Zeke ventures into the walled city to visit the home his parents shared before the Blight. When Briar learns, to her horror, where Zeke has gone, she does the unthinkable and follows him behind the wall.

Granted, there are moments when Boneshaker reads like an exercise in finding legitimate reasons to include elements of steampunk (special goggles let you see the Blight, airships fly over the Seattle wall, and there are gas masks aplenty). On top of that, there's a healthy dose of alternate history. Not only did Priest bump up the timetable for the Klondike gold, Stonewall Jackson fails to die as a result of his injuries at Chancellorsville, a turn of events that has left the Civil War raging back East some fifteen years. And it seems Priest never met a pulp character she didn't like; the supporting cast includes a one-armed bartender, an aged Native American princess, a deck hand whose tongue was cut out, and air pirates.

Ultimately, though, Boneshaker shares more kinship with the post-apocalyptic genre, even though the Blight didn't destroy the world — or even, for that matter, Seattle. As it turns out, people are still living in the wasted city, going about their daily lives thanks to a network of tunnels, a series of pumps that bring in fresh air, and a few novel technologies for dealing with the gas and the rotters. The residents of Blighted Seattle view themselves as sort of frontiersmen (and women) of the apocalypse. With the Blight still leeching into the air, it could someday overtake all of Washington, and perhaps even the world. They live a hard and strange life, but one not devoid of pleasures. There is a sort of freedom in living where the law and most polite society won't travel, and necessity has bred technological wonders that don't exist in the outside world. Progress is slow, but it happens, and it lets them carve out a gradually improving home for themselves. It's a version of the American Dream that exists in sharp contrast to the big payoff the gold rushers and Leviticus Blue chased after.

But even hard labor and ingenuity weren't quite enough to buy a habitable Seattle. The residents were forced to turn to the unscrupulous Dr. Minnericht — a sort of wannabe Bond villain with a dash of Darth Vader thrown in for good measure. In the early days of the Blight, Minnericht helped the residents obtain supplies and fashion new technologies, and now has set himself up as the king of Seattle. No one knows Minnericht's true identity and few have seen his face. But his way with gadgets and his questionable morals remind many of the residents of Leviticus Blue, and they've begun to chafe under his rule. And the sudden appearance of Blue's widow and son threaten to bring years of resentment to a head.

Boneshaker's greatest strength is that Priest doesn't overly fetishize the subgenres she plays with, never overwhelming the fairly straightforward stories of mother and son, and giving her clockwork machinations and zombie encounters more impact when they do appear. Though zombies and Blight certainly color the lives of Seattle residents, they aren't obsessed with either; they simply accept that their routines occur in a deadly world. And Zeke and Briar may live in a world filled to the brim with elements of science fiction and pulp, but those are just the things and people they must navigate to reunite and survive. The only real downside is that, throughout the book, we visit too briefly with so many intriguing characters and concepts in favor of the novel's core adventure. Fortunately, Priest is already setting a second novel in her strange and blemished world, so we will hopefully see a fuller, richer picture of what goes on inside.

According to the New Yorker, Nader includes several real people in the novel, including Warren Buffett, Barry Diller, and Ted Turner, and he telephoned them up to let them know that they were in the book. Nader felt sensitized to this issue, because he's been featured as a character in other people's novels, including Greg Bear's Eon, which the New Yorker says

portrays Nader as "a saintly figure, a hero in a wasteland," whose followers win landslide elections in North America and Western Europe (in 2011) and bring down the Soviet Union (in 2012). "You see, that's science-fiction utopia," Nader said. "Nobody can give that any credibility."

Some people, including one famous billionaire, were a bit "snippy" about being included in Nader's book. But Yoko Ono and Warren Beatty were thrilled:

Yoko Ono, who in the book invents a logo called Seventh-Generation Eye that causes millions of people suddenly to shed their political apathy, sent Nader a brief reply. ("I think it is so sweet of you to write a book about somebody who resembles me. I don't mind at all, of course. Does she look like a tiny dragon?") Warren Beatty, whom Nader envisions running for governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger, and winning, with sixty-three per cent of the vote, blurbed the book. Nader, he wrote, was showing the world "how good he thinks things could be."

So just how weird is this novel? Here's how the San Francisco Chronicle describes the plot:

The story begins in 2005, not long after Hurricane Katrina. A secret gathering is convened by Buffett at a Maui mountain retreat, where 17 very wealthy people agree to take back the country they think has been betrayed.

They give speeches, write books, organize community action groups. They infiltrate corporate boards of directors, stage demonstrations for the environment and better wages. They start a People's Chamber of Commerce, advocate changing the national anthem to "America the Beautiful" and dream up a politicized parrot, "Patriotic Polly," that becomes a media folk hero.

"Fiction is a way to liberate the imagination," Nader says, "to see what could happen if 17 billionaires and super-rich people really put their minds to it, along with a parrot, and took on the existing business power bloc and the politicians in Washington who serve (it)."

The super-rich name themselves "Meliorists," believers that people can make the world better. They persuade the elusive Warren Beatty to run against Arnold Schwarzenegger for California governor. They conspire to force Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to allow its workers to unionize. They push for universal health care. They start a new political party, dedicated to publicly financed elections. They are so quick, and clever, their foes can't catch up.

After talking to Quaid earlier today, we couldn't help watching him as the 1960s Queens everyman in Frequency, where his grown-up son starts babbling at him over the radio about baseball scores and who's going to die when. The son (played by Jim "Outlander" Caviezel) manages to save Quaid from dying in a warehouse fire, but through a kind of twisty movie logic, this leads to Quaid's wife being killed by a serial killer the following week. It never fails: You mess with the timelines, you get serial killers. It's all worth it for the above clip, where Caviezel has to explain the situation to Quaid. Who just takes it on board, because he's a mensch.

We reviewed webcomic Templar, Arizona earlier this month, looking at Spike's richly drawn universe marked by unusual architecture, businesses where you can legally contract a prostitute or eat a puppy, and subcultures devoted to complete honesty, usurping buildings for public housing, or the worship of the ancient Egyptian gods. We talked to Spike via email about her inspirations for Templar, Arizona and what the future holds.

What prompted you to write an alternate history comic in the first place?

It's a cheat. Ha, I can't lie, it's just a blatant cheat. I always wanted to write a comic full of imaginary subcultures that took place in an invented city, but with the "alternate history" angle tacked on, I can custom-fit the environment. I don't want cell phones, so there aren't any. I don't want Arizona's crazy meth problems, which would just be silly to omit if I were writing about the state's underclass realistically, so that's gone, too. Whatever I say, goes. And when something comes up, someone asks me why Templar's Arizona is (x) instead of (y), well hey, alternate history!

I also wanted the city to be more timeless than a product of my specific age. I don't know if I'm completely successful in that regard, but it was definitely part of the motivation. I don't want anyone looking at TAZ twenty years from now and saying, "Man, iPhones and internet. This is so 2000s!"

To what extent do you have the alternate timeline of "Templar" sketched out? Do you have a sense of why the universe is the way it is?

A lot of alternate history fiction has that one big event that changed everything as a base. The Nazis won World War II, the US lost the Revolutionary War, the Roman Empire discovered gunpowder, China discovered America. Templar doesn't have that. It's more subtle. Lots of small things are different. The world is still recognizable. And I have my reasons for that.

One, this fundamentally is NOT an exercise in what-if history. It's just its own environment. The environment is different to permit the storyline; the storyline isn't the product of the differences in the environment. And two, I'm just a big baby. I want it the way I want it. The Sikh Empire never fell, because I say so. Grass-roots revolutionary communism is rampant, because I want it to be. I want to see how people react in these situations.

Although the subcultures often take center stage, it's interesting to see the technological differences between our world and Templar's, like the absence of cellphones and broadcast television. Why did you decide to make these specific changes?

I'm not gonna lie; cellphones are annoying. In a storytelling sense, I mean. And I know that, because I'm part of the problem. I've watched TV shows and movies, watched everything crescendo to the climax, and sat there thinking, "Jesus, just CALL him. He's GOT to have a phone, he's a secret agent/CEO/21st century human." or "There is no good reason to not call the cops now. You're all stupid."

Have you noticed how the "Oh crap, my phone's got no bars!" scene needs to be kludged into everything, nowadays? Just to set things up for the REAL story? I hate that.

But really, I think the technological situation is a combination of how I was personally living when I started Templar, and having tech-minded friends who consider regaling you with the history of the personal computer awesome dinner conversation. I don't like cells, I don't watch broadcast TV, and I am attached to my computer. Templar reflects that.

To what extent is the city of Templar different from the rest of the country? Ben frequently seems surprised by what he sees, but he also seems to have been rather sheltered in his previous life?

The rest of the country is a lot like Templar. The differences are universal, but Ben is from the rural suburbs. Him moving to to Templar is like someone from our world who can see apple orchards from their bedroom window moving to LA or NYC. Sure, that guy has a general idea of what he's gonna see there. But he's still gonna stare when he sees his first transsexual, medical marijuana storefront, or black person up close.

And Ben, sheltered? Oh, man. I can't wait to get into that. You guys don't know the half of it.

It's easy to chuckle at holier-than-thou groups like the Sincerists or tragically hip characters like Curio and Tuesday. But to what extent do you feel that you're lampooning certain real-life subcultures or people, and to what extent are you chronicling your characters' search for authenticity?

I don't think I'm doing much lampooning at all, just being really unoriginal. I'm reproducing the inevitable complications that go along with any group that decides to give itself a name.

Sincerists have irritable hardliners convinced the new crop of snot-nosed kids aren't true to the cause. Barney John, leader of Reclamation, started his group with the best of intentions, and now he's watching it outgrow him, turn on him, and attempt to handle him like a entourage. Nile Revivalists moved to the states to worship Anubis and Osiris freely, only to discover that their children have no interest in their parents' faith. It's not good or bad, it just happens. So it goes.

And frankly, it's my goal with all my characters to make them truly three-dimensional. I really like trying to introduce them in a way that fools you into forming an opinion on who they are, then kicking what you thought you knew about them off a cliff. Gene the lovable dummy? No, Gene the Pythian oracle. On the floor. Naked. With a hard-on.

Is there a Templar subculture you'd fit into, or at least test drive for a while?

Ahaha oh God, no. What a terrible thought. A lot of them mean well, though. Well, except for the Cooks.

I occasionally get emails from people who think Jakeskin, Reclamation, and Sincerism aren't bad ideas. Those are terrifying emails. But to be fair, I know things they don't know.

It often seems that the major difference between out universe and the universe in Templar is that things are often taken to their logical extreme, as if the absence of zoning laws and FCC regulations creates a fertile breeding ground for addict hostels, shows like "In the Coliseum" or "The Damage Report," and the rather bizarre sculptures of presidents. Is there a comment you're trying to make, or is it more that you try to figure out just what would thrive in a place like Templar?

Templar is less commentary and more watershed. I watch almost nothing but documentaries, I love history and technology and sociological docs. I love museums and National Geographic. I have my favorite bands. And when I see something interesting, I steal it. The Jimmy Carter statue? Based off a real statue of George Washington, one depicting him as Zeus. Addict hostels are real in Britain and Washington state. "In the Coliseum" is just a Tom Waits song.

To what extent are the unusual features of Templar inspired by your own experiences in cities?

Pretty much not at all, I'd say... With the single exception of the scene with a drunken Doctor Bash being hauled out of the middle of the street, which is as close to autobiographical as the comic will ever get.

It must be very tempting for people to look at the comic and try to find me, because a lot of people are convinced they have. I'm apparently Reagan or Ben, depending on who's arguing the case. Templar contains no self-insertion at the character level, but you'd be surprised how hard that is for some people to accept.

Personally, I'm a bit miffed that there aren't clay bars around and that I can't buy a Chimera soda. Do you put things in your comic that you wish you would see in the real world?

Definitely, clay bars and Chimera being prime examples. But the comic's definitely not my idea of a utopia. Templar's full of things I also consider to be terrible. I think it's important to keep things balanced if you want to keep things interesting.

We've seen that a lot of your characters have mysterious or tragic pasts that have yet to be revealed, but do you have specific arcs planned out for them in the future?

Sure do. Everyone'll get their turn. And that's all I'm gonna say.

"Templar" reminds me a bit of Warren Ellis' "Transmetropolitan" in that we're also being led through an extreme and often overwhelming city by a columnist. But Ben is the anti-Spider Jerusalem — meek, humble to a fault, and unfamiliar with his surroundings. Will we see him come to discover and love things about the city on his own? And will we ever get to see him be a journalist?

Beautiful weather we're having.

One of the most striking things about the comic is the dialogue. Many of the characters have very distinct rhythms of speech, and the tenor of the conversations often speak volumes about the relationships between the characters. Do the speech patterns come from people you know or people you observe in your daily life?

I use a lot of cheats with the speech, just like I use a lot of cheats with the settings. I haven't given any characters specific voices from specific people, but they all have rules they follow. Favorite phrases, favorite curses, frequency of profanity, overall dorkiness, affectations, grammatical shortcuts. Most people have unique speech patterns, and I've always wanted my characters to talk like most people. I write the most natural dialogue I can manage, sometimes to a fault. I've had people complain that the dialogue is TOO realistic, with too many pauses and thick accents. I have a hard time caring about that, though.

You've been our tour guide through Templar for four years now. If I were to spend one day in Templar, what would be the must-see attractions?

The Oarlock, the legal brothel district. Little Cairo, the ethnic center of the Nile Revivalists. Xenophage, if you can both stomach and afford it. Any random copybook shop. And a protest, if you can find one. Bring a helmet.

[Templar, Arizona]

It's well worth watching the whole thing, for one of Hauer's wryest performances of all time. He keeps digging into a set of mysterious deaths in 1964, even after it's clear the Gestapo want him off the case. And he looks genuinely shattered when he finally discovers what the deaths were covering up: the truth about what happened to all those Jews during the war.

Here's a great bit, where he asks why a one-legged man would hop all the way down to the lake to kill himself:

Basterds is set around a historical event that never happened: Adolf Hitler and several other top members of the Nazi Party attend the premiere of a new propaganda film in Paris, an event that inspires two separate groups to make an attempt on the Fuhrer's life. And, as events that never happened tend to do, this event snowballs into more and more ahistorical events, culminating in a version of 1944 that is a good deal different than our own — to the point where World War II itself would have ended very differently.

Several critics on both sides of the "loved it"/"burn it" fence have termed the film a "Jewish revenge fantasy," an excuse to create a pulpy war movie with a villain we already know and hate. And, without getting too much into how the plot unfolds, it's certainly not the more usual type of alternate history. Instead of picking a point where history diverged and showing how the world has changed from there, Tarantino is slicing up the timeline before our very eyes.

Paul Donovan, in reviewing the film for Camp Kansas City, has perhaps the most astute observation on what Basterds accomplishes from a genre standpoint:

In 1978, an Italian film was released with the American name "Inglorious Bastards", about four U.S. soldiers on their way to prison who end up volunteering for a commando mission behind enemy lines. Tarantino took the name and the idea of rough-and-tumble American soldiers on a mission, and that's where the movie remake stops. His movie is a remake, all right, but not of any old movie. He had the audacity to rewrite history.

Quentin Tarantino remade World War II.

There's certainly a speculative bent to the Tarantino's grisly exercise, asking what might have to happen for WWII to end one way instead of another, what stars would have to align and what personalities would have to be in play. And, when war movies like The Dirty Dozen already add elements and events to history that simply weren't there, there's something appealing about an artist who owns his historical revisionism and goes all out to rewrite the ending.

But beyond asking how firmly Inglourious Basterds fits into the alternate history genre, I'm more interested in what happens after Basterds has left the theaters. Now that Tarantino has created an alternate universe, will we get more stories to populate it and show us how the world has really changed? Will it inspire other artists to create these in-the-moment historical remakes? And what does this mean for the future of Tarantino's movies? While his films often fall outside the realm of reality, they still skirt around science fiction and fantasy (with the notable exception of his screenplay for vampire slaughterfest From Dusk Till Dawn). Could Inglourious Basterds be the sign of more speculative fiction to come?

[Via Dark Roasted Blend]

The AV Club's "Gateways To Geekery" series recommends Robert Sobel's Pulitzer Prize-nominated 1972 novel For Want Of A Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won At Saratoga as the gateway drug for alternate history virgins:

This effective blending of the fanciful and the banal is what makes For Want Of A Nail such a good place to start. The writing style, by its very dryness, achieves a wonderful balance between the counterfactual history-which goes into tremendous depth, with endless variations springing forth from the most minor historical divergences-and the fictional wonders, to the point that when a huge corporation, the invented Kramer Associates, ends up as a nuclear power near the end of the book, it seems like the most reasonable thing in the world. For those interested in the "history" part of "alternate history," the book is incredibly well-researched and meticulous in its presentation of real-world historical figures; for those who like the "alternate" part, it's fascinating for how those figures play a completely different role in this always plausible, yet entirely unpredictable, divergent path of American history.

And if that book grabs you, the AV Club suggests a few classics, like Philip K. Dick's The Man In The High Castle and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years Of Rice And Salt, as well as the harder-to-find Norman Spinrad novel, The Iron Dream. But the Club warns newbies off Turtledove ("his body of work is intimidatingly vast, and not very good") and says Roth's The Plot Against America "works best as literature, with its historical aspects often coming across as flat or not entirely credible." No mention of other oft-raised classics, like Fatherland. Or The Yiddish Policeman's Union, for that matter. (Although both books do get mentioned in the comments.) [AV Club]

We begin our journey through the city of Templar with fellow newcomer Ben Kowalski. Ben left his home in Yakima, Washington, under mysterious circumstances, and has come to Templar possibly to find himself, but probably to become lost in the local color. Ben has a job writing a column for the city's newspaper, a curiosity about Templar's numerous and often outrageous subcultures, and a nasty habit of never leaving his apartment. Fortunately for us, his neighbor Reagan — an imposingly plump woman who treats lewdness as an art form — quickly drags him (and us) out of his apartment and into the heart of the city.

Spike has described the setting of Templar, Arizona as "a slightly irregular Arizona that fell off the back of a truck somewhere, and now all the power outlets are a weird shape and a couple of wars never happened." It's a world where no one has cell phones, where televisions look like laptop computers and shows have always been by subscription instead of broadcast. In lieu of Judge Judy, Templarites watch Claudius Graves, who forces legal disputants to battle inside his coliseum before dispensing his verdict, and rather than protest stores that sell angora sweaters, animal rights groups protest restaurants that serve puppies and panda.

But perhaps the most striking thing about Templar, and the thing Ben himself is most eager to see, is its host of extreme subcultures, tribes that make up (and disrupt) much of the city life. There are the Nile Revivalists, Egyptian immigrants who've gone back to the religion and traditions of the Ancient Egyptians, even going so far as to give their children names like Thutmose and Ra. The Sincerists vow to be scrupulously and absolutely honest in all their words and dealings. The Pastimes make steampunkers look unenthusiastic. The Jakeskin are a survivalist cult with a knack for petty theft and a ruthless dedication to defending their own. And the Reclamationists are soviet renovators who stage coups on Templar's buildings, seizing them and repurposing them as self-sufficient housing for the masses.

It's a weird and warped vision of the world, sometimes comical, sometimes off-putting, and sometimes terribly sad. But Spike's heavy, rounded lines, combined with grayscale and sepia tones give the comic a warm and inviting quality, telling us we're quite welcome to spy on this alien version of America, at least for the time beings. And we often feel precisely like we're spying. Templar consists of a series of vignettes, some dramatic, others focused on the day-to-day, and Spike frequently drops us in the middle of an intimate conversation, pulling back the curtain on her universe and her characters a little bit more. We learn how Sincerists feel about Chinese character tattoos. We meet Curio, a flighty rich girl who desperately wants to be cool, and her also wealthy but successfully hip friend Tuesday. We witness the tension between first generation Nile Revivalist immigrants and their less devout offspring. And we frequently find ourselves back with Ben as he tries to navigate his new home and befriends the outrageous, bizarre, and often mysterious

Spike is a writer who never underestimates her audience's intelligence, and while her scenes are sometimes expository, they are always couched in the unique language of her character. Templar demands close reading, and often rereading, to fully understand what's at work and to catch all the small details and sight gags that crowd her panels. It makes for a rich experience and the sense that we are visiting a fully realized world with characters who are truly, and often frighteningly, alive.

Templar, Arizona is an always-fascinating jaunt through an idiosyncratic universe, which — while often extreme — shares enough with our own world to be both amusing and discomforting. But, while it's not a place you'll want to live, you'll be glad that Spike gives you the opportunity to visit every now and then.

[Templar, Arizona]

Here's the full version of the above image, of a zeppelin mooring in Hyde Park, with the weird-looking elephants and war machines in the background. Doesn't that look fantastic?

Here's the synopsis for Leviathan:

Prince Aleksander, would-be heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, is on the run. His own people have turned on him. His title is worthless. All he has is a battletorn war machine and a loyal crew of men.

Deryn Sharp is a commoner, disguised as a boy in the British Air Service. She's a brilliant airman. But her secret is in constant danger of being discovered.

With World War I brewing, Alek and Deryn's paths cross in the most unexpected way…taking them on a fantastical, around-the-world adventure that will change both their lives forever.

According to a profile of Westerfeld in Publishers Weekly, there will be four books in the series, with the fourth book being a "heavily illustrated 'manual of aeronautics.'" And the book, with tons of illustrations by artist Keith Thompson, will alternate chapters from the points of view of Alek and Deryn. One attraction of this series for Westerfield was the chance to put a strong female character into the traditionally male-dominated Victorian adventure narrative. And there's some backstory on those weird biological and mechanical weapons:

In Westerfeld's re-imagining, the combatants are the Clankers, whose weaponry consists of heavily fortified machinery, and the Darwinists, whose airships are made up of bioengineered animals. The Leviathan is the most colossal of these: a giant whale kept afloat by microscopic hydrogen breathers.

Each book will have 50 interior illustrations and be printed on 70 pound paper with full-color endpapers depicting the alternate map of Europe. The first volume hits stores in October, with the second volume coming in 2010.

[Scott Westerfeld via BSC Review]

A toy hobbyist known on the Toyster.ru forums as Aquila painstakingly created a step-by-step photo series of Russian men in World War II uniforms, assembling a T-800. As the sign in the final few pictures indicates, the T-800 has orders to travel to Berlin, and, unless John Connor had an ancestor hanging around the Nazi stronghold at the time, this T-800 was probably built (and perhaps traveled back in time) to kill Adolf Hitler. Of course, we know that never actually works.

[Toyster.ru via Metafilter]

Artist Sydney Padua has been posting The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage on her comics site 2D Googles. The premise holds that proto-programmer (and sole legitimate child of Lord Byron) Ada Lovelace did not die at age 36, but instead helped inventor Charles Babbage develop the first computer — a fully functional Analytical Engine — after which they retired to battle crime using the power of mathematics (and rayguns).

So far, Padua has pitted the pair against the economic Panic of 1837 as well as subterranean salamander people, but the most priceless of the series is ,Ada Lovelace: The Origin, in which we learn the true force of Lovelace's prescience:

[2D Goggles]