Credits and Acknowledgements
This story would not exist without the help of my editors, lordelliot and Sage Wolf. More than just grammar and spelling corrections, they contributed crucial story ideas and even the names of the main characters. You have all of my gratitude for your efforts over the past ten months.
The initial inspiration for this story came from two sources: The first was the fanfic “Oversaturation” by FanOfMostEverything. The early part of that story includes a mention of how humans in the Equestria Girls setting discovered the symbols (cutie marks) they used to decorate their clothes. The description looked suspiciously like a Mystery Cult ceremony as practiced by the Ancient Greeks, and that fired my imagination. The second inspiration was a series of articles by The Digital Antiquarian exploring the Infocom game Trinity (1986). I was reminded of how disappointing the ending of that game was, and I realized that in this post-Cold War era, a much better ending would be more deserved. And then I realized that I could use my elaborate Equestria Girls setting to pull this off, and finally get another one of my personal heroes into a fanfic.
The human characters of (Principal) Celestia, (Vice Principal) Luna, and the location of Canterlot all come from the media franchise My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, created by Meghan McCarthy for Hasbro as a spin-off of their My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic franchise. It’s not certain which individual is the intellectual caretaker of the franchise going forward, although I’m hoping it’s Nick Confalone.
The alicorn character Celestia and her sister Luna come from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, as well as Daring Do and her series of books.
The extrapolation of these characters and setting back to the year 1985 is the work of my imagination, and if the implied connections between current and past versions don’t make sense to you, then that is entirely my fault—sorry.
The original character that I named Kimiko Mineko comes from Trinity (1986). Again, I took a lot of liberties with her.
The characters of Truth Delver, Mr. Catalyst, Steady Ship, Steady State, Trilogy Point, Meridiem Tempest, Gnosi Augur, Crystal, Thorned Rose and her daughter Yellow, Agents Proctor and Gamble, Round Trip, Archbishop Guardian Shepherd, Butterfly the maid, Blue Note, Father Tailor and Arbus Rhiza are original.
All remaining characters are based on real people—I’ll name them in the notes for each chapter.
The Cold War crisis described over the course of this story more or less happened as described; only it happened in 1983 instead of 1985—I moved the year so it could be after the publication of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! My primary sources for the crisis were Wikipedia’s article on Able Archer 83 (and everything linked from there) and the British TV documentary 1983: The Brink of Apocalypse, which is available on YouTube. The Cold War as a whole was covered by the gaming site The Digital Antiquarian’s series on Trinity: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.
Prologue: A Light Brighter Than a Dozen Suns
The primary sources for the Trinity Test narrative were The Manhattan Project’s webpage, the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s list of eyewitness accounts, Gene Dannen’s list of eyewitness accounts, and People’s 1995 article by David Grogan. Most of what is described in this chapter happened as described.
The parts about the roadrunner and the character of Crystal are fictional, the former taken from the Infocom computer game Trinity (1986), written by Brian Moriarty.
Model Forecast was based on Jack Hubbard. President True Man was based on Harry S. Truman. Cino Cycle was based on Hans Bethe.
Gus Guiseman was based on Richard Feynman. (He’s the main character, so he gets his own paragraph.)
Infra Stellar was based on Edward Teller (and he was one of the inspirations for Doctor Strangelove). Journey Scoop was based on William Laurence. Stable Solution was based on Donald Hornig.
Robinson Crusoe was the main character in a novel from 1719, a castaway who spent nearly thirty years on a desert island.
Precipitated Solution was based on Lilli Hornig. Her maiden name of Gillian Gesinek is also made up to go with the “griffon names start with G” rule; she was actually born Lilli Schwenk.
Most of the “hand-written” section is made up. I had originally intended for the author of the “final note” to be the bratty human Celestia, but I never could find a moment when she could have come across the transcript and known what a “thermal opacity ratio of the fission reaction” actually is. So make up some catty time traveler as the author if you really must have someone.
Oh, and I hope most of the readers picked up the connection between that ratio and Fermi’s betting pool about the bomb igniting the atmosphere. This was the key plot point of the Trinity game as well. My source for the physics of this possibility comes from this Stanford University essay.
Chapter 1: Breakfast Convocation
I suppose I could have dug up Richard Feynman’s actual Glendale address in 1985, but I thought that was taking invasion of privacy just a little bit too far, so I looked on a map and picked Pine Street at random.
Art Bell was the host of the call-in radio show Coast to Coast AM from 1984 to 2006. It had a strong focus on eye-witness reports of supernatural events and discussions of conspiracy theories.
GDS Incorporated is fictional. The initials don’t stand for anything, and are supposed to evoke the word “gods”.
Gwen Guiseman was based on Richard Feynman’s third wife, Gwen Feynman. Gavin and Gloria Guiseman were based on Carl and Michelle Feynman. Michelle was actually 17 in 1985, so having her graduate from high school in that year in my story was not completely unbelievable. However, she doesn’t have turquoise skin or blue hair in real life.
President Far Shooter was based on Ronald Reagan. The narrator of the story takes a strongly positive stance on his actions; my own opinion of the man is more nuanced.
Yuri Andropov actually became Secretary General of the Soviet Union on November 10, 1982, not June 14, 1985.
“Party at Ground Zero” was a song by the ska band Fishbone. It was actually released on September 21, 1985, so there’s no way it can be playing on the radio on June 14. The music video I linked to was directed by Henry Selick, who would go on to direct The Nightmare Before Christmas.
The theodicy argument was an obvious way to get Voltaire in, and to contrast him with Guiseman.
Harlequin is the name of a once-independent publisher (now part of HarperCollins) known for the publication of cheap paperback romance novels.
Ship’s Petroleum and Chemicals is a fictional company. The Poisoning of Bitsburg is supposed to evoke the numerous oil spills of the period, culminating in the Exxon Valdez in 1989.
Gabriel Gell-Mann was based on Feynman’s co-worker at Caltech, Murrey Gell-Mann. He was the man who worked out the existence of quarks in 1964.
Interlude: An Editorial and Its Rebuttal
The editorial is made up, but Roger Wilkins was an actual journalist for The Washington Post in 1985—I hope I didn’t overstate my bounds by putting words in his mouth.
“Lucifer” is an instrumental track by The Alan Parsons Project, released on August 27, 1979. The YouTube video linked is the visual creation of the poster, Eduardo Vivona. I picked this particular video for being unnerving and evoking fears of nuclear armageddon, not because I agreed entirely with its message.
Here are the parts of the editorial that actually happened in the real world: Ronald Reagan being elected 40th President of the United States on November 4, 1980. The release of 52 hostages held by Iran on January 20, 1981, the day of Reagan’s inauguration. The Camp David Accords of September 17, 1978. Muammar Gaddafi taking over Libya as Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution on September 1, 1969. American fighter jets engage with Libyan jets in the Gulf of Sidra on August 19, 1981. The hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 on September 5, 1986 (not 1981) by Abu Nidel, followed by their trial in June of 1988 (not November of 1983)—the role of Gaddafi in the event has long been suspected, but never admitted to nor proven in a court of law. The American embargo on Libyan oil started in March 1982, followed by the removal of all American business relations with Libya in January 1986 (conflated to February of 1984). The bombing of the West Berlin disco La Belle on April 5, 1986 (not 1984)—Ron Reagan, Jr. was not among the victims. The retaliatory strokes on Tripoli and Bengazi on April 15, 1986 (not 1984, and not involving nuclear missiles). The bombing was reported to have resulted in the death of Hanna Gaddafi, but there is suspicion if she actually died, or if in fact she ever actually existed. The Battle of Maaten al-Sarra on September 5, 1987, leading to the expulsion of Libya from Chad, and the fact that the Americans covertly supported the Chadians.
The fact that President Reagan was spending covert funds around the world, with the long-term goal of toppling the Soviet Union, is established by “The Peacetime War: Caspar Weinberger in Reagan’s Pentagon”, an article for The Atlantic written by Nicholas Lemann in October of 1984. The link I posted may or may not work—considering that the article is pretty much the Republican Party’s narrative of how America won the Cold War, I’m amazed that it’s not easier to obtain.
Pan American World Airways, commonly known as “Pan Am”, was the principal international air carrier in the United States between its founding in 1927 and its collapse in 1991. It was founded by the merger of three existing companies, with Juan Trippe as its first CEO. In 1964, Pan Am set up a waiting list of passengers for its first flight to the moon, expected at the time to occur around the year 2000. For this reason, the spaceplane that was featured in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) flew for Pan Am.
The score to Rambo: First Blood Part Two was composed by Jerry Goldsmith. The film was released on May 22, 1985. The particular recording by the City of Prague Philharmonic that I linked to was made in 1998.
The speech that I attribute to the “Markist Historical Society of Ireland” is actually excerpts from Reagan’s Westminster Speech of June 8, 1982 (the “ash heap of history” speech), followed by excerpts from his speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida of March 8, 1983 (the “evil empire” speech—it starts with “Our enemies must understand this”). I deliberately made the “evil empire” part even more provocative than the original, and added the Markist elements.
Firebrand was based on Thomas Paine.
Liposarcoma is a cancer of the fat cells.
Chapter 2: Chemistry Test
Gudea of Lagash ruled his city-state around 2135 B.C. A famous diorite statue of him sitting in a ceremonial robe can be found in the Louvre. President Saddam Hussein of Iraq was in 1985 still an ally of the United States against their enemy the Ayatollah of Iran.
George Grectman was based on Dan Shechtman, the man who discovered the first natural quasicrystal, which earned him a Nobel Prize in 2011.
“Polyrhythms on the bongos”—Feynman was known for his bongo playing, which pushed past Western traditions into the playing styles of Africa and South America. In fact, book publishers constantly pushed to have a picture of him drumming put on the covers of his memoirs, under the theory that nobody would want to read what a boring physicist had to say about anything, but they’d read anything written by a bongo-playing nutjob. He always turned them down.
Interlude: In a Galaxy Far, Far Away…
The title is from the opening crawl to Star Wars (1977) in honor of the fact that this is about the “Star Wars” speech and its aftermath.
The speech is again just a set of excerpts from an actual speech by President Reagan (with slight doctoring), which in the real world was given on March 23, 1983. The linked propaganda video was made shortly afterwards.
Chapter 3: Dinner Conversation
Most of the criticisms made of Guiseman (Feynman) in this chapter are true.
Freemon Dyson is an actual theoretical physicist, and a member of the Federation of American Scientists. Pending Theory was based on Paul Olum. “Schwinger” is Julian Schwinger, and “Tomanaga” is Sin-Itiro Tomanaga, the co-winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 alongside Richard Feynman.
“Newton and Halley”: Edmund Halley was the primary supporter of Isaac Newton when he was writing his work Principia on the nature of gravity. He later went on to prove that several observations of comets over the centuries were actually the same comet, which was then named after him.
The Three Mile Island accident involved the release of radioactive water vapor from a commercial nuclear power plant on March 28, 1979. The resulting protests led to the end of construction for such power plants in the United States.
Dyson’s statement on his faith is taken from a review of The God of Hope and the End of the World by John Polkinghorne.
The 1981 BBC interview: it was with Christopher Sykes, and led to the BBC documentary The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Here’s a YouTube video that concludes with that quote.
The British Broadcasting Corporation is the public service broadcaster for the United Kingdom. It was founded as a radio service in 1922 by John Reith with the directive to “inform, educate and entertain”—in that order.
Interlude: The Empire Contemplates Striking Back
Everything in the Politburo chapters is speculation. I used the names of actual Politburo members during the 1983 crisis, and did my best to guess what their opinions were, but I can’t imagine I got much of it right. In particular, Dimitri Ustinov never defected to the United States, but remained a loyal communist until the day he died, on December 20, 1984.
The title of the chapter references Star Wars’ sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (1981).
Richard Nixon: President of the United States from 1969-1974. Forced to resign over the investigation into how he tried to steal the 1972 election.
Rudolph Valentino was a handsome movie actor from the 1920’s. He died at the age of 31.
There’s a lot of glib talk about how SDI either caused the USSR to collapse just from its proposal, or how it was meant to be a US-only tool to make war impossible. I tried to spell out my understanding of how the technology would have been a threat to the status quo even if it were freely shared with the Soviet Union, as President Reagan had promised.
Andropov collapses: This actually happened in February of 1983, not June of 1985.
Chapter 4: Markism for Unbelievers
“Ed” was Edward C. Stone, the chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at Caltech from 1983 to 1988.
Meridiem: “My special talent is a waste of time.” Heh.
Gloria Guiseman: Michelle Feynman’s occupation is as a photographer.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were a set of manuscripts discovered in 1946, dating back to a few centuries on either side of Christ’s birth. They were written by a strict Jewish sect that Gnostics believe influenced their own religion.
Gnosticism is a branch of Christianity that had its height in the Second Century AD. It believed in a duality between wicked materialism and enlightened spirituality, with salvation being granted through the transmission of secret knowledge. By comparison, Plato’s Parable of the Cave, taken from his work The Republic (380 BC) taught that knowledge of the senses was only a reflection of the true reality, where everything is ideal and perfect. Markism as I have crafted it is designed to be a sort of Greek Mystery Religion that incorporates all of those ideas while being centered on Friendship Is Magic’s friendship lessons.
Chapter 5: Markist History, Part 1
The year 1010 was selected to be a thousand years before the premiere of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic in 2010. The Battle of Aleppo in that year is fictional. Most of the rest of the chapter was based on fact.
Chapter 6: Confrontation in a Small Hotel Room
Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 for working out how chemical bonds worked on the atomic level. He then won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 for being a leader of the nuclear disarmament movement. In many ways he was the Richard Feynman of chemistry.
“If it wasn’t for…a powerful friend on my side”: Celestia. Just in case you thought I had some other character in my pocket that I was saving for a sequel or something.
The Journal of Irreproducible Results is a bimonthly magazine that posts joke scientific papers. The “Best of” compilation was published in 1983.
Not much to say about the rest of the chapter.
Interlude: White Hot War
In the real world, Yuri Andropov’s collapse was in February 1983. He moved into Central Clinical Hospital in August, and he died on February 9, 1984. The illness and death were the result of multiple diseases of the kidneys, not liposarcoma. The change in diagnosis is to match his ailment with Gus Guiseman’s/Richard Feynman’s, and to tie it directly to his observation of nuclear testing in his earlier years.
The Elements of Harmony: I have no idea what’s in this book outside of what I’ve revealed.
The Romanovs: The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia prior to the Russian Revolution. Grigory Romanov was not at all closely related to this branch of the family, and in fact in the real world, he was Gorbachev’s main rival to become Secretary General in 1985.
The shooting of Far Shooter: On March 30, 1981 a man named John Hinkley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Reagan. A bullet grazed his rib and entered his left lung, causing it to partially collapse. Despite being seventy years old, he was able to leave the hospital less than two weeks later, although it was more like six months before he completely recovered.
One Bush, Two Bush, Red Bush, Blue Bush: A reference to the Dr. Seuss book One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and corresponding with George H.W. Bush (Ronald Reagan’s vice president and eventual successor), George W. Bush (eldest son and later President as well), Jeb Bush (second son and governor of Florida) and Neil Bush (third son and Texas businessman). The joke is that American political parties are often identified by color: red for Republicans, and blue for Democrats. There are no Democratic members of the Bush family. Oh and there’s also a third Bush son, Marvin, but that ruins the joke.
The North Pacific training exercise: This was FleetEx ’83, an operation involving three American carrier battle groups located just off the coast of the Soviet Union, described by its organizer as “the largest fleet exercise conducted by the Pacific Fleet since World War II”. The goal was to deliberately provoke the Soviets by flying aircraft over their airspace, in order to study their response. It took place between March 29 and April 17 of 1983.
Operation Barbarossa: The means by which Hitler began the invasion of his supposed ally the Soviet Union. The plan was named after the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa who, like King Arthur, was reputed to be sleeping eternally under one of several German mountains until the moment when he would rise and lead his people to restore the greatness of the Fatherland.
The overflights of both the Kurile and Aleutian Islands: These happened on April 4 and 5, 1983.
Pershing II missiles heading for Europe: This would correspond to late summer of 1983 in our timeline.
The development of events in the world arena demands from us the highest vigilance, restraint, firmness and unremitting attention to the strengthening of the country's defense capability... Perhaps never before in the postwar decades has the situation in the world arena been as tense as it is now... Comrades! The international situation at present is white hot, thoroughly white hot.
The above quote was part of a public address made by Grigory Romanov to the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on November 5, 1983, in reference to Operation Able Archer.
Stanislav Petrov actually did save the world as described. He just did it on September 26, 1983 instead of June 19, 1985.
Gulag: A Soviet forced-labor prison camp, where enemies of the State were sent off to be forgotten. The Gulag system was at its height under Stalin.
Ustinov’s electronic war machine: This is meant to invoke both the Doomsday Machine from Dr. Strangelove (1964) and WOPR from WarGames (1983)—note that the latter was also created in response to someone failing to start World War III when they were supposed to.
Chapter 7: Markism in England and America
Fall of a Jousting Pony, by Rubens or one of his followers: Horses in the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens often appear to have as much agency as the humans, and show particularly human emotions. See for example A Hunt of Lions, Tigers and Leopards (1615-18) and The Battle of the Standard (c.1603).
William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury: Illegitimate son of King Henry II, and therefore King John’s half-brother. He died in 1226 and was buried in Salisbury Cathedral. Apropos of nothing, when Longespée’s tomb was opened in 1791 for study, a well-preserved dead rat was found inside his skull. That rat can now be found on display at the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.
Magna Carta was signed in 1215.
There was no Battle of Annandale in 1377. Annandale was a historic district of Scotland, in the area that was frequently contended between the Scots and the English. I needed for Henry Percy to die before accepting the title of Earl of Northumberland in that year. The coat of arms of the Percy family consists of a blue lion on a yellow field.
Henry “Hotspur” Percy is a major character in Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, Part 1. He was actually born in 1364, not 1377. In 1403 he rebelled against his king, planning to split the country in three between himself, his brother-in-law Sir Edmund Mortimer (a man with a better claim to the English throne on paper than the actual king) and Owen Glendower (a claimant to the recently-conquered land of Wales). That rebellion collapsed at Shrewsbury, against the forces of King Henry IV and his son Prince Henry.
Hair Splitter: Robert Boyle, the first modern chemist. His studies of the properties of gases let to the formulation of Boyle’s Law.
The First Prime Minister of Great Britain stealing credit: Sir Robert Walpole. I discovered the “Extra History” series of YouTube videos while writing this chapter—can you tell?
July 7, 1865: A date with no particular importance in British history. In America, it’s the date when the surviving members of the group that plotted to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln were executed.
Lord Palmerston: Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1855 – 1858 and 1859 – 1865.
The Know-Nothings: In our world, a group dedicated to anti-immigrant and anti-Indian activities. The only reason why anybody knows about this group is their participation in the New York Draft Riots of 1863 (see the film Gangs of New York (2002)—Bill the Butcher was the local leader of the Know-Nothings).
True Man, accused of taking orders from King George VI: In the run-up to the election of John F. Kennedy, America’s first Catholic President, there was a persistent smear campaign that he would be more loyal to the Pope than to the interests of his own people.
Chapter 8: Goddess in the Flesh
The Archbishop of Baltimare: Bishop Truth Delver’s boss, as mentioned in Chapter 6.
Greyhound Lines, Inc.: Founded in 1914, this company is America’s largest operator of motorcoaches. Its primary job is to provide cheap transportation between cities.
Equestrian statues: In case you were wondering what a statue with a rearing horse was doing outside a high school.
Celestia’s first appearance: To be anachronistically accompanied by “Maria” (1999) by Blondie (“She’s like a millionaire, walkin’ on imported air”).
“If Celestia was the bright center of Canterlot, then Luna resided in a spot that seemed farthest from it”: Paraphrase of the line “If there’s a bright center of the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from” from Star Wars (1979).
Childhood’s End: 1953 science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke, about a group of aliens that show up one day to mark the beginning of the end of humanity as a species. In other words, a very Luna book.
Celestia I’s lineage: I needed for Hotspur Percy’s father to die before he was born (as opposed to outliving him), which meant that Hotspur couldn’t have a younger full sister. So I switched the order of Lady Margaret’s two marriages, and effectively moved daughter Margaret Percy over to be Celestia (Margaret) de Ros instead.
War of the Roses: Civil war between rival branches of the English royal family, lasting from 1455 to 1487.
The Spanish Armada: The attempt by Spanish King Philip II to conquer England, defeated by a combination of a naval battle and a devastating storm.
Elizabeth: Queen Elizabeth I, queen from 1558 to 1603.
Louis VIII of France: While still only Prince of France, was proclaimed King of England by the barons opposing King John in May of 1216, but never crowned. These barons changed sides when John died in October of that year, in order to support his son Henry III. In September of 1217 after three devastating defeats, Louis was forced to sign the Treaty of Lambeth, where in return for 10,000 marks payment he stated that he had never been the legitimate king of England.
O&O: Ogres and Oubliettes, the obvious stand-in for Dungeons & Dragons. Characters in the game have their abilities on a scale where humans have scores between 3 and 18 (generated by rolling three six-sided dice and adding up the values). A natural 18 Charisma (“natural” meaning that there are no magical items worn to influence the score) therefore represents the pinnacle of human charm.
I really don’t have to go into the Nightmare Moon stuff, right?
Albert Einstein, whose equation of E = mc2 laid the theoretical foundation for the atomic bomb. During much of his lifetime he was the most famous scientist to have ever lived. He also penned an influential letter to President Truman convincing him to go forward with the Manhattan Project.
Merck: Name of the corporation that developed and manufactured many biological cures in the mid-Twentieth Century.
Chapter 9: Delver’s Mark
My Man Forge: The Markist version of My Man Godfrey (1936, directed by Gregory La Cava). His Girl Friday (1936) was directed by Howard Hawks. Friday had no problem with the existence of a smart female reporter, and in fact actively sabotaged her attempt to settle down as a betrayal of her character. Godfrey is about class relations, and so it’s easy to imagine the title character as a Markist instead a derelict.
I believe Polo House is my original name for Yearling’s publisher, but I would not at all be surprised to be proven wrong.
The Great Griffon-Dragon War: My analogue for World War II, although one where the griffons’ actions are only a little less reprehensible than the dragons’. Ponies volunteered to fight for both sides, losing a good deal of their innocence along the way.
Pr. Villainpants: Cabelleron, obviously. As he currently has no canon backstory, I’m leaning on that of Cabelleron’s inspiration: Belloq from the Indiana Jones franchise, with my own changes on top of that.
Prince Bronze Heart: In 1936, the British King Edward VIII abdicated his crown so he could marry the love of his life, the divorcée Wallis Simpson. His brother became King George VI, and Edward became the Duke of Windsor. The next year, the couple visited Hitler and showed some sympathy for how the Fuhrer ran his country. This led to the creation of “Operation Willi”, a Nazi plot for what would happen when they inevitably conquered the United Kingdom: King George would be overthrown, and the Duke of Windsor would get his crown back as Hitler’s puppet. News of the plot leaked, and Duke Edward seemed to be seriously considering jumping on the “take the crown back” bandwagon, so he was sent to be governor of the Bahamas for the length of World War II.
The Amarezon is right next to Seaddle: If you pay attention to the map segment from Daring Do’s first episode and compare it to the current map of Equestria, that sure appears to be the case.
Chapter 10: Q&A
“What does Latin have to do with insects?”: The study of insects is entomology, which of course sounds a lot like “etymology”.
Chapter 11: Library Research
Canna Table is my name for Vinyl Scratch’s mother. In my headcanon, the pony version of her was librarian of Golden Oak Library before Twilight Sparkle. (The name is meant to evoke the musical term cantabile.)
B. Bookman: His first name was Book, and his pony counterpart was named Book Bookpony.
Luna [Beaufort]: I mentioned that Celestia I was tied to the Percy family, which tried to overthrow King Henry IV. The Beauforts were Henry’s half-siblings, children of his father John of Gaunt and his mistress Katherine Swynford. The last of them was born in 1379, so I added Luna as a fifth sibling, born two years later. The parents married in 1396, and the children were legally legitimized in 1397—three years after Luna went mad and had to be put down like a rabid dog.
For the other families that a Luna was born into, I tried to pick last names typical of each era.
Danvers State Insane Asylum: An actual asylum located in northern Massachusetts. It is the location where the prefrontal lobotomy was invented.
Clean Sweep: A fictional character, as in our reality there was no one to stop Spanish Influenza from sweeping the globe. By the way, the Epidemic of 1918 was called “Spanish” because that was the only country suffering from it that didn’t try to cover up its existence.
Interlude: Toy Plane (Part One)
VAZ-2101: A compact sedan introduced in 1970.
MiG-31: A supersonic interceptor aircraft first deployed in 1982. It was designed to take out any threats—missiles or jets—trying to sneak into Soviet airspace.
Gorbachev never did anything to save Petrov from his fate in the real world, so far as I can tell. But our Gorbachev also was not a closet Markist.
Interlude: Toy Plane (Part 2)
Su-15: A twinjet supersonic interceptor aircraft first deployed in 1965.
MiG-23: The predecessor to the MiG-31.
The first part of this chapter covers Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which in our world wandered into Soviet airspace and was shot down on September 1, 1983, killing all 23 crew and 246 passengers. The Politburo that was running the Soviet Union in the wake of Secretary-General Andopov’s collapse tried to cover up their blame, and President Reagan thoroughly condemned them for their reprehensible actions. This in turn led to fears that Reagan would use this incident as justification for a nuclear first strike, fears that fed into the paranoia surrounding Able Archer 83.
Gorbachev’s television address: My attempt to summarize his political beliefs as Secretary General.
The news ticker: The idea of scrolling news headlines across the bottom of the screen comes from the stock ticker, that stream of continuously-printed paper that reported live stock prices. The New York Times started displaying scrolling headlines outside its office at Times Square in 1928. NBC tried using a news ticker with the Today Show in 1952, but it was soon discontinued. CNN Headline News brought it back in 1989 for its original purpose of showing stock prices, and ESPN started using it for showing sports scores in 1995. Its use for news headlines didn’t become prevalent until the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when a panicked public demanded instantaneous updates on the developing situation.
Chapter 12: Let the Science Begin!
Risk is a strategy board game invented in 1957 by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse. It was sold by Parker Brothers from 1959 to 1991, when the whole company was bought by Hasbro.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel written by 1960 by Harper Lee. The protagonist of the book is the girl narrator’s widowed father, the honorable lawyer Atticus Finch.
A Video Cassette Recorder, or VCR, is an ancient device for recording videos, in an analog format! It’s true, I swear!
The Macintosh is a home computer first sold in 1984 by the Apple Corporation. The Macintosh 512K was the second version of the computer sold, with the memory quadrupled from the 128 kilobytes included in the original. It was sold from late 1984 to early 1986.
Carl Jung was a Swiss psychoanalyst who lived from 1875 to 1961. He was a student of Sigmund Freud, but then branched out into a number of original areas. One of his more controversial ideas was that all human beings shared the same set of not only instincts, but also ideas ingrained in the mind, the collective unconscious. Race memory is a mostly-discredited concept that entire memories have been passed down from the distant past of our species.
Chapter 13: Exactly as Advertised
Jell-O was invented by Pearle Bixby Wait in 1897. It was bought by Genesee Pure Food Company in 1899. During the period from 1925 to 1927, Genesee was caught up in a series of buyouts that led to the creation of General Foods. In 1990, General Foods was absorbed by Kraft Foods. The lime green flavor was introduced in 1930, and has become the stereotypical flavor of the dessert.
A virtual particle is when energy spontaneously converts into a particle, which then turns back into energy so fast that it is impossible to detect. Virtual particles are a major part of Feynman Diagrams, allowing all kinds of interactions to occur that would otherwise seem impossible. It’s the physics equivalent of a short-term loan, and its use looks suspiciously like magic, at least to me.
Young Frankenstein is a 1974 horror parody of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein written by Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder and directed by Mel Brooks. The Monster in the film was played by Peter Boyle. Here’s a YouTube clip that includes the glowing head effect.
The Visible Man and Visible Woman are a pair of educational toys made by Skillcraft. Each model includes a plastic skeleton and organs that are assembled inside a clear plastic skin.
The music box tune: One of the earworms that have been haunting the back of my head since childhood was the commercial jingle for the Holly Hobbie Oven. Luckily for your sanity, I failed to find it online. The safe room that Meridiem creates is based on Holly Hobbie décor. 2020 UPDATE: Oh my God, I found it—click this link to upload it permanently into your brain.
Interlude: The Enemy of My Enemy
“We begin bombing in five minutes”: This was an actual joke made by President Reagan prior to his weekly Saturday radio address to National Public Radio on August 11, 1984—minus the words “and all other Demoness-spawned nations”. It was not meant to be heard, and led the Soviet Far East Army to go on alert for thirty minutes when it was leaked.
Chapter 14: Luna’s Birthday
“It was the first time the darkness had ever betrayed her”: I realize now that growing up with the seeming inevitability of World War III and nuclear winter hanging over my head is the reason why I am so horrified by Nightmare Moon’s “night will last forever” speech, and why I am convinced despite all evidence offered up by later episodes that if she had won, it would mean the eventual death of all life on the planet.
1959: On February 3, 1959, during a tour of the American Midwest, the three singers Buddy Holly, J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson and Richie Valens chartered a small plane in Clear Lake, Iowa, to get to their next concert. The plane crashed soon after takeoff, killing all three passengers as well as the pilot, Roger Peterson. Singer-songwriter Don McLean used the event in his song “American Pie” to mark the moment when rock music started sucking, calling it “The Day the Music Died”.
The Columbia Record Club was a service that allowed customers to buy records through the mail. It was known for frequent promotions where certain records could be obtained for free or for one cent. And unlike record clubs run by other recording labels, Columbia had licensing deals that allowed it to sell popular records made by anyone. The club was founded in 1955 and was an immediate success, selling 10% of all of Columbia’s records in 1963. The sale of music through the club had pretty much ceased by 2001, the year that Columbia House was sold to the first of a long list of internet companies. By this time the primary attraction of the Columbia House brand were the series of videos that they sold on a “similar” model to the record club. “Similar” in this case because they advertised the same way and got you in with a free video, but different in that you were then locked into a contract where you got videos every month whether you liked it or not, and had your bank account automatically debited to pay for it. And also their customer list was continually being stolen because the long list of internet companies all sucked at security. The Columbia House brand has declared bankruptcy at least twice, but apparently still exists as of 2018.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer was the world’s premier progressive rock band; their album Tarkus was released in 1971, with the weird cover art painted by William Neal. Progressive Rock was a genre fusing classical music with rock—as an example, here’s ELP’s cover of “Hoedown” from Aaron Copland’s Rodeo. I don’t know that it was ever incredibly popular, but it existed from 1966 until the 1980s (and I suppose you could be stubborn and insist that it never actually died). Being a fan of both classical music and 70’s rock, I guess I can call myself a fan, but I definitely draw the line at the longer and more pretentious works—exactly the earsores that most people think of when they hear the words “prog rock”, if they recognize the term at all. FYI, quite a few popular rock bands of the mid- to late-80’s started as prog rock bands, including Boston, Journey, Genesis, Kansas, Foreigner and Styx.
New wave emerged as a genre of rock in the late 70’s, out of punk rock with some progressive and pop rock influences. It was noted for being deliberately quirky and with a high reliance on synthesizers. The genre pretty much lived and died on the new MTV channel—“Video Killed the Radio Star” by new wave group The Buggles was the first video ever played on the channel, and the majority of music videos played before 1987 were made by new wave groups…mostly because their videos were weirder than anybody else’s. The Age of Plastic (1980) was The Buggles’ first album.
The Best of Blondie was released in 1981. Blondie themselves was a rock band that straddled the line between punk and new wave, and was founded by lead singer Debbie Harry and lead guitarist Chris Stein in 1974. I consider Clem Burke to be one of the greatest rock drummers to have ever lived, and the linked performance of “Dreaming” (1979) to be one of his best performances.
Dan Rather was the news anchor for the CBS Evening News from 1981 until 2005.
Mike Gravel was a US Senator for Alaska from 1969 – 1981.
Chapter 15: The Flight to London
Bounce House of Tartarus: The band Oingo Boingo, original name “The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo”, started as an experimental theater group founded by Richard Elfman in 1972 and based out of Los Angeles. In 1976, Richard surrendered ownership of the group to his brother Danny, so he could pursue a career in filmmaking. Under Danny’s leadership, the group shrunk down and became a new wave rock band, completing the transition in 1979 with a record contract. From 1979 – 1984 the band made whatever songs they felt like, not carrying who they offended along the way: the song “Little Girls” is pretty clearly told from the point of view of a pedophile, but the same album had a song called “Capitalism” attacking the shallow socialism preached by most other contemporary bands. In 1985, the band changed record labels and their priorities. Their songs now appeared in lots of movies (“Weird Science”, “Dead Man’s Party”, “Just Another Day” and “Stay”) and the attempts to court controversy stopped. This was also when Danny Elfman began scoring movies, rising to become one of the most popular film composers of the 80’s and 90’s (Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, The Nightmare Before Christmas and practically everything else associated with Tim Burton, Darkman, Sommersby, the “March of the Dead” from Army of Darkness, Black Beauty, Dolores Clairborne, Men In Black—can you tell I’m a huge Danny Elfman fan?).
NBS: New Brass Sky, in case that wasn’t obvious.
Pershing II missiles arrive in United Kingdom: In our world, this happened on November 14, 1983. The Able Archer exercise ended on November 11th. Obviously, switching the order of these two events is much more dramatic.
Chapter 16: Bounce House of Tartarus
“I’m So Bad”: Here’s the song on YouTube. I honestly don’t really care for the “edgy” Oingo Boingo.
A happy little song about how much the singer loves underage girls [i.e. “Little Girls”]: As the music video shows, Danny Elfman is way too good at making creepy faces.
Frankie Goes to Hollywood was a British rock band that spanned several genres, including new wave. They started their career similarly to Oingo Boingo, with the controversy-attracting “Relax”. In this case, the song actually attracted a public uproar, which led the song to shoot to Number One in the singles charts. Their follow up, which also went to Number One, was “Two Tribes”, released in May 1984. The music video includes actors impersonating Ronald Reagan and Konstantin Chernenko engaging in a bout of mud wrestling. (Chernenko was Andropov’s short-lived successor and Gorbachev’s predecessor as Secretary General of the Soviet Union. In this story, I skip straight from Andropov to Gorbachev.)
The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979, and governed until 1990. This period corresponds with a strong turn to conservativism in the country. Her actions were strongly opposed by the artist community, leading to her demonization. I suppose you could argue that these actions saved her country from complete economic collapse, but she wasn’t above using a whole host of dirty tricks to accomplish this goal. The title of “Iron Lady” came from her years leading the Parliamentary Opposition from 1975 – 1979, when an anti-U.S.S.R. speech was lambasted by a Soviet Army newspaper, comparing her to “Iron Chancellor” Otto Bismarck of Imperial Germany. She immediately embraced the term, and it has since been applied to any strong-willed female politician.
The Sun is a tabloid newspaper. More like the tabloid newspaper, since this was the one that invented the techniques used by all of the others, and in some cases stooping even lower—like the photo of a topless girl on Page 3 of every issue. During the Thatcher administration, The Sun consistently backed the party line with fear-mongering and wild conspiracy theories.
World Sell-Out Tour: Oingo Boingo fans can pretty much be divided into two groups: those who believe the band sold out in their 1985 album Dead Man’s Party, and those whose love of Oingo Boingo is constrained to Dead Man’s Party. (I’m in the latter group.)
Stonehenge: There are all kinds of things I could say about Stonehenge and the Druids, but all that you can really say for sure is that nobody knew who they were…or what they were doing…
Prams and Kensington Gardens: The Infocom game Trinity begins in Kensington Gardens, where World War III suddenly breaks out during the player’s London vacation. The player survives by following a roadrunner through a magical portal. One of the puzzles involves using a pram. The ancestor of the pram was invented in 1733 by William Kent—two years early to have a 250th anniversary in 1985. And although walking prams through Kensington Gardens has always been popular, the pram was not invented there.
Kensington Gardens themselves was once the western section of Hyde Park. Hyde Park was a forest owned by Westminster Abbey since the days of the Norman Conquest. In 1536, King Henry VIII obtained the park for himself, and had it set up as a deer hunting park for royalty. It was opened to the public in 1637. In 1738, Queen Caroline had the western section converted into a landscape garden. In 1902, J. M. Barrie wrote an odd little novel called The Little White Bird, about the narrator’s attempts to manipulate the lives of two strangers he bumps into one day—he arranges for them to meet, fall in love, get married and have a son, at which point he pretty much claims the child as his own under the title of godfather. Large parts of the novel consist of stories the narrator tells to this boy, and in these stories are the first appearance of the character of Peter Pan, who would become much more famous in the play Barrie wrote in 1906. In The Little White Bird, Peter Pan lives with the other fairies in Kensington Gardens, coming out at night after the park is closed to the public to go on adventures. For this reason, the artist George Frampton created a statue of Peter Pan which was placed in Kensington Gardens and is one of the park’s primary attractions.
Genesis was an English rock band founded in 1967 with lead singer Peter Gabriel. They started out playing folk rock and moved on to prog rock before Gabriel left in 1974. Drummer Phil Collins became the new lead singer, and led the band towards being more popular into the 1980s. The single “Land of Confusion” was released in 1986, making it a bit anachronistic for his story. The song is a call to the common people to fight for peace despite the obfuscation of the world’s leaders.
Men at Work was an Australian new wave band, founded in 1979. “It’s a Mistake” is a 1983 single about military paranoia causing World War III.
“A world on fire”: The Oingo Boingo song “Just Another Day” (from Dead Man’s Party) is about a man convinced the world is about to blow up.
“The concert ended with a bang”: “Dead Man’s Party”.
Ultima was a series of popular role-playing computer games that started in 1981. The creator of the games was Richard Garriot, who went under the name Lord British. Ultima IV came out in 1984 and differed from its predecessors in moving away from a simple good-vs-evil structure into a game that attempts to shape the morality of the person playing the game, just the kind of ambitious goal that might attract an independent movie director into becoming a game producer.
Chapter 17: The Education of Luna
The quotes in this chapter are modeled after The Education of Henry Adams (written in 1907, widely published in 1918), an autobiographical work by the great-grandson of John Adams that won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize, and was called the most important non-fiction work of the century by The Modern Library—I would rate Toynbee’s Study of History at the very least as more important myself. It’s written in the third person, is quite self-important, and concerns itself with the inadequacy of a Nineteenth Century American education to handle the rapid changes of the Twentieth Century. That sickness quote was taken nearly word-for-word, with only the genders changed. The Education has some good ideas and storytelling, but a fair amount of it is a slog.
“Author of the original draft of the Declaration of Independence”: John Adams. I’m leaving out the names because the Adams family are Markists, and I didn’t want to invent new names for all of them.
“Key diplomat behind the Treaty of Ghent”: John Quincy Adams.
“One who single-handedly kept Great Britain out of America’s Civil War”: Charles Francis Adams, Sr.—the father of Henry Adams. This is an interesting aspect of the Civil War that is almost never included in the standard story—if the British had gone along with their economic interests in siding with the Confederacy, I don’t know how the Union could have won. Also, he died in 1886, so he had nothing to do with World War I. Henry Adams himself had a stroke in 1912 and died in 1918, so he had nothing to do with the War either.
Dusky Flyer: Adams’ mother Abagail Brooks Adams actually died when he was 51 years old.
The assembly line: The climax of The Education of Henry Adams was a description of an electrical power plant, and the possibilities which the author was able to foresee from it. I went with a more depressing contemporary development for Luna’s version.
“Damage to [Luna’s] corneas”: In other words, she had Nightmare Moon’s eyes.
Pan Am Flight 103: On December 1, 1988, this flight ended with the detonation of a (conventional) bomb, causing the plane to crash outside Lockerbie, Scotland, killing everyone on board and eleven more people on the ground—Air Force One was nowhere in the vicinity. An inquiry in 1991 pinned the blame for the bombing on two men working under orders from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The state of Libya finally got around to accepting responsibility in 2003. As always with these sorts of tragedies, the evidence is not completely airtight, and therefore there are theories that other parties might be to blame. As far as this story’s concerned, however, it’s all Gaddafi.
Chapter 18: The Woman in Black
Heathrow is London’s main international airport, and one of the world’s busiest. It was opened as London Airport in 1946, and got its current name in 1966. It’s named after the former London suburb where it was built.
Omni was a monthly magazine that covered science news while also including science fiction. It was founded by Kathy Keeton and Bob Guccione and lasted from 1978 to 1997. It was also published in both the United States and United Kingdom, which is why I picked it for this scene.
The old woman in black comes from a character in the game Trinity. The player first encounters her in Kensington Gardens, and ends up taking her prized umbrella after she loses it. Later in the game, after you learn the secret of time travel, the umbrella saves your life when you suddenly find yourself falling from a height into Nagasaki just before its bombing. You give the umbrella to a little girl to get the solution to a later puzzle, and thus create a time loop, as the girl obviously survives the bomb and grows up to become the old woman.
John F. Kennedy is the primary international airport for New York City. It was opened in 1948 as Idlewild Airport, and was renamed to JFK in 1963, in the wake of the president’s assassination.
Chapter 19: Zero Hour, Part One
Pan Am Flight 103 was on a Boeing 747-121 aircraft. Here’s a diagram of the related 747-100.
Procter & Gamble is a company selling a wide range of cleaning agents and personal care products (and in 1985, also foods, snacks and beverages). It was founded in 1837 by William Procter and James Gamble. Popular brands under the P&G umbrella include Bounty paper towels, Charmin toilet paper, Gillette razors, Pampers diapers, Tide laundry detergent and Vicks cough syrup; and in 1985 included Crush soda, Duncan Hines cake mixes, Folgers instant coffee, Jif peanut butter and Pringles potato chips. Oh and by mentioning Charmin here, I don’t have to repeat myself in Chapter 25.
Chapter 20: Dead End—no references
Chapter 21: Going Backward, Part One
TARDIS: The time-travel device used in Doctor Who.
Time is an American weekly news magazine, created by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce in 1923. It is owned by Time Inc. Newsweek is another American weekly news magazine, created in 1933 by Thomas J. C. Martyn, a former editor for Time. In 1985, it was owned by The Washington Post Company; today it’s owned by IBT Media/Newsweek Media Group.
Polaroid cameras were made by the Polaroid Corporation, founded by Edwin H. Land in 1937. The company was known for making polarized lenses until 1972, when Land invented the first instant camera. The company went bankrupt in 2001, a victim of the worldwide switch to digital cameras. I later identify the specific camera “borrowed” as an SLR 680, which was made from 1982 until 1987. As this is my second time sneaking a Polaroid instant camera into one of my stories, I’m including a video showing the 680 in use, in case I managed to make any of you kids curious.
Cadbury is a British candy company, known especially for their chocolates. It was founded by John Cadbury in 1824.
Chapter 22: Going Backward, Part Two
Chaos theory has a history dating back into the Nineteenth Century, but its current form was created by Edward Lorenz and Benoit Mandelbrot in the early 1960’s. Major conferences on the subject were first organized in the late 1970’s. The field reached popular consciousness with James Gleick’s book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987), which led to its inclusion in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990).
In the game Trinity, the player steps through a strange portal in Kensington Gardens to find themselves in a strange fairyland dominated by gigantic mushrooms, running in a band from east to west. Each mushroom represents a nuclear explosion. The player learns how to navigate this world, and by entering specific mushrooms, is able to visit the sites of various nuclear explosions. Most of these sites are reproduced here as places that our trio of protagonists visit, starting with the Nevada Test Site explosion.
A grue is a fictional creature that lives in the dark and eats people. It was invented by Jack Vance for his Dying Earth series of books (1950 – 1984), and borrowed by Dave Lebling for use in Infocom’s first game, Zork (1979). In the game, the grue existed to keep players from trying to navigate without a light source, as that would have been a pain to program, hence the familiar descriptor: “It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.” The most-common light source in Zork is a brass lantern.
The Three Mile Island accident was covered back in Chapter 3—don’t you remember?
The Soviet bomb test in Trinity was not identified, but it did involve lemmings jumping off a cliff into the ocean as a powerful bit of symbolism, and Novaya Zemlya is the closest any Soviet site got to having a sea for anything to jump into. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have any cliffs, though.
(In real life, Andropov was nowhere near Tsar Bomba when it went off. And the idea that lemmings commit mass suicide when their numbers get too high was made up by a film crew for the Disney nature documentary White Wilderness in 1958.)
Chapter 23: Going Backward, Part Three
The descriptions of Nagasaki and Trinity are taken almost word-for-word from Trinity by Brian Moriarty.
In the game, the skink doesn’t get to hide in a crack in the bridge. Instead, the player is required to murder the poor creature with his or her bare hands, for no purpose that I can tell other than to obtain a perfect score. And for the symbolism, of course.
Godzilla is a monster created by Ishirō Honda for his 1954 film of the same name. Why am I explaining Godzilla when he didn’t get mentioned in the chapter? No reason…
The umbrella again: To Brian Moriarty in 1987, mankind’s extinction in World War III seemed inevitable. And so the goal of the game is not to go to Trinity and prevent the first explosion. Instead there’s some mumbo jumbo about altering the blast so it doesn’t wipe New Mexico off the face of the earth, and then the player finds themselves back in Kensington Gardens, poised to enter the portal again and repeat the sequence of events again and again for all eternity—this state of affairs is called “winning”. But with the Cold War over, the idea of truly winning the game of Trinity becomes imaginable, and that’s what I’m doing with this story. The first step in doing that is breaking the time loop.
Kimiko Mineko: The character had no name in the game, so I went through the list of survivors of Nagasaki, and got the first and last names from there (Kimiko Moriyama and Do-oh Mineko).
Chapter 24: Going Back to Trinity
Crystal’s clothing was taken from the ceremonial dress of the Hopi tribe, as depicted in Ceremonial Costumes of the Pueblo Indians (1991 by Virginia More Roediger). I would not be the least surprised if I got my research wrong and ended up with something deeply offensive. Please let me know if I did, and I’ll try to fix it.
Parts of the descriptions in this chapter come from the same sources as the Prologue; for example, the stuff about “Jumbo”.
In 1925, Georges Lemaître published a scientific paper where he used a flaw in Einstein’s General Relativity equations to suggest that the universe was expanding, which meant that it must have started as a “primeval atom”. Einstein himself solved the same flaw in a way that kept the universe constant, neither growing nor shrinking, and so Lemaître’s theory was not very popular until the 1930’s, when Edwin Hubble observed that the universe was indeed expanding. The concept was dubbed the “Big Bang theory” in 1949 by Fred Hoyle as a form of contempt, but as so often happens, the supporters of the theory soon adopted the mocking term as their own.
Kim is a novel by Rudyard Kipling, written in 1901. It won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The story is about an orphaned Irish boy who grew up in India, moving effortlessly from one culture to another. As he grows up he becomes embroiled in the “Great Game”, the Nineteenth Century cold war between the United Kingdom and Russia.
Klaus Fuchs was a German physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. He was also a spy for the Soviet Union.
The paperback book: The book that Stable Solution/Donald Hornig was reading in the tin shack while guarding the bomb at Trinity was the Desert Island Decameron (1945), edited by H. Allen Smith. The book was a collection of funny essays and stories, designed to entertain the American soldier in World War II during his moments of down time. I wanted to include a more substantial reference, but I wasn’t able to get a hold of a copy of the book, digital or paperback, to quote from. So instead I’m referencing the fact that all of Infocom’s heroes were basically packrats, stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down in hopes that it might be used to solve a puzzle. Well in both Trinity the game and Equestrian Business the novel, the Desert Island Decameron has no use whatsoever (well, it holds the bookmark, which is vitally important to “winning” the game, but the book itself is useless).
Chapter 25: Zero Hour, Part Two
“Call Me”: Here’s the requisite YouTube video of this 1980 Blondie single.
Chapter 26: New Meetings…
“Da plane! Da plane!” was a memorable catchphrase from the introduction to the American television show Fantasy Island. The show was in re-runs in 1985.
Telephone answering machines had been used by corporations and the rich since 1949, but they didn’t become cheap enough for mass consumption until 1984.
The Goddess of Mercy Hospital in London: I wasn’t thinking of a specific London hospital that this one replaced, but I guess the Royal London Hospital works as well as any.
Nicholas Meyer is best-known today in nerd circles for being the director (and uncredited co-writer) of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). He first became famous for writing (in my opinion) the best Sherlock Holmes novel not written by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974)—he wrote two more Holmes novels after that, but I never read them. He got his filmmaking diploma from the University of Iowa, so having him work on television in Canterlot is not that much of a stretch. He directed Time After Time (1979), about H. G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper through time to present day San Francisco.
“A ground-breaking TV miniseries”: The Day After, which in our world aired on November 20, 1983, within days of the conclusion of Able Archer ’83.
Chapter 27: …And Old Ones
Goanna Guiseman: Based on Richard Feynman’s sister Joan. She’s an astrophysicist who has made important contributions to the understanding of the aurora, and the effect of the solar wind on Earth’s climate.
The Times is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It was founded in 1785 as The Daily Universal Register by John Walter, and changed to its current name in 1788. The paper originated “The Times” as a newspaper title and it invented the Times Roman typeface. It is owned by News UK, which itself is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Despite its uptight and proper reputation, it is thus run by the same people who run The Sun.
Interlude: The Day After
“A certain Mexican-American labor leader”: A reference to Cesar Chavez, who negotiated with Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California.
“O chem ty govorish?”: Russian for “What are you talking about?”
Hiroshima: Site of the first atomic bomb dropped on wartime Japan, on August 6, 1945.
Nagasaki: August 9, 1945.
Bikini Atoll: The site of 23 nuclear tests. The first was on July 1, 1946. The fourth, Castle Bravo, was the first public test of a hydrogen bomb, detonated on March 1, 1954.
Pérvaya mólniya: Russian for “First Lightning”—the codename for the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb test in 1949. The West knows it as RDS-1.
Snezhok: Russian for “Snowball”—the codename of a 1954 Soviet nuclear test at Totskoye.
In his 1965 autobiography, United States Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis Lemay declared that the proper response to North Vietnamese provocation would be to demand that they “draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”
Chapter 28: Waiting
Hanford, Washington was the location of a complex used to produce radioactive materials for bombs, starting with the Trinity test. It was mostly shut down by 1971, with a lone plutonium-producing reactor running until 1987.
The stories told about Gus/Richard Feynman in this chapter are pretty much true, including Gell-Mann’s opinion of the “bird story”.
Chapter 29: Dea Cæli
The title is a play on “deux ex machina”, or “God of the Machine”. It means “Goddess of the Heavens”.
Roanoke Colony: I’ll let you look that one up yourself.
Arbus Rhiza: An arbuscular mycorrhiza is a symbiotic relationship between the roots of a vascular plant and a fungus. The fungus helps the plant to capture various nutrients, while the plant supplies the fungus with carbon. We pretty much wouldn’t have anything in the way of land plants without this form of symbiosis. The relationship between plant and fungus is still not that well understood, so I made the leap to suggest that the Cure to Cancer may well come from studying it.
Chapter 30: The Greatest Markist
“We Didn’t Start the Fire” is a 1989 song by 40-year old Billy Joel, listing the major events that occurred during his lifetime.
The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on January 26, 1986.
The Talmud is a collection of the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis during the four-century period starting just before the fall of the Second Temple in AD 70, which forms the basis of Rabbinic Judaism. The first complete edition was printed in 1523.
The Road Runner is a cartoon character created by Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese for Warner Brothers cartoons in 1949.
Cellular Radio Telephones: Taken from this Motorola commercial.
Epilogue: Full Circle
Since I don’t really have anything to comment on here, let me wrap up a few historical loose ends:
Mikhail Gorbachev became Secretary General of the Soviet Union on February 5, 1986. As he had promised, he reorganized the state to be more open, both with its own people and in its relations with other states. His first official meeting with President Far Shooter was on March 26th of that year. He demanded the shutdown of Star Wars. What he got was the replacement of the Pershing II missiles with the more powerful B61 missiles. Since the B61s removed the mobility advantage of the Pershing IIs, the net result was to reduce the possibility for thermonuclear war, which was exactly what Gorbachev (publically) and Far Shooter (privately) wanted in the first place.
As the historic meeting came to a close, microphones captured this conversation between the two world leaders:
Gorbachev: So, do you still think of the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’?
Far Shooter: No. No I do not.
& & &
Muammar Gaddafi, Brotherly Leader for Life for Libya and President of OPEC, was arrested on live TV like a common criminal from the manor in southern Scotland that he had rented to witness the nuclear annihilation of Air Force One on June 28, 1985. From there he was put on trial before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands.
The trial lasted nine years. The reason for the delay was not the matter of evidence—it was absurdly easy to prove that Gaddafi had used his nation’s oil riches to fund multiple acts of terrorism against the citizens of over thirty countries. No the problem was the precedent that would be set by a guilty verdict. It was one thing to put away Nazi lieutenants in the Nuremberg Trials for following the orders of a dead Adolf Hitler; quite another to lock away an acting head of state, especially considering how many other acting heads of state were guilty of criminal acts. And then there was the matter of where that nuclear bomb had come from—the truth would be very bad for the Soviet Union, which explains the two attempts on Gaddafi’s life during the trial. But in the end, Muammar Gaddafi survived long enough to be acquitted on a technicality.
During those nine years, the Soviet Union fell, along with the vast majority of communist countries. Libya had long since become a democratic state after a successful revolution led by a baker. As for OPEC, once the Soviet pressure relented they quickly restored the old way of running things. So Gaddafi finished his trial to find himself without a home and without a fortune. He was bounced around from the home of one schemer after another, all planning to use him as a pawn like he used to do to others in his glory days. And he was too desperate to do anything but put up with it. He is believed to have died of gangrene in 1998, but by this late date, nobody cared enough about him to bother to get the facts straight.
& & &
Far Shooter’s presidency ended in January 1989. After him, control of the presidency see-sawed between the two political parties. Two more Markists were elected, both members of the Bush family and both Republicans. Several Markists appeared in the Democratic primaries, but none reached the general election.
…And that’s my massively-complex re-imagining of the Equestria Girls setting as an alternate universe to our own world, in the hope that an infinite number of crossovers with both history and contemporary fiction might be attempted. A world where the highest ideals of the brony community are projected back a thousand years into the past, with the chance to shape the history of the world in ways both large and small.
To be honest, I highly doubt that anybody else will ever do anything with this setting. But you are more than welcome to take what you’ve read and run with it.
Edit, Five Years Later: Alright, I'll do it myself...
