NOT using
the Programme Guide of the 2020 World Science Fiction Convention, ConZEALAND (The
First Virtual World Science Fiction Convention; to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I WOULD
jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION
given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This explanation is
reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes reviewing
books, and other times taking up the spirit of a blog an old friend of mine used
to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…
I
hated history until I was 26.
In
high school, US History bored me to tears. After graduation, I avoided standard
history classes like the plague, fulfilling my Social Science requirements with
Sociology and Psychology. Let me slightly rephrase that: I hated school social
studies excepting a single class.
Ms.
Flora Rogge taught an elective social studies class called Alienation and Dissent.
I was introduced for the very first time to the idea that there were people who
didn’t like how the country was being run. Understand that I lived near Minneapolis.
It was not particularly notable as a source of social reform. In fact, Duluth, was
a hotbed of socialism and Communism!
The
thing I remembered from her class was lettuce and California. She showed us a
sketchy 16mm film, a montage of events that happened during the Salad Bowl Strike
that lasted from August 1970 through March 1971. “…the UFW [the actual field
workers] …the Teamsters [truck drivers and packers both went on strike against
the lettuce growers] effectively preventing most of the nation's summer lettuce
crop from reaching consumers. The price of iceberg lettuce tripled overnight, and
thousands of acres of lettuce were plowed under as crops spoiled on the ground.
The strike ended…but the contract included a special agreement by the growers
to give the Teamsters, not the UFW, access to farms and the right to organize
workers into unions. An agreement to return jurisdiction over the field workers
to the farm union was reached on August 12…[but the]…agreement collapsed, and…[led
by César Chávez] UFW workers [went on strike] in what was the largest farm
worker strike in U.S. history…shipments of fresh lettuce nationwide ceased, and
the price of lettuce doubled overnight…César Chávez was
put in jail…he was visited [by]Rafer Johnson and Ethel Kennedy, widow of slain
Senator Robert F. Kennedy…were attacked by an anti-union mob on the steps of
the jail, and only intervention by city police, Monterey county sheriff's
deputies, and the Brown Berets prevented a riot and injury to the visitors. Chávez
was released by the Supreme Court of California…the Teamsters and UFW signed a
new jurisdictional agreement reaffirming the UFW's right to organize field
workers.”
I
liked THAT drama.
So
when my son and his family moved from South Korea back to a base in the old
Confederacy, he (who is a history buff) loves visiting battlefields: Bentonville,
Gettysburg, and Petersburg as well as the hidden cemetery I wrote about here: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2019/07/writing-advice-startling-experience.html
So,
the battlefields we went to made a circular and complete story that started (for
us) in Bentonville in later summer 2019. It was the largest and last major
battle of the Civil War battle, the largest to take place in North Carolina (which
was barely a Confederate state). Four Oaks was a farm taken over by the CSS as
a hospital where Confederate soldiers were treated for their wounds during the battle
in March of 1865. The defeat of the Confederacy loomed, but the war would grind
on You can visit the operating room where a huge blood stain (tested positive
for Human DNA) remains on the living room floor. It’s a tiny memorial; once
again a medical facility, and again, once we walked outside, evoked a sense
that there was brief moment in Human history where I could have looked out and
seen the bodies of soldiers killed with weapons not designed to inflict the
maximum amount of suffering, but doing it anyway.
Next,
we went to Gettysburg, which was NOT the last battle, nor the conclusion of the
Epic Struggle Between Good and Evil! This was 1862, already the SECOND time the
Union engaged the Confederacy in order to turn back the invasion of the North. It
was the first time the Union stopped the Confederate march to Washington DC, though
Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson reached Antietam in MARYLAND…to fight the
bloodiest battle of the war and eventually withdraw.
It
was Petersburg, North Carolina where the Civil War actually ended, though with
the Siege of Petersburg rather than the battlefield we walked.
At
any rate, as you can see, I became interested in history – world history if you
must know, fascinated by British history, West African history of kings,
queens, and the rise and fall of empires.
At
any rate, the number of alternate history American Civil War books is huge – if
you’re interested, here’s the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_alternate_histories.
With the story noted above, I used the CSA cemetery to spark a science fiction
story.
I’m
not sure what I’m going to do with the thing that inspired this post, but I
found the USS Monitor vs the CSS Virginia conflict fascinating. Not because of
the battle, but because Americans (Union and Confederate) took a concept from the
Greeks, the courts of Alexander the Great, the Greeks, the 17th
Century English and French. The 18th Century found the Russians and
Americans joining in the research and construction of submersibles.
When
America split, the Union and Confederate States created and launched submarines,
but the Confederacy executed the very first successful attack using a
submarine. It took two tries, but the third submarine, the CSS Hunley
rammed the USS Housatonic and while it sank with all hands lost, it was a
harbinger of things to come.
The
USS Monitor. The CSS Virginia. The CSS Hunley. What if?
What
if certain problems had been solved earlier than they had been? Self-propelled,
steam engine driven submarines made their appearance a few years after the
American Civil War. Submarines were even used for the purpose of EXPLORATION
(go figure!) and this was their usual purpose prior to 1640, until Bishop John
Wilkins of Chester in Mathematical Magick in 1648 suggested its use as a weapon
when he wrote, “It may be of great advantages against a Navy of enemies, who by
this may be undermined in the water and blown up.”
I’ve
often fantasized about underwater exploration lagging far behind space
exploration – https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/03/slice-of-pie-exploring-solar-system.html.
So, what would our present look like if we’d followed the lines of inquiry. If
you read the wiki article on submarines below, you’ll find FAR too many times
that the Human push for the bottom of the oceans was undermined: “…further
improvement in design stagnated for over a century” and “…Nikonov lost his principal patron and the
Admiralty withdrew support for the project” and “The French eventually gave up
on the experiment in 1804, as did the British, when Fulton later offered them
the submarine design…” and “it was abandoned because of lack of funding and
interest from the government” and “Waddington was unable to attract further
contracts and went bankrupt”.
A
search of this article for the word “exploration” found no uses of it…Hmmm…
References: https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/news/2016005-days-when-northland-was-red,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_submarines#American_Civil_War
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