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Category: Skwibby fiction

Alternate History Fridays: Dr. Tundra Forsakes the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Published January 20, 2006 By Mark A. Rayner

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the SunHis year at the Holy Writ Reeducation Retreat was up, and later that day, Dr. Maximilian Tundra would be asked to renounce the Flying Spaghetti Monster and evolution.

Kissing off the FSM would be easy — he’d only been preaching his brand of Norse Pastafarianism to make fun of creationism — but evolution?

How did one renounce science? On the other hand, he felt like he would do whatever it took to get out of there, because he couldn’t imagine living through another day of what was, ironically, hell.

When he’d received his punishment for teaching evolution, the Judge had made the Reeducation Retreat sound like a combination of Dachau and the Inquisition, when in fact, it was more like summer camp, with lots of Bibles. And sleep deprivation.

Then there were Writ counselors, hypodermics and pharmaceuticals at the ready. That’s when they weren’t hugging you and asking if you’d accepted Jesus as your personal savior yet or asking you to sing spirituals along with them. A lot of these counselors were virginal young women; unfortunately these nubile believers also toted genital clamps for the wayward souls who showed any interest whatsoever in their chaste bodies. (Dr. Tundra had experienced this first hand, so to speak, after an inadvertent glance at Sister Brittany’s not-to-be-ogled ta-tas. It had taken a month for his tackle to work properly again.)

Yep, Jesus was going to be his savior.

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Alternate History Friday: Joan of Arc Girds Herself

Published January 6, 2006 By Mark A. Rayner

Joan of Arc imageShe looked around her cell again, and realized that she was not going to be rescued, nor ransomed by the King. So, the question was: how far was she willing to take it?

When the Voices began, Joan had been just a girl. They told her they were Saints — St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret — and they had been quite specific about what they wanted her to do. They wanted her to drive the English out of France and bring the dauphin to Rheims, where the French coronated their kings. (She had always been somewhat suspicious that St. Margaret, a saint favored by the hated English, had asked her to do this.)

But she did what they asked. It wasn’t easy for a farm girl from Lorraine to lead an army in the 1400s — Hades, just getting to the army had been a major battle in itself. But back in those days, Joan had been a real believer. The Voices didn’t brook any disagreement. Even when she was shot with an arrow relieving the Siege of Orléans, she’d been unwavering.

She led the French to victory, liberating Rheims, and her Dauphin — that spotted weasel — became King Louis VII.

But really, the turning point for her had been the Battle of Jargeau; while climbing a ladder during an assault, a stone projectile had split on her helmet. It didn’t kill her, but it did drive out the Voices.

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Once upon on a pretty blue planet

Published January 5, 2006 By Mark A. Rayner

Photo of pretty sunsetGla’k T’ung was never fond of humans, but at the same time, he thought it was a damned shame that they were almost extinct.

Of course, Gla’k didn’t really like the flavor of ANY hominid, so he never had an investment in the arguments about how many should be harvested off the third planet from the system’s star — the “Pretty Blue Planet with Tasty Terrors” as they once called it in the Humanliner advertisements.

Part of it was true. The humans were terrifying — a very warlike species.

Gla’k had been on the first expedition to survey the rich planet — a seemingly boundless wealth of life and prestigious protein that ran around on two legs. (Okay, mostly they sat on simple technology they called “couches”, but they were capable of bipedal locomotion, just like Gla’k’s own species, the Thringians.)

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