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5 responses so far ↓

• 1 Mark // Mar 1, 2008 at 9:07 am

  My imperial presidency, let me show you it.

• 2 Miramon // Mar 1, 2008 at 7:28 pm

  Heh. When all you have is a shotgun, everything looks like a quail.

  For some reason this brings to mind a story idea that I never developed because it seemed too dumb. Too dumb to write as a story, but not too dumb to share on other writers’ blogs! Ha ha.

  Back in the late 60s, a small alien detachment is sent to Earth without much staff or resources, instructed to retard human development (I mean even more than is natural.)

  They find to their dismay that the space race is going full bore, but through some desperate measures — bribes and blackmail of congressmen, CEOs, and so on — manage to derail the program into a few pointless return trips to the moon, the pointless skylab, and the laughable shuttle program. Their finest hour on that front is Daniel Goldin’s appointment to NASA, probably One Of Them himself. Similarly, they ensure that fusion research is never funded properly.

  Without all the resources they need to really do a complete and thorough job, they let the ARPANET slip under their radar, but then redirect the Internet properly into avenues of porn and malware via their pawns at Microsoft, but still have not quite ruined the telecommunications and computer industries to their complete satisfaction.

  Then, having gotten a little confidence and some control of the military-industrial complex, they start messing with politics. Reagan. Who’d have thought it was possible? Like everyone else they at first thought Clinton was a sleazy con-man and let him get elected, but he proved to be unexpectedly intelligent. An intern and some pheromones solved that problem. And now their latest triumph, all but completing the degradation of the race, the neocons….

  Well, OK, you’re right, it’s too dull. plausible, and straightforward to be a good SF story.

• 3 skzb // Mar 1, 2008 at 8:44 pm

  I don’t know where to find it, but somewhere on an old blog Will Shetterly did an excellent post criticizing the alternate world story in which George W. Bush actually becomes president in 2000. Hee hee.

• 4 Skwid // Mar 4, 2008 at 4:43 pm

  Steve, wasn’t there a whole thread of that on Making Light one time? I seem to vaguely remember it, anyway. One of the Open Threads, maybe.

• 5 skzb // Mar 4, 2008 at 4:54 pm

  I know that after Will posted it, there was some discussion of it on Making Light.

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