Science Fiction APAs - POD

I'm currently a member of two science fiction/fantasy Amateur Press Associations.  What is an Amateur Press Association?  Basically a group of people with a common interest put together an amateur magazine of sorts and send it out to all of the members of the group.  Typically each member has to contribute a minimum amount of material each year. Each member prints out a certain number of copies of their contribution and sends those copies to a central point, where they are collated, sometimes bound, and sent out to all of the current members.

 For example, POD (Point of Divergence), one of the APAs I belong to, comes out every other month.  Members are required to write at least two pages of material every other issue.  Each member prints 20 copies of their material and sends it to the POD editor.  The editor collates the material from the 15 to 20 members and sends it out to those members.   In the case of POD, issues are usually 100 to 200 pages long.

POD is both an amateur zine on alternate history, and a writer's workshop.   Members contribute fiction, comment on other members' ficton, and write about what is happening in their lives.   I've been a member of POD for almost 10 years, and I feel like I know a lot about the other members, though I've only met about a third of them in person, and don't even know what the rest of them look like.

I’ve certainly gained a lot from comments POD members have made about my scenarios and stories over the years.  I’ve certainly enjoyed a lot of the things I’ve read in POD over the years.  One member wrote about two-thirds of a story called, Trolleyworld, set in an alternate version of California.  I would dearly love to see a finished manuscript of it, but unfortunately the author hit a writer's block that he has never been able to fight through.  There are actually very few people in the APA whose writing I consider a chore to read.  I’ve seen a big improvement in the writing skills of several POD members over the years.  I find it much easier to write something if I know it is going into POD.  I feel like I'm just writing to entertain some friends.  Once I've written something I can polish it up for publication if it is any good.

Here is a sampling of the comments I made in the last issue of POD:

RA: As usual, good job taking the scenario seeds and running with them.  I think that for once I actually tossed out more ideas that you wanted to address than you could handle.  I wasn’t sure that was possible.

                On the higher Bahamas: Sounds about right for the most part.  How vulnerable would the animals there have been?  That depends partly on where they were from and how balanced the resulting ecology was.  If the resulting island was close enough to North America to get a reasonably steady trickle of North American animals, including carnivores, the ecology would be a lot less vulnerable than say Cuba or Hispaniola, where the ecology was stitched together from bits and pieces.  One of the top predators in Cuba seems to have been a giant flightless owl.  On the other hand, there are limits to how large and diverse a group of mammal predators could survive long-term on a relatively small island.   I could see the largest mammal predator being a forty pound, partly omnivorous hyaenodont (not too likely), something in the raccoon family (much more likely), or even a dwarf bear.

                I visualize the Higher Bahamas as being sort of like Sulawesi (formerly Celebes) in Indonesia: isolated enough to develop its own species, but not isolated enough to be as vulnerable as the isolated oceanic islands were.  By the way, Sulawesi is interesting in its own light.  It is one of the few places where primates have been isolated on a fair-sized island and developed into a range of species.  There are 8 species of Macaque on Sulawesi, all apparently derived from two migrations of the same mainland Macaque species within the last million or so years.

  One of those Sulawesi macaque species was actually the subject of an experiment to see what actually did happen if you gave a bunch of monkeys typewriters (or in this case computers).  From News of the Odd:

An Infinite Number of Monkeys May Produce an Infinite Pile of Sh*t

Monkey Typing An infinite number of monkeys, given an infinite number of typewriters, are supposed to be able to produce the works of Shakespeare. Mike Phillips, a media researcher at Plymouth University, has his doubts about that. Phillips and his team gave half a dozen monkeys a computer for a month. "They pressed a lot of S’s," he said Friday. "Obviously, English isn’t their first language."

The crested Sulawesi monkeys, denizens of Paignton Zoo in southwest England, failed to produce any great works of literature, in fact, although their writing skills eventually expanded to include the letters A, J, L and M. This does not mean, though, that they failed to interact with the machine. "The lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it," Phillips said. "Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard." Of course, not everything Shakespeare produced was a masterpiece, either.

Sulawesi has or had a relatively balanced fauna, though it is also a bit stitched together.  It has two species of Cuscus, (vaguely monkeylike Marsupials) plus another one that lives only on a nearby island.  These animals are rather distinct from the New Guinea and Australian versions.  Sulawesi also has Tarsiers, odd-ball pigs called babirusa (possibly four or more closely-related species) and buffalo.  It has one native and two introduced species of civets as predators.  It also at one time had a pygmy Stegodon (elephant-relative), and it probably still has a monitor lizard almost as big as a Komodo Dragon that hasn’t been scientifically described yet.

Based on DNA-clock analysis, the two Sulawesi species of Cuscus have probably been there around 20 million years, maybe longer.  The larger species, the Bear Cuscus, is odd for a Cuscus because it is primarily diurnal (active during the day).  The other Sulawesi Cuscus is a nocturnal fruit-eater.

It would be interesting to figure out what if anything filled the monkey niches on Sulawesi before the Macaques came along.  A more monkey-like Cuscus?  Some off-shoot of the Tarsiers?

        The Sulawesi macaques inspired a subplot of one of my scenarios, and there life has imitated my  fiction.  A few years ago, I posted a scenario where humans died out several million years ago due to “A Bad Day in Eastern Africa”.  (A meteor strike off the east coast of Africa)  In that scenario, Macaques eventually reach New Guinea and Australia, and play a major role in the ecology there.  In real life monkeys have gotten loose in New Guinea and are poised to really screw up the fragile ecology there.

(snipping a lot of material here)

On the technological offshoots of earlier TV: In the last part of the Pacific war the US did have a remotely guided attack drone that used a TV camera in the drone and some mechanism for sending the picture back to the guide-plane.  They built a hundred or two and used them successfully, then shut down the program and kept it classified into the 1970’s.  I believe I mentioned that in POD a couple of years ago.  Some of the drones were made in DeKalb, my hometown.  Earlier TV might mean that other powers got the same kind of technology.  Historically, the Germans did some work with radio-controlled guided bombs, but the Allies quickly figured out how to jam them.  We’re probably lucky that the Germans didn’t figure out some way of guiding their V1s (the buzz bombs).  I doubt that they could have done much to guide in the V2 rockets, though as you mention the technological offshoots might make some difference..

                With all of the noise that people made about German secret weapons, the western allies actually seemed to have done considerably better in actually deploying workable advanced technology.  The atomic bomb comes to mind, as does the British computers that let them consistently break German and Japanese codes.  The allies had a lot of other very useful advances, like proximity fuses, advanced bombsights, advanced bombers like the B29, and technology that made naval gunfire more accurate.  Then there were exotic programs like the one that took old bombers where the wings were about to fall off, packed them with high explosives, and sent them on a one-way, with another plane guiding them in by remote control.

                The most effective allied secret weapons were really advances in production.  The US built a synthetic rubber industry essentially from scratch.  They figured out how to make munitions much more quickly than anyone else could.  They made the U-boat war ineffective by speeding up the production of mass-produced ships to the point where it is hard to visualize any feasible U-boat advance making much of an impact.

                Your comments on hurricane Camille as Katrina: Good point about Louisiana’s long history of corruption and its impact on any response to a natural disaster.  An unfortunate side-affect of our relatively decentralized system of government is that we do have pockets of very poor government throughout the country, and if a natural disaster or a major terrorist attack happens in one of those pockets the disaster will be amplified by the poor local response.  Now I want to be careful not to get into the rather heated local versus federal blame game that followed the historic Katrina.   Whatever the specifics of who did or didn’t do what after Katrina are, the fact is that Louisiana politics has been notably corrupt even by Illinois standards. 

TC: Rockefeller as president in 1964?  Goldwater conservatives would have hated the idea and stayed home in droves, but if elected Rockefeller would not have been able to drive through the kind of massive ‘Great Society’ program that Johnson did, even if he wanted to.   The country would not have moved in a ‘liberal’ direction anywhere near as much as it actually did in the next few years. 

The historic 1964 election produced decisive enough Democratic majorities that Johnson was able to reshape the country far more than any president since FDR.  What the country would have been like without those massive changes is probably unknowable.  A lot of the Great Society programs would have probably happened eventually in some form even minus the Johnson administration because they were ideas that sounded good on paper, and it took contact with reality to expose the bad ideas as bad ideas.  Rockefeller probably would have continued the Vietnam war on about the same level as Johnson did, because the political imperatives that Johnson felt would have operated on Rockefeller too.  He might have run it a bit more effectively because it is hard to visualize it being run much less effectively than it was during the Johnson years.  On the other hand, the Democrats would have probably gone into opposition to the war much earlier than they did historically if it could be viewed as a Republican war.

                The Civil Rights movement might not have progressed as quickly as it did.  With the presidency in Republican hands, leadership of the Democratic Party would shift back toward the southern Democrats that dominated committees due to their seniority.   African Americans would probably shift less decisively into the Democratic party in the absence of Goldwater’s ‘Southern Strategy’, which in itself would have a lot of ramifications.  Unless the Rockefeller presidency was in serious trouble by 1968, Nixon would probably not run against him, which would mean that Nixon wouldn't run until 1972 at the earliest, and he would then probably have to deal with whoever Rockefeller chose as VP.  So, no Nixon and no Watergate, which would be a major bonus.

                The Apollo program might have lost momentum without Johnson to push for it.  It would have probably continued to limp along, but without the funding or priority that Johnson gave it.  How that would have affected the post-Apollo space program is anybody’s guess.  If the Soviets beat us to the moon, we would probably feel compelled to continue the race to the point where we won one.

                With the Great Society social programs delayed, there would be more money for the military side of the federal budget, and you might see some aerospace advances that didn’t happen historically.  The X-plane programs would probably have probably been revived and extended.  Beyond that, the scope and ramifications of the changes are unknowable.

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In any case, we talk about anything and everything even vaguely related to Alternate History in POD.  I've enjoyed being a member of it.  If this sounds like something you might be interested in, just leave a comment and I'll pass your name along to the editor.  POD has had members from England, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and (very briefly) Russia.