So what is this “Dead Skunk” thing I mentioned last week? It’s a timeline on alternatehistory.com, done partly in the form of narrative and partly in the form of false documents — history books and so on. The point of divergence from our own history (the PoD, as it’s known in AH) is that during the British invasion of Louisiana on December 23, 1814, Major General John Keane is briefly held up by a skunk in his path, which is immediately killed by an owl swooping down on it. This illustration of the military effectiveness of striking quickly and out of nowhere inspires him to move up his plans for the invasion of New Orleans considerably. He attacks that very day, before Andrew Jackson ha
First of all, that book that just appeared in the list of books, Catch My Breath, coming out in September, is not being written by me. I assume it's by a different Paul Briggs and there was some sort of confusion in getting it into the Goodreads system. (I'm also not the Australian boxer Paul "The Hurricane" Briggs, more's the pity.) I had a couple of moments of serendipity while reading Argentum by Debbie Manber Kupfer. Early on in the book, there was a reference to the traditional Passover song “Had Gadya” and various elements in the song such as the goat and cat. Not being Jewish, I never would have known about this song if I hadn’t been reading Unsong. Later, there was a reference to t
