From Bruce Munro, an old post (which is technically a crossover) in the alternatehistory.net forum:
[table]
B_Munro
![[Image: user_online.gif]](http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/images/statusicon/user_online.gif)
Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Albuquerque
Posts: 1000 or more
Thanks, thanks.
I'm afraid updates will slow as I have largely worked through the best of my "backstock"....![[Image: redface.gif]](http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/images/smilies/redface.gif)
expanded from the "fill in the blank-punk" thread
DOCTOR DOLITTLE'S WORLD
The year is circa 1940 or so, a century after Dr. Dolittle’s first trip
to Africa to help out some sick monkeys . The knowledge of how to talk
to animals long ago spread beyond the Doctor’s small circle – first a
young naturalist who had seen the doctor in action begged Tom Stubbins
to teach him: Charles Darwin got involved, and things ballooned from
there. An aging Doctor, sick of the now-enormous fame that left him no
time for his work, and no longer as closely involved with Stubbins (who
had found wuv and started to raise a family), ended up returning to the
Moon (with the aid of his animal friends in arranging a signal visible
across space), to spend a peaceful retirement studying all the wonders
of the Moon’s biology.
The world is very different from our own, as a result of the discovery
of animal sentience. This caused major crises in every religion that did
not follow a dogma of reincarnation and the virtue of vegetarianism:
Hinduism is doing fine, and Buddhism has expanded greatly among
Europeans and Americans. Christianity and Islam, with their doctrine of
fundamental separation between the human and animal worlds, have not
fared as well: meanwhile, there has been an explosion of new sects and
religions.
All nations (aside from a few, like Afghanistan, which are fundamentally
in Denial) nowadays have greatly modified their legal and political
systems to accommodate the reality of animal intelligence, although only
a couple nations (most importantly, the UK) have actually granted them
citizenship, and even then on a limited franchise involving block
voting: after all, the notion of humans being outvoted by dogs and cats
and pigs is still too hard for most people to swallow. (And only for
some species – we’re talking birds and mammals: few humans have
mobilized to fight for the rights of reptiles or insects). After all,
OTL, dusky-skinned humans lacked a great many rights around the world in
OTL 1940.
Said dusky-skinned humans made an increasing fuss about having no more
rights than (literally) dogs did, and in the US the civil rights
movement achieved political success by the 1930s: the vote for women was
similarly advanced by a generation.
The biggest problem has been the “eating” thing. Chickens were OK with
continuing the egg thing, sheep with the shearing, cows with the
milking, horses with the plowing, as long as some improvements in
housing and treatment were made: but pigs, for instance, weren’t very
happy with becoming bacon.
Oddly enough, pigs – and cows, goats, etc. – although they will strongly
resist being killed, do not translate this into a general antipathy
towards carnivores and omnivores. After millions of years as prey, they
accept the predator’s need to eat them: they simply do not feel any
hatred towards bears or wolves or lions as a whole. (Weasels and cats
are widely disliked, but because of their cruelty towards their prey,
not because they are meat-eaters). A pig will have no problems being
friends with a man who has a couple rashers of bacon for breakfast.
(This tends to drive human ethicists and thinkers on morality up the
wall.)
As a result, although killing animals for food is now legally verboten
in most countries, only a few (mostly in Asia) make it illegal to
consume animal flesh: there are still animals dying in accidents and of
old age and non-infectious diseases, and most animals find the human
practice of hiding their dead in little boxes underground rather
bizarre. There are the meat-leggers, of which little good can be said.
And then there are the New Darwinian knife-and-spear hunters: the
families of aggressive, violent animals such as bears and lions and
boars will rarely bring charges in the case of a fair and agreed-on
fight.
Humans are more of a problem: if animals accused of attacking humans now
get their day in court, they also can be tried and executed. The
medieval habit of inflicting capital punishment on misbehaving animals
is now seen as a legal precedent rather than blind ignorance: a number
of animals were shot for insubordination during the Great European War.
Animals have new rights, but also new obligations: horses were deeply
annoyed that they were now expected to do scouting by themselves without
human riders sharing the risk. (The difficulty many animals have with
the concept of “patriotism” is one of the reasons so few countries
actually give animals citizenship).
Humans also make a pest of themselves attempting to establish
appropriate behavior and legal relations between animals, which the
animals, especially the predatory ones, greatly resent. (The
human-founded Society to Promote Vegetarianism in Felines did not work
out at all well).
With communication and animals becoming part of the cash economy,
animals have now become a market as buyers rather than products. The
industry in tools and prosthetics for animals lacking fingers or their
functional equivalent is now a multi-billion dollar one, as is the
construction business for making animal-suited housing and furniture.
Most big cities now have an animal “ghetto”, and there are some entire
cities inhabited by cooperative animal societies: the rats and mice and
other rodents have built, with the aid of human tools, some impressive
underground cities. (The clothing for animals business has been less
successful, although some of the vainer species spend quite a bit on
accessories).
With a vast expansion in the population of vegetarians, diets have
perforce grown more varied and the minerals-and-supplements crowd has
prospered. The food situation has been substantially improved by the
rapid growth rates and tremendous nutritive value of some of the plants
that Dolittle succeeded in cultivating on earth after bringing them back
from the Moon. Fishing is still carried out in some places (fish
languages are very hard, fish are not cuddly, and the Pope still holds
that fish have no souls).
It is a different world from ours politically, although there are some
rough parallels. Africa is carved up into colonial areas and
protectorates, but differently from in our world, China still has an
emperor, and the Kingdom of Jolliginki is now a British protectorate. It
is not a peaceful world: human beings are no less foolish and
aggressive than they were a century ago, and the Germans have as OTL
ended up with an unpleasantly racist regime that has taken New Darwinism
to its logical apotheosis (as yet, the rumors of ritual cannibalism
have been dismissed as propaganda cooked up by the Eurasian Union of
Sentient Peoples, where even chipmunks are in danger of being sent to
the Gulag, and some species – not just humans – are more equal than
others). Rumors of war are in the air, and everyone wonders uneasily if
that crow that flew by is a local or a spy for the Other Side.
Animals are increasingly organized politically, and tend lefty and
anti-war: although animals lack a concept of nationalism, many of the
land animals increasingly feel the need for “space of their own”, where
they can run their own lives without being bossed around by humans.
Animal-run cities have already been mentioned, and some areas of African
jungle are essentially self-governing within the colonial empires: the
animals of the Serengeti are pushing hard for an administrative region
of their own within British East Africa. Other animals organize to push
change among animals themselves: the rodent Zero Population Growth
movement is increasingly influential, as the underground cities get
larger, food more expensive, and humans and rodent-hunting animals
become increasingly paranoid about the “burrowers beneath.”
Fine electrical equipment is assembled with the aid of the smallest
animals, and towering skyscrapers are assembled with the aid of monkey
and ape workmen, with birds carrying messages. (Animals are not much
represented on assembly-line jobs, thanks to both Union hostility and
animal inability or unwillingness to stick to fixed schedules.)
Technologically, it is an essentially steam-punk/diesel/punk world, with
submarines and Zeppelins and Mechanical Moles, rocket fliers and
volcanoes tapped for power. It is a more extensively explored world,
with dolphins and octopi bringing back reports of the deep sea, and
moles and other burrowers exploring buried cities and the undersides of
existing ones.
It is a different world from ours physically. The interior of Africa is
rather different, and there are a number of islands that do not exist in
our world (including a formerly floating one currently administered by
Brazil). Much more significantly, in this world the Great Flood is not a
matter of mythology but plain fact: some tens of thousands of years
ago, a massive subsidence of the land and a colossal outbreak of
underground waters drowned much of the world and changed the outline of
the continents. The actual mechanisms of this remain somewhat obscure,
but it had largely been confirmed by early geologists by the mid-19th
century: since then, a number of fragmentary ruins dating back to the
pre-flood era have been discovered. (A certain tank-sized turtle in the
middle of Africa actually remembers the flood, but keeps mum, realizing
he would never have a day of peace if the press found out). It is also a
younger world: it is tens of millions of years, not billions of years
old. Biological and planetary evolution takes place faster in this
universe, and the Moon broke away from the Earth in a cosmic catastrophe
only a million or so years ago: there are still some unimaginably deep
abysses in the Pacific basin. The aether is real (Michelson and Morley
came up with some rather different results from our world) and what is
happening in the sun isn’t quite fusion as we understand it.
The Moon has a considerable population of its own. The mass of the Moon
is unevenly distributed, with the far side being slightly “downhill”
from the perspective of nearside: over the ages since it broke away from
the Earth, most of the water has migrated to the dark side, leaving the
side that faces the earth largely uninhabited and desolate. The far
side isn’t so wet either, with a number of large lakes and little rivers
rather than oceans, with only one fresh-water giant larger than the
Black Sea on earth: areas of dense vegetation form a patchy network,
separated by drier areas. Still, where there is any water, there is
life, and the strange minerals of the lunar dark side (once deep, deep
below the surface of the Earth) and the radiations that penetrate the
luminous lunar atmosphere nourish an extraordinary vitality of growth
among plants and insects and birds, creating grasshoppers big as whales,
trees high as the Empire State Building, and other biological wonders.
It also is a place where things live much, much longer than on earth.
Most living things last for millennia at least, and a few trees and the
giant President of the Lunar Council are as old as the Moon itself.
Although study of the plants brought back by the Doctor to Earth have
yielded some remarkable advanced in the sciences of medicine and
nutrition, they have not added to any great extent to the biblical Three
Score and Ten.
Immortality, or close to it, is what the current Moon Race is about.
Three great nations have built dirigible Aether-flyers, and will soon
embark on lunar expeditions which reflect national prestige and
competitiveness, but which are above all about obtaining the secret of
lunar longevity, by hook, by crook, or by vivisection. Some see this
great enterprise as possibly a substitute for looming war: some see it
as a possible spark for the same.
Meanwhile, the great-granddaughter of Tommy Stubbins, her boyfriend, and
her eccentric uncle are investigating a 2012 - DaVinci Code - type
mystery, involving ancient archeology, geology, and the secret history
of the Earth; Dr. Doolittle’s new diet has finally brought his weight
back down under a metric ton: and deep in space, an unimaginable menace
is set in motion.
These seemingly unrelated threads will converge over the coming months.
A number of oddball characters make an appearance, from the villainous
Dr. Buzzby and his army of insect friends, to Sir Lester Bland,
England’s first pig PM, and his gorilla valet; the numerous descendants
of the original White Mouse (including the World’s Smartest Mouse and
his insane sidekick), a now very decrepit (and very snappish) Polynesia,
who due to wing arthritis must go everywhere by dog-back, the Puddelby
Friends of Dr. Doolittle Society, the Crown Prince of Mars, Charles
Lindberg, and Otho the lunar giant. After the threads of the tale join,
Dr. Doolittle and his companions must embark on a desperate trip across
the solar system to save the world from an implacable judgment and,
before they get to their destination, figure out how to talk to a rock…
(Oh, and the return of Long Arrow from the Subterranean Kingdoms. He really should stay out of those caves).
[table]
B_Munro
Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Albuquerque
Posts: 1000 or more
Thanks, thanks.
I'm afraid updates will slow as I have largely worked through the best of my "backstock"....
expanded from the "fill in the blank-punk" thread
DOCTOR DOLITTLE'S WORLD
The year is circa 1940 or so, a century after Dr. Dolittle’s first trip
to Africa to help out some sick monkeys . The knowledge of how to talk
to animals long ago spread beyond the Doctor’s small circle – first a
young naturalist who had seen the doctor in action begged Tom Stubbins
to teach him: Charles Darwin got involved, and things ballooned from
there. An aging Doctor, sick of the now-enormous fame that left him no
time for his work, and no longer as closely involved with Stubbins (who
had found wuv and started to raise a family), ended up returning to the
Moon (with the aid of his animal friends in arranging a signal visible
across space), to spend a peaceful retirement studying all the wonders
of the Moon’s biology.
The world is very different from our own, as a result of the discovery
of animal sentience. This caused major crises in every religion that did
not follow a dogma of reincarnation and the virtue of vegetarianism:
Hinduism is doing fine, and Buddhism has expanded greatly among
Europeans and Americans. Christianity and Islam, with their doctrine of
fundamental separation between the human and animal worlds, have not
fared as well: meanwhile, there has been an explosion of new sects and
religions.
All nations (aside from a few, like Afghanistan, which are fundamentally
in Denial) nowadays have greatly modified their legal and political
systems to accommodate the reality of animal intelligence, although only
a couple nations (most importantly, the UK) have actually granted them
citizenship, and even then on a limited franchise involving block
voting: after all, the notion of humans being outvoted by dogs and cats
and pigs is still too hard for most people to swallow. (And only for
some species – we’re talking birds and mammals: few humans have
mobilized to fight for the rights of reptiles or insects). After all,
OTL, dusky-skinned humans lacked a great many rights around the world in
OTL 1940.
Said dusky-skinned humans made an increasing fuss about having no more
rights than (literally) dogs did, and in the US the civil rights
movement achieved political success by the 1930s: the vote for women was
similarly advanced by a generation.
The biggest problem has been the “eating” thing. Chickens were OK with
continuing the egg thing, sheep with the shearing, cows with the
milking, horses with the plowing, as long as some improvements in
housing and treatment were made: but pigs, for instance, weren’t very
happy with becoming bacon.
Oddly enough, pigs – and cows, goats, etc. – although they will strongly
resist being killed, do not translate this into a general antipathy
towards carnivores and omnivores. After millions of years as prey, they
accept the predator’s need to eat them: they simply do not feel any
hatred towards bears or wolves or lions as a whole. (Weasels and cats
are widely disliked, but because of their cruelty towards their prey,
not because they are meat-eaters). A pig will have no problems being
friends with a man who has a couple rashers of bacon for breakfast.
(This tends to drive human ethicists and thinkers on morality up the
wall.)
As a result, although killing animals for food is now legally verboten
in most countries, only a few (mostly in Asia) make it illegal to
consume animal flesh: there are still animals dying in accidents and of
old age and non-infectious diseases, and most animals find the human
practice of hiding their dead in little boxes underground rather
bizarre. There are the meat-leggers, of which little good can be said.
And then there are the New Darwinian knife-and-spear hunters: the
families of aggressive, violent animals such as bears and lions and
boars will rarely bring charges in the case of a fair and agreed-on
fight.
Humans are more of a problem: if animals accused of attacking humans now
get their day in court, they also can be tried and executed. The
medieval habit of inflicting capital punishment on misbehaving animals
is now seen as a legal precedent rather than blind ignorance: a number
of animals were shot for insubordination during the Great European War.
Animals have new rights, but also new obligations: horses were deeply
annoyed that they were now expected to do scouting by themselves without
human riders sharing the risk. (The difficulty many animals have with
the concept of “patriotism” is one of the reasons so few countries
actually give animals citizenship).
Humans also make a pest of themselves attempting to establish
appropriate behavior and legal relations between animals, which the
animals, especially the predatory ones, greatly resent. (The
human-founded Society to Promote Vegetarianism in Felines did not work
out at all well).
With communication and animals becoming part of the cash economy,
animals have now become a market as buyers rather than products. The
industry in tools and prosthetics for animals lacking fingers or their
functional equivalent is now a multi-billion dollar one, as is the
construction business for making animal-suited housing and furniture.
Most big cities now have an animal “ghetto”, and there are some entire
cities inhabited by cooperative animal societies: the rats and mice and
other rodents have built, with the aid of human tools, some impressive
underground cities. (The clothing for animals business has been less
successful, although some of the vainer species spend quite a bit on
accessories).
With a vast expansion in the population of vegetarians, diets have
perforce grown more varied and the minerals-and-supplements crowd has
prospered. The food situation has been substantially improved by the
rapid growth rates and tremendous nutritive value of some of the plants
that Dolittle succeeded in cultivating on earth after bringing them back
from the Moon. Fishing is still carried out in some places (fish
languages are very hard, fish are not cuddly, and the Pope still holds
that fish have no souls).
It is a different world from ours politically, although there are some
rough parallels. Africa is carved up into colonial areas and
protectorates, but differently from in our world, China still has an
emperor, and the Kingdom of Jolliginki is now a British protectorate. It
is not a peaceful world: human beings are no less foolish and
aggressive than they were a century ago, and the Germans have as OTL
ended up with an unpleasantly racist regime that has taken New Darwinism
to its logical apotheosis (as yet, the rumors of ritual cannibalism
have been dismissed as propaganda cooked up by the Eurasian Union of
Sentient Peoples, where even chipmunks are in danger of being sent to
the Gulag, and some species – not just humans – are more equal than
others). Rumors of war are in the air, and everyone wonders uneasily if
that crow that flew by is a local or a spy for the Other Side.
Animals are increasingly organized politically, and tend lefty and
anti-war: although animals lack a concept of nationalism, many of the
land animals increasingly feel the need for “space of their own”, where
they can run their own lives without being bossed around by humans.
Animal-run cities have already been mentioned, and some areas of African
jungle are essentially self-governing within the colonial empires: the
animals of the Serengeti are pushing hard for an administrative region
of their own within British East Africa. Other animals organize to push
change among animals themselves: the rodent Zero Population Growth
movement is increasingly influential, as the underground cities get
larger, food more expensive, and humans and rodent-hunting animals
become increasingly paranoid about the “burrowers beneath.”
Fine electrical equipment is assembled with the aid of the smallest
animals, and towering skyscrapers are assembled with the aid of monkey
and ape workmen, with birds carrying messages. (Animals are not much
represented on assembly-line jobs, thanks to both Union hostility and
animal inability or unwillingness to stick to fixed schedules.)
Technologically, it is an essentially steam-punk/diesel/punk world, with
submarines and Zeppelins and Mechanical Moles, rocket fliers and
volcanoes tapped for power. It is a more extensively explored world,
with dolphins and octopi bringing back reports of the deep sea, and
moles and other burrowers exploring buried cities and the undersides of
existing ones.
It is a different world from ours physically. The interior of Africa is
rather different, and there are a number of islands that do not exist in
our world (including a formerly floating one currently administered by
Brazil). Much more significantly, in this world the Great Flood is not a
matter of mythology but plain fact: some tens of thousands of years
ago, a massive subsidence of the land and a colossal outbreak of
underground waters drowned much of the world and changed the outline of
the continents. The actual mechanisms of this remain somewhat obscure,
but it had largely been confirmed by early geologists by the mid-19th
century: since then, a number of fragmentary ruins dating back to the
pre-flood era have been discovered. (A certain tank-sized turtle in the
middle of Africa actually remembers the flood, but keeps mum, realizing
he would never have a day of peace if the press found out). It is also a
younger world: it is tens of millions of years, not billions of years
old. Biological and planetary evolution takes place faster in this
universe, and the Moon broke away from the Earth in a cosmic catastrophe
only a million or so years ago: there are still some unimaginably deep
abysses in the Pacific basin. The aether is real (Michelson and Morley
came up with some rather different results from our world) and what is
happening in the sun isn’t quite fusion as we understand it.
The Moon has a considerable population of its own. The mass of the Moon
is unevenly distributed, with the far side being slightly “downhill”
from the perspective of nearside: over the ages since it broke away from
the Earth, most of the water has migrated to the dark side, leaving the
side that faces the earth largely uninhabited and desolate. The far
side isn’t so wet either, with a number of large lakes and little rivers
rather than oceans, with only one fresh-water giant larger than the
Black Sea on earth: areas of dense vegetation form a patchy network,
separated by drier areas. Still, where there is any water, there is
life, and the strange minerals of the lunar dark side (once deep, deep
below the surface of the Earth) and the radiations that penetrate the
luminous lunar atmosphere nourish an extraordinary vitality of growth
among plants and insects and birds, creating grasshoppers big as whales,
trees high as the Empire State Building, and other biological wonders.
It also is a place where things live much, much longer than on earth.
Most living things last for millennia at least, and a few trees and the
giant President of the Lunar Council are as old as the Moon itself.
Although study of the plants brought back by the Doctor to Earth have
yielded some remarkable advanced in the sciences of medicine and
nutrition, they have not added to any great extent to the biblical Three
Score and Ten.
Immortality, or close to it, is what the current Moon Race is about.
Three great nations have built dirigible Aether-flyers, and will soon
embark on lunar expeditions which reflect national prestige and
competitiveness, but which are above all about obtaining the secret of
lunar longevity, by hook, by crook, or by vivisection. Some see this
great enterprise as possibly a substitute for looming war: some see it
as a possible spark for the same.
Meanwhile, the great-granddaughter of Tommy Stubbins, her boyfriend, and
her eccentric uncle are investigating a 2012 - DaVinci Code - type
mystery, involving ancient archeology, geology, and the secret history
of the Earth; Dr. Doolittle’s new diet has finally brought his weight
back down under a metric ton: and deep in space, an unimaginable menace
is set in motion.
These seemingly unrelated threads will converge over the coming months.
A number of oddball characters make an appearance, from the villainous
Dr. Buzzby and his army of insect friends, to Sir Lester Bland,
England’s first pig PM, and his gorilla valet; the numerous descendants
of the original White Mouse (including the World’s Smartest Mouse and
his insane sidekick), a now very decrepit (and very snappish) Polynesia,
who due to wing arthritis must go everywhere by dog-back, the Puddelby
Friends of Dr. Doolittle Society, the Crown Prince of Mars, Charles
Lindberg, and Otho the lunar giant. After the threads of the tale join,
Dr. Doolittle and his companions must embark on a desperate trip across
the solar system to save the world from an implacable judgment and,
before they get to their destination, figure out how to talk to a rock…
(Oh, and the return of Long Arrow from the Subterranean Kingdoms. He really should stay out of those caves).