"Pellegrino Shots"

I find it hard to imagine an alternate history opus better than this one because yeah, anyone can start from what if Hitler didn't invade Poland or what if Mark Antony was crowned Roman emperor and carve out a vivid speculative world from sheer force of will. Who's gonna gainsay 'em? We can't judge because there are literally billionty billion ways it could go in fuckin' no time. But a timeline like this, that takes a recent, slightly subtler departure point (Yeltsin is slain on top of that tank in Red Square) and takes it in directions that make for a no doubt compelling world taken naively or objectively whatever that means, but much more intriguingly that jibe withand recap and carnivalize recent history: well that's where Marx's "first as trageedy, then as farce" meets Mark Twain's "history never repeats itself, but it rhymes." Here, Vladimir Zhirinovsky ends up president of the UIS (this world's CIS-analogue) and we never know if he's just a buffoon or a hard-eyed fascist with an appreciation of the uses of buffoonery or a dupe or at best proxy shell for the military--though by the end we have a sense that the latter is likely true and that at a minimum he's some kind of jackass (see also real reality on that point). There is a much messier, and fascinating, war in the former Yugoslavia (with Serbia and "Serbian Krajina" and "Republika Srpska" in Bosnia entering the UIS and Russian troops staring down Croatians armed to the teeth); there is a much grimmer Chechnya, there is a Hindu Republic of Dubai (the author, despite his awful alias, deserves major laurels just for making that seem plausible); there is a nuclear standoff in 1998 and two decades of global recession and just about the only place on Earth that's better off is Zaire (no DRC) but it's all just so freakishly familiar and real-seeming. Russian agents flood the world with fake US passports and cut off seven of Kim Jong-Un's fingers. Zhirinovsky punches out Tony Blair. He ends up in the dock at the Hague and Alexander Lebed turns Russia into a much more conventional mostly-dictatorship, like the real world with a smidgen less pretense. Oh, Putin ends up a crank, perennial also-ran presidential candidate who tries to tell the BBC all the (immensely complex, stirringly well researched) Russkiy political skulduggery that takes place to keep Zhiri in place and the puppet masters hidden and the near abroad in chaos and the rest of the world to heel. This is really good and he's publishing it as an ebook shortly; look out for it if you're interested in alternate history or Russia or the days of our lives.… (más)