[Unfortunately, Chapter 4 of this little epic is taking a bit longer than I
thought it would when I started writing it earlier this month. I'm only about a
third of the way through it. Since I didn't want to leave all of you hanging
for three months -- aren't I nice? -- here's a bit of background.]

A Glimpse Behind the Curtain:
The Altered History of _Variations on a Theme_

     It's important to remember that I'm making it all up as I go along. Until
I actually sat down last week and puzzled out just what sort of conditions
could have produced the world featured in this story, I had no more idea what
they were than anyone reading it did.

     Originally, I planned for it to be the twentieth century of the world
brought into being by Eric Flint's alternate history novel _1632_. (Yes, the
mention of Mr. Abrabanel was a reference. You may have a strawberry.) My grand
scheme suggested that the introduction of nineteenth century technology and
eighteenth century political philosophy to the seventeenth century would result
in a nineteenth century that killed the spirit of that world's enlightenment
just as surely as our own twentieth century killed it, and a twentieth century
nearly as unpleasant as a cyberpunk vision of the twenty-first.

     But I changed my mind. Largely because, based on events in _1633_, the
sequel co-written by some space-opera guy I've never heard of [1], North
America may become exclusively French and Spanish in the 17th century, which
squared ill with my designs. But moreso, because I wanted to write high
fantasy, which would mean that magic had always been present in the world's
background. The 1632 sequence is science fantastic (the method by which the
town of Grantville and environs was shifted from the early twenty-first century
back to the seventeenth is the fantastic element), and wouldn't really fit well
with the magical elements I was developing.

     Therefore, the presence of magic itself made the history of the world of
_Variations on a Theme_ different from the moment in prehistory when one of the
ancestors of the human species learned how to use this enigmatic power. Because
of the limitations on a magical existence (be patient), that history wasn't
*largely* different. People lived who might have died, or died that would have
lived. People changed their minds, or had their minds changed for them. A
trained historian might notice one or two anomalies in any records prior to the
eighteenth century, but she might take them for copyists' errors.

     That changed in 1769. On our timeline, the cash-strapped government of
Genoa sold its claim on the island of Corsica to the Kingdom of France in that
year. On Earth-VH, the Genoans -- slightly more cash-strapped -- made the
mistake of offending the French by asking for more than they were planning to
pay. The sale didn't take place. But then transpired a miracle; for the
Genoans, at least. A few days after the deal fell through, Pasquale Paoli, the
Corsican republican who'd made Genoan control of the island such a headache,
sent a message to Genoa offering its rulers a large amount, roughly equivalent
to what France paid "here", in exchange for the Genoans surrendering their
claim to *him*. (Where did he get that much money? That's a Very Good
Question.) Pragmatism outweighed the grudge that Genoa felt, and Corsica became
an independant republic.

     And as a result, Napoleone Buonaparte, who was born that very year, never
had the opportunity to be sent to France to be educated, and never started on
the path that led him to imperial rule. Instead, he followed in his father's
profession, and eventually moved into politics, eventually becoming President
of Corsica in the early nineteenth century. His term was cut short by
assassination, unfortunately.

     Of course, the vaccum in French history left by his absence was filled by
a number of different individuals. But for whatever reason, none of them ever
had the combination of charisma and ability to become the pre-eminent figure in
the Revolutionary councils and conquer half of Europe. But on one noteworthy
occasion, one of them displayed considerably more sense than Napoleon showed.

     In 1804, a British-financed assassination plot against the current First
Consul of the Republic, one Marcel Pagerie, was discovered by French secret
agents. On this timeline, as on our own, information was discovered linking
Louis-Antoine-Henri de Bourbon-Conde, Duc d'Enghien, to the plot. But for
whatever reason, Pagerie decided to disregard the information where Bonaparte
had acted on it. Perhaps he distrusted the man from whom he had received the
information: Joseph Fouche was not the most trustworthy of individuals.

     In any event, the Duc d'Enghien lived, and the great aristocratic
resurgence that his execution provoked (here) was forestalled for nearly a
decade ... at which point, with more British financing, aristocrats seized
power in Burgundy and wrested it away from the Republic. After four years of
war, the territories held by the Burgundians reached from Auxerie in the west,
to Luxenbourg in the north, to Marseille in the south, and Strasbourg in the
east. A new Grand Duchy of Burgundy had been born, and the Republicans, on the
verge of bankruptcy, grudgingly accepted the situation. (In fact, they found an
easily identifiable foreign enemy to be of great use in swaying their own
populace, much like many other regimes before and since.)

     By this point, another effect of Napoleon's absence was just beginning to
be felt. Germany and Austria were still under the "benevolent despotism" of the
Holy Roman Empire, or "the Reich" as it was more commonly known. Without the
pressure of French rule to unite the populace with a sense of "German-ness",
nationalism was slower to take hold, and suppressed by reactionary leaders who
wanted no threats to their rule. Even today, to look at Central and Eastern
Europe on Earth-VT is to look at a maze of principalities, kinglets,
dictatories and free cities, all of which are nominally subject to the Emperor
in Vienna. (And some have been in open revolt since the 1950s, such as the tiny
Dictatory of Lativeria.)

     And so the nineteenth century passed. To the west, the United States of
America expanded until it nearly collapsed in a great civil war. Shortly
therafter, the colony of British California grew impatient with difficulties
experienced in the construction of a railway that was to link it with the rest
of the Domain of Canada, and joined the United States in hopes of receiving a
better deal. Despite this, imperial dreams grew in England, and Russia and the
Reich stared hungrily at each other across the confusion of Eastern Europe.
Ideas like communism and capitalism were born. Japan emerged from its long
removal from the outside world, and its people were dragged kicking and
screaming into modernity. China's Manchurian rulers watched in helpless horror
as Westerners began to invade *successfully*.

     The Great War was finally sparked in 1914 by a populist revolt in the
Serbian territories of the Reich. The placement drew in the Russians, who
planned to increase their influence in the region. Russian involvement drew in
the English, still bristling from Crimea and other disasters. English
involvement drew in the French, who had a treaty with Russia and were
anticipating a British assault on their shores. And the French pre-emptive
retaliation drew in the Burgundians, allied out of necessity to the English and
the Reich. Crushed between the British and the Reich, it's likely that the
French Republic would have seen its last days in 1917, had the United States
not been compelled to abandon its posture of neutrality after the British fired
on American shipping to blockaded France.

     The American intervention brought the war to a stalemate, and ultimately
to a truce. A treaty was signed in Versailles placing the blame for the war on
the Russians -- and since the Russian Empire had fallen to the communists, the
Russians were not available to protest. The American President's call for a
League of Nations was coldly ignored by the European nations, and he returned
disillusioned to a once-more isolationist nation -- which was beginning to
build its own empire. Within two years of the war's end, the western-most
province of the Domain of Canada followed British California (now called the
state of Vancouver) into the Union.

     The mild financial crisis that began a decade or so after the Great War
ended was nowhere nearly as devastating as our own history's Great Depression,
but it did serve as the spark that lit a fuse in the Reich's powderkeg. The
opinions of the Thule Society, led by one Adolf Hitler, began to gain a great
deal of popularity in the Austrian heartland of the Reich, and following a
number of incidents, he was offered the position of Chancellor despite his
rather humble origins. It was the beginning of a reign of terror for Jews and
dissidents of all stripes, but the factionalism of the Reich meant that the
Thules were never able to impliment their policies throughout all the
territories it held. (Many aristocrats despised the low-born Hitler despite
their basic agreement with his politics.)

     Furthermore, Hitler was assassinated in 1938, allegedly by an American
secret agent. (Some less reputable rumors place the blame for his death on the
actions of a Chinese criminal mastermind.) While his chosen successor as
Chancellor, a man who went by the name Johann Schmidt (most often called der
Totenkopf behind his back) was no less of a monster, and was inarguably more
brilliant, he was fortunately less able to sway people to his cause. He spent
the next several years alternately terrorizing the citizenry of the Reich and
the increasingly factionalized membership of the Thule Society, interrupted
only briefly by the Soviet invasion of 1941-43. Whatever else may be said about
Schmidt, he was one of his history's most dangerous generals, and he used every
lick of that talent to defend the Fatherland from the Russian storm.

     During this same period, the Japanese militarists launched a massive
assault against British, Burgundian and American territories in the Pacific.
The United Kingdom and the United States found themselves in an uncomfortable
alliance for the first time, but as neither was distracted by a European war,
the Pacific War was fought quickly and decisively. Unfortunately for Japan, the
Allies' intelligence led them to (erroneously) believe that the Japanese would
fight to the last man before surrendering, and so two atomic bombs were dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The damage was worse at Nagasaki; it was the site of
the Japanese atomic project.

     Less than a year later, the Japanese islands were further devastated when
a giant, dinosaur-like creature, apparently attracted to the residual
radiation, swam out of Tokyo harbor. Vast numbers of Japanese civilians,
especially refugees from Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were camped outside of
Tokyo, died in the attack of the so-called "Giant", especially after the U.S.
Air Force dropped a third bomb on the creature as it climbed Mount Fuji. The
combination of the explosion and the eruption that it provoked apparently
disintegrated the creature, but also sent tons of radioactive volcanic ash into
the air. Japan became nearly unlivable for nearly a decade.

     Shortly afterwards, the fourth usage of an atomic weapon in warfare
transpired, when Britain's new Prime Minister, Churchill, ordered the bombing
of Dublin in response to a possible terrorist threat. International protest
(largely from the United States, outraged that the British had exploited lapses
in security during the Pacific War to steal the atomic secrets) of the British
annexation of the whole of Ireland was met with the chilly observation that the
Americans had scarcely hesitated to add Japan *and* its Korean and Manchurian
territories to *their* empire after *their* bombings. The Cold War on Earth-VT
has not, by and large, been fought between America and the Soviet Union, but
between America and Britain.

     In the Reich, the Thules gradually lost influence after Schmidt was forced
to flee the country following allegations of financial mismanagement.
Unfortunately, they have never been entirely discredited, and many Austrians
and Prussians look back on the Great Patriotic War was their finest hour. The
lot of Jews in the Reich remains unpleasant, but with Zionism as a marginalized
political outlook (without the Dreyfus affair, many more Western Jews are still
inclined to believe in co-existence) they have nowhere else to go.

     In the 1950s, the Burgundians sold their Vietnamese colony to the United
States in exchange for trade concessions, and with the intention of letting the
Americans deal with Ho Chi Minh. The Americans managed it, largely by not
letting reporters anywhere near the battlefields. In 1986, Vietnam became the
most unstable state in their bicontinental empire. For good or ill, it has
remained ethnically Vietnamese, where the native culture in Japan has been
almost entirely cleansed by the influx of settlers offered cheap land and tax
incentives for relocating.

     The space race was a product of cold war rivalry, with the American Space
Agency and the British Rocket Group competing bloodlessly (at least, as far as
the public ever learned) for the moon. The Americans won by a narrow margin;
Benjamin Grimm became the first man to set foot on the lunar surface in 1963. A
permanent settlement was established in the Sea of Serenity, and was declared
the sixtieth state in the union twenty years later, despite having less than a
thousandth the population of Rhode Island. The British had a moon colony of
their own, but seem to have evacuated it sometime around 1987, for reasons they
aren't discussing.

     India remains under the control of the British, but has been wracked by
uprising several times in the last forty years. (On our timeline, Gandhi once
admitted that passive resistance can only work if the agressor desires to
appear civilized; after Ireland, he came to the conclusion that the British no
longer cared, and withdrew from public life again.) Ironically, Mao-Tse Tung
seemse to have dropped off the face of the Earth sometime in the 1940s, and
China is an eastern mirror of the Reich, a maze of imperial fiefs and
international settlements without any central authority. Much of Africa remains
under colonial rule ...

     Is any of this even remotely plausible? Of course not -- it's fantasy.

In Part 2: Character and Magic Theory

[1] Fans of David Weber's "Honor Harrington" can stop howling for my blood any
time now; I am familiar with her, and the comment was a joke.



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