Showing results by narrator "Michael E. Russo" in Science Fiction & Fantasy

It is April 1964 in a world in which the ‘swinging '60s’ never happened. Two Soviet tank armies have fallen on Iran and are poised to pour down from the Zagros Mountains onto the Iraqi floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates like wolves upon the fold. The Shah is dead, and Tehran has been destroyed by a nuclear strike; in Iraq, there has been a coup d’état, and civil war has broken out. Only a handful of British tanks and a few thousand widely scattered troops around the oilfields of the Middle East stand between the Red Army and mastery of the Persian Gulf.

It is April 1964 in a world in which the ‘swinging 60s’ never happened. War is chaos; and chaos is war. The post-October War world is at a bloody crossroads; betrayal and confusion preoccupies and distracts the West to the disasters about to befall newly remade, desperately fragile alliances as long kept secrets surface. The impenetrable fog of war spreads across the Mediterranean. Even while Malta burns and the survivors of the savage naval battle off its coast fight for their lives in the wreckage-strewn iron grey waters....

It is April 1964 in a world in which the "swinging '60s" never happened. Two Soviet tank armies have fallen on Iran and are pouring down from the Zagros Mountains onto the Iraqi floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers like wolves upon the fold. In the United States, the overwhelming popular mood is one of "America first". The "victory" of the October War has never seemed more pyrrhic, or all the death, destruction, and grief more futile, than it does in the second week of April 1964. Only one thing is certain: The world is about to be turned upside down again.

A little over 20 months have passed since the cataclysm of October 1962. It is a minute before midnight in Philadelphia on July 4, 1964, in a world stumbling inexorably toward a second, even more catastrophic nuclear war. The United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom have stepped to the edge of the thermonuclear abyss; who will blink first? In All Along the Watchtower, the main series and the USA series of Timeline 10/27/72 merge into a single global narrative of the most desperate hours in human history.