Showing results by narrator "Stephen M. Ray Jr." in All Categories

It is December, 1963, and the tensions that have been simmering since the October war came to a boil in an atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion so poisonous that nobody in England or Washington, DC, realize that in the background, there is a third, malignant force at work.

It is January 1964 in an alternative timeline in which the Swinging '60s never happened. A little over a year has passed since the Cuban Missile Crisis of late October 1962. Red Dawn, spawned as Josef Stalin's answer to America's atomic monopoly in the late 1940s, has fomented full-scale insurrection in Washington, DC, and almost sparked a war between the world's two remaining nuclear superpowers. But the real fury of Red Dawn - Krasnaya Zarya - is unspent, and time is running out. Now is a time for charismatic leaders to come forward....

It is February 1964 in a world in which the "swinging '60s" never happened. The atomic mushroom clouds over the Mediterranean have dispersed, and now, as the world teeters on the brink of a new thermonuclear war, it is dawning on the "victors" that their "victory", far from being absolute, was tragically pyrrhic. In the uneasy half-peace, the United States stirs from its post-Cuban Missiles War slumber. But will it awaken soon enough to overcome its own divisions to confront the new and terrible forces unleashed by Red Dawn's first paroxysm of violence?

This was where it had started; and ought to have ended. Cuba... Initially, it was estimated that over 90 percent of the population of the main island - over six million men, women, and children - had died on the day of the war.

In the aftermath of the October War, Armageddon rumbled on. The war had been fought, won, and lost in less than a day, but regionally and locally, the fighting and the settling of scores went on for years. It was hardly surprising that the fate of three ships of the Royal Netherlands Navy should be, if not forgotten, then allowed to slip under the ‘radar’ of the world. However, no history of the October War is complete without at least a footnote about that "lost fleet". This, insofar as anybody can know at this remove, is its story.

The House on Haight Street is a novella featuring Miranda Sullivan and Joe Calleja, culled from material originally included in the body of Warsaw Concerto (Book 13 of the Timeline 10/27/62 series). It did not make the "final cut" for two reasons: Firstly, I thought it was one sub-strand too many and therefore interrupted the flow of the rest of the narrative; and secondly, the book was getting very long even by my standards!

A Kelper’s Tale is one young woman’s story, told in her own words; of a drably idyllic childhood at the ends of the earth, of invasion, exile, repatriation and a growing awareness that ultimately, the first and last casualty of war is truth. Over four years have passed since the bloody events of 1964. What will the new year of 1969 bring for the peoples of the United Kingdom, the Argentine Republic, the occupiers of the Falklands Archipelago and the once British administered dependencies in the South Atlantic?

Back in 1964, in a world still struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of the October War, the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands had been a faraway thing that had happened to a couple of thousand kelpers living on a few islands in the South Atlantic, 8,000 miles from England, about which the British people in their post-October War travails, knew little and cared less.

Less than 18 months have passed since the October War and the war in the South Atlantic begins.... In Buenos Aires, there were three of them: the physician doctor who hoped he might heal his divided nation, and the two generals, one the great puppeteer of his generation of officers, the other a would-be technocrat who almost but not quite knew what he was doing. And, forgotten nowadays, there was the admiral who went along with the greatest gamble in his fragile country’s history and privately, regretted ever-after.