Hello, my name is Charles

by on July 26, 2015 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

President Napoleon never claimed the title of Emperor of France, but his time in office was unparalleled. The elected bureaucrats and the military became staunch allies in the effort to reinvent France for the new age of space exploration. On the day he stepped down in favor of the next president, France was one of the foremost spacegoing powers of Earth. The people of France voted to name him Honorary Emperor of the Fourth French Empire. And so the Fourth Empire announced itself to the world, declared itself a decade old, and then became the Ninth Republic. Historians are still arguing over how to address that government in textbooks.

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The Hyades Cluster

by on July 25, 2015 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries, The Essential Galactic Atlas

The Hyades Cluster was not uniformly Chinese like many other Chinese systems are. The upper classes were Chinese of course, but they shipped out Mongolians, Koreans, Japanese, and many other conquered populations to man the factories out in the cluster. They had the dangerous jobs and the crummy slums while their natural betters lived in luxury. We upset that social structure when we acquired the cluster with the peace treaty. We also acquired a seriously fraked up economy full of people fighting to survive. We Cowboys had a lot to do.

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Hello, my name is Betty

by on July 24, 2015 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

The sixth season of Dixie the Drug Lord Slayer took place after the last of the Drug Lords was gone. Most people hadn’t expected it to be revived for another season, but Odessa, Texas needed something to advertise their survival and make people want to come to the city again. And so they optioned the series to tell the story of the Battle of Odessa in the Cybernetic Wars. It was filmed entirely on location in Odessa. The rebuilding city proved the perfect place to tell the story of the city’s near-destruction, and city demolitions engineers arranged many of the fires and explosions seen on the show.

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Hello, my name is Charles

by on July 23, 2015 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Jean-Claude Pierre Charles Napoleon served as President of France for two terms before declining to run for a third term. It was illegal to serve more than two terms, but had he chosen to run there are few who would have said anything. He negotiated favored trading status with the Peloran during his ten years in office, and reinvigorated France’s starship-building capacity with impressive grants given to anyone with the vision and drive to bring France to the stars. He reinvented France and the French loved him for it.

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The Hyades Cluster

by on July 22, 2015 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Essential Galactic Atlas

I spent a lot of time in the Hyades Cluster after The War ended. It was a real mess. The Chinese had industrialized it very heavily and those industries kept them in The War until we burned them all down. We destroyed their economies in the rush to beat the Chinese, and we were left to rebuild them after the Chinese signed the peace treaty. It was a kind of gold rush, Western companies moving in to acquire cheap property and cheaper workers to boost their bottom lines. It was amazing just how little the locals were happy to work for.

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