Mashup Stross x Saunders

[dsrtao]

I wonder what would have happened if, in The Nightmare Stacks, it wasn't the Alfar invading Britain but a Line Company (with standard-captain and attached artillery, perhaps an Independent) had been pushed through.

Nothing simple.

Comments

[dsrtao]

Supposing that they come through by accident and without immediate expectation of finding their way home -- enemy action, obviously -- they're going to be very confused politically about the Laundryverse.

Or maybe not: it's a version of the Bad Old Days with just one hominid species instead of dozens/hundreds, government by coercion (but not, mostly, magical coercion -- the Commonweal has or had money at some point, it may be structured as industrial kibbutzim/communes but I'm sure it would only take a few minutes to figure out capitalism-uber-alles), and a few sorcerors who appear to be ruling behind the scenes instead of as strict geas-bound hierarchy.

In the other direction, the Alfar were expecting to find something just like The Bad Old Days, that's their normal structure. If they had shown up at the edge of the Commonweal, the only surprising thing would have been the shape and strength of their magical critters. I suspect the the Alfar unicorns are cousins of known species.

[autopope]

The Alfär may be just like the Bad Old Days in social hierarchy, but they're a much younger magical world than Graydon's; there are hints in the Commonwealth books that magic and magical users have been around for maybe a quarter of a million years, possibly longer, and there have been many hominid magic-using species and entire magical ecosystems. In contrast, the Alfär only developed speech in the past 30-100,000 years, and their magical civilizations are up to 10-20,000 years old: they've domesticated magical beasties from other realms, but haven't built entire ecosystems, and their slaves are their own weaker members rather than bespoke Homo servus spp.

The Alfär unicorns are equoids, just not part of the borg identifying itself as Shub. (They're quite bad enough as it is.)