Ask Not of Your Country

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The ‘Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series’ is an alternative history of the modern world and because of this real historical characters are referenced and in some cases their words and actions form significant parts of the narrative. I have no way of knowing if these real, historical figures would have spoken thus, or acted in the ways I depict them acting. Any word I place in the mouth of a real historical figure, and any action which I attribute to them on or after 27th October 1962 never actually happened. As I always say in my Author’s Notes to my readers, I made it up in my own head.

The suburb of Waukesha lay astride the Fox River some seventeen miles west of Lake Michigan. On a clear night the lights of nearby Milwaukee used to light up the eastern horizon but for the last three days the smoke from the fires of the state’s largest city had lain upon it like a death shroud. From Milwaukee on the coastal plain the land rose to over seven hundred feet as it climbed towards the old spa town. Since the Second World War the elders of the County had watched the urban sprawl of the city approaching, year on year, from the relative safety of the heights south of Interstate 94. But now an unimaginably worse fate than being — at some stage in the future — enveloped by the suburbs of the great city was about to befall their community.

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