Last and Only Hopes

In 2026, Captain Wilder told his children that the Red Planet represented the anglo's last and only hope. Almost five centuries before, they had quit Europe, carrying a deadly plague that decimated the indigenes of the Turtle Island. However, the madness had travelled with the anglos - the First Nation genocide and then the States War. Finally, very finally, the bomb. The Earth had exploded in the inferno of nuclear war, resulting in the Million Year Picnic the Wilder Family were now enjoying.

President-elect Gore	In 2007,Mike Resnick issued "Alternate Tyrants Part 2" including the controversial short story "Y". In a thinly disguised reference to "W", the United States Supreme Court releases a decision on a disputed President election. To unite the country, the Court proposes a joint inauguration followed by the candidates sharing the presidency with each serving a two-year term.
Best practice had been established by an indecisive election in Israel during 1984 when Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres agreed to the same power-sharing formula. Without the luxury of a full-term to plan and launch an invasion of a Middle Eastern country, the Republican camp falls upon a national security pretext to delay the Democratic Candidates two-year occupancy.

Advertisement	In 1976/1767/1750, Thalmus Rasulala, Cicely Tyson, LeVar Burton and Omoro Kinte converge on Annapolis, Maryland. Somehow they must release Alex Haley from bondage and return him to the year 1976, where he must must publish “Roots: The Saga of an American Family”. According to an advertisement in the Maryland Gazette newspaper, the Africans are to be sold into slavery on October 7.

In 2000, Stephen E. Ambroke published Eisenhower Victorious: The D-Day Options. In this counter-history, the Communist insurgency in China wins through, and Chairman Mao defeats the Kuomintang. Rejecting Truman at the 1948 election, Americans turn to General Douglas MacArthur to reconquer the Pacific for good. Brass Hat dusts off his plans for Operation Downfall and plays them out in the vast interior of China rather than the Japanese Islands, supported by the launching of fifty nuclear missiles at Manchuria. MacArthur also deploys Bacteriological weapons that Unit 731 surrendered to him in 1945 to secure the amnesty of the Japanese scientists against trial for the extermination of 200,000 Chinese citizens during World War II.	What If?
Korea and Vietnam are re-united, Chiang Kai-shek re-instated in Beijing, where he meekly returns with the entire gold and foreign currency reserves had taken on his flight to Formosa. After all, the book asks, how could America use the bomb and Japan, and then permit China to be lost?

T.E. Lawrence	In 1946, outside a building complex on Fürtherstrasse 22 in Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany Commander of the British Eighth Army Colonel T.E. Lawrence and subordinates Bernard Law Montgomery, Archibald Percival Wavell and Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck were shot on this day. They considered themselves betrayed by a group of Egyptian officers, headed by Gamal Abdul Nassar, and Anwar el-Sadat, who secretly sided with the Germans, ridding North Africa of Britain's presence. The Egyptian officers themselves had no opinion, they were so many holes in the desert, having been betrayed themselves by Heydrich who had established a German Protectorate on the Nile.

In 1535, Jacques Cartier discovered Montreal, Quebec. Despite efforts by British to invade New France, and several referendums from federalists, Quebec remains a Francophone pocket in North America. In the famous words of Charles de Gaulle in 1967 Vive le Québec libre ! (Long live free Quebec!).	De Gaulle