Plot summary
DryCo has sent two operatives, retired African-American general Luther and his white bodyguard Jake, to post-communist Moscow, where rival multinational corporation Krasnaya dominates Russian society through consumer capitalist mass production of products. However, Luther and Jake discover that Krasnaya has two highly advanced quantum physicists under duress, Oktobriana Osipova and Alekine. The two Dryco mercenaries manage to abduct Oktobriana, but their escape sends them back to 1939 in a conservative alternate history.
In this world, Abraham Lincoln was killed by a Baltimore pro-slavery mob in 1861 CE, so the American Civil War never happened, and Theodore Roosevelt abolished slavery in 1907 due to European pressure on J.P. Morgan, who feared loss of his European financial assets. On February 15, 1933, Giuseppe Zangara assassinated Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill died from a car accident in 1931. As a result of Roosevelt's premature death, it is noted that John Nance Garner proved to be a fiscal conservative, leading to a situation where much of the western United States had to threaten civil war to obtain economic relief from the ongoing Depression. As the novel progresses, Alekhine, actually a Krasnaya operative, abducts Joseph Stalin from Moscow, to be transferred to Krasnaya custody and kept in a dacha, in a future which has abandoned communism and uses the image of "Big Boy" as nostalgic consumer iconography.
When this world eventually does undergo its World War II, it is assumed that there will be no effective opposition to Nazi Germany from its Soviet Union or United Kingdom as a result. However, as is disclosed in the novel's sequel, Elvissey , this is an incorrect assumption.
Luther and Jake make the acquaintance of Norman Quarles, an African American doctor and his wife, Wanda, but their presence attracts the suspicions of (unseen) J. Edgar Hoover, who sends FBI agents in pursuit. During the chase, Norman is killed, and Oktobriana contracts Dovlatov's Syndrome, a mutated influenza virus that emerged in Irkutsk, Siberia in 1909, and led to the deaths of Queen Alexandra, US House Speaker William Dean Howells, Charlie Chaplin, Christy Mathewson, French Premier Clemenceau, Claude Debussy, Guillaume Apollinaire and Amedeo Modigliani, amongst others, during the ten year space of this epidemic. Ultimately, Luther and Wanda return to Dryco's future, while Oktobriana and Jake are lost in the interdimensional void. Luther and Wanda spend the rest of their lives together, with a coda that takes place several decades later, just after her death.
As an aside, Luther notes that there are sects described as the Albigensian Church of Jesus the Light, Reformed and the Valentinian House of God in this world, which implies the survival of gnosticism has occurred in this timeline. Amongst the books cited in the Albigensian Bible are the Gospel of Matthew, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, but this gnostic bible also includes the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Truth, and the Hymn of Light. The latter revelation will play an important role in Womack's next novel, Elvissey.
Catharism was a Christian quasi-dualist or pseudo-Gnostic movement which thrived in Southern Europe, particularly in northern Italy and southern France, between the 12th and 14th centuries. Denounced as a heretical sect by the Catholic Church, its followers were attacked first by the Albigensian Crusade and later by the Medieval Inquisition, which eradicated the sect by 1350. Many thousands were slaughtered, hanged, or burnt at the stake, sometimes without regard for age or sex.
Gnosticism is a collection of religious ideas and systems that coalesced in the late 1st century AD among Jewish and early Christian sects. These diverse groups emphasized personal spiritual knowledge (gnosis) above the proto-orthodox teachings, traditions, and authority of religious institutions.
The Gospel of John is the fourth of the New Testament's four canonical Gospels. It contains a highly schematic account of the ministry of Jesus, with seven "signs" culminating in the raising of Lazarus and seven "I am" discourses culminating in Thomas's proclamation of the risen Jesus as "my Lord and my God". The gospel's concluding verses set out its purpose, "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name."
Mary Magdalene was a woman who, according to the four canonical gospels, traveled with Jesus as one of his followers and was a witness to his crucifixion and resurrection. She is mentioned by name twelve times in the canonical gospels, more than most of the apostles and more than any other woman in the gospels, other than Jesus's family. Mary's epithet Magdalene may be a toponymic surname, meaning that she came from the town of Magdala, a fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee in Roman Judea.
The Parable of the Pearl is one of the parables of Jesus Christ. It appears in Matthew 13 and illustrates the great value of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Judas Iscariot was, according to Christianity's four canonical gospels, one of the original Twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ. Judas betrayed Jesus to the Sanhedrin in the Garden of Gethsemane, in exchange for 30 pieces of silver, by kissing him on the cheek and addressing him as "master" to reveal his identity in the darkness to the crowd who had come to arrest him. In modern times, his name is often used synonymously with betrayal or treason.
The Great Apostasy is a concept within Christianity to describe a perception that mainstream Christian Churches have fallen away from the original faith founded by Jesus and promulgated through his Twelve Apostles.
Babylon the Great, commonly known as the Whore of Babylon, refers to both a symbolic female figure and a place of evil as mentioned in the Book of Revelation of the New Testament. Her full title is stated in Revelation 17:5 as "Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth".
Antinomianism is any view which rejects laws or legalism and argues against moral, religious or social norms, or is at least considered to do so. The term has both religious and secular meanings.
The purpose of this timeline is to give a detailed account of Christianity from the beginning of the current era (AD) to the present. Question marks ('?') on dates indicate approximate dates.
Most scholars who study the historical Jesus and early Christianity believe that the canonical gospels and the life of Jesus must be viewed within their historical and cultural context, rather than purely in terms of Christian orthodoxy. They look at Second Temple Judaism, the tensions, trends, and changes in the region under the influence of Hellenism and the Roman occupation, and the Jewish factions of the time, seeing Jesus as a Jew in this environment; and the written New Testament as arising from a period of oral gospel traditions after his death.
John 3:16 is the sixteenth verse in the third chapter of the Gospel of John, one of the four gospels in the New Testament. It is one of the most popular verses from the Bible and is a summary of one of Christianity's central doctrines—the relationship between the Father (God) and the Son of God (Jesus). Particularly famous among evangelical Protestants, the verse has been frequently referenced by the Christian media and figures.
The authorship of the Johannine works has been debated by biblical scholars since at least the 2nd century AD. The debate focuses mainly on the identity of the author(s), as well as the date and location of authorship of these writings.
The Gospel of Judas is a non-canonical Gnostic gospel. The content consists of conversations between Jesus and Judas Iscariot. Given that it includes late 2nd-century theology, it is widely thought to have been composed in the 2nd century by Gnostic Christians. The only copy of it known to exist is a Coptic language text that has been carbon dated to 280 AD, plus or minus 60 years. It has been suggested that the text derives from an earlier manuscript in the Greek language. An English translation was first published in early 2006 by the National Geographic Society.
In Christian eschatology, historicism is a method of interpretation of biblical prophecies which associates symbols with historical persons, nations or events. The main primary texts of interest to Christian historicists include apocalyptic literature, such as the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. It sees the prophecies of Daniel as being fulfilled throughout history, extending from the past through the present to the future. It is sometimes called the continuous historical view. Commentators have also applied historicist methods to ancient Jewish history, to the Roman Empire, to Islam, to the Papacy, to the Modern era, and to the end time.
Criticism of the Bible refers to a variety of criticisms of the Bible, the collection of religious texts held to be sacred by Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and other Abrahamic religions. Criticisms of the Bible often concern the text’s factual accuracy, moral tenability, and supposed inerrancy claimed by biblical literalists. There remain questions of biblical authorship and what material to include in the biblical canon.
The doctrine of the Trinity, considered the core of Christian theology by Trinitarians, is the result of continuous exploration by the church of the biblical data, thrashed out in debate and treatises, eventually formulated at the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325 in a way they believe is consistent with the biblical witness, and further refined in later councils and writings. The most widely recognized Biblical foundations for the doctrine's formulation are in the Gospel of John, which possess ideas reflected in Platonism and Greek philosophy.
Elvissey (1993) is a Jack Womack science fiction novel, one of his Dryco series, set in a dystopian 2033 CE. This fictional universe is dominated by Dryco, a Machiavellian multinational corporation which pursues its plans for global domination of its world, amidst runaway climate change, unstable weather patterns and rising sea levels, which threaten to eventually inundate old New York. It won a Philip K. Dick Award in its year of publication.
Serpents are referred to in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The symbol of a serpent or snake played important roles in the religious traditions and cultural life of ancient Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan. The serpent was a symbol of evil power and chaos from the underworld as well as a symbol of fertility, life, healing, and rebirth.
A biblical canon is a set of texts which a particular Jewish or Christian religious community regards as part of the Bible.
