An Alternate History of the 21st Century: Stories

By William Shunn

“Shunn is a fine writer; ingenious, stylish, closely in touch with current global trends and expert in producing thought-provoking near-future SF, and at last he has a collection to show off that keen ability.”—Nick Gevers, Locus Magazine

A presidential inauguration in a fascist America eerily similar to our own. A man who broadcasts his every sense and emotion to a national audience. A space station unequipped to deal with alien visitors. Welcome to an off-kilter 21st century as only Hugo and Nebula Award nominee William Shunn could envision it.

From time travel to nanoterrorism, Los Angeles to Lagrange Point 2, the six stories in this collection span not just the length of a century but the breadth of a unique and provocative imagination. Step inside, settle in, and discover a world that’s always surprising but never unfamiliar. Discover the 21st century.

“This extraordinary book is a journey through our present. From the bitingly political to the sad and personal, and everything in between, this collection is the kind of thing that you can never unread, a book that will awaken you to the present all around you.” —Cory Doctorow

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Regard
• Release date: Sep 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781941928493

William Shunn

William Shunn is the author of the acclaimed 2015 memoir The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary. Since his first publication in 1993, his short fiction has appeared in Salon, Storyteller, Bloodstone Review, Newtown Literary, Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Realms of Fantasy, Electric Velocipede, and various anthologies and year's-best collections. His work has been shortlisted for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Association for Mormon Letters Award. His chapbook An Alternate History of the 21st Century appeared from Spilt Milk Press in 2007, and his novella Cast a Cold Eye, written with Derryl Murphy, came out from PS Publishing in 2009. He lives and writes in New York City.

Book preview

From Our Point of View We Had Moved to the Left

In the end I suppose it was nobody’s fault, but the temptation to assign guilt remains great even today. Taking all the blame for ourselves is especially easy, painfully so. We were only kids then, of course, but we erased a man’s career, a man’s life. And in the same moment, the face of an entire nation was changed. It leaves a powerful impression on a child to be part of such a thing.

Each time I learn of another quiet blacklisting, or disappearance, or imprisonment, I feel that same familiar burden of guilt drop onto my shoulders. The fact that it has become familiar does nothing to lessen its impact. It may be an irrational thought, but at such moments I can’t shake the feeling that, had that first incident with Mr. Kemmelman never taken place, we might have been spared all the madness that has followed.

I believe the others feel the same way. We rarely speak of it, but I see it in their eyes.

We are haunted, all of us, by a misunderstanding.

It happened on a crisp winter day back in ’09, the sun blazing high in a sky as blue as glacial ice. Thousands of shivering spectators thronged the Capitol grounds and the Mall beyond, spilling across Constitution Avenue on the north and Independence Avenue on the south. From our vantage to the left of the Presidential grandstand, the crowd seemed to stretch away like a vast sea, its surface crisscrossed by swells and surges that broke against the security cordon below us like surf against a desert island. The Washington Monument rose in the middle distance, stately and imposing even from Capitol Hill, while at the limits of our vision gleamed the quicksilver waters of the Potomac. History was in the making that day, bearing us along like the barges on that river—but only a few of those present, I am certain, could have foreseen the black waters ahead.

A stirring march from the Marine Corps Band, seated on risers to the right of the grandstand, blared across the Mall from floating loudspeakers arrayed in a broad grid above the crowd. Our choral director, Mr. Kemmelman, tramped back and forth through the snow before our own risers in a rhythm at odds with the music, his heavy face creased in a frown. Inscrutable Secret Service agents rimmed the cordoned area like stone sentries, on occasion speaking into their wrist radios, while harried White House personnel scurried to and fro on obscure errands. Mr. Kemmelman’s pacing hardly stood out amid all that organized chaos, but we in the choir sensed it keenly.

An intense, brooding cloud hung over our director. This, together with the fear, the respect, and even the love with which we regarded him, only tightened our own nerves like piano wire. I wish he’d sit down, I whispered. He’s making me nervous.

I was squeezed onto the risers between my friends Charlie and Hughie. Charlie nodded, narrowed his dark eyes, and said, Know what he looks like, Ben?

No, what?

A big melted candle. With legs.

He was right. We had seen old photographs hanging on the walls of Mr. Kemmelman’s office, portraying a large young man with a square face, its features blunt as if hewn from stone. Dark, slightly protuberant eyes lent that young man the deceptive aspect of a droop-lidded hound, and thick curly hair the color of peanut butter matted his head. In the time since those photographs had been taken, however, age had treated the man before us as flame might treat a fat tallow candle. With his chin pressed down to his collar, his jowls lay in folds about his jaw like layered wax drippings. His heavy cheeks sagged like empty pouches, and his sad, baggy eyes seemed in danger of sliding down his face. His forehead was smooth as bone, as if scoured clean by wind and rain. The effect of all this, together with his pacing, was one of subdued urgency. I imagined him anxiously trying to finish his day’s business before bubbling down into a shapeless puddle of wax.

A candle? I said. You think?

Yep, said Charlie, straightening the cuffs of his school blazer. Picture him with his hair on fire and you’ll see what I mean.

Hughie clawed at his face and rolled his eyes back into his head. "Help me, I’m melting, mellll-ting! Aaaah!"

Our little friend Slapjack craned his head around in the next row, giggling uncontrollably. Slapjack was younger than most of the choir and he never talked much, but he would laugh at just about anything. We were all fond of him, and we regarded him like a mascot. His giggles were infectious. I found myself laughing along with him—I and several other boys.

Mr. Kemmelman looked up sharply. Find your centers, gentlemen, he said in a stern hiss. This is the real thing. Ground yourselves. After a moment’s cold gaze he resumed his patrol, glancing around as if someone might have overheard the reprimand.

We lapsed into a guilty silence, chastened.

None of us was older than ten.

The band music ended with a sudden grand flourish, a wall of reverberation lingering in the air like a gunshot. As the white-gloved Marines snapped their instruments down to rest, a thunderclap of applause erupted from the crowd, sudden as the onslaught of a winter storm.

The sun had reached its zenith in the sky. I checked my watch. High noon.

Every administration places its own stamp on the inaugural celebration, some symbolic embodiment of its philosophies. In ’77, rather than ride in the Presidential limousine, Jimmy Carter chose to walk the full length of Pennsylvania Avenue as proof that he was one with the common man. Mario Cuomo kept the festivities in ’97 to a bare minimum, as befitted the dignity and solitude of the Presidency. And in preparation for Tuesday, January 20, 2009, John Isaiah Wheelock, champion of the New Right, had spared no expense in creating the most extravagant display of red-white-and-blue-blooded nationalism since the Bicentennial.

Which was where the Nathaniel Hawthorne Memorial Boys’ Academy Concert Choir of North Andelain, New Hampshire, fit into the picture.

On the Presidential grandstand, Chief Justice David Souter, swathed in black robes, stepped to the podium to say a few words in honor of Phyllis Whitely, the lame-duck president. I was distracted from Souter’s remarks, however, by all the Secret Service agents in sight, so self-possessed in their dark suits and sunglasses. It took me back to Hawthorne Memorial, the first Wednesday in November, when I had seen my first Secret Service agents in the flesh.

It was the morning after Election Day, and we were truant from choir practice. Four strong, we skittered down the halls of Nathaniel Hawthorne like a squad of miniature commandos, Charlie at point, Hughie and I in the middle, and Slapjack bringing up the rear, one hand over his mouth to stifle his giggles. A door creaked open somewhere in the dim, vaulted corridor, and we dodged around a corner, laboring to breathe quietly until we heard it close again. Slapjack’s cheeks were puffed out and he was nearly doubled over with the effort of holding his laughter in. When Charlie cuffed him on the side of the head, the poor kid almost lost control.

Not a peep, I told you, said Charlie. That dumb-ass giggling is going to get us all busted.

I shushed Charlie and his foul mouth as firmly as if we were in Sunday services. "You’re the one who’s going to get us all busted, I said, dragging us out of class like this." I had followed willingly enough, but now I was having definite second thoughts.

Yeah, said Hughie, but at least he’ll get us busted with some style.

Only a few minutes before, two men in dark suits had entered the choral chamber. We were rehearsing a chorale entitled Requiem, and Mr. Kemmelman was clearly unhappy about the interruption. After the men had spoken to him, though, he turned his baton over to the class president and accompanied the men out. He told us he would be back soon, and he instructed us to ground ourselves and keep on practicing as if nothing had happened.

Almost immediately, Charlie had grabbed my arm, said, Let’s go, Ben, and tugged me out the door along with him. Hughie had followed, with Slapjack trailing in his wake like a happy puppy. The choral chamber with its hundred-odd boys was in an uproar. It didn’t take a quantum physicist to know that those had been Secret Service agents.

We were all a little dazed in the aftermath of the general election, now that a possibility which had seemed so remote only six months before had actually come to pass. Running on his reactionary New Right platform, Senator Jack Wheelock, Hawthorne Memorial’s most distinguished alumnus, had edged out both the incumbent Democrat and her Republican challenger to claim the Presidency. Wheelock had served for years as a member of the Academy’s Board of Trustees, and we knew from dusty old annuals that he and Mr. Kemmelman had graduated together from Hawthorne in the class of ’68. These facts, plus the presence of men in dark suits, told us that our director’s old classmate may have dropped by for a chat.

Our brief rest ended. Charlie gestured for us to move on. This was not something to miss.

We flung ourselves down the next hallway and around another corner, where we halted at the sound of an outside door closing somewhere up ahead. A bank of tall Gothic windows overlooked the front grounds of the Academy, and through them in the distance we could see the thickly forested White Mountains with their fresh mantle of snow. Below us in the wide, circular driveway idled a shiny black limousine. Off to the left stood our chorister with his two escorts. One of them pointed him toward the limo.

Did you see the size of the iron that guy’s packing? whispered Charlie. "That was at least a .38 he had strapped in his armpit. One of those could put a hole in you