The Inevitable Team-Up: Batman and Abraham Lincoln
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I wonder what happened in parallel universe 5501 after Batman’s encounter with Abraham Lincoln. Would we have avoided what we now face?
Of course, this raises the question … if he was such a Southern patriot, why didn’t Booth share all that high-tech weaponry with the Confederate Army? Pickett’s Charge might have succeeded if those Confederates had been wearing that steampunk armor, not to mention some of those suits could have come in handy in breaking the siege of Vicksburg…
I bet Harry Turtledove never even dreamed of this one.
I think we’re living in parallel universe 5501 right now. It might explain a lot of what’s going on.
“Would we have avoided what we now face?”
Lincoln living would have massively impacted Reconstruction and all subsequent US history. No doubt we would be facing challenges now, but they would probably be different ones.
“Pickett’s Charge might have succeeded if those Confederates had been wearing that steampunk armor, not to mention some of those suits could have come in handy in breaking the siege of Vicksburg”
True Tommy. We can only assume that John Wilkes Booth was in cahoots with an evil scientific genius, perhaps the immortal Vandal Savage, or an ancestor of Lex Luthor of that parallel Universe, or that steampunk technology was fairly common and that both sides utilized it. Hmmm, I can see the alternate science fiction novel title now: The Blue, the Gray and the Steampunk!
“I bet Harry Turtledove never even dreamed of this one.”
He came close in Guns of the South WK, with time traveling Afrikaners supplying the Confederate Army with AK-47’s, so the Boers in the future would have an ally in the Confederacy. Robert E. Lee, learning of the plan to alter history, turns the tables on the Afrikaners as second President of the Confederacy by pushing through the Confederate Congress a plan for gradual compensated emancipation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guns_of_the_South
“I think we’re living in parallel universe 5501 right now. It might explain a lot of what’s going on.”
Larry, in recent years I have often felt like we were living through a badly written episode of either the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits.
Reminds me of some of the lines from the classic SNL sketch “Civil War Memories”:
“General Lee was nobody’s fool! I remember he said to the troops, “Boys, ask not what your country can do for you, ’cause the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. I have a dream!” So, when Lincoln heard that, he was, like, “I better hightail it to Charleston, ’cause it’s time for one of my Gettysburg addresses….”
“And the number of casualties was staggering, right? But it was worse for the South, ’cause the North started getting help from these alien spaceships, right? And no martian’s gonna hold off against those space torpedos. Fuggidaboutit! Right? Ohhh! ”
“And then this southern guy plugged this Nazi guy in a headlock! And started pounding him! Bam! Bam bam bam bam!!”
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/94/94gcivilwar.phtml
My favorite SNL alternate history skit Elaine was “What if Napoleon had a B-52 at Waterloo?”