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ESCHER!

Why Escher, you ask?

Because his attempt to portray the impossible mirrors

what we writers of time travel fiction attempt.

The Greatest Science Fiction/Alternate History Ever Written. Ok, it's in a niche of a niche of a tiny genre…but you won't find a better example of its kind anywhere!

It's an "alternate history" with some rather unwelcome "visitors."

It is a time of relative peace and tranquility on planet Earth, in the United States of America, but it's an Earth and an America subtly different from our own, something that only gradually becomes apparent.

Part I: Sllth

On Sllth, things are not so tranquil. A deadly plague has been rapidly destroying the entire species. Their only hope is for the healthy ones to emigrate. There is, however, only one way they can do this - by inserting themselves in an alien hosts at the moment of their deaths, deaths which they can not directly produce. They need a world in chaos, where deaths are many and frequent. One previous "Mission" was only partially successful. They now have one last chance?a planet they call Zapff.

Part II: Zapff

Douglas Nietzsche, a morose assistant professor of American history, who has never recovered from a breakup with the woman he loves, has immersed himself in alcohol and radically unconventional scholarship in an attempt to obliterate his anguish. Yet he remains a dedicated, albeit demanding teacher. He calls his work "speculative history." Thoroughly unheralded, his four controversial articles are preventing him from becoming tenured. They concern how horrible American history might have been, had it not been for certain key events and heroic individuals: one deals with the attempted assassination of Abraham Lincoln by his wife, Mary; another, with the Indian Confederacy that forced the Europeans into an equitable peace; a third, with the agreement between certain factions in the American government and Ho Chi-Minh; and the final one with another failed attempt to kill an American president, John Kennedy.

He discovers that one of his students, an exotic woman who has never managed to make it to even one of his classes, and the school janitor, who occasionally steals a nip or two from his hidden bottle of tequila, have developed an unusual interest in his writings. Nietzsche, along with the sympathetic chair of his department, Beth Bergman-King (?B.B. King?), discover that these two curious persons are actually desperate aliens who have replaced their human hosts.

The aliens are capable of changing history by switching time paths, and Nietzsche?s speculative histories become their working plans. They intend to alter human history so as to maximize chaos and human death, and thus maximize the opportunities for insertion. It is a matter of survival.

An unforeseen problem, however, (discovered by the exotic student) proves that the Mission is doomed from the start - the human?s consciousness will always re-emerge. She reveals everything to Nietzsche, so that together they can stop these fruitless and destructive alterations of human history. Unfortunately, they are not completely successful. In the process, however, the two of them become lovers. Since, inevitably, her human host will re-emerge, their love is also doomed. She can, however, as a final act of her love, alter the time path that made Nietzsche so morose to begin with, and so she does.

Part III: Zapff and Sllth

As a result of this one last alteration, human history is revised to what, at first, seems like our present reality. Yet, appearances, most definitely, are deceiving. At first, in order to resurrect the failed mission, a Sllthian zealot, in the guise of a human host, tries to murder Robert F. Kennedy immediately following his victory speech in Los Angeles. While this attempt is initially foiled, the Senator does in fact die a few days later. But the Sllthians, unaware of the tragedy that awaits them, are already in orbit around Zapff.