Forum:Birmingham's Latest

I was wondering if anyone has seen Birmo's latest, Without Warning. It's a world where the US just spontaneously vanishes off the face of the earth. This phenomonon called the Wave shows up over most of North America one day "without warning" and everyone within it is instantaneously killed. And it sticks around so people can't get in under it to investigate. It takes out all of the continental US except Seattle, most of southern Canada, northern Mexico, and everything in Cuba except, conveniently enough, Guantanamo Bay.

The day this happens is March 14, 2003. The date was chosen because there's a very large, intact, battle-ready US Army well outside the event horizon (Qatar) but they haven't invaded Iraq yet so they're not committed to one battle and can shuffle around at need. I guess they're in a similar boat as the MNF in the Axis of Time series: They can work closely with other governments, but their own chain of command stops at their field commander.

I bought the book yesterday because I had a coupon and no other books that interested me. I went back and forth on whether to buy it because the premise is so damned disturbing: It's the first AH set during my lifetime that I've seen, not counting Donut's tiresome half-baked Gore Stops 9.11 nonsense. So my first taste of how I'll be affected, personally, by changing history I watched unfold is. . . instantaneous death. Hot damn.

And I hate that it happened on 3/14/03. I remember that day well. March '03 was a very memorable month indeed for a wealth of personal reasons. You could almost write a soap opera about what was going on in my little world--and then halfway through our hero, his friends, his foes, all fall victim to a "rocks fall, everyone dies."

I'll give it a look anyway, though. I like Birmo. I've missed him since AoT ended--and by the way I'm disappointed that he broke a pledge he once made to continue the AoT universe in some way or other.

Oh, and I know Bush spent at least part of the weekend before the war started in the Azores. I'm not sure when he left North America or how to look that up, but I'm pretty sure he was there by the fourteenth. He should have survived Birmo's premise--a rather glaring error, yes? Turtle Fan 20:20, 18 March 2009 (UTC)