Literature / Reach for the Skies

"The tale will cover an indefinite amount of time, and have some strange, but hopefully plausible, combinations of technology and engineering. The gilded age will change course, and while Europe goes on dismissing the rude bumpkins of the USA as unimportant in the game of empires, the United States has a new goal: NEVER AGAIN will the country be helpless when rocks plummet from the sky."

— NHBL, explaining the premise of the story

The year is 1876. The United States is expanding westward. Technological and industrial progress are changing both America and the world as a whole. In Washington, President Grant struggles to prevent the death of Reconstruction as his presidency nears its end. As the USA approaches its centennial, all seems more or less normal.

Naturally, it's at this point that, by pure chance, a small asteroid collides with the Earth, blasting a two-mile-wide crater into the White Mountains of New Hampshire and wiping out the town of Lincoln.

As the dust settles (metaphorically and literally), changes ripple across the country. The State of New Hampshire's response to the emergency leads to the creation of a new kind of fighting force. Grant's leadership during the crisis leads to political changes that start small, but may well have major ramifications down the line. The Dartmouth College professor who was the first to understand what had happened finds himself becoming a figure of some importance - and his daughter is inspired to seek a way to reach the stars.

The United States of America has a new question on its mind: "If this happens again... how are we going to prevent it?"

Welcome to the world of Reach for the Skies: A Space Mad USA in 1876, an Alternate History Web Original series posted by user "NHBL" on the AlternateHistory.com forums. The premise is straightforward: in 1876, an asteroid impact motivates the USA to start heavily researching space, and thus rocketry, several decades earlier than OTL. They're limited by the technology of the time, but the development of technology, and of geopolitics, will over time be significantly altered as a result of America's newfound interest in space.

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Reach for the Skies provides examples of:

• Action Girl: Any of the female New Hampshire Rangers, but especially Christine Peckham.
• Alternate Techline: After only a few years, Lynn Houston is leading a revolution in rocketry, and the demand for better number-crunching devices to do the math needed for rocket science and asteroid tracking has spurred renewed interest in the likes of the Difference Engine. The USA's newfound space obsession is also going to affect the progress of astronomy as a science - America has already become one of the world's biggest buyers of telescopes.
• Apocalypse How: Class 0 - Societal Disruption, Local Area. The town of Lincoln is completely annihilated, but the rest of New Hampshire is able to get back to normal. The cultural impact, on both the state and the nation, is a very, very different story - and thereby hangs the tale.
• Apocalypse Wow: At the time, the explosion caused by the Lincoln Impact is the largest ever recorded. It's actually large enough to produce a mushroom cloud, which multiple characters are duly impressed by.
• Arc Words: "Marching to the sound of the guns" comes up multiple times in reference to the Rangers.
• Arch-Enemy: The Rangers have two main nemeses: the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who are often hired to cover up the corruption the Rangers are trying to root out (and who do not like Christine Peckham), and the Southern Confederate revivalists, who hate them both for being Yankees and for their egalitarian nature (the New Hampshire Rangers are famous for allowing women and non-whites into their ranks and treating them equally so long as they prove themselves).
• Big Badass Battle Sequence: The Battle of Case Shot Hill. The New Hampshire Rangers, and the Louisiana Rangers they've been training, defending the plantation they've turned into a training camp/fortress against several hundred angry neo-Confederates. Despite significant casualties, the Rangers successfully defeat the assault.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Played for Drama. Ulysses S. Grant is not cut out for politics at all, and he knows it. But when leadership is needed in an emergency - such as an asteroid impact - he immediately takes charge and provides that leadership. Those who served under him in the Civil War take notice:
  "That wasn't President Grant, the politician. General Grant is back."
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The term "cosmonautics" is used for what we'd commonly call astronautics - to quote The Other Wiki, "the theory and practice of travel beyond Earth's atmosphere into outer space".
  • Mars' moons, which were discovered in 1877, are also named differently: rather than Phobos and Deimos, they are Romulus and Remus. Thanks to some popular dime novels on the subject of aliens, "Romulans" become a go-to alien adversary in early science fiction, much like how OTL uses the idea of Martians. ^note The obvious Star Trek reference is likely intentional on NHBL's part.
  • Barringer Crater is discovered by someone else, so in this timeline, it's called Macmillan Crater.
  • When a rocket explodes, or otherwise catastrophically fails, it's called "jigsawing," because you have to piece the rocket together like a jigsaw puzzle afterwards.
  • Instead of "Ignition" or "Liftoff," the signal people use when they're launching a rocket is "Contact!"
• Call of the Wild Blue Yonder: A recent subplot involves Dartmouth students experimenting with manned gliders.
• Colony Drop: A (canonically, at least) natural and unintentional example is what kicks off the plot: somewhere, somehow, long ago, an asteroid was set on an orbit that, on June 6th, 1876, resulted in it falling on New Hampshire.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Social attitudes towards women and ethnic minorities in 1870s-1880s America are about what you'd expect, though the success of the Rangers has begun to change that - indeed, women end up getting the vote in New Hampshire half a century ahead of schedule.
• Different World, Different Movies: The USA's space mania has resulted in Science Fiction dime novels taking off in a big way.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: General Buller pretty much accidentally invents Special Forces several decades early in founding the New Hampshire Rangers. The pulp fiction of the time loves them.
• Gatling Good: The original Gatling Guns are put to good use by the Rangers at the Battle of Case Shot Hill.
• The Gilded Age: The story opens in 1876, and is currently updated as far as 1879.
• Good with Numbers: One of the reasons Lynn Houston makes such a good rocket scientist is that she's very good with numbers: she's been working on Fermat's Last Theorem in the past, and can tutor college students in calculus, nonlinear algebra, Fourier transforms and non-Euclidean geometry.
• Government Agency of Fiction: After the asteroid impact, Grant founds a new branch of the US government: Skywatch, whose responsibility is to detect, and if possible prevent, further threats from above.
• Gratuitous German: Following a mishap with a glider, a first-year German student at Dartmouth and one very unfortunate pig, any animal being used as a test subject for a flight experiment is known as a Luft.
• Gratuitous Greek: Quite a lot of terminology relating to the Difference Engines is in Greek.
• Just Think of the Potential!: The Navy is very interested in the possible applications of the technology Lynn Houston and the rest of the Dartmouth College Department of Cosmonautics and Aeronautics are working on, such as gyroscopes and rocket propulsion.
• Kukris Are Kool: Rangers have a fair amount of leeway in their choice of weapons. It is noted that one of them wields a kukri.
• No One Gets Left Behind: Whether alive, wounded or dead, the New Hampshire Rangers are absolutely insistent on this.
  Fifty Rangers had met the enemy at Case Shot Hill, and fifty Rangers were going home.
• One-Man Industrial Revolution: Averted. Lynn is no Omnidisciplinary Scientist, and even the advances she makes in her field, while undeniably major and impressive, are limited by the technology and resources of her era.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The Rangers started as this. Experience is rapidly turning them into a Badass Army.
• Rank Up: After the Rangers' Captain is killed during the Battle of Case Shot Hill, Christine Peckham, then a Lieutenant, temporarily takes command. She succeeds in leading the surviving Rangers to victory, and is thus fully promoted to Captain afterwards.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Richard Buller, Adjunct General of New Hampshire, proves himself one in the immediate aftermath of the impact. When he realizes that the governor was in the impact zone and the rest of the state government's out of town, he decides "Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!" and mobilizes the militia to respond to the crisis immediately, indirectly founding the Rangers in the process.
• Redshirt Army: The neo-Confederates are actually called "Redshirts" in some cases, since they really do wear red, and ITTL they live up to the meaning of the trope by dying in droves to Case Shot Hill's Gatling guns.
• Regional Redecoration: The impact leaves a two-mile-wide crater where Lincoln, New Hampshire used to be. Afterwards, the Crater is filled in by nearby rivers and creeks and becomes a lake. The area later becomes New Hampshire's first state park.
• Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: The 19th-century equivalent - the "Redeemers," bands of Southern men who mostly didn't fight in the Civil War, but who resent Reconstruction and wish the Confederacy had won - figure heavily in the story thus far. Needless to say, they are very much Politically Incorrect Villains and considered fair game by most Yankees.
• Science Hero: Lynn Houston, one of the main protagonists of the story. College-age genius, fiercely independent (especially considering she's a young woman in the 1870s), and America's first rocket scientist.
• Shown Their Work: NHBL clearly does their research when it comes to the time period, the local geography and the relevant science.
• Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness: Speculative Science with a twist. Everything remains firmly within the boundaries of the laws of physics... but since it's the 19th century, our heroes don't necessarily know what some of those laws are. The Michelson-Morley experiment is a plot point, and its results produce considerable confusion when they show that the hypothesized luminiferous aether has no observable effect on the speed of light. This is of course because there's no such thing, but Lynn and co. haven't figured that out yet.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Naturally, not all of Lynn and Professor Houston's rocket experiments go well. The Cosmonautics Department quickly learns the value of proper shielding.
• Teen Genius: Lynn Houston. Even before the asteroid, she's recognized as a scientific and mathematical prodigy, and her newfound focus on space and how to get there actually disappoints some people because it means she'll give up trying to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. Many, if not most, of the college students she effectively teaches at the Cosmonautics Department are older than she is.
• Training the Peaceful Villagers: A variation - Louisiana decides it wants its own Rangers, so the New Hampshire Rangers go south to train them. They're subsequently put to the test when the neo-Confederates attack the bootcamp at Case Shot Hill.
• The Tunguska Event: Confirmed by Word of God to be happening on schedule in 1908, currently a few decades in the future of the TL. It will be the entirely mundane asteroid impact we know it to be in real life, but it will also lend America's concerns about asteroids a lot more international credibility.
• Weirdness Magnet: Things just happen to Dartmouth College's wind tunnel. At least one pair of students have been caught Making Love in All the Wrong Places in it, and a squirrel was accidentally turned into Ludicrous Gibs by the fan.
• The Wild West: A subplot occurs out west at one point, surrounding the discovery of Macmillan Crater (OTL Barringer Crater). Understandably, given recent events ITTL, it incurs a fair amount of interest.
• Working-Class Hero: Jason Niles is an ordinary locomotive driver on the Franconia Notch Express who happens to be heading a train bound for Lincoln when the asteroid hits. He does everything he can to help the passengers on his train in the aftermath, along with anyone else displaced by the impact, and ends up becoming a leading figure in the village of Matley's Crossing, the closest surviving town to the Crater.