What is Double Victory

Welcome to an Alternative Future and a Changed Past

The Quick Explainer

DOUBLE VICTORY is an alternative history and accidental travel (time slip) fiction project divided between the Pre-Shift (near-future) and Post-Shift (full alternative history) timelines. It consists of a series of short vignettes and loreposts available on this substack and is intended to be a series of full-length novels. My main inspirations and a very short TLDR of the vibe of DOUBLE VICTORY are Red Storm Rising mixed with The Death of Stalin and Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War.

Book 1 is drafted, but I intend on re-drafting it in 2025 in light of the considerable number of improvements and scattered changes I’ve made on the back end since I first completed the draft in 2022. I also intend to go publicist hunting again in 2025 after moving to Los Angeles and having my life disrupted by a new job—and my sister starting and winning her fight against cancer.

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A Fuller Breakdown

DOUBLE VICTORY follows the events of the Departure—where a US Navy fleet from 2042 deploying to a Fleet Problem disappears in Puget Sound under a wall of fog and appears a hundred years in the past—June 4, 1942. This future fleet, the Composite Testing Force (CTF), brings over 80 vessels and 80,000 personnel back to the 1940s, irrevocably changing the Second World War and the course of human events.

These Sailors, Soldiers, aeros, and Marines—mostly millennials, zoomers, and post-zoomers—are the cream of the crop, those who have remained under arms after the conclusion of the Second Sino-American War in 2040. They have lived through two fractious decades of technological revolution, economic dislocation and expansion, and five major peer-to-peer wars (Russo-Ukrainian War, First Sino-American War, Gulf War IV, Gulf War V, and Second Sino-American War).

Like New York’s hottest club, DOUBLE VICTORY has everything: Whether it’s the industrial, social, military, and political revolutions that ignite after the Departure and unravel simultaneously amidst the War—or the little things like Henry Stimson trying a quesarito or Hap Arnold listening to an E-4 born in 2018 explain what “Amogus” is. I intend to cover the war from the Title Card fights like the Allied Invasion of Western Europe—which may not happen where we remember—or the Second Battle of Moscow to forgotten theaters like Papua and New Guinea and even new theaters.

Then, after the war—there is a completely different world and a very different history that follows as the failures and mistakes create a very different, three-way Cold War.

And for those wondering how and why the Second World War does not immediately end with the arrival of such an overwhelming force, I would have three things to say: politics, fear, and not everyone from the future is a good guy.

Double Victory

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Where to Start?

The vignettes can be read in any order—but it is best to start with either Departure Day (which covers the Departure from the point of view of a destroyer skipper and his XO) or Put the Sin in SYMBOL (which is the prologue of Book 1 and covers part of the Casablanca Conference). There is also a series of vignettes that take place during the Pre-Shift Timeline these include Do No Harm, Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!, I Wanna Be In The Cavalry, and How To Make a Butcher.

The lore posts likewise can be read in any order. We Didn’t Start the Fire and …But We Lived Through the Flames cover the broad strokes and major events of the Pre-Shift Timeline. Islands of Steel in a Sea of Time covers the ships and certain key naval officers in the CTF. Devil in the Details covers the Post-Shift but Pre-Departure alternative history (the timeline that the CTF travels into is itself an alternative history for reasons that will be made clear in the Books).