Light synthesis.
Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.
—Karl Kraus
Those days I don’t want to be Avram Davidson when I grow up, I want to be Kenneth Hite. A prolific author, editor, and designer in the benighted backwater of the gaming industry, his Suppressed Transmissions columns are the ne plus ultra for parahistorical High Weirdness. They are available online through the auspices of Steve Jackson’s Pyramid magazine, and access to five years’ worth of Hite archives is itself worth the $20 price of admission. He recently (okay, back in May; I’ve been busy) celebrated his 200th column with a boggling stunt: using little more than chutzpah and silly string, he tied together all two hundred of his columns—reality quakes, Roswellian interventions, Florentine superheroes, timetravelling supercops, Lovecraftian glosses, steam-powered airship empires, qlippothic ultraterrestrials, paramilitary Shakespearean dramaturgy, Fortean bestiaries, Clio’s nightmares, and the occasional UFO—into a monstrously encyclopedic timeline, the backbone continuity of the best Out There conspiracythink soap opera comic book epic that never was. A taste, a generous (if scattershot) taste:
1588: Another major nexus battle, as MI-∞ throws all its resources including a secretly resurrected Arthur and a dramaturgical inversion ritual into defeating the Spanish Armada in all timelines. Various Armadas receive Reptoid, Sphinx, or ZSS aid. A covert Strike Force Chronos team covers Dee’s back, keeping the Lemurians, the nanotech swarms, and less categorizable things at bay. During the commotion, Spring-Heeled Jack slips into reality.
1776: Masonic Civil War erupts between the Washington and Weishaupt factions. The Reptoid-backed Weishaupt faction mounts an internal coup against Dee that replaces MI-∞ with the Occult Empire. During the struggle, the RCS sets up Reality Cornwallis as a fallback, but the American Templars soak 1776 in mythic energies from their limitless Arcadian cornucopia.
1780: It is a dark time for the rebel alliance; the Occult Empire shrouds the skies of America. An elite Strike Force Chronos team flies through a trench in reality to remove the Occult Empire before it existed, leaving only an acausal eclipse over New England on May 19.
1859: To contain Dixie, Argus is forced to confirm MI-∞ agent of influence Joshua Norton as Emperor of America. The planet Vulcan enters our reality, setting off a cosmic struggle between the Sphinxes and MI-∞ over its existence; the battle spreads back in time to spark a covert space race, remove the Earth from Saturn’s orbit, and launch Monstrator.
1909: Weak between two huge impacts, reality folds back to the 1854 splashback under a Futurist assault eventually contained by Rosicrucian art historians.
1938: An astral Martian invasion nearly breaks into our reality through newly-opened Kirlian space, but is contained at the last minute inside Orson Welles’ radio broadcast. The Occult Empire makes a comeback bid by creating the Waste Land in Cleveland, but Eliot Ness’ myth is too strong for it. In the chaos, the Kriegsmarine and Ahnenerbe “stake out” an eimically-secure fastness in Neuschwabenland for the Antarctic Space Nazi Refuge.
2000: Probably unrelated to the bike controversy, a planetary alignment causes a catastrophic Pole Shift; history restored from backup on January 1, 2001. American Presidential election files corrupted in restore, which takes four tries to get right.
If you’re not up for reading them online, then I’ll point you to the first two collections of his columns, available directly from the publisher. Hie thee hence, and here endeth the plug.
Commenting is closed for this article.
