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Writing prompt:
An alien race discovered Earth, and the exploration party was immediately destroyed by a human aircraft
This was interpreted as an act of aggression and a declaration of war
For many Earth decades, the aliens have been at war with humanity and slowly losing
But the humans don't even realize they exist
East German poster, 1983
My mom has been looking for her dinner table chandelier. What with all the intergalactic war today, I'm sure she'll be pleased.
Kill By Numbers turns 8
On September 1, 2015, Kill By Numbers, the middle book in my space opera trilogy, was published by Skyhorse Books. All 3 books came out in the second half of 2015: The Dangerous Type in July, Kill By Numbers in September, and No More Heroes in November. My publisher called it the Netflix Effect, like when you discover a new TV show and binge-watch ’til you’re done. Kill By Numbers mixes a Philip…
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Biden says objects shot down over North America last week appear to not be part of China's spy balloon operation - CNNPolitics
President Joe Biden on Thursday said that the United States has no indication that the three objects shot down in North American air space a
Aliens
Marvel Studios’ Captain Marvel Intergalactic War Featurette
Marvel Studios’ Captain Marvel Intergalactic War Featurette
“This war is just the beginning.” Get a behind-the-scenes look at Marvel Studios’ Captain Marvel.
The featurette gives a glimpse of the Kree/Skrull war and what the Skrulls might be after. The film is written and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, with Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Jac Schaeffer also contributing to the…
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The story behind The Frihet Rebellion
The story behind The Frihet Rebellion
The Frihet Rebellion is my first book release of 2017 (and the first for over a year!). The story behind it, however, starts a long time ago, but still in this galaxy (sorry).
Way back in 1975 (when I was just 16) I wrote a short book called Space Revolution. A simple story of a nasty Earth government, a heroic alien and human aboard a superior alien craft, and a distant, rebellious princess.…
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After one false start I find that there is no other way to write about what is now called "The Intergalactic War" than as a fan. It is only from this perspective, that of one who thoroughly enjoys both the WBL and all the Intergalactic brands of wrestling, that I can fully unpack what has been an event nearly as old as the leagues themselves. An event that only a fan could have kept track of, and an event that changed the way wrestling worked, who wrestlers where, what it means to be a champion, and the very logic of wrestling storytelling itself.
The hardest part about tracing the history of The Intergalactic War is that a fair bit of it began in what is being called now the "Pre-Televised Era", a time before all the high tech recording software we have now, when the league was presented to us in fuzzy cellphone pictures, and when book keeping was done in spiral notebooks penned by drunken hands. It was in this, truly, dark age that the IWA and the WBL were formed, and it was in this age that we were introduced to their two promoters, owners and general managers Dean Waroff and Nick E. Nielsens. That these two should have run a wrestling promotion at all was the first thing that stretched credibility. Waroff dressed like a stoned nerd and Nielsens like a man who'd rather be dead, and of the two only Nielsens had any personality to speak of, he was excited and excitable almost too excited to be around the wrestlers, like in his heart he truly desired to be one of them, evidenced by the fact that he once joined a stable and often came to the ring dressed like a retired wrestler doing snack commercials. Nielsens became known for the insane stunts he would make wrestlers do, and the inane things he would do himself, it was as if his entire promotion was an avante garde performance art project, part wrestling, part rap battle, part Worldstar video. Waroff made a name for himself as the promoter who shamelessly borrowed talent from wherever he could find it and I am sure he would like us all to simply forget the days when he had people such as "Betty Anne Bongo", "Tiger Mask" and "Superman" himself (or at least had wrestlers pretend they were those people) signed to his roster. In time he managed to ween himself off the imagination of others, trading it for the purely occult and nearly demonic. His first bit of dabbling came shortly after The Wall was finally defeated, and needing a new ghoul to outdo the last one he introduced us to a ring of pure darkness with the All Seeing Eye as the only visible embellishment and he could be seen in videos consulting with The Shadow Man, a figure who has neither been referenced nor reappeared since those days. From then on Nielsens and Waroff would watch each other's league's closely to see what innovations and angles were taking place and proceeded to attempt to outdo one another. Their early rivalry finally came to a boiling point when Nielsens beat Waroff in ring with a flying hurricanrana, and thus the war began in earnest. Now you'll notice that all of this was initially farcical, Purple Robot Monster was still in the league at the time (he turned out to not be the real Robot Monster) as were several wrestlers in the IWA who were blatant comic book rip offs, both leagues reveled in pure silliness and had they stayed there an article like this could never be written and neither would they have enjoyed the longevity they now have, but two wrestlers changed everything.
Victor Yeminov, and The Third General debuted at almost the same time, The Third General appeared, faceless and wrathful, out of nowhere and declared truthfully (perhaps more than he realized) that a new era had begun, that a new world was dawning and that there was nothing that could be done to stop it. His alliance with Captain China (the weakest member of the stable) and The Wall marked a hard turn in the tone and character of the IWA. Similarly Yeminov appeared out of nowhere and with wrestling might and a grave seriousness that was utterly alien to the WBL at the time he and Buggy Ugly (the lesser of the duo by far) forced the WBL to swerve into the same lane that the IWA had just merged into. Their seasons of domination edged Waroff and Nielsens out of the spotlight, making room for the wrestler's personalities to shine, and laying the foundation for the concept that these leagues existed in a universe all their own, with it's own rules and peculiarities. Yeminov and The Third General created an atmosphere where people like undead CIA agents, Brain Wade, and Frances and The Mute could semi-logically exist and be treated as characters with real motivations and not as punchlines. And now that all these characters were free, for the most part, to interact and reference events beyond the wrestling ring and past events in their respective leagues it redefined what a match even meant and what a championship meant. It elevated the title to something quasi-mystic, where the Champion's hits hurt a little bit more, and whoever had the belt was more than just king of the hill but something more akin to king of the world. And losing a match before Yeminov was not the same as losing one after, because a victory for either The Third General or Yeminov had higher stakes, these two were not just here to wrestle (though their true motives remained and still remain ambiguous). Yeminov became so dominant that not a single wrestler on the WBL roster was able to stop him, and so Moses Gunsmoke left the IWA and took on the challenge. And a whole nation of change came from what appeared was just a bout. Gunsmoke tore down the dividing wall between the two brands, and became the first wrestler to make a crossover. His victory immediately inflamed the rivalry between Waroff and Nielsens that had previously been on the back burner. Gunsmoke was followed shortly after by The Unknown Soldier. And we now know that he was sent to the league by Waroff as the first insurgent in a plan to take down the WBL from the inside. With evidence, thanks to Gunsmoke, that the WBL roster was weaker than the IWA's, Waroff's lust for domination got the better of him and he began what would turn out to be the eradication of his own league.
By now how the IWA became the IFA is such common knowledge that we need not retread that territory, but what happened in-between is at least partially worth mentioning. It was during this interstitial period that Waroff utterly vanished from the leagues and was never to be seen in ring or in a promo (save for one clip taken from an unknown period in time) again. This disappearing would serve to wipe from memory the characterlessness of Waroff and replace it with the shadowy conspirator we know today. Waroff traded his visible presence for the garb of myth and became as shadowy as the wrestlers he invited to his leagues, Waroff became The Shadow Man. From this unseen realm Waroff served as puppeteer of the IFA and orchestrated a trade that sent Fire Flame and Faceless Magician to his league and Via Con Dios, Cole Heart and Heartless Kid into the WBL. Now all of this was seemingly benign up until the Faceless Magician began actually do magic in the IFA, first somehow turning Fire Flame into Immortal Flame, then summoning the Paranormal Belt, then The Pharaoh, and in his greatest feat opening wide the door to the Mirror Universe from which had come Holy Hogan, The Third General, The Shadow Man, and so on and so forth. The Mirror Mirror story-line, though not initially tied to the Intergalactic War served to provide explanation for all the faceless wrestlers that had been creeping into to the IWA just as how Professor P.Y.G's human cloning side story gave us an explanation for who Brain Wade really was (a HUMAN0 scientist) and both stories eventually tied into the Intergalactic War because Waroff was responsible and, as later revealed by Agent Q, demanded that The Faceless Magician open the door to the Mirrorverse. Likewise Waroff was working with HUMAN0 to create whatever serum was given to Oliver Pain in the mystery box ladder match. It was after that match, and just as the IFA was vanishing from the face of the earth that the war finally re-entered the wrestling ring. Heartless Kid, Cole Heart, Hitman Anderson, Via Con Dios, Unknown Soldier all at once activated and began to run roughshod on the WBL roster, and no amount of training on the part of 7 Mile Greg, could stop them. They soon found allies in the Circus Freaks and enemies in The Faceless Magician who had undergone a personality transplant upon leaving the IFA and began to act more like his mirror counterpart than his former self. All of this warfare climaxed at the recently ended Ragnarok, which saw the Intergalactic Alliance walk away with the WBL Championship and the Super Middleweight title. But the meaning of their victory is rather obtuse. You see prior to this both leagues underwent a long eerie silence, a silence that lasted nearly two years, broken only by spurious WBL updates and finally by an unforeseen message from Agent Q on Halloween regaling how he tracked down Waroff and evidently exorcised him after having caught him mid dark ritual in the deserts of the middle east. With the IFA gone, Waroff vanished yet again and according to Q, finally. The Intergalactic Alliance now exists as a rogue band of soldiers who have not yet received the message that the war is already over. Though the IFA won in terms of might, they lost existentially, now those last wrestlers that remain are, unbeknownst to them, simply members of the WBL roster, stranded, leagueless and leaderless. And the event that took years to execute and began at the dawn of the leagues themselves simply fizzled out with Hitman Anderson walking into the middle of the ring and making no mention of the war, of Waroff, of anything Intergalactic whatsoever. The IWA returned to television headed by Hai Tien's daughter, and though she makes mention of the WBL she too seems utterly clueless about Waroff's plans or the Intergalactic Alliance, and yet she still finds herself fighting HUMAN0, an organization that was born out the Intergalactic War.
From a story telling perspective the war ultimately hasn't delivered on the promises it’s made, simply because the league that was going to war with the WBL no longer exists, which sort of pulls the rug from under the feet of all the wrestlers who waved its flag, this is why the focus has now shifted on Greg against Order of the Beast as they represent a meaningful threat to the league in the place of the now defunct IFA and nearly disbanded Intergalactic Alliance. The War made the unspoken promise of once and for all settling the conflict between the IFA and the WBL in a wrestling ring. The whole WBL was going to band together and bring all their post-Yeminov power to bear against the a post-Third General IFA that had whole galaxies and alternate dimensions to recruit soldiers from. It was the promise of a world ending battle, and though we did receive more dream matches than we could have expected otherwise, the whole saga was retconned almost immediately after it took place with everyone turning their heads to face the new threat so fast it’s a surprise they didn’t get whiplash. Yet from another perspective The War was the most significant event in the history of either league, as nothing has shaped the way we now view wrestling so much as it has. In it Nielsens and Waroff managed to turn themselves into thought provoking characters, rising high above their previous station as mere circus ringleaders. The War also forced continuity onto what had been before just an assortment of unrelated nonsense taking place in the middle of a wrestling ring. It tied together all the disparate stories and backgrounds in the leagues and wove them together into a cloth that contains threads of everything that happened before (such as pre-IFA and WBL wrestler Great Warrior Nagata), happened in between (the non-wrestling adventures of Pyg) and will happen after. It was and is, the greatest narrative engineering feat to take place in either league and though it did not deliver, and could not possibly have, on all its promises, had it not been for The War With No Victor, we would not be looking so eagerly forward to what new stories will be told in the WBL/IWA Universe. And that too is why it is hard to tell the story of The War, because The War is the story, both leagues have up until now been about The War. Their competition and conflict framed the narrative of nearly every match and every pay per view in the modern era. We are on the other side of The War now, the IWA has returned and the WBL is at a crucial turning point. Whatever stories will be told in either league will always in some way owe a debt to The War, every heel will be seen in light of The Third General and Yeminov, every invasion angle will be compared to the Intergalactic one, and everyone who raises a championship belt will have to bear the weight of being either, defender of the league against threats that first proved real during The War, or of persecutor of the league, in lieu of the great terrors we saw during The War. From the perspective of a fan The War was the best possible thing that could’ve happened to an otherwise goofy pair of leagues, because it, at the very least, forced all that we had been seeing to make a modicum of sense, and like The Faceless Magician, made all that didn't disappear.
