FAN #232: "Strange Bedfellows" by Johnny Pez

Up today at the Sobel Wiki, along with articles on Clem Brook, the New York Herald, and Starkism, are two more For All Nails vignettes.  First is my own #232: "Strange Bedfellows", a sequel to my #217: "When Love Comes to Town" (and a prequel to David Mix Barrington's #233: "Shootout at Black Rock").  Next sees the first vignette by Andrew Barton, a late arrival to the FAN Cabal, #264: "Rising Moon and Falling Star", featuring Quebecois fantascience writer Alan Fairfax.

As I've noted before, tt was Andrew's posting of the 301st FAN vignette on his blog Acts of Minor Treason in March 2010 that started the For All Nails revival that has since spawned 12 additional vignettes by four different authors, with more on the way.  I found Andrew's vignette six months after he posted it; a Google search for Ezra Gallivan led me there, ten days after the founding of the Sobel Wiki.  The timing was not coincidental; after I created the Ezra Gallivan article, I was curious to know where it would show up on a Google search, and Andrew's vignette was the tenth search result.

I'll also take this opportunity to note that I coined the word "fantascience", the Sobel Timeline's name for science fiction.  I picked the word for the sake of its abbreviation FS, a reversal of the common abbreviation for science fiction, and because I found it rather euphonious.  Incidentally, regular shw-i commenter Raymond Speer was of the opinion that the Sobel Timeline would have no analogue to our own Romantic period, and hence no development of an analogue (pun intended) to science fiction.  Speer's opinion met with some disagreement, and anyway, by then it was too late, fantascience was FAN canon.

"Strange Bedfellows" was first posted to the soc.history.what-if newsgroup on 13 April 2003, and "Rising Moon and Falling Star" on 8 September 2003.