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Description
This is based on the Hopkins Manuscript, by RC Sheriff en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hopk…

A great many plans were seriously upset when astronomy revealed in early 1938 that, for some inconceivable reason, the Moon was spiraling inwards towards the Earth. The various major governments agreed on a policy of keeping the knowledge secret from the public and building a series of underground bunkers under the pretense of a civil defense program, so some might survive in the best-case scenario, where the collision would be a glancing one rather than a head on impact.

Although all sorts of panicked war rumors started up as a result of the “dugouts for everyone” program, and panicked rumors about the actual problem as a result of amateur astronomers and simply people with the ability to spot changes in an object visually the size of a quarter held at arms’ length, the governments of North America and Europe (plus Japan) were able to largely suppress a panic (visual growth of the Moon was ascribed to new “atmospheric phenomena” until late January 1939, by which time the Moon had grown to an extent where it was no longer possible to BS about it. A reassuring and universal message emphasized the certainty of only a “grazing” impact, the quality of government preparations, and the certainty of human survival. (In the Soviet Union, the slant was a bit difficult, with the coming end of the Capitalist system and the universal triumph of Socialism as a result of the disaster being confidently predicted).

In Iran that February a new religious movement successfully toppled the Shah. Nobody paid much attention.

Although violence and panics and suicides abounded, a general collapse was avoided, perhaps in part due to the common populace in 1938 having only a vague grasp of the size of the Moon and planetary bodies and the consequences of collisions, lacking much in the way of “educational” TV of the “10 cosmic disasters that could kill us all tomorrow!” type. People not working full-time on shelters were essentially drafted to their jobs to prevent people from quitting in a sense of “there’s no point” and then having free time to get into trouble (nothing much changed in the Soviet Union, of course) and a program of complete censorship was established. Japan emphasized the Way of the Samurai, and Americans their Can Do attitude, as people joked about Roosevelt going from “Dr. fix-the-economy” to “Dr. stop-the-Moon.” The British Upper Lip and the racial superiority of Germans were loudly boosted.

Things began to go rather pear-shaped in much of Europe’s colonial empire. The Japanese largely put their war in China on hold, which just started a new round of fighting between the government and the Communists. Weak Latin American governments struggled to keep their heads above a rising tide of anarchy. As the Moon grew closer, the tides grew monstrously, and freak waves and storms increased to the point where by early April international shipping largely ceased.

May 3, 1939. The Moon and the Earth collide. Oddly, everyone doesn’t die. Oh, it’s unpleasant alright. The Moon landing in the North Atlantic sends a surge of ocean water up to the 500 foot contour all around the Ocean, washing away much of coastal North America, northern Brazil, west Africa, the Caribbean, Ireland, western France and most of Britain. Massive earthquakes rock the planet and a staccato of volcanic eruptions break out, while lesser but still huge tidal waves scour shores from Chile to China and South Africa to Siam. The Earth’s atmosphere is severely disrupted, with massive global hurricanes destroying all but the sturdiest structures where not protected by terrain, and the shock of impact sending massive pressure waves through the Earth’s atmosphere, with high altitude areas temporarily dropping down to conditions approaching empty space and some low lying areas experiencing pressure rises strong enough to burst lungs. Much of the area around the North Atlantic suffered through a pressure peak and trough that temporarily dropped air pressures almost as dramatically as conditions in Tibet and the High Andes. But the crust did not shatter, and the earth was not reduced to a molten mass: why?

Somehow the Moon’s path had brought it into contact with the Earth at improbably slow speeds, and when it had “touched down” in the North Atlantic, it proceeded to crumble like a great soufflé, like an enormous puffball mushroom: the Moon, it turned out, was full of holes and interior spaces, a brittle, fragile thing that crumbled while doing only minimal harm to the Earth: it made nonsense of all the calculations of its mass determined by the Newtonian equations, but there it was.

The initial great surges of the overflowing Oceans withdrew, although the seas remained rather higher than they had before, with the crumbled Lunar mass taking up so much of the north Atlantic: tens of millions in India and China and other such places who were unable to move quickly enough drowned. It would have been rather higher still, save for the fact, not discovered until much later, that the whole Atlantic basin was deeply depressed beneath the huge (if far less than expected) mass of the Moon. As the great mass slowly settled under the effects of gravity, colossal landslides released vast amounts of dust, darkening the skies and bringing lurid sunsets and sunrises.

Slowly, the world picked itself back up. Many of the deep bunkers in western Europe and North America had perished, the combination of earthquake and deep submergence below surging seas having been more than they could take: more than half the population of England died (higher-lying and rugged Scotland fared better) and in the coastal US states things were comparably disastrous (and rather worse in the separate-but-supposedly-equal bunkers built for the use of the black population): France was also hit hard, and Ireland almost wiped out. Germany was not quite so badly damaged, but the Low Countries and the northwest of the country were massively damaged, and the water flooded over Denmark to submerge the Baltic coasts. The massive atmospheric disruptions did terrible damage to those cities not submerged: in some cases failures to remove all combustibles before going underground allowed fire to finish the job hurricane wind had made a fair start on.

The initial efforts to rebuild and restore what had been lost were in many ways quite remarkable and even heroic, and some fine things were accomplished in the first year after the apocalyptic disaster. Still, even with all the work on their hands, the British stopped to worry about their Empire, access to which by sea was almost entirely cut off by the fallen Moon, and the news was not good: Canada was similarly cut off save for its west coast (and Lake Ontario was backing up), India had risen in a new Great Mutiny which seemed doomed to succeed with no backup from the mother country, and there were ominous rumblings from Africa. Of course, the other Powers were having their own difficulties: the whole Arab world seemed to have caught fire from rumors of a true Mahdi arrived to cleanse the infidel (hadn’t the Moon, sacred to Islam, fallen right atop the Christian powers), the situation grew more perilous by the day for the Italian forces in Ethiopia, and vague reports indicated the Soviets, battered by hurricanes and suffering grievously from shitty shelter design, had lost much of central Asia to revolt. A struggling, tidal wave-and-volcano battered Japan (Fuji had gone off and buried a third of Tokyo in ash) was struggling to hold on in Korea and was withdrawing its remaining forces from interior China (where tens of millions fleeing rising seas had thrown things into almost total anarchy) to try and restore order in Manchuria.

A hasty international conference established a division of the Moon between Canada, the US, and the nations of Europe (from which the Soviet Union was markedly left out) and gave the British a strategic “corridor” to the Atlantic which would allow the running of rails to new ports which would be established on the southern shore of the Moon. Unlike the Polish one, this annoyed nobody, since the Lunar body appeared to be a total wasteland and Britain’s promise of allowing everyone access across their “strip” seemed fair enough. The US, indeed, seemed largely uninterested in its piece and there was some talk that it might sell it off (at least once anyone had an economy functional to buy it). And there things stood for another year.

Rumors of a man known as “Selim” brought vague annoyance to European chanceries. He had, it was said, foreseen the fall of the Moon before even the earliest European scientists: he was a man who (although, blessed be Muhammad, not a prophet) God spoke directly to. In India he was seen as an incarnation of a God, it was said. He headed a movement which now extended from Turkey to east Turkestan, it was rumored. But soon European and American attention turned elsewhere: because examination and early exploration of the Lunar mass brought new news, news that once again made mock of scientific expectations. As flimsy and unsubstantial as the Moon has turned out to be, it was not made of chalk or cheese. No: it was, in fact, stuffed full of every sort of mineral wealth imaginable. Wealth that would provide a tremendous boost to the struggling economies of shattered Europe. Wealth which the “British corridor” blocked access to.

The various European governments began to clamor for a re-division of the Moon on the basis of where the richest resources were: agreement proved impossible. A British proposal to make the Moon a common European resource with riches shared proportionally by population went down in flames. A new US president (the horrible stresses of the situation had killed Roosevelt rather earlier than OTL) claimed the entire western half of the Moon on the basis of the US being as important as all of Europe west of Russia (this was largely ignored, since neither Europe nor America had the logistical capacity to launch a trans-Atlantic, or Trans-Lunar, campaign). After a quick coup, the new “emergency” British government of Major Jagger attempted to cow the other European nations by striking first and hard, to gain a decisive advantage from which place Britain could negotiate on favorable terms.

Two and a half years after the fall of the Moon war broke out, and the battered, depopulated, de-industrialized European nations braced themselves for further mass dying. Over the next three years the war of Britain Against Everyone soon turned into a resounding defeat for Britain, which was then followed by the war of Germany Against Everyone, followed before they could grasp a final victory by the Germany And Various Eastern European Nations Which Were Basically In the Way vs the Soviet Union war.

And then the Selimites attacked. Selim, a Persian Arab, a revolutionary, an anti-colonialist, somehow learned of the approach of the Moon years before its public announcement, perhaps from some clear-sighted amateur astronomical observer, and became a preacher of the apocalypse, a prophet and messenger claiming the Moon was being sent to destroy the European oppressor. He was all things to all men: in Islamic lands he spoke of the Moon as being sent by Allah, in India Candi and Chandra were driving their lunar chariot into the Earth for the sake of the oppressed Hindus, in some places the message was heard as the Moon itself being a liberating deity.

The fall of the Moon had killed vast numbers even where the great waves had not reached, by hurricane-induced flood, fearsome wind, suffocation and burst lungs, earthquake and volcanic eruption in places where neither money nor skill existed to carry out a proper program of shelter-building: even in the heart of Asia a quarter or more had died, especially among the young and the old. But it could be seen as a necessary price to end European domination, and indeed could be blamed on Europeans: little resources except massive forced labor were expended on making dugouts in the colonies, and the governments of poor and backward nations such as Tibet and Afghanistan and Iran and Thailand were not even informed beforehand of the situation, since they “could not be trusted” to keep the information secret until the appropriate time. (Neither had a lot of Latin American governments, but there wrath would be aimed in other directions).

His presence was magnetic, his capacity for extemporaneous bullshit magnificent. He started a crusade to unify the peoples of the East to finish off battered Europe, and while his core support was always in the Islamic lands between Egypt and India, Hindus, displaced Chinese, even African pagans would find their way into his armies. And when an already battered Europe had finished bleeding itself white, he struck. The armies of the East poured across the Straits of Gibraltar, surged across Southern Russia, and met the rising masses of North Africa in the Mediterranean. By the seventh year after the fall of the Moon, they had reached the English Channel.

It is now 1999, and the Millennium approaches.

A US effort to stop the invading armies in Spain failed due to the poor logistics arising from the destruction of almost all its port cities on the Atlantic and Caribbean sides of the nation, although many refugees managed to escape from Iberia. On the other hand, the Selimites ultimately failed to conquer the Soviets, who after horrendous human sacrifices managed to expel the “Crusade of the Oppressed” from the Ukraine and held on in European Russia north of the Caucuses region and northern Siberia, and took the Scandinavian peninsula under their protection. The “Empire of the Oppressed” fell apart rather swiftly after Selim’s death in 1963, the vast region from Spain and North Africa to NW India and China being essentially impossible to govern from one place, and while in life the role of Selim as an agent of God (not a prophet, mind you) and the Mahdi was accepted by most Muslims, the semi-divine airs he had taken on later in life did not appear so pleasing when taken up by his children: in the end the “true dynasty” of the “Slaves of God” only managed to maintain control in Iran, where they rule as the shadow of God on Earth, supposedly so filled with the spirit of Allah that they never appear in public without a veil concealing their features. In spite of their claims to rightfully rule over all the former lands conquered by Selim’s Crusaders, their empire has in fact continued to shrink, with their lands in North India and China breaking off, the Soviets reconquering some land, and most recently the fiercely Sunni Pashtuns breaking away.

It is not entirely without allies, though: Selim’s role as Mahdi and the greatest conqueror since Kublai Khan has made him a semi-divine figure in the imaginations of many, and his (various and often mutually contradictory) preachings have become the basis of a number of cults and new Islamic movements. Two major new Islamic Jihadist states have arisen in Africa on this basis, while more esoteric “Selimite” cults have extensive followings in India, China, and elsewhere, many of which recognize the holy nature of his descendants. (Yemen is dominated by its Shia population, which are allied against the House of Islam on the basis of it being the least bad option. )

The most important successor is the predominantly Sunni and Arab-Turk dominated state dominating most of Europe, which almost as arrogantly refers to itself as the “House of Islam.” It has dealt with overextension by ceding much control to regional “Marcher states” dominated by the various populations of “crusaders” which settled in Europe. (The Selimite era was one of great ethnic movement, and even today Iranian Central Asia has a very large number of Chinese, and there are great numbers of people of Indian descent living in Egypt). Although officially Islamic, the House of Islam is tolerant (race is in fact more important than religion, in some ways: Christian Africans and Arabs are higher-status than Christians descended from Europeans, and “ethnic” French and German Muslims often face a bit of a glass ceiling) and indeed has a sizable Hindu population. It leads a coalition of anti-colonial (and anti-US, but we’ll get to that later) nations, which contains a “sub-alliance” of south-SE Asian nations headed by India and mostly non-Muslim. Said sub-alliance is in turn allied with the Socialists (both India and Vietnam are quite Lefty, if not officially Communist), creating a bit of a love triangle, since the more solidly Islamic crowd don’t get along with Moscow at all.

Egypt broke away from the rule of Istanbul during a period of internal instability in the late 1970s: recapturing it is a major obsession of the current Sultan. (The House of Islam is in theory a Caliphate, but the throne remains empty until someone can be found worthy to fill Selim’s shoes: in the meantime, the Sultan, the powerful Military Council, and the Grand Assembly rule in his place).

Non-Christians now make up a majority of the population in large parts of Europe, programs of conversion and resettlement being pursued rather more vigorously by the House of Islam than its Ottoman predecessor. Badly depopulated (losses in the Lunar Wars in places approached Paraguayan levels of fatality, on top of the losses from the fall of the Moon), with a collapsed economy and a dispirited population, Britain offered little resistance to invading crusaders, which swept north as far as the Tees, but the lovely English climate in winter plus the lack of good looting opportunities eventually led the armies of the Oppressed, heavily engaged at the time with the Soviets, to largely give up conquest as a waste of time and withdraw, although further invasions and raids eventually led to the south of England to become a depopulated no-man’s land.

The United States, bitter at the fall of Europe, and traumatized by its losses, turned to political demagogues: in the end Christian nationalism of an aggressive sort won out, with the Selimites clearly the armies of Gog and Magog, the House of Islam the oppressive New Roman Empire, the fall of the Moon being the whole stars tumbling from the skies thing, and the Antichrist clearly being about to appear (Selim was of course the top pick for Antichrist until he was impolite enough to die). Today’s main political parties are the Angry Christian Party and the Crazy Ranting Christian party: Jews who don’t convert face a wide variety of restrictions and discriminatory practices, although nobody has as yet stuck any yellow stars on them (and of course they need to be kept alive until they can be resettled in Liberated Israel). Black people, suspected of having Anti-Colonial Selimite Inclinations, have remained segregated and oppressed, although they finally put an end to lynchings in the 1980s. Black Muslims are few and far between. Women have kept the vote, but morality is only just now edging out the 1950s. For some decades now the US has been preparing for the Final Battle, expanding where they can and supporting Christians (even some rather “iffy” ones) all over. With the approach of the millennium and fighting for control of the Moon heating up, it’s clear Armageddon is fast approaching: to many believers it cannot come too soon, for at home insufficiently “godly” people are increasingly clamoring for more freedoms and less austerity, while many US allies seem increasingly unreliable. In US-backed South China the old semi-Christianized elite is being replaced by an up and coming “Chinese nationalist” generation full of Buddhists and heathens which is uninterested in charging headfirst into the guns of the Istanbul Pact for the sake of US military plans. Australia has its own theocrat types, but they’ve never really forgiven the US for its various sins of action and inaction against the old British Empire, and Mexico remains a bleeding sore. At least Japan is quiet nowadays, and Korea is loyal and solidly Christian majority. (The US is seen by the largely non-Christian Istanbul Pact as successor to the old colonial powers, with plans to reconquer Europe, Africa, etc. They aren’t too far off, although the US tends to think of it as “liberation” rather than conquest.)

Japan had a bad time: it was for a while a US ally in their common effort to stabilize and de-Selimize East Asia, but in the end they fell out over influence in China, and over the US leadership being a bunch of racist dicks many of which felt Shinto was Devil-inspired: after the bloody war of 1966-68, it has been a US puppet, with interruptions for suppressing rebellions in 1971, 1982, and 1991-1994.

In South America a non-racist anti-US *fascism unites much of the continent under Brazilian leadership (in spite of their anti-Communism, they get along surprisingly well with the Soviets): the US tends to see them as part of the general pro-Selimite anti-colonial rebellion, while in fact as Catholics the Latin League is quite unhappy about what the House of Islam has been up to in Europe. They get along better with the Indian sub-block: India, which has managed to establish a working democracy, is in fact a favored destination of Latin American Oppressed Intellectuals. Some Istanbul thinkers worry about the possibility of S. Asia breaking away from their alliance entirely to form a new “triangular” alliance with the South Americans and the Soviets, although so far hostility and fear towards the US keeps the “anti-colonial” Istanbul block together.

Africa is a complex patchwork of remnant white footholds, new native regimes both secular and expansive religious autocracies, and some sheer chaos. Although Selimite armies never penetrated very far into the interior, the message of anti-colonial liberation swept the continent, and European colonial regimes cut off from resupply crumbled in most places: white Kenya hung on in the highlands for a while, as did pockets of French military control, but in the end only in South Africa did the local whites remain in charge: there was an attempted Selimite invasion, but their navy wasn’t really up to it yet, and with their failure to liberate Iberia the frustrated US turned to the salvation of South Africa (at least the white parts of it) with furious energy. Brazil managed to establish a working relationship with the ethnically mixed post-catastrophe elite of Angola, which has been drawn into the South American sphere, while the Soviets have strong influence at various points. The mellowing of US attitudes re Black People Who Revolted Against White People have allowed the US to expand its influence recently beyond the areas of depopulated coastline they initially seized, but relations with their African allies remain quite prickly.

The Soviets are a bit isolated outside the Socialist block proper, being extremely hostile to any form of organized religious “enthusiasm” and deeply xenophobic towards the invading “blackasses” to the south. The religious thing is a bit ironic, in that Soviet Communism has evolved even further in the direction of “secular religion” than OTL even as many of the actual principles of Stalinism have been discarded as impractical. In this wrecked, battered, ideologically nutty world their boast of being a “scientific” society is, however, probably truer than in most alternates. There have been some heroic efforts to deal with the after effects of the Moon fall, most notably the largest scale sea-reclamation projects on the globe, with much emphasis on helping out their Chinese ally regain some of what they lost to the Yellow Sea. (The US says they are doing it better, but from most people’s point of view they’re just imitating the Soviets).

Technology is generally retarded in this world, thanks to the horrendous initial losses in human lives and capital both cultural and industrial, the later Islamic (and odds and ends) conquest of Europe (there is in fact a decent Islamic/Middle Eastern scientific community in this world, really better than what the OTL Arab world has, but it’s no match for what was lost between Lisbon and Warsaw), and the rather anti-scientific attitudes of the US’s leadership after the period of political “experimentation” from 1942 to 1956. Although there have been advances over the 1930s in practical engineering, chemistry, agriculture, and a number of other fields, primary scientific research has been substantially retarded and while computers have been developed and are widely used by science and industry, they still run on vacuum tubes.

The effects of the fall of the Moon on the globe’s climate and geological stability continue. The absence of the tides and lunar cycles have caused massive die-offs of all sorts of coastal life forms, with still continuing and often unclear effects working their way through the global food chain. A number of large and not-too-numerous species went extinct in the violence of the Lunar impact. (On the positive side, the reduced human population means that there is more wilderness left – for now). Volcanic and earthquake activity remain elevated globally, but it’s the Atlantic where the real action is. The massive weight of the Lunar Mass lying on the thin Oceanic crust has cracked open the sea floor along the crustal plate intersections half the length of the Atlantic and west into the Caribbean and east into the Mediterranean. Huge lava flows are taking place down there, and innumerable new volcanoes have popped up like a particularly nasty case of acne, and much of the Atlantic has become contaminated by volcanic gasses, leading to severe drops in fish catches, and some scientists to mumble worriedly about “massive inversions” and “total deep water deoxygenation”. Above water volcanoes have burst into activity in south Italy, southern Spain, the Caribbean islands, and most notably Iceland, whose inhabitants have mostly evacuated by this point. Aviation has been retarded on both sides of the Atlantic due to frequent “don’t fly due to volcanic ash” emergencies. Dust and ash in the atmosphere, some volcanic, some from the collapsing slopes of the mega-mountains of the Lunar interior, make “years without summer” a recurring phenomenon: every responsible government stockpiles in advance in preparation for such events. Some scientists have predicted that the volcanic gasses going into the atmosphere, rather than freezing everyone, in the long run are more likely to bake everyone: most politicians don’t take this very seriously.

The most tense spot on Earth is the fallen Lunar body. Although the Muslims of the House of Islam do not consider the Moon quite as Allah-filled as the fanatics of Iran (let alone those cults who see it as an actual self-sacrificing deity) it is still Holy, and they have never been happy with the US presence in the western part of the Moon, but logistically difficulties made fighting over it difficult, and the leadership after the split with the Iranians was cool-headed enough to know the US was too strong to fight on its own doorstep. But the US has steadily expanded its mining operations and building access roads and railways, and in recent years has violated the unspoken pact with the Selimite powers, opening up new mining sites in the eastern half of the Moon. In response, US mines and transportation links have been increasingly been harassed by raiders, jihadists which the Istanbul government claims are purely “private” affairs motivated by US disrespect for the Moon.

This is an unfortunate case of people not really understanding each other. The Istanbul government thinks it is putting pressure on the US to withdrawn behind an agreed line of Longitude: the US thinks this may be the beginning of Armageddon.

Other important events are underway. In a deep lunar copper mine near Greenland, a miner has found an improbably geometric mass of ore. It will be a while before its artificial nature is determined. It will be longer before the artificial nature of the Moon is determined.

Under Iceland, pressure is building. It will not be long before the biggest blast since the last eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano takes place.

Another blast has already taken place somewhere in Siberia: it has been a long, slow path to get here (Stalin killing all those “deviationist” scientists didn’t help) but Soviet science has finally surpassed all the world. Soon, the time will come for the Revolution to expand again.

Description
This is based on the Hopkins Manuscript, by RC Sheriff en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hopk…

A great many plans were seriously upset when astronomy revealed in early 1938 that, for some inconceivable reason, the Moon was spiraling inwards towards the Earth. The various major governments agreed on a policy of keeping the knowledge secret from the public and building a series of underground bunkers under the pretense of a civil defense program, so some might survive in the best-case scenario, where the collision would be a glancing one rather than a head on impact.

Although all sorts of panicked war rumors started up as a result of the “dugouts for everyone” program, and panicked rumors about the actual problem as a result of amateur astronomers and simply people with the ability to spot changes in an object visually the size of a quarter held at arms’ length, the governments of North America and Europe (plus Japan) were able to largely suppress a panic (visual growth of the Moon was ascribed to new “atmospheric phenomena” until late January 1939, by which time the Moon had grown to an extent where it was no longer possible to BS about it. A reassuring and universal message emphasized the certainty of only a “grazing” impact, the quality of government preparations, and the certainty of human survival. (In the Soviet Union, the slant was a bit difficult, with the coming end of the Capitalist system and the universal triumph of Socialism as a result of the disaster being confidently predicted).

In Iran that February a new religious movement successfully toppled the Shah. Nobody paid much attention.

Although violence and panics and suicides abounded, a general collapse was avoided, perhaps in part due to the common populace in 1938 having only a vague grasp of the size of the Moon and planetary bodies and the consequences of collisions, lacking much in the way of “educational” TV of the “10 cosmic disasters that could kill us all tomorrow!” type. People not working full-time on shelters were essentially drafted to their jobs to prevent people from quitting in a sense of “there’s no point” and then having free time to get into trouble (nothing much changed in the Soviet Union, of course) and a program of complete censorship was established. Japan emphasized the Way of the Samurai, and Americans their Can Do attitude, as people joked about Roosevelt going from “Dr. fix-the-economy” to “Dr. stop-the-Moon.” The British Upper Lip and the racial superiority of Germans were loudly boosted.

Things began to go rather pear-shaped in much of Europe’s colonial empire. The Japanese largely put their war in China on hold, which just started a new round of fighting between the government and the Communists. Weak Latin American governments struggled to keep their heads above a rising tide of anarchy. As the Moon grew closer, the tides grew monstrously, and freak waves and storms increased to the point where by early April international shipping largely ceased.

May 3, 1939. The Moon and the Earth collide. Oddly, everyone doesn’t die. Oh, it’s unpleasant alright. The Moon landing in the North Atlantic sends a surge of ocean water up to the 500 foot contour all around the Ocean, washing away much of coastal North America, northern Brazil, west Africa, the Caribbean, Ireland, western France and most of Britain. Massive earthquakes rock the planet and a staccato of volcanic eruptions break out, while lesser but still huge tidal waves scour shores from Chile to China and South Africa to Siam. The Earth’s atmosphere is severely disrupted, with massive global hurricanes destroying all but the sturdiest structures where not protected by terrain, and the shock of impact sending massive pressure waves through the Earth’s atmosphere, with high altitude areas temporarily dropping down to conditions approaching empty space and some low lying areas experiencing pressure rises strong enough to burst lungs. Much of the area around the North Atlantic suffered through a pressure peak and trough that temporarily dropped air pressures almost as dramatically as conditions in Tibet and the High Andes. But the crust did not shatter, and the earth was not reduced to a molten mass: why?

Somehow the Moon’s path had brought it into contact with the Earth at improbably slow speeds, and when it had “touched down” in the North Atlantic, it proceeded to crumble like a great soufflé, like an enormous puffball mushroom: the Moon, it turned out, was full of holes and interior spaces, a brittle, fragile thing that crumbled while doing only minimal harm to the Earth: it made nonsense of all the calculations of its mass determined by the Newtonian equations, but there it was.

The initial great surges of the overflowing Oceans withdrew, although the seas remained rather higher than they had before, with the crumbled Lunar mass taking up so much of the north Atlantic: tens of millions in India and China and other such places who were unable to move quickly enough drowned. It would have been rather higher still, save for the fact, not discovered until much later, that the whole Atlantic basin was deeply depressed beneath the huge (if far less than expected) mass of the Moon. As the great mass slowly settled under the effects of gravity, colossal landslides released vast amounts of dust, darkening the skies and bringing lurid sunsets and sunrises.

Slowly, the world picked itself back up. Many of the deep bunkers in western Europe and North America had perished, the combination of earthquake and deep submergence below surging seas having been more than they could take: more than half the population of England died (higher-lying and rugged Scotland fared better) and in the coastal US states things were comparably disastrous (and rather worse in the separate-but-supposedly-equal bunkers built for the use of the black population): France was also hit hard, and Ireland almost wiped out. Germany was not quite so badly damaged, but the Low Countries and the northwest of the country were massively damaged, and the water flooded over Denmark to submerge the Baltic coasts. The massive atmospheric disruptions did terrible damage to those cities not submerged: in some cases failures to remove all combustibles before going underground allowed fire to finish the job hurricane wind had made a fair start on.

The initial efforts to rebuild and restore what had been lost were in many ways quite remarkable and even heroic, and some fine things were accomplished in the first year after the apocalyptic disaster. Still, even with all the work on their hands, the British stopped to worry about their Empire, access to which by sea was almost entirely cut off by the fallen Moon, and the news was not good: Canada was similarly cut off save for its west coast (and Lake Ontario was backing up), India had risen in a new Great Mutiny which seemed doomed to succeed with no backup from the mother country, and there were ominous rumblings from Africa. Of course, the other Powers were having their own difficulties: the whole Arab world seemed to have caught fire from rumors of a true Mahdi arrived to cleanse the infidel (hadn’t the Moon, sacred to Islam, fallen right atop the Christian powers), the situation grew more perilous by the day for the Italian forces in Ethiopia, and vague reports indicated the Soviets, battered by hurricanes and suffering grievously from shitty shelter design, had lost much of central Asia to revolt. A struggling, tidal wave-and-volcano battered Japan (Fuji had gone off and buried a third of Tokyo in ash) was struggling to hold on in Korea and was withdrawing its remaining forces from interior China (where tens of millions fleeing rising seas had thrown things into almost total anarchy) to try and restore order in Manchuria.

A hasty international conference established a division of the Moon between Canada, the US, and the nations of Europe (from which the Soviet Union was markedly left out) and gave the British a strategic “corridor” to the Atlantic which would allow the running of rails to new ports which would be established on the southern shore of the Moon. Unlike the Polish one, this annoyed nobody, since the Lunar body appeared to be a total wasteland and Britain’s promise of allowing everyone access across their “strip” seemed fair enough. The US, indeed, seemed largely uninterested in its piece and there was some talk that it might sell it off (at least once anyone had an economy functional to buy it). And there things stood for another year.

Rumors of a man known as “Selim” brought vague annoyance to European chanceries. He had, it was said, foreseen the fall of the Moon before even the earliest European scientists: he was a man who (although, blessed be Muhammad, not a prophet) God spoke directly to. In India he was seen as an incarnation of a God, it was said. He headed a movement which now extended from Turkey to east Turkestan, it was rumored. But soon European and American attention turned elsewhere: because examination and early exploration of the Lunar mass brought new news, news that once again made mock of scientific expectations. As flimsy and unsubstantial as the Moon has turned out to be, it was not made of chalk or cheese. No: it was, in fact, stuffed full of every sort of mineral wealth imaginable. Wealth that would provide a tremendous boost to the struggling economies of shattered Europe. Wealth which the “British corridor” blocked access to.

The various European governments began to clamor for a re-division of the Moon on the basis of where the richest resources were: agreement proved impossible. A British proposal to make the Moon a common European resource with riches shared proportionally by population went down in flames. A new US president (the horrible stresses of the situation had killed Roosevelt rather earlier than OTL) claimed the entire western half of the Moon on the basis of the US being as important as all of Europe west of Russia (this was largely ignored, since neither Europe nor America had the logistical capacity to launch a trans-Atlantic, or Trans-Lunar, campaign). After a quick coup, the new “emergency” British government of Major Jagger attempted to cow the other European nations by striking first and hard, to gain a decisive advantage from which place Britain could negotiate on favorable terms.

Two and a half years after the fall of the Moon war broke out, and the battered, depopulated, de-industrialized European nations braced themselves for further mass dying. Over the next three years the war of Britain Against Everyone soon turned into a resounding defeat for Britain, which was then followed by the war of Germany Against Everyone, followed before they could grasp a final victory by the Germany And Various Eastern European Nations Which Were Basically In the Way vs the Soviet Union war.

And then the Selimites attacked. Selim, a Persian Arab, a revolutionary, an anti-colonialist, somehow learned of the approach of the Moon years before its public announcement, perhaps from some clear-sighted amateur astronomical observer, and became a preacher of the apocalypse, a prophet and messenger claiming the Moon was being sent to destroy the European oppressor. He was all things to all men: in Islamic lands he spoke of the Moon as being sent by Allah, in India Candi and Chandra were driving their lunar chariot into the Earth for the sake of the oppressed Hindus, in some places the message was heard as the Moon itself being a liberating deity.

The fall of the Moon had killed vast numbers even where the great waves had not reached, by hurricane-induced flood, fearsome wind, suffocation and burst lungs, earthquake and volcanic eruption in places where neither money nor skill existed to carry out a proper program of shelter-building: even in the heart of Asia a quarter or more had died, especially among the young and the old. But it could be seen as a necessary price to end European domination, and indeed could be blamed on Europeans: little resources except massive forced labor were expended on making dugouts in the colonies, and the governments of poor and backward nations such as Tibet and Afghanistan and Iran and Thailand were not even informed beforehand of the situation, since they “could not be trusted” to keep the information secret until the appropriate time. (Neither had a lot of Latin American governments, but there wrath would be aimed in other directions).

His presence was magnetic, his capacity for extemporaneous bullshit magnificent. He started a crusade to unify the peoples of the East to finish off battered Europe, and while his core support was always in the Islamic lands between Egypt and India, Hindus, displaced Chinese, even African pagans would find their way into his armies. And when an already battered Europe had finished bleeding itself white, he struck. The armies of the East poured across the Straits of Gibraltar, surged across Southern Russia, and met the rising masses of North Africa in the Mediterranean. By the seventh year after the fall of the Moon, they had reached the English Channel.

It is now 1999, and the Millennium approaches.

A US effort to stop the invading armies in Spain failed due to the poor logistics arising from the destruction of almost all its port cities on the Atlantic and Caribbean sides of the nation, although many refugees managed to escape from Iberia. On the other hand, the Selimites ultimately failed to conquer the Soviets, who after horrendous human sacrifices managed to expel the “Crusade of the Oppressed” from the Ukraine and held on in European Russia north of the Caucuses region and northern Siberia, and took the Scandinavian peninsula under their protection. The “Empire of the Oppressed” fell apart rather swiftly after Selim’s death in 1963, the vast region from Spain and North Africa to NW India and China being essentially impossible to govern from one place, and while in life the role of Selim as an agent of God (not a prophet, mind you) and the Mahdi was accepted by most Muslims, the semi-divine airs he had taken on later in life did not appear so pleasing when taken up by his children: in the end the “true dynasty” of the “Slaves of God” only managed to maintain control in Iran, where they rule as the shadow of God on Earth, supposedly so filled with the spirit of Allah that they never appear in public without a veil concealing their features. In spite of their claims to rightfully rule over all the former lands conquered by Selim’s Crusaders, their empire has in fact continued to shrink, with their lands in North India and China breaking off, the Soviets reconquering some land, and most recently the fiercely Sunni Pashtuns breaking away.

It is not entirely without allies, though: Selim’s role as Mahdi and the greatest conqueror since Kublai Khan has made him a semi-divine figure in the imaginations of many, and his (various and often mutually contradictory) preachings have become the basis of a number of cults and new Islamic movements. Two major new Islamic Jihadist states have arisen in Africa on this basis, while more esoteric “Selimite” cults have extensive followings in India, China, and elsewhere, many of which recognize the holy nature of his descendants. (Yemen is dominated by its Shia population, which are allied against the House of Islam on the basis of it being the least bad option. )

The most important successor is the predominantly Sunni and Arab-Turk dominated state dominating most of Europe, which almost as arrogantly refers to itself as the “House of Islam.” It has dealt with overextension by ceding much control to regional “Marcher states” dominated by the various populations of “crusaders” which settled in Europe. (The Selimite era was one of great ethnic movement, and even today Iranian Central Asia has a very large number of Chinese, and there are great numbers of people of Indian descent living in Egypt). Although officially Islamic, the House of Islam is tolerant (race is in fact more important than religion, in some ways: Christian Africans and Arabs are higher-status than Christians descended from Europeans, and “ethnic” French and German Muslims often face a bit of a glass ceiling) and indeed has a sizable Hindu population. It leads a coalition of anti-colonial (and anti-US, but we’ll get to that later) nations, which contains a “sub-alliance” of south-SE Asian nations headed by India and mostly non-Muslim. Said sub-alliance is in turn allied with the Socialists (both India and Vietnam are quite Lefty, if not officially Communist), creating a bit of a love triangle, since the more solidly Islamic crowd don’t get along with Moscow at all.

Egypt broke away from the rule of Istanbul during a period of internal instability in the late 1970s: recapturing it is a major obsession of the current Sultan. (The House of Islam is in theory a Caliphate, but the throne remains empty until someone can be found worthy to fill Selim’s shoes: in the meantime, the Sultan, the powerful Military Council, and the Grand Assembly rule in his place).

Non-Christians now make up a majority of the population in large parts of Europe, programs of conversion and resettlement being pursued rather more vigorously by the House of Islam than its Ottoman predecessor. Badly depopulated (losses in the Lunar Wars in places approached Paraguayan levels of fatality, on top of the losses from the fall of the Moon), with a collapsed economy and a dispirited population, Britain offered little resistance to invading crusaders, which swept north as far as the Tees, but the lovely English climate in winter plus the lack of good looting opportunities eventually led the armies of the Oppressed, heavily engaged at the time with the Soviets, to largely give up conquest as a waste of time and withdraw, although further invasions and raids eventually led to the south of England to become a depopulated no-man’s land.

The United States, bitter at the fall of Europe, and traumatized by its losses, turned to political demagogues: in the end Christian nationalism of an aggressive sort won out, with the Selimites clearly the armies of Gog and Magog, the House of Islam the oppressive New Roman Empire, the fall of the Moon being the whole stars tumbling from the skies thing, and the Antichrist clearly being about to appear (Selim was of course the top pick for Antichrist until he was impolite enough to die). Today’s main political parties are the Angry Christian Party and the Crazy Ranting Christian party: Jews who don’t convert face a wide variety of restrictions and discriminatory practices, although nobody has as yet stuck any yellow stars on them (and of course they need to be kept alive until they can be resettled in Liberated Israel). Black people, suspected of having Anti-Colonial Selimite Inclinations, have remained segregated and oppressed, although they finally put an end to lynchings in the 1980s. Black Muslims are few and far between. Women have kept the vote, but morality is only just now edging out the 1950s. For some decades now the US has been preparing for the Final Battle, expanding where they can and supporting Christians (even some rather “iffy” ones) all over. With the approach of the millennium and fighting for control of the Moon heating up, it’s clear Armageddon is fast approaching: to many believers it cannot come too soon, for at home insufficiently “godly” people are increasingly clamoring for more freedoms and less austerity, while many US allies seem increasingly unreliable. In US-backed South China the old semi-Christianized elite is being replaced by an up and coming “Chinese nationalist” generation full of Buddhists and heathens which is uninterested in charging headfirst into the guns of the Istanbul Pact for the sake of US military plans. Australia has its own theocrat types, but they’ve never really forgiven the US for its various sins of action and inaction against the old British Empire, and Mexico remains a bleeding sore. At least Japan is quiet nowadays, and Korea is loyal and solidly Christian majority. (The US is seen by the largely non-Christian Istanbul Pact as successor to the old colonial powers, with plans to reconquer Europe, Africa, etc. They aren’t too far off, although the US tends to think of it as “liberation” rather than conquest.)

Japan had a bad time: it was for a while a US ally in their common effort to stabilize and de-Selimize East Asia, but in the end they fell out over influence in China, and over the US leadership being a bunch of racist dicks many of which felt Shinto was Devil-inspired: after the bloody war of 1966-68, it has been a US puppet, with interruptions for suppressing rebellions in 1971, 1982, and 1991-1994.

In South America a non-racist anti-US *fascism unites much of the continent under Brazilian leadership (in spite of their anti-Communism, they get along surprisingly well with the Soviets): the US tends to see them as part of the general pro-Selimite anti-colonial rebellion, while in fact as Catholics the Latin League is quite unhappy about what the House of Islam has been up to in Europe. They get along better with the Indian sub-block: India, which has managed to establish a working democracy, is in fact a favored destination of Latin American Oppressed Intellectuals. Some Istanbul thinkers worry about the possibility of S. Asia breaking away from their alliance entirely to form a new “triangular” alliance with the South Americans and the Soviets, although so far hostility and fear towards the US keeps the “anti-colonial” Istanbul block together.

Africa is a complex patchwork of remnant white footholds, new native regimes both secular and expansive religious autocracies, and some sheer chaos. Although Selimite armies never penetrated very far into the interior, the message of anti-colonial liberation swept the continent, and European colonial regimes cut off from resupply crumbled in most places: white Kenya hung on in the highlands for a while, as did pockets of French military control, but in the end only in South Africa did the local whites remain in charge: there was an attempted Selimite invasion, but their navy wasn’t really up to it yet, and with their failure to liberate Iberia the frustrated US turned to the salvation of South Africa (at least the white parts of it) with furious energy. Brazil managed to establish a working relationship with the ethnically mixed post-catastrophe elite of Angola, which has been drawn into the South American sphere, while the Soviets have strong influence at various points. The mellowing of US attitudes re Black People Who Revolted Against White People have allowed the US to expand its influence recently beyond the areas of depopulated coastline they initially seized, but relations with their African allies remain quite prickly.

The Soviets are a bit isolated outside the Socialist block proper, being extremely hostile to any form of organized religious “enthusiasm” and deeply xenophobic towards the invading “blackasses” to the south. The religious thing is a bit ironic, in that Soviet Communism has evolved even further in the direction of “secular religion” than OTL even as many of the actual principles of Stalinism have been discarded as impractical. In this wrecked, battered, ideologically nutty world their boast of being a “scientific” society is, however, probably truer than in most alternates. There have been some heroic efforts to deal with the after effects of the Moon fall, most notably the largest scale sea-reclamation projects on the globe, with much emphasis on helping out their Chinese ally regain some of what they lost to the Yellow Sea. (The US says they are doing it better, but from most people’s point of view they’re just imitating the Soviets).

Technology is generally retarded in this world, thanks to the horrendous initial losses in human lives and capital both cultural and industrial, the later Islamic (and odds and ends) conquest of Europe (there is in fact a decent Islamic/Middle Eastern scientific community in this world, really better than what the OTL Arab world has, but it’s no match for what was lost between Lisbon and Warsaw), and the rather anti-scientific attitudes of the US’s leadership after the period of political “experimentation” from 1942 to 1956. Although there have been advances over the 1930s in practical engineering, chemistry, agriculture, and a number of other fields, primary scientific research has been substantially retarded and while computers have been developed and are widely used by science and industry, they still run on vacuum tubes.

The effects of the fall of the Moon on the globe’s climate and geological stability continue. The absence of the tides and lunar cycles have caused massive die-offs of all sorts of coastal life forms, with still continuing and often unclear effects working their way through the global food chain. A number of large and not-too-numerous species went extinct in the violence of the Lunar impact. (On the positive side, the reduced human population means that there is more wilderness left – for now). Volcanic and earthquake activity remain elevated globally, but it’s the Atlantic where the real action is. The massive weight of the Lunar Mass lying on the thin Oceanic crust has cracked open the sea floor along the crustal plate intersections half the length of the Atlantic and west into the Caribbean and east into the Mediterranean. Huge lava flows are taking place down there, and innumerable new volcanoes have popped up like a particularly nasty case of acne, and much of the Atlantic has become contaminated by volcanic gasses, leading to severe drops in fish catches, and some scientists to mumble worriedly about “massive inversions” and “total deep water deoxygenation”. Above water volcanoes have burst into activity in south Italy, southern Spain, the Caribbean islands, and most notably Iceland, whose inhabitants have mostly evacuated by this point. Aviation has been retarded on both sides of the Atlantic due to frequent “don’t fly due to volcanic ash” emergencies. Dust and ash in the atmosphere, some volcanic, some from the collapsing slopes of the mega-mountains of the Lunar interior, make “years without summer” a recurring phenomenon: every responsible government stockpiles in advance in preparation for such events. Some scientists have predicted that the volcanic gasses going into the atmosphere, rather than freezing everyone, in the long run are more likely to bake everyone: most politicians don’t take this very seriously.

The most tense spot on Earth is the fallen Lunar body. Although the Muslims of the House of Islam do not consider the Moon quite as Allah-filled as the fanatics of Iran (let alone those cults who see it as an actual self-sacrificing deity) it is still Holy, and they have never been happy with the US presence in the western part of the Moon, but logistically difficulties made fighting over it difficult, and the leadership after the split with the Iranians was cool-headed enough to know the US was too strong to fight on its own doorstep. But the US has steadily expanded its mining operations and building access roads and railways, and in recent years has violated the unspoken pact with the Selimite powers, opening up new mining sites in the eastern half of the Moon. In response, US mines and transportation links have been increasingly been harassed by raiders, jihadists which the Istanbul government claims are purely “private” affairs motivated by US disrespect for the Moon.

This is an unfortunate case of people not really understanding each other. The Istanbul government thinks it is putting pressure on the US to withdrawn behind an agreed line of Longitude: the US thinks this may be the beginning of Armageddon.

Other important events are underway. In a deep lunar copper mine near Greenland, a miner has found an improbably geometric mass of ore. It will be a while before its artificial nature is determined. It will be longer before the artificial nature of the Moon is determined.

Under Iceland, pressure is building. It will not be long before the biggest blast since the last eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano takes place.

Another blast has already taken place somewhere in Siberia: it has been a long, slow path to get here (Stalin killing all those “deviationist” scientists didn’t help) but Soviet science has finally surpassed all the world. Soon, the time will come for the Revolution to expand again.