A while back when the For Want of a Nail alternate history lexicon game was taking place, the theme of a trans-historical struggle of Bicycle vs. Zepplin emerged. Zepplins are the iconic alternate history vehicle, and bicycles were mentioned in the title of my first entry, which inspired others. Rob Macdougall had a brilliant essay which puts the eternal struggle between Zepplins and Bicycles at the center of the war over the nature or reality.
Now I ran across a link to a humorous essay by Umberto Eco from 1994, The Holy War: Mac vs. DOS, which opens with the following:
Friends, Italians, countrymen, I ask that a Committee for Public Health be set up, whose task would be to censor (by violent means, if necessary) discussion of the following topics in the Italian press. Each censored topic is followed by an alternative in brackets which is just as futile, but rich with the potential for polemic. Whether Joyce is boring (whether reading Thomas Mann gives one erections). Whether Heidegger is responsible for the crisis of the Left (whether Ariosto provoked the revocation of the Edict of Nantes). Whether semiotics has blurred the difference between Walt Disney and Dante (whether De Agostini does the right thing in putting Vimercate and the Sahara in the same atlas). Whether Italy boycotted quantum physics (whether France plots against the subjunctive). Whether new technologies kill books and cinemas (whether zeppelins made bicycles redundant).
Either this is a weird coincidence or more evidence of Rob Macdougall’s cleverness.
Ken Hite’s Adventures into Darkness is a roleplaying supplement (just now released in PDF) based on the alternate history premise that H.P. Lovecraft survived the illness that killed him, and went on to write golden age super hero comics.