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Stories

• "The Place" or Caitlin Bankes arrives in the Great Basin Kingdom. Her first impression confuses her. [WIP]

• Potential endings or visions in a glass darkly, what could be but might not [sufficiently complete for reading]

Overviews

• The Aristarchic Theodemocracy of the Great Basin Kingdom or the new nation cobbled out of agrarian communism and a farmboy's visions [complete]

• The United States of America or Jefferson's "empire of liberty" and Lincoln's "more perfect union" glued together by a paradox of old prejudices and new hopes [WIP]

Great Basin Profiles

• Elizabeth Rachel Sleet or the madam president of the Great Basin Kingdom, a living oxymoron [complete]

• Ada F. Uford or the presidentess' personal clerk and the journalist's Great Basin hostess [complete]

• Lucinda Sorensen or the Basin's newest poet laureate, a young bookkeeper and a romantic [WIP]

• Patchoroowit or the chief of the United Bands of the Great Basin, the kingdom's ally among the American Indians [WIP]

• Josiah J. Tanner or the desert prophet managing the church while his wife rules the kingdom [WIP]

United States Profiles

• Caitlin Bankes or the first American journalist to wrest an interview with a national leader out of the usually private Basinites. [complete]

• Philippa J. Jorgensen or the familial namesake and mercantile tycoon of the Great Basin's only "American" city [complete]

• Reuben F. Biggs or the Union's first African American ambassador and first long-term envoy to the Great Basin [WIP]

• Ulysses Grant or the new-and-old president who dares to imagine a world in which the Union and the Basin coexist. [complete]

• Andrew Jackson or the improbable living fossil who still believes in the Republic's "manifest destiny" over the continent. [complete]
  

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It is the year of our Lord one-thousand eight-hundred and eighty-one, and the United States of America's grand ambition to fulfill its "manifest destiny to possess the whole continent" has become more than a little fraught. Losing the Mexican–American War in 1848 was a bitter pill to swallow, especially since an unexpected ally to Mexico tipped the scales of the clash. Some offscourings from the American republic had declared themselves a kingdom in the Great Basin, one that was independent from America and sovereign over its own affairs. They even claimed to speak with the voice of God, as if an Old Testament theocracy had tumbled off the pages of the Bible. This new nation, calling itself the Great Basin Kingdom, provided support against "American invasion," and while their forces were limited, the split front and attrition strained the patience of public opinion until all parties brokered a mutual but uneasy peace.

Destiny, it seemed, had strange designs for the continent.