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January 15, 1960

In the aftermath of the estate sale of one Alicia Thomas of Wapping-by-the-Sea, England (Not to be confused with the district of East London named Wapping some two hundred miles distant), a number of unusual antiques have been brought to my attention. It seems that Ms. Thomas was somewhat obsessed with Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel "Gulliver's Travels", and she owned a number of original copies of the text, bound in crumbling wax paper.

Interestingly, Ms. Thomas also owned a number of personal letters between Jonathan Swift, the author of the work, and a doctor from Wapping-by-the-Sea named Lemuel Gulliver, from whom the manuscript had been inspired. According to the letters, The first two parts of Swift's novel had been inspired by a story Dr. Gulliver once told him, and he had offered to pay the doctor a significant sum for his aid. Gulliver complied gladly, as he was rather impoverished at the time.

Interestingly, however, while Gulliver initially presented the story as fictional, a number of letters from his later years seemed to hint that he was beginning to believe the events himself. On the island of Lilliput, for example, he writes "I had forgotten to tell you a rather crucial and unusual detail about the island of Blefuscu. Every building in and around the shore was crafted in a distinct eastern style, though their vessels looked more akin to a modern English warship."

In the earliest drafts, directly based on Dr. Gulliver's own story, Gulliver was shipwrecked on two islands. The first was the island of Lilliput, where the people were less than an inch tall, and everything around them was of a similarly tiny scale. As the sole survivor of the wreck (or so he thought), Gulliver was practically a god to the Lilliputians. He offered to help them by pulling up trees for farming and to clear land, and catching entire schools of fish in his hat. However, the Lilliputians wanted to use him as a weapon. They were in a vicious war with their neighbors, the similarly tiny people of Blefuscu. The war was apparently over whether a breakfast egg should be broken at the small end or the large end, a fact that knocked Gulliver for a loop. Blefuscu had one massive advantage, however; they had sunken most of their budget into building a navy of warships the size of toy boats. Gulliver thought of a novel idea to end the war without bloodshed, and he simply swam across the channel to Blefuscu, towed the entire navy out to sea, and smashed it to pieces. With Blefuscu's war budget exhausted, Gulliver tried to talk Lilliput's egotistical emperor into accepting peace talks without further pain, but he insisted that Blefuscu should either be wiped out, or made to grovel in utter humiliation. Disgusted, Gulliver spent the next few days trying to keep the peace, but when he put out a fire in the royal palace by spraying it with a horrible mixture of a wine barrel and his own saliva, the queen responded by ordering his immediate execution. Gulliver had been building a makeshift boat out of Lilliputian trees, and he put to sea to outdistance a hail of tiny poisoned arrows.

The second island Gulliver found himself on was a much larger one called Brobdingnag, a land of giants. The scale difference was not as extreme as Lilliput's, but Gulliver was still no larger than a doll next to the titanic Brobdingnagian people. Apparently, Gulliver was taken off the beach by a Brobdingnagian girl named Glumdalclitch, and taken to the palace of "King Brob", who enjoyed his collection of miniature creatures that would wash up on the shore of his kingdom from time to time. His fiance, Elizabeth, had been part of the collection for almost a week, while Gulliver had been dealing with the Lilliputians. The Brobdingnagians were relatively primitive compared to the 18th-Century British, and Gulliver himself described them as "Poor simple-minded men of the Dark Ages, blind to their own shortcomings and completely content with the delusion that they were the most advanced civilization in all the world." Gulliver wound up in a rivalry with the Prime Minister and Court Alchemist, being an avowed rationalist who tended to contradict the alchemist's "magics" (Like many attempted alchemists of the dark ages, the Prime Minister was actually an extremely amateur chemist). The alchemist tried to convince the king that Gulliver was a witch, and twisted all Gulliver's assistance to the court into an elaborate plot to spread chaos and misery. Gulliver was forced to flee from Brobdingnag with Elizabeth, with the help of Glumdalclitch, floating out to sea in her Brobdingnagian basket. After a third storm, they found themselves washed up on a beach near Wapping-by-the-sea, next to a child's basket of ordinary size, and returned home sadder but wiser, resolving to avoid the pettiness of the Lilliputians or the ignorance of the Brobdingnagians.

Update: July 5, 2005: Scans of an area of the Atlantic Ocean off the western coast of England have revealed a number of magnetic instabilities and anomalies in the region. Scientists in string theory studying the region have suggested that interactions with alternate dimensions, and even extra-dimensional portals, might conceivably be opened by severe weather conditions in the area. Studies of the region have been undertaken by a joint project between a UN scientific team, the Royal Navy, and (oddly enough) the US army, under the moniker of "Project Arrowhead".

Reality check: These are based on the people of "The 3 Worlds of Gulliver". I do not own the rights, etc, etc...

Description

January 15, 1960

In the aftermath of the estate sale of one Alicia Thomas of Wapping-by-the-Sea, England (Not to be confused with the district of East London named Wapping some two hundred miles distant), a number of unusual antiques have been brought to my attention. It seems that Ms. Thomas was somewhat obsessed with Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel "Gulliver's Travels", and she owned a number of original copies of the text, bound in crumbling wax paper.

Interestingly, Ms. Thomas also owned a number of personal letters between Jonathan Swift, the author of the work, and a doctor from Wapping-by-the-Sea named Lemuel Gulliver, from whom the manuscript had been inspired. According to the letters, The first two parts of Swift's novel had been inspired by a story Dr. Gulliver once told him, and he had offered to pay the doctor a significant sum for his aid. Gulliver complied gladly, as he was rather impoverished at the time.

Interestingly, however, while Gulliver initially presented the story as fictional, a number of letters from his later years seemed to hint that he was beginning to believe the events himself. On the island of Lilliput, for example, he writes "I had forgotten to tell you a rather crucial and unusual detail about the island of Blefuscu. Every building in and around the shore was crafted in a distinct eastern style, though their vessels looked more akin to a modern English warship."

In the earliest drafts, directly based on Dr. Gulliver's own story, Gulliver was shipwrecked on two islands. The first was the island of Lilliput, where the people were less than an inch tall, and everything around them was of a similarly tiny scale. As the sole survivor of the wreck (or so he thought), Gulliver was practically a god to the Lilliputians. He offered to help them by pulling up trees for farming and to clear land, and catching entire schools of fish in his hat. However, the Lilliputians wanted to use him as a weapon. They were in a vicious war with their neighbors, the similarly tiny people of Blefuscu. The war was apparently over whether a breakfast egg should be broken at the small end or the large end, a fact that knocked Gulliver for a loop. Blefuscu had one massive advantage, however; they had sunken most of their budget into building a navy of warships the size of toy boats. Gulliver thought of a novel idea to end the war without bloodshed, and he simply swam across the channel to Blefuscu, towed the entire navy out to sea, and smashed it to pieces. With Blefuscu's war budget exhausted, Gulliver tried to talk Lilliput's egotistical emperor into accepting peace talks without further pain, but he insisted that Blefuscu should either be wiped out, or made to grovel in utter humiliation. Disgusted, Gulliver spent the next few days trying to keep the peace, but when he put out a fire in the royal palace by spraying it with a horrible mixture of a wine barrel and his own saliva, the queen responded by ordering his immediate execution. Gulliver had been building a makeshift boat out of Lilliputian trees, and he put to sea to outdistance a hail of tiny poisoned arrows.

The second island Gulliver found himself on was a much larger one called Brobdingnag, a land of giants. The scale difference was not as extreme as Lilliput's, but Gulliver was still no larger than a doll next to the titanic Brobdingnagian people. Apparently, Gulliver was taken off the beach by a Brobdingnagian girl named Glumdalclitch, and taken to the palace of "King Brob", who enjoyed his collection of miniature creatures that would wash up on the shore of his kingdom from time to time. His fiance, Elizabeth, had been part of the collection for almost a week, while Gulliver had been dealing with the Lilliputians. The Brobdingnagians were relatively primitive compared to the 18th-Century British, and Gulliver himself described them as "Poor simple-minded men of the Dark Ages, blind to their own shortcomings and completely content with the delusion that they were the most advanced civilization in all the world." Gulliver wound up in a rivalry with the Prime Minister and Court Alchemist, being an avowed rationalist who tended to contradict the alchemist's "magics" (Like many attempted alchemists of the dark ages, the Prime Minister was actually an extremely amateur chemist). The alchemist tried to convince the king that Gulliver was a witch, and twisted all Gulliver's assistance to the court into an elaborate plot to spread chaos and misery. Gulliver was forced to flee from Brobdingnag with Elizabeth, with the help of Glumdalclitch, floating out to sea in her Brobdingnagian basket. After a third storm, they found themselves washed up on a beach near Wapping-by-the-sea, next to a child's basket of ordinary size, and returned home sadder but wiser, resolving to avoid the pettiness of the Lilliputians or the ignorance of the Brobdingnagians.

Update: July 5, 2005: Scans of an area of the Atlantic Ocean off the western coast of England have revealed a number of magnetic instabilities and anomalies in the region. Scientists in string theory studying the region have suggested that interactions with alternate dimensions, and even extra-dimensional portals, might conceivably be opened by severe weather conditions in the area. Studies of the region have been undertaken by a joint project between a UN scientific team, the Royal Navy, and (oddly enough) the US army, under the moniker of "Project Arrowhead".

Reality check: These are based on the people of "The 3 Worlds of Gulliver". I do not own the rights, etc, etc...