A History of What Comes Next

by Sylvain Neuvel

  Beria apparently bragged about killing Stalin. There has been a lot of speculation about Stalin’s death, and many believe he was poisoned, presumably with warfarin. It was reported that Stalin was drinking diluted Georgian wine on the night he fell into a coma.

  Perhaps ironically, it was Beria who requested a new trial for Sergei Korolev after he was sentenced to life in the gulag. Beria had just been named head of the NKVD. He saved Korolev’s life to sell himself as a fair and humane leader. It did not last, but Korolev survived because of Beria’s actions.

  Qian Xuesen, or Hsue-Shen Tsien

  The former is a transliteration of his Chinese name, family name first; the latter is the Americanized version he used while in the US. Qian was one of the people behind the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a real genius. While in the US, he was temporarily made a colonel so he could go to Germany and debrief Wernher von Braun and others after they surrendered to the Americans. The government later accused him of being a communist during the Red Scare. After spending five years under house arrest, he was finally allowed to return to China, presumably in exchange for some prisoners from the Korean War. The US got rid of an absolutely brilliant man because they were paranoid about communism.

  In China, things were dicey at first for Qian. Mao wasn’t the most trusting guy. Qian came from the US, and his father-in-law worked for the government the communists had just overthrown. He had to profess loyalty to the party a bunch of times, but things got better for him soon enough. In 1956, he became director of the Fifth Academy of the Ministry of National Defense, where he ran the missile and nuclear development program. He reached his goal in record time, and China tested its first nuclear bomb in 1964. Qian also founded the Chinese space program, so you may hear from him again at some point. Qian never returned to the United States (he was pissed). He died in 2009, at the age of ninety-seven. His work on complex systems was groundbreaking and served as the basis for some of China’s social engineering experiments.

  The American Space Program

  There’s been so much written on the subject, lots of movies even, that I chose to focus on smaller, lesser-known events. It’s also why the book ends in 1961, before Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. Some of the events I mention were huge when they occurred—the Vanguard rocket explosion, for example. It happened live on national television, at a time when the US was deeply troubled by the Soviet space endeavor. Google “Vanguard explosion” and you can watch it blow up; there are tons of videos online.

  When they go back to the US, Mia works at the Jet Propulsion Labs as a human computer. You probably recognized the term from Hidden Figures.10 Little was known about these insanely smart women and the role they played in the space program before Margot Lee Shetterly’s book and the movie that followed. Both were huge successes and went a long way in giving these pioneers some of the credit they deserved, even if it came fifty years too late. Hidden Figures follows a group of black women working as human computers in a segregated section of NASA’s research center at Langley beginning in 1961, right after this book ends. There were, of course, some women working in scientific positions in the early days of rocket science, before the era of spaceflight. Nathalia Holt’s book11 (also nonfiction) follows a handful of women leaving their mark on the other side of the country at JPL during more or less the same timeline as this book.

  Mia thinks that, once at JPL, she might work on the Ranger program. Those were unmanned missions, basically trying to hit the moon after taking close-up pictures of the surface and transmitting them to Earth. The first six Ranger missions all failed, leading to a congressional investigation of both NASA and JPL.

  At the end, Sarah dies when she causes a Titan missile to fall on her and the Tracker at Vandenberg Air Force Base. That happened, though it was an accident. It must have felt like the world was coming to an end for the people who were there. The blast doors were a mere twelve hundred feet from the explosion, and it was quite the explosion. It destroyed the two-hundred-ton silo doors. Debris flew all the way to the Vandenberg golf course, a few miles away. Miraculously, there were no casualties.12

  Climate Change

  One of the most interesting (and depressing) things one learns reading about climate change is how long we’ve known about it. There are people today who aren’t sure how big a role humans played in the process, but there are also plenty who simply don’t believe that the temperature is rising, or that greenhouse gases have anything to do with it. Svante Arrhenius wrote about it in 1896 (you can read his paper online13 if you’re curious), and he wasn’t the first. We’ve known this stuff for over a hundred years.

  I really enjoyed reading about ice core research. I just love the simplicity of it. I have no idea who thought about air bubbles trapped in ice first, but I like to think the conversation involved an ice cube tray and sounded a bit like the one between Mia and her mother. The hydrogen and oxygen isotope thing is a bit more complicated, but still very cool. The credit for that belongs to Willi Dansgaard,14 the Dutch paleontologist Sarah worked with. I drop a few more names throughout the book; feel free to look them up.

  Towards the end, Sarah thinks she’s found a way to measure the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that comes from burning fossil fuel. I didn’t let her explain, because I thought it was too technical, but now we’re here and I’m filled with regret, so let’s science together a bit. We’ll start with carbon—that’s the C in CO2. Carbon is awesome. It can make funky things at the temperatures found on Earth, like the sugar found in DNA. That’s why it’s in every living thing we’re aware of. It’s in the air. It’s everywhere. There’s also a special kind of radioactive carbon called carbon 14 but we’ll call it Steve because that’s more fun. Steve is also in the atmosphere. Plants take in some Steve during photosynthesis. That means a banana tree has some Steve in it, and so does a banana. You eat the banana and, you guessed it, there is some Steve in you. (Note that the same is true if something else eats the banana and you eat the something else.) In the end, you and every other living thing has more or less the same amount of Steve in you as there is in the air around you. Then you die. Sorry. When you die, you stop eating bananas. No new Steve comes in, and the Steve that’s already in you starts to fall apart because, you see, Steve is not like the other carbons. Steve is unstable. He decays, sloooowly. If you leave Steve alone in a room and come back in 5,730 years, half of Steve will be gone. Because we know how fast Steve decays, we can know how long you’ve been dead by measuring how much Steve is left in you. That’s carbon dating in a nutshell. What’s that got to do with fossil fuel, you say? Well, fossil fuel, petroleum for example, is still a bit of a mystery, but we know it comes from decomposed organic matter. Dead things. Very, very dead. We also know that the process takes, like, forever, way longer than it takes for Steve to disappear completely. So when you burn fossil fuel, the CO2 you throw back into the air contains no Steve at all, and over time, you reduce the Steve concentration in the atmosphere. Tadaa. That effect was discovered by Dr. Suess (that’s not funny) in the late fifties. Dr. Hans Suess was an American chemist born in Austria.

  Given the current attitudes towards facts and science, trying to imagine the social consequences of rising temperatures and extreme and unpredictable weather is really scary. One only has to look at the past for clues. In the first entr’acte, set in 1608, the Eighty-Seven stumble upon a witch trial on their way back from visiting the first wind-powered sawmill in the Netherlands. The sawmill is real, of course, and that technology would help create the Dutch empire, but the interesting part is the witch trial. Like other parts of this book, it has something to do with the climate. The event takes place at the height of what is known as the Little Ice Age. It’s a period of—you guessed it—cooler temperatures. Winters in Europe and America were colder. Rivers froze. The Baltic Sea froze. Winters also lasted longer, by a few weeks, which meant shorter growing seasons, crop failures, famine, etc., etc. Bad things. Science was kind of iffy at the time, so in the absence
of a plausible explanation, people looked to the supernatural for answers. Witches. Unmarried women made for easy scapegoats and were singled out for the slightest of reasons, like having a mole. Women were accused of anything from stealing the milk out of starving cows to raising storms with the Devil’s magic. In North America, the Salem trials (1692–93) are the most well known, but there were similar trials all over Europe during that period. This wasn’t the first time people were killed because of the weather. The Greek myth of Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father to quell the gods’ anger and receive favorable winds, is rooted in the customs of the time. In the north, the Vikings performed a “blót” to ensure Odin’s goodwill about the weather. Scientific ignorance paired with religious extremism leads to all kinds of craziness, including throwing people into rivers to see if they float. There is some interesting new research15 that suggests that the Little Ice Age might have been caused in part by reforestation after the genocide of native people in the Americas. Following Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, Europeans killed about 90 percent of the indigenous population, either directly or by spreading disease. The dead stopped farming, and trees started to grow back, reducing CO2 concentrations enough to cause a global cooling.

  The Kibsu

  Alas. Let’s start with the obvious. As far as I know, they don’t exist, but I’m the first to admit that there’s a whole lot I don’t know. If you believe this story, though, they would have come a little over three thousand years ago, most likely somewhere in Mesopotamia. On today’s map, that’s Iraq and Kuwait, parts of Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey. I know this, of course, because I recognized Kibsu and Rādi Kibsi as words from the Akkadian language, which was spoken in the region at the time. I say they would most likely have landed in Mesopotamia, because Akkadian was also the language used for trade in much of the Near East, so, who knows?

  According to the online Akkadian dictionary16 of the Association Assyrophile de France, the word Kibsu can be interpreted in several ways: a footprint, a path, a way of life, a line of reasoning, etc. Rādi Kibsi is the one following the footprints, a tracker.

  Mia, Sarah, and her mother leave Germany on September 18, 1932, aboard the SS Milwaukee of the Hamburg-Amerika Linie. They cover their tracks as best they can, but if you look at the actual passenger manifest from that day, you will find a Sarah Freed.17

  In AD 921, a thousand years earlier, the Sixty-Five is part of a delegation sent by the Abbasid caliph to Volga Bulgaria. She travels up the Volga River with a fellow named Ahmad Ibn Fadlan—we talked about him before—who serves as secretary to the ambassador. I tried to set events happening at different times in similar places, and you’ll see the Volga in a few places throughout the book. For example, Kapustin Yar, where they built the launchpad for the first Soviet missile, the R-1, is near the river.

  Ahmad Ibn Fadlan was a real person. He went up the Volga to meet the new king of Volga Bulgaria, and along the way he met himself some Vikings. The cool part is he took some notes. I put a little quote from his journal in the scene, but a lot of it is inspired by what he wrote. The Kibsu ends up marrying Igor of Kiev, son of Oleg of Novgorod. The Varangians, a.k.a. Vikings, ruled over a massive part of Europe and Asia at the time. The Kievan Rus’ empire, as it was called, was based in Kiev, and we have Igor’s dad to thank for that. Olga of Kiev, Igor’s wife, was also a real person, and she was not someone you wanted to mess with. We don’t know much about her, but the story about burying people alive, killing thousands, and burning a town with pigeons to avenge her husband is a real thing.

  We go back another eighteen hundred years to meet the Seven in the third entr’acte. She—her name is Varkida—joins a group of horse-riding warriors before being banished and starting her own all-woman tribe, which you might have recognized as the legendary Amazons. Varkida is the name of an Amazon (BAPKIΔA) appearing on a sixth-century red-figure amphora (it means “princess,” likely from Proto-Indo-European *wel-, as in English “weal[th]”).18 Legend aside, there is significant evidence that the Amazons were actually Scythian warriors (sometimes called Saka). The Scythians were badass. They were nomadic tribespeople, incredible horse riders, and absolutely deadly with a bow. And yes, some of them were women. Just google “Scythians”; the connection to the Amazons is cool enough that thousands of people have written about it.

  How we go from actual Scythian warriors to Greek myth is even better. Maybe I’m biased because I trained as a linguist, but I think it’s objectively cool. OK, so the Greeks travel and they meet a bunch of people they don’t know. They find out the names of these people and they go back home and tell everyone. A good chunk of what we can read about the Amazons comes from Greek historians. Now, the Greeks back then have some problems, but a small ego isn’t one of them. They think their language is awesome. So, some Greek fellow gets back to Greece and says he met some women warriors and they were called the Amazons. There are many possible etymologies for the word. The one I picked is reconstructed from Old Persian: hama-zan, which would mean “all women.” Another option is from Iranian ha-mazan. It could mean something as simple as “warrior.” There are many that make sense. But one Greek historian, Hellanikos, doesn’t speak Old Persian. It’s all Greek to him. He sees the Greek a-(ἀ-) “without” and mazos (μαζός) “breast.” BOOM! Without breast. That’s how we end up with women who cut their breasts out because, contrary to the millions of women who have used bows throughout history, these ones can’t do it without hurting themselves.

  The same goes for the Arimaspi (that’s what the caravan members called the first tribe Varkida meets). In Early Iranian, the word would probably be a combination of ariama (“love”) and aspa (“horses”), and it would sort of make sense for people to refer to a horse-riding tribe this way. But Herodotus, another Greek historian, thinks it’s from the roots for “one” and “eye,” and all of a sudden we have a whole tribe of one-eyed people spreading terror up north. In both cases, we have completely absurd myths started not because anyone actually saw anything, but because the guy doing the linguistic analysis was an idiot.

  That was my “linguistics is cool” moment. Oh, and the final battle takes place on the banks of the Volga River.

  Three generations later, in 825 BC, the Ten settles in the kingdom of Quwê. The Kibsu is still great at breeding horses, of course, and the Ten sells some to the king of Israel. Those of you who studied the Bible would recognize the kingdom from the first book of Kings as the place King Solomon got his horses from: “Solomon’s horses were imported from Egypt and from Kue—the royal merchants purchased them from Kue at the current price. They imported a chariot from Egypt for six hundred shekels of silver, and a horse for a hundred and fifty. They also exported them to all the kings of the Hittites and of the Arameans” (1 Kings 10:28–29).

  The Kibsu loses all the knowledge in Quwê when the Ten kills herself. The Eleven, and all of those who follow, will spend their lives trying to get it back.

  There are a million more historical references in the book, some more subtle than others. I’ll let you discover them for yourself.

  I really hope you enjoyed this one. I can tell you I had an absolute blast writing it.

  Until next time,

  Sylvain

  PLAYLIST

  Chapter

  Song

  1.

  Sentimental Journey, Les Brown and His Orchestra (with Doris Day) (1945)

  2.

  The Honeydripper, Joe Liggins and His Honeydrippers (1945)

  3.

  Begin the Beguine, Artie Shaw and His Orchestra (1938)

  4.

  I Wonder, Cecil Grant (1944)

  5.

  Crawlin’ King Snake, Big Joe Williams (1941)

  6.

  Lili Marlene, Marlene Dietrich (1938)

  7.

  God Bless the Child, Billie Holiday (1941)

  8.

  Hot Time in the Town of Berlin, Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters (1944)

  9.
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  Death Valley Blues, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (1941)

  10.

  This Land Is Your Land, Woody Guthrie (1944)

  11.

  Y’a pas de printemps, Edith Piaf (1944)

  12.

  Stormy Weather, Lena Horne (1941)

  13.

  Trouble So Hard, Vera Hall (1937)

  14.

  Dream, the Pied Pipers (1945)

  15.

  L’âme au diable, Léo Marjane (1943)

  16.

  Down, Down, Down, the Mills Brothers (1941)

  17.

  Going Home, Paul Robeson (1958)

  18.

  Twilight Time, Les Brown and His Orchestra (1945)

  19.

  Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive, Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters (1945)

  20.

  My Mama Don’t Allow Me, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (1944)

  21.

  Che puro ciel, Kathleen Ferrier (1946)

  22.

  I’m on My Last Go-Round, Lead Belly (1942)

  23.

  Gloomy Sunday, Billie Holiday (1941)

  24.

  “Murder,” He Says, Dinah Shore (1943)

  25.

  Songs My Mother Taught Me, Nellie Melba (1916)

  26.

  You Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone, Tampa Red (1944)

  27.

  La vie en rose, Edith Piaf (1946)

  28.