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SanFrancisco

San Francisco is the fourth most populous city in California and the 12th most populous city in the United States.

In 1776, the Spanish established a fort at the Golden Gate and a mission named for St. Francis of Assisi on the site. The California Gold Rush, set off by the discovery of gold near present-day Sacramento in 1848, propelled the city into a period of rapid growth, increasing the population in one year from 1,000 to 25,000, and thus transforming it into the largest city on the West Coast at the time. After three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915. During World War II, San Francisco was the port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. After the war, the confluence of returning servicemen, massive immigration, liberalizing attitudes, and other factors led to the Summer of Love and the gay rights movement, cementing San Francisco as a center of liberal activism in the United States.

San Francisco in "The Breaking of Nations"[]

San Francisco was a traditionally progressive city which embraced Pacifican independence. The mayor (pronouns she/her) introduced President Nicole Yoshida's speech there, which laid out the basic mission of the new nation, after the President had survived a United States Air Force ambush near Vacaville.[1]

San Francisco in Broadway Revival[]

As part of his "Broadway Revival Project", David Greenbaum researched 20th century San Francisco, including the 1906 earthquake and fire, which he incorporated into the backstory of his fictional identity of "Joseph David Cohen".[2] On January 19, 2079, he illegally traveled back to March 20, 1934, landing in Yosemite National Park on March 20, 1934. After hitching a ride to Fresno from a construction worker, Greenbaum took a bus to San Francisco.[3] He stayed here for a few days to further develop the Joseph David Cohen identity, primarily by contacting Rabbi Michael Epstein and his wife, Shirley.[4]

San Francisco had damaged by a major earthquake in 2042. Greenbaum and his spouse Ramon Abarca had visited the city twice in the 2070s, but Greenbaum wasn't really familiar with it, and so was unable to compare the pre-quake version of 1934 with the post-quake version of his time.[5]

San Francisco in The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump[]

St. Francis was a large city in the Golden Province, far to the north of Angels City.

San Francisco in "Coming Across"[]

In 1979, San Francisco was one of the safest places in the world for homosexual men to practice their romantic preferences freely. And so did Gaetan, a vacationing Air Canada flight attendant, and Lingol, a beautiful foreign man, who hit it off together for a whirlwind courtship in that city. Unbeknownst to either, their brief encounter would doom Lingol's people to potential extinction.

San Francisco in Crosstime Traffic[]

San Francisco in Curious Notions[]

220px-SFTGMoonBridge

Lucy Woo and Paul Gomes met at the Japanese tea garden of Golden Gate Park.

The Crosstime Traffic corporation chose San Francisco as one of the cities to set up an outpost in "Alternate 3477". The company established the retail store called Curious Notions, which specialized in electronics. San Francisco was chosen for two reasons. First, it was one of the few American cities to survive an atomic war with Imperial Germany in 1956 because the bombers headed for the city were shot down. Second, it was close to the Central Valley, a particularly fertile agricultural area in nearly every timeline.

As the United States had been under the rule of Imperial Germany, much of San Francisco had become rather rundown over the years. Many buildings and places (such as the San Francisco Zoo) still bore the marks of the 1989 earthquake over a century later. One major exception was the Golden Gate Bridge, which still proudly stood.

It was also quite common to see officers of the Feldgendarmerie patrolling the streets. A statue of Kaiser Wilhelm IV stood in front of City Hall.

The Chinese gangs known as the Triads maintained a quiet but powerful presence in the city.

When the Woo family was brought to the San Francisco of the home timeline, they were astonished to find a sophisticated, cultured, and world-class city.

San Francisco in The Disunited States of America[]

A phenomenon often noted by Crosstimers was that in any alternate where both San Francisco and Los Angeles existed, the two cities were cultural rivals. This included the alternate where the United States dissolved in the early 1800s.[6]

San Francisco in The Valley-Westside War[]

People living in the various little states into which Los Angeles had been divided after the big war, knew of Frisco as a place far away to the north, which hardly any of them had visited or was likely to visit; the journey was long, difficult and dangerous, requiring the crossing of the national boundaries of many small states as well as various lawless areas where robbers waited to prey on travelers.

San Francisco in Days of Infamy[]

San Francisco was bombed by Japanese flyers based in Hawaii in the Spring of 1942. The bombing came in response to Jimmy Doolittle's night raid on Oahu after Japan conquered the territory from the United States. The attack further humiliated the U.S. but was more of a nuisance raid than a damaging attack.

Joe Crosetti hailed from San Francisco. His uncle's family was wiped out by the bombing.

San Francisco in "The Fillmore Shoggoth"[]

In May 1968, an iceberg which had broken off from Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf more than a year before and made its way north finally landed off the coast of San Francisco. A swarm of shoggoths attacked the city, destroying a number of artifacts pertaining to the Old Ones that were housed around the city.

The attack also killed several, including a pair of Old Ones who'd come to see a concert at the Fillmore, before it was finally halted. Members of the band HPL were witnesses to the Fillmore attacks.

San Francisco in The Guns of the South[]

In early 1868, San Francisco was seized and burned by a force of Royal Marines, who then reboarded their ships and departed, evading the wrath of American forces.[7] The Federal Mint in the city was also raided.

San Francisco in The Hot War[]

San Francisco was one of several cities the Soviet Union successfully atom bombed on the morning of March 2, 1951 during World War III.[8] The bombing destroyed most of the city and also caused the famous Golden Gate Bridge to collapse into the San Francisco Bay, blocking marine traffic from entering and exiting the bay. In the aftermath of the bombing, the federal government established a number of refugee camps around the bay.[9]

By June 1952, San Francisco Bay was functioning at prebomb levels.[10]

Bruce McNulty, a US Air Force pilot who flew bombing missions over Soviet targets in Europe, was from San Francisco. Cade Curtis and his "son" Jimmy disembarked in San Francisco after the Korean phase of the war ended, and were appalled by the damage.[11]

San Francisco in "The Last Word"[]

After the Drakas' atomic destruction of Washington, DC and New York City in the Final War, the surviving U.S. Government personnel attempted to set up a new capital in San Francisco, but the Drakas soon nuked that too.

Captain Fischer and Commodore Anson MacDonald watched a televisor report of this grim news shortly before emerging from the Nantahala Redoubt.[12]

San Francisco in "The Maltese Elephant"[]

A bizarre series of murders were committed in San Francisco after one of the rare elephants of Malta was shipped there, triggering the violent desires of various criminals to possess it.

San Francisco in The Man With the Iron Heart[]

San Francisco was one of many cities Diana McGraw visited in 1947. Although the Eightieth Congress, dominated by the Republican Party, had cut off funding for the continued American occupation of Germany, McGraw still rallied her supporters against President Harry Truman.

After the speech, McGraw had an adulterous encounter with Marvin, a city supervisor. McGraw could never remember Marvin's last name, but remembered the physical act fondly.

San Francisco in "News From the Front"[]

In San Francisco on March 26, 1942, the passenger liner Rio Negro picked up American pacifists bound for Yokohama, who intended to bring about peace between the United States and Japan.[13]

San Francisco in "Powerless"[]

The organic law of the West Coast People's Democratic Republic was written in San Francisco. Many years after it was formulated, Charlie Simpkins of Los Angeles used Article 1101, Section 9, Subsection 16 of the organic law to prevent the West Valley Central Committee from tearing down an apartment building and replacing it with a headquarters for the Communist Party.[14]

San Francisco in Southern Victory[]

180px-Old San Francisco Mint

British Marines raided the US Mint in San Francisco in 1881

San Francisco had been a Mexican town until the US conquered it during the First Mexican War. After the 1848 gold rush, the town became the major city of the Pacific coast, and the prime base of the US Pacific Squadron.

During the War of Secession in 1861, San Francisco had been isolated from the conflict, but suffered heavily from the stock market collapse in 1863. By 1881, the city had pulled itself up, but was once more isolated when the Second Mexican War began, and Utah rebelled, cutting the city off from the East Coast. As the British entered the war, the Royal Navy bombarded San Francisco and detached marines to raid the US Mint. Journalist Samuel Clemens lived in the city at the time, witnessed this attack, and extensively reported on it in The San Francisco Morning Call.

Both before and after the Second Mexican War, San Francisco was hit by periodic earthquakes, with the biggest one occurring in 1906.

In the 20th century, the city was a major port of call for the US Navy and other Central Powers fleets in the Pacific. It was a staging area for the 1914 assault on the Sandwich Islands during the Great War.[15]

In 1944, San Francisco was one of several U.S. cities Confederate President Jake Featherston idly threatened to destroy with a superbomb. It was a bluff as the CSA's only such bomb had already destroyed the outskirts of Philadelphia west of the Schuylkill River.

San Francisco in State of Jefferson/Three Men and...Stories[]

In 189-, as part of their resolution to avoid the "preternatural", J, George, and Harris made a jaunt to San Francisco.[16]

In the 1970s, a number of homosexual Jeffersonian Sasquatches resettled in San Francisco, where their "attributes" were in great demand among a certain set.[17]

San Francisco in The Two Georges[]

Drakestown (San Francisco before the 1860s war) was a major city in the American province of Upper California. It was situated on the west shore of San Francisco Bay which had retained its original Spanish name. Although people had talked for years of bridging the bay, they could never come up with an earthquake-proof design. Due to this absence, numerous ferries continued to adequately connect Drakestown with the cities and towns on the east side of the water.

In 1995, Colonel Thomas Bushell, Captain Samuel Stanley, and Lieutenant Colonel Felix Crooke had an hour-and-a-half lay-over in Drakestown during their flight from New Liverpool to Wellesley on the airship Empire Builder in the course of their investigation into the theft of The Two Georges.[18]

San Francisco in Worldwar[]

Literary comment[]

In his first scene from In the Balance, Jens Larssen is introduced as having grown up in San Francisco, making him ill-suited to Chicago winters. Larssen is later retconned in the same novel as a lifelong Minnesotan who played in the snow throughout his childhood, and San Francisco plays no further role in the plot. Colonization contains a few errant references to its ongoing cultural rivalry with Los Angeles.

References[]

  1. And the Last Trump Shall Sound, pgs. 31-33.
  2. Broadway Revival, pg. 18, loc. 285, ebook.
  3. Broadway Revival, pg. 28-33, loc. 431-494, ebook.
  4. Ibid., pgs. 35-38, loc. 540-561.
  5. Ibid., pg. 34, loc. 498.
  6. The Disunited States of America, pg. 61.
  7. The Guns of the South, pg. 439.
  8. Bombs Away, pg. 153, ebook.
  9. See, e.g., Fallout, loc. 534, e-book.
  10. Armistice, pg. 72, loc. 1173, ebook.
  11. Ibid., pgs. 346-348, ebook.
  12. Drakas!, pg. 249, mmpb.
  13. See, e.g., Atlantis and Other Places, pg. 98.
  14. Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction September/October, 2018.
  15. American Front, pg. 59, HC.
  16. Next Stop on the #13, ebook, loc. 3712-3735.
  17. "Typecasting".
  18. The Two Georges, pgs 169-170, MPB, 119-120, HC.
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