IMPOSSIBLE FABLES

Impossible Fables

The impossible fables of the atlas: collisions history could never stage, drawn as truthfully as we know how. No bridge of causes leads here; the atlas keeps these pages anyway.

12 charted timelines in this galaxy

Impossible Fables

The impossible arrives. No bridge of causes leads here; the atlas keeps it anyway.

Leonardo presents an open folio of machine drawings to the Duke of Milan in a candlelit hall, 1482

IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · 1482 · MILAN

Da Vinci's machines are built

Milan, 1482. A thirty-year-old Florentine writes the Duke a letter listing ten kinds of war machine he can build, and adds painting almost as an afterthought. This is the timeline, recorded in the fables' galaxy, where every machine in the letter works.

A colossal reinforced timber crate on the stone quay of Ostia at dusk, dockworkers frozen and silent

IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · AD 80 · ROME

The beast in the Colosseum

During the hundred days of games that opened the Colosseum in AD 80, the animal hunters of the empire delivered one crate too old for any map. Through a fold in deep time, a subadult tyrannosaur reached the arena that was built to prove nothing alive outranked Rome. This is the fable of what Rome did when it met an animal it could not beat.

A storm-worn fleet of Japanese war junks off a jungle coast where a stepped pyramid rises above the trees

IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · 1515 · THE GULF COAST OF MEXICO

Obsidian and steel

No storm in our history ever carried a fleet whole across the Pacific. This is the fable where one did: two thousand soldiers of Japan’s civil wars set down on the Aztec gulf coast in 1515, four years ahead of Cortés.

A Han envoy with a camel at the crest of a snowy mountain pass, looking down on terraced vineyards and a straight Roman road

IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · AD 97 · THE PAMIR PASSES

The two empires meet

In AD 97 the Han general Ban Chao sent the envoy Gan Ying to find Rome, and Parthian sailors turned him back at the Persian Gulf with tales of a two-year sea. The two greatest empires of the age never met. This is the fable where the atlas folds the map once, and a nineteen-day mountain pass joins Roman Syria to the Tarim Basin.

Thousands of Mongol riders emerging from ground fog across the lanes of a motorway toward stopped trucks with headlights on

IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · A TUESDAY IN OCTOBER · THE HUNGARIAN PLAIN

The horde on the motorway

On a Tuesday in October, out of the ground fog of the Hungarian plain, ten thousand riders of Batu Khan’s army come through onto the M5 motorway near Kecskemét, still carrying orders written in 1241. The one fable in the atlas told from our side: the past visits us, and is met by dashcams, quarantine law and an offer of asylum.

Merlin raises his staff on a hillfort rampart as a helicopter descends from the storm

IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · THE AGE OF ARTHUR · THE WALLS OF CAMELOT

Merlin calls the thunder over Camelot

The fortieth night of the siege of Camelot. The gate is splinters, the wells are low, and on the last wall Merlin asks the storm for help. What answers is not a dragon and not a demon: a made thing, from a timeline of iron.

Two Bronze Age armies drawn up at dawn on a river plain while the sky between them glitters with small dark machines

IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · THE NINTH YEAR OF THE WAR · THE PLAIN OF TROY

Achilles and the swarm

In the ninth year of the siege of Troy, a military drone swarm falls through the seam with no operators, no country, and one standing order: deny this ground to all combatants. The war becomes a siege against a god who never sleeps but is dying from the moment it arrives.

Genghis Khan on the ridge above a column of modern tanks

IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · AUTUMN 1219 · THE OTRAR STEPPE

Genghis Khan charges a column of tanks

The steppe thunders. A hundred thousand of Genghis Khan’s horsemen pour over the ridge toward a column of modern main battle tanks grinding across the grass — horn bows against armour plate, the old world against the new.

Napoleon on horseback beneath a towering iron war-mech at Waterloo

IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · 18 JUN 1815 · WATERLOO

Napoleon commands a war-mech at Waterloo

18 June 1815, Waterloo. Where the Old Guard once marched, a towering iron war-machine strides through the mud at Napoleon’s command, its cannon-arms wreathed in smoke. The line that broke him may not break today.

Viking longships rowing toward a towering lit oil platform in a storm

IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · LATE OCTOBER, THE VIKING AGE · THE NORTH SEA

Viking longships raid a North Sea oil rig

A storm hurls a raiding fleet of longships against a colossus of steel rising from the North Sea — an offshore oil platform, blazing with impossible lights. The Norsemen row in, axes ready, certain it is a god or a giant.

Blackbeard’s sloop beside a towering modern container ship in fog

IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · 22 NOV 1718 · OFF THE CAROLINAS

Blackbeard boards a container ship

1718, off the Carolinas. Blackbeard’s sloop draws alongside a mountain of steel drifting silent in the fog — a modern container ship, ten storeys tall. Cutlasses against a hull no cannon can dent.

A grey guided-missile destroyer looms among Spanish galleons in a Channel storm

IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · AUG 1588 · THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

A modern destroyer meets the Spanish Armada

The English Channel, August 1588. Between the Armada and the English fleet, out of a rain squall, comes a hull of grey steel that belongs to no century either side has seen. No bridge of causes leads here. The atlas keeps it anyway.