Rocket City - An Outline

Hello All, I hope you are all doing well.

I assume that most of you have seen the trailer I posted on Youtube for Rocket City, my new short series. Let me give you all a quick overview of what the project will specifically entail.

This summer, I read a book that transformed my understanding of many things, the novel Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow is often cited as the great American post-war novel. It's a hard novel to summarize, but it deals largely with themes of Human Ambition, colonialism, the military industrial complex, scientific management, psychology, chemistry, physics, and most prominently, war. Pynchon delivers these themes through the story of the Nazi V2 Rocket, and continued allusions to Operation Paperclip. The novel changed me and deeply affected me on a level that no other novel I've read really ever has.

Although Pynchon's novel is fictional, many of the events depicted and the connections he makes (he's often characterized as the father of paranoid fiction, his novels are a real treat to anyone who's into parapolitics) are real and based in history. So I got to work researching the events he depicted and the real story of the development of rocketry more broadly. I think the stories of Paperclip and the development of the V2 are fascinating stories, that often feel surreal even though they actually both happened. But what I find most enlightening and disturbing, is how the Nazi rocket program was essentially used as a prototype for the military industrial complexes that would spawn on both sides of the iron curtain. Cold calculated scientific management, the integration of big business, military and government, and the endless expenditures on increasingly complex weapons of war that either had little strategic military value or would alternatively spell total annihilation. This sounds rough because it is, I have just completed my research (read five books in their entirety and read a ton of articles and supplementary material) I am starting the writing process now.

Rocket City is going to be a 4-5 part project, starting in Weimar Germany, then moving into Nazi Germany, then Paperclip, then the American and Soviet military industrial complexes and space programs. On Patreon, you will get all 4/5 parts at once. I am also planning on having another History of the CIA video ready as well after these are done releasing on Youtube. This will be focused on Laos, which is somewhat topical given Kissinger's death recently. So yeah, a lot left to do but I have my main narrative outline written I just need to write the scripts and edit. I'm sorry for the long wait, but this is by far the biggest project I've undertaken so far.

Patreon billing will only resume once the five parts are released

Happy to answer any questions you may have.

Take care,

EWO