Mark Twain claimed to have been born more times than anybody but Krishna, and the sorcerer Merlin was among his previous incarnations. Merlin granted to his future self the power to send Connecticut Yankee Hank Morgan to Camelot to win an eternal war to end all war by helping King Arthur create a Republic similar to the United States a thousand years early. While Mark Twain laid a false trail by portraying himself and the Yankee as enemies, they are actually on the same side—but Merlin has also made an enemy of the powerful sorceress Morgan le Fay by arranging for Uther Pendragon to sire Arthur on her mother, Duchess Igraine of Tintagel.
The industries founded by the Morgans meanwhile evolved over the centuries to the extent that, by the year 2001, the Morgan Armory has become the world’s largest defense company. Its heiress Diana is a brilliant mechanical-aerospace engineer who learns to fight in the company’s virtual reality simulators and then meets government agent Brian Graham on the worst day in America’s history. They hope to write two world wars, numerous genocides, and 9/11 out of the history books when they find themselves in Camelot but then they learn that Merlin summoned only Brian to aid King Arthur. Morgan le Fay piggybacked her own magic onto Merlin’s to summon Diana to create for her an unstoppable weapon with which to dominate the entire world–and she and the young woman from the distant future share a mysterious connection.
Empress Irene of Byzantium meanwhile has her own ambitions, and she enjoys the service of the Grand Master sorcerer Mezentius whose powers also rival Merlin’s. A corrupt Cardinal seeks meanwhile to usurp the Papacy for himself, while the future Charlemagne seeks to build a better future for his people. This sets the stage for widespread geopolitical intrigue and confrontations that pit the weapons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century against the most powerful sorcery on earth.
This is the setting for the work in progress On Camlann Field, and also published works under the pen name Charles Kyffhausen. Many of the latter use the fictional Morgan family (as descended from Camelot) as a story device to introduce inventions that are considerably well ahead of their times, such as deployment of Leonardo da Vinci’s submarine and Archimedes’ heat ray against the Spanish Armada, submarines that use a (fictional) electric cell invented by Benjamin Franklin, and so on.
Charles Kyffhausen 