Introduction

What if, by the passing of just two events, Japan and Germany had won World War 2?

The Goddess of Fortune is a work of speculative fiction in which alternate history is explored, and consequences examined.

• Beautiful Louise, while only 24 years old, uses her intelligence, wiles, and body to dominate the so-called "stronger sex."
• Kaito Sasaki of the Bank of Tokyo, inspired by Lenin (“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency”), proves just that with his printing of U.S. 100 dollar bills.
• The treachery of Hermann "Fatso" Goering is uncovered and his punishment is swift. 
• The duplicity of Roosevelt and his so-called Brains Trust is exposed and the doubts of the urbane gentleman, Henry Morgenthau, are made clear.

As a work of historical fiction, Goddess reveals the private foibles, quirks, and lusts of the famous (and often rich) of the period. How could the end goals of the Axis come to fruition given these events?

Goddess explores just how, and in doing so brings to light in imaginative prose the lives of historical figures we have only known from our history books.

Prepare to reimagine history, get The Goddess of Fortune today.

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Excerpt

1: Meeting An Old Friend

Vevey – Saturday, 7 September 1940

The sun slowly set in the late summer day but the heat was still on the lake. Lake Léman—“Lake Geneva” as the moneyed classes liked to call it in Geneva—was its normal quiet self: modest, still and bland, just like the Swiss themselves. Julius Stein wandered about his apartment in his old purple and yellow dressing gown, the gold braid ends of the belt having been almost completely chewed off by the short-haired dachshund that respectfully followed his master. Julius slowly made his way to the small interior bedroom for his ultimate luxury—his afternoon nap.

The bed was really an elevated tatami mat holding a pale orange futon with a small Japanese buckwheat pillow at its head. The Asian bed blended into the room that was conventionally decorated by Julius’s very conventional German wife in what she boasted to the rich Iranians living in the apartment below was a “Japanese motif.” Sophie so loved to use the English word “motif,” a word she had recently discovered in one of Julius’s precious copies of the American Esquire magazine, which, for reasons never explained, Julius kept and very occasionally re-read; the February 1936 issue was always in his study, with a slip of paper to mark an article by an American writer.

Julius laid down and thanked heaven for his tiny, small corner of peace and calm in the world. Every minute of every day back in Germany there was a tension in his chest and in his stomach, a sense of anticipation—actually more a dread—of the knock on the door, or even the tap on the shoulder as he rode the slow and squeaky elevated railway around Alexanderplatz—his and other Berliners’ beloved “Alex.” A dread of him and his family being taken away by the security service to disappear into the night and fog, to have their names recorded in the horrible and antiseptic SD books with only the terrible initials of “NN” beside their names. It had happened to his friends, it could have happened to him any day he was in Germany; this was the reality of the “New Germany.”

Julius knew the Swiss: they were dull, they were boring, and their lives centered around money and prestige, but they were fair in a world rapidly losing all sense of fairness. And he loved the sense of security he felt in Vevey.

Now, a glorious warmth slowly wrapped its soft feminine fingers around him, caressing him like a mother does to her child, nothing more important to her than to see the little smile and the tiny eyelids slowly drooping.

In the warmth and peace of the small bedroom, Julius could actually sense himself slowly falling asleep, a sensation he had never experienced in Germany. Soon he and the dog at his feet were asleep, both quietly snoring. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. How about those love scenes? Do you think those scenes moved the story forward?

2. Where is Louise in the grand scheme of the story? Power player? Pawn? Do you think this reflects reality in the ‘halls of power’?

3. The counterfeit currency poured into the Americas by the Bank of Tokyo proved a strangely potent weapon. Do you, and why do you agree or disagree?

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