Won't Get Fooled Again

By: James Philip

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN is the fifteenth book in the core MAIN SERIES OF TIMELINE 10/27/62.

Readers: please be aware that this book was originally published as a much longer novel, which as of November 2025 was split into two parts, the second part being published separately as BEAR IN THE SKY.
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It is February 1968 in a world in which the swinging sixties never happened because the Cuban Missiles Crisis of October 1962 went catastrophically wrong.

Since the cataclysm struck, obliterating great and historic cities, laying waste to great swathes of the northern hemisphere, the threat of new wars has never been far away. There has been no post-war settlement, no washing of the spears.

In the United States a President beset by crises at home and overseas, is ruthlessly intent on clinging to power to power; and it is election year.

The Russians and the Americans have determined that the price of peace in Europe is to be paid by the victims of their war over Cuba.

But in a world in which mendacity rules the political stage, in which the leaders of the free and the communist world alike are at loggerheads, and in which the long-term reverberations of the October War and its resulting aftershocks, conflicts large and small, are still playing out, is there is still room for heroes? Or for unlikely villains? Or desperate players who have nothing to lose who might, conceivably, change the course of the history of the brave new, post-apocalyptic epoch.

While presidents, admirals and generals, prime ministers, strategists and warriors, ministers great and misguided, struggle to find sense in the chaos, the fate of nations hangs in the balance.

And yet, in spite of the swirling tides of war and peace; there is time enough for love.

And both despair, and hope.


Author’s note to readers: since the publication of OPERATION ANADYR in October 2014, the Timeline 10/27/62 series has branched into and explored a number of additional narrative arcs and themes, and in several standalone stories.

For my readers who prefer to read the Timeline 10/27/62 books in the chronological order of the overall narrative arc WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN = 41.