OK, a new commission for Mumby. The notes will be on a separate sheet from the map proper: Mumby wants to print the map out and I don't want it shrunken down by the area for notes.
The world of Fallout! Well, almost. It’s 2091, some 14 years after the bombs flew in the canon TL, and the world is still largely non-destroyed. What gives?
The basic situation is similar – a more conservative US has done its darnedest to stay in the 1950s, the Cold War never really ended (although China took the place of the USSR as Leading Red Menace as the latter relatively declined and turned isolationist), atom-punk technology is widespread, and the global economy has cratered as a result of incompetent handling of global climate change and declines in raw material stocks, most particularly oil.
In this near-parallel timeline, Soviet scientists developed an effective fusion power cell in 2055 more than a decade earlier than in the baseline scenario, and the Soviet Premier of the time, worried about the increasing energy and raw materials crisis worldwide, decided to share the technology with other nations in hopes of stabilizing the international situation.
Various knock-on effects have flowed from this. With less desperation about gaining oil sources, China and the US have not gone to war over control over Alaska, the US has not annexed Canada to secure its access to Alaska (although Canada has still been reduced essentially to a puppet), and various nasty experiments in Extreme Technology haven’t pushed forward quite so fast by the Chinese and US governments. The US is even selling a little of the oil from its experimental super-deep ocean well tp the Chinese, now that fusion has made US energy needs a little less critical.
On the other hand, fusion power by itself hasn’t been enough to solve all the world’s problems. Other vital resources are in short supply, climate change greatly compounds an already very difficult situation, and the European-Middle East war, which had already been under way in 2052, dragged on to its disastrous conclusion, leading to the collapse of the European Community. Much of the world is run by various “governments of emergency”, while oil shortages and lack of access to advanced nuclear and fusion tech means much of the Third World is operating on largely 19th century levels. And a switch over from a fossil fuel (supplemented by fission) infrastructure to a fusion one has been slow and difficult; only in the decade after 2067 did the US power grid become majority fusion-powered (although, rather representatively of this world’s priorities, the first luxury fusion-cell powered car came on the US market in 2060).
(This world has an odd blind spot when it comes to wind and solar and some other renewable, but it may be explainable in terms of alternate physics making solar panels less practical or simply the even greater power of conservative corporate regimes).
Fusion, robotics, new forms of artificial intelligence, biological engineering: the technology exists to create a true post-scarcity society, but will Politics As Usual and the accumulated weight of past errors bring things to a point of collapse before this new future can bloom? Early development of cheap fusion has given the world some critical extra time, but it remains unclear if this will be enough.
The long-isolationist Soviets are struggling to find a new path in this changing world. The Soviet leadership, after the crisis of the early 2000s in which the Soviet empire nearly broke up (and some of the western bits of the Warsaw Pact peeled off), faced a choice between collapse if things went on as they had been going on, fundamental reform, or withdrawal from active competition with the US. It took the third choice, forged the remnants of the Warsaw Pact into a closer union, and largely dropped out of the International Big Dude contest, leaving the stage to China and the US, returning (in the words of its leadership) to “Communism in one country.” Largely technocratic rather than Communist nowadays, regime survival have been the watchwords for the 21st century: it’s a rather grey and grim sort of place, but at least nobody is starving, and while private radios are a death sentence, one has to work pretty hard at it to get sent to the gulag nowadays. However, the collapse of the European Commonwealth has left it with a crumbling western frontier that offers opportunities – and perhaps unavoidable risks – while the apocalyptical final rounds of the of the War for Oil has send ripples which in spite of all censorship and border security, seemed to have reached as far as its central Asian provinces…
The European Commonwealth broke up into squabbling bits after the war with the middle East ended with the EC gaining bupkis. Economic collapse brought to power a pretty totalitarian regime in France, the efforts of which to grain new raw materials and resources in _Europe_ did not work out very well. Germany is divided into an authoritarian but semi-democratic regime in the north, an essentially neo-Nazi regime in the south, and a weirdo, not very widely recognized technocratic regime In Saxony, while the best that can be said for northern Italy is that there are _fewer_ Governments of National Salvation than before. By and large, even the better off parts of Europe are currently looking rather Latin American Junta nowadays.
The UK has disengaged from the continent and is leaning on the few remnants of its old empire for support (the Brits were rather more successful in maintaining the Commonwealth as a genuine political power block than in our timeline, but there has been a slow erosion). It’s a US ally, but mostly due to fear of China: the Canada thing really rankles. Democratic France hangs on in the overseas territories (France, too, incorporated more of its overseas territories directly into the Mteropole than in our world), but its rapidly becoming an African-dominated affair (vs the alternate option of becoming a pro-Chinese and French person-free affair).
Outside of British and French bits, the European effort to help keep afloat through ruthless neocolonial exploitation of African resources is over with Europe as a major power center: the US and China carry on with their own projects, though. Will Africa ever control its own destiny? The Science Dictatorship of Liberia, founded as a private venture by US blacks to stabilize said country, and then expanding way beyond its original ambitions, is one possible model: the Grand Jihad expanding in the wake of collapse of authority and functional economies in the Sahel region is another.
The Middle Eastern powers managed to deliver in the later stages of the war some 20-odd crude, first-generation nukes to Europe, by missile, by boat, by crate of weed. The European response was perhaps a trifle disproportionate: the area between Morocco and Pakistan remains a disaster area thirty years on, although outside the lawless Sahel most of the area has recoalesced into more-or-less functioning states.
India has weathered the nastiness of the 21st century without collapsing, perhaps thanks to the Hindu belief that this life is just compensating for bad Karma. The current Very Hindu (but not Hindu-nationalist in the Our Timeline sense) government is pursuing an ongoing project for creating a Minimalist Society capable of living comfortably but lightly in a harsh future: yoga and ancient Hindu mind-control seems a part of this, and there are confusing reports of telepathic and psychic powers. The Chinese and US Deep Governments don’t take this too seriously: one gets telepathy through gross genetic manipulation, not squatting and chanting. It is true that India of late seems to be getting more impenetrable to foreign intelligence…
China is quite totalitarian if pragmatic, a still theoretically Marxist society whose leaders having had some success in a program of creating a true planned society through the use of computers and AI (indeed, the more powerful Chinese AIs have been of late been developing some agendas of their own, unknown to the Central Committee), although having a US more authoritarian, rigid and big-corporation dominated than OTL has helped them in their ongoing completion. The population is enormous (there was no one-child policy) and it is only thanks to China’s high level biotech work that they aren’t starving. Unlike the USSR, China remains an active overseas interventionist, and supports Marxist or just pro-Chinese regimes and movements world wide. Current US internal difficulties are seen by many as a golden opportunity for expansion of Chinese influence, starting with a very annoying offshore island: others fear the possibility of overextension and the risks of pushing the US too far.
The US is currently in a state of turmoil, and its empire of allies, puppets and dependencies in Asia and Latin America is undergoing fierce unrest as the center of power seems increasingly paralyzed. Ultimately the Enclave, the secret alliance of scientists, military, industrial and political leaders which existed to maintain their own survival in the face of an expected atomic war couldn’t keep all of its dirty laundry hidden. Starting with the discovery by uninformed army officers of their facilities where advanced genetic manipulation took place on human subjects and human brains were made mere information processors for robot bodies (the mass escape of super mutants into Central Florida was _really_ hard to cover up), the Conspiracy has begun to unravel, first slowly then at explosive speed as several Enclave members decided to throw their allies to the dogs to secure their own position, and powerful politicians outside the Enclave’s “magical circle” (usually because of their failure to grasp the expendability of most of the US, and world, population [1]) have seized the opportunity to go after a lot of people whose smell they haven’t liked for a long time.
Actual civil war has not yet broken out, but much of the US is now under the banner of the “new nullification movement”, which refuses to accept the legitimacy of Washington’s orders until a genuinely free and independent investigative body is given the authority to dig out the sordid truth about such things as the “experimental shelters”, the “super-soldier program”, and the notorious “starship project” (apparently abandoned when space telescopic studies confirmed that the nearest habitable planet was over a thousand years away at current travel time projections). The Enclave, who knows that a full accounting will leave many of them facing the disintegration chamber or at least jail time, are blocking and denying and doing their best to blacken the reputation of their opponents, while making preparations for more violent measures if baffling the US public with bullshit fails to do the trick. Whether democracy will survive (some cynics prefer the term “return”), or even the Union itself, is currently in some doubt.
Certain elements in the Enclave are making preparations for evacuation to the secret Moon Base if the worst comes to the worst.
Scientists working at UC Berkley have successfully nullified gravity on a small scale. The planets and their resources await – if the human race makes it through the current uncertainty.
Deep in space, the Zetans observe. Their experimental manipulations of human society through surreptitious technology transfer (the Zetans, to whom individuals are no more important than skin cells, are amused by continued human assumptions as to the crash-prone nature of their ships) have yielded much valuable data, but some feel that it is time to wrap things up and reduce humanity to a level where it will be less likely to make a nuisance of itself: an atomic war should be easy to trigger at this point. Others disagree: human creativity is a valuable resource. After all, a species which has created the Giddyup Buttercup has tremendous potential. Of course, control is necessary, but the current unstable situation has considerable potential for the expansion of their covert on Earth influence: it will be possible to maneuver many Implanted humans in positions of power, and their secret bases can be expanded under the cover of supposedly “official” authority. (They haven’t been dissecting all those human brains for fun, after all). And then there is the possibility of Elder technology on Earth, which will be a lot easier to track down with human cooperation.
A consensus will probably be reached soon.
Bruce