Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk

Why would (Old) Latin grammar apply to Novalatina? It's a different language. And on top of that, it's partially derivative of Meridian Spanish.
Because the creators of Novalatina claim that their new dialect is a continuation of old Latin. The grammatical inconsistencies reveal that the 'enlightened' Societists were really making it up as they went along, and had a clear Hispanophone bias despite their condemnation of national identities.
 
The amount of work you put into a scientific update is amazing, Thande. Kudos!
The LTTW world feels so lived in, it's one of the things I like most about the timeline. I think my all time favorite update was the one about automaton fiction and the alternate evolution of genre boundaries.
 
Based on the Combine’s policy towards rainforests, and their current/eventual control of the Amazon, the Congo Basin, Borneo, and New Guinea, it seems the Jungle episode of a LTTW version of “Planet Earth” might be pretty short.
 
Fascinating as ever! Thank you, Thande! Curious about the impact of chemistry moving forward - if chemistry has been advanced thirty years compared to our history, how quickly will future developments advance?

Then again, I suppose the nuclear warring probably put a damper of sorts on the Meridian chemical industry.
 

Thande

Donor
The amount of work you put into a scientific update is amazing, Thande. Kudos!

The LTTW world feels so lived in, it's one of the things I like most about the timeline. I think my all time favorite update was the one about automaton fiction and the alternate evolution of genre boundaries.

One of my favorite aspects of this TL is the way that I actually learn science reading it.

Fascinating as ever! Thank you, Thande! Curious about the impact of chemistry moving forward - if chemistry has been advanced thirty years compared to our history, how quickly will future developments advance?

Then again, I suppose the nuclear warring probably put a damper of sorts on the Meridian chemical industry.


Thanks everyone for the comments. Science, and specifically chemistry, is my day job, so I like to bring it in. Again, if you want to know my main inspiration for both this and trying for the 'lived-in' feel, check out Tony Jones' alternate history settings (which were developed as RPG settings - if you prefer narratives, he has a novel "The Plague Policeman" available from Sea Lion Press which is set in his "Cliveless World"). He likes to play with one part of science/technology being more advanced while another is less advanced; for example, "Monarchy World" has Orion nuclear thrust spacecraft but barely any personal computers, while "Cliveless World" has advanced genetic engineering but all the aircraft have only one wing - yes this is based on an OTL thing.
 
No logic? I kinda doubt that. It's an artificial language, so I would actually assume it to be more logical than most other languages. At least initially.
If you want to call the endless torturing the actual speech patterns of real languages to fit an ideological straightjacket a "logic", I'll grant you that. ;)
 
Based on the Combine’s policy towards rainforests, and their current/eventual control of the Amazon, the Congo Basin, Borneo, and New Guinea, it seems the Jungle episode of a LTTW version of “Planet Earth” might be pretty short.

I dunno, it could also be pretty long but extremely propagandistic? In a sort of, "This is what the records we have say the rainforests were like before the Combine, and this is our film footage of what's left, which is why the Combine deserved to get Threshed."

Honestly, IDK if we've seen an environmentalist movement yet but it's almost certain to be really Diversitarian-tinted.

Also, more related to the update it self, now I'm really curious about what this Alkahest actually is. It looks like the war is about to be brought to a swift end courtesy of the plague, and then immediately reignited by the Combine launching their "last throw" backed up by a chemical weapons stockpile formidable enough to make the collective militaries of the world in ~1917 blush.
 
The text lays out that it was the treaty between Siam and China that opened up the plague region to the world that spread it.
 

Thande

Donor
A nitpick, wouldn't a pandemic have already happened after the Pandoric War since it was the first true global war?
There was a brief global 'Peace Flu' described at the time (it shortened M. Mercier's life) which, though driven by similar factors to the OTL Spanish Flu, was far milder (more comparable to the Russian Flu of 1889-90 in OTL).

In OTL the Third Plague happened earlier as the reservoir in Yunnan was opened up earlier by the Panthay Rebellion against the Qing, whereas here (as Kylia says) this was delayed until peace between China and Siam opened the area up. The Third Plague in OTL didn't coincide with a global war (though it was spread by smaller ones*) so it's considerably more devastating in TTL.

* A plague outbreak that began in Manila in 1900 may have been related to the Spanish-American War; the latter is better known for being one of the final wars in which more men died from disease than enemy action, but the bigger killer was yellow fever. More obviously, the Taiping Rebellion played an earlier role in spreading it throughout China. It is worth noting that some of the Yellow Peril racism in the United States was in part driven by fear that Chinese immigrants were bringing the plague with them and living in unsanitary conditions to spread it (which came to a head with the plague outbreak in San Francisco just before the earthquake, and ultimately led to the Qing government boycotting American goods in protest of discriminatory laws against Chinese in the US).
 
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Also, more related to the update it self, now I'm really curious about what this Alkahest actually is.
It's named after the alchemical concept of a universal solvent. I could imagine someone from the twentieth century, aware of the existence of atoms, calling the process of their collapse a dissolution. Maybe these Alkahests are fissile materials? Pioneering in this field definitely has the potential of granting the Combine a "feared and exalted" position.
Refresh my memory please - what's the Doctrine of the Last Throw?
It is similar to Stalin's concept of keeping a low profile and waiting for the capitalist powers to go to war against each other before intervening. It's arguably the only way revolutionary state can hope to take over the world. Like the OTL Stalin, Alfarus must secretly be terrified of a worldwide coalition against the Combine.
So all of Russian America in TTL and not just the lost American-settled PNW is in the ENA’s hands, eh? Well, that’s a bright spot for the patriotism of TTL me. :p

I cannot see why it would be lost to America by this point or in the future since in terms of isolation it is still more easily accessible by the ENA than Russia.
Perhaps the Russians will succeed precisely because the Americans think that such an invasion is logistically impossible and liable to fail based on their own recent experience of trans-oceanic invasions and don't prepare for such a possibility.
 
It is similar to Stalin's concept of keeping a low profile and waiting for the capitalist powers to go to war against each other before intervening. It's arguably the only way revolutionary state can hope to take over the world. Like the OTL Stalin, Alfarus must secretly be terrified of a worldwide coalition against the Combine.

Y'know, if I was Alfarus I'd be terrified of it for more reasons than just "they can actually stop us", there's also the fact that a worldwide coalition against the Combine would falsify Combine Societism. Their whole idea is that the Combine is the only Human government, that the illegitimate bandits who call themselves "nations" would never unify under any circumstance, and that the Final Society is the only way to bring about world peace, right? If a worldwide anti-societist coalition, some kind of Alliance of Independent Nations, actually formed it'd immediately suck a lot of the oxygen out of the Societist cause.
 
As interesting as developments in chemistry are, I'm also wondering how and when computers will come about. In OTL, Andrei Kolmogorov could, despite working in the Soviet Union, travel internationally and publish his works. It is already known that TTL there will be restrictions on trade and on the flow of information for many decades, until the 1980s at the latest. The effects on mathematics... well, concurrent independent invention is hardly unprecedented in the field, but every mathematical tradition having to arrive at every theory independently, and not knowing how to interpret references in imported texts, all that will slow things down. We could go for what happened OTL and have a large number of mathematicians flee to a single country and cooperate there-- or maybe, due to its unique in-between status, Danubia ends up becoming a venue for discreet meetups and conferences, people being dropped off in Czechosilesia or the Balkan border with the Eternal State and returning home with new notes in hand. It would be really funny if mathematicians took on this kind of Freemason-ish/First International air, considering themselves more loyal to their noble shared mission than to the competing governments that would stand in their way, and meeting in multinational cabals to... I don't know, listen to each other talk about topology.

At the very least, for every country to get computers at around the same time one would hope that the rules of mathematical logic, of Boole's binary system and Frege's predicate logic, have been created and propagated in the previous century. This seems likely, because although this world is late to electricity the Optel system already got people thinking about these questions of how to construct meaningful codes out of as few symbols as possible. It's possible that mechanical difference/analytic engines have already been built around the world.

Lastly, a interesting video:
 
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I think I found the OTL analogue to the Combine.

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The Last War of Supremacy, 1990

Just pretend Brazil is the ENA, Argentina is Russia, Uruguay is France and Paraguay is the Combine
 
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