Alternate History Travel Guides: an AH gazeteer

Polish Eagle

catboy637 said:
My take on 64.
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Thanks!

Here's the next dimension:

65.) Wrath of the gods--When the first cities were starting up in Sumer, an asteroid impact destroyed them. The apparant displeasure of the the gods with humans starting their own cities retards such development across the Old World. Word soon spread through Europe, Asia, and Africa that the gods rained fire down upon the cities, and people return to the fields and hunter-gatherer lifestyles. The great societies of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Greece, and Rome are strangled in the womb.

But the New World civilizations form almost as IOTL. The Olmec Empire conquers Central America around the year 1 AD. The Inca Empire forms a few centuries later and expands across the Andes, and into the Amazon Basin. Both Empires have knowledge of bronze working, and their successor states develop iron while expanding to fill the Americas. Eventually, they reach Europe and conquer it with the unwitting help of a form of airborne syphilis. Though the Americans suffer from smallpox and other plagues, they develop an immunity, and nothing can stop them from conquering the primitives of Europe, Asia, and Africa, who just started building cities again around 500AD.

In the OTL Year of 2009, the world is entering a technological phase comparable to the Renaissance. However, human sacrifice cults are still prominent. The most advanced parts of the world are the Andes, MesoAmerica, and the Mississippi basin.

ASB? Sounds like it to most OTL residents. When visiting this world, they are warned to exercise extreme caution. It is a good idea to visit this TL only if you are armed. Otherwise, you just might get sacrificed.
 

B_Munro

66.) Song – a world in which the Song south Chinese Empire survived and spread colonies all around the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and through trade and commerce largely sinicized the planet. Indonesia is very Chinese, as is Australia, New Zealand, and most of the Americas: much of India is satellites, colonies, protectorates, etc. of several of the Song-derived empires, as is Eastern and Southern Africa. Europe and the Islamic world are outside of the immediate sphere of Song influence, but have picked up a lot of Chinese art, dress, and philosophy, not to mentions forms of business organization and technology. Theoretically the whole area from the sinicized Ethiopian Empire to the Chinese farming states along the Mississippi owe tribute to the Emperor in Kai’Feng, but it’s really quite theoretical nowadays.

It is a highly civilized world, and courtly, chivalrous, (there is, alas, even more sexism than OTL 1900) and elegant manners are widely appreciated. Technology is late 1800s, but it is much more widely spread than OTL, with most of the Americas, East Asia, the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and Eastern Islam roughly on the same level. (Thanks to contacts with the Song Sphere, the eastern parts of the Islamic world are more modern and advanced than those further to the west.) Oman rules southern Arabia and is a commercial and business center comparable to a combined Switzerland and Netherlands OTL. Japan, a federal monarchy (?) has its own little Empire in Africa, the far NE of Siberia, and the Pacific NW of America. Dynastic alliances and intermarriages are common. It has been long since any Emperor in the Song sphere has had absolute power, but it is considered simply far too gauche to not have one. The Song world is dominated by vast trading combines, the heads of which rival Emperors in wealth and power (and sometimes are Emperors). Northern China and Siberia south and west of the thinly populated Japanese areas are still ruled by a Mongol-derived dynasty, but follow Song customs and are an accepted part of the Song Sphere.

The most important European states are Russia (limited to west of the Urals, and distinctly Asiatic – robes, long beards, an Emperor in a secluded Kremlin), England (heavily influenced by Chinese philosophy, with colonies in west Africa and the largely Song-disregarded NE of America (too cold, too many rocks), and Portugal-Castile (colonies in the Amazon jungles, north Africa, large Jewish population has helped make it the banking center of Europe). There is a “buffer” of relatively backwards Native American states between Chinese and British North America. The Piedmont Republic, which broke away from British America in the early 20th century, is part Chinese, part Native American, and marvelously corrupted and rule-free. Chinese settlers and colonies are all over the world, and there are a lot of people with Chinese surnames even in Europe and the Islamic lands: indeed, there has been some intermarriage between the royal families of the Song Sphere and the English and Portuguese dynasties. (Venice, Russia, the German Union, not so much).


67.) Islamic Germany - in which an earlier spread of Islam to North Central Asia led to Europe being overrun not only by Mongol-equivalents, but Islamic ones to boot. Although in the end the Christian states of Iberia, the British Isles, and Italy managed to break away from the Islamic-Mongol Yoke, and later liberate southern France, Northern Europe remained under Islamic rule, and over times became Islamicized, although the Sultanate of Mainz still runs about 12% Christian nowadays.

The world is dominated by Islamic powers, although the underdog but highly capitalistic Christian states have done a rather better job of imitating Islamic modernity than the Muslims of OTL have in going the other way around. Although the Germans and their North African and Scandinavian pirate allies challenged the Christians for mastery in the Atlantic, most of the Americas are Christian, colonized by the powerful British-Castilian monarchy and their Portuguese and South French allies. (There were a _number_ of colonial efforts by the Germans in the Americas, a few of which still exist today. But they did get something of a last laugh when they helped most of the BC colonies in the Americas to break away from Londres in the 19th century).

Anglo-Spanish Greater Mexico is the most important of the American states: if a bit backwards by the standards of the great Islamic powers, it is still a major industrial power. Other major states include Germany itself (includes OTL Bohemia, Poland, the Low Countries, and northern France), Islamic Rus (roughly OTL USSR less east Siberia, central Asia, and the South Caucuses), The Persian Union, Mongolia-Korea, and the sprawling mass of the “slaver state” in Africa, an Swahili-dominated dictatorship looked upon with considerable distaste by other important states. India is politically fragmented between Hindu, Muslim, and mixed states. The Balkans are a mix of small Muslim and Christian states, while Italy is a hard-headed mercantile oligarchy that has been perfectly willing to ally or kowtow to Muslim states when needed, but has always kept the fortifications on its Alpine frontiers well equipped and manned.

There have been two major wars in the last century: the first saw the collapse of the Khanate of Ind and the Turkish Empire of Rum, and the reemergence of Persia as a major power, while the second, following the breakup of the Anglo-Castilian monarchy, led to the expulsion of Russia from the Balkans and the replacement of the Khanate with a Behnamist “people’s state” (a republic, more or less, rather than the Communist dictatorship that would imply OTL), the collapse of colonial rule in much of still-Buddhist and Taoist continental East Asia and the reemergence of south China and (mostly Islamic) Nippon as independent states, the development of the first Corpuscular Bomb by the Germans (too late to use in the war) and the emergence of Greater Mexico as an important state on the world stage, and the end of the Iberian dictatorship. (Reunification with Britain is still being debated).

The Christian states tend to be oligarchic or monarchial, and although his Imperial Majesty George Arbusto of Greater Mexico is a constitutional monarch, he still has some real power. (Mexico is linguistically complicated: although “Spanglish” is the normal means of communication, Castilian is something of a prestige language, some communities are almost monolingual English, and then there are the Native Americans). It’s generally a peaceful world, although Hindu-Islamic conflicts in India, squabbles between the states of balkanized North America, and hostility between a modernizing (if not yet great-power) South China and the Mongol-Korean Empire which holds much of what it considers its historical soil still make for occasional overheated headlines - and then there’s that nastily racially and religiously divided African colossus.

Technology is roughly OTL, and it is an economically somewhat more leftist but socially more conservative world than ours: in much of the Islamic world women now have the vote, but their social roles are still on the order of women in OTL 1950s (and with much more modest clothes). It is a fairly tolerant one, Muslims and Christians getting along roughly as well as Protestants and Catholics in the late 19th century, there is little discrimination against people with a black skin, and Mexico has even allowed Jewish immigrants since the 1960s. (Alas, Eastern and Indian “Paganism” are still very much looked down upon, and both Christians and Muslims send a lot of missionaries to mainland SE Asia). Given how much of the Islamic world is located on ecologically fragile land, global warming threats are being taken rather seriously.


68.) T’ang – a very different world arising from a longer-lasting and more successful T’ang dynasty and the many butterflies that arose. The20th century has been a bloody one, what with the Hindu Rameshist Revolution and the Karmic Union’s struggle with the Triple Alliance for mastery of China and Southeast Asia, the great struggle between the Republic of Al-Marrak and the expansionist Atacaman Empire, the Great European Revolution and the ascendancy of the French Republic, and the current Careful Peace with its balance of power between the half-a-dozen or so Great Powers. It is a rich and modern world, industrialization having started earlier and spread far more widely than OTL: aside from some parts of SE Asia, parts of Eastern Europe, and some of the states of interior Africa, it doesn’t have much of a “third world.” It also has bad pollution, global warming, and resource depletion problems.

The Parhae Empire includes what in OTL would be Korea, Manchuria, Japan, and a chunk of Eastern Siberia, and has colonies throughout the Pacific and in what OTL would be California and southern Oregon. It is Buddhist, multi-lingual but using a language similar to Korean for a common language, with a phonetic writing system and a semi-democratic, oligarchic government headed by an Emperor with some actual powers, both as a secular ruler and as the head of the Buddhist orders. “Occidental” food (mostly European and North African) is popular. Sui China (OTL China, roughly, less Manchuria but plus Taiwan and N. Vietnam) has recovered from being a battleground in the middle years of the 20th century, and although still poor on a per capita basis, has the world’s largest overall economy, and ambitions of bringing the various independent Chinese colonies scattered around the world under their control.

Al-Marrak is a powerful Islamic federal democracy incorporating roughly the US Confederates states, plus the mid-west, north Mexico, and the Caribbean. Like the OTLs US, it has a bit of a classical-Greek fetish, and the mix of Islamic and Classical architecture visible in its public architecture is a bit eye-hurty to people of our TL. A fairly large percentage of its population is Native American: conquest here was slower than ATL, and less racist, so the locals had a better opportunity to adapt to disease and incorporate their preexisting societies into the Marrakeshi federal structure. To the west there is a nowadays peaceful border with the Parhae, to the south some slightly Hispanicized central Mexican states, roughly OTL Latin-American poor, mostly Amerindian by blood and practicing a weird mix of Christianity and local faiths (the Portuguese-Castilian colonization effort was cut short by some fresh Islamic invasions of Iberia): to the north, the fragmented remains of the Theocracy, a Franco-British colonial effort which ended very messily in civil war: the successor states, some mostly European, other mostly Amerindian by race, all obnoxiously Christian, all seem to cordially detest each other, and Al-Marrak is currently in the midst of a couple rather troublesome peace-keeping operations in the area. (Al-Marrak has absorbed, fairly successfully, a few former Theocracy states, but Marrakis have no desire whatsoever to establish rule over the lot of them.)

Khazaria is Turkic-speaking, partly Slavic, and extends over OTL southern Russia and the Ukraine to Kazakhstan. It is in fact the second such Empire, and is in fact Jewish, as is its ancient rival, the Slavic state with its capital at Novgorod and extending from Belorussia and the Baltic States to the sea of Okhotsk. (It lost its warm (-ish) water ports on the Pacific, and its territories in Alaska and the Pacific NW – now an independent republic - by picking the wrong side during the second round of the Indian wars). They each follow different brands of Judaism, and condemn each other as heretical – while they are in turn both anathematized by many Diaspora Jews for their odd beliefs picked up from Islam and pre-existing paganisms.

Christian Europe (OTL Europe west of the Poland, roughly, less the Iberian peninsula, Italy and some small Balkan states that converted to Judaism during the Khazars (first empire) occupation of Eastern Europe), is roughly unified by the EC-NATO type economic/military union known as the European Concord, led by the French Republic, which is larger than OTL France (it includes much of OTLs Low Countries, and large chunks of Western Germany and Switzerland). Religion is mostly Unified Christianity, although there are some Old Orthodox worshippers in the Balkans and the Celtic Revival of the 19th century brought about modern Celtic Christianity, which the French and the British still have trouble taking seriously. The Concord has made great strides forward since the bloody violence of the Great European War of the 1870s, although still somewhat backward (especially Eastern Europe) compared to the Parhae and Al-Marrak. Other Christian states include Britain, Ireland, north-German-Danish Pomerania, Austrian-Bavarian-Swabian-eastern Swiss Austria, the little Slovene-Croat nation of Carniola, and the Greek, Serb, Wallachian, Bulgarian and Bosnian fragments of the old Serbo-Wallachian Empire. (Moldova/Moldavia is part of Khazaria, and Hungary, Albania and Poland are Khazari-Jewish independent states, although the Albanians, for reasons of geography, have joined the Concord of Europe).

Other lesser but still important powers include Persia, extending from OTL Pakistan to the border of Iraq, and beginning to see the end of oil looming alarmingly in the future: the shrunken but still extensive Atacama Empire in the south American Andes and western Amazon: and a couple of the successor states to the now-collapsed Karmic Union. (Iraq is a solidly Shiite, aggressively nationalistic Arab state with a bit of a chip of its shoulder over previous periods of Persian rule, and has the atom bomb – as do some 21 other countries in this civilized but somewhat belligerent world).

Islamic Spain, Italy and North Africa form a bit of a distinct zone within Islam, modern, scientific, (mostly) democratic and closely tied economically and politically to Al-Marrak, compared to the more backward and authoritarian Islamic kingdoms of sub-Saharan West Africa, Egypt and Arabia. The Republic (formerly the Kingdom) of Anatolia is a religiously pluralist state, since Muslims make up a bare majority of the total population – Khazarian Jews make up over a third, with Christians and some odds and ends making up the balance. The Islamic kingdoms of West Africa are modernizing, but still somewhat under the economic thumb of Al-Marrak and the western Arab/Berber states. One of the more advanced, the Songhai Sultanate, managed to break into the “cheap, crappy cars” niche of the world economy in the early 1990s. East Africa is…complex, with Hindu and Chinese coastal states (much mixed now with the local population) as well as local kingdoms which have absorbed cultural elements from both, as well as from the Muslims that preceded them, to create a new, syncretic religion that has played a major role in state-building in the area, which has by this point spread from OTL Zimbabwe north to Uganda and west to compete with Islam in OTL Congo-Zaire and the Central African republic.

In central Asia, north of Persia, the upper Amu and Syr Darya rivers area (roughly Kazakhstan SE of Balkhash, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekstan east of Bukhara) is a successor state to the old T’ang empire, currently ruled by a Tajik dynasty and following a mix of Buddhism and Manicheanism: once a great empire extending from OTL Mashhad to Yumen in Gansu, it is now a mere Kahzar puppet. SE Asia is complex, with many small states, some Buddhist and some Hindu, and a place of shifting Indian-Chinese-Parhae influence. Some of the states, thanks to Indian settlement programs, are highly Indian-ized: Hindus outnumber Muslims and Buddhists in what OTL would be Malaysia, for instance. Australia is an independent Hindu state, New Zealand part of the Parhae Empire.

In South America, the Atacama still hold territories from OTL Ecuador to Patagonia (thanks in part to the very successful program of cultural assimilation followed by the Inca before them) and much of the Amazon, but have lost most of OTL Colombia (now organized as a league of small states) thanks to losses in wars vs. Al-Merrak, the Chinese states along the east coast of Brazil and around the mouth of the Rio De Plata, and the Goajiro confederation, a loosely federal republic mostly ethnic native American by blood, Catholic (kinda) by religion, and speaking Portu-Castilian as a common rather than a national language. The Confederation extends from OTL British Guyana through northern Colombia and Central America to the borders of Maya territory. Although a somewhat backward state, nobody wants to mess with them: the Yanomamo Special Forces in particular are deeply psycho.


69.) Danube Pentarchy – a rather alien world in which the Scythians developed the stirrup much earlier than anyone did OTL, and did a Genghis on the Persians and the Greek city states. The hybrid culture that arose between the German forests and the borders of China eventually became a great empire, which warred and traded and exchanged ideas with both the Carthaginian-ruled southern and western Mediterranean and the Empire along the Yellow river (unified here by someone other than Quin Shi Huang, and therefore different from the very start of Empire). It eventually broke apart under fresh barbarian invasions, but from its fragments arose a civilization that assimilated the Germanic peoples, developed science and technology more quickly than OTL, and brought most of the world under its control and colonized the Americas, even putting a man on the moon in what OTL would be the 17th century. Tragically, it then outgrew the oil supply, fought a brutal series of nuclear wars, and collapsed into pre-industrial squalor amid the death of billions.

Today the world is fragmented and war-torn, struggling over scraps of resources and technology, hotter and drier than ours (the effects of a load of CO2 in the atmosphere are still working themselves out) and with a poorer ecosystem. The most advanced people on the planet are the mercantile republics of the Danube Pentarchy (stretching roughly across where Romania and Austria-Hungary were OTL), who dominate the trade of most of Europe and the Mediterranean. They have held on to the printing press and gunpowder, reinvented the steam engine (although with the forests being cut down almost as fast as they can grow back, and all the easily accessible coal dug up, they have a bit of a problem fueling them), know how to use glass to make a solar furnace and are trying to do something with the fragments of electrical science they retain - and are currently kicking the ass of the Hysekopia, a backwards monarchy occupying roughly OTL Poland, Belarus, and the western Ukraine, whose defenders are basically knights in scrap-iron armor. (Ok, the Pentarchy is using a lot of mercenaries from the Saharan Autocracies, but they do have a decent army of their own).

Racial types are a bit different from OTL – the vast spread of the Scytho-Greek Empire meant that there was a considerable mixing of distant types, and there are a lot of people with Asian features (epicanthic eye-folds, etc.) in East and Central Europe. A common solar cult with a savior myth extends across most of the Americas and Eurasia (Africans follow a religion with Carthaginian roots), but has broken into many sub-sects, many nastily apocalyptic. (The priest-kings of Hysekopia have revived the long-banned practice of widow-strangulation, a sort of poor man’s Suttee). With the global collapse, slavery has revived in many places, although it remains illegal in the Pentarchy. Other pockets of semi-civilization persist in the Americas, and in the Far East, where the people which in our world were the Chinese still managed to create one of this world’s great civilizations in spite of annoying Scythian neighbors in Central Asia. Indeed, the Wu Hsia Despotism (located in what OTL would be the deep south of China: the north suffers from severe desertification and is thinly populated) is in some ways a more developed state than the Pentarchy, a well-organized bureaucratic state with a real tradition of learning, although with even worse raw materials problems.

It is a world filled with the crumbled ruins of a civilization that collapsed nearly two and a half centuries ago, and tunneling through the rubble and garbage heaps for useful artifacts, metal suitable for recycling, etc. is an ancient and honorable profession. Nothing ever gets thrown away, but is reused and recycled till reduced to powder. Most metals are no longer available in rich near-the-surface ores, and the technology for deep mining and extraction no longer can be duplicated. Stone and adobe are the main construction materials of choice. Particularly rich urban ruins can be something to fight wars over. Much in the way of old books and knowledge is preserved here and there, but most nations aren’t too interested in sharing what know-how they have, and organization is often quite deplorable: there are rather few library scientists out there nowadays, and the scientific method is almost lost. Then there are the apocalyptic cults, some of which see all ancient knowledge as something to be promptly burned…

Bruce
 

B_Munro

And here's a map for T'ang.

Bruce

TANG.png
 

B_Munro

70.) "Radio Free America" scenario – due to a somewhat different course of 19th century events, starting with the Ottoman crushing of a Serbian revolt, the Austrians stayed out of this TLs WWI-equivalent, and Germany ended up fighting alone against France and Russia: German efforts to crush the French at sea and grab their colonies, plus the attempt to open a second front in France after Russia collapsed by invading through Belgium and the Netherlands brought the UK into the war, and Germany lost as OTL. WWII had a peculiar lineup, being in fact two wars which only converged at the end, with the Soviets moving to aid a Red Revolution in the United States, and maintaining “friendly neutrality” re Fascist France and Germany, which joined forces to divvy up Europe and invade the UK.

The alliance of the non-Commie bits of the US, the UK, Austria, Italy, Kuomintang China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire eventually managed to defeat the German-French-Soviet-Red Manchuria-Red US alliance, although it was a close-fought thing in Europe. (“Operation Leviathan” nearly succeeded in invading England, the Germans overran Bohemia, Habsburg Poland, and most of Austria, Vienna only being (ironically) saved by the Ottomans throwing a shitload of (British-armed) warm bodies into harm’s way.) The American situation, although it dragged on for years, was less desperate: the USSR never got further south than the state of Washington (the logistics were horrible) and were unable to ever link up with the Red forces in the NE, the simultaneous thrusts from Ottawa and Calgary never getting closer than 500 miles apart. In any event, although at their peak they held the US industrial heartland from Pittsburg on north, the American Soviet never commanded the loyalty of the majority of its subjects, and was plagued by rebellion and resistance from day one. The last stage of the war, against the Soviet heartland, was brought to an end by the use of the joint Austrian-British atomic arms project.

Today Austria-Hungary dominates Europe, having absorbed southern Germany in the war’s aftermath, and with Habsburg princes sitting on the thrones of Poland and the Ukraine. Aside from the OTL territories, in this world the Austrians hold Serbia and Kosovo and Albania (Macedonia is Bulgarian). The European Economic Union has its headquarters in Prague. Russia, reconstructed with roughly OTL borders post-war (plus the Crimea, a bit of eastern Ukraine which is mostly Russian, and a bit of OTL North Kazakhstan), is nationalistic, rather more populous than OTL, and is currently experiencing a bit of a political revival of the hard left, since the USSR has been gone long enough to gain a romantic aura (and the Peerless Leader, besides being a bolder sort than OTL’s Stalin, only killed about 1/3 as many Soviet people). Russians are rather unapologetic about their part in the war.

The Japanese and Koreans are actually allies in this TL (Japan lost its version of the Russo-Japanese war, and was able to play the role of liberator and later protector from the Red Hordes). The Kingdom of Hawaii (ethnically more Japanese than Polynesian nowadays) is a Japanese protectorate, and China is capitalist and pushing hard for superpower status, if it doesn’t choke on its own rather ghastly pollution. The Ottoman Empire, alas, is suffering from the rise of a nasty Islamic movement originating in its Arab territories, which want a return to Sharia law and other good ol’ fashioned medievalisms, and isn’t shy about occasionally blowing people up to prove a point.

The US is a bit poorer and less populous than OTL, but is still a dominating power. Oddly, in spite of the failed Revolution, it is in some ways a more lefty country than OTL: the rich and powerful feel less secure in the submission of the poor and lowly, and are more willing to bribe them to keep them down, and the South simply is not open to the sort of playing on resentments that the Republicans have used so successfully played on OTL: this time it was the South that saved the nation, and the Yanks who lost. The southern ego is in quite good shape, ATL. (The fact that the defeat of the Revolution was also largely guaranteed by Yankees who resisted its rule is largely forgotten in Richmond and Atlanta). A civil rights movement succeeded roughly at the same time as OTL, Southerners having gained a rather different appreciation of the black population as soldiers in an integrated all-Americans army.

As OTL, the British Empire is gone, although for certain WWII-related reasons Newfoundland is run as part of Great Britain. Various communistic movements flourish in the ex-colonial and other dirt-poor parts of the world, although with the Soviet model gone they often tend to be extravagantly heretical from a proper Marxist POV.



71.) Neuland – the German medieval emperors were rather more successful, and managed to unify almost all of Europe under their rule by 1400, but were unable to hold it together, and the empire finally collapsed in a series of wars and rebellions from 1698-1795 (generally referred to ATL as the “Hundred Years War.” In the meantime, however, they had succeeded in colonizing much of the Americas.

Today North Neuland is rather Balkanized, with many small German-speaking states, the most important states being a German-speaking and Catholic but mostly Mestizo south Mexican-Guatemalan kingdom, and an oligarchic federation of states in the Great Lakes area. South America was never as intensely settled, and much of the eastern half of the continent has been taken over by adventurers and raiders from Muslim west Africa, which has re-conquered most of the areas of North Africa that were grabbed by the HRE at its height. Most of the South American west coast is ruled by a sizeable Peruvian empire, mostly Native by blood and speaking an odd German-Quechua mix and practicing a version of Catholicism that makes visiting representatives from Rome pull their hair out, which trades vigorously across the Pacific with the kingdoms of Asia.

Europe is still sort of a mess, but largish successor states in the area of OTL France and Poland (German-speaking, in this TL) are busy trying to rebuild the empire: before long they will probably meet in central Europe, and the fireworks will really start. The Byzantines (saved from Turkish inundation by the Holy Romans, only to be swallowed by the Empire) are Catholic nowadays, but still speak Greek, and are too busy holding the line in Anatolia against a revived Islam locally led by Persia to get involved. The Pope runs most of Italy, and is quite unhappy at the notion of being bossed around again by a unified Holy Roman Empire.

Islam may have taken a bad beating in this world (Egypt was ruled by the Empire for over two centuries) but it has revived, and expanded in Africa, South America/Neuland, and in Asia, where the Japanese have adopted an (admittedly eccentric: most Muslims don’t believe the Emperor of Japan is a descendant of Abraham) version of Islam, with the Emperor as figurehead Caliph and a Shogun-Sultan, and are spreading vigorously through island SE Asia and conducting Jihad against the Pagans of SE Asia (state-approved looting and pillaging, that is). China is currently in a “contending states” period, much of North Asia is ruled by a powerful Turkish sultanate, and the rich Hindu trading state that rules south India, Sri Lanka, and posts all around the Indian Ocean, is getting increasingly nervous, what with its fragmented but powerful Islamic neighbors to the north (among which it tries to maintain a Balance of Power through shifting alliances) and the new Nipponese threat to the east…

Technology is pre-industrial, with architecture, metallurgy, seamanship, etc. being roughly at a 1700 level overall. Telescopes are common and a heliocentric view of the solar system is widely accepted in the Islamic lands, but although natural philosophers and alchemists are a dime a dozen, there is as yet nothing like a genuinely scientific world view, although a Chinese philosopher of the early 20th century missed formulating the scientific method by (as Maxwell Smart used to say) thaat much.



72.) Byzantine II – a more limited success in this TL, the Byzantine Empire is limited to Anatolia west of OTL Kurdistan, the southern Balkans, and southern Italy. It is a rich and quite tolerant nation, and is on quite cordial terms with its neighbor, the current Hasifid Caliphate (Egypt south to Lake Victoria, the Arabian Peninsula) – indeed, they have a mutual defense agreement against the autocratic Khanate of Persia. Jews are also quite safe in the Empire – western Catholics and Protestants, though, do tend to be looked upon with a bit of suspicion.

The Empire has a long-standing cordial relationship with a *Ukrainian nation to the north, and a rivalry with the Russian state to the north of that. The former Russian Empire was overthrown and replaced by a republic after ending on the losing side of the last major European war, but still doesn’t like the Byzantines. Bosnia, a traditional center of oddball religion, is the world’s only Reform Greek Orthodox nation (although the Reformed Church has a fair number of adherents in the tolerant Ukraine). Europe is largely recovered from the 1960’s war: although the Polish-Bohemian-Lithuanian Union shows no signs of reuniting, the French show signs of slowly moving away from People’s Corporatism back towards capitalism, and the Tripartite Crown of Austria-Milan-Aragon is now in a free trade agreement with the League of Hamburg (successor to the Saxon Empire).

South and Central America are a mix of Spanish, Portuguese and Saxon colonies, while the area of the US and Canada OTL are split between Portuguese in the SW, a French republic in OTL Canada and the OTL US states bordering the Great Lakes and north of Virginia, and a British “Duchy of Williamsland” roughly in the Olde South. The Papacy, split between two anti-Popes far longer than OTL, has had some bad knocks to its prestige, and infallibility lies in Church councils, not the Pope – who is grateful, what with German and Magyar Protestants, and the atheistic French, that the British have always been true to the Mother Church.

A couple largish strips of NW African coast are Catholic and mostly Spanish-speaking, relics of an era in which the Castilians tried to expand the Reconquista into North Africa (there was a Bishop of Carthage again for a while). As a side effect of this era, Arab migrations to the less crusader-plagued Sahel led to the development of more substantial Islamic states in the area, and the Sultanate of Gao, running from Bamako to N’Djamena by way of Sokoto and Ouagadougou, managed to convince the British in Senegal that the conquest of the Sahel would be more trouble than it was worth.

China is divided between a Buddhist/Taoist south and a Greek Orthodox north (the Russians played the role of Manchu in this TL, but were too few to conquer the south) and Japan is divided between a turbulent Russian north and a British protectorate in the south. The several states of India were previously French colonies and protectorates, and there’s already been one bloody effort to create a “unified Hindu nation.” The north of Australia is Portuguese, but the rest of it is a Greek-speaking kingdom (long story).
The world is fairly polycentric, with many mid-sized powers and a lot of competition, intrigue, and shifting alliances. The French republic in North America is the current cutting edge of architecture, with some rather lovely art-deco looking public buildings. Technology is mostly on a 1950s level: nukes but no ICBMs, computers as big as rooms, tiny-screened black and white TVs. Oddly, also quite sophisticated radio astronomy and an odd fetish for hovercraft, which a whole bunch of people in several countries are trying to make into the Vehicle of the Future, in spite of that whole pesky “no friction braking” issue.



73.) Templar – in this world the Templars really were Gnostic heretics, and arranged for Philip the Fair’s assassination before he could get them. In the end the Templars were unable to keep their heresy secret from the Papacy, and were forced to carve out their own state in southern France and Provence, aided by the underground remnants of the Cathar church. Over the centuries, they slowly and opportunistically expanded, playing Protestants off against Catholics, and allying with or against the Ottomans as convenient. By the late 1700s, joining the Russians in a carve-up of the Ottoman Empire, they were able to add Egypt and the Holy land to their possessions in Italy, S. France, Catalonia, and the western Balkans, but it was not until the Wars of Revolution of the 1800s that they were able to establish themselves as clearly the strongest nation in Europe (while expanding vastly in Africa). And it was not until the 20th that the Templar superiority in the practical sciences allowed them to first crush the Christian Coalition powers in Europe, and then use nuclear weaponry to command the abasement of the North Asian Hegemony and the Anglo-Dutch kingdom of Great Colombia.

Nowadays, the Grand Master of the order (elected for life, like the Pope OTL) rules the world, directly or indirectly, from the vast Palace-Temple complex in Jerusalem. “Indirectly” is the operative word: the inhabitants of Italy, the western Balkans, Catalonia, western Anatolia, and the Holy land are solidly Bahomphet-worshippers, as are vast formerly Pagan areas of Africa, and a majority of the speakers of all three major French dialects, but North Africa still has a large Muslim population, and most of the rest of Europe is still majority-Christian, in spite of fairly harsh laws against public displays of Demiurge-worship and prohibitions against religious education or the building of new churches. Much of Asia is allowed to largely go to hell their own way, as long as they allow for free movement by Templar preachers and don’t try to build WMDs.

Catholic South America (in spite of butterflies, the Portuguese-Castilian kingdom still ended up settling South America) is more of a problem, what with the apocalyptic Christian groups claiming the Gran Master is the anti-Christ. The Templar armed forces are currently occupying large parts of the continent and carrying out executions of those who failed to protect Templar preachers slaughtered by mobs.

Great Columbia, a far less religious place than the OTL US (it has long had an Anglicanism-like state religion of fairly stupefying dullness) has seen a gratifying crop of new converts to the Templar faith. It is slowly recovering from the nuclear flailing it received in 1952-1953, and the Templars are judicious in not interfering too much in its internal affairs. Bahomphet will triumph over the Demiurge, but patience must be exercised: there are simply not enough Templars to effectively hold down the whole world, atomic weapons or not (and government by occasional genocide is doing the work of the Demiurge).

(And no, Bahomphet is not worshipped as a goat-man – a combination of Christ and Mohammed, he is portrayed as a mighty good-looking dude, thank you very much. The sexual elements in the Templar Inner Mysteries have, admittedly, been toned down a bit since women started being allowed into the Order).

The Order being mentioned, it should be understood that Templar society is divided into several groups: the Templars proper, an order of Knights True and Bold, who do not reproduce, form the government, defend Jerusalem, provide the officer class for armies, and are always bold and fearless and generous to the unfortunate and gallant (or the female equivalent) and pure (well, for those initiated into the Inner Mysteries, it is understood that there are certain aspects of “purity” that the un-initiated might ignorantly think are a bit kinky). They do not reproduce, for that would just give the Demiurge more vessels to trap souls within.

Then there are the Bahomphet-worshipping civilian classes, who provide the recruits for the Order, carry out the dirty necessity of reproduction, provide the infantry, and engage in commerce and manufacturing and run the local equivalent of Kinko’s Copies. There are both holy and lay preacher from the Order and the civilian followers of the true Faith, although civilian preachers are not initiated into the Inner Mysteries.

Thirdly, there are the unconverted, which are divided among Pagans and unbelievers (not worshippers of Bahomphet, but at least not worshipping the Demiurge) and active Demiurge worshippers, which labor under various legal and tax regulations, and are Watched. The Templars are a traditional bunch, and for most public and ceremonial occasions wear their old-fashioned outfits of mail armor and white robes with red crosses and carry swords: in actual combat situations, however, they tend to go for camouflage uniforms and automatic weapons. Clothing styles are brighter and more colorful than OTL, architecture more florid. (The Colombians are as fond of skyscrapers as their OTL counterparts, but theirs tend to have statues and non-structural ornamental columns at various levels – official buildings in directly Templar-ruled areas are even more retro-looking, and the complex in Jerusalem does a good job of use hidden steel and concrete to manage the “mega deluxe king-sized” version of a medieval keep and church complex).

The Order is not without its good points. It is quite non-racist (black African converts make up nearly 1/3 of the Order nowadays): the body is the mere creation of the Demiurge, and human souls are the same everywhere. Evolution was not accepted as a reality rather than a trick of the Demiurge until the 20th century, and “scientific” racism based on a biased view of evolution never arose. The Templars also do not believe in slavery, and have increasingly over the last two centuries put their money where their mouth was re the equality of human souls. Also, Templar beliefs have not erased Jesus’ words with respect to feeding the hungry, etc.; those trapped in the Demiurge’s illusion should always help each other to minimize the suffering inherent in it.

On the down side, it still is a religious dictatorship, albeit one where the Head of the Order is not considered Pope-infallible, and can be deposed by a majority of the Inner Council. (Something generally devoutly prayed against: this caused a civil war, once, and nearly led to a Christian triumph against the order). Censorship is the norm, as is government control over information, and laws against blasphemy, etc. are harsh. Assassination is a common tool of government policy (the sub-order of the Assassins is a powerful one). And the Order _did_ kill close to seventy million people to forestall the development of nuclear weapons by the Asians or the Americans.

Hindu India, freed of foreign control and unified thanks to the Templar victory in the Final War, is so far simply absorbing the Catharist religion of the Templars into its own mélange of faiths, which irritates Templar preachers no end. (However, since India is a Protectorate rather than an Incorporated Territory at this point, they aren’t allowed to arrest those who mix-and-match their religions for blasphemy).

East Asia is complex: Japan did not “give up the gun” in this world, but instead overextended itself trying to conquer all of East Asia, creating a vast but wobbly empire which fell apart messily at the start of the 19th century. The North Asian Hegemony is descended from one the chunks of the former empire, and is as much a Chinese enterprise as a Japanese one.

Islamic terrorism is bad, as it has been since the razing of Mecca and Medina (now generally agreed upon to have been a Bad Idea).

Science is surprisingly advanced: the Templars have long felt that the world created by the Demiurge, given his imperfection, should be easy to reshape in the interests of humans: for are we not all pieces of the True Creator? Practical engineering, agriculture, etc. all have a long tradition among the Templars, who feel until the day comes that humanity, with Bahomphet’s aid, shall break open the false heavens, it is a Goodly Work to reduce the suffering and want that are part and parcel of the Demiurge’s piss-poor creation. Of course, starting with the discovery of the heliocentric solar system, the study of useful things has often been mixed with things that are widely condemned as both useless and blasphemous: although chemistry, physics, and engineering are as advanced or more so in the Templar world as ours, biology, geology, biochemistry, etc. are somewhat more backwards thanks to theological outrages. (Indeed, many Templars feel the Grand Master from 1860-1905, a long-lived and progressive sort who made it clear that where theology and experimental evidence conflicted, one should take a damn long think before kicking out the scientific evidence, is largely responsible for Templar science not stagnating in the 20th century).

There is currently a serious split in the intellectual leadership between those who suggest the vast universe revealed by modern science is actually the creation of the True God, with the earth as the work of the Demiurge, and those who think all those empty-looking galaxies are just signs of the colossal bungling of the Demiurge, which brought forth life only on this world and gave us the sort of crappy laws of physics that prevent useful interstellar travel.

Bruce
 

B_Munro

Ok, a few more...

74.) Ellsworth – in which the survival of a pro-Union fanatic in the Civil war and an election with an electoral college – popular vote split led to a showdown between the abolitionist, more radical elements of the Republican Party and the Democrats and the more conservative Republicans in the “uprising of ‘76”. After a bloody three-year struggle between various factions nation-wide, (in which George Custer became the hero which he never quite managed to be OTL)this led to the early establishment of income tax, national healthcare, and civil rights laws – and the expulsion of over a million “rebellious” Irish-Americans and all Chinese-Americans, a crushing of the native American tribes even more thorough than OTL, and laws strictly restricting emigration and naturalization that did not end until the 1960s.

Today the League of Nations, backed by the military force of the US, Soviet Union, and other major powers, maintains order abroad. It’s a more “lefty”, pink-tinted world than OTL, and the US is far more like OTLs western European countries in terms of healthcare, social safety nets, etc. than our version of the US. Thanks to a lot less immigration, it also has perhaps a bit over 2/3 the population of OTL, has rather less people of Polish or Italian descent, less than ½ as many Jews, and is culturally rather blander. It is also an overwhelmingly middle class country with a low level of inequality, relatively low crime rates, and fully integrated Hispanic and black populations only slightly below the average in income. (Native Americans have also been “fully integrated”, or, in their terms, been victims of cultural genocide). The major political parties are Monopolist and Anti-Monopolist, and the economy is more government-controlled than OTL (the state-run railway is doing quite well, thank you – perhaps due to rather less of a superhighway-building effort). The official stance on language has shifted from a previous “majority rules” stance (Spanish-speaking south California, Puerto Rico and W. Texas and New Mexico, English elsewhere) to a broader bilingualism: economic and political ties with Latin America are close.

The USSR is still around, a nation of 335 millions, with the borders of OTL 1938 plus Mongolia, admitted as an SSR in 1948 by a “democratic” vote. Butterflies mean that Stalin never came to power, and the country has slowly evolved into a mixed economy, although it is still a one-party state with rather radical notions re the relationship of the post-colonial world to the more bourgeois countries (it heads a bit of a league/debating society of poorer, more leftist nations, from India to Mexico). The Nervous 60s, with their atom-bomb fears and talk of “preemptive warfare” are long gone, and the USSR is generally tolerated by the US, Europe and China the way most families tolerate the opinionated uncle with Decided Views on the Secret Government. China is capitalist, powerful and more-or-less democratic (if richly corrupt), Korea a Soviet dependency (liberated from Japan in the war of ’53-’54).

The Middle East, in spite of the absence of the state of Israel, is still a mess, as a result of several efforts to forcibly unify the Arabs into one nation - foiled about 50% by the League, and about 50% by Arabs who didn’t want to be incorporated in President X’s Greater Arabia. The League, of course, gets all the blame, although the Egyptians did eventually manage to get Libya, the Sudan, and Tunisia into their “United Arab States.” Then of course there was the Communist revolution in Iran, which almost led to a world war, the Syrian civil war… elsewhere in Asia, Japan, which still rules Taiwan, various Pacific isles, and all of Sakhalin, is a middle-sized power, and is nowadays a strong supporter of a “unified world” – after all, if it had not been for the increasing globalization of the world economy, they never would have been able to recover economically after being kicked off the mainland. India and Pakistan are still united, but the Muslims have been able to extract so many concessions on autonomy that foreign diplomats tend to refer to the place as “Pak-India.”

Europe is not too different from OTL, with generally 1937-ish borders, although Germany has absorbed Austria and Danzig (Germany ended up under a dictatorship in the 30s as OTL, but a more leftist one, and one far less interested in conquering all of Europe). Poland has been forced to cede autonomy to large Ukrainian and Belorussian-inhabited areas, while the Czechoslovakian Republic has simply fallen apart (Yugoslavia, oddly, has held together). There is a European Common Market, but there is no overarching political organization as strong as OTLs European Community, international politics and mutual defense arrangements mostly taking place through the League of Nations, which successfully arranged for international resistance to Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, and warned off Japan from further adventurism in China although it took Red Army to get them out of Manchuria).
One European oddity is the Danzig corridor: the Poles, although beaten in the Danzig conflict of ’42, refused to give in on the subject, and rather than drag on a fight that could only be advantageous to the USSR, the League intervened to stop the fighting and give the Corridor to a neutral party that would be bound to respect the extraterritoriality and transit rights of both parties, and which would be disliked equally by both sides: a bunch of Jews, looking for somewhere else to go after being kicked out of Palestine by the British. (This was energetically protested by the Polish Jews, to no avail.) Today, 4.535 million Jews (aside from the Palestinian Jews, they’re mostly from Poland, the Balkans, and the rest of the Middle East) squeeze into 3863 square miles of territory, sharing the space with some 438,000 Poles and 135,000 Germans, creating one of the most densely populated areas in the world – and, Jews being Jews and the area being on the Baltic rather than in the Middle East – a very prosperous one.

The British Empire is gone, in the end undermined on the one hand by Red-supported revolution in their colonies, and on the other hand estranged from its dominions by London’s obsessive determination to hold onto Ireland (the lack of US support for the Irish helped keep England on this suicidal path). India departed by the 50’s, Australia (which had a lot of Irishmen) became a republic, and after a new generation of Irish terrorist made the “bloody fifties”, the massive public protest against a government that seemed to be willing to suspend elections indefinitely led to the Emergency, which led to the General Strike of ’61, which led to the Suppression, which led to the failed military Coup of ’63, and the Queen’s flight to France and the collapse of the government in the same year. After a lot of arrests and some suicides, the new government pulled out of Ireland forthwith, and liquidated the rest of the Empire 1967-1980, holding on to only a few islands and places like Brunei and Guyana.

75.) Carthaginian – unlike the Phoenician world, the Carthaginians here adopted the imperial model of their Roman enemies, and built an empire that lasts till today, although nowadays the People and the Senate are more powerful than the Emperor. The Carthaginian Union includes Africa north of Ethiopia and the jungle kingdoms, the Levant and Anatolia west of Armenia, the Black Sea straits and most of OTL Greece, Italy and Iberia and former Gaul (the northern 2/3 of which were taken from the Hunnic Empire in their last major war, in the 1930s), the Caribbean and South Florida and Madagascar and the eastern half of south America.

Carthage is the greatest power on earth, rivaled only by the Chinese Xin Empire, which rules Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines and splits Indonesia with the Malwa of north India, rules much of the Pacific coasts of the Americas and vassalizes many of the states, not to mention the little states of SE Asia and the Koreans. Only Japan, which rules much of Siberia, has managed to maintain effective independence in East Asia.
Other powers include the Maya, who modernized through centuries of trade with the Carthaginians, and either directly or through puppet regimes rules much of Central and North America (the empire is dispersed in three major chunks: commerce and religion bind the empire together, and the Maya control one of the world’s strongest navies to maintain contact between the Yucatan, the Mississippi valley, and the oil country of Venezuela). Then there are the United Persian Republics (the world’s only Social-Democratic nation), a small power which makes up for it with some rather massive chutzpah, the aforementioned Malwa, and their SE Asian, Indonesian, and East African colonies and satellites, and the Celtic Brittys Republic of Ireland and Britain, and their colonies along the eastern shore of North America, and in South Africa.

Then there is the Holy Hunnic Empire, extending from the Low Countries through Eastern Europe and the Balkans to Central Siberia. It is something of a pest-hole, upper end third world corrupt military dictatorship (the last Holy King was strangled after losing the war in the 1930s), an oddball ethnic mix of Slavs, Turks, Finno-Ungrians and who knows what else, which through an ancient policy of resettlement and population shuffling has created a majority “Hunnic” culture, mostly made up out of whole cloth in the last three centuries. There are some exceptions: the Lithuanians hung on in their marshes and nearly took over the Empire when ¾ of it was devastated by the Horse Gods in the 14th century, and survived their failure to break loose during the last war to join the Empire of Gottsland (Scandinavia and the colder northern bits of Canada) as an autonomous province: the world’s only non-Scandinavian Germanics (survived in the Alps) have a similar arrangement with the Carthaginians.

Lesser states include the Tiahuanaco in the Andes, the large but loose Kongo federation, the Zoroastrian states of central Asia, the Araucanians of Chile and the various dinky states of North Mexico, the Hotinosavvanih Federation inland of the Brittys colonies, the Armenians, the South Indian Kingdoms (allied against Malwa dominance), the Arabs, and the Oyo federation. It is a religiously diverse world, with the Buddha competing with Viracocha and Reformed Kukulhanism in the Americas, Baal is worshipped in Carthage and Ethiopia and west Africa and the Kongo and northern Europe (although very heretically, grumble the high priests), Zoroaster dominates Persia and Arabia and Central Asia and the Malwa lands (there was a _big_ Persian-Indian empire a while back, until it cracked under nomadic invasions) and is a sizeable minority in China, Hinduism hangs on in South India and as a too-large-to-safely-persecute minority in Malwa India, and the Buddha dominates the east. The Huns have their own faith, a particularly bloodthirsty and apocalyptic offshoot of Buddhism: they are also one of the few nations to make a practice of persecuting “heretical” minority faiths, along with the Maya and the Gottslanders.

It is a generally rich and peaceful world, although the Huns are a bit of a worry: they may have fallen too far behind to fight a conventional war against a major power, but they do have nuclear weapons. The Maya, who have long sought to link their northern and southern domains through the conquest of the Mexica-Tarascan alliance, and who see themselves as the natural unifiers of the small, Old Worlder-bullied Native American states, are a more serious problem. They have modernized pretty successfully, and are formidable negotiators and manipulators to boot. There is a UN-equivalent headquartered in Carthage, the name of which can be roughly translated as the “Allegiance of Nations”, but, as usual, the organization has fairly limited powers.

Technology is generally ahead of OTL: there is a tremendous use of solar power, idiot-proof nuclear power, advanced quantum computing, biotech (yes, Mr. Crichton, they _do_ clone prehistoric animals. Not dinosaurs, though) and extensive space exploration (there are manned bases on the Moon, Mars and Europa. There has been a bit of a Chinese/Carthaginian space race since the 1950s, and lately the Maya, the Malwa, and the Japanese have joined in). One side-effect of the more extensive space race is that near-orbital, supersonic passenger transport is an everyday thing. Cars have never really caught on big-time, high-speed rail and trolleys and moving walkways for urban transportation dominating.

Carthage is considerably larger than in Phoenician –world, and does not have any walls. It glitters with innumerable solar collectors, and a vast complex of atomic power plants extends out into the sea, where they desalinate the enormous amounts of water a city of 20 millions needs in a dry climate. The huge statue of Hannibal and elephants is somewhat tacky, but it has an even wider variety of peoples, foods, cultures, etc. than OTL NY, and one shouldn’t miss the world’s largest zoo – now with mammoths and cave bears.


76.) Internationale – in which socialism was rather more successful: after a second and a third world war (no 2. Was socialist nations vs. capitalists, followed in the third round by Luxenburger democratic Reds vs. Trotskyite autocrats – which the democratic side won) some 75% of the world’s population live under legally socialist or communist regimes, varying from a US about as lefty as OTL Sweden, to the rump Soviet Union (well, the one corresponding to ours…there are several states which call themselves “Soviet Union”) which is as autocratic as it was OTL under Brezhnev and has used imported computer tech to create a society planned to the point of Kafkaesque nightmare. Still capitalist powers run from the downright reactionary powers of White Siberia and the Ethiopian Empire to the exceedingly bourgeoisie French Sixth Republic. It is a pretty secular world, with probably a majority of the world’s population describing themselves as agnostic or atheist (admittedly, a lot of “atheists” adhere to some mighty odd superstitions): one of the areas of the world where religion is still strong is the Islamic world (about ½ of which live under Capitalist governments). The Catholic Church has liberalized substantially, and now allows married priests (no women yet, though).

The Fourth Internationale is something of a Marxist UN, and indeed competes with and in some ways is more important than the actual UN-equivalent, the Concord of Nations. The Internationale meets in New Zealand (stodgy old-fashioned Marxists, and remarkably industrially self-sufficient) and given the overblown drama that often accompanies sessions, makes for good television ratings. Germany is divided, with the Soviet Republic of Greater Bavaria having remained separate even after the rest of Germany went socialist. (Doctrinal disputes, alas). Italy is also a first-generation Red state, Benito having stayed true to his Socialist principles, and Mexico is a bit of a mess, the Socialist half having tried to reunite the divided nation by force: nowadays an international peacekeeping force keeps order, while politicians argue to find a formula for reunification that will not squick either side too badly. (Political fragmentation is not rare: most socialist regimes in this world recognize the right of self-determination, and Alaska is an independence capitalist regime).

Colonization ended earlier than OTL, with much of the colonized countries gaining their independence by the early 40s. A current major issue is trying to push and gently or otherwise bully the poorer ex-colonies to make some major necessary adjustment to their economies: socialism has been far more successful at finding a balance between state power, equality, and economic growth than OTL, but that does not mean that finding the right formula for poor, pre-capitalist-in-the-first-place nations is easy to find or apply.

Arguments on how to create a True Socialism continue, but with any war likely to have at least 5 different sides armed with nuclear weapons, things remain fairly cordial. There are strong international regulations on nuclear weapons, and there is much close economic coordination between the majority of Socialist states, in most of which things like housing, education, healthcare, public transportation, etc. have been taken out of the cash economy and made basic rights, and in a majority of which utilities and vital mineral resources are controlled by para-statals: there is even a convertible “socialist currency”, the International Labor Certificate (the use of which is leading to some friction with the Capitalist countries, who often raise arguments about proper conversion rates). Technology is slightly ahead of OTL, with a World Wide Web even more widespread than OTL (only a handful of hard-line Red and extreme conservative states ban internet communications), advanced sustainable agriculture, and some of the best solar-power tech around.

77.) New Empire – diverging initially in a later, rather different, and Napoleon-free round of French Revolutionary wars, it is now a world in which the New British Empire and its Russian, NE Asian, Mexican-central American and Dutch allies hold the line against the Theocratic quadruple threat of the New Caliphate, the Spanish Empire, and a very Christian US. (Fortunately, the Brazilian and Spanish Catholics don’t like the US Protestants, and neither likes the Islamic caliphate: they have a common hatred for the “godless” Empire, but cooperate rather erratically). “The Empire”, as it is now called, moved its capital from London to Bombay in 1964 as economic development and manpower increasingly made India the natural core of the Empire. It includes Canada, the UK, Australia (which includes New Zealand), Fiji, India, N. Borneo/Brunei, Singapore, Hong Kong, various Caribbean isles, the Cape Province, and the Falklands. The kingdom of Hawaii, the republic of South China, and Malaysia are associated states, while Nigeria, Kenya, the Zulu kingdom, and Ethiopia are protectorates. It is a federal state governed by a Parliament with limited powers and much local sovereignty. India is less populous than OTL, having gone through the demographic transition a while back as a result of earlier economic modernization. It also has large (tens of millions) minorities of European, African, Malaysian and Chinese origin. Thanks to the less appealing nature of the increasingly theocratic US as a destination from migration, Canada and Australia got rather more immigrants than OTL and are rather more populous. It doesn’t have too much African territory: what would be the Cameroons and Gambia OTL were traded away for Imperial possession of Portuguese holdings in Asia, and most of Africa south of the Caliphate is part of the French Union. The Empire trades with everyone, no matter how unpleasant they may be.

Its allies include the Netherlands (which includes Belgium) and its descendant states in interior South Africa and colonies in the Caribbean (including Trinidad and Tobago) and Indonesia, which nowadays is increasingly the tail that wags the Dutch dog (there is some talk of moving the capital of the Dutch Empire to Jakarta in the way the British Empire’s capital was moved to Bombay).

Japan, another ally, due to butterflies from a different forced opening, took longer to resolve its traditionalist-modernizer conflict, and never found the right timing to become a big territory-grabber (its colonial annexations were confined to Taiwan) and eventually chose to become a British protectorate as the lesser evil. Later, after Korea and NE China moved towards independence from their Russian “protectorate” in the 1960s, Japan moved to form an economic and military alliance with the new powers, although it retained close ties to the Empire. Today the Northeast Asian Federation of Japan, Greater Manchuria, Korea, and Taiwan is an important power in its own right (although the rump Qing state is still a bit backwards), and is perhaps even more closely tied to the Empire than the Dutch: it is certain that selling stuff to the Empire is vital for the NAF’s prosperity. Korea, which has a large Christian fundamentalist movement of its own, is a bit worrisome, although they show no signs of planning to desert the Federation and ally themselves with the Americans.

Russia, which did not make the very sharp turn to reaction it did OTL after the Napoleonic invasion, has managed to painfully and slowly make its way to parliamentary democracy and a largely symbolic Czar, although Russian society remains rather conservative and religiously very Orthodox. (The Jews are no longer confined to a Pale, but there is a definite glass ceiling to the advancement of Jews in the Russian Empire). It includes more of Poland than OTL 1914 (Prussia was squished in the Great War of 1910-1915), Xinjiang and Mongolia are part of the Empire, and European Constantinople is a joint Greek-Russian possession. (Finland, however, is still dynastically tied to Sweden). It is a British ally, mainly out of mutual hostility to the Caliphate, but doesn’t really like the British.

The Caliphate originated with the annexation of much of the Ottoman Empire’s Arab lands by the Egyptian Empire after the Great War, but did not become a Caliphate since the previous Supreme MuckaMuck (think the unholy love child of Joe Stalin and Osama Bin Laden) declared himself so in the 90s, and who would disagree? It currently extends from Morocco to Iran and includes the Asian parts of the old Ottoman Empire and much of the Sahel. It is an isolationist state which does not allow any non-Muslim visitors from abroad, and as for getting out again, visiting can be as hazardous as visiting the aformentioned Stalin’s USSR in the 1930s, so not too much is known abroad about its internal affairs. It sponsors Islamic “unificationist” movements in Pakistan, Africa, Afghanistan and Russian Central Asia (with varying degrees of success: most Pakistanis are too Empire loyal, and most Russian Muslims too secular, to have much regard for this, but turmoil in Afghanistan and West Africa keeps a lot of Imperial troops all too busy. Largely unknown to the outside world, the Caliphate has some serious internal problems: the Iranians, of course (Shiites under a Sunni Caliph), but also Maghreb Arabs unhappy with being ruled from Egypt and with different understandings of the Koran, Turks who think Arabs are a bunch of desert rats, and certain radical groups in the Arab peninsula who think the Caliphate is far too “western” and “radical” in all the wrong ways. A regime of positively Stalinist severity keeps on the lid – so far.

The Emperor of Brazil successfully pushed his claim to the Portuguese succession with the aid of his Spanish allies, and therefore rules over not only Lisbon but also the Portuguese territories in Africa. The Emperor has the loyalty of his black subjects, having created an army of slaves to crush his republican enemies at home and giving them freedom in exchange: nowadays black Africans born in Angola and Mozambique have (almost) the same opportunity to rise to the top in the Imperial government as any white native of Brazil or Portugal proper. The Spanish Empire rules over OTL Spanish-speaking South America, southern Italy, Cuba and San Salvador and the Philippines, plus some chunks of Africa and a large slice of China.

The US is not a genuine theocracy like Revival Earth’s USA, but all political candidates need to be vetted by the powerful Ecumenical Councils, so nobody who is not properly Christian and conservative gets to run for office. Prohibition is still in effect, censorship is fierce, non-Christians are not allowed to become citizens (although there is a grandfather provision for those who have been here since those laws went into effect) and the teaching of evolution is illegal. The one partial exception to the dominance of Christianity is the Mormons, which were accepted into the “system” in the 1990s: they were simply too numerous and influential to shut out. On the positive side, this US lacks the racial attitudes of Revival, and racial segregation ended earlier than OTL, with the Black churches nowadays included in the “oversight” process.

The Great War, in which the North Italian-Ottoman-Prussian-Austrian (Austria in this TL the senior partner) alliance was trounced by the Russian-French-British-Egyptian one, led to the disintegration of the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, the loss of 20% of Prussia’s territory, and a Collectivist revolution in Italy, the brutal putting down of which leaving fissures in Italian political society that last until today. The French Union, plagued with Caliphate-sponsored Islamic terrorism, is struggling to convert its empire into a federal union on the model of the Empire, and is pursuing a policy of heavily armed neutrality. The South German federation, Prussia, Austria-Bohemia, and Saxony have rejoined into a loose economic/mutual defense alliance, but the Russians and the French aren’t standing for anything closer.

China, divided into British-protected greater Canton in the south, a Qing remnant allied to Korea and Japan in the north, French, Spanish and Brazilian colonial possessions in the middle, and a couple of semi-independent warlords in the deep interior, dreams of reunification. (The latest unification talks between those arrogant, stick-up-their-ass-conservative, Mandarin-speaking, ruled-by-Mongols/pushy, un-Chinese, Cantonese-babbling, British-ass-kissing Imperials/Republicans have, strangely, broken down again).

Technology is roughly OTL, and all the major powers have ICBMs and nuclear weapons. People worry quite a bit about what the Caliphate might do some day. (And the Caliph worries about what those Christians might get up to).

Bruce
 

B_Munro

78.) Weimar – where Weimar Germany survived, and the world’s most important power block is a German-centered United States of Europe. The USSR broke up in a civil war in the 1990s, although the Russian rump regime still holds Belarus and about 1/3 of the Ukraine. The League of Nations is still around, and everybody is now a member, but alas, it is no more powerful than OTLs UN. The USE extends from Portugal to the Ukraine, and nowadays includes Lebanon and Turkey. Poland and the Ukraine squabble over their borders a great deal, and a multinational effort to negotiate a solution to the problem of several million Ukrainians under Polish rule is still grinding along after over a decade. Germany includes the Corridor (the Poles were a long time in forgiving that), Austria, and the German part of Trento (Mussolini’s Italy came a cropper). The French didn’t join until the 1980s, fearing to join a German-dominated organization (nowadays, they’re jockeying to displace Germany as the political leader of the USE). Yugoslavia is still around, and Albania is no poorer than Turkey OTL. Current moves are under way to deepen the USE, to make it a bit closer to a true federal super-state (the French, predictably, oppose this).

In Asia, the Japanese Empire holds all of Sakhalin (since the Soviet-Japanese war of the 40s), and has ironically managed to create a “Co-Prosperity” sphere peacefully, sans warfare: it forms a close economic union with (independent) Taiwan, south Korea (split north-south during the Soviet war), NE China (Soviet puppet for five decades, now moving towards capitalism and on the outs with the corrupt one-party Kuomintang regime that rules the rest of China), Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. South China is corrupt, but capitalist and richer than OTL, and is working to develop economic influence in the post-Soviet central Asian states (which include Mongolia and Xinjiang), and includes Tibet as an autonomous province.

North Korea is a post-communist dictatorship, and not as nightmarish as OTL, but the horrible economic costs of reunion, plus a strong sense among northerners that the south is corrupt and “un-Korean” has so far held up reunification. The Republic of Iran is secular, politically turbulent and multi-party, and competes with China for influence in central Asia. India, which broke with the Commonwealth in the 1970s over disagreements on the apportionment of Commonwealth Council votes (it felt it should have more than a dinky country like Britain), is still unified, and sturdier economic growth than OTL has helped keep Muslim-Hindu squabbles from boiling over into outright civil war. The British partitioned Palestine into Israeli and Palestinian mini-states while holding onto Jerusalem, which pleased nobody. A sizeable Commonwealth military presence in Jerusalem has prevented efforts to rectify the situation by force, but bombs still go off regularly.

The British Commonwealth is still afloat, although weakened by the defection of India. Dominions include Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Azania, and the Cape (the Boers have their own little state, after the breakup of South Africa in the Second Boer War. Much scheming goes on in Pretoria on the subject of regaining some of their territory), Kenya, and a lot of little bits and pieces, including Cyprus (nobody wants a Greek-Turkish war). It is a pretty loose association nowadays, but more substantial than OTL. Canada is currently in a free-trade arrangement with the US, which leads to some complications. Africa is a patchwork of alliances and confederations, and quite a bit of it is still part of the Commonwealth. The independent nations mostly became so between the late 70s and early 90s: there is quite a bit of bloody history there, as a result of several decades of attempted Red subversion on the part of the USSR. Currently Ethiopia is the only remaining Communist regime in Africa. Egyptian nationalists managed to snag northern Sudan after the Commonwealth intervention to stop the north-south civil war: they are now suffering from a civil war due to the Sudanese thinking the Egyptians treated them like untermenschen. The League has imposed an arms embargo on the conflict.

The US is somewhat less populous than OTL, somewhat more leftist, and pushy. From the 60s onwards, as the European economy finally began to catch up with it and the main effort to contain the USSR was shouldered by Europe, China, and Japan, a feeling that it was no longer the center of the world’s attention began to grow. In compensation, the US joined the League, attempted to create a free-trade union of the Americas, meddled in Middle Eastern politics, joined the Space Race, got involved in African Economic Development and is currently making a major effort to move to a post-fossil fuels economy and making a lot of noise about it. Other nations find it very annoying, a sort of perpetual wannabe life of the party, and are also a bit terrified by the sheer level of its energy and enthusiasms, and wish it would go back to the isolationism routine. To the south, Brazil, a richer country than OTL, with a fascistic political tradition (it squashed the Communist regimes which arose in Uruguay and Bolivia) schemes to displace US influence in South America with its own. Mexico is currently in the midst of political turmoil as leftists and rightists clash in trying to shape a way forward for the impoverished country.

Federations and alliance are the norm, some overlapping. French Africa forms a trading block which is in turned tied into the European Confederation through France, while the Commonwealth has a number of multilateral economic agreements with Europe. Ecuador, Chile and Peru are closely tied together in the Andean Pact, while also having various economic agreements with both the US and the Co-Prosperity sphere. And so on. Esperanto, the working language of the League, is spoken by most educated people, and about 10% of the global population as a whole.

Technology, in spite of a milder Cold War, is a bit ahead of OTL. A Soviet-European-US-Commonwealth-Japanese space race of sorts has somewhat petered out, but there are several permanent space stations, and a few lunar bases (the US took over the running of the Soviet one in 2003). There is an internet, but it is a European, rather than a US invention (although the US is now almost as “wired” as Europe, and gaining fast). Nuclear power is more developed and wide-spread (the only example of nuclear warfare was a single use during the Soviet slow-motion civil war, and there is less paranoia on the subject than OTL).

Weimar Germany itself is almost as rich as this world’s US, and its 107 million inhabitants (including almost 2 million Jews and millions of people of Eastern European origin) live in the most culturally exciting and liberal society on the planet, although oldsters grumble about how it is a little too liberal and multi-cultural. Berlin competes fiercely with New York for the position of “World’s most global city”, and is the hub of the European Autobahn system, which allows one to speed from Lisbon to Kiev within a day. (Or it will, once they finish bringing the Ukrainian and Spanish parts of the road system up to spec).



79.) Alexander Judeopater – in this TL Alexander lived a lot longer, and ended up converting to Judaism. Today, a Greek-derived culture, which follows a basically Judaic faith which includes various oddities such as the belief in a “Queen of Heaven” and various minor “helper” Gods and spirits, dominates the Middle East, the Mediterranean area, and much of the Americas. The Empire has grown and shrunk over the ages, like China OTL, but there is a continual tradition back to antiquity. Nowadays, thanks to dirigibles, steamships, and locomotives, the central government in Alexandria Egyptus has at least theoretically reestablished its rule over most of the area in the last century and a half, but the South American territories remain obstinate (and well-armed), and a messy rebellion has broken out in OTL South France, whose inhabitants are Celtic with a Basque admixture and follow a Goddess-centered religion of their own. People tend to go in for robes and togas, architecture and sculpture towards the wildly colorful (no sterile white Classicism here) and lots of columns. The island of Elephantine, where the first Alexander is buried, is a holy place, if not as much as Jerusalem, where the rebuilt (rather Greek-looking, with some south Asian influences) Temple stands.

Other major powers include the Four Corners of Heaven (a sort of Federal Chinese Empire – enough intellectual contact that the Chinese intellectual ethos is rather different from OTL) and some large Greek-derived Indian Empires which compete with the Chinese for influence in SE Asia and have colonized east Africa and Australia. The half-civilized Teutons, from the Swiss Alps to the mouth of the Rhine, have long formed a buffer between the Celtic peoples of the western Empire and the great Slavic Empire extending eastwards to the Steppe. Followers of the Grey Master, the Purifier of the Avedas and the Heir to Zoroaster, the Slavs once marched east to the Great Ocean and northern China, but have fallen behind technologically of late, and their lancers, horse archers, and musketeers no longer can match the philosophically organized gunpowder armies of the Empire’s Teutonic Vassals: but does this mean the Teutons may be tempted to carve out their own empire, from the Slavs on the one hand, and from the rebellious Celts on the other?


80.) Bosporus – An early entry of Greece into WWI allowed for a successfully “Gallipoli” and an end to the war with an Allied victory in 1917. More limited wars in the 30’s and 40’s saw the breakup of rump Austria-Hungary, the Russian civil war, and a “Brown” fascistic Russian victory over Japan that drove Japan from the continent but left them open to a White counteroffensive that drove them east of Moscow . The Russian empire of old is currently divided along a Volga-Saratov – Yaroslavl – Lake Onega line with the areas to the west becoming a democratic federation and later joining the European Block, while the Eastern territories (which also include most of Central Asia, Mongolia, and a bit of Northern Manchuria) remain under a nasty dictatorship allied to the KMT one-party Chinese dictatorship, which has managed through endemic corruption and protectionism to grow its economy only slightly more than the OTL Communist state. Korea is theoretically independent but actually a Russian/Chinese puppet. Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states are independent.

The KMT-Russian alliance is the last and least of the three great power blocks of this world, although with a great deal of future potential – China is currently the world’s fastest growing major economy, as OTL, and the leadership role has passed from Novosibirsk to Beijing. The two dominant power blocks are the “Rim” or “Oceanic” alliance (US, Japan, the British White Commonwealth and associated territories, Vietnam – the US prevented a Chinese vassalization of the country - Indonesia, Philippines) and the European Union (created by the reconciliation and eventual unification of French and German-led alliances and monetary blocks) and its associated states, which between them effectively dominate the globe. And coming up from behind, neutral and still-unified India, which although still not as rich per capita as China is growing almost as fast. Decolonization occurred a bit later than OTL, but has gone through all the same: even Japan gave Taiwan its freedom, although they remain fellow members of the Rim alliance rather than joining China (Taiwanese rather like living in a democracy).

France includes Algeria, and of its 97 million inhabitants including Outre-Mer, nearly ¼ are Muslims, which makes things a bit difficult for its sizable Jewish population, especially given the whole more-than-tit-for-tat nuking of Alexandria and Cairo in exchange for Haifa. Libya is Italian, and majority-Christian (Mussolini died in bed in 1970 in this TL, and although Italy is now a democracy, there is still a Fascist party). A somewhat larger Hungary than OTL has a Habsburg monarch. Germany includes Austria and Slovenia, giving it a port on the Adriatic. South Africa broke with the Commonwealth over conflicts re it’s treatment of Black Africans: the place ended up slowly undergoing meltdown in the 90’s, and is currently occupied by League of Nations peacekeepers, and is about as likely to return to unity as OTL Bosnia. Also-Apartheid German East Africa managed a more graceful transition to black majority rule in the 1970s. Latin America is divided into Rim and European spheres of influence, and political games of influence are continuous. Thanks to long economic integration, the area is wealthier than OTL: Argentina is middle-tier First World, with Chile and Uruguay not far behind, and Brazil lower-tier first world (Portugal or Greece OTL).

Israel holds the Sinai, although most of the West Bank (NOT including Jerusalem) is still part of Transjordan, and after the war of ’81 has built most of its housing stock underground: just one nuke can REALLY ruin your day. The old Baghdad pact of Arab nations has rather fallen apart: although Syria, Egypt and Iraq all still have Baath-like fascistic dictatorships, they somehow just don’t like eachother. Lebanon is smaller and more Christian than OTL, and is a working democracy closely tied to France. Constantinople is part of the Russian Federation and as much Slavic and Greek and Armenian as Turkish.

It’s a somewhat tense world: over 19 countries have their own nuclear arsenals, and nuclear weapons have been used (in limited numbers) in a couple military conflicts. Still, it’s a higher-tech, richer world than ours, and although there is a fair amount of political sniping and economic competition between more homogenous, socialistic Europe and the looser, more anarcho-capitalist sprawl of the Rim, it’s hardly a “toss the nukes” kind of rivalry. Although the Chinese-Siberian alliance is not good people, they aren’t old-style USSR or Maoist China or current North Korea bad.

The Space Race got going earlier than OTL and ended up as a competition between no less than seven nations and alliances rather than the two of OTL, with the US landing the first men on the Moon in 1966. National space programs became subordinated to Rim and all-Europe programs by the 1980s, although the major nation states also keep their hand in (there are a lot of space stations in orbit). Currently there are some small bases on Mars, and there is a lull in manned exploration while new technologies are developed, and the space programs keep their hand in with unmanned missions.



81.) Mongol Nomad World – as in the Mongol Japan and Khanate worlds, the Mongols did better than OTL, gaining control of India and Europe as well, and holding together for longer: but in the end it came crashing down, very messily indeed. Many formerly conquered peoples now sought to “purge” themselves of all Mongol influences, from Mongol dress to Mongol architecture to anybody of Asian ancestry (in the West, there is extreme xenophobia about “Asiatics”). Wars were often common between peoples who considered eachother “tainted” by Mongolian influences.

Europe is zealously Christian, mostly following a new form of Catholicism which dismisses the legitimacy of the Pope-in-exile in Ireland. England flourished culturally in isolation for some centuries, but eventually a mix of overpopulation and increasingly extractive methods on the part of the nobility led to peasant unrest on an unprecedented scale (this is when the Pope upped skirts to quieter Ireland) and is currently divided into peasant theocratic communes and brutally oppressive dukedoms busy quarreling as to how to subdue the miserable peasants. Moscow and the surrounding area were thoroughly devastated in a Mongol civil war some centuries ago, but a Slavic, Orthodox state has reemerged along the Volga river, and is currently fighting with the Poles (a damnably Mongolized people, to be sure, each says of the other)for control of what in our world would be the Ukraine.

On the west of the European peninsula, the various “heretical” Christian variants which flourished under Mongol rule have only recently been wiped out: the British Isles will come next. (As soon as the French and the Spanish and the Greater Bavarians finish settling who is the _true_ leader of Neo-Catholic Christendom, anyway). The oligarchic state occupying roughly OTL Netherlands, east Belgium and NW Germany to the Danish border is staying on the sidelines, and none of the contestants really want to bring in its powerful and well-trained army and formidable navy into the mix. Not that the Low Germans won’t require eventual Purification: their ships circle Africa and trade with heathens and Muslims, and worse, they trade with the motherland of abominations, Asia itself…

Islam in Asia has suffered badly, due to vicious persecution following the crushing of the attempted breakaway of the sub-Khans which had converted to Islam. Even now, wars continue between orthodox Muslims and the various “pacifist” cults that the Mongols had favored, and against the East Asian Buddhists settled en masse from Anatolia to Central Asia in an effort to dilute support for Islam. War and plague have depopulated much of the area. The only truly strong and stable state west of China is Muslim-ruled southern India, which has a live and let live attitude towards heretics and Hindus (and very few Buddhists or worshippers of the Great Blue Heaven). Indonesia, where Mongol rule was very light, is prosperous, still Hindu and loosely unified under the rule of the Rajah of Java: of late the Malay people have started to settle Northern Australia and enslave the local aborigines.

Japan is an armed-to-the-teeth isolationist theocracy in which every male over the age of eight goes around armed, while the Fen Dynasty of China is suffering advanced dynastic decay: increasingly the job of guarding the northern borders is left to the vassal-empire of Koryo, which rules most of OTL Manchuria. And there is reason to guard: a rump Mongol state still exists in Siberia and northern Kazakhstan as well as Mongolia proper, in spite of all efforts by the Chinese to exterminate them and kill every last inhabitant of the steppe: they have always had too much space to withdraw into, and Chinese armies tended to starve. The backward rump Khanate is probably not up to defeating even Koryo’s well-organized gunpowder armies on their home ground, but the terror of Mongols is not a rational fear.

Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, is doing OK. A great many Arabs fled south from the Mongol invasions, bringing Islam, writing, and superior organizational methods to the African kingdoms: the Maghreb essentially dropped out of Mongol control nearly two centuries before the whole edifice came crashing down, and Egypt was returned to the Islamic fold by fanatical crusaders from the Sudan. Today, the Islamic states of Africa compare pretty favorably in terms of development to those of Europe, and Arabic is the common language of the continent north and east of the equatorial jungles, spoken widely even in Ethiopia. The hegemony the federated cities of East Africa once held over everything from Mecca to the mouth of the Limpopo has since fallen apart in the face of the development of larger Islamic states inland (even the Masai now live in Mosque-centered cities), but western Arabia is still ruled by the Somali Emirate.

In the Americas, both the Inca and Aztec empire have fallen by this point: the Inca grew too brittle and eventually cracked under its own weight, although by the time it collapsed into many smaller states the Quechua language had become dominant from OTL Venezuela to Patagonia. (The Amazon jungles remained outside the Inca sphere). The Aztecs, on the other hand, went from success to success until the increasingly bloody and baroque nature of their death cult sparked irresistible revolt, bringing the Empire crashing down. A loose federation of kingdoms, led by the Tarascans now dominates Mexico, and have turned to a new Quetzalcoatl cult (lower in sacrifices, less killing), while the worship of and bloody sacrifices to Smoking Mirror and Obsidian Hummingbird has spread as far as the OTL great lakes. (The Aztecs got as far as Texas before they collapsed, and some Mexica successor states still exist in the area). In the meantime, some traders from the Low Countries have returned with reports of a “great island” in mid-Atlantic…

Bruce
 

B_Munro

82.) Anglo-Aztec – a world in which earlier and more intermittent contacts with the Old World allowed the Native American civilizations to pick up enough tech (and survive enough plagues) to manage to survive the eventual full onset. The strongest power grouping in this world is the alliance between the Mexica Empire and the British North Americans. The Mexica Empire extends from OTL Panama north to Alaska and east as far as the Mississippi-Missouri line. Three small mixed-race-native American states form buffers from southern Canada to the Savannah River: Canada east of Regina, Saskatchewan and the US east of a line roughly Chicago-Knoxville-Charleston is the Republic of West England. They are the principal opponents in the global “great game” against the Romanian-Pacific Chinese alliance.

The Romanian Empire, arising from the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in the New Crusades of the 17th century, was originally a fief of the French Empire, but soon managed to become a regional power in its own right, by the 19th century bringing most of the Orthodox Balkans under its control. After the horrific War of Empires at the start of the 20th century, the Empire took advantage of the revolutionary chaos that followed to expand enormously: unable to contain so vast a territory by conventional absolutist-monarchy means, the Emperor was eventually reduced to as vassal of the Unity Party, a *fascist party different from OTLs Fascists in that they lacked racial discrimination: if you were Orthodox you were in, and eventually everyone in Europe would be Orthodox and a member of the Unity Party. Today, all the Balkans, much of OTL Anatolia, and the Ukraine are run from Bucharest with an iron fist: the states of western Russia (Russia broke up in the 17th century ATL) are kept weak and disunited puppets. Only Poland-Sweden (in this TL, Sweden is still Catholic) of its neighbors remains strong enough to avoid at minimum Finlandization. (Venice is simply too corrupt and its leadership too slippery to manipulate subtly, and too valuable as a place to do shady business to actually invade).

China is currently divided in three parts: Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, Russified and mostly converted to Orthodoxy by the East Russians: the Councils of Civilized Order, controlling the bulk of OTL China and Tibet: and the southern coasts, which are ruled by the Pacific Chinese, descendants of the Ming who fled overseas. Nowadays, from a capital in OTLs Philippines, the sea-Chinese rule south coastal China, Indonesia, Malaysia, northern Australia, New Zealand, and all the isles of the Pacific. They are not interested in re-conquest of impoverished, backwards China proper, presently ruled by revolutionary committee after the long, bloody collapse of the old Zuo dynasty: they have developed their own, mercantile culture, have interbred with the Malays and the Polynesians, come to wear light and colorful clothes and abandoned examinations on the Classics, although they still revere Confucius, along with the Buddha and the gods of the sea. Old China would be a milestone around their necks. The oligarchic dictatorship which rules has a place in its plans for the ancient homeland, but that is for the future.

Europe is mostly dictatorships of one kind or another. The Franco-Italian dictatorship and its Spanish puppet are allied to Bucharest, while the Anglo-Danish monarchy is a corrupt police state which requires either connections or a load of bribes to navigate. Fragmented Germany is bullied and terrorized by the French and the Romanians. Eastern South America, settled by the French and the Portuguese, is actually one of the more civilized parts of the globe: France-Antarctique is a working democracy, if not a power of the first rank, and has less oppressive security laws than West England. Western South America is an Inca state, a Pacific Chinese ally since they gained their independence from their Mexica overlords as a result of the Pacific War.
Some Mexica fashions, such as the jeweled nose-plug, have spread to their European allies and even Europe itself (although the roasted grasshoppers on popcorn have never really caught on). In other cultural fashions, Christopher Marlowe lived until 1630 and did very well indeed, while Shakespeare never seems to have amounted to anything. It is a harsh world: the Aztecs still do the human sacrifice thing, if not on the industrial level of old, and “cruel and unusual” punishment remains the norm in Europe. The chemically preserved and mutilated bodies of criminals, nailed up on steel crosses, are a normal part of life in the Big City, whether London-on-the-Hudson or Greater Paris. (The Romanians prefer to put them in large transparent jars of alcohol: more sanitary). West England is a democracy, of sorts, but there are substantial economic requirements for voting, social mobility is low, and it is also a “security state” that would make John Ashcroft swoon with delight. (Really, aside from the human sacrifice, the Mexica Empire has fairer and more humane laws).

Although a lot of Mexica now follow Christianity or Buddhism, the old religion is still followed by most. If criminals and volunteers for sacrifices are in short supply – and they usually are, these days – many people deed their bodies to serve as stand-ins for a live sacrifice in much the way people OTL fill out organ donor cards. Many temples now include shrines to Christ and the Buddha – most Aztecs feel you should show some respect for other people’s gods.

Islam has done poorly in this world: between the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish conquest (and brute-force conversion) of Northwest Africa, and the distinctly anti-Islamic nature of the Chinese conquerors of Indonesia, it covers less of the world than OTL: only Persia is a major power, having conquered much of Central Asia and Iraq in the absence of Russian and Ottoman competition, and has moved a long ways towards modernity on the basis of a sea of oil. India, long struggled over between the French and the British, is currently divided between French-controlled territory and the West-England protectorate of the Ganges Confederation.

Technology is more advanced than OTL, with high-definition 3-d television, excellent “drain-cleaner” meds for those pesky arteries, multiple landings on Mars, and bases on the Moon. Of late, thanks to the rise of a new, reformist group in the Pacific Chinese government, (and some realization on the part of Bucharest that the whole “star wars” missile defense thing was harder than it had first looked) the world has been taking some slow, cautious steps away from global thermonuclear warfare…


83.) Kurd II – Saladin is more successful at establishing an empire, and his heirs rule an empire with its capital at Tabriz extending to the borders of China, west to Morocco, and NW to Italy and the Balkans. Most of Africa and India is a patchwork of Islamic states at least theoretically accepting the supremacy of the Sultan-Caliph. The empire has had an industrial revolution of sorts based on oil rather than coal, and technology is roughly on the level of OTL 1930s, with airships and hydroplanes and radio and general diesel-punkery. It is a tolerant, cultured sort of place, largely post-expansionist, and somewhat smugly certain of its inherent superiority.

The Empire has had its down periods, and failed to colonize the Americas, the bulk of which is ruled by the various branches of a Portuguese-Castilian dynasty which is the strongest of the western Christian states. (Russia is small states bullied by a Turkish empire bordering Saladin’s empire to the north: other important European states include Burgundy, England, and Poland-Bohemia-Saxony). It is also worrisome just how fast the states of Europe are overtaking the Empire in productivity: Europe has richer soil and water and agriculture, so it has a large and still growing population, although individual states are still much smaller. It also has more iron and coal, and easier internal communications.

Also a worrisome competitor is an empire centered in OTL Cambodia, which having conquered most of SE Asia went on to colonize the Philippines and Australia-NZ, while championing Buddhists and Hindus vs. Muslims in the area of OTL Indonesia. A war in the 1960s proved indecisive due to logistics (and, to be fair, the soldiers of the Most Holy Realm of the Everlasting Sutra proved to be serious ass-kickers.) China is fragmented into several states, some Islamic, as a result of Kurdish and Turkic invasions during its last Time of Troubles, and Japan is a puppet of the Iberians.


84.) Sikh – a world in which France and a UK which remained under Puritan rule were too busy fighting each other to conquer India, the Sikhs rose to unify northern India by the late 19th century, and the Sikh Supremacy is nowadays considered the world’s greatest power. North America is fragmented between a French-speaking Canada, Puritan New England, a Dutch republic in the NY-New Jersey area, some small Native American states in the interior, and a catholic kingdom of Virginia ruled by the descendants of Charles II. Ireland, Scotland, and Wales are independent countries and the British Republic will never forget the French occupation of 1730-1761. Colonialism never really caught on, France concentrating on European affairs, most of Africa remained independent, and slavery was eliminated in N. America by 1806.

It’s a fairly civilized world, with a great deal of international cooperation, and a globalized economy. The Sikhs of India actually industrialized in parallel with the Europeans of OTL (the British were a lot slower off the mark, and the Scientific revolution of this world was French-flavored and went off in some odd directions in the 19th century before it got itself straightened out).
Technologically, this world is backwards compared to OTL, but the larger “first world” that emerged in this world’s 20th century (India and the Sikh-influenced nations of the Indian Ocean rim as well as the states of OTL) has meant faster progress since then, and currently Sikh world is only about 60 years behind OTL, although it has not yet developed nuclear weapons.

The Sikh Hegemony is the world’s largest power, but there are several other influential and independent states, the most important being the Russian Empire, the North Chinese Autocracy, and the Mitteleuropa Confederation (originally the League of Seven Nations, formed after the messy collapse of French hegemony to prevent Russian expansion into central Europe). There has been some effort to create a “north Atlantic block”, but this has been somewhat baffled by the fact that while the Dutch get along with everyone, New Englanders don’t like the Canadians, the Canadian Kingdom has some issues with the French republic, and the Kingdom of Virginia dislikes both the British Republic and New England. (Well, at least they’re not fighting wars any longer).

Central and Western Africa is only slightly less screwed up than OTL, in that the more organic and less predatory nature of the native kingdoms was balanced out by generations of warfare as foreign weapons were used to determine what belonged to who, only finally brought to an end by some muscular efforts on the part of the World Forum, a UN-equivalent with some (mostly Sikh, Russian and M.C.) teeth.

Bruce
 

B_Munro

And here's a map for Anglo-Aztec. I'm almost done with this: would any one like this stickied so they can add some gazeteers of their own if they feel like it, or use it for ideas? Or shall we let it peacefully sink into the past?

Bruce

AngloAztec.png
 

Keenir

Banned
B_Munro said:
And here's a map for Anglo-Aztec. I'm almost done with this: would any one like this stickied so they can add some gazeteers of their own if they feel like it, or use it for ideas? Or shall we let it peacefully sink into the past?

Bruce
Click to expand...

STICKIED!

(by thunder!)
 

Atom

I'll let you slide on the Anglo-Aztec world, thats obviously a wank, but a Tarascan led federation that worships Quetzalcoatl? That seems improbable, considering one of the defining features of their religion was the lack of a winged serpent god.
 

B_Munro

Atom said:
I'll let you slide on the Anglo-Aztec world, thats obviously a wank, but a Tarascan led federation that worships Quetzalcoatl? That seems improbable, considering one of the defining features of their religion was the lack of a winged serpent god.
Click to expand...

People pick up new religions, don't they? :confused:

Bruce
 
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