Nice map, rvbomally! I've actually made one of my own I'd like to contribute.
Iiiit’s Gernsback, everyone’s favorite superscience colonial lovefest (Local year 2007)! Note that the descriptions may come off as more negative than how the setting was portrayed in the sourcebook. I don’t care how flying my car is, racism is racism.
The PoD is Nikolai Tesla marrying Anne Morgan, the daughter of J.P. Morgan, in 1893, meaning his inventions get all the funding they need. By 1902, Tesla had prototyped a global wireless radio system. During world war 1, he even devised a way to transmit electricity wirelessly. These new technologies kept Wiemar Germany just stable enough to keep Hitler out of power, and the League of Nations became gradually less completely f*cking useless. Tesla founded an important League regulatory body known as the World Science Council. The League stood up to both Japan and Italy, staving them away from Ethiopia and China, respectively. France fell under a socialist government, but one willing to play ball with the rest of the Great Powers.
Only Stalin’s Comintern stood outside the friendly, smothering umbrella of the League by 1940. As relations worsened, Stalin began a Soviet nuclear program. But in 1951, a scientist leaked this information to the League, and the WSC demanded the USSR stand down. Moscow refused, and so began this timeline’s deadliest conflict, the Soviet War. The Western Allies fought the Soviets in Europe, while Japan swept into CPC-controlled north China. In 1953, as the atom bombs neared completion, the Ukraine rose in revolt against the Soviet Union, welcoming in League armies. In a rage, Stalin ordered the nuking of Kiev. His scientists were horrified he would nuke his own country, and the “Scientists’ Coup” caused pitched fighting in Moscow itself. Stalin would die in that confused battle, and the Soviet War drew to a close.
Afterwards, the League strengthened its position and Japan hung on to its gains in China, while Russia was divided up. Colonialism was now here to stay. The German Reich eventually drew up a better constitution and became the German Republic, second only to the United States and Britain in world affairs. The sourcebook says Italy is fascist, but I imagine the regime's kept its head down in order to survive after the Ethiopia scare.
Revolts are frequent in the middle east and India, and it’s no wonder. Without experiencing the horrors of Nazism, this world still buys into a great deal of psudoscientifc crap about the inferiority of this and that race, or womens’ place in the home. Basically, living here as a non-white male would suck donkey balls, if it weren’t for all the cool tech dulling the pain somewhat. Even a lower-class Indian laborer’s car drives itself, after all.
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