A ten-minute, ASB map with a 45-minute bit of blather:
In 2003, annoyed by the flight suit posturing, an ASB decides to give Bush some real challenges: it plunks 4 new superpowers into the game.
1. The Caliphate of Far Damascus – 350 million people, about as advanced technologically as OTL US, if a bit poorer due to a more managed economy and more expensive energy (say West Germany). The Caliph is mostly a figurehead; the Caliphate is more of an oligarchic republic, with the balance of power between bureaucracy, religious authorities, the Grand Council and the Vizierate constantly shifting due to various pressure groups (religious, scientific, big business, huge organized charities, the Jewish and Christian minorities - speaking of which, the Caliphate considers itself a paradise of civilized values – why, they even gave pagans (Hindus, Buddhists…) the vote recently!)
Women have the vote and there are many female scientists and politicians, and can even go out in public without a veil. Of course, neither a male or female citizen of the Caliphate would ever think of going out without properly baggy and enveloping robes, in spite of the scandalous stuff that goes on nowadays at some private beaches. (
http://www.bikiniscience.com/chronology/1700-1900_SS/E188601_S/E188601_J/E18860101.JPG )
It is a polite and civilized society, much given to Arabian Nights-ish flowery language, but behind the scenes it is also a ferociously competitive society, and things can get pretty nasty if you offend the wrong people. The Caliphate has ICBMs that can reach anyplace in the globe, but not very many – its Islam-dominated world is a generally peaceful one, and Northern Europe is a distant land of violent and religion-besotted barbarians (the citizens of the Caliphate are generally fairly religious, but they are never _rude_ about it, and can’t imagine suicide bombers as anything but Hussites or some other brand of European Christian).
It’s a racially mixed society, settled by a mix of Andalusi and people from the West African Islamic states, not to mention refugees from the Persian wars and Hindus looking for a better life far, far away from the Sultanate of Ind. The language is an Arab-Berber mix sprinkled with West African words, although anyone with a decent education can read and write Classical Arabic. Like much of its world, it gets much energy from solar and nuclear power – with one of the centers of this worlds scientific revolution sitting right on top of the worlds largest oil fields, petroleum was used industrially rather earlier than OTL, and Peak Oil was hit a while back.
2. The Empire of Japan, from a TL similar to Randy McDonald’s “Tripartite Alliance” world. Includes Taiwan and a few bits of Indonesia they picked up in the post-WWIII chaos. About 180 million people (78% Japanese, 22% Taiwanese, Balinese, etc. and post-chaos refugees (about 9 million of which still lack the vote). Richer and technologically more advanced than OTL Japan, with computer tech and antimissile defenses at least a generation ahead of ours…for this remains a somewhat dangerous world, what with nutty technocratic post-humanist Siberia, the nuclear armed SE rump of what was once the US, and the bloody African Unification movement. This Japan, never occupied by US forces in a rather different alt-WWII, remains a more militaristic society, although it is currently probably a better democracy than the OTL Japanese virtual one-party state, with a multitude of squabbling political parties. It is also a rather more cosmopolitan state than OTL, although racism persists.
Anime and Manga flourish as well here, but there is less of a Pedo element to it – most of the Empire’s inhabitants would find the “hello kitty” vibrator almost as creepy as OTL Americans would. It’s also rather big on autonomy – the breakdown of trade in the wake of WWIII nearly led to mass starvation (fortunately, the US president in this TL wasn’t crazy enough to nuke Japan or Europe “just for the hell of it”). It has invested heavily in hydroponics and biotech, and the “green towers” can expand their production quickly to (barely) feed the population in case of a trade breakdown, and it uses an even higher share of nuclear power in it’s energy consumption than OTL France. And in the north Pacific, the captain of the nuclear sub “Yamato” is becoming increasingly worried about the very odd signals they are picking up…
3. The Byzantine Empire, from a world like Turtledove’s series, where Islam never arose. The Empire has waxed and waned over the millennia, but has never fallen, and traces it’s history back to the old city in Italy, currently under the rule of the French Imperium, their principal rival in Europe. It’s 247 million inhabitants inhabit a bustling commercial society as rich as the USA OTL, trading not only with their fellow Orthodox [*] in Africa and Rus’ and the Magyar Empire, but also with the Nestorian Khanates of the East, the Catholic West, the very odd syncreticists of India, the Jews of Arabia and the Desert Continent, and beyond. (More resource-poor and with bigger-GNP neighbors than the US, trade is a larger chunk of the Empire’s GNP than it is of the US). It’s a genuinely tolerant society, and although the Romans (as they think of themselves) still love a good theological argument, nowadays nobody gets _killed_ as a result. (Although many TV careers often perish through poor research). Not that they’re a particularly perfect people – when it comes to a snobbish certainty on their own superiority, they make Victorian Englishmen or the French of any era look like tyros, and politics are turbulent and vituperative to say the least.
The Emperor is still powerful, but is careful nowadays not to offend the powerful Restored Senate and the huge industrial combines which some people claim _really_ run the empire. (They’re wrong. It’s actually run by the worlds longest continually operating bureaucracy, which has files going back to Justinian’s day). Besides being a rich society, it is also a well-armed one: the Empire has waxed and waned since the days of Herakleios the Restorer, and the world is a complex, many-centered one in which nobody can be certain of their supremacy. One has to keep an eye on the French, the Arabians, even the Rus’, dynastic intermarriages or not. The last big war – to prevent the Vajaras from unifying all of the Trans-Indus under their rule – killed tens of millions in two dozen countries, and now that there are nuclear weapons, one must worry if Wei will invade Chao, whether the Confederation in North Atlantea will ever get its act together, what do about the Reunification Party in Mauretania…not to mention the current competition with Rus’ and the self-titled “Roman” empire in South Atlantea to put a man on Mars. Frankly, the move to our TL, Nazis aside, is almost relaxing.
* - well, there _are_ the Copts. But they have been fairly quiet since Emperor Constantine VII freed Egypt from the Turks and put forth his Edict of Toleration, which since has only once been violated, with near-disastrous results (by Emperor Leonidas “the Numbskull.”)
4. The Nazis – who else? From a TL where the US stayed out of the war due to internal problems of their own – Roosevelt never went into politics, and president Huey Long’s term in office was, shall we say, a wee bit divisive – and the Nazis (barely) won a six-year war of attrition that bled them white. The Reich _looks_ big and scary, but it is a bit of an ersatz superpower – of its 293 million inhabitants, between a quarter and a third are serfs or slave laborers or miserably poor inhabitants of Slavic Bantustans that don’t add much to the economic product. The Reich is rather poorer than the US of its TL, which in turn is poorer than OTLs US. (OTLs average Spaniard probably has a better standard of living than the average member of the Master Race, and doesn’t have to worry about the “knock on the door.”) It took _decades_ to deal with the economic disaster that Hitler’s policies had made out of the Eastern Region, even longer to bring Party corruption down to Thai rather than Nigerian levels. OTOH, they have lots and lots and lots of nukes, some of them in orbit.
(On the positive side, they’re big on environmentalism, and some of the depopulated parts of the East have some lovely national forests overgrowing the ruins of old farms and villages).
The rather harried current Reichsfuhrer, who of late has been wondering whether surrender to the Americans is preferable to blowing up the planet, sees some opportunities in the new situation: now if he can only prevent a war from breaking out between the Reich and those very strange people with which said Reich now shares a border where Fascist Georgia and Turkey used to be…
Bruce
