alternatehistory.com

WARNING: This thread is not for butterfly fundamentalists.

Your challenge is, with a POD as far back as possible, to create a world that is just like ours...but slightly different. There are no limitations on your POD, so long as the society that exists is recognizable to someone from our timeline. So the USA still has to exist, but we can have a President McCain. Or Kennedy could still be alive...but can you engineer things to that Obama is still elected despite that?

Can you make 9/11 happen in a world where airships are used instead of airplanes?

Can you have Julius Caesar not being assassinated in 44 B.C., but still have the Roman Empire collapse 500 years later?

There are limits, of course: You cannot have a world with a surviving Roman Empire and Canada existing simultaneously.

To use an analogy: create two different wills for the same person, but have the fine print on those wills differ.

Examples:

Julius Caesar is not assassinated, but he is killed in a power struggle with Marc Antony. Augustus still becomes Emperor. History is slightly different.

Romulus Augustulus is the last Roman emperor...but instead of disappearing from the history books after 476, he retreats to the East, becoming a vocal critic of the Visigoths and later meeting Justinian in his old age. History is slightly different.

JFK survives assassination, but the experience leaves him psychologically scarred, and he resigns from the Presidency-the first to do so. He gives LBJ his blessing to do as he pleases, and retires from public life permanently, dying in 1972. History is slightly different.

You get the idea. Be creative. And like I said, if you're a butterfly fundamentalists, don't bitch about how ASB this is.

-AYC
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