Map Thread XX
- Thread starter Balkanized U.S.A
- Start date
- Status
Well, here...
Returning to the publication of maps...
Earlier in the thread, someone made maps of Britain and Spain having swapped Western Hemispheric colonies. I took the idea and started to run with it, stumbled, forgot, but now decided I may as well put this up here.
Though it suffered the loss of the United States of Mexic, the UK still holds on to the Dominions of South America and South Africa. While France won out in India and therefore seized Egypt (and avoided those pesky Napoleonic Wars, delaying Brazil's independence until the conclusion of the present revolutionary war), the UK still mustered a respectable colonial empire in the East. Spain has expanded into North Africa though it still holds its viceroyalty in the North of *America but Jadusohenia (*Mexico with the Iroquois in place of the Aztecs) broke away, though it did lose much land north of New Orleans to the USM.
The Kingdom of the Kongo was kept independent as a buffer between Portuguese and German Africa. Far to the North, Egypt was able to break away much of the Ottoman Empire before being taken down by France. Northwards still, Italy has been split by France in order to maintain control of the Mediterranean. Out in the East, Iran has seen better days but at least it's still a sovereign nation. With Russia busier in Europe due to a weaker Germany, China has not yet been seriously challenged, but all that is about to change...
I may go back and annotate this properly.
Love the flags
You should try Qbam for your next project. I would love to see some more detail and world building in the maps.
Thanks, though 2 are just blank but that was common OTL for radical political movements & early modern Asian states.
I might do a Q BAM but I don't want to make any promises yet
I'm not really sure what you mean.
I've kept the Earth the same size. Basically how it works is that when you get into the New World you step into the enlarged lands, however before that it appears as normal.
So the New World is like the TARDIS - bigger on the inside?
It's January 1st, 1970 and American cosmonauts at Artemis Lunar Base are still celebrating the safe arrival of a supply shipment that arrived on Christmas Day
President Nixon sends his regards through a videophone call which is widely televised, although he knows the American presence on the Moon is more for show than a substantial investment in an attempt to control the high ground. The Soyuz Lunar Base is much larger and more populated, plus there are rumors that the station is storing nuclear missiles. When Jerrie Cobb makes a slurred comment on the call about looking forward to cocktails with him in the White House, it's just par for the course. Richard shares a jovial laugh with his staff after the recording, then quickly returns to work. For all that it fascinates the public, there's much more important matters to deal with than the Moon.
Tricky Dick swivels his attention to an ingenious plan that Bobby Kennedy has been cooking up that would secure the Democratic-Republicans another term in the White House: the Family Assistance Program. It's time to show the damn riff-raff in the American Labor Party that Nixon and Kennedy intend to play hardball. The man who won Antarctica back for the United States of America isn't going into the next election without playing a few more aces. There are surely some Senators out there who aren't hungover this late in the day that could take a call... but if they are and they pick up, it may come to his advantage. Nixon doesn't want anyone remembering offhand remarks from Ben Franklin.
The starry-eyed dreamers of four African republics, proud new members of the Popular Federation , are still optimistic about their future after a few years in the union, and not just because of the continuing surge in trade, industrialization, and immigration. Many look ambitiously towards their neighbors, deeper within the African continent. High hopes abound concerning the possibility that all Africans may soon unite with their socialist liberators in Russia and China to resist European colonization for all time. That sentiment is growing even in far-away South America, championed as it is by the Castro brothers and all those powerful Cuban trade unions. To Chairman Kosygin, who is catching an inebriated slumber, it's fascinating that despite his continued focus on economic reforms, his foreign ministry is always coming back to him with good news. It's enough to make even a hard-nosed bureaucrat like him drink one too many margaritas.
The leadership of the Revolutionary Socialist Republic of Vietnam is not so easily swayed. Communist paramilitaries under President Ho Chi Minh conquered South Vietnam in 1969 and have already captured eastern Laos through their affiliate organization, the Pathet Lao. They are most concerned about the Khmer Rouge, who facilitated the entrance of Cambodia into the Popular Federation and receives substantial assistance from them. Also, the neutralist Laotian government in Luang Prabang has cultivated support from foreign interests, but remains weak in the face of the revolutionary Vietnamese military. Newly-ascended President Le Duan is eager to exploit this weakness. He also dreams of some day linking up with revolutionaries in Africa and South America to create a Communist International Front against the colonial powers... only time will tell...
President Nixon sends his regards through a videophone call which is widely televised, although he knows the American presence on the Moon is more for show than a substantial investment in an attempt to control the high ground. The Soyuz Lunar Base is much larger and more populated, plus there are rumors that the station is storing nuclear missiles. When Jerrie Cobb makes a slurred comment on the call about looking forward to cocktails with him in the White House, it's just par for the course. Richard shares a jovial laugh with his staff after the recording, then quickly returns to work. For all that it fascinates the public, there's much more important matters to deal with than the Moon.
Tricky Dick swivels his attention to an ingenious plan that Bobby Kennedy has been cooking up that would secure the Democratic-Republicans another term in the White House: the Family Assistance Program. It's time to show the damn riff-raff in the American Labor Party that Nixon and Kennedy intend to play hardball. The man who won Antarctica back for the United States of America isn't going into the next election without playing a few more aces. There are surely some Senators out there who aren't hungover this late in the day that could take a call... but if they are and they pick up, it may come to his advantage. Nixon doesn't want anyone remembering offhand remarks from Ben Franklin.
The starry-eyed dreamers of four African republics, proud new members of the Popular Federation , are still optimistic about their future after a few years in the union, and not just because of the continuing surge in trade, industrialization, and immigration. Many look ambitiously towards their neighbors, deeper within the African continent. High hopes abound concerning the possibility that all Africans may soon unite with their socialist liberators in Russia and China to resist European colonization for all time. That sentiment is growing even in far-away South America, championed as it is by the Castro brothers and all those powerful Cuban trade unions. To Chairman Kosygin, who is catching an inebriated slumber, it's fascinating that despite his continued focus on economic reforms, his foreign ministry is always coming back to him with good news. It's enough to make even a hard-nosed bureaucrat like him drink one too many margaritas.
The leadership of the Revolutionary Socialist Republic of Vietnam is not so easily swayed. Communist paramilitaries under President Ho Chi Minh conquered South Vietnam in 1969 and have already captured eastern Laos through their affiliate organization, the Pathet Lao. They are most concerned about the Khmer Rouge, who facilitated the entrance of Cambodia into the Popular Federation and receives substantial assistance from them. Also, the neutralist Laotian government in Luang Prabang has cultivated support from foreign interests, but remains weak in the face of the revolutionary Vietnamese military. Newly-ascended President Le Duan is eager to exploit this weakness. He also dreams of some day linking up with revolutionaries in Africa and South America to create a Communist International Front against the colonial powers... only time will tell...
Last edited:
It is in our universe also. You know this if you've ever driven the length of Illinois from Rockford to Carbondale.
Either that or there's some kind of time dilation thing going on along I-39.
I missed this meme when it was A Thing, but what exactly do the letter & number combos stand for? I can never figure out what the categories in this sort of map are supposed to be.
It's just a convenient way to number a grid. A, B, C, etc. are the columns, 1, 2, 3, etc. are the lines.
soviet_killer
Banned
Nah, those are meant to be the church's subdivisions. It did begin as a sort of "big US of Romania" idea, but it devolved into this
Man, that's going to screw with the heads of the natural philosophers for the next few centuries (on the positive side, we'll get an FTL star drive in 1902.
).Reminds me of Baxter's "The Pacific Mystery", although in that case the Pacific's spacetime geometry is so weird it might be effectively infinite.
Nuclear Alchemist
Banned
A continuation of my last post, here's my headcanon for the history of Oceania:
Ingsoc can find its roots in the various socialist movements within the United States of America and the British Commonwealth. Society in these countries weren’t all that great in the early 20th century, with America being economically ruled by giant capitalist companies who were trying to squeeze every last drop of productivity from the population as they could; work lasted up to 12 hours per day, leaving little time for people to see their families, do their hobbies, and simply live. Unlike OTL, Roosevelt simply fails to become president, and the capitalists continue business-as-usual monopolizing everything from steel to lumber to the water people drink. Because of this, no matter how much they tried, the worker’s unions had little success or support to push legislation through congress to improve their health, safety, and wages (mostly due to the fact that by 1940, every member of congress was bought out by the very companies the unions were fighting against).
Things weren’t quite as bad in Britain, where the workers were at least allowed to form their own political organization, the Labor Party. However, they were constantly sidelined by their Conservative and Liberal counterparts within Parliament not only in Britain itself but also its Dominions, even as the conditions of the working class visibly deteriorated.
Another factor to Ingsoc‘s eventual rise is that of race. The Anglosphere was predominantly European in ethnicity and background, however there was a sizable minority of Africans in the American south, who were being used as a source of labor cheaper than even their white counterparts, not helping that their ancestors were slaves before the first civil war. A more glaring misdeed, however, was the situation in the Dominion of the Union of South Africa, where despite making the majority of the population, native Africans were treated as second-class citizens under the English and Dutch-descent Boers.
Due to these factors, tensions between the ruling elite and the common people rose throughout the first half of the 20th century. There was a brief hope for change when the Bolsheviks took over Russia, however when it quickly devolved into a dictatorship, that hope quickly evaporated. The situation only got worse with the Great Depression of the 1930’s and the 2nd Great War, the latter of which made the inhumane toil the corporations and trusts subjected the working man to mandatory by law, and they kept it that way even after Japan surrendered in 1945.
Ultimately, everything came to a head when the 3rd Great War erupted in Korea in 1950, specifically when it went nuclear in 1953 as the Red Army approached Paris. The resulting devastation in Britain, America and parts of Canada sent the western allies’ economies into the gutter, and their societies were thrown into upheaval. In the US, the Soviets had wiped the capital of Washington off the map through heavy atombombing, killing not only the President but his entire line of succession, creating an all-out power vacuum. Seizing the moment, the Workers’ Party of the USA had their militia storm government buildings in all major cities (the military was stranded in Europe, and therefore were helpless to events back home), and by 1955 had secured their rule over the States.
In the Commonwealth nations, where there was still law and order, the public blamed the ruling Conservative-Liberal coalition government for the devastation caused by the nuclear exchange, and were soon voted out and replaced by the Labor Party and its counterparts. Almost immediately, the capitalist giants of the Anglosphere found themselves surrounded not only by their own laborers but a hostile government, as were the racist institutions in South Africa and the former CSA; within a few years, they were thoroughly torn down and brushed under the rug of history.
Now that their goals had been accomplished, the socialist parties were now faced with the question of where to go next. Fortunately, the answer came on November 20th, 1957, when Lavrentiy Beria declared the reorganization/merging of the USSR, its East European puppets and its occupied territories into the Eurasian Union, and denounced the western socialists as “fake” and "too lenient", declaring that they were to be swept away by the strength of the newly rebranded Neo-Bolsheviks. The “false” socialists promptly banded around this cause to survive and eventually defeat the Neo-Bolsheviks in Moscow. To better organize their efforts, on May 30th, 1958, the British Commonwealth member nations and the United States of America officially merged into the Union of Oceania, and the various socialist parties of those countries merged into the English Socialist Party. (‘English’ as in the cultures of the Anglosphere as a whole, not just England by itself.)
The government of Oceania was organized into Provinces, based off of the countries that formerly occupied the land that was now Oceania (bar the assimilation of Alaska into Canada and the reunification of Ireland), and the Provincial governments were governed by the federal government. The federal government was composed of 3 main branches: the Ministry of Plenty, which supervised the redistribution of wealth and products, both industrial and agricultural; the Ministry of Truth, which was intended to give the Proles (proletariat sounded too Russian) accurate, up-to-date information about the war and other ongoing events; and the Ministry of War, which controlled the Oceanic Proles’ Free Army, Navy and Air Force. The 3 ministers in charge of them were subservient to the Worker’s Congress (think the politburo), seated in New York City. In turn, the Congress was subservient to the Supreme Chairman, the first of whom the WC elected to that position being Oswald Mosley.
However, this system of centralized government was short-lived. As Oceania was forming, to its south Latin America was collapsing into anarchy. Due to border security issues, the WC decided to intervene in 1960 to restore order. The same would happen in the former European colonies in Africa from Congo southwards in 1963. This is where they ran into a problem: not all of the colonies (which were swiftly integrated into South Africa) had belonged to the British; Angola and Mozambique were Portuguese and Congo was Belgian in former ownership; not to mention that Latin America was culturally Spanish (Portuguese in the case of Brazil), and were distinctly un-English. The solution, devised by John F. and Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, was to decentralize rule to the Provincial level. Each province would have its own Congress and 3 ministries, run locally both in its operations and the people the Party would recruit to man them, while the federal government would take on a more supervisory role. Not only did this reduce administrative stress, but it also helped the Proles everywhere in the country not feel like they were being ruled from some Far-off land.
Unfortunately, the brothers Kennedy would never be credited for their genius, in fact they, as well as nearly all of the other founding members of the Party, would disappear completely from the historical record.
You see, Oswald Mosley, the de facto leader of the largest country to ever exist, was likely the biggest control freak to've ever lived; though the rest of the English Socialist Party didn’t realize it in 1958, they had given a tyrant along the likes of Stalin, Beria and Hitler the keys to the Union. Shortly after the annexation of Latin America, Mosley initiated a “shakedown” of the Party, and from then until 1965 a whopping 89% of Party membership was arrested, tried and convicted of crimes against “the revolution” (most of which were likely fabricated), and executed. Some of those purged, such as Gus Hall and Lawrence Sharkey, had legitimate reasons to be eliminated, however Mosley also purged liberal socialists, such as the Kennedys, moderate socialists like the trio of Aaronson, Rutherford and Jones, hardcore socialists like Emmanuel Goldstein, and… well, anyone who wasn’t an absolute sycophant towards him and his personal version of English Socialism. All efforts and contributions of the purged were subsequently attributed to the Supreme Chairman.
Once the purges were complete, Mosley began vilifying everything socialism stood for, claiming to be doing so for socialism’s sake. The Ministry of Truth was converted into a massive propaganda machine, spewing outright lies for the Proles to consume. The idea was to make them too distracted by their own lives and entertainment to be interested in politics, and for the most part it worked. The Ministry of Plenty’s operations were rerouted to wasting physical materials so that the standards of living wouldn’t rise, and give the Proles more impetus to overthrow him and his lackeys, the newly-dubbed Inner Party. The Ministry of War was rebranded as the Ministry of Peace.
To top off the paragraph above, in 1969, Mosley added a fourth branch to the government: the Ministry of Love. This ministry and the Thought Police warrant their own discussion, but the short of it is that Oswald wanted everyone in Oceania to love him from the moment they were born to the day they died, no exceptions or martyrs allowed. Most of the ministry’s operations were focused on the Outer Party, the mass of bureaucrats formed in the wake of the purges of the early ‘60’s who, despite carrying out most of the Party's actual work, were very, very disproportionately targeted for vaporization, re-education and unperson-ment.
Mosley also... reorganized the provinces within Oceania:
Columbia, Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia were merged into the province of Bolivia, named after Simon Bolivar; Argentina, Chile and Uruguay were merged together to form River Plate (Rio de la Plata[?]).
Paraguay and the Guyanas were assimilated into Brazil.
The rest of Central America was reintegrated back into Mexico, as they’d been a part of the country when it first became independent.
Britain, the ancestral homeland of all the Anglo-Saxon cultures, was renamed Airstrip One; Ireland Airstrip Two; New Zealand Airstrip Three.
Lastly, the province of America (the former continental USA) was split apart; everything east of the Mississippi River became the province of Atlas, everything from there to the Rio Grande and Rocky Mountains became the province of Missouri, and the remaining third became the province of California.
I could go on with the ways society was torn down and distorted by Mosley, or Big Brother, as he came to… insist everyone call him. (e.g., Newspeak, the Anti-Sex League, the eradication of all pre-existing holidays and their replacement with Hate Week) But I know you already know most of it, so I'll address the elephant in the room: Why did Oswald Mosley create one of the 3 mothers of all nightmare regimes to ever exist [in fiction]?
The answer is simple: Big Brother had wanted power not for luxury or for pleasure, but for its own sake. Worse, what he believed, and what he managed to convince the rest of the Inner Party, to be the ultimate way to express that power was by controlling every physical and psychological aspect of another person’s life; specifically, by making them suffer. He made a speech about it to his fellow Inner Ingsoc Party members at one time, and I think it explains it best:
Big Brother would die in 1980, but this would be carefully buried from the eyes of the Proles and Outer Party, as he was "too powerful a propaganda tool to dispense with," as our fellow alternatehistory.com user troy put it. Despite this, the Party has been going on without him ever since, determined to make his "dream" reality...
...
Ask me any questions you have about this, and I'll gladly answer. I'll even put down headcanon for Eurasia and Eastasia if you'd like!
Last edited:
Probably the "German" part of the Austrian Empire and the Hungarian part being united under personal union but the "German" part also being part of Germany.
It's January 1st, 1980 and the Third Indochinese War rages on as the Popular Army continues to press forward against their enemies on the roads to Ho Chi Minh City
Vietnamese-American cosmonaut Valentine Vu frets as she thinks she sees enormous smoke bellows rising up from Southern Vietnam... or is she seeing things in the window of the Enterprise? Her mom is going to give her an earful about it on their next videochat. The fuel and coolant lines of the nuclear-powered ship need more diagnostics before the next lunar transit, so there's plenty to do, but she can't help but think about her mom... and politics. If only President King could do something more for those poor people in the old country. Simply resettling refugees in Texas and sending them a monthly Bank of America check for half the amount that citizens receive seemed like no strategy at all. How was the Alliance going to catch up to the Federation on Mars if this kind of molly-coddling kept up?
She may not have voted for Nixon's re-election after the Capitol Hill Club scandal, but she is seriously considering her next ballot for a true man of the people... and a Democratic-Republican. Her favorite candidate for president reminds Valentine of her own father. While she begins to organize her toolkit for the upcoming procedures, her mind is far away, wondering about primaries. George Bush had "the Big Mo" on his side: all he needed to do now was to rake that idiot Ronald Reagan over the coals for his ridiculous debate shenanigans. There was no way Ted Kennedy would ever reach the winning vote, not in a contest for the Democratic-Republican nomination! The future really might be bright for the Alliance if they could just elect an actual war hero into the White House. Valentine is ready for America to be the land of the brave again and she was willing to bet her fellow citizens were ready, too...
Corporal Vu was doing her part, god dammit! After all, she had submitted her application for the Ares mission the day she had qualified. When would she be notified on her application's progress? Was it because she was a woman that the boys in Houston kept her in the dark? Or was it more that she was half-Vietnamese, or that her father was British? She sighs (not that old thought pattern again) and then starts flipping switches for fuel rerouting procedures.
Vietnamese-American cosmonaut Valentine Vu frets as she thinks she sees enormous smoke bellows rising up from Southern Vietnam... or is she seeing things in the window of the Enterprise? Her mom is going to give her an earful about it on their next videochat. The fuel and coolant lines of the nuclear-powered ship need more diagnostics before the next lunar transit, so there's plenty to do, but she can't help but think about her mom... and politics. If only President King could do something more for those poor people in the old country. Simply resettling refugees in Texas and sending them a monthly Bank of America check for half the amount that citizens receive seemed like no strategy at all. How was the Alliance going to catch up to the Federation on Mars if this kind of molly-coddling kept up?
She may not have voted for Nixon's re-election after the Capitol Hill Club scandal, but she is seriously considering her next ballot for a true man of the people... and a Democratic-Republican. Her favorite candidate for president reminds Valentine of her own father. While she begins to organize her toolkit for the upcoming procedures, her mind is far away, wondering about primaries. George Bush had "the Big Mo" on his side: all he needed to do now was to rake that idiot Ronald Reagan over the coals for his ridiculous debate shenanigans. There was no way Ted Kennedy would ever reach the winning vote, not in a contest for the Democratic-Republican nomination! The future really might be bright for the Alliance if they could just elect an actual war hero into the White House. Valentine is ready for America to be the land of the brave again and she was willing to bet her fellow citizens were ready, too...
Corporal Vu was doing her part, god dammit! After all, she had submitted her application for the Ares mission the day she had qualified. When would she be notified on her application's progress? Was it because she was a woman that the boys in Houston kept her in the dark? Or was it more that she was half-Vietnamese, or that her father was British? She sighs (not that old thought pattern again) and then starts flipping switches for fuel rerouting procedures.
Last edited:
There's not actually going to be many communists left once the Viet Minh are defeated. They really gave the Kunist-Stalinists a bad name.
More like guaranteed income checks, but yeah. Valentine is one of those, but still extremely competent at her job.
Last edited:
- Status