Pump the breaks 😂 Lovecraftian Fascism is alien and weird certainly but not dystopic, partially due to an accelerated timeline for his historical shift in attitudes on race and politics, partially due to VP Clark Ashton Smith prodding him, and partially down to the idea that a culturally-chauvinist technocratic socialist system (which Lovecraft OTL advocated for by the end) that actually puts effort into segregating its services based on race is wasting resources and energy that could be spent more productively building weapons and public works. It also helps that the Rational Anarchist discourse central to the
Raise the Black Flag! section basically butterflies away top-down eugenics in the Fascist sphere in favor of an emphasis on individuals self-selecting to produce superior children, whatever that means to them personally.
Huxley is still a writer and his character is basically unchanged but I have a role for him I won't spoil.
It Can't Happen Here fictionalized a hypothetical Long presidency OTL so the subject matter is much the same, actually. Given that the divergence to this TL's version of
The Man in the High Castle is Lovecraft dying and Long becoming president some culture critics consider it an unofficial sideways prequel of sorts to the Pelley dictatorship Dick describes in his novel, of course sans any of the metaphysics that permeates the setting Dick creates.
I haven't quite figured out what to do with Orwell yet 🤔 He'd certainly see the Fascist sphere as authoritarian and the Comintern (weird as he finds it) is certainly more organic and responsive to the people than the Stalinist system he despised, so I think TTL's
1984 would likely revolve around:
- The Fascists (The Americas, East Asia)
- A Savinkov/Goebbels/Mussolini-led Comintern (the majority of Eurasia)
- An authoritarian FBU (Western Europe, Africa)
But the existence of decentralized libertarian communism doing pretty well for itself in this timeline would likely see him include some version of that as a legitimate resistance movement and threat to the big three rather than the resistance existing as a honey trap as it was in the version we got.
He wasn't intentionally political
in OTL, here he's PM during the Second Clash of Civilizations as mentioned offhand in the culture update for Act II (
A Wine-Dark Sea). He'll get a bit more time in the sun in Act V (
Illuminatus!) when I flesh out his electoral alliance with Mosely the Elder's New Party* but suffice to say he's quite a bit more conservative than he was historically. But hey, a Catholic PM in the thirties, who says people can't get ahead?
I love the culture stuff too, hence my commitment to including a culture update at the end of every TLIAW to both flesh out the world and tie each act up with a bow. As for Hollywood specifically with the success of the End Poverty in California campaign the promised threat to move the studios turned out to be mostly bluster since Hearst himself came down on the side of EPiC due to political butterflies, though there is a lesser film hub in Florida that puts out more socially conservative and Populist-aligned fare. They call themselves Cottonwood.
*It's an uninspired name for a political party but it's one he used and it's fun so I'm keeping it!