WI Neither Rome nor China

If one uses multiple separate PODs you begin to get more into wish fulfillment and creative writing territory than this happens and differently and this is what follows.
 
@Sheliak Lawyer But again, this isn't that -- it really is just two really awesome and fascinating WI, in their own right, that happen to be close enough chronologicallly and far enough apart geographically to be plausible as part of the same TL. It's not wish fulfillment or narrative focused so much as just not wanting to chose between two very good TL ideas and just deciding "Why not both?"
 
Don't get me wrong one WI or POD gets stale.

Asking for example WI Egypt never unifies and an asteroid craters central Africa into a low lying sea involves utterly shaking history as we know it.

Thing is the more WIs the more things writers have to account for and from a writing POV take more discipline to manage. Not I want Thracian empire WI Greece doesn't recover from dark ages and Persia descends into anarchy and on and on. Where you are basically creating a scenario to get your desired result.

But using multiple PODs is cool and something the genre I think should explore more. It really gets into chaos theory and magnifies discussions over the butterfly affect.

But using more than one WI takes greater imagination and writing discipline than WI Lee won at Gettysburg.

For example WI a working class revolt occurred in England a year after a confederate victory as a result of Lee winning at Gettysburg.

From there it gets much more challenging but much more interesting.
 
To be honest, "creating a scenario to get your desired result" is all of AH, regardless of how many PODs or butterflies you put in. You can argue about plausibility and likelihood of outcomes all you want, but every writer is going to put their thumb on the scales in different places because this is an inherently creative writing hobby.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
To be honest, "creating a scenario to get your desired result" is all of AH, regardless of how many PODs or butterflies you put in. You can argue about plausibility and likelihood of outcomes all you want, but every writer is going to put their thumb on the scales in different places because this is an inherently creative writing hobby.

Sure, but there's a huge difference between "changing things at will to get to result X" and "changing thing Y and attempting to identify plausible results of that change". Needless to say, the further you move in the TL, away from the POD, the more you'll have to rely on stuff you're just making up. Any longer TL will get to that. But it's still a world away from actively working towards a specific outcome from the very beginning.

Of course, having a discussion on "what would have to happen to get to result X" is also perfectly valid, but I don't think it's a good basis to build a good TL on. A discussion regarding the effects of a Eurasia disunified on both ends is certainly interesting, and worthwhile in itself.
 
I think it's hard to remain North China fragmental. Look at the topographic map, in north China there are not many Geographical obstacles to become a good border. In that area, nations can easily attack each other, and the nomads can also attack them. So I think North China will still unified.
What's more, don't forget the Yellow River. The water conservancy system in the Yellow River is very valuble, but it needs an unified North China to maintain.
A unified North China will try to expand, at least to protest its core area. The problem is how large it can be……
 
No Rome,China or India,hmm? Well,the world would be different,but not completely alien; after all Rome borrowed heavily from Ancient Greece and the Hammurabi Code has already been around for centuries,so things won't be completely unrecognizable.
For Europe, I can imagine these.....
Ancient Greek states keep their dominance in the Balkans and Italian Peninsula
Celtic Tribes grow in power and influence,and mind you that before Rome,they were a force to be reckoned with.
There will still be nomads. AKA,the Scythians of Northeast and Caucasian Europe.
Might see more from the Illyrians.
Troy does dominate North Africa and more than likely the Iberian Peninsula.
Persia dominates the Near East and still wars with Ancient Greece.
On Asia.....................
Like to see more of the Yuezhi or Hmong without a unified China.
Central Asian nomads probably dominant throughout the steppes,mayhap spreading their culture even farther.
The various pre-Buddhist/Hindu cultures of Himalayas and Southeast Asia continue on.
 
Something else just occurred to me -- first, both the Warring States and Hellenistic periods have reputations for being periods of lots of technological and scientific advances; it is frequently speculated that prolonging either of these periods could have led to even more progress in this (some going so far as to claim an earlier scientific revolution might have resulted).

And here we have a TL that not only does this, but potentially makes Northern China part of an expansive Central Asian empire some 1400 years earlier than OTL, allowing these hotbeds of philosophy, experimentation, and invention to potentially exchange information and ideas at levels U reached OTL until centuries later. We could see things like finery forge iron arriving in the west over a millenium earlier than OTL; that one invention alone could mean, for example, more effective farming techniques, further boosting these developments.

Another thing to keep in mind is that (ridiculous levels of tech advancement aside) TTL is likely to see the same global climate changes as OTL; meaning, shortly before our PoDs, we're still seeing the start of what OTL calls the Roman Warm Period. This will still last about six centuries or so, meaning wherever Europe and Asia are as of the 3rd to 5th centuries CE is still going to be entering something of a dark age.
 
Thing is, even a place as rugged as Greece was still able to support relatively large urban populations before the Roman Warm Period. I think a more multipolar Mediterranean world, where the city-as-basic-political-unit remains the order of the day, could be more durable in the face of climate change. No one city would become as ludicrously gigantic as Rome in the first city, since none would have the imperial infrastructure to support it, but they'd be more self-reliant.

A big part of the fall of Rome is that the army changed to defeat opponents of the Emperor in civil wars, and became less able to protect the frontiers. Rome's urban centers, reliant on the exterior, suffered population collapse as the structural foundation crumbled. Climate change alone was not enough to bring the total collapse of urban populations; Constantinople remained far and away the largest city throughout the Dark Age cold period. Maybe more cities/states/confederations could survive to the Medieval Warm Period.
 
@dandan_noodles Very excellent point. But alternatively, if the Warm Period still sees vastly more agriculture in continental Europe, and said food became entangled in the trade networks of the Mediterranean (and maybe beyond), then the prosoerity of these urban centers and multiple polities would likewise grow, meaning bigger and/or more cities. But then these vast farmlands start running into climate problems, meaning not only is a key part of this trade network disrupted but now you have a vast rural population in the north looking to migrate; this is basically what happened in the Bronze Age Collapse (AIU the prevalent view to be).
 
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