Traveller 2011

It's the world of GDW's traveller RPG franchise - in the year 2011. It is 76 years away from the discovery of Jump Drive, and more importantly 87 years away from first contact with the Vilani Imperium at Banard's star. This world's PODs are the laws of physics permitting FTL in the form of a jump drive and the super-powerful alien Yaskoydray taking humans and wolves off of earth around 300,000 years ago and scattering them accross the stars but the effects on earth don't happen until the 1960s and aren't that visible until the mid-70s. it is the best of times and yet the worst of times. The economy grows in the wealthy nations while many areas like Albania, Angola, Upper volta and Ethiopia are living the grim meathook future predicted by so many dystopian SF writers.

The current big international issue are increasingly serious environmental disasters and resource problems which are forcing the nations of earth to start working together. Yes, the United Nations with new reforms has helped but many think they need more. Perhaps a... Terran Confederation of some sort might be needed..

America is a corporate oligarchy and the world's leading military empire like in OTL. The one big difference is that the nation's foreign policy takes a multilateral stance -- As the cold war ended, America moved from being "leader of the free world" to "Leader of the world". The government is even more pro-business than OTL,s but it takes the form of paternalism, corporatist policy and lots of open crony capitalism with the de facto abolition of anti-trust laws. The closest real-world analogies to this would be France or Japan. In order to ensure this system works the government uses various measures such as extensive media censorship(The FCC got spongebob removed from Nickelodeon for homosexual themes and comedy central's cable license was revoked for "undue controversy"), school uniforms, the draft still existing, more of an intrusive security state than Israel as of OTL 2011 and populist/conservative social policy to keep the religious on board. Whether as part of that last policy or due to butterflies, America is in a bit of a religious phase with the last election being between a moderate evangelical and a fire breather. The firebreather won, but thankfully on an international level his views there mostly focused on clothing the naked and feeding the hungry instead of exterminating those who deal with the devil. Unsurprisingly, this has produced a counter-reaction from those born in the 80s and 90s which isn't helped by the fact there's no internet to distract them and video games are too rudimentary by OTL's standards to keep them occupied. There are 52 states -- There's Puerto Rico which is the "Junior but one" state and isola, "The Island state" which consists of all the US's non-hawai'i pacific island posessions.

Mexico and Canada are quite economically integrated into the US and you no longer need to go through customs to travel between the US and Canada. Mexico isn't economically convergent with the US and Canada so there's still borders and an illegal immigration in both the US and Canada -- Canadians and in particular francophones aren't too happy with the fact that Canada's population is 1/4 mexican by now(mexicans tend to vote no on sovereigntists legislation and national bilingualism was abolished in 2007). Cuba was "liberated" while the Soviets were busy at home and the US still hasn't left.(certain expats who've returned have proposed doing a referendum on statehood where those who are US citizens can vote)

The other big superpower and America's most powerful ally is Hu Jintao's People's Republic of China. China modernized and became a fascist state as in OTL. The only differences are that they don't even really try to hide it -- without a decentralized internet to spread news of massacres, their ability to control the population sitll works. People talk of a "special relationship" between Washington and Beijing. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao gave Beijing control over foreign relations and trade but are otherwise de facto independent. The fact that the Taiwan question was solved in a way that was at worst neutral for Taiwan's leaders and saved face for China's leaders has helped cement the Anglo-Chinese alliance.

China has a collection of friendly dictatorships which include nations like Cambodia, Burma, Indonesia and a Phillippines that went bad in the 1990s. This Pan-Asian Combine is focused on wealth, order and stability. SLORC was forcibly removed from power by Chinese intervention and "socialism with chinese characteristics" was imposed after needing to kill only 10% of burma's population in the process(mostly localized minorities who wanted to secede).

Japan is the third economic superpower. A mix of sound policy and better demographics(there are 165 million japanese and that country's TFR is 1.9 instead of 1.2) enabled Japan to keep the bubble going until 2000 and simply fall to growth rates of 3-4% instead of having a depression. Besides setting new and more extreme levels of excess(There's a condo complex with diamonds encrusted on it's bathroom walls), Japan uses it's wealth to have a space program on par with the American, Chinese or European efforts. Japanese cultural exports are rather controversial in both the United States and the European Union but for different reasons("Tentacles are obscene" in the US and "Tentacle porn objectifies women" in Europe).

The European Union is more cohesive than our worlds' Europe, more militarized and rather more lefty than our world's European union. Europe split from the US following... disagreements with the US during the Reagan 70s and the Graham 80s and only now in the last few years begun to cooperate with America's leaders. Europe includes Yugoslavia, Austria, Turkey and finland but not eastern europe -- Moscow tends to wave the nuclear big stick and crises happened over East German reunification in 2000 and the Yugoslav accession in 2004.

At the bottom of the list of great powers is Putin's soviet union. The Soviet Union was able to hold or recapture it's entire territory during the bad years of the 1990s, and since 2004 has arrested the seemingly irreversible economic decline. A tank on every corner, an informer in every house and synthetic food to end the hunger problems have enabled the Party to retain control. However, in order to keep control, the party line has shelved marx's atheistic rhetoric in favor of a mix of russian orthodoxy, islam and russian nationalism. In order to prove to itself that it's still a superpower, the USSR still props up a few hard left regimes. These regimes include Somalia, Bulgaria, Yemen. Mongolia, Syria, Pakistan and a Vietnam that didn't wish to subordinate itself to China. The efforts to try to keep Romania and Albania's communist governments have convinced Moscow to stop playing games in eastern europe.

Czechslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania are all poor democracies whose standards of living range from Czechslovakia with OTL's Latvian standard of living to wartorn Romania with a Bolivian standard of living. They are all neutral by treaty and have tried to join Europe but Soviet threats have prevented it.

Australia is still first world and stable but it has a government even more authoritarian and culturally paranoid than the United States's government. The bipartisan national consensus of economic solidarity, (social gospel) christianity and a nebulous concept of "mateship" really doesn't help. The fact that certain top bureaucrats are currently blowing billions of Australian tax dollars on investments in ill thought out of computer and neuroscience schemes in order to get better control really doesn't help. The last few people who tried pointing out to them that no, Vinge's "A deepness in the sky" was fiction and not a "how-to" guide have all been fired at best with a few ending up in administrative detention with Prime Minister rudd hoping they forget.

South America outside of Brazil is linked in the Liga del sur -- a trade zone, customs union and since 2009 a single currency zone. It is somewhat more prosperous than OTL. Brazil is roughly as OTL. Central America and the Caribbean have a trade zone, and in the case of Central America a reasonably integrated federation.

Unfortunately, outside of Latin America, the bulk of the third world is visibly worse off than OTL in many different ways. India is a wartorn land that is recovering from a recent near brush with civil war, Qadaffi's arab unification dreams led him to take over Tunisia too, North Korea imploded messily and Syria has become a charismatic, personalist dictatorship under Abdallah Assad(Butterflies). Assad's regime is arguably as bad if not worse than our world's north korea. The "reforms" like forcing parents on pain of death to name their children after either himself or one of his relatives plus the execution of dissidents in soccer stadiums really don't help matters. Africa is for the most part enough of a nightmare for the rest of the world to not care much. There is some hope, though -- East Africa is now a federated democracy, Apartheid ended peacefully and in recent years a common market was set up in portions of south africa.

The environmental problems combined with the first world's move away from oil usage have made politics... interesting in parts of the muslim world. There are several islamist states with Egypt and Najd as the most visible ones. Islamism in this world borrows more from maoism in rhetoric, tactics and to a lesser extent goals. Populism, economic justice and third world struggle against the west(phrased in terms of jihad of course) are all big parts.

The United nations has recieved a serious boon from the decades of crisis. It's no world government but neither is it the purely theoretical debate society of our world. Compared to our world, the UN enjoys alot of power and various treaties are more likely to be honored than OTL. Various restrictions on nuclear weapons production are actually enforced by an impartial international corps of inspectors. The UN is largely financially self-sufficient due to having 25% of all shares in various space companies along with the revenue from the collection of 1% import/export taxes along with a 1% tobin tax on various financial transactions. The fact that the UN's Douane service collects these revenues is an irritance to third world nationalists and capitalists in London, New York City, Tokyo or Hong Kong but enough people benefit to keep it in place

Various areas which are either failed states like Guinea or highly disputed like the cases of Kashmir or Palestine have ended up becoming mandates of the United Nations and thus, under the sponsorship of a UN member state. A typical mandate involves UN/Sponsoring state-appointed "advisors" and government officials mixed with elements of native home rule. For example, the Israeli mandate over Palestine features a parliament elected by citizens of Palestine as its legislature, but executive functions in the hands of a governor and cabinet appointed by Tel Aviv. Upper Volta, Ciskei, Romania, Nicaragua and Sierra Leone have regained enough stability to no longer need the mandate status. Like the taxes that the United Nations's Douane collects, the existence of United Nations Mandates is quite controversial. Besides the usual objections raised that cite sovereignty, there are objections from certain third world nationalists about " Imperialism" and western dominance.

Space travel is rather more widespread than OTL. First, there are the massive numbers of solar powered sattellites set up in the 1990s by the great powers and then there are hundreds of orbital factories created for producing the latest advances in materials science. Man's first step to serious large-scale colonization of space began with the successful founding of the international Archimedes settlement on the moon in 2010 for helium-3 mining. American, British and Japanese corporations are currently in discussions about doing a second base. Originally, cost projections were showing that the base could be made in first 2013, then 2015. Now, it appears that the base will take until 2020 to be launched.

Physicists have discovered some quite interesting things about gravity. So far, all they've been able to do with these theoretical tools and ideas is to levitate one electron of a hydrogen atom one and a half angstroms for .00001 seconds but gravity-related research shows some promise...

Certain butterflies like Paul Baran working for IBM, Donald Davies dying in a car crash, DARPA focusing on technologies more directly related to the space program(solar power to replace increasingly expensive oil) and IBM's 1975 patenting of the microprocessor have made computer technology seriously lag our world. Overall computers are 20 years behind, computer programs 25 years behind and computer networking is 30 years behind and the field is generally a very slow-moving backwater(The money is in space travel with computin being pretty much). On a cultural level, the stillbirth of the digital age has ensured that "Blade Runner" was a box office bomb, "Terminator" was never greenlit and Gibson's manuscript ended up in the publisher's wastebasket.

The lack of an internet means that "mom&pop" stores, local stores and in particular stores that focus on electronics or videos or music are doing better. The musical scene is naturally rather more centralized without the internet to divide it. The current big waves are christian rap, country and bland inoffensive pop music in the US. The underground tends to be a horrifying mix of punk and rap with an unhealthy amount of screaming. There are many more and healthier malls. There has still been some penetration by big chains, but without the second wave of competition caused by web distributers they are doing better.

This is a world that despite better materials science, a big space program and a new wave of suburban expansion fueled by solar power and moving roads is much more like the world of 1960 on a technological level in many ways. There are some differences in what technology does well such as the videophone. One quite popular application for this technology is pornography and a number of illegal or semi-legal(depending on the country) corporations are profiting from this. The Fax machine has done better. Cell phones never really took off, and even the most innovative telecommunications firms have more or less entirely dropped the idea.

As a genre, print science fiction is doing even worse than in our world due to religious revival in the United States and the solar system being a disappointing place with no aliens and little of interest. Many remaining science fiction fans get mocked for still bringing up aliens("Aliens at Banard's star? What are ya? Some kind of hippie? Get out of that basement sometime. There's no aliens and most definitely not at Banard's star"). The American demonization of fantasy literature by elements of the christian right didn't produce a revival of science fiction, but instead a move to paranormal romance earlier than in our world. Rice, Meyer and many others have gotten rich.

Comics are doing well as superheroes have dodged the rest of the demonization of genre fiction due to superheroes seeming more inherently patriotic. With many good writers diverted from other forms of genre fiction to comics, that art form has done better than OTL. This is a world that avoided our worlds' dark age of comics in the 80s and 90s both in part due to a better writer pool, along with a socially conservative climate. The one positive side effect of over three decades of social conservative dominance has been Frank Miller's never being allowed near an ink pen. Attempts to revive controversial genres in the medium of comics like SF or fantasy flopped but there are pirate, war, romance and pulp comics. Superheroes are still king but there's more diversity than OTL -- Image is DC's competitor instead of Marvel(Marvel declared bankruptcy in 1982).