Found these on Youtube. They are what inspired the TV show “Futurama”. They are perfect inspiration if you want to create an alternate history or a pastiche.
Another Inkscape work. I originally posted this on my main blog some time ago, but I figured it was much more appropriate here. It’s “Alternate History Art”, without being actually part of any specific setting.
I used an old German Zeppelin poster as reference. The Pan Am logo and world map are from Wikipedia. The drawing is a little rough, but I am still not exactly an Inkscape pro and this was done half a year ago. You see where I am going with this.
The local year is 1999. The League of Nations now includes almost every nation on Earth, and dominates through the wealth of its off-world resources and, where necessary, through the power of its military. As most countries can focus their expansionist desires and their hunger for resources to uninhabited parallel versions of Terra, international conflict is at an all time low. Not everybody is happy with the status quo, of course, and in some countries nationalists dream of ending the League domination.
This post describes the current situation in some key countries.
Continue reading “Terra – The State of the World” »
Previously: The World War
After the World War, the League slowly consolidated its power, as former colonies joined and formed a counter-weight to European imperial interests. Twenty years after the war, the Edison-Tesla Corporation discovers a startling technology and places it under League control, which granted the League the ability to rule through ultimate economic power.
Continue reading “Terra – An Alternate History, Part 3: Ascendency of the League” »
Previously: The Great War and the Invasion of Manchuria
The second part of the history of Terra deals with the second extended war in the 20th Century.
The “World War” began as a war in Europe, which quickly spread around the world. It was, at first, called “The Russian War” by everybody except the Russians, who called it “The War of Restoration” if they called it something at all. It was this global conflict that cemented the League of Nation’s Role as a “world government”.
Continue reading “Terra – An Alternate History, Part 2: The World War” »
And now for something completely different.
Terra is an alternate history version of Earth. It forms a “meta-setting” that connects several of my worlds because the Terrans eventually discover a way to travel between parallel universes, but it’s easy to just consider it as an alternate history and to use it as a setting for more traditional “modern” stories or role-playing adventures if you want to use something a little less like our mundane world.
The history consists of a lot of text, so I’ll split the setting up into several postings.
Point of Divergence
Napolean’s war against Russia didn’t occur until 1813. The outcome was the same – Napoleon’s Grande Armée was decimated in Russia, but it delayed the fall of the French Empire to 1815 instead of a year earlier.
Summary of Subsequent Developments
As the British continued to be occupied by the war against Napoleon, the war of 1812 ended with an American victory and in partial annexation of Canada by the US. The enmity arising from this strained US-British relations and led to greater confidence in Germany that the Americans would not enter the war on the allied side. The Zimmermann Telegram was never sent, removing an important justification for war for Woodrow Wilson.
The US finally did enter the war, as a victory of the central powers was seen as undesirable, but later and more cautiously; the Great War ground on until the Spanish Flu ravaged the world. The post-war situation was radically altered, the League of Nations was strengthened and eventually became a de-facto world government after a brutal war against Communist Russia and Imperial Japan.