2400AD Notes: 4
Dec. 28th, 2002 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldAt this point, a briefing on the history of Tripartite Alliance Earth seems to be a good idea.
Tripartite Alliance Earth is an alternate history of mine with a point of divergence in 1802-3, when the United States moved toward an alliance with Napoleonic France. This did little for France apart from allowing it to retain control of Dominica and Mauritius come the Peace of Paris. The United States ended up being rather badly beaten by a decade of British maritime warfare, brutal frontier fighting in Upper Canada and elsewhere, and general economic decline. This propelled the United States toward a full-blown defensive isolationism, and to a xenophobic exclusion of foreign trade and foreign immigrants. This xenophobia benefited the Southern Hemisphere states (South Africa, Australia, and the states of South America) which in our history were secondary immigrant-receiving countries, along with France. By the late 20th century, the United States found itself on the outside of a prosperous multinational grouping around a viable League of Nations, along with post-colonial Southeast Asia, neo-Maoist China and Stalinist Siberia. Most unfortunately for the future of the world, the United States got caught up in its massive internal political and economic problems, seized upon China and Siberia as the responsible agents in a throe of police-state paranoia, allied with the independent Southeast Asian states, and embarked on a spectacularly destructive Third World War that ended up killing three billion people once the secondary famines, plagues, and assorted minor genocides finished by the mid-1980's.
"What stillness in this pre-dawn hour. The air is cold. In all our life of preparation we are unprepared for this new hour filled with emptiness. How thick the darkness behind which hides the animal cry. I know what is there, hidden from my stare. Grief's weeping. Deeper emptiness."
Joy Kogawa, Obasan (Toronto: Penguin, 1981)
The world that emerges from the Third World War is, relatively speaking, in much better shape for a future technological civilization than the world after 2300AD's Twilight War. For one, the worst effects of the war were confined to the marginal areas of the world economy, to East Asia and North America; peripheries closer to the neutral cores of the world economy, in Africa, Mexico and the Caribbean basin, and the Middle East emerged more-or-less intact, impacted "only" by the war's secondary effects, while some countries in the geographic middle of the nuclear war (Japan, Korea, Thailand) managed to emerge as functioning (if rather badly injured) societies. Compare this to the post-Twilight World, where only France and Japan retained modern industrial bases and that after the nuclear attacks aimed at destroying oil-refining and other heavy-industrial facilities of potential use to either of the two broad coalitions. Economic recovery in the devastated areas will take a long time; economic recovery in the uninvolved countries should be comparatively easy.
In the meantime, though, the task of reconstruction is more than enough for the unfortunate survivors. The North/South division of the world, here, is tipped decidedly in the favour of the South--Brazil is the de facto economic centre of the world, but Argentina and Australia are richer, a South Africa that never went through the trauma of apartheid is a regional motor, and Venezuela never suffered anything at all similar to the relative economic decline that brought its per capita income down from West German levels in the 1950's to their current, historically low levels. (Canada, in case you're wondering, never quite recovered from the Napoleonic Wars.) Europe is united from the Sahara to the Urals in the European Confederation under a loose Franco-German hegemony, but it's preoccupied with its trans-Mediterranean and eastern European peripheries never mind the task of trying to deal with all the fallout to west and east and north and a rather disturbed hinterland. North America is divided between those fragments which once constituted the United States and those countries which had the good sense to remain neutral; Mexico, already doing well before the war, now has the frontiers of 1840 and then some. Japan and Korea, for their parts, are too numbed to do much of anything in the interim apart from vengeful preemptive attacks into China to keep any last redoubt of Lin Biao's men from using any weapons of mass destruction which might have survived.
And from this point, things can only go up.
Tripartite Alliance Earth is an alternate history of mine with a point of divergence in 1802-3, when the United States moved toward an alliance with Napoleonic France. This did little for France apart from allowing it to retain control of Dominica and Mauritius come the Peace of Paris. The United States ended up being rather badly beaten by a decade of British maritime warfare, brutal frontier fighting in Upper Canada and elsewhere, and general economic decline. This propelled the United States toward a full-blown defensive isolationism, and to a xenophobic exclusion of foreign trade and foreign immigrants. This xenophobia benefited the Southern Hemisphere states (South Africa, Australia, and the states of South America) which in our history were secondary immigrant-receiving countries, along with France. By the late 20th century, the United States found itself on the outside of a prosperous multinational grouping around a viable League of Nations, along with post-colonial Southeast Asia, neo-Maoist China and Stalinist Siberia. Most unfortunately for the future of the world, the United States got caught up in its massive internal political and economic problems, seized upon China and Siberia as the responsible agents in a throe of police-state paranoia, allied with the independent Southeast Asian states, and embarked on a spectacularly destructive Third World War that ended up killing three billion people once the secondary famines, plagues, and assorted minor genocides finished by the mid-1980's.
"What stillness in this pre-dawn hour. The air is cold. In all our life of preparation we are unprepared for this new hour filled with emptiness. How thick the darkness behind which hides the animal cry. I know what is there, hidden from my stare. Grief's weeping. Deeper emptiness."
Joy Kogawa, Obasan (Toronto: Penguin, 1981)
The world that emerges from the Third World War is, relatively speaking, in much better shape for a future technological civilization than the world after 2300AD's Twilight War. For one, the worst effects of the war were confined to the marginal areas of the world economy, to East Asia and North America; peripheries closer to the neutral cores of the world economy, in Africa, Mexico and the Caribbean basin, and the Middle East emerged more-or-less intact, impacted "only" by the war's secondary effects, while some countries in the geographic middle of the nuclear war (Japan, Korea, Thailand) managed to emerge as functioning (if rather badly injured) societies. Compare this to the post-Twilight World, where only France and Japan retained modern industrial bases and that after the nuclear attacks aimed at destroying oil-refining and other heavy-industrial facilities of potential use to either of the two broad coalitions. Economic recovery in the devastated areas will take a long time; economic recovery in the uninvolved countries should be comparatively easy.
In the meantime, though, the task of reconstruction is more than enough for the unfortunate survivors. The North/South division of the world, here, is tipped decidedly in the favour of the South--Brazil is the de facto economic centre of the world, but Argentina and Australia are richer, a South Africa that never went through the trauma of apartheid is a regional motor, and Venezuela never suffered anything at all similar to the relative economic decline that brought its per capita income down from West German levels in the 1950's to their current, historically low levels. (Canada, in case you're wondering, never quite recovered from the Napoleonic Wars.) Europe is united from the Sahara to the Urals in the European Confederation under a loose Franco-German hegemony, but it's preoccupied with its trans-Mediterranean and eastern European peripheries never mind the task of trying to deal with all the fallout to west and east and north and a rather disturbed hinterland. North America is divided between those fragments which once constituted the United States and those countries which had the good sense to remain neutral; Mexico, already doing well before the war, now has the frontiers of 1840 and then some. Japan and Korea, for their parts, are too numbed to do much of anything in the interim apart from vengeful preemptive attacks into China to keep any last redoubt of Lin Biao's men from using any weapons of mass destruction which might have survived.
And from this point, things can only go up.
