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rfmcdonaldI'm happy to report that the third meeting of the Counterfactual Threats Assessment Group, beginning as always at the Starbucks on Yonge and Wellesley in downtown Toronto at 2 o'clock, proved quite productive.
Non-uchronical material discussed included language change over time, which science-fiction and fantasy books to read and which to avoid, and the lack of a serious sharp political divide in America beyond politicized minorities.
The fourth meeting is provisionally scheduled for 1 o'clock this coming Thursday the 12th.
- The meeting began with the continuation of the previous meeting's talk about how to arrange a battleship war around 1900. We eventually settled upon a point of divergence where Second Empire France got heavily involved in Mexico, resulting in a naval clash in the Gulf of Mexico around 1870 won by France. This clash distracts Napoléon III from the Ems Telegram and avoids the Franco-Prussian War, allowing France to join Britain as a wealthy naval power, incidentally putting the Anglophile Napoléon IV on the throne after his father's death sometime in the 1870s. It also prompts the United States to build up its own naval forces, starting from scratch with the most advanced naval technology possible, soon echoed by Russia. Cause for the battleship war was judged to lie in the construction of a railroad in the Ottoman Empire's Mesopotamian provinces by a certain American railway baron, who would import skilled personnel who would be able to discover Iraq's large oil deposits.
- Extensive consideration was given to the question of how to create a multi-state East Asia technologically and economically on par with Europe. The solution eventually agreed involved a canny Oda Nobunaga succeeding in the conquest of Korea, and then being drawn into further conquests into Manchuria and north China. (South China stays independent.) Once his empire collapses by the mid-17th century, the two Chinas, a mercantile Japanese settler state on Taiwan, independent Korean and Japanese states, and a Manchuria that might recruit Russian Old Believers as purveyors of technical skills, begin to compete. European traders--Spanish, Dutch, English, French--are attracted to northeast Asia, being unable as OTL to establish privileged treaty ports. By 1800, northeast Asian settlements might be founded on the Pacific coastline of North America, causing interesting things like potential wars over California.
- Brief discussion was given to the idea of a Catholic Japan and a Protestant Korea, caused by the decision of a Shogun to embrace Catholicism as the glue to unite Japan. Fun things ensue.
- The question of the degree to which the outcome of the War of American Independence was a product of native American versus extensive French support, and the outcome of the American movement without foreign aid, was also debated.
Non-uchronical material discussed included language change over time, which science-fiction and fantasy books to read and which to avoid, and the lack of a serious sharp political divide in America beyond politicized minorities.
The fourth meeting is provisionally scheduled for 1 o'clock this coming Thursday the 12th.
