Alternate Histories: state of the world in 2012

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Alternate Histories: state of the world in 2012

Post by Somes J »

A little worldbuilding exercise. The exercise for this is a simple, pick a fictional alternate history that does not extend to or describe in detail present day (it can be either "real" AH or "honorary" AH that described contemporary or future events when it was written but from today's perspective depicts a past inconsistent with real history, e.g. Eugenics Wars in Star Trek), and describe what the world as of today, the year 2012, would look like in that universe.

I'll take the first shot, at the world of:

George Orwell's 1984

2012 rolls around (though most of the world counts in calendars where the year numbers have yet to exceed two digits), and not all that much has changed in the past half a century or so. Technology has mostly stagnated since the Party came to power, with only a few improvements. General technology is what we OTL would call 1950ish. Nuclear power exists, but mostly in military applications such as powering floating fortresses and the secret Antarctic research bases of Oceania (which produce the main product of scientific research these days; extravagant and impractical superweapons of extremely dubious value), and of course each of the Three Powers maintains a vast arsenal of nuclear bombs, many of them old and in questionable condition, which they continue to expand every year as fast as they can crank them out in expectation of a final decisive end to the war. The paper gigatonnage this arsenal is rather alarming (far in excess of OTL Cold War stockpiles), but its continued expansion is really less about wanting more firepower and more about having another excuse to waste resources in service of the doctrine of engineered poverty. The Inner Parties are generally smart enough to know a nuclear war would be quite against their interests.

Aside from a few impractical weapons schemes space was never a big thing in this world. There is not so much as a single functional artificial satellite. Nobody has ever done so much as send an unmanned probe to the moon, and nobody is likely to do so any time soon.

Compared to OTL, the world is poor and empty. Most of the world's population lives in what we would call Third World conditions, and as for those living in the Disputed Zones... well, religious beliefs that state that this world is actually Hell are gaining popularity there; their world has been an unending half century hell of poverty, slavery, slaughter, and attrocity, with no end in sight, and they increasingly turn to increasingly apocalyptic religion for some promise of deliverance. Urbanism never really took off like OTL; even in the relatively "industrialized" Three Powers most people are still farmers. The world population is around 3 billion and stagnant, which is probably a good thing since agriculture is if anything less productive than it was in OTL 1950s. Say what you will about the Parties, but they have managed the population problem quite effectively ... though most OTL might not like their methods. They don't really go in for these newfangled ideas of condoms and birth control and family planning, in fact large families are encouraged - they prefer to stick with the time-tested ancient mechanisms for keeping the population small: war, hunger, and disease.

The War rages as it has for the last half century, all over Africa and the Middle East and South Asia. Oceania is at war with Eurasia and Eastasia, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and Eastasia, Oceania most definitely wasn't at peace with Eastasia a few months ago. The war would look strange to OTL military minds. On land, fighting resembles WWI but in a hotter climate; trench warfare, mass infantry rushes against prepared defensive positions, hundreds of thousands of lives sacrificed for a few kilometers lost and gained, the fronts crawling over the continents with agonizing slowness. At sea, the supertanker-sized battleships called Floating Fortresses are king. Now that they're nuclear powered Chernobyl-level nuclear contamination events are a regular part of naval combat, but it's not like the Parties are really bothered by a few sailors dying of radiation sickness and cancer, or higher cancer rates in the local fishermen... OTL military men might be boggled by the apparent incompetence of the whole production (for all that they might look impressive these forces would generally last all of five minutes against their OTL counterparts in a field battle), but that's like criticizing a Nazi concentration camp for the counterproductively poor working conditions. The War's real purpose is death; victory is just a side-benefit, and weapons, tactics, strategy, and doctrine are designed around this set of priorities. For all the bloodshed when actually valuable resource extraction infrastructure is threatened the commanders usually find some excuse to abandon it to the enemy before it can get too damaged (farmland is a different story, it's extensive enough that it's hard to protect it from the fallout of the exercise in planned poverty and population control disguised as a war, but then all the Three Powers can grow enough food in their own borders - for a rather ghastly definition of enough - and if the masters of Eurasia and Eastasia want exotic tropical fruit they can quietly buy it from Oceania's unthreatened tropical American territories - this is, in fact, a big item of what little and secretive international trade exists in this world).

Every year the young men of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are poured in their millions down the throat of war, and what comes out the other end is mostly corpses. The proles/lumpenproletariat/eta have a gender ratio strongly skewed toward female, in many areas they are over 75% women. The men that do come back are often maimed, crippled, or suffering from what we OTL would call PTSD. This has about the social effects you would expect. Polygyny is officially plusungood (it seems a shame to kill all those men without it translating into a lower birth rate), but enforcement is rather lax, especially if the man has any connections in the Parties (it's quite common for local administrators to have harems). As much as they might like to crow over the power they hold over men's minds much of the leadership is smart enough to realize that standing between millions of young women and any hope of sexual or romantic fulfilment may not be the best idea (there's the old standby anti-sex propoganda, of course, but it can only go so far). The Parties are considering extending the draft to women, on the principle that when it comes to population control you'll probably get more bang for your buck more reliably by destroying wombs than destroying testes.

Some of this world's few weather scientists have suggested a connection between industrial CO2 emissions and greenhouse effect and that this might become a problem, but nobody listens to them much. Besides the institutional issues with breaking bad news to the Party (James Hansen only narrowly survived the latest round of purges) and a tiny, fragmented, and resource-poor research community it just isn't as noticeable; with a smaller and poorer population CO2 emissions are far lower than OTL, and global warming is also proportionately more effectively masked by "global dimming" caused by particulate, SO2 etc. pollution (nobody in this world is likely to pass clean emission laws). Peak oil is a similar situation, though one taken a bit more seriously by the overlords (their reaction is mostly to consider reducing general standard of living some more).

A new scourge has begun to spread among the lower orders of the Three Parties; a bloodborne disease that attacks the immune system (OTL AIDS). The reaction is to step up anti-sex propaganda among the Outer Party (and Eurasian and Eastasian equivalents), combined with pro-condom propaganda, without really explaining why. As far as the proles/lumpenproletariat/eta are concerned, the disease is mostly left to have its way with them; some millions less of them will not be missed.

The project to reform language to make dissent literally unthinkable hasn't been as big of a success as hoped for. Turns out people have this annoying tendency to modify the Newspeak to articulate things that are supposed to be (literally) unspeakable. There's been a certain loss of enthusiasm for the idea, but the effort continues, and Eastasia has at least made it a lot harder to get ideas from old books by changing all the ideographs, which is better than nothing.

In a village in the American Midwest the farmers are looking with trepidation at what's left of their harvest after officials came to "requisition" the rest for the army. They're a sorry lot; stunted by childhood malnutrition and riddled with disease and gruesome old war wounds. There plainly isn't enough food left to see them to the next harvest. The officials thanked them for their sacrifice and commitment to the war effort, and promised that the Ministry of Plenty would get them extra food from their heroic and generous comrades in South America if what was left didn't stretch. Doublethink or no, the farmers can't help remembering that they said that the last time, and the time before that ... food did arrive, but nowhere near enough... But despite their fear most of them assume the MiniPlenty is doing what is best for everyone and has their best interests at heart, and even if there is a famine it will be better than what the savage orcs of Eastasia and Eurasia would do to them if the army failed, which might happen if they didn't get that corn...

What they don't know is that corn isn't going to the army at all, most of it's going into an incinerator in a MiniPlenty pyramid, and the rest is going to be dumped in the sea (hey, at least the fish will get to eat it). Similar scenes are being repeated in the wheat fields of Europe and rice paddies of Eastasia. The leaders of the Three Powers have decided to make this a "population reduction year." This winter will not be a good one to be a prole anywhere in the Three Powers.

In Eastasia a member of the shadowy cabal that pulls the strings of the hollow puppet Brother Number One is gaining more power for himself and placing a network of loyal people in key positions. It's a dangerous game, but he's actually a patriot of a sort, and is worried. Eastasia has always been a little bit of an outsider, the poorest in resources of the Three Powers, and a little bit weird and suspect. They actually popularly disseminate something vaguely like their real history - they don't feel the need to lie quite as vigorously as the rest, for them the age of the capitalists really was a dark age of foreign domination - and Death Worship always was a little weird (as much as they might like to imagine themselves as a clean break with the past the Party doctrine is always influenced by the base culture - mostly Euro-American for Eurasia and Oceania, East Asian for East Asia). Besides, officially the Eurasian Bolsheviks and Oceanian Inner Party isn't racist ... but old habits can die hard, and it's not a society exactly hostile to considering other people subhumans. You mean the people who invaded and exploited our countries before might realize that the system doesn't strictly need three powers, and be tempted to gang up on the weakest member and do away with us, yes, surely that would never happen Comrade...

--------

Looking back on it, I wonder if I didn't make it a bit too moustache-twirling with the war and famine as deliberate population control by megadeath thing ... but it really isn't a very big extrapolation from the stuff described in the book. Consider, when you're reading 1984 you're reading from the perspective of a member of the "middle class"; in the material sense that of somebody who has it relatively good. Chew on that for a minute... Besides, I'd say the Inner Party was pretty much moustache-twirling villains in the book, Orwell was just a good enough writer he managed to make them seem believable.
Last edited by Somes J on Fri Feb 17, 2012 2:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Alternate Histories: state of the world in 2012

Post by Heretic »

Geez, that would be interesting to see how the current issues of today and future past affect the Three Powers. My particular favorite was the whole cabal thing with Eastasia. The plot thickens!
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Re: Alternate Histories: state of the world in 2012

Post by Somes J »

I decided to do a little "slice of life" thing for my little 1984 scenario, show a little bit more of the state of the world:

Camp Liberation, Northern Resource Zone, Oceania:

In a mass grave outside an Arctic lumber camp, near the tundra line in what some of the the old-timers still call Canada, the frost gnaws the bones of a man named Norman Borlaug, along with that of some thousands of other Thought Criminals. He had some interesting ideas about increasing crop yields, but the Inner Party of Oceania wasn't particularly interested, and he made an enemy of a rising star in the Ministry of Love named Charles Manson. He was accused of ideological suspectness and corruption and hauled off to an Arctic gulag, where he succumbed to cold, hunger, disease, and mistreatment before the year was out.

Charles Manson has since risen high indeed in the fearful halls of MiniLove, and works closely with an aging member of the Inner Circle named Jim Jones, who has pretty much run MiniLove for decades now. They're not the only OTL infamous criminals to prosper in the Parties. The Eurasian Ministry of Hygene is headed by one Andrei Chikatilo, who distinguished himself with his bold and decisive response to the AIDS (though this world uses a different name for it) crisis, which consisted of massively stepping up persecution of prostitutes and homosexuals and sending them to die in Siberian labor camps by the millions. It didn't actually do much about the spread of the disease, but it sure made it look like the government was doing something and, after all, Truth Is Lies. There are dark rumors about how he likes to do ... things ... to women, but nobody cares very much except his political and personal enemies, who would appreciate the excuse to have him given a taste of his own medicine.

In a secret research base in the Amazon an Inner Party applied psychologist named Jeffrey Dahmer supervises an ambitious project to render humans incapable of Thought Crime through surgical, chemical, or behaviorial conditioning means. Thousands of proles and Thought Criminals have disappeared into the project as test subjects, with little practical success to show for it (although they have learned some interesting things about the human brain in the process of breaking it in all sorts of creative ways), but his bosses are happy enough to keep throwing resources and test subjects at him, it's not like Oceania has any shortage of disposable people. Comrade Dahmer's personal project of creating zombie sex slaves had rather more initial success, although he eventually became a bit bored with his harem of lobotomized unfortunates and has set out to find a way to leave them with a little more functioning brain while still rendering them compliant. So far, this has not had much success either, but there's plenty of test subjects and as the old saying goes if at first you don't succeed try try again. His bosses don't pay much attention to the rumors about how he keeps many skulls and bones of his failed experiments in his personal quarters, or the more gruesome ones that he frequently dines on the "waste material"...

On the other side of the world a minor functionary of the Eastasian Ministry of Supply named Issei Sagawa is also rumored to have developed a taste for human flesh. He's particularly fond of European women, and gets a regular supply of "meat" from his personal friend and fellow gourmand on the other side of the Eurasian border, a mental deviant of Norwegian extraction in the Eurasian Ministry of Supply who was never born in OTL, perhaps fortunately for the rest of us.

To be fair, unstable people generally don't get too high in the Parties; the ideal Inner Circle member is a person with a blend of intelligence, hard-nosed realism, and sociopathy, but as long as you don't get too close to the Inner Circles it's a relatively friendly environment for the ordinarily deranged.


Subic Bay, Philippines:

What's left of the Oceanian Pacific Task Force 1 is limping back to the Philippines after a disastrous battle with the Eastasians. The Floating Fortresses make an impressive sight, as big or bigger than OTL's largest oil tankers, but they've been shot up quite badly. OPNS Victory is in bad shape, having suffered a hydrogen explosion in its compromised Reactor 2 though thankfully there's been minimal leakage of actual fission fuel yet, and as for OPNS Triumph, well, it's pretty much a mobile Chernobyl full of walking corpses who are already experiencing serious radiation poisoning symptoms. It's been ordered to come in last, staying downwind of the rest of the fleet ... well downwind. As indifferent to human life, especially the lives of Phillipino slave laborers, as the Party is the commandant of Subic is not crazy enough to let that into his harbor, it's going to be scuttled well out to sea. He isn't actually particularly sorry, the need to frequently replace the very resource-intensive Floating Fortresses is part of the engineered poverty doctrine. He's actually rather annoyed with the engineering crew of OPNS Glory, who sealed themselves in the radiation flooded engine compartment of their ship and worked heroically to prevent a full-scale nuclear disaster. The ship will probably be salvageable, damn them. At least they're all dying of radiation poisoning right now ... their story will make a nice bit of propaganda. For once, the MiniTru will tell people exactly the truth; their heroism needs no embellishment.

Meanwhile the commandant of Subic is happy to hopefully soon be out of this dreadful hot climate. The Eastasians are going to be landing on the Phillipines pretty soon. At least there will be no serious unpleasantness here, the valuable naval yard of Subic will change hands with a minimum of token violence, leaving its valuable equipment and huge slave labor barracks-city mostly intact for the Eastasians to use. The same can't be said for the rest of the islands, which the Army will defend fanatically. Navy support really is a very cushy job, relatively speaking...


Tokyo, Japan:

Comrade Jien and the aging Comrade Kim Jong Il look down from a high window in the People's Tower on the vast compound where streams of elderly Eta and Townsmen are cueing up to be methodically gassed and burned, as they do every day. The mandatory "euthanasia" at 60 (and of any disabled people) is a rule even the Eurasian Bolsheviks and Oceanian Inner Party find a little weird and creepy ... of course, they have bigger countries with more land, and less people in the land, and their land is less mountainous. If Eastasia had been allowed a fairer slice of the pie maybe it wouldn't have to be the most brutal of all the Three Powers when it comes to keeping the population under control.

Comrade Jien plans to rectify that. The Oceanians have finally been kicked out of the Southern Disputed Zone (what had once been called Indochina), and Jien has the Army busily fortifying that place like never before. It's Jien's first major international gambit; that area is a "natural territory" for Eastasia if there ever was one, but no, because Europeans managed to take it over it was made a Disputed Zone... not anymore, he intends for Eastasia to move in for good this time. He has big plans for India too, but one step at a time. It's critical not to alarm Big Brother and Uncle Joe (or rather, the Inner Circles behind those, respectively, imaginary and long-dead men) too much. And also there is the matter of the threat from his own side. A lot of the Inner Circle don't like the idea of messing with the balance of the world any more than Eurasians and Oceanians do. Which brings him to the present business with Kim Jong Il, who has his own definite ideas about Eastasian destiny...
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Re: Alternate Histories: state of the world in 2012

Post by Somes J »

I decided to do some more:

First some more notes on the state of the world:


Geopolitics

Eurasia emerged from the conquest of Europe by Joseph Stalin's USSR in WWIII. It consists of the OTL USSR territories and Europe, minus Britain, Ireland, and some associated small islands (part of Oceania) and the immediate region of the Bosphorus Straight (part of the Disputed Zone - Oceania occassionally likes to make a show of seizing it).

Oceania emerged from an odd coalition of communist governments and right wing military juntas (the right wing elements found it convenient to adopt the rhetoric of communism in their propaganda). It consists of the Americas, Australia, various islands, and Antarctica (though there is very little settlement or exploitation of that continent - mostly just a few weapons research bases).

Eastasia emerged from an alliance of Japanese and Chinese communists during the turmoil of WWIII. It consists of OTL China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan. Compared to the Oceanian and Eurasian regimes the governing style of its regime has a somewhat distinct "flavor". For instance, their popular ideology is heavily flavored with pan-East Asian race-based nationalism, and they actually popularly disseminate something vaguely resembling their actual history, their real history being relatively convenient to this narrative (though some inconvenient facts are edited out - the Japanese are portrayed as benevolent saviors of their oppressed fellow Asians who were tragically almost destroyed by the evil capitalists, with the Party rising from the ashes of their defeat).


Living Conditions

The majority of the world's population consists of the rural proles/lumpenproletariat/eta. Aside from those unfortunates living in the Disputed Zones these are the people who pretty much have it worst, although they are supervised less closely than the Outer Parties (I'm just going to use Oceanian terms from now on, the Eurasians and Eastasians call stuff different names). They have some access to mechanized farming equipment and artificial fertilizers, but generally living conditions are pretty much preindustrial. Electricity and running water are rare. Disease is rampant, thanks to deliberate stinginess with distributing modern medicine as a population control measure; childhood mortality rates aren't quite pre-industrial, but they're pretty attrociously high by OTL standards.

The urban proles have it better, they generally get electricity and running water (though not always reliable), better housing (better than huts and makeshift cabins), more food (Inner Party members are less likely to be physically threatened by peasant rebellions than urban ones), and better access to medicine and other services. The cities are guarded to prevent mass immigration from the countryside...

The Outer Parties get what we generally would call Second World lifestyles, rather spartan but they're generally not in serious danger from hunger etc.. On the other hand, they're more heavily watched and policed. The Party only wants you to think they're always watching you through the telescreen (think of the logistics of trying to do that for a minute...), but you can never tell when they are watching you...

The Inner Parties are the only group that gets to live what we OTL would consider well, in some cases very well indeed. A boot in a human face forever may be pleasure enough for some, but others would like some silk pajamas, and some good food, and a nice and spiffy car or six, and how about a nice big mansion somewhere with a warm and pleasant climate. The lower ranks of the Inner Party (like O'brien) are well-advised not to look too rich (give the impression of a besieged city where a pound of horse flesh is the difference between wealth and starvation and all that) but if you can get high enough ... villa in the Riviera or Cancun with some nice beachfront property, a big yacht, scantily clad and compliant maids, and solid gold toilet seat just because I feel like having one, here I come!

Officially, all constituent races and ethnicities are equal in the Three Powers. Unofficially, some are more equal than others. In Eurasia this means Europeans, in Oceania it means British and white North Americans, and in Eastasia it means Japanese and Han Chinese. Eurasia is probably the most actually racially equal, having only a relatively small non-European population (mostly from the USSR's OTL Russian far east and southern satellite republics).

That describes life for most of humanity. As far as the Disputed Zones go, if you're lucky you'll be a slave laborer in one of the "Productive Zones" which are generally transferred from owner to owner with a minimum of token bloodshed. A surprising amount of the world's resources flows from these. If you're not lucky, you'll live outside them, which is pretty much a cross between Mad Max and WWI.


Newspeak

All of the Three Powers have versions of the Newspeak project, although it goes by different names in Eurasia and Eastasia. Different names for the same thing is a common pattern, for instance in Oceania the lower orders are called the proles, in Eurasia they are called the lumpenproletariat, and in Eastasia they are called eta, a word that means "worker" in the People's Language, but in the rulers' language retains something closer to its original Japanese meaning; it roughly translates as "filth". The more classist and sociopathic members of the Eastasian elite think it's a nice joke that they can insult the plebs constantly to their faces without them realizing it.

In Eurasia and Oceania Newspeak is the language of the Party, while the proles are largely left to speak their own local "Oldspeak." Eastasia has gone a more ambitious route, attempting to create a new universal "People's Language" for the eta and one seperate language each for the Outer and Inner Party equivalents. A major motivating factor for this is the desire to get rid of the old writing systems and replace them with new Party-approved ones, so that people can no longer read old books.

The nature of Oceanian Newspeak (based on and still mutually intelligible with English) has caused more than a little grumbling among Oceania's Central and South American subjects about gringo favoritism. Oceania is demographically mostly Spanish-speakers, wouldn't it be more fair to use a modified Esperanto like the Eurasians do? The Eastasians based their Newspeaks on what most of their subjects actually spoke (Chinese), why can't we? Still, the complaining isn't too loud ... gringos are heavily overrepresented in the Inner Party, and the mines and lumber camps of Canada, the Amazon, the American deserts, and the Australian outback are always willing to accept more Thought Criminals, the slave laborers do wear out so quickly...


I have another slice of life thing in mind but I didn't get around to writing it, I'll probably post it tomorrow. That'll probably wrap this scenario up.
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Re: Alternate Histories: state of the world in 2012

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

While, as you say, the Parties in 1984 were first class moustache twirlers (tbh moustache twirlers doesn't really do them justice, you could, without a shred of hyperbole, sum up O'brien's description of his own ideology as 'pure evil') I think that the mentioning of real life serial killers working with Miniluv seems a bit over the top, it kind of breaks the verisimilitude of the setting. Kim Jong Il I could see as being a high-ranking member of the Eastasian Party since his father would have been alive during the 'Death Worship' revolution and possibly been high up considering his real world position, but Jeffrey Dahmer and Charlie Manson? I'm not so sure I can buy them still being alive in this world.

I think most of the rest of it lines up with the book, though you don't mention much of the doublethink that is such a staple in the book, which is fair enough because describing the mind of someone who uses doublethink all the time would be incredibly confusing, and what's worse is that it really isn't clear how much doublethink the Inner Party uses as opposed to the Outer Party who are forced to mentally torture themselves essentially for the philosophical shits and giggles of their masters.
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Re: Alternate Histories: state of the world in 2012

Post by Somes J »

speaker-to-trolls wrote:but Jeffrey Dahmer and Charlie Manson? I'm not so sure I can buy them still being alive in this world.
I checked beforehand, most of these guys would have been alive as of the PoD, which I'm tentatively putting sometime in the late 40s/early 50s (they would be pretty old men now, but I kind of figure Party officials would tend to take the dictator for life approach to retirement - hand off responsibility to subordinates while retaining the title and official power basically until they die). As memory serves Jefrey Dahmer was the only one where I took artistic license in that respect, he was born in the 1960s.

I see your point though that it might be a bit over the top.

As far as doublethink goes, I kind of think a lot of the time it's not so much that people actually believe the blatantly ridiculous stuff as they're not going to court a date with Room 101* by telling anybody they don't buy it. So they pretend to believe even the most ridiculous lies and you get a false impression of obedient consensus, and probably lots of people going feeling a lot more alone in their silent nonconformity than they actually are.

* btw, little idea I had but never got around to working in.

So some Outer Party guy gets accused of Thought Crime and is hauled off to Room 101.

Said guy had like six sons who went into the Army. Five of them never came back. One came back a shattered wreck. I mean, I'm talking limbless horrifically scarred shell of a human being that couldn't even communicate because he breathed through a hole the surgeons made in his throat. He lived like that for a few years and then finally died of pnuemonia or something.

So the torturer is explaining to him the nature of the torture he is to endure, how they will force him to face his worst fear and break him that way.

And he looks into the torturer's eyes and says "I have already endured it."

I got the idea from a scene in from Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt.

But I didn't get around to writing that section. Maybe I should actually go back and do it.
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Re: Alternate Histories: state of the world in 2012

Post by Somes J »

I decided to do a final section for my 1984 scenario, another slice of life thing:


It was during the hungry years after Father died, in the little apartment in Guangzhou, the the Kwan girls had started to love airplanes. Mei and Huan would go up on the roof of the apartment tower and watch the fighter jets fly south to fight the white barbarians in the southern lands and over the eastern islands. It was then that Kwan Mei had started to want to fly.

It was a famine year when they started watching the airplanes, a year when the corpse carts rattled through the streets, carrying the bodies of the eta who had died from hunger to the incinerators in the People's Tower. As the daughters of a typist in the People's Tower the girls were not in danger of dying, but they knew want, and it was hard because they were used to better. Father had been a Captain in the Army, he had died fighting the white barbarians in the south. When he died the family's utility index was reduced, and their rations and living quarters were appropriately downgraded.

A few years after that Mother had been reassigned to the People's Tower in Jiamusi; a grim city at the northern edge of the world, close enough to the lands of the white barbarians that rocket bombs fell on it. They didn't stop the business of the city (after all, the short range missiles that the Three Parties like to throw over each other's borders don't exist for much reason but to make people in some of the secure zones feel unsafe), but they were scary, and often they killed people. Kwan Mei had once kicked something when she was walking, and only noticed when she kicked it that it was a severed human arm.

Years later Kwan Mei would wonder if Mother had angered somebody important in the People's Tower (Mother never would talk about it, and the girls didn't ask), because a few years later, as if to make her exile complete, she was sent even farther to the edge of the free world; to a post in the People's Tower in Toyohara, on Karafuto Island. The family would stay there for the rest of Mei's childhood. Mother was not transferred again, maybe because there wasn't any more distant post to send her.

It was during the Toyohara years that a family drama played out. Huan fell in love with a boy in the Party school who was a white Eastasian; the descendant of white barbarians called Russians who had lived on Karafuto before it was taken by the free people in the Great Liberation, and who had been allowed to join the free people by the magnificent compassion of Brother Number One. When she learned of this Mother had beaten Huan and forbidden her from associating with the boy, but to her horror Huan had argued back, and cited the Red Book, which said that all free people were equal and the same, and said that Mother was acting no better than a white barbarian - a real white barbarian, not Budarin An-shi, who was as good and faithful a servant of Brother Number One as anyone. That particular ploy didn't work - the Red Book also said children should obey their parents - but Huan was very stubborn and eventually got her way and married the boy after her day of maturity with Mother's blessing.

It took a lot of time and tears though. At first Mother was firmly convinced that An-shi would beat and rape Huan every night if she was stupid enough to marry him. After all, the Red Book said that the whites were the most naturally evil and cruel race in the world (which was one reason they so hated the Eastasians, who were the most naturally good and kind). Mei thought An-shi was actually a fairly nice boy, but it took a long time for Mother to accept that his apparent personality wasn't some masterful act.

It might have been a good thing this had happened, because it meant by the time Huan graduated from the party and applied for, and was accepted to, the Air Force Mother's resistance to what she saw as her daughters' foolish ways was broken. She had wanted the girls to go to work in the safe People's Tower like she did, called Huan cruel; it wasn't good enough that her husband had died in the Army, now her daughter wanted to fly a fighter jet and die in flames over the southern jungles or the eastern ocean. At least she had been grateful to have only daughters because she would not give any children to the Army, but fate couldn't even leave her that, her own children wanted to make it so she would be alone in her final years. But, after a little complaining, she gave her blessing.

Of course, this time she was careful to do all her complaining in the apartment building utility closet. These were not the sentiments one wanted to give voice to in front of the home telescreen.

Things got better for Mei and Mother after Huan finished flight school and became a fighter pilot and the family's utility index was raised appropriately. They were moved into a nicer apartment and got better rations.

Mei went, not into the more glamorous service of the fighter jets like her sister, but into the more obscure spyplane service. Mother was happy to hear that the spyplanes were really much safer; they flew higher and faster than any fighter jet, so high and fast that they only thing that was dangerous to them was specialized rockets that were hard to make, and therefore thinly scattered over the enemy's country. Mei rather liked this too; she didn't like to think she was a coward, but she had to admit she'd rather do something that was less likely to make her die, or know great pain.

She liked the spyplanes for other reasons too though. They flew higher and faster than anything, and she liked the idea of being higher than anything, of going higher than almost anyone in the world ever went. It spoke to the oldest dream, of being in the fighter plane, high above the cramped apartment and gnawing hunger and corpse carts of Guangzhou in the hungry years.

In the flight school Kwan Mei learned that not long after the Great Liberation there had been talk of making space bombers, and a few prototypes had been build and flown. There were men alive who had flown above the air, gone outside the world and looked down on it. Mei would have liked to do that, but nothing like that had been done since many years before she was born (the books said the project had been abandoned because of the resource demands of the War). Only rocket bombs like the ones that fell on Jiamusi and Toyohara went above the air now. The highest things that carried humans were the spyplanes, and that would have to do.

The spyplanes launched from far north in Kuril Islands, the very edge of the world of the free people. It was a very isolated posting. Mei didn't mind very much, though she wished she could ask Mother how she was doing.

She found she liked her job as much as she hoped she would. She thought the spyplanes were wonderful machines (they were, if not the apex of aircraft technology in her world, at least pretty close), and she very much liked looking down at the world from high above. The world was indeed beautiful from high above. And on deep penetration missions she got to see from above such distant and exotic cities as Moscow, Seattle, San Francisco, even once Chicago.

She fell in love with another pilot, and debated to herself how to break the news to Mother. He was another match she'd disapprove of: an ascended member of the eta from the slums of Wuhan (unlike Eurasia and Oceania Eastasia occassionally does actually promote eta who do well in the Examinations instead of quietly killing them).

It was in the spring of the year 2012 - though Kwan Mei knew only the calender that counted forward from the Great Liberation - that Kwan Mei flew her last mission. As she was passing over the area that had once been called Washington State her spyplane was struck by one of those rare missiles that could reach its speed and altitude. She managed to keep a precarious control over it for a little while - if she'd been over Alaska she just might have made it to Siberia, which would be a relative sanctuary now the Eastasia was at peace with Eurasia, but she had no hope of making it back over the wide Pacific. She soon was forced to accept the inevitable and eject, falling into a green forest that looked pretty from high above, but was deep in the land of enemies. She tried to tell herself that the fear she felt was less for herself than for the precious cannisters of film she carried, the fruits of this mission which must make it back to Eastasia, but she quickly admitted she was lying to herself about that.

She actually managed to lead the Oceanian Army searchers on a chase for some days, before finally being caught, slowed down by a bullet wound in the shoulder. She also managed to profoundly terrify the inhabitants of some local villages, many of whom knew Eastasians only from lurid propaganda depicting armies of inhuman orcs lead by twisted and evil Fu Manchu and Dragon Lady types with strange powers, and did not know of the existence and extent of the Pacific Ocean and so feared imminent invasion. Old soldiers from the War stood guard with old guns from "before the war" hidden away to defend against wilderness predators - very illegal old guns, it's a death penalty offense for a prole to be caught with an unauthorized firearm. The whole thing actually played out rather well for the Party, being a nice distraction from the planned "population reduction year". The more rebellious proles were grumbling about those "greasers" who'd taken all their food (it's Party policy to often assign such duties to units from other areas of Oceania on the theory that they will be less likely to sympathize with the locals - and indeed, the Mexican commander, still haunted by nightmares of the terrible famines in his own home village after men with Texas accents "requisitioned" their produce for the Army, does take some pleasure in having the shoe on the other foot).

The crash of the spyplane might be considered a minor environmental disaster in a better world - the spyplanes are nuclear ramjets, and the crash fairly pulverized the reactor. The Party doesn't much care - cancer rates may go up among the prole farmers in the area, but nobody's going to run out of prole farmers any time soon.

Kwan Mei is struck by how similar Seattle looks to the cities of her girlhood. The people look like the white Eastasians of Karafuto, and the propaganda posters are a little different, but otherwise it could be a city in north China. She was told that most people in the lands outside Eastasia are the slaves of the white barbarians, who are in turn the slaves of cruel and evil rulers called capitalists, who wear strange stovepipe-like hats and clothes and have canes. This is the uniform of the capitalists and nobody else is allowed to wear it, and everybody has to bow low to the capitalists in the street and kiss their shoes. She finds it a little strange that she hasn't seen any, but there are lots of people in uniforms that look rather like those of the Eastasian Party, though the colors, cut, and insignia are rather different.

She notices that the van is descending a ramp. She can only see out of a small backward-facing window (officially the Eastasian prisoner is being paraded through the streets in a cage so everybody can get a good look at him, but that "prisoner" is a Hawaiian actor surgically altered to look like the orcs of the propaganda), so she never sees the white pyramid of Seattle's Ministry of Peace as the van enters one of its underground garages.

*Note: Karafuto Island = Sakhalin, a part of Russia OTL.
and I hope my Chinese names aren't terrible, although at least I have the excuse these people speak weird Chinese Newspeak instead of actual Chinese.
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Somes J
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Re: Alternate Histories: state of the world in 2012

Post by Somes J »

I made a political world map for my 1984 scenario:

This board's software doesn't seem to like the IMG link very well, so I'll just give a direct link:

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a24/Ju ... rldmap.jpg

Edit: I made a smaller version, hope this'll work

Image

Red = Eurasia
Grey = Oceania
Yellow = Eastasia
Pink = Disputed/War Zone (permanent war, constantly shifting zones of control)

Oceania also owns Antarctica and most of the Pacific islands, which the map doesn't show.
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
Samuel Anders, nBSG, Daybreak, Part 2.
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Re: Alternate Histories: state of the world in 2012

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

Looking at it like that I can see why you have kind of a soft spot for Eastasia, even as an evil transtotalitarian regime dedicated to the perpetual maintenance of large-scale face-stamping, you have to feel sorry for them being that badly outmassed by their enemies.

I liked the story and the bits you've added about the Eastasian philosophy, I particularly like the bit of doublethink they employ on the matter of race. The bit about her falling in love with the boy in her school and the guy in the airforce doesn't gel with 1984's description of how love and sexual compatibility are essentially banned under Ingsoc, but then that is Ingsoc, and it might be something that's peculiar to the ideology that came out of England, I don't know. Still, it does seem to suggest quite a lot of freedom on Kwan's part.

I know you say you've probably done with this project, but do you have any ideas on the kind of form 'Death Worship' might take? Keeping in mind it is apparently 'more properly translated as "Obliteration of the Self"' and remembering your post on a hypothetical Zen-Buddhist-type dictatorship in the Random Worldbuilding thread, I thought you might have some interesting thoughts on that, though this post mainly paints the Eastasian ideology as racially based.

I'm afraid I can't help you with how bad the Chinese names are :?
"Little monuments may be completed by their first architects, but great ones; true ones leave their copestones to posterity. God keep me from completing anything."
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Re: Alternate Histories: state of the world in 2012

Post by Somes J »

speaker-to-trolls wrote:Looking at it like that I can see why you have kind of a soft spot for Eastasia, even as an evil transtotalitarian regime dedicated to the perpetual maintenance of large-scale face-stamping, you have to feel sorry for them being that badly outmassed by their enemies.
Yeah, reading the book I thought that a division of the world that breaks down into Eurasia, Eastasia, and basically everything else except a triangle of land in the Old World's south didn't sound exactly fair - I was kind of wondering if there might be another superstate in the Americas, but then I vaguely remember reading something about how Oceania was supposed to be US + British spheres of influence.

And in the context of this I thought "hey, another possible stress-point in the system." If you haven't noticed, I tend to fall on the side of wanting to deconstruct the idea of the system as some kind of expertly crafted well-oiled machine of oppression that could keep going forever, because it seems to me like a system that would realistically probably have a lot of potential failure points.
The bit about her falling in love with the boy in her school and the guy in the airforce doesn't gel with 1984's description of how love and sexual compatibility are essentially banned under Ingsoc, but then that is Ingsoc, and it might be something that's peculiar to the ideology that came out of England, I don't know. Still, it does seem to suggest quite a lot of freedom on Kwan's part.
I figure the Party's attitude toward this kind of stuff would sort of be like stereotypical American social conservatives/1950s, minus the sexism and religious angles. You're supposed to marry early, sex is supposed to be about procreation not recreation and remember it's evil and dirty and disgusting and you should feel guilty for enjoying it, and you should have lots of babies for the greater glory of Big Brother! Marrying people you like might still be OK though (I guess now that you bring it up arranged marriages FOR MAXIMUM UTILITY as standard would fit, but eh), and feeling love is I suspect a point where human nature is just going to clash with the theoretical ideal if nothing else.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people have all kinds of hilarious sexual/emotional issues but I kind of wanted to portray some not totally screwed up people in that section.

Edit: also, the spyplane pilots are somewhat atypical, it's one of the branches of the military that comes closest to having an actual function instead of just being a prop in a huge blood ritual (did I just imply the Inner Parties don't trust each other and would want to spy on each other for real? I can't think why that would be when even their own weird theoretical ideal is that they should want to conquer each other - while simultaneously not wanting to). So they're picked (relatively speaking) more for competence instead of ideological correctness, their physical isolation (on an Arctic island) and small size of the organization means they're mostly their own relatively tight social circle etc..
I know you say you've probably done with this project, but do you have any ideas on the kind of form 'Death Worship' might take? Keeping in mind it is apparently 'more properly translated as "Obliteration of the Self"' and remembering your post on a hypothetical Zen-Buddhist-type dictatorship in the Random Worldbuilding thread, I thought you might have some interesting thoughts on that, though this post mainly paints the Eastasian ideology as racially based.
My inspiration for what Eastasia is like is mostly North Korea, specifically based on B.R. Myers's The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters.
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
Samuel Anders, nBSG, Daybreak, Part 2.
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