[IW] Heinlein-1

[Michele]

Some details may seem odd, but... we GMs can always change them, right?

Apart from that, good job. I like to see new IW Earths. And this has a certain disturbing appeal.

[Phantasm]

To be fair, the one Heinlien timeline I'm most familiar with is the one from To Sail Beyond the Sunset (same universe as The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and Lazarus Long, IIRC), where people had a moon colony and landed on Mars in the '70s, as well as a covert eugenics program - and a slew of highly intelligent nymphomaniac redheads. o/` It's either TL7+2 or 9, depending on your point of view; as it was written in the mid-'80s, it took the microchip into consideration, but didn't have things as omnipresent as the Internet that I could see, even though it had videophones all over the place. Not sure when the divergence is, though I'd be tempted to say 1938 or 1945, depending on how WWII went.

Shall we consider that timeline Heinlein-2?


As for his politics, as a small-l libertarian I can agree that his book had a large libertarian bent, thought his worlds were hardly "utopias". Going by the Nolan Chart (the linked image reverses the positions of "libertarian" and "authoritative", though), I'd say he was somewhere on the border between "Individualist" and "Centrist", which could be a result of a realistic dose of cynicism in his later writing, clearly favoring individual rights but realizing governments like to meddle.

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

To be fair, the one Heinlien timeline I'm most familiar with is the one from To Sail Beyond the Sunset (same universe as The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and Lazarus Long, IIRC), where people had a moon colony and landed on Mars in the '70s, as well as a covert eugenics program - and a slew of highly intelligent nymphomaniac redheads. o/` It's either TL7+2 or 9, depending on your point of view; as it was written in the mid-'80s, it took the microchip into consideration, but didn't have things as omnipresent as the Internet that I could see, even though it had videophones all over the place. Not sure when the divergence is, though I'd be tempted to say 1938 or 1945, depending on how WWII went.

Shall we consider that timeline Heinlein-2?

Is that the same one where the Japanese bombed San Francisco in WWII and later there was a policy in Occupied Japan of destroying one shrine for every American occupier killed? I'd wondered how badly that policy turned out.

[Kymage]

Originally Posted by Michele

Some details may seem odd, but... we GMs can always change them, right?

Indeed we can

[Kymage]

First off I just wanted to be clear I am not the author of the timeline. That is Calbear over on alternatehistory.com. The timeline deals with the restarting of active combat between the Western Allies and the Nazis up until the surrender of the Berlin/Nuremberg enclaves in early 1961. He did somewhat continue the timeline from the end of the war but not to the extent he did the actual fighting. All I did was write up the post-war world in GURPS terms.

The thread is still active after many years and is the site for many active discussions about the timeline. I would recommend you check it out for
yourself. There are actually several spinoff threads from the original.

Now for some of the questions raised in the forum.

1. Japan in this timeline hung on until November 1946 when it surrendered after an extended blockade/bombing. The Allies chose not to invade and instead blockaded the Home Islands. They also did not use nuclear weapons because they did not want to tip off the Nazis about their existence. The conditions in Japan were horrendous at the time of the surrender. Conditions were so bad that a fair number of allied military personnel sent to Japan after the surrender had PTSD and related ailments from what they found.

2. The Four party system in the United States is a somewhat recent development. The first new party “The Freedom Party” got its start in West Alaska and spread throughout the Western United States. The Freedom Party did not have congressional representation in the continental United States until 1994 when they had a Representative from Wyoming elected. I believe they had their first votes in the electoral college in 2000 or so with the Liberal Democrats also getting a solitary electoral vote in that election. It appears to be a Tea Party analogue favoring a strong defense and reduced domestic spending. The four parties are the Liberal Democrats (That’s what they’re called in the TL), the Republicans, The Freedom Party and the Moderate Democrats (Centrists and DLC types). There is rumbling of a fifth party called the Labor party which is a far left wing party. I think the system is still evolving to adapt to the two-party system becoming a multi party system. I think as the TL continues, one would see more changes because of that.

3. The exact reason for the Nazi attack on civilian targets that restarted the Hot War is unclear historically. Not many, not many at all, of the Nazi leadership survived the war. The only eyewitnesses the Allies found after the war to the decision was some of the domestic staff at the meetings and they only had snippets of what all was talked about. Not many Nazi records survived the war and those that did survive did nothing to shed light on the Nazi decision making process for the attack. The best guess is that Joseph Goebbels was the moving force behind convincing Hitler to restart the war. His eldest son was killed in action on his U-boat the January before the attacks. As to the choice of targets, the military planners suggested industrial target- Chicago, Detroit and Windsor were specifically suggested. They were overruled by the Nazi Higher-ups. The timeline actually discusses this somewhat.

4. CR ratings- I admit these were guesses by me as opposed to anything from Calbear. The USA in this TL had a longer period of central/wartime control over the economy and society than we had in OTL. This led to a more liberal/Big Government world than exists in OTL. For example, in the discussions of the postwar world, Calbear does state that the USA has National Health Care. I may have put the CR level for Australia and Canada too high at 4. The United Kingdom makes sense at a CR of 4 as for about twenty years it was a frontline state in the war against the Nazis. India and Brazil were just complete guesses by me. China, well any country that is a version of North Korea would be a 6.

5. Tech Level- You are indeed correct the TL was misstated. The TL is 8 on the most part. The Space travel aspect is elevated as they have Mass Driver launchers which is beyond TL8 and medicine is advanced as they had more experience dealing with the radiation and biological problems from the war. There is also hints in the recent updates to the TL that they are about to go into TL9 when it comes to Fusion energy.

6. Naming of the timeline, I came up with the Heinlein moniker. There was a comment on alternatehistory.com about it sounding like something that Heinlein would write. So Heinlein it was.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Kymage

6. Naming of the timeline, I came up with the Heinlein moniker. There was a comment on alternatehistory.com about it sounding like something that Heinlein would write. So Heinlein it was.

Generally, Infinity designations named after people have names recognizeable from from RL, and whose actions or lack of action were a proximate cause of the historical divergence or whose presence or lack of presence is a prominent feature of the divergent history. So either Heinlein should be a political or otherwise historical figure, or the lack of his inspirational stories (and possibly of him entirely) led to less popularity of science and engineering in the US and the losing of the space race, or something like that.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Generally, Infinity designations named after people have names recognizeable from from RL, and whose actions or lack of action were a proximate cause of the historical divergence or whose presence or lack of presence is a prominent feature of the divergent history. So either Heinlein should be a political or otherwise historical figure, or the lack of his inspirational stories (and possibly of him entirely) led to less popularity of science and engineering in the US and the losing of the space race, or something like that.

Generally, but not always. There was 'Bizarro Earth', for ex, the one where JFK fired a gun into the crowd rather than being murdered, and was then removed from office by means of an honor for shooting bystanders.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Generally, but not always. .

Look at Gernsback. With more conventional naming as it came to this would be "Tesla-1" but it isn't.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Generally, but not always. There was 'Bizarro Earth', for ex, the one where JFK fired a gun into the crowd rather than being murdered, and was then removed from office by means of an honor for shooting bystanders.

I think that if 1000 outtime visitors discovered that world, most of them would separately come up with that name.
Either that or WTF-1.

[Tuk the Weekah]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

This is the part that needs the most the most....eh, call it "Cliobabble". A more of less stable 4 way split based only on "spanning the political spectrum" makes no sense to me. We already have a two party system based on covering the ideological spectrum.

Not always; but the multi-party periods have always been transitional in the US. One of the interesting features of the Second Party System is that pretty much throughout the period there were minor parties that carried special interests (Anti-Masons, Liberty Party, Free Soil Party, etc.).

The idea that the Long War may have broken down alliances, causing a fragmenting of the traditional parties, isn't unlikely. Unless there was a significant change to the mechanics of US democracy, though, I'm pretty sure that they would eventually coalesce into two parties again.