Re: New Reality Seeds
 

The book Helm wants to say something about the idea of the license to kill and does it with humor. The film Helm is only about sending up the superspy genre while giving Dean Martin a vehicle to do both action and comedy. The more serious/dark sides of the book didn't interest them. Still, the films are fun, silly fun, but fun.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

I write up a world where the weirdest thing to happen is the release of the Ultra Nintendo and you go and have them possibly figure out The Secret? Impressive.

Also, as far as I've read, none of the divergences redraw the maps. It's mostly video games getting their mainstream renaissance a decade early and the (sometimes massive, but not THAT massive) ripple effects. Like: MTV does a gaming review show from 1995 to 2000, Avril Lavigne takes up skateboarding during about of laringitis and becomes a pro on the level of Tony Hawk, Al Gore testifies in favor of video games during the Doom/Mortal Kombat hearings because he played the original, unbutchard-for-cart-space, SNES-CD version of 'Secret of Mana'. Tupac, B.I.G., and Cobain survive their brushes with death, Eminem dies before he gets famous in a argument over a Nintendo, Columbine fizzles out with only two deaths, The 1996 Atlanta Olympics Bombing is far worse, OJ Simpson momicide/suicide instead of double homicide, Fundamentalist Christianity takes a hit after the Atlanta Bomber goes on to nearly attack the US launch party for SMT: Devil Summoner and a major figurehead straight up endources the bomber, etc. And that's all before 2000.

This story is AWESOME.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

What about John Drake (Danger Man)

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

As there is no backstory on John Drake to get that from, I'll say he's the same age as his actor. That makes him twenty-nine in 1957.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Try this one...

A brilliant inventor, Manfred Reinach, who in Homeline history died in the Holocust, got to come to America in 1932. He got to work with Robert H. Goddard and became his close confidant. When Wernher von Braun gets to America he finds Reinach and manages to rebuild his friendship.

Since, Reinach is a brilliant metalurgist and has both great conections with the millitary and the right to look through all of Goddard's papers, the team of von Braun and Reinach manage to get the first satellite into orbit in 1950.

The local year in this Q6 low manna world is 1959. The US built maned satelite is just gotten to the point that people can stay there. Work on the life support systems, growing food in space, medical issues of micro-gravity, are all being studied. The USA is commited to reaching the moon in the next decade and building a moonbase.

Russia, hasn't really tried to compete in the space race, they focus on retrenchment and demands that the American Milliterist Imperialist Warmongers leave space. The Russians, feeling that America is too dangerous to challenge directly focuses on promoting revolution in the decolonizing world. America, secure in her oceanic moats and dominating the orbital high ground, has stayed out of the third world and continued the New Deal commitment to anti-colonialism and, without a Korean War (Stalin feared US rockets with nukes), Truman's third term was devoted to FDR's Second Bill of Rights.

This means France and Britain are competing with Russia in the third world. While America focuses on ending racial and class inequality and starts to move out into the solar system Europe fights a cold war across their former empires.

Basically, another version of the classic spy thriller. Like my other recent spy thriller I've changed a basic fact. America's focus on world events and desperation to prove to the world they can compete with the USSR is removed. America is minimally engaged with the world so Frace and Britain provide the spy power. In many ways this setting makes Bond films, were Britain's spy masters make it a still dominant power, semirealistic.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Yeah, I transposed the digits.

Attempted 1957 U.K. right-wing coup would probably want Churchill as leader/figurehead. In this timeline, he might have resigned from politics beforehand (maybe to teach at Westminster College, like on Lenin-1).

I think/hope he would denounce it.

Avengers plots do read a bit like potential I-Cop adventures, if Infinity being less sexy & sexist.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

The major problem here is paying for it. Creating a rocketry industry is really expensive. In the real world, that was paid for by the military, but they worked rather too slowly for this outcome. The US got serious about space in reaction to Sputnik. Who pays for this rapid development?

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Yes, 1950 for the first satellite is really too early, as there would not have been the impulse without the Cold War. Without the Cold War, the USSR would have steamrolled over Europe (and probably Japan and Korea) after the end of World War II, as Stalin would not have wanted to have given France, Germany, Japan, or the UK time to recover.

In addition, without the research into ICBMs, there would not have been any money for the Space Race. Sputnik 1 went up on a R-7 launch vehicle (an ICBM), and the threat posed by Sputnik 1 to the USA was physical, not psychological. If the USSR could place a satellite into a stable orbit, it meant that it could hit the USA with a nuclear weapon without needing to send them by bombers vulnerable to fighter interceptors or anti-aircraft guns. It meant that all of the protections that the USA had built after WWII were worthless and that the only way for the USA to avoid annihilation would be to build its own ICBM. The Space Race was just a propoganda tool to spin the positives of the development of the ICBMs (and to build national pride and unity in the face of the divisions caused by racism), though the derived and improved technologies largely created TL8.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

This is a perpetual problem for the more realistic sort of "space" plots. Realistic spaceflight is mostly an expensive boondoggle. Even the low earth orbit stuff that kind of pays off is iffy considering you could get most of the benefits from a cheaper network of undersea cables and weather radars.

Without the military uses (and even the ICBMs probably aren't *that* big a win over, say, jet powered stealthed bomber drones) and the international bragging rights, it's hard to find reasons anyone cares about space enough to spend even a fraction of what it would cost to go there.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Yes, at $10,000 per kilogram, it is just too expensive. Now, at $300 per kilogram, the economics are much different, but you need to get to that point (and we have not after over half a century).