Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

Oh, so these are not an alternate earth, but a different made up world that just happens to coincide with our earth's development, diverging in this certain way?

It's really impossible to speculate if that's the case, since so many of our important advances have come from individuals, such as Tesla. And so much of the other--like the automatic weapons ban--are the result of pure coincidence.

There's no Hemingway. If it was going to be a made up world, there never was going to be a Hemingway in the first place. What does that even look like? There's really no way to know. No Murnau or Lang either. We'll have to suppose they have their own great men doing great things.

I'm not looking for a particular other made up world, but mostly looking at things that we take for granted, treating as an assumed part of TL6+, but which are actually merely the logical outcomes of certain political events in our world. The stuff that a worldbuilder should 'Unlearn'.

(For the record: Æthereal Sun didn't have a WW/WWII/CW-equivalent, but gun laws vary wildly across the world.)