New Reality Seeds

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by malloyd

It also seems to suffer from a problem of scale - a ranch full of velociraptors is not going to collapse *South America*, and don't have a food supply that will let them build up to even a serious local threat, even assuming nobody bothered to hunt them out during the decades that would take.

There is a geography problem too - there are some serious natural barriers in the way of expanding their range way before those deserts. Even with millions of years to make the trip, the megafauna of North and South America was different when humans arrived.

These velociraptors breed like flies and, although Bestial, have IQ10 in GURPS terms.

Besides, the setting is about action and combat.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by robkelk

There are natural barriers in our way, but are they barriers to velociraptors? Not having seen a live 'raptor, I can't answer that question.

Astromancer says the outbreak started in Columbia. Will the Darién Gap be as much a hindrance to them as it is to us moving between the Americas? (link to WikiVoyage, to illustrate the dangers of traveling through the area)

Only if you want it to be. Were do you want your Lizard hunters to go?

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by adm

In the first book, the dinosaurs had a genetically introduced lysine deficiency, they had feeders around the park to feed them, leave the park and die being the protective measure. I never read anything else from the series.

The Godwhale by TJ Bass had the Hive using that idea to control their supersoldier. Until a defector knew the right memonic...

[adm]

Originally Posted by adm

If we did not delay elections for the U.S. Civil War, I don't see them being delayed for anything short of an alien invasion.

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Both candidates were assassinated. One by Latin American refugees and one in retaliation because bloggers said that the other assassination was paid for by the surviving candidate.

Ah, that makes a bit of a difference. I still don't see a very long delay, whoever was second at the Party Convention/delegate count would likely push hard for they now being the nominee, especially if they were the VP pick.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

These velociraptors breed like flies and, although Bestial, have IQ10 in GURPS terms.

Besides, the setting is about action and combat.

The biologist in me is crying about every aspect of this. I mean, except the intelligence, that's loosely plausible.

You need a ton of food relative to body size to breed like flies; flies lay their eggs on corpses thousands of times their size for a reason. Not to mention that anything particularly clever is going to be a K-strategist, due to both the cost of large brains and the inability of a parent to teach a large number of offspring.
Not to mention that it takes a lot of time for vertebrate children to grow into adults. If we're going with the outdated "Deinonychus and Velociraptor are the same genus" raptors, the closest modern analogy would probably be wolves, which take about 5 months to be ready to go watch the adults hunt, 9 months to take down small prey, and two years to reach sexual maturity, most living 4-5 years after that.
While I'm at it, South America would hardly be a raptor paradise. Velociraptor-raptors lived in sandy deserts similar to those of modern Mongolia, while Deinonychus-raptors probably lived in swamps or floodplains. While such areas certainly exist in South America—patches of desert along the east and north coasts as well as a bit in western Brazil, plus some of what I think are floodplains in northwestern Argentina and near the Bolivia-Brazil border—most of the continent is something completely different. Not to mention that the local fauna are completely different. Raptors are generally believed to have worked together to take down large prey, but aside from cattle and such, how much large game is there left in South America? And it's all going to be foreign to the raptors, which can work to their advantage (see all the invasive species that get established) or not (see all the other potential invasive species).
That's not getting into the political stuff. Even if South America was run by raptor cartels who found the Nazi Final Solution inspiring, I find it unlikely that a leader on another continent would consider that enough of a disaster to call off elections. Especially if it would come off as an attempt to use said disaster to prolong his power beyond legal boundaries.

TL;DR: Interesting idea, but it needs a lot of work. Maybe replace the raptors with something that could plausibly take over an entire continent in a few years, like xenomorphs or demons.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Jadwiga of Poland was the first female monarch of that nation, with the title of King for various political reasons. This seed is not about that (though the butterfly effects of those changes could make for an interesting want-of-a-nail world). Instead, we are here to discuss her marital situation. See, her father, King Louis of Hungary and Poland, planned to marry her to Duke William of Austria; however, Louis died when she was roughly five. Her mother and advisors arranged for her to be out on the Polish throne (despite Louis having wanting to have Jadwiga inherit Hungary and her sister inherit Poland) and marry the Grand Duke of Lithuania in exchange for him converting to Catholicism. After William made one last attempt to consummate and secure his marriage to Jadwiga*, the deal was secure and the future Polish commonwealth was created.

However, in another universe, Louis lived a while longer. Louis married his other daughter to the Duke of Masovia (a Polish vassal) to secure her hold on Poland, and Jadwiga was married into the House of Habsburg. Meanwhile, Louis's conquests and centralization of power continued, though most of the former didn't last long beyond his death. Perhaps more importantly, the Habsburgs gained a large amount of territory in Hungary...territory outside the Empire, which will become relevant. In addition, Louis's centralization efforts keep Poland and Austria/Hungary close for quite some time.
Over the coming generations, Lithuania is conquered by its Catholic neighbors (Hungary, Poland, and the Teutonic Order), with a few remnants becoming vassals of the Grand Prince of Moscow. This, combined with the lack of a Poland-Lithuania alliance, helped keep the infighting to a minimum for a time and kept the Order strong enough to handle the Prussian Confederation better. Their alliance with the Habsburgs was more effective and forced the Prussians to ally themselves with Orthodox Russia. This harmed their credibility with Catholic locals, and (combined with the might of the Order's Habsburg allies) crushes the Prussian Confederation. The Teutonic Order probably won't last for much longer, but it may survive long enough to influence the Protestant Reformation (and, if one wants to go for Rule of Cool over plausibility, might even set up a small colony in the New World).

Beyond this...my lack of knowledge on eastern European history is going to hold me back, but I can make some sweeping guesses.
Between the Order and the stronger, unified Catholic powers, the Protestant Reformation likely won't take as strong of a hold in the east, possibly stunting its growth entirely; the 15th/16th-century religious conflicts might be between Catholicism and a completely different crop of new denominations. Obviously, religion has many knock-on effects which are subtle but potentially capable of causing quite the butterfly effect.
Russia's aid in the Probably-Less-than-13-Years War would simultaneously distance itself (and other Orthodox nations) from the Catholic world while building ties with Prussia. Can you say "Prusso-Russian alliance"? I knew you could. If Prussia tried to break from the HRE, this could lead to a war between the Holy Roman and Russian Empires, which could easily broaden into a religious war between Catholics and Orthodox (with any extant Protestants likely aiding the latter). The effects of this are hard to determine.
Despite this, the HRE might be able to hold on. As I understand it, one of the (numerous) causes of the HRE's decline had to do with members owning land outside the HRE. With the Habsburg emperors being kings of Hungary, it would be easy for them to argue for a law stating that any land controlled by a prince of the HRE is legally part of the Empire, which would blunt that problem. Combined with the additional power the Habsburgs would possess, the Empire would likely decline more slowly over the centuries, possibly making it impossible for Napoleon to completely dismantle it in his time. From there, it might be used as the framework for a larger and more powerful German Empire, be reorganized into a proto-EU, or maybe even reorganize itself into a powerful, centralized nation deserving of its grand name.


I invite anyone with some understanding of eastern European history to take this idea and run with it farther than I can.



*Who was about ten by then, so...at least he didn't try right when old King Louis died? Ugh, sometimes dynastic politics make my skin crawl.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Cariamaformes are an order of flightless birds whose only surviving representatives are two species seriemas of South America. But they were not always so mundane; their relatives include the famed Terror Birds which existed through most of the Cenozoic, only becoming extinct a couple million years ago (or, according to some experts, perhaps a few hundred thousand years ago or even just a few thousand years before humans are believed to have arrived). What if they hadn't?

Imagine that, tens of millions of years ago, a clade of adaptable, omnivorous cariamaformes evolved. It foraged in flocks, something like apes or horses (or wolves, for the more carnivory-oriented species). The clade diversified and spread across the Americas. A few survived humanity coming to the New World, and one or two had temperaments, diets, and other properties suitable for domestication (as a pig-like food source, a horse-like beast of burden, or some species as each).
If the New World had better livestock, their agricultural development would have been more rapid, with their sociological development following suit and technological development following that. If the people lived with their birds as Old Worlders did with their livestock, the New World would have a crop of plagues as deadly to Europeans as European diseases were to Americans. It would put the two regions on more even footing.
Also, conquistadores against Aztec bird-cavalry. That's just kinda cool.

[Astromancer]

Wolf Ladejinsky was sent to Vietnam in our world's history in order to achieve land reform. Sadly, the only land reforms he was allowed to do came late and were of limited extent. However, these reforms had spectacular success, the local farms both forced an end to corruption and drove the Viet Cong out of their area.

In this world Ladejinsky has powerful patrons in the state department and the bitterness that Friederich von Hayek directed at him and land reform was seriously limited other factors. Ngo Dinh Diem understood the need for Ladejinsky's land reform proposals, as he did in our world, but unlike in our history, Diem was forced to go along with Ladejinsky's ideas early. By 1964 the Viet Cong couldn't go into South Vietnam because the peasants no longer allowed them to. By 1980 South Vietnam was a democracy actively working to export Ladejinsky type land reform programs throughout Southeast Asia. Cambodia and the Philippines are major successes. The Thai elites and China are terrified of South Vietnam's passionate promotion of democracy. North Vietnam is wondering if they should join the South and thus gain full independence from China. Russia is terrified that a magic bullet to kill Communism has been found.

Basically and transformed Southeast Asia with cool new conflicts.

[Astromancer]

This world (von Fronius) diverts from our in the year 1903. Carl Menger and about sixty of his colleagues and students, including Ludwig von Mises and Joseph Schumpeter, were all killed in an explosion caused by an anarchist bomb.

In the high turnover of professors, one Carl Friederich von Fronius , in most worlds a minor religious mystic who normally becomes a Nazi in the late 1930's, got a professorship. Having little time for anything but academics, von Fronius neither becomes a religious mystic nor goes in for extreme fasting and drug use to gain visions. In fact he becomes a stable member of the Austrian political and economic elites. However, von Fronius is still fiercely conservative and hostile to democracy, he creates an economic theory based largely on defenses of tradition and complex arguments to explain how Free Market economics are the best defenders of tradition. von Hayek saw what a complete mess von Fronius' theories were and refocused all of his efforts into legal studies and ignoring economics completely.

Von Fronius fled Austria when the Nazis took over. Like many other members of the continental European elites, he loathed both British and American democracy. However, his writings seemed to strike a cord with Anglophone conservatives. After WWII von Fronius' books attacking social justice and progressive politics were a hit with Conservatives taking the cultural niche that the Austrian School had in our history. However, because von Fronius was a crude racist, and became far less discrete as he got older, and was also bombastically sexist and homophobic, his books and ideas got dropped in the 1960's and 70's.

As his theories were largely incoherent, if uncannily well presented for the audiences of his time, no revival was possible. Thus the political right lacked a coherent economic theory after the oil shocks. The political Left was able to repackage itself and the New Deal consensus was revived.

The local year is 2009 and there's is an economic boom going on. The West is riding high. Meanwhile, China is bitter and upset. Unlike in our timeline, were Austrian School style globalization both gave it and opportunity to grow and made Western style democracy look bad and corrupt, China is both economically stagnant and is terrified of outside influences that could threaten the rule of the Communist Party. Russia is similarly bitter and paranoid., plus American investments in renewable energy and electric cars has paid off very well and oil prices are in free fall.

Both China and Russia feel threatened and bitter. They want revenge and victory at any cost.

Basically a revived Cold War setting with the troubles of the Arab lands available to add extra confusions. Yes, I know I didn't mention the Arabs, but with Democracy riding high and oil prices in free fall, the Arab lands are in turmoil.

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

... By 1980 South Vietnam was a democracy actively working to export Ladejinsky type land reform programs throughout Southeast Asia. Cambodia and the Philippines are major successes. ...

And without the "boat people" to inspire other mass exoduses by sea, later refugee groups are less likely to risk their lives in desperate water voyages to escape from whatever they're escaping - at least, for a decade or two.

(Also, without the large influx of Vietnamese refugees into the capital of Canada, southeast Asia remains a mystery to the Ottawa restaurant scene. But that's a third-order effect which probably won't make too much difference.)