HOME | DD

Description
A while back I did my interpretation of what the world of Harry Turtledove's "Worldwar" series might be like in 2011: ( www.deviantart.com/quantumbran… )

here's an updated version looking at the year 2067.

It is the year 2067, and a world transformed. The Race are no longer the rulers of the majority of the world’s population: they are nowadays confined to overcrowded “reservations” making up a fraction of their former territory, stripped of their atomic weapons and space-travel technology, and under no little threat of further dispossession. The human race is both more and less united than half a century ago, the situation of most humanity being under the hegemony of only four great powers (and the UK) being replaced by a multitude of independent states working towards a common global understanding (with some exceptions: see, Nazis). It is also a rather more radioactive world than ours, and one with distinctly vengeful aims.

The Race Death Fleet of 2025 (really just three ships loaded with extremely dirty cobalt-salted fusion bombs), were sent with instructions to pass through the solar system without stopping, moving at speeds too high to intercept and dropping off at similarly high speeds enough missiles to make Earth’s biosphere non-sustainable, unless news reached them in route that the situation had already resolved itself, either with the Race forces on Earth pulling a miracle out of their cloaca and defeating the human powers, or more likely with the Race and humans blowing each other to bits. As it turned out, as usual the Race was slow: if they’d gotten off the ships as little as five years earlier, it would probably have worked (if possibly failing to exterminate humanity), but by the time the Fleet arrived humans had managed to work out all the fine points of the Race fusion drive and had a small fleet of interceptors ready to go when the flare of the Fleet’s drives appeared (alerted much earlier than the Race had anticipated, at that: they hadn’t imagined anything as extensive as Earth’s network of high-powered space-based telescopes).

Although all three Race ships departed the solar system as radioactive rubble (being “impossible to intercept”, they had not been designed for ship-to-ship fighting) and those missiles (fired much too early) which did reach earth tended to disintegrate rather than detonate in the atmosphere, enough persistently toxic and radioactive material still got into the Earth’s atmosphere to rather seriously spike death rates from cancer and other radiation-based ailments, as well as cause large die offs in wildlife populations due to concentration of radiation in the food chain, along with more sensitive plants and insects and those poor frogs. As of 2067 only one large area remains “restricted”[1], although at the time there were a great many often panicky evacuations and population movements as “radiation fronts” drifted through the planet’s atmosphere. Makers of bio-nuclear warfare suits for civilians (already a profitable business due to the ongoing human-Race cold war) made a bundle.

Over the intervening four decades, background radiation has dropped considerably, but the only reason cancer rates are somewhat lower than OTL 2019 (save in the poorest countries) is that cancer treatments are much more effective. A lot of the more paranoid still tend to wear filter masks on windy or dusty days, and you still see the occasional oldster in somewhat more contaminated areas who won’t go out without a full protective suit. A lot of older houses have anterooms with elaborate cleaning and vacuuming attachments. The spike in wildlife extinctions, alas, is close to “noise” within the massive humanity-driven and Race invasive-species-driven wave of extinctions over the last century and a half.

Aside from the Death Fleet, some radiation was contributed by hurried action on the part of the Race on earth, which had not been informed of the Death Fleet (there was some worry about their reaction once they found out they had been deemed Regrettable but Unavoidable Casualties), but did know that new ships (presumably from Home) were arriving and being intercepted by human ships based in the asteroid belt. They proceeded to do as much as they could to degrade human space fighting capacities, whether based on the Earth, in orbit, on the Moon, or the asteroid belt, where they had followed the humans with some difficulty [2]. The human powers, of course, proceeded to degrade right back.

To paraphrase Nikita Kruschev, it is better that an enemy have an exaggerated notion of your dangerousness than know you have nothing up your sleeve at all. The rather low success rates of Race armaments compared to human ones confirmed what human analysts had suspected for some time: Race military technology, especially missile and antimissile, and anti-satellite tech, had fallen well behind human cutting edge, with the best they had been essentially so-so knock-offs of human designs. A successful coordinated “first strike” against the damaged Race empire with the human powers now getting no more than “their hair mussed” (albeit killing a load of their human subjects in the process) looked plausible.

Given the universally vengeful human attitude post-Home’s “stab in the back”, the possibility that the always vengeful Germans might try a first strike by their lonesome before the Race could rebuild its ravaged defense network, and the massive psychological blow of being written off by Home and the Emperor, it was not surprising that, after a brief and bloody round of coup and contrecoup, the Race supreme leadership on Earth preemptively surrendered.

The Race’s one condition was that they be allowed to keep some land for themselves, and with none of the human powers really eager to add tens of millions of members of the Race to their population, it was agreed on, although the Race was allowed, with a few exceptions, to keep only the driest and most barren lands for themselves.They were also forced, after a great deal of pressure was put on, to give up their nuclear weapons, although allowed to maintain some militaries to defend themselves from newly independent, hostile, and often irredenta-minded human states.

Decolonization by the Race occurred rapidly and messily: once it became clear the Race were leaving, their human subjects were in no mood to wait patiently for things to be organized for independence. Borders were drawn hastily in some areas where Race settlement areas were being evacuated, or where administrative lines had been redrawn in ways highly dissatisfactory to locals. Ethnic clashes took place. China soon sank into another left-right civil war as the many, many anti-Race revolutionary factions failed miserably to create a unified government. Many of the new regimes were rather extremist, fascistic, one-party socialist, Islamicist.

By 2067, things have settled down considerably. Given the Soviet Union’s internal troubles from the late 2000s through the 2020s, the Communist brand had already taken a blow, and the crumbling of the Japanese Empire and the continued isolation of the Third Reich didn’t do too much for the reputation of fascism. As always, the US, the richest, freest, and most technologically developed of the human powers exerted a magnetic attraction unspoiled by a history of third-world interventions or electing flaming dumpsters [3], and there has been a move towards the center and democratization. (Somalia shaking off the Islamicist back-monkey and having free elections surprised a lot of people).

This has led to a stronger “One Panet” moving seeking something along the lines of a unified planetary government to deal with the Race and other aliens in the future (there are of course those who argue that planetary unification is a “Race” thing and our disunity is in fact part of our strengths). The League of Nations, an almost rudimentary organization during much of the “four powers” period, has revived and greatly increased its powers and influence, a number of areas of the globe are under international control, and the Global Entente is the dominant planetary organization for mutual cooperation and assistance.

THE GLOBAL ENTENTE

The Global Entente is a loose alliance dedicated to maintaining global peace, keeping the Race in line, encouraging trade and common technological and scientific projects, and expanding the human presence in space. It consists of the US and its allies, a more-or-less democratized USSR and its allies and clients, the Republic of China, the Indian federation, and various states not aligned closely to any of the major powers but sympathizing with its goals. Outside the Entente but seeking to get in is the Empire of Japan, entry of which is currently blocked by the Chinese (they want Hainan and Taiwan back, at a minimum), and by various former Race colonies plus anti-colonial elements in the US who want Japan out of New Guinea, Malaya, the Philippines, etc. (The Japanese point out this is rather hypocritical, given Soviet Russian dominance of a load of non-Russian minorities).

Definitely unacceptable are the defiantly imperialist Germans and their few allies, and the Islamicist dictatorships, which are very much on the outs with current global civilizational ideals. It’s occasionally mooted that the Race territories join, but their former colonies are understandable not cool with that idea at all, and even in the more developed nations, a lot of people think they can’t be trusted while Home is still out there. And there are of course a few strict neutrals, who after coming out from under Race domination really don’t want to get involved in any new international drama.

Generally speaking, there is currently little fear of an apocalyptic human-vs-human war nowadays: while the Japanese and Germans aren’t part of the Entente, nobody considers them crazy enough to commit national suicide (although there are always a few kooks claiming Japan or the Reich has secretly developed A 100% EFFECTIVE NoUCLEAR SHIELD), and even fears of a second and more effective Race second strike have receded greatly, especially in those under 30. The vast underground tunnel networks under the major nations of the world, built for survival in case of human-Race nuclear atomigeddon, some so deep as to require advanced refrigeration systems, have largely been recycled as cheap housing (outside of ever-paranoid Germany) , and some underground communities are now as large as small cities, and have developed peculiar, claustrophile cultures of their own. (There are a lot of jokes about the “mole-men menace”, some of them a touch nervous in the wake of one British underground community trying to secede from the UK).

THE US AND ITS ALLIES

The big man on campus the planet, the US, has over 390 million inhabitants, if a bit differently ethnically arranged than they’re likely to be in OTL, with somewhat fewer Hispanics (up until the end of the Race’s rule of Mexico, the border was rather tight), more Muslims and Chinese (the Race was happy to see ones with any political convictions leave) and, of course, several million members of the Race, the US being one of the few relatively accepting human states.

The relatively tolerant attitude of most Americans was badly compromised by the Death Fleet and for a while such human expressions of Race tolerance as casual nudity, shaved heads, and body painting were to some extent verboten for years afterwards, This led to such oddities as Race “scaly humans” who adopted to human cultural norms to the extent of wearing suits and human-style marriages. [7] By 2067, however, things have turned around to the extent that nowadays the US Race community includes “cultural purists” who live in isolated desert communes and refuse to use English and only communicate with humans through translation machines.In the meantime, humans no longer try to maximize human body hair to emphasize their mammalian nature, although hair is generally worn longer than OTL.

The US is the most technologically advanced of the major nations and the biggest contributor to the Starship project, although a certain degree of cultural conservatism and suspicion of untried technology means it tends to ban the more extreme forms of genetic and cybernetic modification (at least as far as the general public knows: after 88 years of Cold War vs the Race, the Deep State is genuinely Deep).There is a form of New Manifest Destiny on the grow: the USA has a mission to Americanize (and among many, to Christianize) the universe.

Canada has some sixty million inhabitants, and is even more of an "immigrant country" than in our world. Its moderately sized Race population wears clothes more often than anywhere else, due to the cold winter climate and a period of post Death-Fleet hostility even worse than the US. (One of Canada's more successful clothing companies does a busy sideline in clothing specifically tailored to Race bodies, with pants designed to accommodate tails and jackets for those with no real shoulders.)

The UK remains somewhat separate, still clinging (like the Argentines and their dream of being just as rich as the US) to the notion that the British Empire sans the Race invasion would have become a global multinational superpower (efforts to create a post-Race alliance with the former ubits of the Empire have not, alas, been very successful), The Reich’s disastrous war with the Race in the 1960s badly undercut the pro-Nazi alliance forces, and their failed attempt to override public opinion in 1969 through military coup remains one of the defining watermarks of British history. Not that the British have given up on national relevanceritain remains one of the most “space-crazed” Entente nations (a new British Empire among the stars? Stay tuned!)

Race rule in Latin America was less harsh than in other places (for one thing, aside from the Pacific coast and north Mexico, there wasn’t that much area the Race found pleasant for settlement) and in response quite a bit of Latin America didn’t oppose Race rule that vigorously, with important exceptions such as Mexico and Venezuela. This leads to a modern loud and vocal anti-Race sentiment, likely out of embarrassment. Some argue that Brazil’s effort to create a powerful South American block is not so much a matter of resistance to US dominance as an effort to show that South America is a formidable human block rather than a bunch of Race collaborators. (Things are further complicated by Race indifference to human racial rankings, which led to the current Amerindian/Mestizo dominance of Bolivia).

CHINESE, INDIANS AND OTHERS

The end of Race rule led to the emergence of many new nations and the end of the human “four powers” system, but ultimately led to a world more in fact unipolar, or at least bipolar (lol) as nations tended to cluster around the major non-total-dick powers of the US and USSR. India, which had achieved after an additional eighty-odd years of “colonial” rule a much higher level of Hindu-Muslim unity (well, outside of the solidly Muslim NW) emerged from Race rule a nation closer to Ghandi’s ideals of tolerance (at least by 2067 nothing as unpleasant as our BJP has emerged) but has failed to progress economically as well as China, which has recently surpassed India in standards of living in spite of India starting out at a higher level and avoiding seven years of post-Race civil war. (China is in fact fairly authoritarian, a right-wing version of OTLs People’s Republic, but willing to make political and economic concessions to the US to maintain good relations even as it intends to eventually displace it as the leader of the Global Entente.)

Sub-Saharan Africa is doing better than in our world, Race rule having done a superior job of development than the age of dictators OTL from the 1960s to the 1990s, and having avoided the Cold War period of LETS SCREW OVER YOUR ALLY. Having started from a pretty low base, the area is still rather less developed than the USSR, North America, and Japan, not to mention the long-term distortions of the Race developing the area mainly as a source of anti-human industrial/military production. (central Africa is still trying to make something from an enormous radionuclide industrial complex.). Ambitious plans are being drawn up for large scale economic integration.

THE REDS

The Soviet Union, with over 450 million inhabitants, is in this world a fairly serious competitor to the USA, but is hardly the nation it was in the 1960s. It has a lot of immigrants from the Chinese and Islamic worlds, and in spite of efforts to spread them evenly across the Union (Moscow has a lot of Chinese restaurants) the USSR east of Baikal has a Chinese plurality which worries the leadership. It also has had a lot of often turbulent political change since the 1980s: although the combined menace of the Race and the Reich kept the USSR unified until the 2020s, fundamental economic difficulties have long threatened its survival. A move to “mixed economics” in the 1980s, while improving living standards, combined with US aid ( meant to support the USSR as a Threat In Being to the Reich and the Race) fundamentally undermined the ideological basis for the existence of the USSR as a multinational “empire”, especially after the collapse of the Race as a unifying menace.

The Soviets after the 2020s managed to save appearances by turning to an increasingly “computerized” economy similar to the OTL “red plenty” program of the 60s and 70s, only with a vastly more advanced computer technology based on Race models. It proved possible to at least avoid collapse, although “converging and surpassing” the US model remained an aspiration rather than a coherent plan into the 2060s, although the possibilities of AI and quantum computing raised hopes for the remainder of the 21st century. Also important was the move towards a more post- national Soviet identity (ethnicity was removed from Soviet ID cards after 1990) and a move towards a more democratic governing system, if still one in which non-left-wing and nationalist parties were forbidden, and dedicated to the manipulation of public opinion through carefully controlled social media. Ironically, that has led to the emergence of a new "Deep Red" movement, whose wacky storm-the-heavens Utopianism, if certainly pro-continued-USSR, is rather hostile to the current governments "rationalist" approach.

Other “socialist” states were largely assessed on the basis of how well (or how poorly) they adopted the essentially technocratic Soviet model. The most frustrating case was the Islamic People’s Republic of Iran, whose weird mix of old school Stalinism and Islamic principles was entirely incompatible with modern Soviet ideas, and by the 2060s had emerged as a fundamental intellectual challenge to Soviet influence in the Middle East. (The whole “massive biochemical weapons arsenal” thing was almost an irrelevance by comparison)

BALTS, POLES, AND JEWS

In the lands around the Baltic sea, an area long contested between the Race (overlord of Poland and Finland) the Germans (Finlandizers of the Swedes) and the Soviet Union, the somewhat chaotic nature of the withdrawal of the Race from the area allowed for the emergence of a regional, more or less neutral (if still a part of the Global Entente) block, consisting of Poland, Finland and Sweden. This political re-arrangement of the situation was not without its costs, though: Poland, although avoiding in the process German irredentism, was forced to give up much of its territory to the Soviets. In the aftermath, Polish Jews, which had been favored by the Race as a people dependent on their support, were persecuted as “collaborators”, never mind that Poles had energetically collaborated themselves as long as the Race kept the Soviets and Nazis at bay. Most Polish Jews who didn't end up in the USSR left for the US, Canada, or Palestine: Palestine, too, was a complicated sort of place, where the Race had replaced the rebellious Arabs with Jews and Catholic Christians: oddly enough, they have managed to work out an equitable power-sharing relationship which is still working as of 2067: possibly because all their neighbors are enormous dicks, aside from the North Arabian Race territories, which are rather dependent on Palestine for access to the outside world. 39% Catholic, 54% Jewish, almost all the ethnic cleansing done by the Race. Fortunately, Palestine is even more solidly supported by the USA than Israel OTL.

The US has somewhat more Jews than OTL. The USSR has a lot more Jews than OTL’s Former USSR, but they’ve been heavily “Sovietized” culturally: for various reasons, including the lack of an independent "Jewish state" before the 2020s and the need to keep themselves unassociated with a surviving Third Reich in people’s minds, this USSR has historically been less anti-Semitic than OTL’s USSR, but has worked harder to create a “post-nationalist” Soviet identity.

FORMER JAPANESE IMPERIUM

Japanese rule has receded. Too dependent on global commerce and free trade, it could not choose full self-sufficiency within the borders of its territories without a severe cut in its standards of living, could not maintain its empire after the collapse of the Race menace without methods so savage as to alienate all its trading partners save the (rather disdained) Germans. (Chinese independence also utterly undermined the role of the Chinese diaspora as a prop of the Empire: Malays, poor SE Asians, and Filipinos have largely replaced the Chinese as the cheap labor of Nippon). A shrunken, isolated New Axis sustained by Draka-esque genocidal violence or abandonment of Empire and union with global currents. In the end, Japan sort of half-assed it, abandoning rebellion-torn Indonesia and Korea (annexing rebel-filled Race Korea and thereby massively revitalizing Japanese Korean rebels proved a serious self-own), but holding on to the Philippines and other territories pretty much guaranteed to insure the hostility of China and Nusantara (OTL Indonesia). This has so far kept them out of the Global Entente, although the US and USSR are increasingly in favor of having them inside the tent pissing out rather than the other way around. Things are somewhat complicated by Japan’s cybernetic infatuation, which leads to some downright alarming body modification trends (DOWN WITH THE FLESH) and a weird Japanese neo-imperialist movement that holds Japan can expand indefinitely through robotic and virtual proxies. (They aren't happy at all with the government's recent decision to grant citizenship to over a million of those aforementioned cheap laborers, in an unstated acknowledgement of the fact that keeping Japan's female population barefoot and pregnant hasn't been a practicable method for keeping the population growing for a while now.)

THE REICH AND OTHER BADDIES

The Third Reich has had its ups and downs. Their developing a “Dr. Strangelove” type doomsday radiological device to threaten the whole world with destruction if they were attacked turned out to be very bad messaging and failed in their secondary purpose of getting them back into space, after a very unpleasant day in May, 2017 when the Race called their bluff and shot down a heavily armed German space plane.After some unpleasantness in which the then-Fuhrer supposedly shot himself seventeen times in the back and head, an agreement was finally reached in which the Germans promised to disassemble their device in exchange for US and Japanese-mediated access to space (for ENTIRELY PEACEFUL purposes). Although some people claim the disassembled devices the Germans showed the world were in fact fakes, the Germans haven’t suggested they might have enough cobalt-contaminated devices to poison two thirds of the world, especially after the Race death fleet nearly did exactly that thing only more.

As it often does, international isolation and general hostility proved counterproductive, simply stoking German paranoia and hysteria. While the Japanese looked at the possibility of their empire becoming North Korea in the Large Economy Size and backed down in the end, the Germans ended up embracing that shit. While the more extremist Nazi ideologues of old failed to make a return, Germany developed a brand new ideology based on “memetic” ideas, the notion of “creative” and “destructive” cultures (not races) while still sticking with nature red in claw and tooth as the fundamental truth of nations: either your nation grew and imposed it’s cultural Weltanschauung on others, or it would be devoured in turn. The Reich of the later 21st century would be less racist than the Reich of old: Dutch and Norwegian “Germans” now can reach the very highest ranks, and the Balkan Slavs are accepted as partners in the Reich’s project as long as they were good fascists. On the other hand, North Italians would be forced to become Germans - as would Hungarians, after they had an anti-fascist revolulution and were punished by being incorporated into the Third Reich as a “protectorate.” Whether the Romanian revolt - a few decades later - would lead to the same is as yet unclear.

Germans remain big on the idea of the Superman, but nowadays more as an ideal than as something Germans already are. More than any other country, Germans embrace the notion of transhumanism, and go further than any other country in biological and cybernetic enhancement. While other nations stick with removing dangerous genes (coding for disabilities, low resistance to alcoholism) and minor improvements (genes for greater disease resistance, cholestesterol resistance), Germans go so far as major phenotype modifications (it is estimated that 90% of Reich citizens born in the 2070s will be tall, blond, and blue-eyed) and are also enthusiastic about cybernetic enhancements (although their insistence on maintaining a Magnificent Blond Beast look means they avoid the more extensive implants favored by the Japanese.) As with the Japanese, the Germans have finally accepted that keeping the female 50% of the country's brains unemployed aside from housekeeping and childraising is a serious self-own, which hasn't helped with their population (240 million including the Protectorates) issues (all the pro-reproduction propaganda in the world doesn't change the fact that children are expensive and time-consuming, and state efforts to raise more kids in creches have produced disappointing results, to be polite). The nation is theoretically ruled by a collective body rather than one man for the while, but the current Reichsfuhrer has been working on his own neat little cult of personality for a decade now, while his rivals quietly try to undermine his position with their own subtle propaganda.

Of course, the Reich needed more than German cultural supremacism to have much influence abroad - and found it in anti-Race posturing. In some ways, Germany has made the Race the new Jews - a constant threat to humanity, always plotting our destruction. They have been National successful in finding allies in the former Race-ruled areas, many of which still nurse grudges or have extensive anti-Race irredenta. (The more powerful nation’s decision to let the Race keep part of their territory rather than exterminate them outright still bugs a lot of nations which failed to regain much of their territory as a result of this.)

Even more aggressively anti-Race than the Reich is the Arab Union, centered in Cairo.(Aside from a few buildings of unusual historical interest, Old Cairo was largely torn down and built over by the Race after they expelled most of the rebellious population. The returning Arabs and Sudanese in turn have torn down or at least heavily remodeled the Race architecture, creating what might be described as "Arabized Nazi Triumphalist architecture with extra glass and fake chrome", and modern Cairo is widely recognized as a global triumph of bad taste.) Far too much of the Arab lands remain part of the Race "reservations", and they want them back. Regaining Palestine is some ways down their "to do list", although they don't like Jews either. To add to their annoyance, due the very sharp division between the sown and the wastes, Egyptian/Sudanese farmers often struggle with Home pest animals, and grumble about the Race continuing to invade and harass them by proxy, so to speak.

More troubling than its African, Arab and Latin American allies and hangers-on is France, at least to Americans. The close collaboration between the “Fourth Republic” and it’s Race overlords after the period of Nazi domination did a lot to discredit democratic rule in France: after the withdrawal of Race forces, the Fourth Republic collapsed into left-right civil war which was won by the Right with German assistance. Having learned something from past mistakes, the Reich has treated the French “National Union” as an equal partner.

Germany is Back in Space, the nations of the Entente being unwilling to challenge the Reich on this front after the collapse of the Race on Earth, Their space presence isn’t quite on the scale of the US or the USSR or even the Japanese, but German bases are scattered about the inner solar system, with a substantial presence of the French and other allies. (Including the South Italians, who have developed a weird high-tech neo-futurism which sometimes even creeps out the Germans.)

The Germans and their allies aren’t strong enough to seriously challenge the dominance of the Entente, but are too heavily armed to suppress: they remain a perpetual thorn in the side of global democratic (or semi-democratic) order. Even more disassociated from the global mainstream are the Islamicist dictatorships, descendants of revolutionary movements which the Race was never entirely able to suppress, and consider themselves the guardians of the eternal Islamic flame, and the Race to be agents of Shaitan, who must either bend the knee to Allah or be exterminated. There is some hope for evolution with the move away from extremism of the Somalis and the New Kano Caliphate, but the hardline regimes in Industan remain committed to a weird combination of Islamic Law fundamentalism and hard science (the better to exterminate the agents of Shaitan with).

THE ENVIRONMENT

Race ideas on environmental conservation, avoidance of global warming., etc. were initially accepted only rather grudgingly, partly because any Lizard ideas on the Right Way to Do Things were automatically looked upon with suspicion, and also because the Race were pretty darn hypocritical on the subject, cheerfully indifferent when their imported desert-habituated species displaced and wiped out terrestrial species less sophisticated in their dry-climate adaptations. It was only later that environmentalism became linked with the idea of preserving a “human-adapted” Earth, a world suitable for human beings. The free human nations would eventually so far as pushing the newly liberated human nations of the late 2020s to maintain the Race-created natural preserves on Earth - not exactly to the pleasure of nations who considered these regions to be part of their national heritage, to exploit (or not) as they saw fit.

The other side of conservation is, of course, “re-terraforming”: the removal of alien, Race-introduced ecosystems and the recreation of terrestrial desert and semi-desert environments. The struggle is ongoing and particularly intense in the US southwest, and protests by the Race inhabiting former North Mexico when US biological “counteragents” spread into their territory have a tendency to be ignored.

Global warming is a Thing, the fossil fuels era may be over, but human nations burned a lot of coal (and in case of the oil-rich USSR, petroleum) getting there, and in spite of the known bad effects, the Race burned coal too when it was more economically efficient and fast to build coal or gas power plants to drive development in their territories than building "proper" clean power sources in the never ending Red Queen's race against the Big Uglies. Things haven't reached the "outdoor agriculture is screwed" stage, but the temperature is still below its expected peak. (The Oceans are still storing up heat) Combating this through various ambitious projects (carbon dioxide sequestration, artificial cloud generation, etc.) is a major aim of the "re-terraformers": after all, warming-driven desertification in various places means that the amount of Race-desirable real estate on the planet is actually increasing.

TECHNOLOGY

The human race surpassed the Race technologically by the 2030s, any remaining technologically edges still held by the Race quickly duplicated by terrestrial science after the surrender (in which access to any and all Race technology and scientific knowledge was part of the terms): the only field in which the Race still has an advantage is Race medical science (as a result of millennia of incremental improvements in Race understanding of how their bodies worked). Cheap and (relatively) clean fusion and solar power have long since put an end to the age of fossil fuels. Although true AI remains frustratingly difficult, immensely powerful learning networks can fake it pretty well, and manage planetary ecological and industrial systems of a complexity increasingly beyond human understanding: with such technology the Soviets are finally approaching the vision of a truly “scientifically run” economy, although some Soviet scientists are rather concerned over the fact that it’s increasingly impossible to tell how the machines are reaching their decisions on economic optimization. Japan is aiming at an even more radical version of this in which robotization will compensate for their low human-power compared to larger nations: this has raised concerns not just among Japanese thinkers but abroad as well.

Biological science has moved ahead as well: a modified version of the Race’s hibernation technology has been adapted for human beings, cancer if not entirely licked certainly knows it’s been in a fight, and current lifespan estimates in the more advanced nations is over ninety. (The world’s oldest person is close to 140, although it’s a bit hard to say where the cybernetics and grafts end and the person begins, and it’s hard to tell how much of her conversation is her and not her Personal Brain-Aide and External Memory Unit.)

Buildings, having reached heights of up to a mile, aren’t growing any further. It’s kinda pointless. The rather baroque anti-Race stylings of half a century ago have been replaced by a more “geometric”, futurist style. The US is fussing with new “organic” styles.

Internet development was hampered by security concerns, but nowadays the Global Entente has a shiny universal network of positively gargantuan proportions. This world’s equivalent of the Social Media Era came and went, from the 2020s to the 2050s, fortunately taking place at a time when racist and objectivist memetics weren’t well positioned to take advantage of them in the world’s major democracies (not that they weren’t horribly misused by the Germans and some of the post-Race governments, and, albeit with good intentions/paving stones, by the soviet reformers). Holographics is quite advanced, and when combined with modern weak (merely mildly superhuman) AI, Japanese virtual idols are really very convincing as long as you don’t try to touch them.

(Japan never developed anything quite like OTLs Anime industry, but in the “post-superpower” era has created an even more extensive artistic, sexual, and “countercultural” reality based on virtual people of widely varying levels of cartoonishness)

Genetic engineering continues to progress, as well as cybernetics. Attempts to actually upgrade human intelligence are so far fairly limited by the possibility of it going wrong scaring the crap out of most governments, but health-related genetic tinkering is increasingly common. Biowarfare vs the Race’s imported plants and animals continues in desert and semi-desert areas. Cybernetic ears, eyes, limbs, etc. are increasingly common, although full body prosthesis remain the stuff of rumor (usually re government X’s supposed super-soldier program)

Space travel had somewhat of a slowdown after the Death Fleet: all those orbital anti-orbital-weapons-weapons went off, filling the Earth’s orbit with debris, speeding ball bearings, etc. Methods to “clear orbits” were soon put into use, from giant balls of debris-braking fluff to giant lasers to just evaporate nuisances, but for most of a decade space was only accessible through very fuel-expensive Polar launches or through massively armored Orion atomic-bomb propelled craft. Some of the more distant human outposts were abandoned due to resupply issues.

However, by the mid-2030s, the Conquest of Space was back in business, more or less. In the subsequent three decades some of the more ambitious plans for space colonization were scaled back (there’s still less than ten thousand people on Mars) simply because the Moon, Mars, and the Asteroids are simply difficult and expensive places to keep human beings alive and healthy (and it’s almost impossible on Venus) but space based industry, military installations, spaceship yards, space robotics, etc. continued to expand at a fast clip. Partly this was because Orion launches from earth proper were no longer acceptable: anything that added further to Earth’s radioactive contamination wasn’t really acceptable. (The first Orion built entirely on the Moon, almost entirely from Moon-sourced parts, was launched - from the Moon, of course - in 2047).

And Earth would soon have a way to get into space that wouldn’t require atoms at all, fusion or fission. The first orbital elevator took fifteen years to complete: the second, watching and avoiding most of the errors of its predecessor, will (hopefully) take seven years if it successfully meets its goal for 2069. There is some talk of a third one to be build in the Andean Union (Indonesia is currently looking a bit unstable). The Great Congo League’s bid was turned down, but now they’re talking about being the site for a Reich-only “beanstalk” (most people don’t think the Germans have the capacity to build one on their own, although a fair few worry about them trying and failing disastrously).

The world’s first Starship, the James Cook, [5] is under construction. Earth admittedly had the technology to launch a crude knock-off of the Race’s interstellar ships by the mid-2040s, but after the Race Death Fleet it was decided that any ships sent to Home would have to send a message. (The German proposal to send a message in the form of a one-way starship crashing into Home at half the speed of light was given some consideration and ultimately discarded.) This ship, a joint Global Entente project, with some Japanese participation, is not fusion-propelled: it will be propelled by anti-matter, now being manufactured in automated facilities located on Mercury (for the solar power and the lack of human beings within a five hundred mile blast radius) and shipped from their to the spaceship building yard in the asteroids. It will be equipped with the finest defenses and the most lethal weapons available to current science, and will send the message “DO NOT F**CK WITH HUMANITY.”

RACE TERRITORIES

The Race on Earth has been confined to shrunken “reservations” in areas with dry and desert climates they are comfortable with and few humans previously inhabited in any event. Since these areas were always under Race rule in their days of planetary dominance, many of their cities and infrastructure was already there, and much of the Race didn’t have to move at all. However, the former Race settlement area was much larger and in any event was supported by resources drawn from the majority of the planet’s land surface: and even the Race, expert recyclers that they are, need adequate water supplies for agriculture and their cities. What they now have is not enough to support the close to a quarter of a billion members of the Race on Earth: the Race territories are crowded, thirsty, and economically crippled.

The number of Race members has remained fairly fixed since the aftermath of the Death Fleet. The ability of the Race to increase its numbers rapidly simply by letting more of their eggs hatch is matched by their ability to control their numbers by disposing of extra eggs (Race females do not waste much emotion on unhatched eggs): there are Lizards who argue that the Race would be better off if they shrank their population by a third or more, but so far the fear that humans would take even more of their land if there were less of them has prevented this viewpoint from gaining favor in any of the Race territories.

The dominant overriding desire among the leadership is to try to rebuild, to not give in to despair, and show both to the Big Uglies and members of the Race itself that the Race is still at least an equal, if not outright superior race. With few resources besides sand and sunshine [6], and the desert-habituated plants and animals of their homeworld, the Race struggles to catch up with the human race from a point far below what they were at their height. Relationships with the USA are fairly cordial: the food aid the US provided in the very difficult early years is still remembered with gratitude. Unemployment and homelessness are a problem: the clan support system has been badly damaged by the effects of ginger addiction.

(A cure of sorts for ginger addiction was finally developed in the 2050s, a form of drug therapy that effectively blocked the effects of ginger on the nervous system and controlled the worst of the cravings. Unfortunately, by then the new generation had discovered cardamom. )

The Race territories also lie under the shadow of irredentist human nations, from Mexico to Iran, and most notably the much-oppressed (during the era of Race rule) Arabs. Race territories in the Thar desert area, Balochistan, Arabia, and the Sahara suffer from frequent cross-border raids, missile attacks, and other outrages, to which their ability to respond is limited by their inability to launch serious counterattacks without bringing the wrath of the major human powers down on their heads. (Of late, the nations of the Global Entente have been increasingly sympathetic, given that their major tormentors are mainly non-Entente Islamicist states or allies of the Third Reich).

Economics are complicated: the capitalistic but very rules and law-bound economy of the former Race Empire is being eroded by both top-down technocratic, neo-Socialist modernization attempts and by a rising anarchic “entrepreneurship” copied from the Americans. The current leadership, following a long tradition of Race pragmatism, follows the old adage “it does not matter if a Beffel is green or blue, as long as it catches Tsellepem.”

Most Race cities nowadays have an Old City and a New City: the original pre-Surrender city, and an outer New City for the settlement of Race members expelled from now-human territory. Initially makeshift shack and tent and tin slums/refugee camps, over the last four decades these New Cities have slowly and steadily become more substantially, more geometrical in their layout, and cleaner: the Race have been city dwellers in the main for tens of thousands of years, and even in the depths of post-Surrender depression and poverty, the notion of the Well-Ordered City survived (in their own way, members of the Race are as concerned with "respectability" as any 19th century Londoner. It's just that sex doesn't have much to do with it).

Geographical dispersion and travel difficulties (inter-territory travel is heavily monitored and controlled by the human Powers) means that the various Race territories largely run themselves, although almost all theoretically recognize the leadership of the Australian Territories, which are headed by the chosen successor of ... Atvar’s successor. There are a couple exceptions: the Race territories in former northern Mexico, heavily under direct US influence, have adopted a democratic form of government (not entirely successfully: one party commands the loyalty of most of the population to the extent it has to actually prop up a couple “competing” parties to avoid the appearance of a one-party state. But they’re trying!). More of a problem is the Race territory in what used to be SW Africa, which has seen a takeover by a radical “pro-Emperor” party which refuses to accept the authority of a leadership which betrayed the Emperor and his sacred ancestors by surrendering to the humans. The fact that the Emperor had essentially written them off by sending the Death Fleet makes no difference to these factionalists: it had to be done for the survival of the Race. They are of course under very close observation by the human governments, and have been forced to accept inspections of multiple sites across their nation to make sure they aren’t trying to, say, build an interstellar transmitter to warn Home of human technological progress. There have been violent incidents, and there is fear of military intervention.

(Earth is under something of a “interstellar radio blackout”: Race constructed interstellar transmitters have all been seized, and human governments monitor technology to make sure nobody builds any radio transmitters powerful enough to be received on Home, and efforts have been made to move media transmission in general from broadcast signals to tight beam using satellites and optical cables. Not that the Race has any radio detection arrays powerful enough to make regular TV signals comprehensible at a distance of eleven light years).

MEANWHILE, BACK HOME

Thanks to the speed of light, the Race didn’t find out about the debacle of the Fleet until 2036, which caused something of a panic. There was much claw pointing, although in the end the general consensus was the Fleet had failed because of the absurd hurry with which it had been “thrown together.” (A mere quarter-century from conception to launch!). Still, the very best analyses of the situation by Race scholars was that with the collapse of the immediate Race threat on Earth, the humans would probably turn on eachother again: in the unlikely possibility of their not nuking themselves into oblivion, worst-case analysis predicted a terrestrial invasion no earlier than the terrestrial year 2126. By that time it should be possible to construct defenses capable of stopping alien invaders well away from Home, and assemble a much stronger fleet able to effectively force surrender on the Big Uglies.The costs would be frightful, but bearable if spread out over a seventy year period.

Research, development, and resource and financial accumulation have proceeded well over the last thirty years, and the committee for the Home Defense Initiative boast actual physical construction will be under way in another decade.

The first human starship will arrive in the Race’s home solar system in 2086.

[1] In Soviet Central Asia. Some paranoid Soviets still mumble about the Americans or Japanese “letting missiles through.”

[2] While doing their best to avoid damaging important human cities. The Race leadership on Earth really, really didn’t want to trigger a general holocaust.

[3] (President Camacho at least had his heart in the right place)

[4] The virtual spaces and networks inhabited by the latest, memetic-warfare savvy generations would be very hard for us to grasp.

[5] The name Commodore Perry was a popular early proposal for a name, and there were a lot of jokes about opening up Home for commerce and civilization. Undoubtedly coincidentally, the name suddenly got a lot less popular after the Japanese accepted the invitation to join the project.

[6] The Saharan Race territories make a tidy profit off of selling their solar power to the West Africans.

[7] There was even a short-lived religious movement that held that God was human in form, the Race having been created by a rebellious demiurge. Believers would be reincarnated as humans. Fortunately, religious fanaticism isn’t really a Race characteristic.

Description
A while back I did my interpretation of what the world of Harry Turtledove's "Worldwar" series might be like in 2011: ( www.deviantart.com/quantumbran… )

here's an updated version looking at the year 2067.

It is the year 2067, and a world transformed. The Race are no longer the rulers of the majority of the world’s population: they are nowadays confined to overcrowded “reservations” making up a fraction of their former territory, stripped of their atomic weapons and space-travel technology, and under no little threat of further dispossession. The human race is both more and less united than half a century ago, the situation of most humanity being under the hegemony of only four great powers (and the UK) being replaced by a multitude of independent states working towards a common global understanding (with some exceptions: see, Nazis). It is also a rather more radioactive world than ours, and one with distinctly vengeful aims.

The Race Death Fleet of 2025 (really just three ships loaded with extremely dirty cobalt-salted fusion bombs), were sent with instructions to pass through the solar system without stopping, moving at speeds too high to intercept and dropping off at similarly high speeds enough missiles to make Earth’s biosphere non-sustainable, unless news reached them in route that the situation had already resolved itself, either with the Race forces on Earth pulling a miracle out of their cloaca and defeating the human powers, or more likely with the Race and humans blowing each other to bits. As it turned out, as usual the Race was slow: if they’d gotten off the ships as little as five years earlier, it would probably have worked (if possibly failing to exterminate humanity), but by the time the Fleet arrived humans had managed to work out all the fine points of the Race fusion drive and had a small fleet of interceptors ready to go when the flare of the Fleet’s drives appeared (alerted much earlier than the Race had anticipated, at that: they hadn’t imagined anything as extensive as Earth’s network of high-powered space-based telescopes).

Although all three Race ships departed the solar system as radioactive rubble (being “impossible to intercept”, they had not been designed for ship-to-ship fighting) and those missiles (fired much too early) which did reach earth tended to disintegrate rather than detonate in the atmosphere, enough persistently toxic and radioactive material still got into the Earth’s atmosphere to rather seriously spike death rates from cancer and other radiation-based ailments, as well as cause large die offs in wildlife populations due to concentration of radiation in the food chain, along with more sensitive plants and insects and those poor frogs. As of 2067 only one large area remains “restricted”[1], although at the time there were a great many often panicky evacuations and population movements as “radiation fronts” drifted through the planet’s atmosphere. Makers of bio-nuclear warfare suits for civilians (already a profitable business due to the ongoing human-Race cold war) made a bundle.

Over the intervening four decades, background radiation has dropped considerably, but the only reason cancer rates are somewhat lower than OTL 2019 (save in the poorest countries) is that cancer treatments are much more effective. A lot of the more paranoid still tend to wear filter masks on windy or dusty days, and you still see the occasional oldster in somewhat more contaminated areas who won’t go out without a full protective suit. A lot of older houses have anterooms with elaborate cleaning and vacuuming attachments. The spike in wildlife extinctions, alas, is close to “noise” within the massive humanity-driven and Race invasive-species-driven wave of extinctions over the last century and a half.

Aside from the Death Fleet, some radiation was contributed by hurried action on the part of the Race on earth, which had not been informed of the Death Fleet (there was some worry about their reaction once they found out they had been deemed Regrettable but Unavoidable Casualties), but did know that new ships (presumably from Home) were arriving and being intercepted by human ships based in the asteroid belt. They proceeded to do as much as they could to degrade human space fighting capacities, whether based on the Earth, in orbit, on the Moon, or the asteroid belt, where they had followed the humans with some difficulty [2]. The human powers, of course, proceeded to degrade right back.

To paraphrase Nikita Kruschev, it is better that an enemy have an exaggerated notion of your dangerousness than know you have nothing up your sleeve at all. The rather low success rates of Race armaments compared to human ones confirmed what human analysts had suspected for some time: Race military technology, especially missile and antimissile, and anti-satellite tech, had fallen well behind human cutting edge, with the best they had been essentially so-so knock-offs of human designs. A successful coordinated “first strike” against the damaged Race empire with the human powers now getting no more than “their hair mussed” (albeit killing a load of their human subjects in the process) looked plausible.

Given the universally vengeful human attitude post-Home’s “stab in the back”, the possibility that the always vengeful Germans might try a first strike by their lonesome before the Race could rebuild its ravaged defense network, and the massive psychological blow of being written off by Home and the Emperor, it was not surprising that, after a brief and bloody round of coup and contrecoup, the Race supreme leadership on Earth preemptively surrendered.

The Race’s one condition was that they be allowed to keep some land for themselves, and with none of the human powers really eager to add tens of millions of members of the Race to their population, it was agreed on, although the Race was allowed, with a few exceptions, to keep only the driest and most barren lands for themselves.They were also forced, after a great deal of pressure was put on, to give up their nuclear weapons, although allowed to maintain some militaries to defend themselves from newly independent, hostile, and often irredenta-minded human states.

Decolonization by the Race occurred rapidly and messily: once it became clear the Race were leaving, their human subjects were in no mood to wait patiently for things to be organized for independence. Borders were drawn hastily in some areas where Race settlement areas were being evacuated, or where administrative lines had been redrawn in ways highly dissatisfactory to locals. Ethnic clashes took place. China soon sank into another left-right civil war as the many, many anti-Race revolutionary factions failed miserably to create a unified government. Many of the new regimes were rather extremist, fascistic, one-party socialist, Islamicist.

By 2067, things have settled down considerably. Given the Soviet Union’s internal troubles from the late 2000s through the 2020s, the Communist brand had already taken a blow, and the crumbling of the Japanese Empire and the continued isolation of the Third Reich didn’t do too much for the reputation of fascism. As always, the US, the richest, freest, and most technologically developed of the human powers exerted a magnetic attraction unspoiled by a history of third-world interventions or electing flaming dumpsters [3], and there has been a move towards the center and democratization. (Somalia shaking off the Islamicist back-monkey and having free elections surprised a lot of people).

This has led to a stronger “One Panet” moving seeking something along the lines of a unified planetary government to deal with the Race and other aliens in the future (there are of course those who argue that planetary unification is a “Race” thing and our disunity is in fact part of our strengths). The League of Nations, an almost rudimentary organization during much of the “four powers” period, has revived and greatly increased its powers and influence, a number of areas of the globe are under international control, and the Global Entente is the dominant planetary organization for mutual cooperation and assistance.

THE GLOBAL ENTENTE

The Global Entente is a loose alliance dedicated to maintaining global peace, keeping the Race in line, encouraging trade and common technological and scientific projects, and expanding the human presence in space. It consists of the US and its allies, a more-or-less democratized USSR and its allies and clients, the Republic of China, the Indian federation, and various states not aligned closely to any of the major powers but sympathizing with its goals. Outside the Entente but seeking to get in is the Empire of Japan, entry of which is currently blocked by the Chinese (they want Hainan and Taiwan back, at a minimum), and by various former Race colonies plus anti-colonial elements in the US who want Japan out of New Guinea, Malaya, the Philippines, etc. (The Japanese point out this is rather hypocritical, given Soviet Russian dominance of a load of non-Russian minorities).

Definitely unacceptable are the defiantly imperialist Germans and their few allies, and the Islamicist dictatorships, which are very much on the outs with current global civilizational ideals. It’s occasionally mooted that the Race territories join, but their former colonies are understandable not cool with that idea at all, and even in the more developed nations, a lot of people think they can’t be trusted while Home is still out there. And there are of course a few strict neutrals, who after coming out from under Race domination really don’t want to get involved in any new international drama.

Generally speaking, there is currently little fear of an apocalyptic human-vs-human war nowadays: while the Japanese and Germans aren’t part of the Entente, nobody considers them crazy enough to commit national suicide (although there are always a few kooks claiming Japan or the Reich has secretly developed A 100% EFFECTIVE NoUCLEAR SHIELD), and even fears of a second and more effective Race second strike have receded greatly, especially in those under 30. The vast underground tunnel networks under the major nations of the world, built for survival in case of human-Race nuclear atomigeddon, some so deep as to require advanced refrigeration systems, have largely been recycled as cheap housing (outside of ever-paranoid Germany) , and some underground communities are now as large as small cities, and have developed peculiar, claustrophile cultures of their own. (There are a lot of jokes about the “mole-men menace”, some of them a touch nervous in the wake of one British underground community trying to secede from the UK).

THE US AND ITS ALLIES

The big man on campus the planet, the US, has over 390 million inhabitants, if a bit differently ethnically arranged than they’re likely to be in OTL, with somewhat fewer Hispanics (up until the end of the Race’s rule of Mexico, the border was rather tight), more Muslims and Chinese (the Race was happy to see ones with any political convictions leave) and, of course, several million members of the Race, the US being one of the few relatively accepting human states.

The relatively tolerant attitude of most Americans was badly compromised by the Death Fleet and for a while such human expressions of Race tolerance as casual nudity, shaved heads, and body painting were to some extent verboten for years afterwards, This led to such oddities as Race “scaly humans” who adopted to human cultural norms to the extent of wearing suits and human-style marriages. [7] By 2067, however, things have turned around to the extent that nowadays the US Race community includes “cultural purists” who live in isolated desert communes and refuse to use English and only communicate with humans through translation machines.In the meantime, humans no longer try to maximize human body hair to emphasize their mammalian nature, although hair is generally worn longer than OTL.

The US is the most technologically advanced of the major nations and the biggest contributor to the Starship project, although a certain degree of cultural conservatism and suspicion of untried technology means it tends to ban the more extreme forms of genetic and cybernetic modification (at least as far as the general public knows: after 88 years of Cold War vs the Race, the Deep State is genuinely Deep).There is a form of New Manifest Destiny on the grow: the USA has a mission to Americanize (and among many, to Christianize) the universe.

Canada has some sixty million inhabitants, and is even more of an "immigrant country" than in our world. Its moderately sized Race population wears clothes more often than anywhere else, due to the cold winter climate and a period of post Death-Fleet hostility even worse than the US. (One of Canada's more successful clothing companies does a busy sideline in clothing specifically tailored to Race bodies, with pants designed to accommodate tails and jackets for those with no real shoulders.)

The UK remains somewhat separate, still clinging (like the Argentines and their dream of being just as rich as the US) to the notion that the British Empire sans the Race invasion would have become a global multinational superpower (efforts to create a post-Race alliance with the former ubits of the Empire have not, alas, been very successful), The Reich’s disastrous war with the Race in the 1960s badly undercut the pro-Nazi alliance forces, and their failed attempt to override public opinion in 1969 through military coup remains one of the defining watermarks of British history. Not that the British have given up on national relevanceritain remains one of the most “space-crazed” Entente nations (a new British Empire among the stars? Stay tuned!)

Race rule in Latin America was less harsh than in other places (for one thing, aside from the Pacific coast and north Mexico, there wasn’t that much area the Race found pleasant for settlement) and in response quite a bit of Latin America didn’t oppose Race rule that vigorously, with important exceptions such as Mexico and Venezuela. This leads to a modern loud and vocal anti-Race sentiment, likely out of embarrassment. Some argue that Brazil’s effort to create a powerful South American block is not so much a matter of resistance to US dominance as an effort to show that South America is a formidable human block rather than a bunch of Race collaborators. (Things are further complicated by Race indifference to human racial rankings, which led to the current Amerindian/Mestizo dominance of Bolivia).

CHINESE, INDIANS AND OTHERS

The end of Race rule led to the emergence of many new nations and the end of the human “four powers” system, but ultimately led to a world more in fact unipolar, or at least bipolar (lol) as nations tended to cluster around the major non-total-dick powers of the US and USSR. India, which had achieved after an additional eighty-odd years of “colonial” rule a much higher level of Hindu-Muslim unity (well, outside of the solidly Muslim NW) emerged from Race rule a nation closer to Ghandi’s ideals of tolerance (at least by 2067 nothing as unpleasant as our BJP has emerged) but has failed to progress economically as well as China, which has recently surpassed India in standards of living in spite of India starting out at a higher level and avoiding seven years of post-Race civil war. (China is in fact fairly authoritarian, a right-wing version of OTLs People’s Republic, but willing to make political and economic concessions to the US to maintain good relations even as it intends to eventually displace it as the leader of the Global Entente.)

Sub-Saharan Africa is doing better than in our world, Race rule having done a superior job of development than the age of dictators OTL from the 1960s to the 1990s, and having avoided the Cold War period of LETS SCREW OVER YOUR ALLY. Having started from a pretty low base, the area is still rather less developed than the USSR, North America, and Japan, not to mention the long-term distortions of the Race developing the area mainly as a source of anti-human industrial/military production. (central Africa is still trying to make something from an enormous radionuclide industrial complex.). Ambitious plans are being drawn up for large scale economic integration.

THE REDS

The Soviet Union, with over 450 million inhabitants, is in this world a fairly serious competitor to the USA, but is hardly the nation it was in the 1960s. It has a lot of immigrants from the Chinese and Islamic worlds, and in spite of efforts to spread them evenly across the Union (Moscow has a lot of Chinese restaurants) the USSR east of Baikal has a Chinese plurality which worries the leadership. It also has had a lot of often turbulent political change since the 1980s: although the combined menace of the Race and the Reich kept the USSR unified until the 2020s, fundamental economic difficulties have long threatened its survival. A move to “mixed economics” in the 1980s, while improving living standards, combined with US aid ( meant to support the USSR as a Threat In Being to the Reich and the Race) fundamentally undermined the ideological basis for the existence of the USSR as a multinational “empire”, especially after the collapse of the Race as a unifying menace.

The Soviets after the 2020s managed to save appearances by turning to an increasingly “computerized” economy similar to the OTL “red plenty” program of the 60s and 70s, only with a vastly more advanced computer technology based on Race models. It proved possible to at least avoid collapse, although “converging and surpassing” the US model remained an aspiration rather than a coherent plan into the 2060s, although the possibilities of AI and quantum computing raised hopes for the remainder of the 21st century. Also important was the move towards a more post- national Soviet identity (ethnicity was removed from Soviet ID cards after 1990) and a move towards a more democratic governing system, if still one in which non-left-wing and nationalist parties were forbidden, and dedicated to the manipulation of public opinion through carefully controlled social media. Ironically, that has led to the emergence of a new "Deep Red" movement, whose wacky storm-the-heavens Utopianism, if certainly pro-continued-USSR, is rather hostile to the current governments "rationalist" approach.

Other “socialist” states were largely assessed on the basis of how well (or how poorly) they adopted the essentially technocratic Soviet model. The most frustrating case was the Islamic People’s Republic of Iran, whose weird mix of old school Stalinism and Islamic principles was entirely incompatible with modern Soviet ideas, and by the 2060s had emerged as a fundamental intellectual challenge to Soviet influence in the Middle East. (The whole “massive biochemical weapons arsenal” thing was almost an irrelevance by comparison)

BALTS, POLES, AND JEWS

In the lands around the Baltic sea, an area long contested between the Race (overlord of Poland and Finland) the Germans (Finlandizers of the Swedes) and the Soviet Union, the somewhat chaotic nature of the withdrawal of the Race from the area allowed for the emergence of a regional, more or less neutral (if still a part of the Global Entente) block, consisting of Poland, Finland and Sweden. This political re-arrangement of the situation was not without its costs, though: Poland, although avoiding in the process German irredentism, was forced to give up much of its territory to the Soviets. In the aftermath, Polish Jews, which had been favored by the Race as a people dependent on their support, were persecuted as “collaborators”, never mind that Poles had energetically collaborated themselves as long as the Race kept the Soviets and Nazis at bay. Most Polish Jews who didn't end up in the USSR left for the US, Canada, or Palestine: Palestine, too, was a complicated sort of place, where the Race had replaced the rebellious Arabs with Jews and Catholic Christians: oddly enough, they have managed to work out an equitable power-sharing relationship which is still working as of 2067: possibly because all their neighbors are enormous dicks, aside from the North Arabian Race territories, which are rather dependent on Palestine for access to the outside world. 39% Catholic, 54% Jewish, almost all the ethnic cleansing done by the Race. Fortunately, Palestine is even more solidly supported by the USA than Israel OTL.

The US has somewhat more Jews than OTL. The USSR has a lot more Jews than OTL’s Former USSR, but they’ve been heavily “Sovietized” culturally: for various reasons, including the lack of an independent "Jewish state" before the 2020s and the need to keep themselves unassociated with a surviving Third Reich in people’s minds, this USSR has historically been less anti-Semitic than OTL’s USSR, but has worked harder to create a “post-nationalist” Soviet identity.

FORMER JAPANESE IMPERIUM

Japanese rule has receded. Too dependent on global commerce and free trade, it could not choose full self-sufficiency within the borders of its territories without a severe cut in its standards of living, could not maintain its empire after the collapse of the Race menace without methods so savage as to alienate all its trading partners save the (rather disdained) Germans. (Chinese independence also utterly undermined the role of the Chinese diaspora as a prop of the Empire: Malays, poor SE Asians, and Filipinos have largely replaced the Chinese as the cheap labor of Nippon). A shrunken, isolated New Axis sustained by Draka-esque genocidal violence or abandonment of Empire and union with global currents. In the end, Japan sort of half-assed it, abandoning rebellion-torn Indonesia and Korea (annexing rebel-filled Race Korea and thereby massively revitalizing Japanese Korean rebels proved a serious self-own), but holding on to the Philippines and other territories pretty much guaranteed to insure the hostility of China and Nusantara (OTL Indonesia). This has so far kept them out of the Global Entente, although the US and USSR are increasingly in favor of having them inside the tent pissing out rather than the other way around. Things are somewhat complicated by Japan’s cybernetic infatuation, which leads to some downright alarming body modification trends (DOWN WITH THE FLESH) and a weird Japanese neo-imperialist movement that holds Japan can expand indefinitely through robotic and virtual proxies. (They aren't happy at all with the government's recent decision to grant citizenship to over a million of those aforementioned cheap laborers, in an unstated acknowledgement of the fact that keeping Japan's female population barefoot and pregnant hasn't been a practicable method for keeping the population growing for a while now.)

THE REICH AND OTHER BADDIES

The Third Reich has had its ups and downs. Their developing a “Dr. Strangelove” type doomsday radiological device to threaten the whole world with destruction if they were attacked turned out to be very bad messaging and failed in their secondary purpose of getting them back into space, after a very unpleasant day in May, 2017 when the Race called their bluff and shot down a heavily armed German space plane.After some unpleasantness in which the then-Fuhrer supposedly shot himself seventeen times in the back and head, an agreement was finally reached in which the Germans promised to disassemble their device in exchange for US and Japanese-mediated access to space (for ENTIRELY PEACEFUL purposes). Although some people claim the disassembled devices the Germans showed the world were in fact fakes, the Germans haven’t suggested they might have enough cobalt-contaminated devices to poison two thirds of the world, especially after the Race death fleet nearly did exactly that thing only more.

As it often does, international isolation and general hostility proved counterproductive, simply stoking German paranoia and hysteria. While the Japanese looked at the possibility of their empire becoming North Korea in the Large Economy Size and backed down in the end, the Germans ended up embracing that shit. While the more extremist Nazi ideologues of old failed to make a return, Germany developed a brand new ideology based on “memetic” ideas, the notion of “creative” and “destructive” cultures (not races) while still sticking with nature red in claw and tooth as the fundamental truth of nations: either your nation grew and imposed it’s cultural Weltanschauung on others, or it would be devoured in turn. The Reich of the later 21st century would be less racist than the Reich of old: Dutch and Norwegian “Germans” now can reach the very highest ranks, and the Balkan Slavs are accepted as partners in the Reich’s project as long as they were good fascists. On the other hand, North Italians would be forced to become Germans - as would Hungarians, after they had an anti-fascist revolulution and were punished by being incorporated into the Third Reich as a “protectorate.” Whether the Romanian revolt - a few decades later - would lead to the same is as yet unclear.

Germans remain big on the idea of the Superman, but nowadays more as an ideal than as something Germans already are. More than any other country, Germans embrace the notion of transhumanism, and go further than any other country in biological and cybernetic enhancement. While other nations stick with removing dangerous genes (coding for disabilities, low resistance to alcoholism) and minor improvements (genes for greater disease resistance, cholestesterol resistance), Germans go so far as major phenotype modifications (it is estimated that 90% of Reich citizens born in the 2070s will be tall, blond, and blue-eyed) and are also enthusiastic about cybernetic enhancements (although their insistence on maintaining a Magnificent Blond Beast look means they avoid the more extensive implants favored by the Japanese.) As with the Japanese, the Germans have finally accepted that keeping the female 50% of the country's brains unemployed aside from housekeeping and childraising is a serious self-own, which hasn't helped with their population (240 million including the Protectorates) issues (all the pro-reproduction propaganda in the world doesn't change the fact that children are expensive and time-consuming, and state efforts to raise more kids in creches have produced disappointing results, to be polite). The nation is theoretically ruled by a collective body rather than one man for the while, but the current Reichsfuhrer has been working on his own neat little cult of personality for a decade now, while his rivals quietly try to undermine his position with their own subtle propaganda.

Of course, the Reich needed more than German cultural supremacism to have much influence abroad - and found it in anti-Race posturing. In some ways, Germany has made the Race the new Jews - a constant threat to humanity, always plotting our destruction. They have been National successful in finding allies in the former Race-ruled areas, many of which still nurse grudges or have extensive anti-Race irredenta. (The more powerful nation’s decision to let the Race keep part of their territory rather than exterminate them outright still bugs a lot of nations which failed to regain much of their territory as a result of this.)

Even more aggressively anti-Race than the Reich is the Arab Union, centered in Cairo.(Aside from a few buildings of unusual historical interest, Old Cairo was largely torn down and built over by the Race after they expelled most of the rebellious population. The returning Arabs and Sudanese in turn have torn down or at least heavily remodeled the Race architecture, creating what might be described as "Arabized Nazi Triumphalist architecture with extra glass and fake chrome", and modern Cairo is widely recognized as a global triumph of bad taste.) Far too much of the Arab lands remain part of the Race "reservations", and they want them back. Regaining Palestine is some ways down their "to do list", although they don't like Jews either. To add to their annoyance, due the very sharp division between the sown and the wastes, Egyptian/Sudanese farmers often struggle with Home pest animals, and grumble about the Race continuing to invade and harass them by proxy, so to speak.

More troubling than its African, Arab and Latin American allies and hangers-on is France, at least to Americans. The close collaboration between the “Fourth Republic” and it’s Race overlords after the period of Nazi domination did a lot to discredit democratic rule in France: after the withdrawal of Race forces, the Fourth Republic collapsed into left-right civil war which was won by the Right with German assistance. Having learned something from past mistakes, the Reich has treated the French “National Union” as an equal partner.

Germany is Back in Space, the nations of the Entente being unwilling to challenge the Reich on this front after the collapse of the Race on Earth, Their space presence isn’t quite on the scale of the US or the USSR or even the Japanese, but German bases are scattered about the inner solar system, with a substantial presence of the French and other allies. (Including the South Italians, who have developed a weird high-tech neo-futurism which sometimes even creeps out the Germans.)

The Germans and their allies aren’t strong enough to seriously challenge the dominance of the Entente, but are too heavily armed to suppress: they remain a perpetual thorn in the side of global democratic (or semi-democratic) order. Even more disassociated from the global mainstream are the Islamicist dictatorships, descendants of revolutionary movements which the Race was never entirely able to suppress, and consider themselves the guardians of the eternal Islamic flame, and the Race to be agents of Shaitan, who must either bend the knee to Allah or be exterminated. There is some hope for evolution with the move away from extremism of the Somalis and the New Kano Caliphate, but the hardline regimes in Industan remain committed to a weird combination of Islamic Law fundamentalism and hard science (the better to exterminate the agents of Shaitan with).

THE ENVIRONMENT

Race ideas on environmental conservation, avoidance of global warming., etc. were initially accepted only rather grudgingly, partly because any Lizard ideas on the Right Way to Do Things were automatically looked upon with suspicion, and also because the Race were pretty darn hypocritical on the subject, cheerfully indifferent when their imported desert-habituated species displaced and wiped out terrestrial species less sophisticated in their dry-climate adaptations. It was only later that environmentalism became linked with the idea of preserving a “human-adapted” Earth, a world suitable for human beings. The free human nations would eventually so far as pushing the newly liberated human nations of the late 2020s to maintain the Race-created natural preserves on Earth - not exactly to the pleasure of nations who considered these regions to be part of their national heritage, to exploit (or not) as they saw fit.

The other side of conservation is, of course, “re-terraforming”: the removal of alien, Race-introduced ecosystems and the recreation of terrestrial desert and semi-desert environments. The struggle is ongoing and particularly intense in the US southwest, and protests by the Race inhabiting former North Mexico when US biological “counteragents” spread into their territory have a tendency to be ignored.

Global warming is a Thing, the fossil fuels era may be over, but human nations burned a lot of coal (and in case of the oil-rich USSR, petroleum) getting there, and in spite of the known bad effects, the Race burned coal too when it was more economically efficient and fast to build coal or gas power plants to drive development in their territories than building "proper" clean power sources in the never ending Red Queen's race against the Big Uglies. Things haven't reached the "outdoor agriculture is screwed" stage, but the temperature is still below its expected peak. (The Oceans are still storing up heat) Combating this through various ambitious projects (carbon dioxide sequestration, artificial cloud generation, etc.) is a major aim of the "re-terraformers": after all, warming-driven desertification in various places means that the amount of Race-desirable real estate on the planet is actually increasing.

TECHNOLOGY

The human race surpassed the Race technologically by the 2030s, any remaining technologically edges still held by the Race quickly duplicated by terrestrial science after the surrender (in which access to any and all Race technology and scientific knowledge was part of the terms): the only field in which the Race still has an advantage is Race medical science (as a result of millennia of incremental improvements in Race understanding of how their bodies worked). Cheap and (relatively) clean fusion and solar power have long since put an end to the age of fossil fuels. Although true AI remains frustratingly difficult, immensely powerful learning networks can fake it pretty well, and manage planetary ecological and industrial systems of a complexity increasingly beyond human understanding: with such technology the Soviets are finally approaching the vision of a truly “scientifically run” economy, although some Soviet scientists are rather concerned over the fact that it’s increasingly impossible to tell how the machines are reaching their decisions on economic optimization. Japan is aiming at an even more radical version of this in which robotization will compensate for their low human-power compared to larger nations: this has raised concerns not just among Japanese thinkers but abroad as well.

Biological science has moved ahead as well: a modified version of the Race’s hibernation technology has been adapted for human beings, cancer if not entirely licked certainly knows it’s been in a fight, and current lifespan estimates in the more advanced nations is over ninety. (The world’s oldest person is close to 140, although it’s a bit hard to say where the cybernetics and grafts end and the person begins, and it’s hard to tell how much of her conversation is her and not her Personal Brain-Aide and External Memory Unit.)

Buildings, having reached heights of up to a mile, aren’t growing any further. It’s kinda pointless. The rather baroque anti-Race stylings of half a century ago have been replaced by a more “geometric”, futurist style. The US is fussing with new “organic” styles.

Internet development was hampered by security concerns, but nowadays the Global Entente has a shiny universal network of positively gargantuan proportions. This world’s equivalent of the Social Media Era came and went, from the 2020s to the 2050s, fortunately taking place at a time when racist and objectivist memetics weren’t well positioned to take advantage of them in the world’s major democracies (not that they weren’t horribly misused by the Germans and some of the post-Race governments, and, albeit with good intentions/paving stones, by the soviet reformers). Holographics is quite advanced, and when combined with modern weak (merely mildly superhuman) AI, Japanese virtual idols are really very convincing as long as you don’t try to touch them.

(Japan never developed anything quite like OTLs Anime industry, but in the “post-superpower” era has created an even more extensive artistic, sexual, and “countercultural” reality based on virtual people of widely varying levels of cartoonishness)

Genetic engineering continues to progress, as well as cybernetics. Attempts to actually upgrade human intelligence are so far fairly limited by the possibility of it going wrong scaring the crap out of most governments, but health-related genetic tinkering is increasingly common. Biowarfare vs the Race’s imported plants and animals continues in desert and semi-desert areas. Cybernetic ears, eyes, limbs, etc. are increasingly common, although full body prosthesis remain the stuff of rumor (usually re government X’s supposed super-soldier program)

Space travel had somewhat of a slowdown after the Death Fleet: all those orbital anti-orbital-weapons-weapons went off, filling the Earth’s orbit with debris, speeding ball bearings, etc. Methods to “clear orbits” were soon put into use, from giant balls of debris-braking fluff to giant lasers to just evaporate nuisances, but for most of a decade space was only accessible through very fuel-expensive Polar launches or through massively armored Orion atomic-bomb propelled craft. Some of the more distant human outposts were abandoned due to resupply issues.

However, by the mid-2030s, the Conquest of Space was back in business, more or less. In the subsequent three decades some of the more ambitious plans for space colonization were scaled back (there’s still less than ten thousand people on Mars) simply because the Moon, Mars, and the Asteroids are simply difficult and expensive places to keep human beings alive and healthy (and it’s almost impossible on Venus) but space based industry, military installations, spaceship yards, space robotics, etc. continued to expand at a fast clip. Partly this was because Orion launches from earth proper were no longer acceptable: anything that added further to Earth’s radioactive contamination wasn’t really acceptable. (The first Orion built entirely on the Moon, almost entirely from Moon-sourced parts, was launched - from the Moon, of course - in 2047).

And Earth would soon have a way to get into space that wouldn’t require atoms at all, fusion or fission. The first orbital elevator took fifteen years to complete: the second, watching and avoiding most of the errors of its predecessor, will (hopefully) take seven years if it successfully meets its goal for 2069. There is some talk of a third one to be build in the Andean Union (Indonesia is currently looking a bit unstable). The Great Congo League’s bid was turned down, but now they’re talking about being the site for a Reich-only “beanstalk” (most people don’t think the Germans have the capacity to build one on their own, although a fair few worry about them trying and failing disastrously).

The world’s first Starship, the James Cook, [5] is under construction. Earth admittedly had the technology to launch a crude knock-off of the Race’s interstellar ships by the mid-2040s, but after the Race Death Fleet it was decided that any ships sent to Home would have to send a message. (The German proposal to send a message in the form of a one-way starship crashing into Home at half the speed of light was given some consideration and ultimately discarded.) This ship, a joint Global Entente project, with some Japanese participation, is not fusion-propelled: it will be propelled by anti-matter, now being manufactured in automated facilities located on Mercury (for the solar power and the lack of human beings within a five hundred mile blast radius) and shipped from their to the spaceship building yard in the asteroids. It will be equipped with the finest defenses and the most lethal weapons available to current science, and will send the message “DO NOT F**CK WITH HUMANITY.”

RACE TERRITORIES

The Race on Earth has been confined to shrunken “reservations” in areas with dry and desert climates they are comfortable with and few humans previously inhabited in any event. Since these areas were always under Race rule in their days of planetary dominance, many of their cities and infrastructure was already there, and much of the Race didn’t have to move at all. However, the former Race settlement area was much larger and in any event was supported by resources drawn from the majority of the planet’s land surface: and even the Race, expert recyclers that they are, need adequate water supplies for agriculture and their cities. What they now have is not enough to support the close to a quarter of a billion members of the Race on Earth: the Race territories are crowded, thirsty, and economically crippled.

The number of Race members has remained fairly fixed since the aftermath of the Death Fleet. The ability of the Race to increase its numbers rapidly simply by letting more of their eggs hatch is matched by their ability to control their numbers by disposing of extra eggs (Race females do not waste much emotion on unhatched eggs): there are Lizards who argue that the Race would be better off if they shrank their population by a third or more, but so far the fear that humans would take even more of their land if there were less of them has prevented this viewpoint from gaining favor in any of the Race territories.

The dominant overriding desire among the leadership is to try to rebuild, to not give in to despair, and show both to the Big Uglies and members of the Race itself that the Race is still at least an equal, if not outright superior race. With few resources besides sand and sunshine [6], and the desert-habituated plants and animals of their homeworld, the Race struggles to catch up with the human race from a point far below what they were at their height. Relationships with the USA are fairly cordial: the food aid the US provided in the very difficult early years is still remembered with gratitude. Unemployment and homelessness are a problem: the clan support system has been badly damaged by the effects of ginger addiction.

(A cure of sorts for ginger addiction was finally developed in the 2050s, a form of drug therapy that effectively blocked the effects of ginger on the nervous system and controlled the worst of the cravings. Unfortunately, by then the new generation had discovered cardamom. )

The Race territories also lie under the shadow of irredentist human nations, from Mexico to Iran, and most notably the much-oppressed (during the era of Race rule) Arabs. Race territories in the Thar desert area, Balochistan, Arabia, and the Sahara suffer from frequent cross-border raids, missile attacks, and other outrages, to which their ability to respond is limited by their inability to launch serious counterattacks without bringing the wrath of the major human powers down on their heads. (Of late, the nations of the Global Entente have been increasingly sympathetic, given that their major tormentors are mainly non-Entente Islamicist states or allies of the Third Reich).

Economics are complicated: the capitalistic but very rules and law-bound economy of the former Race Empire is being eroded by both top-down technocratic, neo-Socialist modernization attempts and by a rising anarchic “entrepreneurship” copied from the Americans. The current leadership, following a long tradition of Race pragmatism, follows the old adage “it does not matter if a Beffel is green or blue, as long as it catches Tsellepem.”

Most Race cities nowadays have an Old City and a New City: the original pre-Surrender city, and an outer New City for the settlement of Race members expelled from now-human territory. Initially makeshift shack and tent and tin slums/refugee camps, over the last four decades these New Cities have slowly and steadily become more substantially, more geometrical in their layout, and cleaner: the Race have been city dwellers in the main for tens of thousands of years, and even in the depths of post-Surrender depression and poverty, the notion of the Well-Ordered City survived (in their own way, members of the Race are as concerned with "respectability" as any 19th century Londoner. It's just that sex doesn't have much to do with it).

Geographical dispersion and travel difficulties (inter-territory travel is heavily monitored and controlled by the human Powers) means that the various Race territories largely run themselves, although almost all theoretically recognize the leadership of the Australian Territories, which are headed by the chosen successor of ... Atvar’s successor. There are a couple exceptions: the Race territories in former northern Mexico, heavily under direct US influence, have adopted a democratic form of government (not entirely successfully: one party commands the loyalty of most of the population to the extent it has to actually prop up a couple “competing” parties to avoid the appearance of a one-party state. But they’re trying!). More of a problem is the Race territory in what used to be SW Africa, which has seen a takeover by a radical “pro-Emperor” party which refuses to accept the authority of a leadership which betrayed the Emperor and his sacred ancestors by surrendering to the humans. The fact that the Emperor had essentially written them off by sending the Death Fleet makes no difference to these factionalists: it had to be done for the survival of the Race. They are of course under very close observation by the human governments, and have been forced to accept inspections of multiple sites across their nation to make sure they aren’t trying to, say, build an interstellar transmitter to warn Home of human technological progress. There have been violent incidents, and there is fear of military intervention.

(Earth is under something of a “interstellar radio blackout”: Race constructed interstellar transmitters have all been seized, and human governments monitor technology to make sure nobody builds any radio transmitters powerful enough to be received on Home, and efforts have been made to move media transmission in general from broadcast signals to tight beam using satellites and optical cables. Not that the Race has any radio detection arrays powerful enough to make regular TV signals comprehensible at a distance of eleven light years).

MEANWHILE, BACK HOME

Thanks to the speed of light, the Race didn’t find out about the debacle of the Fleet until 2036, which caused something of a panic. There was much claw pointing, although in the end the general consensus was the Fleet had failed because of the absurd hurry with which it had been “thrown together.” (A mere quarter-century from conception to launch!). Still, the very best analyses of the situation by Race scholars was that with the collapse of the immediate Race threat on Earth, the humans would probably turn on eachother again: in the unlikely possibility of their not nuking themselves into oblivion, worst-case analysis predicted a terrestrial invasion no earlier than the terrestrial year 2126. By that time it should be possible to construct defenses capable of stopping alien invaders well away from Home, and assemble a much stronger fleet able to effectively force surrender on the Big Uglies.The costs would be frightful, but bearable if spread out over a seventy year period.

Research, development, and resource and financial accumulation have proceeded well over the last thirty years, and the committee for the Home Defense Initiative boast actual physical construction will be under way in another decade.

The first human starship will arrive in the Race’s home solar system in 2086.

[1] In Soviet Central Asia. Some paranoid Soviets still mumble about the Americans or Japanese “letting missiles through.”

[2] While doing their best to avoid damaging important human cities. The Race leadership on Earth really, really didn’t want to trigger a general holocaust.

[3] (President Camacho at least had his heart in the right place)

[4] The virtual spaces and networks inhabited by the latest, memetic-warfare savvy generations would be very hard for us to grasp.

[5] The name Commodore Perry was a popular early proposal for a name, and there were a lot of jokes about opening up Home for commerce and civilization. Undoubtedly coincidentally, the name suddenly got a lot less popular after the Japanese accepted the invitation to join the project.

[6] The Saharan Race territories make a tidy profit off of selling their solar power to the West Africans.

[7] There was even a short-lived religious movement that held that God was human in form, the Race having been created by a rebellious demiurge. Believers would be reincarnated as humans. Fortunately, religious fanaticism isn’t really a Race characteristic.