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Description
This is my interpretation of weaverj’s idea of an eternal 1830s-1840s-punk. Many thanks to him and others on my Discord for the ideas.

It is the year 1948, and the Enlightened Collective in Europe is celebrating the centennial of their glorious revolution. Although the Revolution of 1789 failed, it was because the revolutionaries did not go far enough, and allowed their revolution to be corrupted by the tyrant, Napoleon. A century has proved that the Age of Reason has come, but work is still to be done.

The Collective is just that, a collective of revolutionary communes occupying what was once France, Iberia, and the western portions of Germany. The Collective seeks to destroy any old vestiges of oppression, corruption and tradition. Fanatically atheistic, Catholicism has been scoured from the Collective, replacing Bibles with Enlightenment texts, and churches with temples to Reason. Anyone who supported the old order genuinely was sent to the guillotines long ago, although there are a surprising number of “counter-revolutionaries” found every day. The Collective’s communes control all property, with everything a person would traditionally own “held in trust” by that individual in the name of the commune. The Collective is at true Collective, governed by elected representatives from all of the communes. Of course, the value of this democracy is questionable, as these representatives often run unopposed; their opponents often find themselves marked as counter-revolutionaries. However, the communes of Paris and the German cities tend to have far more sway than the others, and can push their pro-urban agenda at the expense of the rest of the Collective. And should any mistakes be made, the Collective’s de facto leadership could always shift blame to somebody else.

If the Collective is the Europe of the poor man, the Imperium is the Europe of the rich man. In response to the Revolutions of 1848, the autocracies of Austria and Russia mobilized to put an end to it. While the Russians and Austrians succeeded in putting down the revolution in Hungary, they could not do the same in the West, which was lost. The toll of the war, and maintaining the police state and military necessary to stop the Collective from exporting its revolution, pushed the Russian and Austrian empires to the brink of collapse. Their solution was a union of the Habsburg and Romanov thrones through an extensive system of planned intermarriages, thus forming the modern Austro-Russian Co-Imperium. Governed by the Tsar-Emperor from St. Petersburg, the CoImperium retains theoretically separate Austrian and Russian governments, although the Imperium’s system places the Tsar-Emperor as supreme leader. The only portion of the CoImperium’s government which is wholly united pertains to foreign affairs: diplomatic staff, and the military, the latter of which is commanded by the Tsar-Emperor personally. The Imperium is a highly stratified autocracy, with a complex system of noble titles above a teeming mass of peasants and serfs. The Imperium spends as much effort policing its own people as it does defending against its enemies abroad, whether it be the Collective in Europe or the British in Central Asia. Only Catholic and Orthodox Christianity are legal in the Imperium; the Pope, for his part, moved to Vienna.

Prussia, an “Enlightened Autocracy,” is a draconian Imperium puppet maintained to be the vanguard army for the Imperium’s forces against any apocalyptic war against the Collective.

The Italian states are divided, although united in their opposition to both the Imperium and the Collective. Ruled by crime families, often appealing to either reactionary or revolutionary rhetoric as it suits them, the Italians are more concerned with their own power struggles than the fight for the soul of Europe.

Britain has cut itself off from Europe, disgusted by both the revolutionary Collective and the reactionary Imperium. It regards itself as the only sane power left in Europe, maintaining its liberal, constitutional monarchy through thick and thin. Britain is the singularly most powerful state in the world, ruling the waves and managing a massive colonial empire. In the colonies, Britain is rather less liberal, preferring to rule directly to teach the “savages” how to live like proper Englishmen rather than backing revolutionary mobs or local kings as the Collective or Imperium would.

The British are trying to prop up the corpse of the Ottoman Empire as a legitimate bulwark against the Collective and the Imperium. It isn’t working.

The United States of America died with a whimper, not a bang. After one too many constitutional crises, it reformed itself into the Commonwealth of America, something in between the Constitution of 1787 and the Articles of Confederation: a unified economy, currency, and a president elected by state legislatures, but little else. States’ rights triumphed, the Commonwealth being little but a defensive alliance and economic customs union, although the constituent parts of America have fought limited wars against each other in the past. As for those constituent parts, the states are all theoretically as sovereign as one another, but they have formed de facto conglomerations which act like full nation-states. These are, roughly, the North, the South, and California.

The North is made up of the free states of America. Highly religious and desperately opposed to slavery, the North is also America’s industrial heart. While they consider the South’s practice of chattel slavery to be inhuman, they have little problem treating the poor descendants of German immigrants as slaves in the factories. The South is made up of the agrarian slave states, ruled by Anglo-Saxon planter families which can trace their lineages back to Jamestown. Aggressively colonial, the South has many ties throughout Latin America, and was the leading force in expanding into East Asia. In fact, the only reason America went to war with Japan was because the South wanted its Pacific empire; the division caused by this war and the subsequent partition of the Japanese Empire between the North and South led to the creation of the Commonwealth. California, once divided between the North and South, eventually became its own power, using the Gold Rush to become a libertarian third bloc in the Commonwealth. It even formed the California East Asia Company, colonizing the parts of the Spice Islands that the British had not already taken.

Mexico is an unstable power, and would be a weak, third-rate one were it not for the division of its northern neighbor. Mexico’s government always shifts between military strongmen aligned with the British or the Imperium, or with revolutionary mobs aligned with the Collective. These regime changes do little to change the actual operation of Mexico’s government, run as it is by corrupt bureaucrats, wealthy landowners and career criminals. The great estate owners establish their own laws independent of Mexico City.

South America, like Europe, is divided between the forces of reaction and revolution. On the side of reaction is the Empire of Portugal-Brazil, an autocratic slave state with a complex racial system that places purity of race as being just as important as the standard racial classification systems of North America. The Emperor of Portugal-Brazil is deeply anti-Collective, as he considers Portugal his true homeland, despite never having set foot on it. On the side of revolution, the children of Bolivar’s revolution. Although more moderate than even the Revolution of 1789, the Bolivarians have fallen into the same trap as the French, and most of their countries have their own Napoleons ruling over them. This hypocrisy is straining relations with the Collective, which initially backed the Bolivarians.

In Paraguay, the government attempts to govern according to what they believe Rosseau would have wanted. In their minds, this means the destruction of all property, and the reduction of man to a state of noble savagery. Funny that the leadership live like Imperial aristocrats.

Africa remains the Heart of Darkness, with disease and dangerous flora and fauna killing European explorers. The harsh conditions of the deep African continent seems to be responsible for the relatively low population and tribal state of the locals: with no respite from the environment, settling down and creating cities and civilization is pointless and impossible. Yet, many European explorers brave Africa. Legends of Eden or Atlantis being deep in the dark continent entice Europeans, while others seek to spread their dogma, escape tyranny, or elude the law.

In the Far East, the ancient nations have been made to bow before Western power. Japan and Southeast are under American control, and India under the Union Jack. China alone is truly independent, and it has followed the CoImperium’s example, maintaining the same culture and traditions as medieval times. Emperor worship has only grown more fanatical, as the Chinese people feel besieged by foreign barbarians. Only China’s massive population – larger than any on Earth – and more pressing conflicts abroad keep the West from conquering China.

The technology of this world is still powered by coal, petroleum oil being a commodity only used in lighting after whales were hunted to extinction. The use of coal has made heavier-than-air flight impossible, and all lighter-than-air aircraft are limited to observation balloons. The railroad is the king of transportation, with rail lines criss-crossing the Imperium and the Americas. The Collective, try as it might, has not created a unified rail system, as its constituent communes could not agree on something as basic as a standard gauge. Automobiles are nonexistent, the closest thing being tracked farm vehicles and weapons of war.

As for weapons, single-shot rifles remain the standard, although they have become more precise and use heavier munitions than their counterparts a century ago. Repeating weapons exist, but are bulky and have to be mounted on chariots or testudos, the local term for the tank. Artillery is the true king of the battlefield, with railway guns the size of houses capable of obliterating entire army formations. It is these massive guns which keeps the border between the Collective and the Imperium stable.

As for communication, the main form of communication is the wireless telegraph. Although limited in range, space travel and satellites being beyond the capabilities of Earthmen, they are capable of being carried on one’s person. Such is the ubiquity of the wireless telegraph that most people know better to type messages using it, rather than traditional typewriters.

Beyond the Earth, there live strange creatures. On the Moon, the vespertillio-homo build their temples and hunt tailless beavers and unicorns, living in a state of savagery not unlike that found in the darkest corners of the Earth. Earthmen have attempted to visit the Moon by the means of giant cannon, but these missions have ended in failure, as no cannon on Earth is powerful enough to break free from its gravitational pull. On Mars, the Martian Empire’s canal system is beginning to fail thanks to centuries of mismanagement, threatening to leave the cities of the desert without enough water to sustain themselves. Unlike Earthmen, the Martians do have cannons that can break free from the weaker Martian gravity, but they have no cause to leave their planet, for now.

Description
This is my interpretation of weaverj’s idea of an eternal 1830s-1840s-punk. Many thanks to him and others on my Discord for the ideas.

It is the year 1948, and the Enlightened Collective in Europe is celebrating the centennial of their glorious revolution. Although the Revolution of 1789 failed, it was because the revolutionaries did not go far enough, and allowed their revolution to be corrupted by the tyrant, Napoleon. A century has proved that the Age of Reason has come, but work is still to be done.

The Collective is just that, a collective of revolutionary communes occupying what was once France, Iberia, and the western portions of Germany. The Collective seeks to destroy any old vestiges of oppression, corruption and tradition. Fanatically atheistic, Catholicism has been scoured from the Collective, replacing Bibles with Enlightenment texts, and churches with temples to Reason. Anyone who supported the old order genuinely was sent to the guillotines long ago, although there are a surprising number of “counter-revolutionaries” found every day. The Collective’s communes control all property, with everything a person would traditionally own “held in trust” by that individual in the name of the commune. The Collective is at true Collective, governed by elected representatives from all of the communes. Of course, the value of this democracy is questionable, as these representatives often run unopposed; their opponents often find themselves marked as counter-revolutionaries. However, the communes of Paris and the German cities tend to have far more sway than the others, and can push their pro-urban agenda at the expense of the rest of the Collective. And should any mistakes be made, the Collective’s de facto leadership could always shift blame to somebody else.

If the Collective is the Europe of the poor man, the Imperium is the Europe of the rich man. In response to the Revolutions of 1848, the autocracies of Austria and Russia mobilized to put an end to it. While the Russians and Austrians succeeded in putting down the revolution in Hungary, they could not do the same in the West, which was lost. The toll of the war, and maintaining the police state and military necessary to stop the Collective from exporting its revolution, pushed the Russian and Austrian empires to the brink of collapse. Their solution was a union of the Habsburg and Romanov thrones through an extensive system of planned intermarriages, thus forming the modern Austro-Russian Co-Imperium. Governed by the Tsar-Emperor from St. Petersburg, the CoImperium retains theoretically separate Austrian and Russian governments, although the Imperium’s system places the Tsar-Emperor as supreme leader. The only portion of the CoImperium’s government which is wholly united pertains to foreign affairs: diplomatic staff, and the military, the latter of which is commanded by the Tsar-Emperor personally. The Imperium is a highly stratified autocracy, with a complex system of noble titles above a teeming mass of peasants and serfs. The Imperium spends as much effort policing its own people as it does defending against its enemies abroad, whether it be the Collective in Europe or the British in Central Asia. Only Catholic and Orthodox Christianity are legal in the Imperium; the Pope, for his part, moved to Vienna.

Prussia, an “Enlightened Autocracy,” is a draconian Imperium puppet maintained to be the vanguard army for the Imperium’s forces against any apocalyptic war against the Collective.

The Italian states are divided, although united in their opposition to both the Imperium and the Collective. Ruled by crime families, often appealing to either reactionary or revolutionary rhetoric as it suits them, the Italians are more concerned with their own power struggles than the fight for the soul of Europe.

Britain has cut itself off from Europe, disgusted by both the revolutionary Collective and the reactionary Imperium. It regards itself as the only sane power left in Europe, maintaining its liberal, constitutional monarchy through thick and thin. Britain is the singularly most powerful state in the world, ruling the waves and managing a massive colonial empire. In the colonies, Britain is rather less liberal, preferring to rule directly to teach the “savages” how to live like proper Englishmen rather than backing revolutionary mobs or local kings as the Collective or Imperium would.

The British are trying to prop up the corpse of the Ottoman Empire as a legitimate bulwark against the Collective and the Imperium. It isn’t working.

The United States of America died with a whimper, not a bang. After one too many constitutional crises, it reformed itself into the Commonwealth of America, something in between the Constitution of 1787 and the Articles of Confederation: a unified economy, currency, and a president elected by state legislatures, but little else. States’ rights triumphed, the Commonwealth being little but a defensive alliance and economic customs union, although the constituent parts of America have fought limited wars against each other in the past. As for those constituent parts, the states are all theoretically as sovereign as one another, but they have formed de facto conglomerations which act like full nation-states. These are, roughly, the North, the South, and California.

The North is made up of the free states of America. Highly religious and desperately opposed to slavery, the North is also America’s industrial heart. While they consider the South’s practice of chattel slavery to be inhuman, they have little problem treating the poor descendants of German immigrants as slaves in the factories. The South is made up of the agrarian slave states, ruled by Anglo-Saxon planter families which can trace their lineages back to Jamestown. Aggressively colonial, the South has many ties throughout Latin America, and was the leading force in expanding into East Asia. In fact, the only reason America went to war with Japan was because the South wanted its Pacific empire; the division caused by this war and the subsequent partition of the Japanese Empire between the North and South led to the creation of the Commonwealth. California, once divided between the North and South, eventually became its own power, using the Gold Rush to become a libertarian third bloc in the Commonwealth. It even formed the California East Asia Company, colonizing the parts of the Spice Islands that the British had not already taken.

Mexico is an unstable power, and would be a weak, third-rate one were it not for the division of its northern neighbor. Mexico’s government always shifts between military strongmen aligned with the British or the Imperium, or with revolutionary mobs aligned with the Collective. These regime changes do little to change the actual operation of Mexico’s government, run as it is by corrupt bureaucrats, wealthy landowners and career criminals. The great estate owners establish their own laws independent of Mexico City.

South America, like Europe, is divided between the forces of reaction and revolution. On the side of reaction is the Empire of Portugal-Brazil, an autocratic slave state with a complex racial system that places purity of race as being just as important as the standard racial classification systems of North America. The Emperor of Portugal-Brazil is deeply anti-Collective, as he considers Portugal his true homeland, despite never having set foot on it. On the side of revolution, the children of Bolivar’s revolution. Although more moderate than even the Revolution of 1789, the Bolivarians have fallen into the same trap as the French, and most of their countries have their own Napoleons ruling over them. This hypocrisy is straining relations with the Collective, which initially backed the Bolivarians.

In Paraguay, the government attempts to govern according to what they believe Rosseau would have wanted. In their minds, this means the destruction of all property, and the reduction of man to a state of noble savagery. Funny that the leadership live like Imperial aristocrats.

Africa remains the Heart of Darkness, with disease and dangerous flora and fauna killing European explorers. The harsh conditions of the deep African continent seems to be responsible for the relatively low population and tribal state of the locals: with no respite from the environment, settling down and creating cities and civilization is pointless and impossible. Yet, many European explorers brave Africa. Legends of Eden or Atlantis being deep in the dark continent entice Europeans, while others seek to spread their dogma, escape tyranny, or elude the law.

In the Far East, the ancient nations have been made to bow before Western power. Japan and Southeast are under American control, and India under the Union Jack. China alone is truly independent, and it has followed the CoImperium’s example, maintaining the same culture and traditions as medieval times. Emperor worship has only grown more fanatical, as the Chinese people feel besieged by foreign barbarians. Only China’s massive population – larger than any on Earth – and more pressing conflicts abroad keep the West from conquering China.

The technology of this world is still powered by coal, petroleum oil being a commodity only used in lighting after whales were hunted to extinction. The use of coal has made heavier-than-air flight impossible, and all lighter-than-air aircraft are limited to observation balloons. The railroad is the king of transportation, with rail lines criss-crossing the Imperium and the Americas. The Collective, try as it might, has not created a unified rail system, as its constituent communes could not agree on something as basic as a standard gauge. Automobiles are nonexistent, the closest thing being tracked farm vehicles and weapons of war.

As for weapons, single-shot rifles remain the standard, although they have become more precise and use heavier munitions than their counterparts a century ago. Repeating weapons exist, but are bulky and have to be mounted on chariots or testudos, the local term for the tank. Artillery is the true king of the battlefield, with railway guns the size of houses capable of obliterating entire army formations. It is these massive guns which keeps the border between the Collective and the Imperium stable.

As for communication, the main form of communication is the wireless telegraph. Although limited in range, space travel and satellites being beyond the capabilities of Earthmen, they are capable of being carried on one’s person. Such is the ubiquity of the wireless telegraph that most people know better to type messages using it, rather than traditional typewriters.

Beyond the Earth, there live strange creatures. On the Moon, the vespertillio-homo build their temples and hunt tailless beavers and unicorns, living in a state of savagery not unlike that found in the darkest corners of the Earth. Earthmen have attempted to visit the Moon by the means of giant cannon, but these missions have ended in failure, as no cannon on Earth is powerful enough to break free from its gravitational pull. On Mars, the Martian Empire’s canal system is beginning to fail thanks to centuries of mismanagement, threatening to leave the cities of the desert without enough water to sustain themselves. Unlike Earthmen, the Martians do have cannons that can break free from the weaker Martian gravity, but they have no cause to leave their planet, for now.