@Alon@ww3real If you're looking for concrete arguments: the biggest downside of the WW3Real format is that it's hard to maintain context for the overarching narrative when it arrives in tiny pieces spread throughout the day. That doesn't make it a bad idea, but it is a bit more challenging to read than a regular book.
(This is reminding me of the hypothetical I sometimes revisit where Europeans in the New World saw themselves as immigrants rather than conquerers; in that world I might be a native speaker of Anishinaabemowin.)
@kechpaja@ww3real Yeah, and I'm also more than a year behind on uploading the narrative to AO3 (which requires some annoying error fixes, including one I found going back to 2034 that I don't think the AO3 upload fixed).
@Transportist@paninid@ww3real Toronto might not even exist as a city, and certainly doesn't as a major one. Its history in OTL is that first of all, Ontario was settled by American loyalists, and second, Toronto was chosen as the capital instead of Niagara-on-the-Lake for safety from an American attack. Ontario presumably still eventually gets settled in the same wave as the Midwest, but its main cities are *Niagara Falls, *Welland, *London, *Hamilton, *Kitchener, and especially *Windsor.
@Transportist@paninid@ww3real (In contrast, in the West, *Vancouver is much larger than in OTL, as the main Pacific port in British North America and as the natural ending point of transcontinental railways; in OTL the only reason for there to be railroads going north of the Great Lakes instead of South is the US-Canada border, so in any timeline in which that is not an international border, transcontinentals go via Chicago but cross the Rockies north of 49° N, where the passes are lower.)
@paninid@Transportist@ww3real No. Spain loses its American colonies, on schedule with OTL, as does Portugal; Latin America's history is parallel, except no Mexican-American war, so Mexico stays in control of California and Texas. This in turn changes Spain and Portugal's history: they try to form confederations with their American ex-colonies, figuring that if they were pluricontinental like the UK they'd be as rich, and this fails and makes them poorer, both a bit poorer than OTL's Portugal.
@paninid@Transportist@ww3real France hangs on to Louisiana (captured from Spain in the early Napoleonic Wars; the UK doesn't seize it, in order to spite the American back-country). But it doesn't settle it much; at the end, areas upstream of about Arkansas end up as independent indigenous states, while Louisiana proper (inc. Arkansas) ends up as an independent middle-income multicultural state with an economy based on gambling tourism, sex tourism, oil, and Mississippi exports.
@Alon@paninid@ww3real So what happens to media and silicon valley and defense technology if California and the southwest is Spanish? Does technology depend on Common Law. Will there be parallel developments elsewhere, is technology a few decades behind?
@Transportist@paninid@ww3real Parallel developments elsewhere. In OTL, the American tech industry was concentrated in the Northeast until Bill Shockley moved back to Palo Alto to be near his mother. In this timeline, there is a tech industry, with clusters in London, Detroit, and Seattle/*Vancouver. Defense works differently - after the Anglo-Japanese War (1943-6), the UK settles on spending 4-6% of GDP on the military year in, year out, with no event comparable to the breakup of the USSR.
@paninid@Transportist@ww3real Mostly. One big exception is that there's less late-19c German immigration, and more Irish migration in lieu of mass death from famine. In 1900, the population of British North America is marginally less than OTL's US + Canada in 1900; there's much more divergence post-1950 in that there's much less of a baby boom.
@paninid@Transportist@ww3real In Europe: no world wars. Closest equivalent is when *fascist Italy gets too excited about wars and gets overrun by France and Germany within months. In Asia: the Anglo-Japanese War works pretty similarly to WW2. Nuclear tech: not sure yet, but certainly no wartime use of nuclear weapons.
@paninid@ww3real@Transportist@Alon I gotta say, this is very well thought out, and possibly more interesting than The Man In The High Castle. It deserves a comic book treatment, I think. Wait--do comic book superheroes exist without American culture as we know it?
@colby@paninid@ww3real@Transportist ...I am assuming they do, because the origin story of the superhero comic is "Jews feel powerless against global anti-Semitism." There is no Holocaust in this timeline but there are plenty of pogroms. I can even see Golden and Silver Age parallels, with the Silver Age comics maintaining a certain moralism of reminding the readers that Koreans, Vietnamese, and Thais are allies and should be treated respectfully.
@Alon@Transportist@paninid@ww3real so in this, the railways jump up to the now Winnipeg, and then go in to gather all the wheat in the Prairies then proceed through the various passes?
@chrisbegley@Transportist@paninid@ww3real Some do, yeah. Some go along alignments similar to those of OTL's Northern Pacific/Great Northern/Milwaukee; the Dakotas and Montana get bought from France/conquered from the Indians for rail development.
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