1980s World By QuantumBranching Watch

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A commission for daniusmaximus on Deviantart: a retrofuture, the 2010s as it might have been imagined in the 1980s.



(In what follows, OTL means "our time line", the world we mostly inhabit)



It's based on (and expands a little on) this old scenario I posted quite a while back:





Mirrorshades (with built-in computer displays) are plentiful and hairdos are elaborate. The climate is hotter and stormier, and the rain pours down on the grimy, towering Cities of Tomorrow.



After overthrowing Gorbachev, the Soviets turned back to their hard-line roots politically, but also took up a weird sort of State Capitalism, with government-backed Soviet mega-corporations now competing with those rooted in Japan and the US for global market share. Although Eastern Europe was lost, the Soviets still play games of political influence and subversion in the area, and are allied with the leftier bits of fragmented China, along with India (which turned hard-left after their atomic war with Pakistan) and the United Socialist States of Central America. The Corporate-dominated US is allied to Corporate-nation Japan as the leaders of the PacRim Association, the world’s most powerful political association, competing with the Soviets and their Statist allies, the EuroFed, the Arab Union, and independent-minded mega-corporations. A decade after the Second Oil War, the Soviet and US-European forces have finally agreed to neutralize West Iran and put an end to the tense nose-to-nose situation that had existed previously.



The PacRim also includes some of the bits of China, South Korea, Australia, etc. The European economic union has expanded into Latin America, expansion to the east being hampered by Soviet maneuverings. Arab North Africa has unified under a nationalist-Islam movement, which makes the Israelis nervous, especially since a pro-unity party has come to power in Jordan. Africa has descended into chaos, and much of the area is run by warlords, mercenaries and Arab-backed Islamic movements, although atomic-weapons armed South Africa remains relatively stable through extreme repression and the use of pacifying drugs on the black population.



The night sky glitters with satellites, Soviet and US and EuroFed military “Star Wars” projects, mega-corporation commercial stations, spy satellites, and stuff nobody is sure who put it up. They are frequently replaced as they malfunction or are destroyed through properly deniable accidents: military fencing and testing of the enemy, corporate warfare, possibly hackers messing with the system. Europe and Japan are more “wired” than OTL: the World Wide Web is even larger and more complicated than in our world, and includes a variety of virtual reality access modes and entire secret parallel systems run by hacker associations and megacorporations, accessible only to those In the Know. The Soviets have their own hackers, and have infiltrated much of the vast network of cyberspace. Autonomous robots are more advanced, and are used in a number of military applications.



The Republicans are more libertarian than OTL, and are less arm-in-arm with the Religious right. Violent crime is worse than in our world, and many houses are now built like fortresses, while the armed guard industry has boomed and gated communities are even bigger than OTL. Most civilians in the US now carry guns or at least tasers or gas grenades. Interpol and other police agencies battle against the Network, the powerful international alliance of Italian, Columbian, Japanese, etc. crime lords.



The major states all have bases on the Moon, although Mars has not yet been reached (too expensive, both the Supreme Soviet and US corporate heads agree). There are a lot of space stations in orbit, many of them on-the-cheap Indian and Soviet models. (Explosive decompression deaths no longer make it onto the front page of newspapers). Japan is a lot wealthier than OTL, never having undergone an economic collapse of comparable scale, and dealing with the population deficit through massive imports of foreign “temp” labor (1/10 of Japan’s population nowadays is foreign born, and some have been there for 15 years or more. Very few have actually become citizens, and they are often harassed by ultra-nationalist Japanese biker gangs. The Japanese restaurant scene is much more varied than OTL.

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Published : Feb 25, 2018