Etherscope Background
The year is 1984. Welcome to the Great Metropolis.
The Great Metropolis, the mightiest city of empire. Not London, the glorious capital of the British Empire, but the industrial monster of the North that has grown out of the industrial giants of Liverpool and Manchester. From it’s towering heights to its scum-ridden floor and stagnant waterways, its over one hundred million inhabitants struggle for survival.
But this is not your world. This world has grown quicker, with less regard for life and at a much greater cost of human suffering. The world is dominated by our ‘glorious’ british empire and all its profits are paid out into the great industries of the North. And the centre of this is Metropolis, the world’s largest city and the place that I call home.
But you may ask how this has happened. It is a good question to ask. From what I understand of your history, there are only a few, yet crucial events in history that have determined our very different paths.
I suppose it all began with Herbert Spencer, a philosopher and friend of Darwin. Just as the world was finally abandoning Plato’s concept of the five elements; earth, air, fire, water and ether, Spencer speculated that these concepts indicated the different interchangeable states occupied by the fabric of the universe: energy, solids, gases and liquids. Fire represented energy, water liquids, air gases and earth stood for solid matter. As such, so Ether remained, the unknown quantity. This changed the direction of research into the nature of ether and renewed funding at a time when the scientific community was beginning to believe that ether was an archaic figment of a Greek imagination.
This probably would have been discounted eventually, but for one key discovery. In 1874 Daniel Wallace discovered Etherspace. Through clever manipulation of magnetic forces, Wallace was able to open a portal into an alternative dimension of reality. This was Etherspace. Wallace’s experiments were soon reproduced by the great universities and institutions. It is fair to say that this is probably the greatest discovery of our history with practical implementations that have changed the world in greater ways than your personal computer, internal combustion engine and nuclear weapons put together.
Ether is the fifth state. It is has properties that would be impossible to describe to a world that is without the boon of its discovery. Etherspace has allowed the development of miniaturisation on a scale vastly beyond anything your silicon chips can manage. It can be vented into an energy source which is both more powerful and more controllable than nuclear fusion. It has enabled the forging of new alloys that are stronger and lighter than anything in your world. In our world, the British Empire had a manned defence platform in orbit before your Yuri Gargarin had even put on his space suit.
The second important difference between our worlds surrounds the events that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In your world, this led to Austro-Hungary declaring war on Serbia. This was closely followed by Germany joining forces with Austro-Hungary and Russia, France and Britain declaring war on Germany and Austro-Hungary. This great war destroyed both Britain and the rest of Europe as world powers and signalled an end to the power of the aristocracy and the raise of worker’s rights, the welfare state and votes for women here in Britain.
However, the Britain of our world was in a much more confidant position after the assassination in Sarajevo. In your world Britain felt the need to stifle German growth and prop up France against the great might of the German war machine. However, the war in Europe was treated largely with disinterest by the British Government. The Germans were not considered a match for the might of our navy. We were confident that we could protect our borders and colonies from any threat. We had our new super-guns, built on Ether technologies. We had taken Gunship diplomacy to new levels and saw the chance to take control of France’s colonies as Germany took control of her homelands.
Our war, known as the Pan-European War, was a much quicker affair in the west. Germany had the military and industrial power to take full advantage of the new Ether technologies and ran over France in under a year. Their massive land dreadnaughts and Aerial battle-platforms strolled through France like a knife through butter. Italy soon followed. However, the war in Russia was a very different affair. The long, heavy winters and vast distances slowed progress. The war soon became a slow and grinding battle of attrition, with the Germans slowly pushing back the Russian forces. Eventually, in 1922, the Germans decided to stop their advances. They had captured the Ukraine and the Black Sea states and decided not to press home into the Russian heartland.
German power was consolidated when, in 1926, the German Kaiser Wilhelm III married the Austrian Princess Sofia. This was a marriage of political convenience and significance, as their Son, Franz Joseph, was declared the heir to both the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, thus uniting them into becoming the Neu Reich; the New Empire. This alliance solidified at a surprising pace. Prince Franz Josef was born in 1928. Emperor Karl I of Austro-Hungary was under pressure in his own country, due to his liberal attitudes. He abdicated in 1929 and declared the baby Prince his heir. Sofia and Wilhelm acted as regents until his eighteenth birthday in 1946. Wilhelm III, whose health was failing at this point, also chose to abdicate and let his son rule the New Reich in its entirety.
In Russia, problems went from bad to worse. The vast numbers of refugees who had been made homeless by the German advance were flooding the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Russian revolution of 1925 came a few years after yours, but the overall affect was very much the same. Josef Stalin became the new Russian leader and they began to resurrect some form of dignity and security from the ruins of their country. The only solution for their refugee problem was to transport vast populations to the far eastern edges of their territory and set up the new cradle of their empire on the northern rim of the Pacific Ocean.
1937 saw a British revolution put down in a most bloody and horrific way. The British workers, denied representation in parliament took heart from the Russian revolution and the communist party organised a massive uprising in the North. However, the Red Jackets had no qualms about putting the revolution down with whatever force was required. They mobilised their new power-armoured divisions into the cities and exterminated anyone in red. This decimated the British workforce and threatened to destroy the empire’s power, but the power and influence of the Eugenics League had been gradually growing since the 1890s. The Eugenics League is an international body that grew out of London in the later part of Victoria’s reign. They believe in perfecting the human race for leadership and providing lesser species, engineered for the purpose of Labour. They practiced their breeding program on themselves and have evolved beyond humanity. They are examples of perfection in human physical and mental ability and can be found in many high ranking positions in Britain, America and Germany. The League provided the British government with alternative workers to make up for the losses in manpower. The Gammas (they considered themselves 'Alphas' and the ordinary humans 'Betas') are genetically engineered creatures, part human and part rodent (mouse DNA has as yet undetermined properties that make it much easier to manipulate than that of iother mammals). Later came the Deltas (mixed with Cannine DNA) and the Epsilons (Equine DNA). They are the new workforce, bred for labour and despised by the human population who have lost their jobs and their futures to the Dogs and Rats and all their kind. The workers had expected aid from the Soviet Union, but none came. Russia had its own difficulties to deal with and needed the help of Britain.
By the 1930’s Japan was on the march. They invaded and captured most of the western coast of china, taking many German and British colonies on the way. They decided against angering the British by Attacking Singapore and Hong Kong as they did in your second world war and turned their attentions north to Vladivostok and other Russian territories, now prospering with their burgeoning population. However, this time the British chose to prop up the Russians. Historians tell us that the we feared that Japan could become a Naval power to threaten our dominance of the pacific. It certainly makes much sense that the Japanese were more of a threat to us than the New Reich, that we could keep happily contained within their European power base.
The Pacific War began, officially, in 1941. As the Japanese pushed North, the British began to pick off their southern-most outposts. Gradually the British began to press towards the Japanese islands. Japan had found little success in Russia, whose main cities had become industrialised and took advantage of ether weapons technologies, sold to them by the British. However, the war was stopped in its tracks as the British looked likely to invade the Japanese homeland. In June 1943 the American fleet sailed to meet with the remains of the Japanese and intercepted the British in the Yellow Sea. The Americans risked a great deal in protecting the Japanese, but the show of strength was enough to make the British concede to a peace treaty. The treaty protected the Japanese interests in Korea and Northern China, whilst leaving the British to keep control of the southern portion of the Pacific. Many Believe that this antecedence by the Americans was backed up with rigorous diplomacy in London. Whatever their methods, the move has granted the Americans a much greater level of security on their Western coast and given them the freedom to consolidate their holdings in Latin America.
Since the Pacific War, a strange cold war has grown up between Britain and America. The border between America and Canada has become rigorously enforced, with neither side willing to risk what an all-out war between these two super-powers might lead. Britain is by far the strongest military power, but America has an economic power base that could threaten the very fabric of the British empire. The New Reich remains a significant power, with the greatest land army the world has ever seen, and often plays America and Britain off against each other.
[part two to follow...]
This sounds like a positively AWESOME setting. I can't wait to see it! And now, the obligitory: when?
