Quantum Cats

I'm in a crazy mappy mood lately: it's been eating up all my spare time... ...BUT I CAN'T STOP!

This one is one of the worlds from Fred Pohl's "The Coming of the Quantum Cats."

Even messier WWI -> worse post-war unrest and social conflict -> violent right-wing counter-reaction in 20s + Great Depression = Red Britain.

Thanks to Lenin living a bit longer, Trotsky gets the lead and succeeds him as Supreme Big Chief, although he is never really liked or trusted by the other major Olde Communists, and after the Industrial Terror fails to achive its objectives is in fact overthrown in the 30's: a coup led from behind the scenes by Stalin, although having taken power by extralegal means he is never able to achieve the absolute power of OTL, and doesn't kill as many people (on the other hand, Trotsky had already done the job of breaking independent-minded peasants for him).

There's no WWII. Hitler is assassinated, and Goering (who taken power after a certain number of heads roll) doesn't want to fight both Britain and the USSR if he invades Poland, even with France neutral. France and Italy and Germany eventually reluctantly kiss and make up in the face of the Spanish-British-Soviet "axis" (which in fact actually largely falls apart by the 50s in the face of ineluctable ideological differences). The Nazi party continues to run Germany for a while, but after Goering dies of a massive overdose of cocaine and cream horns, there is nobody really up to filling his shoes, such annoyances as Himmler having been thrown overboard by this point. There is an army coup and the Monarchy is restored.

Atom bombs are developed, and things get very tense for a while. The British Worker's Republic communizes its colonial possessions, or those it manages to hold onto, anyway, with varying degrees of success. The Soviets get into a war with Japan and drive them off the mainland, although thanks to US and European support Japan manages to at least hold onto Sakhalin and Taiwan and win the air war vs the Soviets. China goes communist, but heavy-handed Soviet efforts to subordinate them to Moscow soon sour the relationship, and the BWR fishes in these troubled waters.

A Soviet-Chinese conflict breaks out in the mid-70s. The Chinese nuclear arsenal is supposedly taken out in a first strike, but Soviet intelligence fails to spot the new long-range missiles, and Moscow and some other European cities are hit. Temporarily without orders, Soviet Missile Command retaliates with brutal force. By 2010 China will have less than 1/2 the population of OTL.

Although only a few million Soviets die, the effect of the strike on the capital is devastating, and the full incompetence and inefficiency of the system comes into view as planning, distribution, etc. break down, and in spite of a good harvest food supplies dwindle across much of the country. US food aid will play a major part in getting through the winter, as a government reconstructed in Leningrad struggles to reestablish order.

The nervous Capitalist world relaxed considerably in the 1980s. The Soviet Union remained in poor shape through the next decade, struggling to reform its battered economy and to recover from the massive internal and external blows to its prestige it had taken. (Russians culture is cut through by the long, painful stuggle to come to terms with having been the perpetrators of the largest mass killing in all of history). The British-led Worker's International Union was still around, but although strong in the Third World it is not the potential military threat that the USSR or (at least in people's imaginations) the Chinese were.

Although the Soviets managed to avoid outright disintegration and managed to get their economy restarted (with a large input of capitalism) by the 90s, this was not too alarming, given that by the same time it was clear the Worker's International Union was increasingly troubled, the British economy's growth sharply slowing, and the Union split by disagreements between Britain and India: the British economy essentially imploded after a series of half-assed reforms in the mid-90s, and the army refused to move from its barracks when "extreme methods" were called for. The hardliners caved in or fled to India, and the British Worker's Republic breathed it's last in 1998.

The Union disintegrated, some bits going with India, others trying to keep the Revolution going on their own, and others undergoing rapid changes of government as the threat of British or Indian military intervention was lifted.

In 2010, it is a fairly mutipolar world. The German Fourth Reich (the Nazi interlude has left behind a still extant, if shrunken, Nazi party and some craptastic public art and architedture) is the dominant state in a Europe joined by a free trade union with a relatively more developed east than OTLs EC, and this may eventually develop into a more united federation if the French and the Germans can work together a bit more effectively. Japan, which includes Taiwan, has some 30 million more people than OTL (women were slower to emerge from their traditional roles here) and remains a tough economic competitor to the US. After several reconstructions, the USSR, shedding some states and rebranded as the Eurasian Socialist Federation (not actually very socialist anymore) is reemerging as a major power. And then there is India, the remaining center of global Communism (the Koreans are a fairly formidable Commie state, but lack the Indians global influence), which is beginning to reach the limits of a command economy in a relatively resource-poor nation, and suffering from violent Muslim unrest as a result of an effort to instill Communism in Afghanistan gone horribly bloody.

The League of Nations is still around, and has in fact since the collapse of British Communism gained in influence and prestige: with US and European and Japanese funding, the UN Peacekeepers are currently doing serious work in some of the messier and more screwed-up parts of the globe.

China is creeping towards reunification, although the world hopes that the two major contending blocks working towards unification won't come to blows. At least none of the Chinese states (currently) is an atomic power.