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Description
In this world an alien spaceship with a blue shape-changer and body-snatcher frozen alongside was discovered by a US Antarctica expedition in 1939. It was defeated, but left behind some gadgets it had made to escape: with anti-gravity and an atomic power source, the US intervention in WWII looked rather different from OTL, with US anti-gravity fliers bombing German cities pretty much at will from 1942 onward, from heights where they couldn't be reached, and atom-powered US ships zipping across the Atlantic at speeds that subs couldn't intercept. (The Japanese sensibly stayed out of the war).

The US didn't find a way to use the atomic power process to make big booms till 1949, but the Soviets had stolen the initial secrets even faster than they stole the ones relating to atom bombs OTL, and although it took them till 1956 to find a way to make an earth-shaking kaboom, a chunk of iron with an anti-gravity drive on the other end makes a fine substitute, given a long enough trip through space to build up some speed, so the jingoist calls for taking down the USSR before it could become a major menace were sensibly ignored. Today the major powers (US, the European Confederation, the Greater Soviet Union, and the Empire of Japan) are busy exploring and colonizing the planets.

The colossal glob which is the Soviet Union extends from Poland to central China, and is the world's largest economy, if a lot poorer than the US per capita. The Chinese territories, liberated by Soviet-backed popular insurrection and then assimilated into the USSR over a period of thirty years, have about 2/3 of the total manpower, and are increasingly wagging the Slavic dog, although with the replacement of both Chinese and Russian by universal NewSpeak and the standardization of Cyrillic writing, merging into a universal 'soviet' culture is far advanced.

Since the breakup of the Red International, the realization that depriving the Capitalists of third-world labor and resources simply wasn't going to work if said Capitalists got their raw materials off-planet and refused to impoverished their workers like Marx said they were bound to, the USSR has slowly come to accept Global Revolution isn't coming any time soon. Instead, the USSR has concentrated on turning the planets red (which incidentally serves as a way to put millions of discontented citizens to work somewhere far away from the more docile members of the State). Currently, the Soviet colonization programs are nearly as large as that of all the other states put together.

The Japanese Empire was eventually pushed out of most of China by the aforementioned Soviet-backed popular insurrection, but has held onto Korea and Taiwan, and props up a Capitalist Running Dog regime in Greater Manchuria. Both the Japanese and their Manchurian puppets are very big nowadays on Tradition, Confucius, the Buddha, etc., to appeal to popular hostility to the Soviet "scientific" uni-culture. With about 220 million inhabitants in the Empire proper and another in 350 million in economically unified Manchuria and Thailand, the Japanese Economic Zone is the world's third largest after the Greater USSR and the United States-dominated North American Customs Union. As America has become increasingly alienated from the Soviets over the years, Japanese relations with the US have improved: although the US came close to war with Japan back in the 40s, the slant-eyed little militarist bastards are now welcome as slant-eyed little militarist bastards on our side.

Relations with Europe have decayed a bit. Europe, nowadays dominated by the Franco-Spanish-Italian "catholic axis", has turned increasingly inward and conservative, hostile to US Liberal Technocracy and disinterested in pursuing the Good Fight against Communist influence in Africa and the Middle East. Increasingly Europe challenges the US for influence in Catholic and authoritarian or Techno-Unionist Latin America: there is some talk of the increasingly restive Scandinavians and Brits leaving the Confederation and South Brazil and Argentina joining in their place. Europe also has close relations with the Neo-Fascist Arab North African Union. Austria, Croatia, and the OTL Czech republic are part of the EC. Germany is part of the EC as several smaller states, of which the Southern ones nowadays dominate.

What with Red revolution and Islamic counter-revolution, dictators, rebellions, attempts at empire-building and the occasional mad scientist-adventurer trying to carve out their own space in the wake of the withdrawal of Colonialism, Africa and the Middle East are a mess, although the New Caliph has managed to establish peace and public safety in much of West Africa and Dr. Elton Perry (formerly of Harlem, NY) and his robo-zombies have managed to bring stability to the Congo Basin. Iran is a Soviet puppet, South Africa is large and Technocratic and white-ruled and rather scary, and Israel, after the Jerusalem War of '71, was moved into the Asteroid Belt, where it was a bit less easy to target with suicide spaceships.

India, the Great Neutral, is a loose and peaceable federation, although the Brotherhood of Kali are sworn to bring atomic spaceship Armageddon to the USSR the day Red Horde one crosses the sacred mountains. Their secret bases and installations are scattered across the solar system. Indian sages seek inner knowledge and the powers of the mind rather than better ways to split atoms, and Soviet and US and Japanese agents, hearing weird rumors, have been poking around lately, only to be baffled with annoying skill.
Australia is in the US sphere, and thanks to easy-peasy atomic power providing cheap desalination, rather more populous and green than in our world.

Popular culture is flamboyant and colorful in the US, more conservative and backward-looking in Europe, dull and standardized as a billion mass-produced Happy Faces in the Soviet Union, weird and baroque and decadent in the Empire of Japan (as odd as OTL, but with 90% less pedo-porn). Aliens and alien technology, shape-shifters and body-thieves, are part of universal culture and world entertainment: the mad who think others are aliens, or that they are themselves aliens, are far more numerous than in our world. Many odd religions have sprung up based on Mysterious Messages from space: they are illegal in the USSR and closely watched elsewhere, because they might actually be alien-inspired.

The solar system is different from ours. Mercury is tidally locked, with lakes of liquid metal on the endless dusty plains of its dayside and Plutonian cold among the jagged mountains of its far side. Rich in minerals if unlovely, a number of mining colonies have been established, with the bases usually in the more livable twilight zone while machines are sent into the freezing and baking regions.

Venus rotates slowly, an ocean-covered world, a vast global steam-bath reeking of the sulfide-based life which exploits it's innumerable, constantly bubbling underwater volcanoes. Great barges harvest the medically valuable complex molecules floating in its malodorous oceans, and far above floating cities bob at heights where the atmosphere thins enough to be breathable and to let in enough light to allow the air-filled bubbles of the vegetoids to carry out the photosynthetic portion of their eternally rising and falling life-cycles.

Mars is not too dissimilar to OTL, but there is life: fast-growing, near-vacuum adapted plant life near the poles, sessile in near-indestructible seed form for more than half the year; immensely tough self-insulating "cacti" nearer the equator: weird, iron-tough lichen-like forms scattered throughout wherever even then teensiest bit of permafrost exists. No animals, save some tiny creatures which almost entirely dry out in the cold to revive and feed and breed during the brief polar 'spring.' Harsh as it is, this is the most settled planet, and vast burrows inhabited by identically-uniformed Children of the Revolution now are being extended with nuclear power under the red sands and frozen icecaps. Lesser but still substantial efforts are being pursued by the US and Japan.

The scattered asteroids are variously claimed by multiple governments and some private agencies, but increasingly the stereotype of an asteroid miner is Jewish: the state/corporation of High Israel owns free several of the larger asteroids, and has mining and settlements rights on dozens of others. Not that this is all of High Israel: pursuing their policy of "many, many baskets" Jewish settlements can be found far into the outer darkness of the Solar System.

Jupiter is in fact rich in life, but it is hydrogen-ammonia life, operating under horrendous pressures and as unreachable to human science as in turn it is unable to survive outside of its own atmosphere. There is even a form of intelligence – vast, flatworm like creatures, communicating by radio waves, and slowly building immense structures of crystalline ices for purposes quite incomprehensible to human beings, devices meant to do things and learn things which humans could barely grasp. They care little about the outside universe – which is perhaps to humanity's benefit. Mining settlements occupy a few of the cold moons: anti-gravity makes Jupiter's crushing gravitational attraction a minor issue.

The rest of the outer solar system is similar to OTL: frozen and lifeless. However, there are some scientific bases here and there, and on Pluto, eternally frozen, important research is going on in extreme low-temperature chemical synthesis. And even beyond Saturn the atom-power heated settlements of the Space Jews are to be found here and there, on far-drifting asteroids as well as on frozen moons. The Jews will never be exterminated, and some of the settlers have begun to probe into the vast dark beyond Pluto, (not called that here), where dark worlds roll in the ocean of night.

The Moon, lifeless as OTL, is still quite heavily settled, being after all essentially a hop and a skip away from earth in these days of anti-gravity propulsion. Unlike the other planets, which have been carved up into various national claims (fortunately, they are large enough and settlers still few enough that violent disputes are so far almost unknown), the Moon is international territory, and the International Lunar Commission adjudicates purchases of territory, mining claims, etc. The "Free City" of Luna is the most cosmopolitan place in the solar system outside of Earth proper, and the Soviets have noticed some worrying signs of Lunar patriotism among their settlers.

Description
In this world an alien spaceship with a blue shape-changer and body-snatcher frozen alongside was discovered by a US Antarctica expedition in 1939. It was defeated, but left behind some gadgets it had made to escape: with anti-gravity and an atomic power source, the US intervention in WWII looked rather different from OTL, with US anti-gravity fliers bombing German cities pretty much at will from 1942 onward, from heights where they couldn't be reached, and atom-powered US ships zipping across the Atlantic at speeds that subs couldn't intercept. (The Japanese sensibly stayed out of the war).

The US didn't find a way to use the atomic power process to make big booms till 1949, but the Soviets had stolen the initial secrets even faster than they stole the ones relating to atom bombs OTL, and although it took them till 1956 to find a way to make an earth-shaking kaboom, a chunk of iron with an anti-gravity drive on the other end makes a fine substitute, given a long enough trip through space to build up some speed, so the jingoist calls for taking down the USSR before it could become a major menace were sensibly ignored. Today the major powers (US, the European Confederation, the Greater Soviet Union, and the Empire of Japan) are busy exploring and colonizing the planets.

The colossal glob which is the Soviet Union extends from Poland to central China, and is the world's largest economy, if a lot poorer than the US per capita. The Chinese territories, liberated by Soviet-backed popular insurrection and then assimilated into the USSR over a period of thirty years, have about 2/3 of the total manpower, and are increasingly wagging the Slavic dog, although with the replacement of both Chinese and Russian by universal NewSpeak and the standardization of Cyrillic writing, merging into a universal 'soviet' culture is far advanced.

Since the breakup of the Red International, the realization that depriving the Capitalists of third-world labor and resources simply wasn't going to work if said Capitalists got their raw materials off-planet and refused to impoverished their workers like Marx said they were bound to, the USSR has slowly come to accept Global Revolution isn't coming any time soon. Instead, the USSR has concentrated on turning the planets red (which incidentally serves as a way to put millions of discontented citizens to work somewhere far away from the more docile members of the State). Currently, the Soviet colonization programs are nearly as large as that of all the other states put together.

The Japanese Empire was eventually pushed out of most of China by the aforementioned Soviet-backed popular insurrection, but has held onto Korea and Taiwan, and props up a Capitalist Running Dog regime in Greater Manchuria. Both the Japanese and their Manchurian puppets are very big nowadays on Tradition, Confucius, the Buddha, etc., to appeal to popular hostility to the Soviet "scientific" uni-culture. With about 220 million inhabitants in the Empire proper and another in 350 million in economically unified Manchuria and Thailand, the Japanese Economic Zone is the world's third largest after the Greater USSR and the United States-dominated North American Customs Union. As America has become increasingly alienated from the Soviets over the years, Japanese relations with the US have improved: although the US came close to war with Japan back in the 40s, the slant-eyed little militarist bastards are now welcome as slant-eyed little militarist bastards on our side.

Relations with Europe have decayed a bit. Europe, nowadays dominated by the Franco-Spanish-Italian "catholic axis", has turned increasingly inward and conservative, hostile to US Liberal Technocracy and disinterested in pursuing the Good Fight against Communist influence in Africa and the Middle East. Increasingly Europe challenges the US for influence in Catholic and authoritarian or Techno-Unionist Latin America: there is some talk of the increasingly restive Scandinavians and Brits leaving the Confederation and South Brazil and Argentina joining in their place. Europe also has close relations with the Neo-Fascist Arab North African Union. Austria, Croatia, and the OTL Czech republic are part of the EC. Germany is part of the EC as several smaller states, of which the Southern ones nowadays dominate.

What with Red revolution and Islamic counter-revolution, dictators, rebellions, attempts at empire-building and the occasional mad scientist-adventurer trying to carve out their own space in the wake of the withdrawal of Colonialism, Africa and the Middle East are a mess, although the New Caliph has managed to establish peace and public safety in much of West Africa and Dr. Elton Perry (formerly of Harlem, NY) and his robo-zombies have managed to bring stability to the Congo Basin. Iran is a Soviet puppet, South Africa is large and Technocratic and white-ruled and rather scary, and Israel, after the Jerusalem War of '71, was moved into the Asteroid Belt, where it was a bit less easy to target with suicide spaceships.

India, the Great Neutral, is a loose and peaceable federation, although the Brotherhood of Kali are sworn to bring atomic spaceship Armageddon to the USSR the day Red Horde one crosses the sacred mountains. Their secret bases and installations are scattered across the solar system. Indian sages seek inner knowledge and the powers of the mind rather than better ways to split atoms, and Soviet and US and Japanese agents, hearing weird rumors, have been poking around lately, only to be baffled with annoying skill.
Australia is in the US sphere, and thanks to easy-peasy atomic power providing cheap desalination, rather more populous and green than in our world.

Popular culture is flamboyant and colorful in the US, more conservative and backward-looking in Europe, dull and standardized as a billion mass-produced Happy Faces in the Soviet Union, weird and baroque and decadent in the Empire of Japan (as odd as OTL, but with 90% less pedo-porn). Aliens and alien technology, shape-shifters and body-thieves, are part of universal culture and world entertainment: the mad who think others are aliens, or that they are themselves aliens, are far more numerous than in our world. Many odd religions have sprung up based on Mysterious Messages from space: they are illegal in the USSR and closely watched elsewhere, because they might actually be alien-inspired.

The solar system is different from ours. Mercury is tidally locked, with lakes of liquid metal on the endless dusty plains of its dayside and Plutonian cold among the jagged mountains of its far side. Rich in minerals if unlovely, a number of mining colonies have been established, with the bases usually in the more livable twilight zone while machines are sent into the freezing and baking regions.

Venus rotates slowly, an ocean-covered world, a vast global steam-bath reeking of the sulfide-based life which exploits it's innumerable, constantly bubbling underwater volcanoes. Great barges harvest the medically valuable complex molecules floating in its malodorous oceans, and far above floating cities bob at heights where the atmosphere thins enough to be breathable and to let in enough light to allow the air-filled bubbles of the vegetoids to carry out the photosynthetic portion of their eternally rising and falling life-cycles.

Mars is not too dissimilar to OTL, but there is life: fast-growing, near-vacuum adapted plant life near the poles, sessile in near-indestructible seed form for more than half the year; immensely tough self-insulating "cacti" nearer the equator: weird, iron-tough lichen-like forms scattered throughout wherever even then teensiest bit of permafrost exists. No animals, save some tiny creatures which almost entirely dry out in the cold to revive and feed and breed during the brief polar 'spring.' Harsh as it is, this is the most settled planet, and vast burrows inhabited by identically-uniformed Children of the Revolution now are being extended with nuclear power under the red sands and frozen icecaps. Lesser but still substantial efforts are being pursued by the US and Japan.

The scattered asteroids are variously claimed by multiple governments and some private agencies, but increasingly the stereotype of an asteroid miner is Jewish: the state/corporation of High Israel owns free several of the larger asteroids, and has mining and settlements rights on dozens of others. Not that this is all of High Israel: pursuing their policy of "many, many baskets" Jewish settlements can be found far into the outer darkness of the Solar System.

Jupiter is in fact rich in life, but it is hydrogen-ammonia life, operating under horrendous pressures and as unreachable to human science as in turn it is unable to survive outside of its own atmosphere. There is even a form of intelligence – vast, flatworm like creatures, communicating by radio waves, and slowly building immense structures of crystalline ices for purposes quite incomprehensible to human beings, devices meant to do things and learn things which humans could barely grasp. They care little about the outside universe – which is perhaps to humanity's benefit. Mining settlements occupy a few of the cold moons: anti-gravity makes Jupiter's crushing gravitational attraction a minor issue.

The rest of the outer solar system is similar to OTL: frozen and lifeless. However, there are some scientific bases here and there, and on Pluto, eternally frozen, important research is going on in extreme low-temperature chemical synthesis. And even beyond Saturn the atom-power heated settlements of the Space Jews are to be found here and there, on far-drifting asteroids as well as on frozen moons. The Jews will never be exterminated, and some of the settlers have begun to probe into the vast dark beyond Pluto, (not called that here), where dark worlds roll in the ocean of night.

The Moon, lifeless as OTL, is still quite heavily settled, being after all essentially a hop and a skip away from earth in these days of anti-gravity propulsion. Unlike the other planets, which have been carved up into various national claims (fortunately, they are large enough and settlers still few enough that violent disputes are so far almost unknown), the Moon is international territory, and the International Lunar Commission adjudicates purchases of territory, mining claims, etc. The "Free City" of Luna is the most cosmopolitan place in the solar system outside of Earth proper, and the Soviets have noticed some worrying signs of Lunar patriotism among their settlers.