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Description
A cover of this scenario on the alternate history wiki: althistory.wikia.com/wiki/East…

Ok, this is for Nick Griffalco: a map cover for the alternate history wiki's "Easternized World", with various changes reflecting my personal views and prejudices.

It’s a hot, humid, post-global warming world, the sky shimmering with the diamond dust of weather-control mirror arrays, space habitats, and automated robot factories powered by sunshine. It’s crowded, a bit malodorous, glowing with holographic displays and a-scuttle with weak-AI machines in a rainbow of colors.

It’s an Asian-dominated world, deriving from a China that took a sharp turn towards expansionism back in Tang times, helping spur outward the even more expansionist powers of Nihon and Swirijaya, a world where Europe was beaten to the Americas and the Mongol Empire never existed. Buddhism is the world’s most wide-spread religion, and Islam is rather more restricted in range and influence. Butterflies from events in Asia saw Catharism survive in Europe – indeed, it almost became the French state religion at a time Papal/royal relations were at a nadir – and helped keep the Khazars (Alans) in business.

The Americas were settled initially west to east by Japan (Nihon) and China (nowadays the Central Republic), and is very alien from our world’s POV. On the other hand, longer and often close communications between Asia and the rest of the world have led to some interesting cultural backflow, so to speak: the European equivalent of the Renaissance had effects as far east as China, creating the first new Classical-Chinese artistic and architectural fusions since the Hellenistic age. Asian colonialism and semi-colonialism in Europe tied Europe to the Asian Americas, and brought a great outflow of European immigrants.

Technology is more advanced than OTL, with atomic weapons first developed in the 19th century. Lifespans in advanced countries are now over 100, although mutated new diseases continue to develop and there are still occasional scares with much of the population wearing full-body antibacterial/viral protection when venturing outside.

There are colonies on the Moon, Mars, and some bodies in the asteroid belt, and there have been expeditions to the Moons of Jupiter, with primitive life being discovered beneath the ice of Europa. North India or Bharat is particularly keen on space colonization, having failed to participate in the era of colonization on Earth, and they have managed to achieve a number of “firsts” in space.Even the relatively minor states have gotten into the act, with Arabia establishing mining colonies on the Moon and more recently starting to build an enormous radio transmitter to broadcast the Koran (with the Great Sage’s amendations and glosses) to any aliens out there. (More traditionalist Muslims in Ifriqiya and Morocco have started work on a transmitter of their own, to send aliens the _correct_ version of Islam).

Increasingly, society, at least in the richer nations, is moving towards a sort of “rentier” society in which people own shares in the robots which do an ever increasing share of the world’s work. People grumble about the death of the Dignity of Labor, but work for work’s sake has never been as big a thing in this Asian, non-Christian world as in ours, and there is certainly a huge explosion in artistic work and the more intellectually challenging forms of service work. True AI is still an experimental thing, but there are a variety of weak-AI semi-autonomous machines. Oddly, due to different developments in economic and social structures, combined with the very different Malay, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian languages and approaches to an “internet”, what we would call the “web” and “social media” have been rather late bloomers compared to OTL, although by now things have become quite immersive: indeed, direct machine-brain link virtual reality now exists, although it is restricted by most governments in fear that people will become addicted to virtual existence. Since most full-immersion virtual realities tend to still be rather uncanny-valleyesque (as they say, the devil is in the details, and the human body has a _lot_ of senses we rarely notice), this is unlikely to be a big problem for a while yet.

The closest thing to a universal language is the Standard Kanji System, a set of symbols put together a couple centuries back and amended several times since by Nihonese, Chinese and Swirijayan scholars to create a universal written system of communications not dependent on differences in language, and now that memory drugs are widely available, pretty much everyone _can_ pick it up fairly quickly. Of course, now that weak AI translators are getting so efficient, it may become obsolescent even as it reaches its widest global reach…

Europe has largely caught up with Asia and their colonies in the Americas (or the Yoddericks, as they are called by Europeans mangling the original Asian term), but remains a continent of relatively small nations not capable of matching the giants of India, China, or the unified blocks of Nihonese or Malay-speaking states. A unified Europe is one of those things which is constantly in the air, but never quite brought to full realization, and the splits between the Orthodox east and the west, between the former allies of Swirijaya and their former enemies, Catholic and Cathar, north and south, remain problematic.

Atomic weapons are closely regulated since the clash with the East Romans (at the time the the People's Eastern Roman Democratic Republic) nearly consumed half the planet in nuclear fire (fortunately someone had the good sense to shoot the Supreme Leader at the right time) , but there are many more subtle threats nowadays – biological, cybernetic, even memetic – which can be employed for various possibly catastrophic effects. Supposedly the world is “post-ideological”, but there are still religious hardliners, neo-Levelers (“all we needed was better computers and data-gathering methods!”), Nihonese Yamato Supremacists, Chinese who are resentful of brash newcomers like the north Indians or the Miechi, post-humanists, and odder groups, plus vast “underground” societies with their own and often not exactly legal agendas. Many young see the world as a seamless whole, but there are darker stirrings: people look to the rest of the X century (mostly likely a Chinese calendar) with hope, but also trepidation.

Description
A cover of this scenario on the alternate history wiki: althistory.wikia.com/wiki/East…

Ok, this is for Nick Griffalco: a map cover for the alternate history wiki's "Easternized World", with various changes reflecting my personal views and prejudices.

It’s a hot, humid, post-global warming world, the sky shimmering with the diamond dust of weather-control mirror arrays, space habitats, and automated robot factories powered by sunshine. It’s crowded, a bit malodorous, glowing with holographic displays and a-scuttle with weak-AI machines in a rainbow of colors.

It’s an Asian-dominated world, deriving from a China that took a sharp turn towards expansionism back in Tang times, helping spur outward the even more expansionist powers of Nihon and Swirijaya, a world where Europe was beaten to the Americas and the Mongol Empire never existed. Buddhism is the world’s most wide-spread religion, and Islam is rather more restricted in range and influence. Butterflies from events in Asia saw Catharism survive in Europe – indeed, it almost became the French state religion at a time Papal/royal relations were at a nadir – and helped keep the Khazars (Alans) in business.

The Americas were settled initially west to east by Japan (Nihon) and China (nowadays the Central Republic), and is very alien from our world’s POV. On the other hand, longer and often close communications between Asia and the rest of the world have led to some interesting cultural backflow, so to speak: the European equivalent of the Renaissance had effects as far east as China, creating the first new Classical-Chinese artistic and architectural fusions since the Hellenistic age. Asian colonialism and semi-colonialism in Europe tied Europe to the Asian Americas, and brought a great outflow of European immigrants.

Technology is more advanced than OTL, with atomic weapons first developed in the 19th century. Lifespans in advanced countries are now over 100, although mutated new diseases continue to develop and there are still occasional scares with much of the population wearing full-body antibacterial/viral protection when venturing outside.

There are colonies on the Moon, Mars, and some bodies in the asteroid belt, and there have been expeditions to the Moons of Jupiter, with primitive life being discovered beneath the ice of Europa. North India or Bharat is particularly keen on space colonization, having failed to participate in the era of colonization on Earth, and they have managed to achieve a number of “firsts” in space.Even the relatively minor states have gotten into the act, with Arabia establishing mining colonies on the Moon and more recently starting to build an enormous radio transmitter to broadcast the Koran (with the Great Sage’s amendations and glosses) to any aliens out there. (More traditionalist Muslims in Ifriqiya and Morocco have started work on a transmitter of their own, to send aliens the _correct_ version of Islam).

Increasingly, society, at least in the richer nations, is moving towards a sort of “rentier” society in which people own shares in the robots which do an ever increasing share of the world’s work. People grumble about the death of the Dignity of Labor, but work for work’s sake has never been as big a thing in this Asian, non-Christian world as in ours, and there is certainly a huge explosion in artistic work and the more intellectually challenging forms of service work. True AI is still an experimental thing, but there are a variety of weak-AI semi-autonomous machines. Oddly, due to different developments in economic and social structures, combined with the very different Malay, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian languages and approaches to an “internet”, what we would call the “web” and “social media” have been rather late bloomers compared to OTL, although by now things have become quite immersive: indeed, direct machine-brain link virtual reality now exists, although it is restricted by most governments in fear that people will become addicted to virtual existence. Since most full-immersion virtual realities tend to still be rather uncanny-valleyesque (as they say, the devil is in the details, and the human body has a _lot_ of senses we rarely notice), this is unlikely to be a big problem for a while yet.

The closest thing to a universal language is the Standard Kanji System, a set of symbols put together a couple centuries back and amended several times since by Nihonese, Chinese and Swirijayan scholars to create a universal written system of communications not dependent on differences in language, and now that memory drugs are widely available, pretty much everyone _can_ pick it up fairly quickly. Of course, now that weak AI translators are getting so efficient, it may become obsolescent even as it reaches its widest global reach…

Europe has largely caught up with Asia and their colonies in the Americas (or the Yoddericks, as they are called by Europeans mangling the original Asian term), but remains a continent of relatively small nations not capable of matching the giants of India, China, or the unified blocks of Nihonese or Malay-speaking states. A unified Europe is one of those things which is constantly in the air, but never quite brought to full realization, and the splits between the Orthodox east and the west, between the former allies of Swirijaya and their former enemies, Catholic and Cathar, north and south, remain problematic.

Atomic weapons are closely regulated since the clash with the East Romans (at the time the the People's Eastern Roman Democratic Republic) nearly consumed half the planet in nuclear fire (fortunately someone had the good sense to shoot the Supreme Leader at the right time) , but there are many more subtle threats nowadays – biological, cybernetic, even memetic – which can be employed for various possibly catastrophic effects. Supposedly the world is “post-ideological”, but there are still religious hardliners, neo-Levelers (“all we needed was better computers and data-gathering methods!”), Nihonese Yamato Supremacists, Chinese who are resentful of brash newcomers like the north Indians or the Miechi, post-humanists, and odder groups, plus vast “underground” societies with their own and often not exactly legal agendas. Many young see the world as a seamless whole, but there are darker stirrings: people look to the rest of the X century (mostly likely a Chinese calendar) with hope, but also trepidation.