- #The road not taken by harry turtledove generator#
- #The road not taken by harry turtledove full#
- #The road not taken by harry turtledove tv#
In 2010, as a result of the 1978 Treaty of Shanghai, space beyond the 100 light year line is divided up into six sectors, extending outwards to infinity across the arm of the galactic spiral. Currently the inner solar system is a nuke-free zone. The Cold War never so much ended as eventually faded into unimportance as both sides found themselves with far too much to chew beyond the sky: the unfortunate General Ripper incident might have brought apocalypse, but the damage was kept to the destruction of Omsk and Columbus, Ohio, and brought about a vigorous mutual disarmament program.
#The road not taken by harry turtledove tv#
However, it was not until 1953 that the crew of a US "space torpedo" (early purpose-made US spaceships tended towards the "heavily armored spindle" design) experimenting with the various geometries of the antigravity field discovered that it could take on more than three-dimensional forms: the story of how, after some very desperate weeks, they managed to navigate their way back to Earth from interstellar space has made for a multitude of books, movies, and TV specials. A B-17E Flying Fortress hastily refitted for vacuum conditions reached the Moon in 1946, and it would not be long before the planets were reached. By 1955, skies over the US and the USSR swarmed with huge flying fortresses ready to repel invaders.Īn outlet for human energies was fortunately found in space.
#The road not taken by harry turtledove generator#
It also made large-scale invasion of the US heartland a relative snap: it after all only took a few horses on treadmills to whirl an anti-gravity generator powerful enough to put a battleship in orbit. The Cold War became frigid even faster than OTL, given the antigravity technology gave the Soviets the capacity to easily transport nuclear weapons to the US right from the start of their production.
(Also, the secret probably could not have been kept long from the US, given the extreme simplicity of the basic mechanism: it only took eighteen months for the Soviets to steal it, after all).
#The road not taken by harry turtledove full#
Some new theories about the structure of space-time seem to offer some hope for an explanation, but since they also seem to indicate that General Relativity is full of holes and there really is no such thing as Dark Matter, the general response from the scientific community has been skeptical.Ī sizeable contingent of the London government, headed by Winston Churchill, pushed for keeping anti-gravity a British secret, for the establishment of a new British Empire In! Space!, but given the economic condition of the UK at the time, pissing off the Americans was in the end too much to risk. (Nobody is building a quantum computer anytime soon in this world, for one thing, and there's no equivalent of string theory: the laser wasn't invented until 1974 due to research going off in other directions). Quantum mechanics has gone off in some very odd directions, most of them dead ends, since 1945, as have theories of gravity, mass, etc. The dark red, somewhat slimy and rather appendage-gifted Ssslethy being rather less cute than the teddy-bearish Roxolani, and the Indian Army of 1945 being a trifle more ruthless than the US army of 2039, none of the invaders survived: however, the antigravity generator for one of their shuttles was captured intact.Įarth scientists have spent the last 65 years banging their heads against the incontrovertible fact that if you arrange copper, quartz crystals, and a piece of magnetite in a certain configuration, and rotate it, you get an antigravity field, in spite of there being no discernable reason why this should be so. In this world, another bunch of pre-scientific aliens descended upon British India in October, 1945, with plunder and conquest in mind, only to run into machine guns, anti-aircraft artillery, overlapping fields of fire, etc.
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