League of Nations circa 2115

[ffutures]

Is it reasonable to assume that barring catastrophe Weinbaum would have expected the League of Nations would still be around at the time his stories are set, circa 2110-15?

There are very slight hints of a space police service of sorts in The Red Peri; should I think of them as run by the League, or as company police run by the Interplanetary Corporation?

Later Never mind - I just reread the opening of The Red Peri and realised that Weinbaum describes "a blunt little League rocket" coming to the rescue of a ship after it was attacked by pirates, which I think answers both questions - The League of Nations runs the space fleet!

Comments

A Possible Alternate "Near-Future" Timeline for Weinbaum (I)

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Interesting question ...

Weinbaum's stories were written in the mid-1930's, before the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Japanese invasion of China proved the League toothless. Now, this was technically well after the rise of Stalin and even that of Hitler, but a possible AH that lets the League survive goes like this:

October 1935 - Italy invades Ethiopia. The British, a little less trusting than in OTL, decide that this constitutes a threat to their own African colonies, and demand that Mussolini pull back. Mussolini refuses.

November 1935 - The British blockade Italian Somaliland, a ridiculously easy thing for them to do given the relative naval strengths of Britain and Italy, especially in the Indian Ocean. They claim to be acting in defense of the principles of the League of Nations.

December 1935 - Italian forces begin to run out of supplies, go over to the defensive.

January 1936 - Italians suffer a military disaster in Ethiopia when one column, out of supplies and retreating, is annihilated by a major Ethiopian attack.

February 1936 - Coup in Italy unseats Mussolini. The new Government, essentially an oligarchial democracy, sues for peace.

March 1936 - Hitler reoccupies the Rhineland. Unfortunately for him, when the French go to Britain and ask for advice, the British are still riding high on the momentum of their very easy success over Italy, and agree to form a united front to enforce the Versailles Treaty.

April 1936 - Declaring that they are acting "in defense of the principles of the League" without first looking for unanimous support of them, Britain immediately blockades Germany while the French march a division into the Rhineland.

May 1936 - Hitler falls to an army coup. The new government, the "Berlin Republic," immediately pulls out of the Rhineland.

1937 - Observing the events in Europe, the Japanese military becomes more wary of Western military power and decides to move more cautiously in the absorption of China. The Marco Polo Bridge incident never happens.

1939 - Several major trade pacts negotiated, causing an immense increase in international trade. Recovery from the Great Depression begins and over the next few years becomes universal, everywhere save in the paranoid Soviet Union.

1941 - After crippling his own military and economy, Stalin falls to an NKVD coup. Different factions begin fighting. Start of the Second Russian Civil War.

1943 - Germans develop first operational atomic reactor. It is first used for commercial power generation. Since nobody has any bad associations with atomic anything, it is rapidly adapted for other purposes.

1945 - Replacement of old-style Communist regime in Russia with a bureaucratic oligarchy supported by the surviving military. The new Russian Federation remains oppressive, but not madly democidal or insanely aggressive as Stalin had been.

1947 - First atomic marine engine operational. They swiftly displace

1953 - Following 15 years of successful commercial penetration of China and most of the Pacific Rim, a strongly business oriented Japanese government comes to power. The next quarter-century is called the "Period of Rapid Economic Growth," and sees Japan become a Great Power as mighty and respected as any other, without ever having to fight a major war.

A Possible Alternate "Near-Future" Timeline for Weinbaum (II)

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

With this, all the extremist regimes which came out of the Great War have been replaced by saner ones. The immense growth in industrial productivity which in OTL was consumed in the potlatch of the Second World War is instead available for private industry, including industrial research and development.

Consequences include the development of the personal autogyro, the passenger airliner, and the orbital rocketship. When atomic engines get small and reliable enough, they are mated to rocketships, and the consequence is the exploration of Luna and Mars, and the beginning of the interplanetary era described in Weinbaum's stories.

Some science fiction writers speculate about alternate timelines in which the Western Powers stuck to the letter rather than the spirit of the League and did nothing to stop Mussolini and Hitler. It is generally assumed that, in such a world, the economic destruction would have been vast, and whole nations depopulated by aerial bombardment. Certainly, such a sad timeline would never have attained spaceflight during the 20th century!

What do you think? :)

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Oh, to make something explicit. I'm assuming that even with the sort of atomic energy used in the Weinbaumverse, it's easier to reach Luna than it is to reach Mars, and easier to make orbital and still easier to make sub-orbital hops than either. So I'm assuming that sub-orbital and orbital flight begins in or soon after the 1950's, and Lunar flight sometime between then and the end of the century, just as in OTL.

I should probably re-read the stories to see if they give a hard-and-fast time for the first Moon landing in the Weinbaumverse. As Heinlein pointed out, that's one good way to tell alternate histories apart!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

A Martian Odyssey is set "less than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad Cardoza rode on it to the moon." And that's about as close as you get to a date, except for Flight on Titan which sets the landing in 2030 - but none of the other dates it mentions fit into the continuity of the other stories, so I'm ignoring Flight on Titan and going with evidence in the other stories which suggests circa 2000.

Thanks for the timeline - I can't really use it as such, I'm keeping the history as brief and vague as possible, but some aspects of it would fit very nicely into what I've said, e.g. the widespread use of personal gyros, rockets, etc. due to very cheap atomic power.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

On second thoughts some of the early history will go in very nicely, to explain how the League ended up as an effective organization - probably boiled down to a couple of paragraphs rather than a detailed time line.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Hmm, so if "A Martian Odyssey" takes place around 2000, then the early space epxloration timeline would look like this:

c. 1982 - Doheny develops the "atomic blast" spaceship engine.

c. 1980 - Cardoza pilots the first atomic-blast driven spaceship to the Moon.

It isn't mentioned, but it's quite likely that there were pure chemical rockets preceding those, but probably not Moonships. So we could tentatively assume something like

c. 1950 - First unmanned sub-orbital rockets used for research purposes (proof of concept, sceintific study of upper atmosphere, etc.)

c. 1955 - First unmanned orbital rockets used for research purposes (maybe as very simple radio emitters, like Sputnik 1 from OTL).

c. 1960 - First manned sub-orbital rockets as proof-of-concept and rapid courier vehicles.

c. 1965 - First manned orbital rockets as observation craft.

c. 1975 - First manned space stations for communications relay and observation purposes (remember, no advanced electronics so small comsats and recon sats are not possible).

It's possible that some of these carry small atomic reactors to generate power and some maneuver thrust, but not "atomic blasts," which come in the 1980's and are _much_ more powerful (and in their early versions, _dangerous_).

The Powers may have been planning to launch chemical or atomic-reactor type Moonships, but on a slower schedue as there didn't seem much commercial purpose to this, when Doheny and Cordoza betwen them wrought the revolution in interplanetary spaceflight.

Once this happened, there was a much more solid infrastructure already established in space (owing to the much less intense competition and hence less "stunt" ventures). So a Mars expedition by 2000 seemed perfectly reasonable.

Does Weinbaum ever talk about what's on the Luna of his universe? Luna is still probably dead or near-dead, but "near-dead" could include quite a lot of subterranean life, and Luna's a _whole world_ (both in the AH and in OTL). I would see the late 1980's and 1990's as being a time of major Lunar exploration, with extensive Lunar settlement in the early 21st century.

I also wonder about the future of Mars. Tweel's people would obviously be the easiest for us to deal with, as their psychologies were the least alien to our own kind. Did we trade peacefully with them, attempt to shoulder them aside in a colonization program, or cooperate with them against the slinkers and other hazards of Mars? I sort of hope things went well there.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I've given the moon a radioactive waste dump (not at all likely to explode and drive the moon out of its orbit) and some vacuum tube factories, and said that it's otherwise pretty useless.

My timeline runs a bit later than yours, with the first lunar flight 2000 and Mars 2010, and no space stations - Weinbaum never mentions them, and makes it clear that ships fly from planet to planet and land at both ends of the journey, and you just wouldn't do that if you had space stations.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I've given the moon a radioactive waste dump (not at all likely to explode and drive the moon out of its orbit) and some vacuum tube factories, and said that it's otherwise pretty useless.

Admittedly, in a world with a habitable Mars, Venus, Galilean satellites and Titan, Luna is a lot less attractive a site for colonization than in our world. Also, the atomic blast drive gives the Weinbaumverse spaceships much better interplanetary capabilities than real-world ion engines; it's more like a plasma drive.

My timeline runs a bit later than yours, with the first lunar flight 2000 and Mars 2010,

Which would put the first atomic blast around 1992. Most rocketry even in the 1990's would be chemical, with the Lunar flight the first practical use of atomic-blast rocketry (probably too dangerous in its earliest incarnation for ordinary orbital or sub-orbital flight). Between 2000 and 2010 they could have worked the kinks out of the system.

... and no space stations - Weinbaum never mentions them, and makes it clear that ships fly from planet to planet and land at both ends of the journey, and you just wouldn't do that if you had space stations.

With no space stations, you'd instead launch recon or signals sub-orbital or orbital rockets as needed, and then land them at the end of their missions. On Earth or any other well-settled planet, you'd communicate across distances by means of cables; by 2100 I suspect that every corner of the planet would be well-wired (we may be going to this instead of satellite TV and radio in OTL as well). Recon stations would be much less necessary owing to the more relaxed international situation. Recon flights would suffice for high-altitude mapping missions.

Lacking solid-state electronic computers, the capabilities of orbital photography would be far less than in OTL (no computer enhancement of images). They would still be far better than the best high-altitude photographs of the 1930's, and they'd probably be color plates, to boot.

I wonder how good TV is in the Weinbaumverse. It probably exists -- it was pioneered in the 1920's -- but they may not have the precision to beam it across interplanetary distances.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It exists all right, they mention a "Vision star" in one of the stories. I'm giving the typical set a colour 3D display (using the lenticular plastic system) but lowish resolution, and assuming VHF rather than UHF. So no more than six or so channels in the average city.

I don't think that there can be TV off Earth - the cameras and transmitters were hugely heavy in 1930, and Weinbaum seemed to think that even radio transmitters would still be fairly large in his future - in The Red Peri an expedition to the outer planets doesn't take a radio because of the weight.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Re the Martians - I'll be writing the "Mars 100 years after first contact" bit as soon as I'm finished with Earth. I think that the Martians are doing pretty well, now that they have atomic power, and still fairly friendly to humans, but there's been little progress on language etc.. Humans who abuse their friendship, e.g. by looting, are just shunned, and since the abandoned Martian cities are potentially death traps for an unescorted human... well, it might not be pretty.