The World of 6-Commando
The state of the world in the year 1997 is unstable, at best. Early in the century, a Great War lasting over a decade bled the world white, and culminated in revolutionary bloodshed in Russia, China and Eastern Europe. The great powers realized that a second direct confrontation of that kind would mean the end of civilization, and that the only answer was to establish a balance of power to forestall such a conflict for as long as possible.
Thus, three gigantic superblocs developed, divided by ideology and geography. The UNA, an alliance of Western nations, calls itself the defender of the world’s Democratic ideals. The FSR, a conglomerate of Socialist states, claims to be struggling for the liberation of the world’s underprivileged classes. The Nonaligned Movement, dominated by the South American Coalition and the Arab League, is a loose confederation of states that claim to want no part of the Cold War.
Between these states lie areas of constant political and social upheaval called Disrecognized Zones. In these areas, the three power blocs fight out their disputes by proxy, with little regard for the misery inflicted upon the hapless inhabitants of these perpetual warzones. For eighty years, this has allowed the three alliances to defuse many political and ideological tensions, but recent developments threaten to upset this delicate balance of power.
Katanga, India, UNITA, and other newly-formed nation-states in Africa and Asia have grown weary of the constant devastation of their lands, and are starting to rise up and take their place as independent countries. As their buffer zones shrink, the superstates are beginning to confront each other directly for the first time since the Great War, and the threat of all-out conflict on a truly global scale has suddenly become very real.
Is 1997 the correct year?
It is indeed. The story is occurring in the late 1990’s. You may also notice that although there was a Great War, there was no World War II.
–M
Hmmm…for some reason (probably my own brain reading something that wasn’t there), I thought it was roughly 100 years into the future.
interesting place to change world history. it also makes sense, delay US entering WWI and it could have turned out this way. so kudos there.
It’s something I’ve often thought about, actually, as the U.S. entry into the Great War was pretty much the country’s “coming out” party on the global scene, and set the precedent for American interventionism (and sometimes, interference) on other continents. Also, as in the 6-Commando world there was no World War II, they live in a society that has never truly come face to face with its own mortality, as our world did after the atomic bombing of Japan. Thus, they’ve spent a century developing enormous stockpiles of weapons, including atomic bombs and missiles, and put them all over the place. They know how destructive they are, but they have no frame of reference for understanding what would really be likely to happen if they started using them in an all-out war. That’s kind of why the characters have a World War I mentality about what they’re doing in Africa – they have high technology that has actually begun to outstrip their own ability to understand it.
–M
I really must say that is a well thought out world. kudos. and you can be sure I’ll be reading every update.
I’m also gonna spin for a second, since learning about this really got my mind turning, and I’m the kind of guy that likes to have practical reasons for everything (if you feel like I’m going too far, or thinking too much, tell me to shut up.)
and this world has seen an 80 year cold war, since without actual images of the devastation from the nukes the button really could be pressed. (in our own world, I believe the cold war ended because no one believed the other guy was crazy enough to actually unleash that kind of destruction again) since they are in a near constant state of near war, technology grew quickly. leading to where they are today technology that is a bit ahead of us today.
with the amount of places for proxy wars shrinking the 6-commando world is quickly reaching the point where there will be another great war. which will most likely involve the big red button. and that would be bad, since I’m guessing they are at a point of mutually assured destruction.
OK… that is more thinking and typing than I planned on doing… shutting up now.
***edit to prior statement***
I know the cold war ended for more than the fact that no one was crazy enough to press the big red button, and that it had to do with a number of reasons, one of which is the soviet economy could not maintain the proxy wars. sometimes I forget to engage brain-mouth (or finger) filter and spew what is in my mind.
and I don’t know why, but I really want to understand the political aspects of the world… again it is a good one.
I’m actually really pleased that you guys are thinking about the background – alternate history is a passion of mine. And you’ve basically hit it right on the nose, Seriann – in this world, technology has gone ahead in the military sphere because of constant but low-intensity warfare. But in other areas, the people of the 6-Commando world are profoundly backward as a reuslt of this limited form of imagination. For one thing, they have never developed atomics for any other purpose but weaponry – they have thousands of atomic bombs, but still burn coal and oil for fuel. A lot of things that don’t show up in the story are crucial later, as well: medical science is backwards, as is social and political progress. Education is geared very heavily towards military training, and engineering pursuits that benefit the arms race, while the humanities have suffered – especially political science and philosophy. Computer technology has only been applied to civilian life in very limited ways (personal computers exist but are very expensive and are purely data-oriented – so much for internet TV!), and most computers and software are kept as state military secrets. The most advanced country, in my imagination, is the Southern Coalition, which has developed a relatively peaceful society but managed to remain aloof from the international conflicts, but even they live an austere kind of existence compared to our own, one which would more readily tally to the United States in about 1960 in our world, comparatively speaking.
A lot of this story has to do with my own childhood, growing up in the final days of the real Cold War, when we really had a great deal of anxisty in the United States that the Soviet Union might go wildly out of control and lash out against the West in its death throes. I remember the goings-on in Afghanistan and Berlin when I was a kid, and how desperate the Soviets were getting, and we really believed that things might just get out of hand. The science fiction I grew up on was decidedly dystopian, and this is my little take on the genre. I chose 1997 as they year for the story to begin mainly because that was when I was finishing high school, and in this world, would probably have been sent trudging off in a battlesuit through some desertified Disrecognized Zone.
–M
they say that we write what we know.
I was too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall (I was alive for it, but at 2 you really don’t remember much) I do remember having U.S.S.R. on the globes until the end of middle school. and since I’m a history buff I found it fascinating. Admittedly I was always a bit more interested in WWII, that was always a bit more cut and dried. the cold war had all sorts of interesting twists and turns. the will they do it, won’t they tension and the ideological differences.
I do have one comment, if you wouldn’t mind a little constructive criticism. I’m doing a little better on that brain/mouth filter problem.
on second thought ignore what I said about having a comment. it falls into the category of nitpicking, and since I hate when people do that I better not turn into one of those.
apparently I still have work to do on the brain/mouth filter
I love a well thought out parallel world. This one is. I am just puzzled by one thing. Why was there a need to create doomsday bombs aka nuclear weapons if there never was a life and death struggle of some version of World War II? Was it the paranoia that did it?
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One parallel I worked on had a different kind of second world war. Just imagine Japan and the Polish Empire at war. Germany never went Nazi. (They immigrated en mass to S. America to set up shop in what was once Paraguay.) And the Japanese never attacked Hawai’i since they decided to go fully north and not south. (They attacked the Panama canal instead.)