Wertham

This Earth's deviation began in the mid-1700s, when backlash and criticism of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" swept England in a moral crusade. The result was a series of laws banning not merely satire or offense, but any use of "fanciful perversions of reality". A crusade for "realism" in art and literature swept first England, then Europe, and was of course carried forth to colonial territories. By the 1800s, virtually anything except the most banal of fiction was forbidden, and even that had to contain "educational" material. (This, of course, did not apply to the "undoubted truth" of the Bible, but works which attempted to expand on it in any way, such as the Divine Comedy, were banned.) Art needed to be accurate; any hint of something behind the simple capture of reality would lead to severe consequences. Even metaphors and idioms became suspect; how can one 'let the cat out of the bag' without an actual cat and bag?

The natural consequence, of course, was a tremendous slowdown in all forms of progress. The breach opened in this world's 2021, to a midwestern town that was apparently in the early 1900s, technologically. The only libraries were at universities, heavily restricted, and containing reference material only. Events similar to the American and Russian revolutions, the two world wars, and so on, occurred to some degree, creating a mostly recognizeble 'present day', though the specifics were highly varied.

Except as a very minor pawn in the growing transdimensional cold war, there is little interest in Wertham amongst Baseline governments or corporations. While human rights advocates are suitably horrified, there are worlds with active genocide and global slavery out there to save; this has to wait. The one exception is a coalition of librarians, sci-fi fans, and artists who have begun sneaking in both classic tales of myth and lore, and material from Baseline's 19th and early 20th centuries, from Frankenstein to Burroughs, all slightly edited to fit Wertham's history, with the hope of triggering cultural change.

World Type

Alternate History

Divergence

1730s

Current Year

2022