Sunday, May 17, 2026

50 More Alternate History Divergence Points

First installment

THE TROUSERS OF TIME HAVE SPLIT AGAIN

  1. Aleister Crowley successfully summons his guardian angel at Boleskine House; it immediately reduces him to constituent atoms and irradiates over a hundred square kilometers of Scottish countryside by presence alone.
  2. A confederation of eastern hunter-gatherers and surviving neanderthal tribes successfully blocks Yamnaya migration into Europe.
  3. Brief but peaceful contact is made with a team of alien academic observers in Australia c. ~14,000 BCE.
  4. The excavation of Troy is handed off to literally anyone besides Heinrich Schliemann.
  5. Five volumes of Emperor Claudius’ Tyrrhenika are discovered in a Lombard monastery, April 1378.
  6. H.P. Lovecraft is drafted into the US army and dies on March 29, 1918 during the Battle of St. Quentin.
  7. The Indian Plate migrates slower than in baseline, and has not yet collided with Asia by the time humans evolve.
  8. Basque sailors discover a chain of islands west of the Azores in the early 1400s, which is swiftly called Atlantis by continental scholars.
  9. Some absolute mad bastard of a Soviet linguist spends 40 years documenting Siberian languages in exhaustive detail, providing much firmer support for the Dene-Yeneseian hypothesis.
  10. An anonymous Spanish clergyman, by some miracle of conscience, squirrels away 15 Maya codices that remain untouched until 1954.
  11. A relatively small and relatively slow meteor hits the northern Atlantic Ocean in 1701, causing relatively catastrophic tsunamis.
  12. Catherine Eddows fends off her attacker in the early morning of September 30th 1888, fracturing his skull, collarbone, and three vertebrae with a brick in a stocking; “Jack the Ripper” is found dead later that day.
  13. A few clades of trilobites make the jump to land and/or freshwater and survive to the present day.
  14. OH JESUS CHRIST SEA SCORPIONS NEVER WENT EXTINCT EITHER
  15. Han dynasty scholars mostly-accurately reconstruct several dinosaur species.
  16. Jimmy Hoffa’s body is found in 1990, having been stuffed inside the freezer of a Wendy’s franchise in Jersey City.
  17. The Rosetta Stone is never lost.
  18. The United States forgoes the use of nuclear weapons on Japan.
  19. The 1998 Copyright Extension Act fails to pass.
  20. Pre-Socratic philosophers devise a preliminary germ theory as an offshoot of atomism, where sickness is caused by harmful atoms entering the body.
  21. Percival Lowell doesn’t jump to conclusions.
  22. Mongol invasion of Japan finds initial but unsustainable success.
  23. Alexander the Modestly Accomplished dies to an errant slingstone in 330 BC, toppling his Persian campaign.
  24. Early church fathers are somehow persuaded to approve the practice of same-sex unions, on the grounds that it’s technically not called a marriage and the participants definitely promised to remain celibate.
  25. Queen Victoria dies of tuberculosis in 1839.
  26. Star Wars isn’t saved in the editing room, and achieves only modest success; its sequel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, flops hard enough to shutter the franchise.
  27. Tolkien ends up finishing and publishing that sequel novel to LotR.
  28. Constantinople remains Constantinople, and does not become Istanbul.
  29. Old New York remains New Amsterdam, and does not become New York.
  30. Henry VIII decides it’s easier to just institute inheritance by adoption.
  31. CPR invented by Abbasid physicians c. 900.
  32. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms fail to establish the Commonwealth; Ireland and Scotland remain independent.
  33. Someone slightly to moderately less bigoted than Joseph Campbell serves as early science fiction’s tastemaker.
  34. Christianity flounders in the Mediterranean and survives primarily in central Asia and India.
  35. Sino-Soviet split never occurs. 
  36. Monotremes make up ~1/4 of all mammal species on Earth.
  37. Alien transmissions are detected nearly as soon as radio telescopy is introduced.
  38. Major eruption of the Yellowstone hotspot in 1803.
  39. Hawaii remains an independent kingdom.
  40. Publication of Malleus Maleficarum is banned by the Church.
  41. Elder Thing arcology detected during Artemis II lunar flyby.
  42. USAF pursues 2003 “Rods from God” satellite weapons program.
  43. A semi-successful IAL takes off through connections to the various early 20th century New Age movements.
  44. Piltdown Man is immediately clocked as a hoax and gains minimal publicity.
  45. Robert E. Howard dies of a stroke in 1982.
  46. A series of mass shooting in the 1970s lead to a semblance of American gun control laws.
  47. Common Brittonic isn’t displaced by Old English.
  48. Augustine of Hippo remains a Manichaean.
  49. Penicillin is discovered decades later.
  50. Hokkaido maintains independence.

Or all of them at once, as usual.

2 comments:

  1. It's been long enough since the last one that I had several I needed to cut for just being reworded repeats.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Soviet Polyus spacecraft successfully deploys.

    David Lynch doesn't get a headache that day, is in a good mood, agrees to direct Return of the Jedi.

    Cornwall gets a devolved government alongside Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

    Slobodan Milosevic comes down with a bad case of food poisoning, can't go to Kosovo to address Serb ethnic tensions, Dragisa Pavlovic is sent in his place.

    Kangaroos are sapient by the time Europeans find Australia.

    ReplyDelete