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"A startling number of alternative histories wind up strengthening the marginal technology of airships and zeppelins, for example. This is a matter of flavor rather than logic, but this is a game book, after all." - GURPS Infinite Worlds

If your characters have entered a parallel universe that's just a few steps removed from our own, the fastest way to establish it is by sticking a whopping great zeppelin in the sky.

In our world zeppelins and other airships lost popularity during the 1930s after a series of catastrophic crashes culminating in the firey Hindenburg disaster, largely because advances in other aircraft technologies rendered them obsolete except as novelties. More recently airships have made a bit of a comeback for applications such as advertising, logging, non-perishable bulk transport and scientific research where airships' strengths in vertical flight, long range, fuel economy and relative silence outweigh their obvious disadvantages.

So by filling up Earth 2 with bulbous aircraft rather than hovercars or spaceships, you are suggesting a world that is of a similar time period to our own, but just happened to follow a different technological route. It also helps that they have lots of Steam Punk cred and are sufficiently olde-worlde to be used in fantasy stories too. They are also cool.

Alternatively, the zeppelins are just there to show the audience that the movie is set in another world, even if nobody from our world crosses over into it.

Alternatively, you could make the whole sky different. This works, too.

Also see Airborne Aircraft Carrier, Cool Airship, and Floating Continent.

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Examples:

Anime

• Done with a powerful kick in Fullmetal Alchemist: After falling through the Gate, Edward finds himself in a world with zeppelins in the sky... but it's our world: London, mid-WWI.
• Also done in Last Exile (though it turns out that said zeppelins are actually heavier-than-air ships made to float with the use of Applied Phlebotinum conveniently supplied by a neighboring society that happens to possess somewhat more advanced technology).
• Zeppelins and blimps (along with windmills, solar power, and other eco-friendly technologies) are a big part of the "just like ours only better" world of Pokemon
• Castle In The Sky
• Kikis Delivery Service has a huge polar exploration zeppelin as befits its Retro Universe setting. It also crashes spectacularly, proving that Kiki's world, while different, is not all that different from ours.

Comic Books

• One of the more obvious differences in the Watchmen universe (which departed from our own when a genuine superpowered being came into existence in the aftermath of WW2 and singlehandedly won the Vietnam war for America) is the huge zeppelins that hang in the air over New York.
  • Explicitly justified, because Doctor Manhattan can synthesize helium in large enough volumes to make airships safe and cheap. Electric cars become ubiquitous for similar reasons.
    • Dang, It seems like the only reason that world changed is because of Manhattan, not the existence of comic book superheroes. Manhattan wins the Vietnam War for the US, Manhattan is the only thing between Russia and the US going into WWIII, until Ozymandias' plot came to fruition, and he's even changed the modus operandi of air flight! The guy's everywhere!
• The Invisibles by Grant Morrison has some of these early on when Dane and Old Tom trip their way to another London.

Film

• The (rather loose) film adaptation of The Borrowers has numerous indicators that is set in a mid-Atlantic Retro Universe, not least of all being the constant presence of one or more zeppelins in the sky. Note: this is not the good version with Ian Holm, which is zeppelin-free.
• Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow (2004), set in a Diesel Punk version of 1939, opens with the Hindenberg III docking with the Empire State Building. While the building was in fact designed with a mooring mast the idea was dropped after tests with a U.S. Navy airship showed that wind turbulence caused by the surrounding skyscrapers made it too hazardous.
• The film adaptation of The Golden Compass features airships in the establishing shots of the alternative Oxford.
• In the film of the book Stardust Robert DeNiro plays the captain of the airship Caspartine.
• Despite being set in 2019, the Los Angeles of Blade Runner appears to be infested with zeppelins, most of which wind their way through the labyrinthine skyscrapers advertising travel to the Off-World Colonies and various Chinese/Japanese products.
• One of the big differences between real 2009 and parallel universe 2009 in Southland Tales is the presence of massive perpetual-motion powered Zeppelins.
• The Rocketeer was clearly an alternate universe - Howard Hughes invents an alcohol-fueled rocket backpack - and so, of course, the final big battle of the movie takes place on a zeppelin. In this case the zeppelin is the "real-world" bit of technology.
• The film version of Watchmen manages to show a few Zeppelins in the background of some of the shots of New York.
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, although it is supposed to be in the real world and an historical zeppelin, they still threw it in because it was cool.

Literature

• The Robert A Heinlein book JOB: A Comedy of Justice has the main character from a zeppelin-filled world, slipping into a world with no air traffic at all, and then into one with similar technology to our own. One especially well-done part is when he attempts to explain to the readers what an airplane looks like from the perspective of someone who's never seen one before.
• Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series features a world with zeppelins and no jet planes (although small propeller aircraft exist). At one point Thursday has the option of being hidden in a parallel Earth where there are jetliners (presumably, from the sound of things, our world) and she says such a thing is impossible.
  • Of course, there's little demand for high speed airliners with the gravtubes. (London to Osaka in 42 minutes!)
• The opening story in Elizabeth Bear's New Amsterdam is a murder mystery set on a zeppelin. With vampires.
• The parallel world that takes up the majority of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series features giant zeppelins as a mode of transport.
• This is the premise of the novel Airborn: an alternate world where, due to the existence of an ultra-light gas called hydrium, airships became the primary means of long-distance travel. Features lots of nautical metaphors.
• Aaron Alston's novel Doc Sidhe is set on an alternate world where zeppelins and autogyros are still cutting edge aviation technology, and the climactic showdown takes place on board the major villain's airship.
• Fritz Leiber's short story Catch That Zeppelin! is about an alternate universe where things turned out (mostly) much better than our own, It too includes zeppelins docking at the Empire State building, where a Real Life mooring mast was considered. Needless to say, they didn't use hydrogen to lift them.
• Harry Turtledove's novel The Two Georges is about an alternate world where the United States never left the British Empire. The first chapter is set on an airship, where the protagonist sees a Air Force biplane fly past and echoes the general view that while such speed is useful for the military, there's just no need for it in civilian life.
• S. M. Stirling's books are lousy with zeppelins.
• Mortal Engines has a lot of Zeppelins, though it's a post-apocalyptic future version of this world rather than a parallel one. Heavier-than-air flight is reinvented over the course of the series.
• The War in the Air by H. G. Wells is about the German Empire using giant zeppelins to attack the rest of the world, particularly the United States. While at the time it was written, it was a reasonable extrapolation of the current technology, it suffers from being set Twenty minutes into the future and so might now be considered an honorary alternate reality.
• Dean Ing's The Big Lifters has a messianic protagonist pushing high-tech "delta-dirigibles" as a way to get big trucks (like the one that killed his grandmother) off of America's freeways.
• The War Against The Chtorr. Blimps are used for military and rescue operations, but nothing beats the Hieronymus Bosch, a giant luxury airship (30% longer than the Hindenberg) converted for the scientific expedition in "A Season for Slaughter".
• In Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series, one of the two alternate universes featured in detail uses zeppelins for air travel. (The other one has a roughly medieval level of technology, so it doesn't have air travel at all.)
• L. Neil Smith's alternate history novel The Probability Broach features large zeppelin passenger liners. Interestingly, Smith does not have them simply for style, rather their existence proceeds logically from the nature of his world. The character's claim that zeppelin travel is uncommon in our world because the military subsidizes airplanes so that it can requisition them in emergencies. It does not subsidize the less militarily useful zeppelins, which means the incentives are for companies to develop planes. In The Probability Broach the governments and militaries of the world are much weaker, so are unable to subsidize much of anything.

Live Action TV

• In the Doctor Who episode "Rise of the Cybermen," The Doctor immediately notices that they've slipped into a parallel world when he sees zeppelins in the sky above London.

Role Playing Games

• Kenneth Hite noted this trope in his column Suppressed Transmission, and took it to its logical conclusion: our own history was an Alternate Universe in the early 20th century.
  • One of Ken's contributions to GURPS Infinite Worlds is a table to randomly generate alternate technologies for one's randomly generated worldline; it has a note that certain results dictate adding zeppelins regardless of the rest of the universe's tech level. Apparently, alternate history just generates airships.
• Airship technology turns up from time to time in Shadowrun: in remote drones for aerial surveillance, in huge "cargolifters" for inexpensive bulk transport, and in luxurious cruise ships for the ultra-rich. The finale of the first Shadowrun book takes place at an airfield where a yakuza boss has just flown in on a zeppelin.

Video Games

• The beginning of Arcanum: Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura sees the player barely surviving a terrible zeppelin crash.
• Final Fantasy VI and VII (both much more technology-oriented than their predecessors) have a badass zeppelin as their major airship, and Final Fantasy IX brings them back as general-use vehicles in a fantasy Steam Punk setting.
• Used... interestingly in Timeshift. Most of the game takes place in an alternate 1940s, so the zeppelins are supposed to be there. The helicopters and giant mechanical spiders, however, make you realize something is more than a little wrong.
  • The last of the zeppelins was scrapped in April of 1940, so they aren't supposed to be there.
• The Crimson Skies game has Zeppelins as flying aircraft carriers/battleships. Somewhat appropriate considering the timeframe of the setting, but they were used far more than in real life.
  • Very much appropriate considering it's explicitly stated that all of the countries the US broke up into severed all roads and railroads in order to avoid invasion leaving zeppelins as the only vehicle capable of large scale intercountry commerce. Well that and how else are you supposed to justify air piracy.
• Command And Conquer: Red Alert 2 and Red Alert 3 (Both set in separate alternate timelines) feature the Kirov Airships, massive, heavily armoured war Zepplins used by the Soviet Union to bombard ground targets. Cutscenes and promo pictures, as well as the menu screen for RA 3, show them looming ominously over US Cities.
• Zeppelins seem rather abundantly used by villains in Dead Or Alive series, mostly by the evil DOATEC. Their universe seems to be a mix and match of different eras. At DOATEC, it seems to be a big city with elements of Cyber Punk, then there's the ninja clan villages which seem to be stuck in feudal Japan. Oh, and dinosaurs still roam the jungles for some reason. To top it all off, now there's a time travelling Spartan.

Webcomics

• Girl Genius features massive, castle-sized zeppelins.
• xkcd has zeppelin appearances signalled by wristwatch dial and elevator button.
• The Thinking Ape Blues features an alternate universe in which zeppelins are frequently seen in the sky.
• Order Of The Stick's Anachronism Stew comes with a side-order of airships.

Web Original

• In Decades Of Darkness, they're used to great success in the North American War and the Brazilian Civil War.

Western Animation

• Batman The Animated Series was fond of these, as they evoked a 1930s atmosphere.
• Avatar The Last Airbender has regular, reality-based two-people zeppelins, and massive metal ones that are truly from another world.
  • They're called "hot-air balloons." They really exist.
  • See also the ZMC-2. It got the nickname "Tinship" for a reason...
    • What, a lead Zeppelin? Preposterous. It would plummet like Robert Plant's dreams of rock stardom.
• Disney's Atlantis The Lost Empire shows why people riding in hydrogen-filled dirigibles shouldn't back-stab Bad Ass subordinates packing flareguns.

Other

• John Reilly has warned that airships, which are most prominent in alternate history scenarios, are a "Fortean technology" indicative that some thing's wrong with the timestream.
  • In that case, we should be very worried.

Real Life

• Airships really are eye-catching, as anyone who lives near a major sports venue can tell you. That's why they've always been popular for advertising. If you think the airships you see over ball games today are impressive, think about how they are dwarfed by their grandparents. The Goodyear Blimp that we are all familiar with is about 192 feet (58 meters long). The Hindenburg was a whopping 804 feet (245 meters) long. Contrast that with the RMS Titanic which measured 882 feet (269 meters) long. If you can imagine (I sure can't) what it must have been like to have an object nearly the size of the Titanic hovering silently just a few hundred feet above you, you can understand why the zeppelin caught in our collective imagination and stayed there.
• In 1953 a Providence, Rhode Island attorney named Leo Connors found a mysterious back stairway in his offices that led to a fully furnished dirigible passenger waiting room atop the Fleet National Bank Building. Built in 1928 but never used and subsequently forgotten, it must have seemed like a relic from a alternate future that never happened.
• Not quite zeppelins, but steerable hot air balloons are currently used a lot in nature photography, and for the study of life in the inaccessible rainforest canopy.

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