Literature / Overheaven

"Another Yesterday's Tomorrow, Today"

— Tagline for the map of Earth in 2022

Overheaven (styled OVRHVN) is a Science Fiction Alternate History/future timeline posted on DeviantArt by user NK-Ryzov. The timeline's Point of Divergence is in 1963, when Nikita Khrushchev accidentally leaves a loophole in the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, leading to the passing of an alternate version of the Outer Space Treaty which does not prohibit nations from making territorial claims in space. This causes the Cold War to take a radically different course, and leads to mankind's technological progress and advancement into space happening much faster. Notably, the timeline continues past our own present day, well into The Future - the furthest official posts are set in 2585.

A map of Earth in this timeline's alternate 2022, with links to the Google Docs that comprise much of the lore mentioned on this page, can be found here, and makes for a good starting point.

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OVRHVN contains examples of:

A-M

• Absent Aliens: Heavily downplayed, and Double Subverted for that matter, but still somewhat in play. There are microbes on Mars, and a fairly robust ecosystem in the underground oceans of Europa, but sapient life is notably absent. It clearly was around at some point, but isn't anymore — alien megastructures around Delta Pavonis and Kapteyn's Star were spotted by our telescopes in 1999, but they seem to be abandoned.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: One of the anti-terraforming armies on Mars is called the Red Planet Revolutionary Ronin.
• Advert-Overloaded Future: Post-Hell Day, a Lunar company buys Easter Island and turns it into a strange sort of augmented-reality historical theme park, creating a localized version of this.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Soundly averted.
  • In 2022, sentient AI has only just recently been invented. The anti-technology groups are fearing it will be the end of us all, the transhumanists are proclaiming it will bring The Singularity... and MIT's Sophia, the first of her kind, is on alternate-Twitter, liking people's fanart of her as a cute anime girl.
  • By 2150, AIs appear to have been afforded equal rights, thereby averting What Measure Is a Non-Human?, and they've integrated into human civilization as more or less ordinary members of society. They respect humanity for having created them, and "robot revolt" scenarios are thus all but nonexistent.
• All There in the Manual: The maps and flags, as impressive as they are, are at most half of the story. The real meat of OVRHVN lies in the lore documents Ryzov posts alongside the art.
• Alternate Techline: A major part of the TL. Biotech, cybernetics and of course space travel advance extremely quickly throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries. One noteworthy example is a description of an early test of a cybernetic prosthetic arm, which demonstrates that, among other things, an early cyborg can successfully use their arm to operate a computer... specifically, a 1977 Apple II.
• Alternative Calendar: Since Mars' day and year are longer than Earth's, dates for events that take place on Mars are given using the Darian calendar.
  • Jovian calendars are even stranger, since Jupiter's year is twelve times longer than Earth's and its moons (where everyone lives) are tidally locked. Days aren't even called days, but "circads," and the light-dark cycle encompasses the whole eight-circad week.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: The city of Port Dread, on Deimos, has one, an Oni named Goki. Dreadites in general seem fond of using Cute Monster Girl oni for this purpose.
• Apocalypse How: Happens a few times throughout the timeline.
  • The advent of nuclear fusion causes a crash in the oil industry, sending much of the Arabian Peninsula into a Class 0 (Regional Societal Disruption).
  • India and Pakistan have a localized nuclear war in 2009, causing a somewhat more severe Class 0 (which in some areas approaches Class 1).
  • In 2150, an asteroid strikes the Earth, wiping out the majority of the population in what becomes known as Hell Day. It's likely a Class 3, almost Class 4, but humanity on Earth (barely) manages to survive. Of course, by then there are hundreds of millions of us off Earth...
• Apocalypse Wow: In spite of how Nightmare Fuel it is, the description of Hell Day is genuinely awe-inspiring.
• April Fools' Day: Ryzov always posts something funny for April 1st. For 2020, it was Lasagna Dawn, the story of an exoplanet colonized by genetically engineered lifeforms based on, of all things, Garfield. For 2021, it was Wagon Station, a station wagon that's also a space station. 2022 gave us the story of Parbex Presents: Easter Island. The April Fool's 2023 post is Ryzov taking a self-deprecating dig at the tropes they use and their own Schedule Slip. Most recently, April Fool's 2024 gives us Downfall of the Corn Lords of Chacornac, about a society on Luna ruled by sentient corn plants.
  • Notably, however, with the exception of 2023 (Ryzov had COVID at the time), all the "shitposts" have provided genuine OVRHVN lore - hence why they're considered Loose Canon as opposed to noncanon, and why they all bear the subtitle "(Not) A Shitpost."
    • Lasagna Dawn goes into the relevant facets of the Alternate Techline.
    • Wagon Station talks about the early years of the Space Boom.
    • Parbex Presents: Easter Island discusses Hell Day in a fair amount of detail and was indeed the main canon source on it prior to Graveyard Earth.
    • Corn Lords gives a full explanation of what florasophs are and how they work, along with some information on the pansophist movement, who created florasophs out of a belief that the non-human parts of the biosphere deserved their own say.
• Arc Number: Nines show up on a semi-regular basis. Eight planets plus Luna, nine aerospheres making up the United Principalities of Cloud 9, nine grand-pelarcs on Ganymede.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: Early into the Red-Blue War (Mars' civil war over Terraforming), the difficulty of getting supplies to Mars means both sides start running out of ammo. As such, many soldiers are issued upgraded versions of traditional melee weapons. "Power bows" that are best utilized by cyborgs come into use, the British colonists in the Avalon Red Commandos take to using the Zulu iklwa spear, and thanks to Mars' large Japanese population, katanas and naginatas become a common sight. Guns are never abandoned, but they're less common than they would be otherwise - with the exception of the neutral Green armies, who end up creating a Kingmaker Scenario partly because they still have their ammo stockpiles.
  • A downplayed example, specific to firearms, occurs in the case of Don "Tank" Fontaine, a cyborg soldier with the Blues whose weapon of choice is a Browning .50 machine gun - a gun which was manufactured for World War II and is thus over a century old by the time Fontaine brings it to Mars. It's said to be the only one of its kind on the whole planet.
• Artificial Human: Not yet, at least not as of 2022, but scientists in Taiwan are working on it.
• Assassin Outclassin': Aaron Lang, leader of the Blue side in the Red-Blue War, survives over 600 assassination attempts over the course of the war, at least one of which he overcomes by personally putting one assassin in a headlock and shooting the other one. (In the intestines, mind you. He had to interrogate him afterwards, after all.)
• Asteroid Miners: A frequent sight in the Asteroid Belt, naturally. Notably, many are West Virginian coal miners who headed to space to keep putting their skills to use after the coal industry started declining and most of the mines shifted to using robots.
• The Atoner: The Cape Republic (the white half of a balkanized South Africa) has come to regret the apartheid system that led to its creation, and many in it would like to reunite with their black neighbors in Mzansi, or at the very least reestablish a good relationship between the two. While the former is unlikely, the latter has seen some progress.
  • The Capians' distant cousins, the Martian colonists of Kruger, come to feel similarly, and while they're no liberals, they're still willing to fight (and win) a war against their Neo-Nazi neighbors in Agartha.
• Author Appeal: Ryzov seems to really like designing flags. (Not that anyone's complaining.) The Mars posts in particular include dozens of them.
• Balkanize Me: While it doesn't actually happen to Yugoslavia, it does happen to Saudi Arabia after the introduction of fusion power causes the collapse of the oil market. Oil prices recover (even without using oil as fuel, everyone still needs plastics), but the damage to the House of Saud's power base has been done, and Saudi Arabia winds up in at least six pieces. The rest of the Arabian Peninsula suffers too, to varying degrees - Oman, for example, makes it through, but Kuwait isn't so lucky, and the less said about the UAE the better.
  • Quebec secedes from Canada in 1995. War is narrowly averted, but Canada spends several years trying (and failing) to block Quebec's international recognition, and ends up giving a lot of concessions to the Atlantic provinces (which are now an exclave) to keep them from leaving as well. By 2150, Canada has balkanized even further, with the Prairies and British Columbia joining the USA.
  • South Africa splits in half in 1997, precipitating a bloody race war. Eventually, the two successor states of Cape and Mzansi manage to make amends, and by the 22nd century they reunify.
• Base on Wheels: Some of the colonies on Mercury take this route, though it's less "on wheels" and more "on tracks" or "on rails."
• Bio-Augmentation: Not uncommon, and sometimes goes hand in hand with cyborgization.
• Brain in a Jar: One of the Red generals in Mars' civil war is a businessman who installed his brain into a box on wheels, partly because it was cheap and partly so that people would underestimate him - which they do.
• Book Ends: The Cenozoic both began and ended with an asteroid impact.
• Bullying a Dragon: Muammar Gaddafi launching (non-nuclear) missiles at the European Federation, one of which destroys the Colosseum, can only be described as this trope. Eurofed, more enraged than intimidated, promptly invades Libya, and Gaddafi is ultimately captured attempting to flee to space and is executed.
• But What About the Astronauts?: Hell Day causes a Kessler catastrophe, destroying most of Exonesia. The survivors - in particular the Uplifted Animal and Little Bit Beastly population on ArkGenesis - are forced to evacuate to the devastated Earth, and will do much to begin rebuilding it.
  • Luna suffers much loss of life due to impact ejecta and space debris falling onto the moon, but by then the population (which numbers over 120 million) is mostly self-sufficient, and civilization there is able to survive.
  • The rest of Sol (which comprises hundreds of millions more people) is unscathed by the impact itself, but the social, economic and political ramifications will reach across almost all of humanity.
• Cargo Cult: A rocket booster from a Ecuadorian satellite launch accidentally fell into the territory of a hitherto-uncontacted tribe in the Amazon. The company that launched it sent a helicopter for recovery, but after the locals fired arrows at the chopper, they decided it was best to let them keep the booster. Satellite imagery of the area suggests that the tribe has since surrounded the booster with bonfires, "and possibly pushed it upright for unknown reasons."
• Chekhov's Gag: At one point during E!22, whilst discussing Eastern Europe, the strong cooperation between the restored constitutional monarchies of Romania and Bulgaria is noted, with the reaction from the rest of Eastern Europe being described thusly: "Why don't your monarchs kiss and marry already?" "Maybe we will!" Naturally, in E!2150, it's revealed that by the 2070s, that's exactly what happened, and the two nations now share a ruling dynasty.
• Chummy Commies: Russia moderated into a very reasonable democracy, and even the diehard communists who inhabit the aerostats of Venus are mostly friendly, if sometimes Cloudcuckoolanders.
• Church of Happyology: Averted - Scientology is mentioned by name, and is given an unflattering depiction. Apparently their main church is outright banned by international treaty on Mars.
• City of Adventure: Port Dread, a rotating space station city attached to Deimos, the smaller of Mars' two moons. Originally setted by Japanese and British colonists, it's grown into a melting pot, a gateway to and from Mars, and a thriving city full of unique local quirks and stories. And also Yakuza. There's an entire map (with attached lore document) focusing on Deimos in general and Port Dread in particular.
  • On Earth, the "Principality of Cloud 9" is a flying city, built in the form of a geodesic sphere, based on a concept by Buckminster Fuller. Due to being in effect an independent state, it's filled with all kinds of tech startups and transhumanists.
• City on the Water: As the ice melts on Ganymede, the colonists move out of their bases dug into the ice and build floating cities, called pelastats or "isles." A group of pelastats is a pelarc ("pelastat archipelago"), and a really big pelarc, large enough to be the equivalent of a country, is a grand-pelarc. There are nine grand-pelarcs in total.
  • There's some floating cities on Earth, too - seasteading has taken off in a big way. Several such cities are built off the coast of Japan (though their boom years only last so long before going bust). Some American libertarians construct "Freedom Ship," a city-state in the form of what amounts to a giant cruise ship that sails around the world doing business.
  • The Brits get in on the action, too, having two seastead colonies that are technically part of the UK as Crown Dependencies^note like the Channel Islands. The first is Doggerland, located in the North Sea, which grew from an artificial island built to house offshore oil well workers into a semi-thriving colony of over 200,000. The second is none other than Sealand, massively expanded and now boasting over 35,000 inhabitants on and under the water.
• Clone Jesus: One company claims to have succeeded in their effort to clone Christ ^note key word being "claims" — scientific consensus is that the DNA they used is not from the historical Jesus, but is at least from the right part of the world, along with several other renowned historical figures. Clone Jesus is now a teenager living on a Jesuit compound in Paraguay. He goes by the name of "Joshua", preaches via Twitch to an audience mostly his own age, and uses his fame to advocate for various charities and good causes. The Vatican's stance on him is as follows:
  "He is not the Savior. Nor is he the Antichrist. Do not bother him."
• Crazy Survivalist: The Lomonosov Project, a group of several thousand people who built an underwater city in the Arctic in the hopes of ensuring humanity could survive any concievable catastrophe in some form. Come Hell Day, it turns out they were Properly Paranoid, and over a century of doomsday prepping made them so Crazy-Prepared they weather it almost unscathed.
• Coca-Pepsi, Inc.: Hasbro and Marvel merge in this timeline.
• Colonized Solar System: Most if not all of the Solar System will, sooner or later, have some kind of human presence. Even in 2022, humans are already venturing as far as Titan, and Luna and Mars are becoming quite extensively colonized.
  • Mercury seems to have been settled mostly by Americans. They live in Underground Cities, have a thriving drug culture and fought a war over whether or not they should dismantle the planet to build a Dyson swarm.
  • Venus is colonized by way of "aerostats" - essentially floating airship-cities in the Venusian clouds. It's also the setting's premier Commie Land. Eventually, it's terraformed and its ecosystem populated with, among other things, genetically-reengineered dinosaurs.
  • There's a significant human presence in orbit and on Luna, and these are naturally the most closely tied to Earth. The orbital nations are referred to collectively as "Exonesia," and many of them are Start My Own ventures by nationalist groups. Luna, as the first place beyond Earth humanity colonized, is often colloquially called the "Eighth Continent," but even it has developed a unique culture of its own.
  • Mars is heavily colonized, and eventually terraformed (or "noaformed" as is said in this timeline), by a wide range of nations. A civil war is fought there in the 2070s between Red (anti-noaforming) and Blue (pro-noaforming) factions, which the Blues win, leading to the formation of the Martian Alliance. Phobos and Deimos, Mars' moons, are also settled, with Deimos in particular becoming home to the major trading city of Port Dread.
  • Many asteroids are colonized by Asteroid Miners and other such ventures. One, 15 Eunomia, has actually been colonized by the Church of Scientology, who are Persona Non Grata on both Earth and Mars.
  • Jupiter's moons are united under the Jovian Empire in 2249 at the end of a century-long "Warring Moons Period." Io becomes a desert world of heavy industry, Europa is home to a thriving ecosystem of alien creatures in its subsurface ocean and Ganymede and Callisto are both terraformed. Ganymede is the focus of the Age of Aquarius update, which reveals that the whole moon is now one giant ocean.
  • Saturn's moons are colonized as well, but there doesn't seem to be a Planetary Nation there. Instead, the transhumanists on Titan and the cephalopods on Enceladus are engaged in a Space Cold War with the backing of Mars and Earth, respectively.
  • Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are colonized by the Martians. Pluto may or may not also be home to German goths gene-modding themselves into vampires.
• Colony Drop: In a natural example of the trope in 2014, a comet strikes Mars near its north pole, melting part of the northern polar icecap and kicking the terraforming conversation into high gear - thus indirectly causing the Red-Blue War.
  • And then, in 2150, another probably-natural example happens in the form of Hell Day. An asteroid comes crashing down on top of Beijing, wiping out most of Earth's population via shockwaves, superheated temperatures (and ensuing firestorms), earthquakes (which trigger volcanic eruptions), Kessler Syndrome in orbit and nuclear winter-like conditions and general chaos after the fact. Once the dust (literally and metaphorically) settles, Luna devotes its efforts to rebuilding Earth. The "Metazoic Era" that Earth subsequently enters has been hinted to be the subject of a future update.
• Conlang: The first astroceti (uplifted whales and dolphins) invent their own language, Astroceti Basic, based on whalesong. Their descendants still speak it. It also becomes traditional amongst astroceti to each create a personal conlang or "heart-tongue," which is typically only revealed to those one is closest to.
• Culture Chop Suey: Offworld colonies end up like this on a pretty regular basis.
• Cyborg: Cyborgs are a major part of the timeline. The technology first comes into existence during the Cold War, and it becomes fairly common over the course of the 21st century. By the 2300s, even with noaforming, most Martians are augmented in some way.
• Dangerous Orbital Debris: Most of Earth's orbital infrastructure is destroyed in Hell Day, bringing Kessler Syndrome into full effect for quite some time.
• Dead Guy on Display: The ultimate fate of Masoud Noorani, the Pakistani General Ripper who nuked India, is a high-tech version of this trope. After being captured, turned over to India and convicted of crimes against humanity, Noorani is hanged in a livestreamed Public Execution - the video of which remains on the front page of the Indian government's official website to this day.
• Designer Babies: Possible by 2022, but only to a very limited extent, and considered to be somewhat ethically dubious in most cases.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: Nelson Mandela dies in 1984 in OVRHVN, and without him, South Africa falls into civil war. Several other Historical Domain Characters also die before they can rise to fame:
  • Ruhollah Khomeini dies before he gets a chance to lead the Iranian Revolution (meaning Iran is still a Shahdom into the modern day).
  • Thomas Sankara dies in obscurity (meaning, among other things, that Burkina Faso is still called Upper Volta).
  • Deng Xiaoping dies in an accident in 1984, and he's succeeded by the incompetent Sun Luoyang, who ultimately brings about the downfall of the CCP.
  • Chiang Kai-shek falls down the stairs and dies in 1967, and his son Chiang Ching-kuo is hit by the ambulance as it arrives at the scene of his father's death. With the Chiangs thus out of the picture, Taiwan ends up reaching an agreement with China and the UN to remain as a recognized, but separate, country.
  • Valentina Tereshkova, in OTL the first woman in space, ITTL goes on to lead the Soviets' first expeditions to Venus. Tragically, a freak accident leads to her falling to her death into the sulfuric clouds of Venus. Rather than discouraging further Venusian endeavors, however, her death is viewed as a Heroic Sacrifice of sorts, and the Warsaw Pact's efforts to colonize Venus are soon in full swing.
  • Harvey Milk survives the assassination attempt that killed him in our timeline, and goes on to become mayor of San Francisco... only to discover in 1982 that he has AIDS. He uses the time he has left to advocate as much as possible for doing something about the disease, and it's partly thanks to him that Ronald Reagan is, unlike in OTL, persuaded to actively work to combat HIV. The end result of all this is that Milk's efforts get the cause of gay rights into the mainstream earlier than OTL, and that in 1987, scientists at Stanford University successfully develop a cure for AIDS, which saves millions of lives around the world.
  • Saloth Sar, the man who in OTL would become Pol Pot, dies in 1969 of a snakebite. The Khmer Rouge thus never come to power, and this combined with the USA never invading Cambodia (on account of a shorter Vietnam War) produces a still troubled, but slightly better off Cambodia.
• Different World, Different Movies: Quite extensively so. For one thing, Star Trek comes to an end in the 2000s, since its vision of the future doesn't look all that futuristic anymore now that people are actually traveling to other planets. The Trek fandom, however, does manage to carry on and become a minor cultural force in its own right, thanks in large part to a number of unauthorized Martian Star Trek anime. Trekkie colonies spring up throughout the solar system, trying to bring the show's utopian ideals into reality.
  • The 80s and 90s see a major boom in high fantasy, leading to, among other things, a Dungeons & Dragons animated series which is much more successful than the one our timeline got.
  • One original work from OVRHVN that's been mentioned repeatedly is Freeman, a neo-noir TV series about a detective running from his past on the colony of Port Dread on Mars' moon Deimos. Actual Dreadites cringe at its inaccurate portrayal of their city and its Yakuza underbelly, but acknowledge that its effects and sets (done in Vancouver) are actually quite good.
  • Since Korea's rise was slowed by the Second Korean War (the North lost, but it was still messy) and the USSR succeeded in reforming into the Sovereign Union and peacefully ending the Cold War, this TL has R-Pop - Russian pop music - take the place of K-Pop.
  • Ted Kaczynski's hit novel ''The Unabomber'' inspires a generation of radical environmentalists, and is eventually made into a hit movie which is implied to be this timeline's equivalent of Joker, given that Joaquin Phoenix plays the titular Eco-Terrorist Mad Bomber.
  • By 2585, one of the most popular musical genres on Ganymede is whalesong - which is to say, music made by, and in the languages of, uplifted cetaceans. The delphi (bottlenose dolphin uplifts) dominate the pop scene, while classical whalesong is more the province of the paikea (humpback whale uplifts).
• Domed Hometown: Something that's done both in the colonies, for obvious reasons, and on Earth, for stylistic and practical purposes. Turns out, it's a pretty good way to keep cool in the US Southwest, or warm in Siberia.
• Eagleland: Type 1. The United States of America is the undisputed #1 superpower in 2022, and it's consistently been the main driver of space exploration, space colonization, and technological development. While not without its problems, it's portrayed as a pretty good place to live, and it's avoided many of the pitfalls it suffered OTL, thanks in large part to Lyndon Johnson pulling America out of The Vietnam War much earlier than OTL.
• Early-Bird Cameo: A blink-and-you'll-miss it marker on the map of Earth in 2022 mentions a young man named Tobias Falco having just graduated US Marine Corps officer school. Later, when the Red-Blue War series (set in the 2070s) is posted, Falco's significance is revealed - he will grow up to be the Rebel Leader of the Reds and be remembered as one of the founding fathers of the Martian Alliance.
  "His name will be forgotten on this planet, but immortalized on another."
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After a senseless nuclear war with Pakistan followed by a decade of chaos, suffering, terrorism and Necessarily Evil governance, by 2022 things are finally starting to look up for India, thanks in no small part to the leadership of President Shah Rukh Khan.
  • After a long civil war and resource shortages to go with it, Mars is finally able to unify under one government, and will go on to successfully noaform the planet and build a prosperous and democratic society.
• Eccentric Millionaire: Crossed with Cool Old Guy. Reinhold von Lowitz, born a German noble in 1918. He was formerly an Idle Rich Millionaire Playboy, but when he realized how empty his life was, he started Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life - and he found it in space, investing all his millions into building a massive interplanetary transport hub, the Tannhäuser Gate orbiting the far side of the moon. In 2150, he lives there to this day, and is, at the age of 232, the oldest man and second-oldest human alive.
• The Elites Jump Ship: Muammar Gaddafi certainly tried it, attempting to escape to space when it became clear he'd lost the Libyan War, but Eurofed forces caught up to him before he could reach his rocket. His secret launch site in the desert (which Ryzov likens to a "Bond Villain Lair") is now a museum.
  • When things really started falling apart in Arabia, the House of Saud and their fellow Arab Oil Sheikh-types scattered to the winds - to America, to the UK, to Switzerland, to various libertarian havens and, occasionally, to space. Their main refuge, however, is the technocratic city-state of Neom, not far from the Sinai Peninsula.
• End of an Era: Ryzov makes the point that Hell Day is not the end of the story, but rather, the end of the Old Earth and the beginning of the New Earth.
• Enemy Mine: ESCA, one of the Red armies of the Red-Blue War, is an alliance between Christian fundamentalists and Muslim jihadists. They work together surprisingly well during the war, but it ends as badly as you'd expect afterwards.
• Evil Luddite: America, and the Pacific Northwest in particular, has a problem with eco-terrorists for a while. Most are eventually caught, killed or surrender, but a few are still around in 2022 - mostly older veterans who went off the grid and live solitary, self-sufficient lifestyles deep in The Other Rainforest. A number of other countries have had, or still have, similar issues.
  • Nejd, one of the post-Saudi states, has reached net zero carbon emissions... by destroying all the modern technology they can get their hands on. Except the AK-47s. They need those. They also mutilate or decapitate those caught with technology deemed haram (i.e. most technology post-dating the World Wars). Fortunately for everyone, such militant primitivism means Nejd doesn't have the cash to bankroll terrorism or the resources to try to invade their comparatively liberal neighbors in Hejaz (who control Mecca), and with oil not as necessary as it used to be, most of the world is content to, as Ryzov puts it, "leave the Nejdis to their full-time Fremen LARP."
• The Exile: Multiple communist leaders head for Venus, or try to, when things go south for them on Earth. Nicolae Ceaucescu fled to the Romanian colony of Infloria when he was overthrown, and Jim Jones founded an aerostat colony with the People's Temple after defecting to the USSR. Gaddafi attempted to flee to Venus when Eurofed invaded Libya, but he was captured and executed. When communism fell in Cuba, Fidel Castro did depart for Venus, but died en route, and when the Ba'athist regime in Iraq and Syria fell, Bashar al-Assad was "encouraged" by the new Western-backed government of Mesopotamia to leave for the Syrian aerostats.
• Expanded States of America: Subverted. The USA has built up an extensive network of offworld colonies, which are at least nominally part of the USA. In practice, however, the further out one gets, the more likely the colonies are to be effectively independent.
  • Back on Earth, the USA does still control the Panama Canal Zone, albeit not as a state.
  • And by 2150, it's played straight, with chunks of Canada and Mexico joining the US as states alongside a few space colonies.
• Extinct in the Future: A positive example, oddly enough. It's mentioned in passing that by 2150, as a result of concerted campaigns against the diseases they spread, mosquitoes, guinea worms and tsetse flies have been wiped out.
• Failed State: While most of OTL's infamous failed states, such as Somalia, are doing well for themselves ITTL, other nations that are mostly stable in OTL have become this trope in OVRHVN's timeline. Not coincidentally, they tend to be oil-based economies that failed to adapt when oil started falling out of favor as a fuel:
  • The United Arab Emirates has split in two, and the new "Republic of Magan" is an archetypal example of the trope - impoverished, anarchic, ruled by cults and deranged warlords, and infested with Ruthless Modern Pirates. The rump UAE, now under a military government, is somewhat stabler but not much better off.
  • When things really started getting bad in 2011, the Sultan of Brunei and his ministers refused to try and reform the country, instead opting to simply take the money and run to Singapore. With no central government save for what remained of the military, Brunei fell into complete chaos. By 2018, the once-prosperous country had become an "open-air black market" for drugs, weapons and slaves, and Malaysia finally had enough and decided to invade. Even after this, the Sultan still refuses to return, and 80% of Bruneians would rather be annexed into Malaysia than have him back.
• Fantastic Livestock: Perhaps the strangest thing about the alien creatures of Europa's underground ocean is that they can be this. Not only are many "Eurozoa" edible to humans, some of them are actually nutritious, and frippers and tigerspines soon become the staple protein of the Jovian colonies.
• Fantastic Racism: Zoans - a catch-all term for uplifted animals and humans with genetically engineered animal traits - are massively discriminated against on mid-21st-century Earth, prompting many to leave and establish the "Zoan Homeland" of ArkGenesis in orbit.
• Fantastic Religious Weirdness: Shintoism is brought offworld by Japanese colonists, and it goes off in some odd directions on Mars. In particular, there arises a significant belief that humans have brought the kami with them to Mars, and that said kami are now trapped in the colonies' life support systems and can only be released by way of noaforming. Naturally, this leads to Shinto Church Militant groups fighting for the Blue side during the Red-Blue War.
  • Many Mormons also find their way to Mars, settling mostly in the area around Olympus Mons, after the discovery of an unusual meteorite there that they interpret as a sign from God.
• Fantastic Ship Prefix: Prior to the Red-Blue War, Martian spaceships use MTOS (Mars Treaty Organization Ship). After the war, with the foundation of the Martian Alliance, they use MCS (presumably, MarsCom Ship).
• Fantasy Counterpart Religion: The Barsu. Basically, their prophet was a woman named Aelita (born Susan Schneider) who became convinced she was a reincarnated ancient Martian. Aelita produced a huge volume of writings and art, and many people who met her in person or followed her online came to identify with her beliefs as well. The Barsu believe that they are humans with alien souls, and that Mars is the promised land to which they must return. They are thus heavily involved in Martian colonization and the Red-Blue War. Most Barsu are Blue, and some Red factions heavily persecute them. By the 24th century, the Barsu will have grown into a major demographic on Mars.
• Fatherly Scientist: Dr. Francis Cuvier, inventor of much of the necessary tech for creating zoans, came to feel responsible for the injustices committed against the zoans, particularly those created under illegal and/or inhumane circumstances. He ultimately spent much of his life doing everything he could to be this trope to the zoans, up to and including founding the zoan orbital ethnostate of ArkGenesis. When he died in 2077, his last words encapsulated the trope:
  "You are all so much more than what’s been done to you [...] don’t let this unfair world decide who you are."
• The Fellowship Has Ended: NATO apparently dissolved in the early 1990s following the mending of Russo-American relations.
• Feudal Future: Downplayed, but invoked nonetheless, by the Jovian Empire. It's a constitutional monarchy, and one which grants a lot of autonomy to the individual moons that comprise it, but it is nonetheless still a monarchy, ruled by the genetically-engineered philosopher-kings of House Fulmen. Their explicit aim is to be The Good Kingdom. In practice, they come off as more of an unusually decentralized Hegemonic Empire.
• Fictional Political Party: The party of government in Australia in 2022 is called the Science Party. They're an offshoot of Labor which advocates for scientific advancement as well as a generally progressive social policy.
• Fictional Sport: Ganymedeans play ice cricket.
• Fictional Video Game: The Tacitus series of war games (including at least one Real-Time Strategy installment), by Mars-based studio Team Horus. They take place in a Constructed World and often discuss themes like the harshness of war and when violence is and isn't necessary. The series even played its own small role in the Red-Blue War, when the Team Horus devs formed a human chain to stop the two sides from destroying their home city, then set up multiplayer matches for the troops in the local Internet cafes so Reds and Blues could bond over a shared love of Tacitus while the truce to keep the city neutral was being negotiated.
• For Want Of A Nail: Among many other examples, here's a noteworthy one: The Point of Divergence means America takes a different Cold War policy, meaning the US government is more willing to import sugar from South America. Because of that, Colombian farmers can farm more sugarcane, which means fewer of them go into farming coca, which means the cocaine glut of the 1970s deflates, which means the American crack epidemic is drastically weakened and in some cases averted altogether. (It also means that Colombia is likewise in much better shape by the present day.)
  • Two PoDs, both involving the original PoD for the timeline, ensure that Iran winds up in much better shape than OTL. First, in 1967, after a long night spent discussing the implications of the newly-passed alt-Outer Space Treaty with his wife, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran has an "intense" dream which leads him to rethink his policies and decide to pivot the country away from oil, which he does. Second, Ruhollah Khomeini falls down the stairs and dies in 1974 whilst "pondering the impiety of colonizing the moon," meaning there's never an Iranian Revolution to overthrow the Shah. The end result of all this is that Iran remains a monarchy and a US ally into the modern day. They're a cultural and economic force in their own right, and as much of the rest of the Middle East collapses, Iran thrives. They've got a robust space industry and even their own little Mars colony.
• Friendly Rivalry: Following Gorbachev's successful reform of the USSR into the Sovereign Union, and the subsequent breakup of NATO, America and Russia have settled into this by 2022.
• Full-Conversion Cyborg: Since 2001, it's been possible to become one via the "Yashima Procedure," named after the first person to undergo it, a 25-year-old Japanese woman named Tsuru Yashima, who volunteered for the experiment as it was the only way for her to survive her terminal leukemia. She experiences severe dysphoria afterwards, and it takes her several years to acclimate to her new prosthetic body, but by 2006, she's comfortable enough to appear on the cover of TIME alongside the second person to undergo the procedure - Christopher Reeve.
• Future Food Is Artificial: "Veat" - vat-grown meat - is becoming popular on both Earth and Mars.
• Goth: Many are concentrated in (reunited) Berlin. Some of them are genetically modified into pseudo-vampires. And then there's the Kara...
• Graceful Loser: At the end of the Red-Blue War, Tobias Falco's reaction to his Arch-Enemy Aaron Lang showing up in person with a squad of soldiers to capture him while he's in the middle of his daily livestream is to calmly turn around, offer Lang a seat and a cup of tea, and say the following, live for all of Mars to hear:

  "GG."

• Gratuitous Latin: A semi-regular feature of post titles. The map of asteroid 433 Eros is titled "Omnia Vincit Amor," and the series on the Red-Blue War is called "Pax Per Bellum."
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Neither side of the Red-Blue War is necessarily "the good guys" or "the bad guys" as a whole, though there are undeniably nutjobs on both sides. In the end, the moderates on both sides unite against the extremists after the war, and both the Reds and the Blues get most of what they wanted.
• Human Subspecies: "Chimeras," humans genetically enhanced with animal traits. These and uplifts are known by the collective name "zoans."
  • There's also the aquamorphs or "gill-babies," humans genetically modified to be able to breathe underwater. Initially outcasts both on Earth and on the moons of Jupiter, they come into their own when Ganymede is terraformed into an ocean world.
  • The Kara, a subculture of "Australian libertarian spider-goths" who have made extensive genetic modifications to themselves, most visibly extra limbs. As experts in esoteric gene-modding, their skills are in high demand on Mars, though their dark aesthetics (which they sometimes play into) lead many to be suspicious or fearful of them.
• Humans Are Psychic in the Future: Psychic Powers are proven to exist in the mid-to-late 21st century. However, they're not particularly strong nor common. Furthermore, "espers" can only receive or transmit thoughts - not both.
• Illegal Religion: Downplayed, and somewhat justified. It's not technically illegal to be a Scientologist on Mars, but their main church is banned there. Considering that said church had infiltrated several Martian colonial governments, committed many crimes (including murder) and made plans for coups in some places, declaring it a criminal organization was an understandable decision.
• In Spite of a Nail: The COVID-19 Pandemic still happens, at the same time and in fairly similar fashion. The biggest difference seems to be that it's not called COVID-19, but NCOV-19 (Novel COronaVirus 2019). Ryzov exclusively refers to it as such.
  • Chile undergoes an odd subversion. It seems like For Want Of A Nail at first, when Augusto Pinochet comes down with a stomachache and misses the meeting that would've brought him into the planned coup against Salvador Allende, leading to the coup being called off... but then Pinochet becomes leader of Chile anyway, by winning an election the honest way. Neither he nor Allende are remembered as particularly impressive presidents, but Pinochet is much more moderate than OTL and even initiates the Chilean space program.
  • While some parts of the Middle East ends up better off than OTL, since there's never a War on Terror, there is still a great deal of turmoil there in 2022. In this timeline, however, it's not Iraq and Syria that are the the epicenter, but a balkanizing Saudi Arabia. The advent of fusion power caused the oil market to collapse in the 2010s, and while it rebounded (even without oil as fuel, people still need oil for plastics and such), the damage to the stability of the Arabian Peninsula had been done.
    • Meanwhile, the Ba'athists under Hafez al-Assad had managed to unite Syria with Iraq, forming the Arab Republic of Iraq & Syria or ARIS, which also falls into serious disorder around the same time and for some of the same reasons. Bashar al-Assad is "encouraged" by the USSR to step down and go into exile on Venus, and ARIS transitions into the Republic of Mesopotamia.
• In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race: The goal of the Zera movement, based in the UK, is to bring about this by encouraging the growth of an entirely new, genetically-engineered human phenotype: light brown skin ("splitting the difference" to weaken the grip of racial prejudice), naturally white hair (to cut down on ageism), and red eyes ("something new and different.") While it never really catches on on Earth, it does catch on in the British colony of Avalon on Mars. In Ryzov's Red-Blue War political compass meme, the Avalon Red Commandos are depicted as being Zeras.
• Insistent Terminology: It's "noaforming," not terraforming. Which term you use is actually something of a political statement. The Blues call it noaforming, in reference to Mars' ancient Noachian Epoch, suggesting the idea of returning Mars from its lifeless present to a former "rightful" state. The Reds, meanwhile, call it terraforming, stemming from a belief that making Mars into "another Earth" would strip the Martians of their identity.
• Inspirational Martyr: Tobias Falco becomes this, his death at the hands of "Hard Red" terrorists uniting the Reds and Blues against the extremists on both sides.
• Kid Hero: The "Tank Kidz," a group of Martian high-schoolers piloting remote-controlled robot tanks, who lend their skills to the Blues during the Red-Blue War.
• Land of One City: The Cape Republic is described as this, being very much centered on Cape Town.
• Lighter and Softer: Ryzov has admitted that the current OVRHVN canon (essentially, everything from The Terror Moon onward, and especially E!22, Pax Per Bellum, E!2150 and Age of Aquarius) is deliberately this compared to the earlier versions of the story. In the first few drafts of OVRHVN, the Earth underwent four world wars, the setting's advanced technology was used in numerous atrocities, the Beijing Impact was intentional and the alternate history elements weren't present. The nature of modern OVRHVN as a Reconstruction of hard science fiction is as much a reaction to early OVRHVN as it is to other sci-fi stories. ^note Some of those early drafts were posted on dA, and they're still viewable there, but they are considered to be outdated. Word of God holds that everything predating The Terror Moon ranges from semi-canon to non-canon.
• A Lighter Shade of Black / Evil vs. Evil: What the "Blank War" boils down to. Following South Africa's split and subsequent race war, a number of Afrikaners had decided to start over in space, founding the Martian colony of Kruger. Naturally, this colony ends up attracting a lot of regular old white supremacists and Neo-Nazis from around the world, producing the two demographics of the Boers in Kruger and the Blanks in the breakaway state of Agartha. The Boers are religious, conservative and not exactly egalitarian, but they're also markedly less racist than they used to be, and by the time of the Red-Blue War, they want to put their apartheid origins behind them. The Blanks, on the other hand, are, well... Neo-Nazis. The Boers and Blanks go to war during the RBW, the Reds and Blues eventually intervene, and the Boers ultimately win. The Blanks are implied to have been nigh-completely wiped out, which is treated as a good thing.
• Literal Metaphor: It's a minor Running Gag for the process of "building bridges" between two nations to involve building an actual bridge. Israel and Palestine build the Salam Bridge to connect the West Bank to Gaza, while Spain and Morocco build a bridge across the Straits of Gibraltar.
• Lysistrata Gambit: Large-scale "sex-strikes" by the women of Sudan played a major role in weakening Omar Al-Bashir's forces enough that a Commonwealth intervention succeeded in ending the Sudanese Civil War in favor of democracy. A similar strategy helps to bring down the FARC in Colombia.
• MegaCorp: Corporate influence is significantly downplayed compared to many hard sci-fi works, but there is a noteworthy example of the trope: the Chinese space venture Tian Corp. The mysterious billionaire Liao Jiahao seeks to promote Chinese culture across the solar system, and to that end, he's secured Tian Corp contracts from the Chinese National Space Agency, which he uses to ramp up the efficiency of China's rockets and establish "Chinatown" colonies all across the Inner Solar System and even as far as Ganymede.
  "For all intents and purposes, Tian Corp has become the Chinese National Space Agency."
  • There's also the Japanese Shimizu Corporation, a real-life architecture, engineering and contracting firm which ITTL has gotten the chance to bring to life some of its more ambitious projects - floating cities, experimental Solar Punk communities, and of course the Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid, the last of which has proven especially successful and become something of a symbol of Japan, not unlike the Sydney Opera House for Australia.
• Mile-Long Ship: Try five-mile-long ship. The MTOS Goliath, a giant space tanker built to deliver much-needed nitrogen, ammonia and water to Mars, is 8.2 kilometers long. It's thus very slow, such that its round trip from Mars to Ganymede (where the ice is) and back takes seven years. But since it's so huge, it's capable of carrying so much of these precious supplies that its return to Mars, and the ensuing conflict over it, is what ends the Red-Blue War.
• Military Mashup Machine: Land Battleships, in the form of "megatanks" deployed by the Reds in the Red-Blue War.
• Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness: Firmly on the hard end of the scale - but Ryzov seeks to prove that hardness need not mean dystopia or pessimism.
• Monumental Damage: The Colosseum is destroyed in a Libyan missile attack. On the site, a new structure, the so-called "Colosseum Nova," is built, in the style of the original, and it now hosts sporting events, historical reenactments and even the Eurovision Song Contest.
• Mundane Utility: The Dominican Republic's cyborg population use their enhancements to play baseball.
  • The Space Boom in general leads to a lot of technologies originally developed for space colonization being put to use back on Earth. In particular, the "everything in one place" architectural style that's necessary in the colonies inspires a boom in megastructure-building on Earth. Arcologies become widespread, huge new housing developments and skyscrapers crop up everywhere, Buckminster Fuller's ideas get taken much more seriously and Japan even builds the Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid!
  • Some space colonies actually find a Mundane Utility for nukes, of all things - turns out, because they're great at melting ice and heating up the atmosphere, nuclear bombs make remarkably good terraforming devices.
• Multinational Team: The Hong Kong Defence Forces allow foreigners to serve in their ranks so long as they have a grasp of English and/or Cantonese. This comes in very handy when China gives them a year to surrender or be invaded. Thousands of volunteers flock to Hong Kong from all over the world and even as far as Luna, and when China does indeed invade, they (along with an almost-as-diverse Commonwealth task force) succeed in driving off the People's Liberation Army and ensuring the independence of the city-state.
  "Koreans, Taiwanese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Brits, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, Americans, Brazilians, Iranians, Turks, Indians, Malaysians, Filipinos, Soviets, Germans, Greeks, Frenchmen, Italians, Swedes, Israelis and even volunteers who made the journey from the Lunar colonies, just to fight for Hong Kong. These ranged from grizzled military veterans, die-hard lifetime anti-communists and special forces operatives covertly acting on behalf of their government’s national interest, to middle-class waiters who quit their day jobs for an adventure."

N-Z

• Naming Your Colony World: It's common for countries to name their offworld colonies after important historical figures or significant locations from Earth. American settlements in particular tend to have names alluding to whichever state most of the colonists come from.
• Neat Freak: Played for horror with Masoud Noorani. He's obsessed with cleanliness to the point of germophobia... and he views Hindus as "filthy." It's implied to be part of why he nukes India.
• Necessarily Evil: The so-called "Worst Generation" of leaders who take charge of post-nuclear India are described as being this, and all too aware of it. They see themselves as having done what they had to do to keep India alive and mostly unified. They did succeed, and India has survived, but at a high price.
• Neologism: Astropolitics - it's like geopolitics, but IN SPACE!
• New Neo City: Hong Kong builds a habitat in orbit, which is naturally dubbed Neo Hong Kong.
  • The capital of the Japanese colonies on Mars is, perhaps inevitably, named Neo-Tokyo.
• No Transhumanism Allowed: This is a political position - it's called "bioconservatism" - and it's far from unheard of in many places, though it's also not exactly a majority. Some of the Western Terrorists in this timeline are of this viewpoint.
• Not Me This Time: Mars and Earth were still not fully on good terms at the time of Hell Day, and it was thought by some at first that the Beijing Impact had been a deliberate attack. Ryzov describes the Martian government's reaction to Hell Day as being "Bring My Brown Pants, followed by 'we swear we didn't do it.'"
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: Hell Day wipes out the majority of the human population, destroys most of Exonesia and completely removes Earth from the astropolitical stage. While the physical effects of the Impact extend no further than Luna, the social, economic and political impact reverberates throughout the whole Solar System. Afterwards, Earth no longer exerts influence on the colonies (if anything, it's the other way around), technological development slows and the general balance of power is completely changed.
• Nuke 'em: India and Pakistan go to war in 2009, and thanks to a coup launched by mentally unstable Pakistani Army officer Masoud Noorani, the war ends up going nuclear. Pakistani nukes destroy or badly damage several Indian cities and irradiate the Ganges River for a while, whilst Indian nuclear retaliation (as well as non-nuclear Orbital Bombardment by the international taskforce that was trying to ensure nukes wouldn't be used) leaves Pakistan devastated. Thankfully, the destruction is largely confined to the Indian subcontinent - though it still ends up having an effect on the rest of the world, via a "minor" nuclear winter and producing so many refugees they effectively form a new demographic, the so-called Pravasi ("migrants").
• Oni: Oni have been adopted as a general symbol of Port Dread. There's an oni face on the flag, the Anthropomorphic Personification of Deimos is depicted as an oni, and the famous Spaceman's Quarter district is full of oni statues, which superstitious spacers often leave small sacrifices at.
• Only in Florida: This timeline has its own variant, concerning China. China's laws on cybernetics and gene-modding are quite lax, and ever since the fall of the CCP and the establishment of democracy, the nation has become known for eccentric billionaires, fistfights in the legislature and generally wacky news stories. Apparently there's even a subreddit for it - r/MeanwhileInChina.
  • Incidentally, this is a bit of irony on Ryzov's part - IRL, it's Taiwan that's known for legislative brawling.
• Orbital Bombardment: The "Rods From God" concept is put into action by the US and other militaries. The Brits, with a kinetic projectile loaned from the Americans, help convince China to pull out of Hong Kong by firing a warning shot from their new Kill Sat. Later on, during the Punjab War, the system gets fully put to use in destroying the Pakistani Armed Forces' bases as soon as the erstwhile peacekeeping mission realizes the Pakistani General Ripper Noorani has just nuked northern India. Sadly, it doesn't stop the Indians from retaliating with their own nuclear arsenal, leaving Pakistan even more devastated than India afterwards.
• Our Presidents Are Different:
  • John Glenn is a deconstructed President Geek - he spends much of his single term focusing on space to the exclusion of domestic affairs, and is remembered as a great astronaut but a mediocre president.
  • Ronald Reagan ends up less conservative, though still a Republican, and he's remembered largely as President Personable.
  • Donald Trump becomes president in 1992, on the Reform Party ticket, and he's depicted as President Buffoon - his presidency is remembered as a mixed bag and a strange time, but a nostalgic one.
  • Colin Powell and Hillary Rodham are both President Minority, being the first black and female presidents, respectively.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: A non-combat example in the form of Minako Hiyama, leader of the Red Planet Revolutionary Ronin, one of the larger Red armies during the Red-Blue War. Firebrand ideologue, intensely charismatic Rebel Leader, 146 centimeters (4 feet, 9 1/2 inches) tall.
• Planetary Nation: The Red-Blue War ends with the victorious Blues, the defeated Reds and the neutral Greens agreeing at the Peace Conference to unite under a new government, the Martian Alliance, which seems to encompass the entirety of Mars. It's the first such planetary government, but it's not the last - Ryzov has already given us a flag, a backstory and a fair bit of setting detail for the Jovian Empire, which encompasses Jupiter and all its moons, and Parbex Presents: Easter Island provided a bit of info on the Lunar Covenant, which controls the Moon. A "Venusian Soviet" has also been mentioned in passing.
• Plant Person: Florasophs are these, although they're more "plants who are people" than "people who are plants." They tend to have rather alien thought processes, be very good at contingencies and long-term planning, and be thought of as distant cousins to the Uplifted Animal community.
• Please Select New City Name: When South Africa splits into white Cape and black Mzansi, Mzansi ends up with Pretoria as its capital, so they rename it Tshwane.
• Post-Cyberpunk: OVRHVN is an excellent example - technology is used to help people, society can be and is changed from within, and while the downsides are not shied away from, the world is A World Half Full and humanity is always making progress.
• Reconstruction: Ryzov has stated that OVRHVN is essentially intended as this for science fiction. Specifically, they wanted to write relatively hard sci-fi that still maintained the optimism of older sci-fi works.
• Rebel Leader: Tobias Falco, "80-year-old zoomer" and former general in the Martian government, who kicked off the Red-Blue War by defecting to the Reds and occupying the erstwhile Martian capital of Primus. He proves himself a Reasonable Authority Figure and A Father to His Men during the war and a Graceful Loser at its end. Tragically, he's killed at the peace talks by a group of "Hard Red" terrorists who considered him a traitor to the movement, thereby uniting both sides against the extremists and helping to ensure the stability of the nascent Martian Alliance.
  • In fact, the United Forces (the main organization of the Red side) actually had seven of them:
    • Falco himself, of the Primus Occupation Force.
    • Levi Brahm, of the Euromartian Defense Forces.
    • Minako Hiyama, of the Red Planet Revolutionary Ronin.
    • Liam Merrick, of the Avalon Red Commandos.
    • Utena Jackson, of the Code Red Coalition.
    • Sultan Al-Khatib, of ESCA.
    • Ernesto Nores, of the Army of the North.
• Reconcile the Bitter Foes: Thanks to a number of factors, including the lack of an Iranian Revolution and the more rabid Zionists moving to Mars, Israel and Palestine manage to find peace.
• Refuge in Audacity: During the Red-Blue War, CivCom (MarsCom's civil engineering division) would send operatives behind Red lines - not to sabotage, but to repair civilian infrastructure, both to win over populations and to demonstrate MarsCom's power. They'd even leave behind a Calling Card, usually in the form of "you're welcome" notes, pro-Blue graffiti or advice on mitigating erosion risks in the area.
• Regional Redecoration: The USA builds a massive dam (called the Rampart Dam) to provide electricity to Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. As a result of the Dam's construction, a sizable portion of northern Alaska is flooded, creating a new lake called Lake Kennedy.
  • Indeed, lake-making is not unheard of throughout the world - the nations of the Maghreb have all been engaging in their own plans to alter the Sahara to their liking, with Egypt even going so far as to create a whole new branch of the Nile. Meanwhile, the Chadian government has done much to rebuild Lake Chad, and the USSR is working on restoring the Aral Sea.
• The Remnant: It's not uncommon for movements or nations that have fallen from grace on Earth to attempt a new start offworld — or in a sufficiently out-of-the-way place on it.
  • Venus, having already been the target of extensive colonization by the Warsaw Pact, is now the destination of choice for those who are bummed communism fell.
  • The Martian colony of Kruger becomes this for racist Afrikaners who preferred South Africa while it was still under apartheid (and before it split in half), as well as for various white supremacist groups who were fast becoming Persona Non Grata on Earth. These two demographics eventually have a civil war.
  • Albania ends up being one of the last communist states on Earth. It's described as being a pseudo-monarchist People's Republic of Tyranny not unlike OTL North Korea, except instead of a family member succeeding Enver Hoxha, they've cloned him.
    • Owing to being the only hardline Marxist state left on Earth, Albania ends up hosting a number of die-hards from the deposed Chinese Communist Party, who set up a government-in-exile/micronation there. Only Albania recognizes them.
  • After the Punjab War, a remnant Pakistani government is formed in Pakistan's orbital habitats. It eventually manages to reunite with the homeland.
  • The Church of Scientology falls out of favor on Earth and is banned on Mars, so they colonize the asteroid 15 Eunomia instead.
  • The closest thing to this trope for Saudi Arabia would be the city-state of Neom.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: There's an entire post about famous revolvers of the 26th century. Apparently, such guns still see a fair bit of use in the offworld colonies. The post features four examples:
  • The Lokang M62, from Io, is the weapon of choice of the Imperial Patrol, the Jovian Empire's equivalent to the Mounties.
  • The Jager Tarzan, from Venus, an ancient DinoTek design for killing or at least deterring dinosaurs, refined over the centuries by the people of post-terraforming Venus.
  • The Isayama Gun, an Ornamental Weapon from Mars, where the judges in the Alliance's Disciplinary Court use pistols as gavels in a tradition dating back to the Red-Blue War.
  • The 262 Gungnir Smartpepper, from Luna, a popular choice among police forces on Luna and Earth thanks to its ability to minimize collateral damage via Homing Projectile.
• Richard Nixon, the Used Car Salesman: Extremely common with figures from The '60s up through the present - Ryzov, it seems, is very fond of this trope.
  • It's not known what Nixon himself was up to in OVRHVN, but he never became president. Other presidents from the TL include Robert F. Kennedy, John Glenn, an earlier President Donald Trump (he serves in The '90s after winning on a third-party ticket, and is thus less extreme and more just strange), Colin Powell, John Edwards, Hillary Rodham and (incumbent as of 2022) Andrew Yang.^note The exact order is: LBJ, RFK, Glenn, Reagan, HW Bush, Trump, Powell, Edwards, Rodham, Yang.
  • After the Chinese Communist Party is overthrown, Xi Jinping winds up in Albania, leading an unrecognized communist government in exile. He's described as being completely ineffectual, and thus very depressed.
  • Alexei Navalny and Volodymyr Zelenskyy become President and Prime Minister, respectively, of the Sovereign Union (the USSR, after a successful liberalization).
  • Chris Hadfield, a successful Canadian astronaut with NASA IOTL, becomes Governor-General of Canada.
  • John Travolta becomes the main celebrity spokesperson for Scientology, and one of its leaders, in place of Tom Cruise. (Cruise, for his part, has become a Barsu.)
  • Rather than establishing a cult compound, Jim Jones defects to the USSR and is eventually persuaded to move to Venus. Since the People's Temple is now based offworld and never commits mass suicide, Jones gets something of a Historical Hero Upgrade, and his descendants still lead the aerostat colony he founded.
    • Also on Venus, one may find John Lennon. He was never murdered ITTL, and he's still a celebrity among the British leftists on the colony of Aumbria, but he's not on good terms with the other ex-Beatles, and Yoko Ono has long since left him, so he's quite depressed.
  • Gordon Ramsay, of all people, is Prime Minister of the UK.
  • Alex Jones, of InfoWars infamy, takes the exact opposite career path ITTL - becoming famous in the world of news as a debunker and skeptic. Meanwhile, since the militia movement isn't as powerful ITTL, Timothy McVeigh never commits the Oklahoma City bombing and instead becomes OVRHVN's equivalent of OTL Alex Jones. Needless to say, McVeigh and Jones don't like each other one bit.
  • George W. Bush never becomes president. Instead, his wife leaves him due to his alcoholism, and he eventually spends a few years in jail after accidentally killing someone in a car crash. While in prison, he sobers up and converts to Mormonism, and after his father pardons him, he moves to Mars, remarries and returns to (local) politics.
  • Christopher Reeve still suffers the riding accident that rendered him quadriplegic IOTL. ITTL, however, thanks to advances in cybernetics, he's able to walk and function again - specifically, by becoming the second person ever to undergo the experimental "Yashima Procedure" and become a Full-Conversion Cyborg. He seems to be quite happy with his new state, as he's gone on to become a major advocate for the technology in addition to returning to acting.
  • Robert H. Lawrence Jr., the first African-American astronaut, became the first man on Mars. Later, he moves there for good with the first wave of civilian colonists, bringing his whole family with him. Laurentia, one of America's Martian colonies, is named in his honor.
  • Charlie Day has gone into politics and become Governor of Rhode Island, and is known for strange publicity stunts.
    • Dwayne Johnson, meanwhile, has gotten himself elected Governor of California.
  • Ted Kaczynski's politics don't change, but he never becomes a Mad Bomber himself, instead writing a controversial best-selling novel entitled ''The Unabomber'' whose titular protagonist is indeed one. It's been an inspiration to many a would-be domestic Eco-Terrorist, and it eventually gets The Film of the Book, starring Joaquin Phoenix.
  • Hugo Chávez never becomes a leftist (he never discovers the stash of Marxist literature he did OTL because he was tuning in to the Mars landing that day instead). He ends up having a Turn to Religion and living out his days as a small-town priest (and a Good Shepherd at that), while Venezuela goes off in an altogether different direction without him.
  • Alberto Fujimori is hit by a car whilst attending college in America, falls in love with his nurse, and moves to America to marry her. He thus never becomes dictator of Peru.
  • In the absence of The War on Terror, Hamas is the name of Palestine's most renowned and controversial... hip-hop collective. (There's also a drag troupe from Mesopotamia called ISIS.)
  • After the USSR successfully reforms into the Sovereign Union, they invest heavily in rehabilitating the Soviet image through culture, and in particular pop music. Thus, many ex-KGB agents reinvent themselves as managers for R-Pop labels - one of the most successful being one Vladimir Putin.
  • The new president of India is none other than Shah Rukh Khan, and he's turned out to be just the kind of positive influence India direly needs.
  • Abbas al-Musawi, the man who in our timeline founded Hezbollah, never did so in OVRHVN. Instead, thanks to advances in space travel in The '70s, al-Musawi develops a new perspective on humanity's place in the cosmos, and becomes an atheist. He goes on to start a successful punk rock band (still called Hezbollah) in a much more peaceful Lebanon.
  • Osama bin Laden emigrated to the United States early on and leads an altogether unremarkable life running a chain of 7-Elevens in Southern California's Orange County. Meanwhile, a different Bin Laden, a distant relative of Osama, is leader of a terrorist faction - specifically, the Emirate of Nejd.
  • In a Philippines where the Marcos regime came to an early end, Rodrigo Duterte ultimately becomes a Vigilante Man, and is eventually arrested and tried for the murder of 12 alleged drug dealers.
• Rightful King Returns: Bulgaria and Romania both restored their monarchies (in constitutional form) after their respective communist governments fell. The two nations are now allies.
• Running Gag: If a Historical Domain Character needs to be out of the way for things to go differently in a particular country, there's a good chance they'll fall down the stairs to their death. (Except for Joseph Mobutu - he survives the fall, but in an interesting justified case of Historical Hero Upgrade, the hit to the head causes a shift in his personality and he becomes a somewhat better ruler, allowing Zaire to do decently well for itself in the modern day.)
  • Another running gag is Chead, a fictional soft drink frequently mentioned or shown as a random background brand, which Ryzov is seemingly insistent on not elaborating about.
• Science Is Good: A common opinion In-Universe. Ryzov describes the world as one of "techno-optimism."
• Science Marches On: An In-Universe example occurs in the story of the asteroid 298 Baptistina: in the 1990s, scientists believed that they had traced the origins of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs to Baptistina. This hypothesis was disproven in 2008, but by then, someone had already colonized Baptistina and turned it into a dinosaur-themed interplanetary tourist trap.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When Hong Kong rejoins the Federal Republic of China in 2037, the orbital habitat of Neo Hong Kong decides they'd rather not and declares independence. After several years of political crises nearly escalating into war, NHK and a few other like-minded habitats simply strap engines to their orbitals and defect to Mars. (This also nearly causes a war, and in fact is a major inciting incident in the Space Cold War between Mars and Earth.)
• Shout-Out:
  • The series of maps and documents detailing the Red-Blue War includes several, not all of them intentional:
    • The Color-Coded Armies themselves are an unintentional reference to Red vs. Blue.
    • One of the Red side's generals is a revolutionary named Utena Jackson. (She goes on to become the Martian Alliance's first proper president after Lang refuses the job, and proves very good at it.)
    • The climactic battle of the war involves a unit called the Spartan Corps fighting on a ring of space stations called the Halo. According to Ryzov, this was completely accidental.
    • One minor Red group, the Red Katipuneros under "Revolutionary Commander" Karen Bondoc, are a force of "radicalized theater kids" whose idea of protesting against the Blue-controlled local government largely boils down to organizing flamboyant "revolutionary" public musical numbers. They don't see much action during the war itself, but end up becoming heroes at the peace summit when they block off the escape route of the terrorists who attacked the summit and killed Falco. According to Ryzov, their existence is an elaborate reference to Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight, which explains why their leader is named Karen.
    • Tobias Falco's surname can easily be assumed to refer to Star Fox (or to Super Smash Bros. for that matter), but when asked, Ryzov said that it was if anything a reference to the Austrian singer.
  • OVRHVN as a whole features a recurring one: Ryzov's April Fools' Day posts are typically given the subtitle "(Not) A Shitpost". Lasagna Dawn even had its chapters titled in the same style.
  • The New World Brigade, a minor antagonistic organization from Ghost in the Shell, shows up as a terrorist network founded by Former Regime Personnel from North Korea. Perhaps not surprisng, given that Ryzov has never made a secret of Ghost In The Shell being a major influence on OVRHVN.
  • Ganymede being terraformed into an ocean world is a reference to Cowboy Bebop, and to a lesser extent Farmer in the Sky.
• Shown Their Work: NK-Ryzov clearly does their research - For Want Of A Nail plotlines and obscure historical footnotes being raised to prominence are quite common, and usually extensively thought out, and the science involved is very accurate.
  • Likewise, the explanations of the Tarot Motifs for the South Asian nations display a very in-depth understanding of the relevant symbolism.
• Significant Reference Date: The first manned Mars landing occurs on July 4th, 1976, America's 200th birthday. Naturally, it's a NASA mission.
• Single-Biome Planet: Ganymede is terraformed into an ocean world.
• Sketchy Successor: When Deng Xiaoping dies earlier than in OTL, his replacement is not Jiang Zemin, but instead a different, more obscure CCP figure named Sun Luoyang. Unfortunately, Sun proves thoroughly incompetent - he fails to keep China competitive in space, gives up China's claim to Taiwan in order to get China onto the UN Security Council, and finally brings about an even-worse-than-OTL Tiananmen Square Massacre, leading to years of further protests and over a thousand more deaths. Sun's idea of trying to foster unity in the face of this is... to invade Hong Kong. The "Hong Kong War" is a Curb-Stomp Battle in Hong Kong's favor, and it ultimately results in Sun Luoyang being forced out of office and the pro-democracy protest movement gaining enough strength to force the CCP out of office.
• Solar Punk: The term is name-dropped a few times, and indeed, most of Earth's electricity even in 2022 is coming from green energy and nuclear fusion.
• South Asian Terrorists: One of the many problems India has to contend with during the post-nuclear period is that of rebellious Naxalites.
• Space Cold War: The timeline is mostly about space and starts in The '60s, so naturally the initial driver of the Space Boom is the Cold War. By The '90s, however, detente's been achieved and the USSR has liberalized, and by the 21st century, while there are four great powers - America, the Sovereign Union, Eurofed and China (in about that order) - their rivalry is downplayed, and the USA is clearly on top. (For the record, Japan is a close fifth.)
  • Following the Red-Blue War and the rise of the Martian Alliance, Earth and Mars become involved in a "Geo-Martian Cold War."
  • After Hell Day, Luna and Mars developed one. Luna made a We Can Rule Together offer to Mars, who rejected it as more "Earthling imperialism," kicking off the Solar Wars. Mars eventually Won the War, Lost the Peace - they took control of Jupiter, but their Puppet State was swiftly overthrown by the revolution that founded the Jovian Empire.
• Spaceship Girl: After a certain point in the timeline, spaceships begin having AI constructs (referred to as "figureheads") that handle a large part of the ship's operations. Perhaps inevitably, they seem to invariably be this trope.
  • Freedom Ship also has one, named Liberty.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Anwar Sadat survives the assassination attempt that killed him OTL, and goes on to make Egypt a prosperous economic power in North Africa before finally retiring in 1995 and dying peacefully a few years later.
  • 9/11 never occurs ITTL, so the World Trade Center towers still stand.
• Starfish Aliens: Europa's underground ocean is home to a whole ecosystem of alien life, the so-called "eurozoa," and they're very much this trope. The one eurozoa we've seen a picture of, the "cubecell," looks like a cube-shaped single-celled organism - except it's almost as large as a human. With this in mind, the fact that many eurozoa are edible and nutritious to humans gets even stranger. Thus far, no known eurozoa have displayed signs of sentience, but you never know...
• Start My Own: It becomes relatively commonplace for marginalized or stateless groups to engage in "exo-nationalism," leaving Earth and founding new nations in orbit or on other worlds.
• Straw Nihilist: The "Cleaners," a fringe group from the Red-Blue War, believe humanity is unworthy to be on Mars and thus that all human influence must be wiped off the face of Mars. They espouse Misanthrope Supreme talking points, engage in sabotage, and even use a black flag. Fortunately for everyone else, the Cleaners' nihilism means they don't attract many recruits, and the Reds and Blues are not above working together to get rid of them.
• Super-Soldier: During the Space Cold War between Earth and Mars, one of the ways in which Mars seeks to overcome its massive disadvantage in resources and manpower is by using genetic engineering and cybernetics to create these, under a program known as "Project Marabunta" after the army ant, an animal Martians consider emblematic of courage and David Versus Goliath scenarios. (Martians in general have something of a fixation on insects.)
• Superstitious Sailors: Spaceship crews are no less superstitious than their seagoing forebears. In the Spaceman's Quarter of Port Dread, which as the name suggests is frequented by spacers, the local Oni statues are a frequent subject of such superstition - it's not at all uncommon for spacers to leave small offerings at the statues. (The understanding is that in the case of offerings of money, the haves give what they can and the have-nots take what they need, in a sort of ritualized charity.)
• Tannhäuser Gate: It's an interplanetary transport and trade hub orbiting the far side of the moon, founded (and to this day ruled as an independent state) by Eccentric Millionaire Reinhold von Lowitz.
• Tarot Motifs: The nations of the Indian subcontinent, which in 2022 range from "more or less back in action" to "Apocalypse Anarchy" following the nuclear devastation of the Punjab War, are each assigned a tarot card by Ryzov, with the card's meaning being significant to the state of affairs in that country.
  • India is The Hanged Man. The Hanged Man represents circumstances beyond one's control, but also patience, resilience of character and the clarity needed to choose a new path after breaking free. India certainly didn't start the war, nor did they choose much of the hardship that ensued afterwards, but they've managed to survive despite everything, and by the 2020s it's becoming clear that India's best days are still ahead.
  "All that remains is patience, until the Hanged Man is free once more."
  • Pakistan is Death. When upright, Death represents new beginnings, change, transition and letting go, while when reversed, it represents inability to move forward, repetition of negative patterns, dependency and resistance to change. Pakistan spent the 2010s seemingly trapped in a cycle of violence and suffering, but with the help of their orbital colonies, they gradually managed to lift themselves out of it. Now, Pakistan is trying to pull itself back together and move on. Time will tell whether it manages to take, though, and many Pakistanis, having learned the hard way how to manage by themselves, are unconvinced that Pakistan can, or even should, be resurrected.
  "Because sometimes dead is better."
  • Bangladesh is The Tower. The Tower is perhaps the most negative card, representing chaos, destruction, and loss, and sure enough, Bangladesh, despite not actually being nuked, is the biggest loser of the Punjab War. The Ganges is still partly irradiated at its mouth in Bangladesh, leading to horrific social stratification based around access to water. An Islamist coup, short-lived though its rule was, did not help matters, and civil war is believed to be just around the corner. While the ongoing crisis is at least helping to drive innovation in the field of radiation-clearing, it will get worse - much worse - before it gets better.
  "This is life in the shadow of the Tower."
  • Sri Lanka is The Sun. The Sun represents material happiness and contentment, and so Sri Lanka, largely insulated from events on the mainland, has managed to do rather well for itself. Sri Lanka had already been on good terms with Japan since even before the Point of Divergence (long story), and they thus benefitted from OVRHVN's Japan being even stronger economically than OTL. Political reforms to rectify anti-Tamil discrimination averted the Sri Lankan Civil War, and after the Punjab War, a great deal of investment and outsourcing that was previously geared at India instead went to Sri Lanka. Today, while India still has the greater GDP, Sri Lanka has the highest standard of living and the healthiest democracy in the subcontinent. All things considered, Sri Lanka's sun seems to be on the rise.
  • Nepal is The Wheel of Fortune. The Wheel of Fortune represents cyclical change, the inevitability of ups and downs, and the turning of karma with both its disorder and its opportunity. Nepal manages to avoid some of the worse events that befell it OTL - Prince Dipendra never murders his family like he did in our timeline, instead renouncing his claim to the throne to marry an Indian noblewoman, with whom he moves to Mars. Nepal is able to remain a monarchy and adopt a formal constitution, and this helps them weather the worst of the Punjab War and its aftermath. The Himalayas shield Nepal from most of the fallout, and the main issue for Nepal in the 2010s is a relatively minor refugee crisis. That, and the thorny issue of genetically-engineered human-chimpanzee hybrids, one of whom fights crime on the streets of Kathmandu for a time.
  • Bhutan, perhaps inevitably, is The Hermit. The Hermit represents wisdom, introspection and solitude. Isolated as it is, Bhutan managed to more or less completely dodge the war. They controversially kept their borders closed during the ensuing refugee crisis, and even in 2022 their only noteworthy interaction with the outside world is as a supplier of a very specific strain of fungus that happens to be useful in certain anti-cancer treatments.
  • Afghanistan is Temperance. Temperance represents balance, harmony and prudence. The Soviet Union, preoccupied as it was with Venus, never invaded Afghanistan ITTL. Thus, with the help of Iran, the Afghan monarchy is restored. The Islamists are eventually fought off, and rather than commit to Iran, Pakistan or the USSR over the others, Afghanistan settles into a comfortable neutrality. They fight in a minor capacity against Pakistan in the Punjab War anyway, even setting up a client state in the form of Pashtunistan. Afghanistan has been actively modernizing, welcoming outside culture and building up their own. The mullahs grumble, but hardly anyone's listening.
  • Pashtunistan, for its part, is The Fool - new beginnings, beginner's luck, and putting one's faith in the absurd. Only partially recognized by the rest of the world, Pashtunistan was carved out of northern Pakistan by Pashtun separatists backed by the Royal Afghan Army towards the end of the Punjab War. Outright described by Ryzov as The Apunkalypse, Pashtunistan has an explicitly unlimited right to bear arms in its constitution, encouraging the Proud Warrior Race Guy Pashtuns to use military-grade weapons for the sake of settling vendettas and feuds. With nearly all the "country"'s elder statesmen having been killed by the fallout from nuked Islamabad, the area is in a state of Apocalypse Anarchy, save for the capital of Peshawar, where organized vigilante groups (possibly backed by Pakistan and India) are actively working to establish some semblance of law and sanity.
  • Myanmar is The Devil - selfish impulses, ambition, taboo and The Dark Side. As in OTL, Myanmar is engaged in a long-running civil war between the Bamar ethnic majority and the various minorities they discriminate against, and the Punjab War hasn't helped one bit. Buddhist militants have gained significant influence, there's a massive refugee/immigration crisis along the border with India, the country's human rights record is atrocious, and it's an Open Secret that China is Playing Both Sides of the whole thing.
  • The UN Trust Territory of Rakhine is The World. The World represents wholeness, the big picture, emigration, assured success, and the end of a cycle about to start anew. The United Nations has set up a trust territory in a particularly chaotic region near the Myanmar/India border in the hopes of protecting the Rohingya and other persecuted minorities and refugees from genocide. Unfortunately, incompetent and corrupt governance has led to massive slums, human trafficking scandals and cholera outbreaks, among other troubles. In spite of this, it remains the best hope for many in it, and the "Rakhine Mandate" actually is succeeding in some of its goals: the refugees there remain reliably fed, effective vaccination regimens made the disease outbreaks much less severe than they could've been, and many refugees are successfully moving out to safer countries such as Indonesia, Australia or the USA.
• The Theme Park Version: In-Universe example. Earthling media about the colonies tends to have an exaggerated and not terribly accurate idea of what they're like, which actual colonials, especially the Martians, cringe at.
• Title Drop: The E!22 lore document, after hundreds of pages detailing every aspect of life on Earth (and, to an extent, beyond) in the alternate present of the setting, ends by calling attention to the friction between pro- and anti-technology forces over whether human progress really is inevitable:
  "Will mankind choose Earth over heaven?"
• Transhuman: Cyborgs, genetically modified humans and such things are a major part of the timeline, and the term is name-dropped repeatedly. Outright transhumanism for its own sake is considered a somewhat fringe political stance in 2022, and frowned upon in most places, but that's likely to change in the future...
• Transhumans in Space: ...which naturally results in this trope.
• Underground City: Some offworld colonies are like this. The "Ice Age" of Ganymede was dominated by such cities, but this came to an end when terraforming started melting the ice.
  • Mercury continues to make use of them, as it's the best way to stay out of the sun.
• Underwater City: The city-state of Atlantis is one, built in the 90s and early 2000s. It's of a somewhat libertarian bent, but it's no Rapture.
  • Ganymede, thus far, seems to have averted this, instead opting for building arcologies that float.
• United Europe: United Western Europe, at least. The European Federation (Eurofed for short) consists of France, Italy, Germany, Austria, the Low Countries and (for a time) Iberia. They spend most of the 21st century as a world power.
• Uplifted Animal: A technology that's still in its infancy in 2022, but is already producing interesting results. There's at least one facility working to uplift various primates, and New York City has a problem with tool-using rats.
  • By the 2070s, several species have been genuinely uplifted - the Red-Blue War sees rodent uplifts doing espionage and cat uplifts doing counter-espionage, and the oceans of Ganymede are home to uplifted whales and dolphins.
• Velvet Revolution: Ultimately, this is how the Communist Party of China falls. After an even worse Tiananmen Square Massacre, years of further protests and deaths, and a botched attempt to invade Hong Kong that ends in humiliating defeat for the PRC, on the 8th anniversary of the Tiananmen protests in 1997, 500,000 protestors march on the square once more... and this time, the People's Liberation Army lets them in. The CCP is all but forced to organize a multi-party election, which they naturally lose in a landslide, and Hu Jintao steps down peacefully, allowing a new constitution to be written and the People's Republic to transition into the Federal Republic of China.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Cryomorphs - humans gene-modded for cold climates, like the Canadian Arctic or Europa - tend to not wear a whole lot when in warmer climates, as they run the risk of overheating.
  • Male delphi (bottlenose dolphin uplifts) also have a penchant for shirtlessness when in humanoid prosthetic bodies, but that's just because delphi are both rather fond of the human form and rather lecherous, and think it's a shame that we humans insist on hiding our bodies as much as we do.
• Wandering Culture: Every world seems to have one. Tuaregs on Earth, Grays on Luna, Rusties on Mars and Mariners on Ganymede.
• We Will Use WikiWords in the Future: Both sides of the Red-Blue War have CamelCase names: MarsCom (Martian Command) for the Blues, and UniFor (United Forces) for the Reds.
  • The three main divisions of MarsCom are also like this: DefCom (Defense Command), SciCom (Science Command), and CivCom (Civil Command).
  • Back on Earth, there's the European Federation, more commonly known as Eurofed.
• Western Terrorists: While the different course of the Cold War weakens the power of the militia movement, that just means domestic terrorism in the US persists into the 21st century on a lower level.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: There's a Second Korean War in The '90s, and the North ultimately loses. Thus, Ryzov gives a rundown of what became of the various members of the Kim Dynasty:
  • Kim Jong-il is executed for crimes against humanity at the end of the war.
  • Kim Jong-nam, the dictator's eldest son, flees the country and goes on to found a far-left terrorist network called the New World Brigade. The NWB terrorizes Asia for some time, and in recent years has splintered after Jong-nam's death in a gunfight with police in 2014.
  • Kim Jong-un was thirteen at the time, and thus wasn't tried for anything. However, after the war, he becomes an object of worship for a minor neo-Juche cult in post-war Korea. He eventually leaves the cult, writes his memoirs, moves to Japan and leads a relatively normal life, albeit under tight security for fear of harassment by the cults he now advocates against.
  • Kim Yo-jong, Jong-un's younger sister, was only six when the war started, and went missing in the chaos. She ends up being adopted by a Japanese family and grows up under the name "Kayoko Iwamoto." Eventually, years of therapy allow her to recover her suppressed childhood memories, and her identity is confirmed. She's able to reunite with her brother and becomes something of a celebrity as the "Korean Anastasia," even getting a Studio Ghibli movie based on her life.
  • Kim Pyong-il, Jong-il's half-brother, was overseas on diplomatic duties when the war started. He distances himself from the regime (and has to dodge NWB assassination attempts as a result), and he ultimately serves a few years in a Swiss prison before finally coming back to Korea and reuniting with Jong-un and Yo-jong. Sadly, the New World Brigade finally manages to kill him in 2018.
  • Kim Jong-chul, Jong-un's half-brother, is last seen by US Marines, running down an alleyway in Pyongyang. He's never heard from again. Conspiracy theories about what happened to him circulate in Korea to this day.
• Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell: Not only does Russia successfully reform into a social democracy, the Chinese Communist Party is overthrown and the Castro regime in Cuba is forced to step down, leaving communism almost nonexistent on Earth, and communists there quite bummed indeed. This leads to the rise to prominence of "exit socialism," a theory asserting that establishing socialism on a planet already controlled by capitalism is either impossible or not worth the effort, and that therefore, the socialist state must be built from scratch, in the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism - space! Fortunately, the Soviet bloc had already been colonizing Venus.
• World in the Sky: The use of aerostats on Venus produces a society something like this. Not an exact example, since there is of course an actual surface down there below the clouds, but as the Venusian surface is, well, the Venusian surface, the effect is much the same.
• The World Is Just Awesome: This trope actually winds up having a tangible effect on global politics. By 2022, enough of Earth's population (including policymakers) has been into space that the Overview Effect is starting to become widespread, fostering an increased sense of community and an upswing in international cooperation.
• World of Technicolor Hair: Thanks to modern genetic treatments, by 2022 it's becoming common for people (especially younger people) to have hair colors that would ordinarily be the province of anime without needing to use hair dye. Interestingly, while most of the treatments are temporary, if one conceives a child after having recently taken such a treatment, the child might well end up with that color as their natural hair color. Indeed, so many women in Brazil used such a treatment to recolor their hair in anticipation of the 2002 World Cup that when Brazil won, the ensuing celebrations resulted in so many pregnancies that twenty years later, 11.4% of the Brazilian population has naturally green hair.
• World War III: Never fully comes to pass on Earth, at least not the way it's usually envisioned, but the Punjab War between India and Pakistan is probably close enough - it did go nuclear, after all.
• Zeppelins from Another World: Believe it or not, airships have made a comeback in OVRHVN. The use of aerostats on Venus brought them back into the public's good graces, and rather than flammable hydrogen, they can be fueled using the much safer helium that's produced as a byproduct of nuclear fusion reactors. Eurofed is noted to be a leader in the technology.

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Whatever the future may bring, things seem bright for everyone on Earth and over heaven.