Nuclearth
Nuclearth is an alternate Earth which was devastated by nuclear war in 1989. As is the case with the names of most alternate worlds, the name "Nuclearth" is only a name used in the Wongery for convenience; it is not a name that residents of the world would ever use.
Geography
The nuclear armageddon rendered large areas uninhabitable, knocked off pieces from some coasts, and caused a slight rise in the overall sea level, but all in all didn't make any drastic large-scale changes to the shapes and positions of the continents, all of which still exist in the same places as before, even if their outlines may be a little different. North America and Europe are both missing enough chunks from their outlines to noticeably change their contours, but the other continents for the most part are little altered beyond a slight contraction of the coasts due to the higher sea level.
The one major geographical change that did occur in Nuclearth, though really calling it "geographical" may be stretching a point, is the formation of Atlantis. The Atlantis of Nuclearth isn't the Atlantis of legend risen from the sea, though of course it's named after that mythical land, but is rather a solid mass of an alga called Atlantean weed, mutated from the sargassum that had always been plentiful in the area. Atlantis has a diverse flora and fauna all its own, similarly mutated from preapocalyptic sea life, and has been settled by humans from all over the world.
Political Structure
As of 261 years after the terrifying war, civilization has begun a recovery, though most of the antebellum nations and organizations are gone, or exist now as very imperfect imitations of their previous forms. The prevailing social structures vary widely in different areas. Where the closest things exist to large nations is in southern Africa and northern Asia, where, independently from each other, feudal societies arose out of the chaos and emptiness of the postwar years—not identical, of course, to the feudal system of medieval Europe, but sharing many of its basic features. Some of the feudal leaders lay claim to large territories, though their ability to actually enforce their will in the far-flung outskirts of their supposed domains may in practice be minimal. Europe, too, retains relatively large political units—relative to those in the rest of Nuclearth, anyway, if not to the preapocalyptic nations—but these are governed by military stratocracies rather than by feudal lords and lieges.
Elsewhere, for the most part, the largest forms of government are independent city-states, or at best small collections of a handful of cities united under common leadership. There are, however, generally some organizations that exist in multiple city-states and may exercise a considerable amount of power. In North America—as well as in Japan—a system of organizations called fraternities play an important role, each focused on a different philosophy. In the Middle East and southern Asia, occupational guilds hold the power. Meanwhile, in northern Africa, such a high premium is placed on knowledge that scholars and researchers, while not holding official rulership positions, are so venerated that they often hold more actual power than those who do, making the cities into de facto clerisiarchies.
Most of South America and Australia form intermediate cases, albeit for different reasons. Most of South America has fallen under the rule of a family of reputedly telepathic mutants, who are said to rule by directly controlling the minds of those who oppose them, though a few argue that really they only rely on the populace's fear of them. These mutants appear like ordinary humans for the most part, though some of them have slightly metallic or opalescent skin tones. As for Australia, a handful of religious groups have seized power there, turning the continent into a patchwork of rival theocracies. The organization that controls the most territory is the Church of the Holy Martyrs, although the second-place group, the Church of the Exalted Brethren, has done more to spread its doctrines to other lands, and has a greater presence globally.
Aside from the continents, the oceans have human inhabitants of their own, with their own political systems. Atlantis, mentioned above, is a patchwork of different political systems. Many of the various islands dotting the waters have their own inhabitants as well—though these islands are now far more isolated than they were before the war when sea travel was more commonplace, and many of them have suffered technological regression far more extreme than elsewhere. But there are also more or less self-sufficient floating communities called flotillas, or sea towns, seabound cities composed of boats and barrels and anything else that floats, lashed together or otherwise attached into huge more or less stable masses. The largest such city, Neptunia, wanders the Pacific, but thousands of others of various sizes are found throughout the seas.
The dominant political structure within an area, however, is only that... the dominant political structure. Everywhere, there are those, also, who live outside the mainstream of civilized society. Aside from bandits and other outlaws, there are three main categories of such outsiders common to many areas of Nuclearth. Of the three, the hillmen are those most closely allied to civilization; they are people who live outside the settled communities, but who may occasionally enter towns for trade and socialization. The ferals see civilization as the cause of the nuclear disaster and who actively resist it and its trappings, eschewing any technology or anything clearly pertaining to civilized culture. Finally, the most enigmatic of the three groups are the salvage-men. Though not the staunch opponents of civilization that the ferals are, the salvage-men still seem to want to keep close to the land and to abstain from the use of any technology greater than that of the prehistoric eras. There are constant stories of the salvage-men wielding strange powers totally different from the psionic endowments that others are said to possess, though few scholars claim to have discovered any reliable documentation that these alleged abilities truly exist.
Creatures
The nuclear apocalypse wiped out many species of animal, plant, and other organism. Though humanity survived, many other species, including the horse, the eagle, the cantaloupe, the Siberian pine, and, somewhat ironically, the cockroach, did not. However, the extinctions didn't follow the pattern that one might expect—just one of many unexplained factors in Nuclearth's development. While one might expect the biggest casualty rate to be among the top carnivores, who occupy the precarious peak of the food chain, in fact these animals have fared remarkably well, while the extinctions have occurred disproportionately among the teeming arthropods and nematodes.
Despite all the extinctions, however, the total number of species in Nuclearth may possibly be larger than before, for one simple reason—mutation. In another unexplained process, the radiation of the nuclear war has caused all sorts of bizarre mutations in many of the organisms that lived through it. The offspring of mutated creatures are also mutated, but not necessarily in the same manner as their parents. In some cases, however, not just the fact of mutation but its particular manner is passed down, leading to mutant strains that breed true. Now some of these mutant creatures are as common and as well known as the preexisting species, and in some cases have more or less taken their place—in the absence of horses, for example, people have taken to using large canines called riding wolves as steeds instead.
Mutations occur not only in nonsentient creatures; humans too are susceptible to the mutation process, and human mutants are found throughout the world, though their reception among the unmutated people varies. There are some pure strains of human mutant, just as of other mutant organisms, some of the most prevalent of which are the death's head and the quarterling.
There are rumors of other, weirder creatures existing in Nuclearth. Some believe in supernatural land spirits that serve the salvage-men. Others—and even some of the same people—believe that Nuclearth has been invaded by extraterrestrial beings, who may have been responsible for some of the strange phenomena that accompanied and succeeded the war. There is, however, little evidence that either of these creatures truly exist.
History
Though the defining event of Nuclearth would probably be considered the nuclear war that nearly wiped out humanity and that made the world what it is, the world's history diverged from True Earth's well before that. The exact point of divergence is impossible to pin down, but certainly the first obvious point of departure was the murder in 1986 of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev by a radical dissenter, and his replacement in the position by one Alexei Dmitrivich Vintronov.
Another significant deviation occurred the following year, in the Iran-Contra affair, when president several members of president Ronald Reagan's administration were discovered to have been involved in the sale of arms to Iran in return for the release of hostages and money to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. On True Earth, the long-term effects on the administration were minimal; Reagan's popularity plummeted in the short term but quickly rebounded, and vice president George Herbert Bush was elected president the following year. On Nuclearth, however, the political damage was much more extensive; while Reagan wasn't actually impeached, his popularity never reallyrecovered, and Bush's political future was more or less ended. With Bush no longer a viable candidate, the Republican candidate for the 1988 election was a dark horse senator named James Carrister, who barely managed to beat out Democrat Michael Dukakis in the national election.
Vintronov and Carrister met early in Carrister's administration to discuss arms reduction, but the talks never made much progress, and the two remained always in a state of mutual distrust. Finally in 1989, Carrister reacted to a perceived threat by Vintronov, though whether Vintronov's statement was meant the way Carrister took it may never be known. In any case, Carrister decided on a preemptive strike at the supposed locations of the main Soviet missile silos. The Soviets, however, discovered the incoming American missiles in time, and Vintronov retaliated with a launch of his own—and as more nations were drawn into the conflict, the ensuing nuclear war devastated most of the Earth and decimated mankind.
Neither nature nor humanity was entirely wiped out, however, and in the centuries since civilization has started to reestablish itself, though in a rather different way. The years in Nuclearth are now generally counted starting at the nuclear exchange, though given the chaos and desolation just after the war the count is actually a few years off. Most articles about Nuclearth in the Wongery describe the world as it exists about 258 years after the nuclear exchange, in the year 261 by the new calendar.