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Alternate Techline
- 244 statements
- 46 feature instances
- 42 referencing feature instances
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Technology does not necessarily advance in Tech Levels. Instead, the present of an Alternate Timeline may be more advanced than our world in some areas, and yet have the same or less knowledge in other fields. After all if you have no good metal, it may be an impassable barrier, or a good reason to learn more about ceramics, and if Aliens Never Invented the Wheel (or humans, for that matter), this doesn't mean they sat on their behinds and couldn't think of anything good. Steampunk and other forms of the punk literature and media (not to be confused with the music style known as punk) are well known for this trope, although it appears in all forms of sci fi to some extent. May include Zeppelins from Another World. If done in an incoherent way, it becomes Schizo Tech. Sometimes indirectly caused by Zeerust, as a Sci-Fi book set in the future becomes a film set in what looks more like an alternate present. Cassette Futurism uses this to justify its setting. Not to be confused with Giving Radio to the Romans, in which Time Travel and an enforced technology bump are involved instead of technology advancing by itself in a different direction. Examples |
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| Alternate Techline / int_12300cc3 | type |
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Watchmen has much of its tech levels thanks to Doctor Manhatten's ability to synthesise the requisite materials. Notably, electric vehicles are far more practical in The '80s in the Watchmen verse than in real life, since the Doc can create the batteries at will. | |
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Mega Man (Classic) and its sequels take place in a world where intelligent humanoid robots, teleportation, energy weapons and matter replication all exist as early as 2001. Mega Man Battle Network is itself an alternate technological progression from the mainline run-and-gun games where networking tech became the preeminent focus of technology advancement over robotics, resulting in a massively complex Internet that requires the use of sentient AI to navigate (called "NetNavis"). This eventually moves off of physical links to the EM spectrum in the sequel series Mega Man Star Force. |
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Fringe has an alternate universe with Zeppelins and autopiloted helicopters, while pens are obsolete, but smallpox is still untreatable and has not been eradicated. To explain, medical technology in general is greatly ahead of 'our' timeline - gunshot wounds are treated as minor inconveniences - but diseases like smallpox have mutated and become incredibly virulent, so much so that epidemics seem to be a fact of life in the heart of the US. There's a throwaway news story about refugees from Texas affected by one such epidemic. | |
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Steam Boy features this trope. It takes place in an alternate 19th century where, as the title suggests, steam is the main source of power instead of coal, nuclear, etc. One example of an alternate technology is the steam ball, a sphere that can store a seemingly infinite amount of steam under a practically infinite amount of pressure, which the protagonist uses as an improvised jetpack and which the villain wants to use to power his flying fortress. The father of the protagonist makes steam powered weapons such as the monowheel and is considered this universe's version of Darth Vader. | |
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The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello has an alternate techline, featuring, among other things, steam-powered dirigibles. | |
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Naruto has computers, but no cars or guns (except for one scene in the background during the first arc). Instead jutsus are used. Movie theatres and convenience stores exist though. One area where the Naruto world seems particularly underdeveloped is in transportation since most places are walked or sailed to. The internal combustion engine seems to exist, as modern construction equipment has been seen. It's just that people don't seem to use it for transportation. | |
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The world of Fullmetal Alchemist seems to be at a roughly 1910s or 1920s technology level in terms of weapons and consumer products, but automail is well beyond anything that exists in 20th-century (or even 21st-century) Earth. Many technological advances were probably either accelerated or averted due to the existence of alchemy, though oddly there's no sign of planes or other flying machines (not even airships), and alchemy is never used for that purpose either. | |
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This is played with in the short story "Impossible Dreams" by Tim Pratt as it concerns formats as opposed to technology levels. Pete discovers a video store from an Alternate Universe called Impossible Dreams Video that appears for increasingly short periods of time every night. He rents a copy of The Magnificent Ambersons with the rediscovered footage from the store, intending to watch it on his DVD player at home. However, the player can't read the disc as DVD encryption is different in the Alternate Universe. The next night, he plans to rent a DVD player from the store but he notices that the electrical plug's two posts are "oddly angled, one perpendicular to the other." As such, the store's player would be equally incompatible with the outlets in his apartment. He ruefully notes that it is unlikely that the local Radio Shack has an adapter that would work. The same problem exists with videotapes as they are smaller than VHS and larger than Betamax. | |
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In Never Let Me Go, medicine is ahead of our world. The film version begin with stating that these breakthroughs were made in the fifties. | |
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The latter half of the 1993 Made-for-TV Movie (and pilot episode that was never picked up) Doorways happens in an Alternate Universe that is a New Old West... or rather, a "current day" world that was forced to revert to mostly Old West levels of technology because of an oil and plastic-eating bacteria that was unleashed a few years earlier to get rid of some oil spills and ended up Gone Horribly Right. | |
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In If Wishes Were Ponies, The technology levels and magical understandings of The Wizarding World and Equestria are contrasted in the story to be about as different as The Dark Ages are from The Industrial Revolution respectively. The Statute of Secrecy has caused innovation in Wizarding magic to stagnate due to the Magical governments' lack of interaction with their Muggle counterparts, with wizards often continuing to use unconventional magical solutions as long as they work without trying to improve them as an "If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It" mentality. Meanwhile, Equestria's understanding of magic and worldwide acceptance of its principles has led to ponies viewing Magic as another kind of science that is to be both studied, researched and improved upon. This is best seen with both societies' approaches to instantly transporting people across large distances: Wizarding Apparition has a strict age limit for even attempting to learn the technique due to it frequently causing Teleportation Sickness and Splinching being a consequence of not giving it one's full attention, while the Equestrian teleportation spell is well-researched and has safeguards in place to prevent serious harm befalling the user, allowing even untrained magic users to use it given proper instructions and tools: where Twilight Sparkle designs a version of the spell that can be used with Wands that she then successfully teaches to a young Hermione Granger just months before she would attend Hogwarts. | |
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Maniac (2018) takes place in an alternate present in which computing technology never got past the 1980s; most computers shown are 1980s models running basic command-line interfaces and the internet and cell phones don't exist. What has advanced is the ability to scan, download & manipulate the human brain as well as Artificial Intelligence. A more immersive, yet graphically ancient form of Virtual Reality also exists. | |
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In the Civilization games, you can advance your tech trees in whatever order you prefer. Some technologies are dependent on each other, but many are not. All games in the series feature this. The most obvious examples are caravels and frigates, whose technology is independent of Gunpowder, and yet they are clearly shown using cannons. One example in V: through a number of quirks in the tech tree, it is possible to research and build destroyers without having sailing. Civilization: Beyond Earth features a "tech web" instead of the typical "tech tree", which allows players to advance in any direction they wish. In fact, the game doesn't limit which main techs a player researches, but it can take a long time, if none of the connecting techs have been researched first. Additionally, researching branch techs requires first researching the main techs. In fact, the central game concept is the three primary research tendencies called "affinities": Purity (defense, terraforming), Supremacy (cybernetics, satellites), and Harmony (genetic engineering, taming local lifeforms). For example, the ultimate unit for a Purity-aligned faction is the LEV Destroyer, a hovering fortress that wouldn't look out of place in Warhammer 40,000; the ultimate Supremacy unit is a Humongous Mecha called ANGEL; the ultimate unit for Harmony is the Xeno Titan. Each affinity also has has a preferred strategic resource: floatstone for Purity, firaxite for Supremacy, and xenomass for Harmony. |
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Metal Gear has this as a major point of development. Despite the timeline extending to, at the absolute latest, the year 2018, technology by that point is so far beyond what this timeline is capable of as to have everything including genetically-engineered Super Soldiers, cyborg ninjas, robotic prosthetics invented as early as the 1970s, cloning, nanomachines and the titular Metal Gear Mini-Mecha, to say nothing of its numerous variants and any other bipedal tanks the series has to offer. | |
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| Alternate Techline / int_5a160237 | comment |
Civilization: Beyond Earth features a "tech web" instead of the typical "tech tree", which allows players to advance in any direction they wish. In fact, the game doesn't limit which main techs a player researches, but it can take a long time, if none of the connecting techs have been researched first. Additionally, researching branch techs requires first researching the main techs. In fact, the central game concept is the three primary research tendencies called "affinities": Purity (defense, terraforming), Supremacy (cybernetics, satellites), and Harmony (genetic engineering, taming local lifeforms). For example, the ultimate unit for a Purity-aligned faction is the LEV Destroyer, a hovering fortress that wouldn't look out of place in Warhammer 40,000; the ultimate Supremacy unit is a Humongous Mecha called ANGEL; the ultimate unit for Harmony is the Xeno Titan. Each affinity also has has a preferred strategic resource: floatstone for Purity, firaxite for Supremacy, and xenomass for Harmony. | |
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In Schlock Mercenary matter annihilation reactors ("annie plants") have been a staple of galactic society for millennia that enable Artificial Gravity and Reactionless Drive, while Longevity Treatments are a very recent invention. The Bradicor, however, didn't have the chance to develop annie plants before their civilization imploded but the survivors are individually over twelve million years old. However, it's known that the F'sherl-ganni, who have lifespans measured in hectomillennia, have been manipulating galactic politics and economies via their Portal Network and the Post-Trans-Uranic elements needed to construct an annie plant are extremely difficult to synthesize without an existing plant. | |
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Similarly, in Last Exile, antigravity generators are common, yet in other respects the setting is almost entirely steampunk, as seen here. | |
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It's a relatively minor change, but Princess Mononoke has the Tatara clan develop an alternate form of musket apparently based on the Chinese cannon long before firearms were ever actually used in Japan. | |
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The Prestige has different technology in its universe due to Tesla actually creating devices like a teleportation machine. Or rather, what most people think is a teleportation machine due to the way Angier uses it in his magic act - only he and Tesla know that it's actually a duplication machine. | |
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Resident Evil downplays this by and large, as despite the series' fusion of Military Science Fiction with Survival Horror and Bio Punk, the setting's general tech level is otherwise consistent with our own, to the point the remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3 made it a point to accurately capture the look and feel of the late 1990s. However, outside of that, development into biotech and biological weapons of mass destruction is so thoroughly researched that by said late 1990s, there exists a plague that creates typical John Romero-esque zombies from the infected - and the variants of what kind of bioweapons there are has only gotten crazier and crazier from there. This leads a major point of concern of the world to be around "bioterrorism," which is terrorism done with the horrific bioweapons found as a result of their proliferation in the 1990s. This is somewhat hand-waved given the absurdly-corrupt Umbrella Corporation was ultimately the one who started all this madness, and even almost thirty years after the collapse of Umbrella and everyone associated with the project being terminated, their aftereffects are STILL felt to this day. | |
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Further discussed in Mass Effect 2, where you can discuss the topic with Legion. | |
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Fallout in spades: They have nuclear propulsion, Power Armor, robots and lasers, but their computers are at the level of computers in the 70s and early 80s and many other consumer technologies like telephones and TVs are stuck in the 50s and 60s. | |
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The Geth in Mass Effect are a race of AI's who cut themselves off from the rest of the galaxy following the Morning War. After 297 years, their technology is very different from the standard Element Zero-based mass effect technology. For example, they use plasma-based weaponry as opposed to railguns, their space stations lack air or gravity (naturally), and their ultimate goal is to create Dyson Sphere-like megastructure to house all of them together, which could let them attain a new level of consciousness. They were offered the potential to achieve their goal by Sovereign, but most Geth decided that the best option for all life is self-determination. Further discussed in Mass Effect 2, where you can discuss the topic with Legion. |
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In Trinity Blood, airships armed with rayguns are standard equipment for most countries' militaries, but infrared - homing missiles? Software that allows you to write computer programs yourself? That's lost technology from before the apocalypse! | |
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A non-alternate-reality example in Iron Sky. The Moon Nazis have advanced in the areas of space travel (anti-gravity), weapons technology (cannons capable of blowing up sizable chunks of a planet), and nuclear fusion (why else would they stockpile Helium-3?). However, their computer technology has stalled at 1940s levels. This is actually a major plot point in that their most powerful computer (the size of a room) can't operate their flagship... but a smartphone can. | |
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In In Time, mankind has had genetic engineering with clinical immortality for over a century and a method to give everyone biological digital clocks embedded to their arms which they have from birth that allow their remaining lifespan to be used as a form of currency, but doesn't seem to have invented the cellphone or the internet yet. Almost all technology is like a few decades before the film was made. (In other words, almost all technology is like when the book the film was based on was written.) | |
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Later games have tried to move away from this, introducing cargo planes as well as ordinary cars and trucks (moving vans have appeared before, but without real roads to explain how they got there, and technically, there was a single, infamous truck in the first generation, but it was never commented on). | |
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Real Humans and its British remake Humans both take place in an alternate present in which all technology is the same, except robotics/A.I. has advanced to where androids (called "hubots" in the original and "synths" in the remake) are commonplace. | |
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A few Sliders episodes involve this: For example, one episode involves a world where antibiotics were never discovered. As such, the world lives in perpetual fear of germs and has developed the means to detect sick people just by passing through a metal detector-like device. Another episode has them land on a world with no aluminum (it's not even on the periodic chart, which either means there's a blank spot there, or another element), meaning no long-range air travel. Helicopters were never invented. However, at the end, it's revealed that the US government plans to "invent" long-range airplanes made of kevlar. Naturally, pirates don't want their golden age to end and try to hijack the shipments of the material. |
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One Piece uses this frequently, having things such as advanced medicine, but no steam powered ships or computers. Instead of phones or televisions, living creatures called Transponder Snails are used to broadcast signals. There are also cola-powered cyborgs and seashells called dials which can store and expel just about anything. | |
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Alternate Techline | |
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Pokémon. They have hi-tech tools such as Poké Balls and artificial Mons (Magnemite, Voltorb, Porygon, Kling), but their transportation methods are terrible. The world has a few ships and trains (most of which are "Magnet Trains") and it's supposed to take place in Turn of the Millennium. Of course, this is the world where kids are allowed to have pets that can fly anywhere, travel through seas and work as their bodyguards against wild animals, they probably don't feel like needing too many vehicles. Later games have tried to move away from this, introducing cargo planes as well as ordinary cars and trucks (moving vans have appeared before, but without real roads to explain how they got there, and technically, there was a single, infamous truck in the first generation, but it was never commented on). |
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Alternate Techline | |
| Alternate Techline / int_a38e31ce | comment |
Bring the Jubilee has this. Most of their technology is inferior to ours (at the 1950s), all streets have railroads and electricity was never made universally available. Instead they use some kind of heated gas or plasma which they channel through tubes. And their type writer design is apparently not as needlessly complicated as ours. | |
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Alternate Techline | |
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Different Paratime timelines have evolved different levels of technology based on whether or not they remember their ET roots and other causes like mass extinction wars etc. | |
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Alternate Techline | |
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In Orphan Black, technology is entirely the same but successful human cloning was made possible in the mid-1980s (albeit not widely known to the general public), and science is much further along in making Designer Babies possible in the present day. | |
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Alternate Techline | |
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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen take place in an alternate 1900 where humanity has already created tanks and assault rifles, zeppelins are common and people can become invisible. | |
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Alternate Techline | |
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In Disco Elysium, despite the world being in a time period culturally analogue to the late 20th century, technology is very different. Computers are chunky, lack a monitor screen, use crystalline cubes to save data and display their data through printing and function through radio waves (hence they are called radiocomputers in-universe); television doesn't seem to exist and radio is the main form of mass media technology; movies exist in some capacity since a video rental store is mentioned, but apparently they rent reel tapes instead of VHS or other later formats; video games also don't seem to exist and arcades feature exclusively Pinball, although there's also radiocomputer games; motorcarriages (the analogue of modern cars) look like more advanced versions of real-life motorized carriages, such as 1886 Daimler Motorcoach◊, and lorries (the analogue of trucks) are quite different in design from that of their real-life counterparts, specially those created for travelling through The Pale, since they have a set of several small wheels to attach itselves to the inside of cargo planes. While automatic weapons are stated to exist, a lot of flintlock and musket like weapons are still in regular use while the Krenel mercenaries wear bulletproof ceramic body armor far more advanced than anything in our world. | |
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Alternate Techline | |
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The expository title sequence of Lockwood & Co. (2023) shows that after the outbreak of the Problem, technology stocks plummeted. The series takes place in the 2020’s but the technology is at 1980's level. The timetable is pushed forward from that of the original books to set the series in the modern day. Thus, while there is never any mention of computers in the original novels, in the series the young Fittes agent Bobby Vernon is mentioned as getting information from a new database that has only just been developed. | |
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Doctor Who: Season 2 travels to an alternate universe Earth where Zeppelins are common, Britain's technology is more advanced than than at home, and science has developed medallions with the power to make the wearer cross universes. It's also a universe where the Cybermen, consisting of human brains placed in robotic bodies, were created on Earth rather than on Mondas like in the main universe. In The Wedding of River Song, due to all time happening at once, tech is a mixed bag; Zepplin-cars replace highways, while the Holy Roman Emperor, Winston Churchill, travels by horse-drawn chariot and long-distance travel is by high-speed rail. |
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Alternate Techline | |
| Alternate Techline / int_c7ad75dc | comment |
In Mrs. Davis , which takes place in 2023, everything is technologically the same except that the omniscient Artificial Intelligence Mrs. Davis has been introduced at some point in the preceding decade. As a result, war, famine, and unemployment have all been eradicated, while social media such as Facebook and Twitter have become obsolete. | |
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Alternate Techline | |
| Alternate Techline / int_cb55ac08 | comment |
Another of Lukyanenko's works, Seekers of the Sky, also describes an alternate world with a major deficit of a useful resource - iron. While iron can be mined, it's very difficult to find and extract. It has thus been turned into a currency and a status symbol despite the fact that it corrodes very easily (apparently, they haven't yet invented stainless steel). This often results in Schizo Tech. Armies fight with Bronze Age weapons supported by nobles with machine guns. The air force is made up of wood-and-canvas gliders whose only means of powered flight are one-shot rocket boosters. Despite this, the Chinese have developed boosters that can allow a glider to get from China to the State (i.e. Roman Empire that never collapsed) on a non-stop flight (provided the pilot memorizes all the relevant wind charts beforehand). | |
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| Alternate Techline / int_d46beefd | type |
Alternate Techline | |
| Alternate Techline / int_d46beefd | comment |
The film Wild Wild West could be considered an alternate techline and has steam punk technologies such as the steam powered giant spider and non steam punk technologies like the metal collars and saw gun. | |
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Alternate Techline | |
| Alternate Techline / int_e235270c | comment |
Stellaris: There is a possible event where a portal to Another Dimension can be discovered on one of your colonies. If you decide to probe the portal, you can discover an alternate version of your empire, in a galaxy where the Hyperdrive Engine wasn't discovered, and instead, the go to way of Faster-Than-Light Travel is the Jump Drive. The First Contact DLC contains a "primitive" civilization known as Habinte Unified Worlds. They're called primitive because they don't use any space technology. Yet... they've colonized all the inhabitable worlds in their star system anyway, and display the ability to teleport entire planets across vast distances, something not even the Fallen Empires can do. They're also much more advanced in terraforming tech, as all of their planets are Gaia Worlds and their buildings are built to not interfere with nature as much as possible. And if you do decide to try to use your space superiority to conquer them, you'll find they are not nearly as helpless as you might think... |
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Alternate Techline / int_e235270c | |
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Alternate Techline | |
| Alternate Techline / int_e5c5bc22 | comment |
While GURPS generally uses Technology Levels, some of the settings touch on the fact that divergent tech levels (TL('x'+'y'), where x is the technology level shared with our development, and y is how much farther they've advanced along some alternate line — TL(5+1) is usually Steampunk, for example), while generally equivalent to the technology level indicated by the sum, tend to have at least somewhat different advantages and disadvantages. There also occasionally are settings that are noted to have higher or lower tech levels for a specific area of technology/science than what is otherwise the case. | |
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Alternate Techline | |
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Robert Sobel's For Want of a Nail features an Alternate History world where the American Revolution failed; within it, the car is developed and commercially available before 1903, but they don't develop nuclear weapons until 1962. | |
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Alternate Techline | |
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Mega Man Battle Network is itself an alternate technological progression from the mainline run-and-gun games where networking tech became the preeminent focus of technology advancement over robotics, resulting in a massively complex Internet that requires the use of sentient AI to navigate (called "NetNavis"). This eventually moves off of physical links to the EM spectrum in the sequel series Mega Man Star Force. | |
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Alternate Techline | |
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A steam punk game known as Space 1889 takes place in an alternate universe where technology is different from ours. This is because Victorian theories that have been discredited in this universe work in the other universe, leading to a very different techline. | |
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