/jp/ - Otaku Culture

You wake up in a world where a slightly technologically advanced race of lizardlike aliens invaded Earth in 1942 and forcibly took over all the southern emisphere, with some outposts in the northern as well.
Thanks to temporary alliances between all the remaining human-ruled nations, Japan got away scot free and was spared the atomic holocaust.

The pure sciences are roughly equivalent to our history in the 1940s: Nuclear fission is near, the Bohr model of atomic structure is current, the first applications of quantum mechanics are moving out of the laboratory. Biology is slightly more advanced; high-energy chemistry slightly less so.

Technology is somewhat more advanced than our 1942, and has developed along rather different lines. For example, vulcanized rubber and the pneumatic tire were developed in the 1820s, for autosteamers; natural asphalt from Angola and Trinidad was used for roads at about the same time. Steam engines of all types, particularly piston engines and small portable turbines, are more advanced than in our history. In this timeline, Africa is a "developed" region; accordingly, tropical medicine and agriculture are more advanced, since they received concentrated attention. Problems such as bilharzia, sleeping sickness, and river-blindness were overcome in the 19th century. By the 1940's the hydroelectric power of the Congo and the geothermal energy of the Great Rift were being harnessed, and the Sahara was in retreat before reclamation and afforestation projects. The Domination is particularly strong in civil engineering, transport, weapons, and large-scale "process" industry, which are accordingly ahead of our timeline.