Technology does not necessarily advance in Technology 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 Science Fiction 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
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
- 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.
- In Last Exile, antigravity generators are common, yet in other respects the setting is almost entirely Steampunk, as seen here
.
- Naruto has electricity, power lines, LED screens, and 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.
- 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.
Comic Books
- Watchmen has much of its tech levels thanks to Doctor Manhattan's ability to synthesise the requisite materials. Notably, electric vehicles are far more practical than in real life, since the Doc can create the batteries at will.
Fan Fiction
- Hours 'Verse: In the "Hours Other Side" sub-series which focuses on events that take place in the world left behind after it was destroyed at the end of Persona 2: Innocent Sin, it's noted that the touch-screen smartphone was never developed on the Other Side (presumably that world's Steve Jobs died in the apocalypse). When That Side's Tatsuya and Jun are unexpectedly drawn back to This Side at the end of The Other 25th Hours, it takes them a while to realize that their counterparts' smartphone is a phone and a while longer to figure out how to use it in order to contact Katsuya for help.
- 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: 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. That being said, the Wizarding World has made innovations that Equestria has never considered, such as Wands, the Floo network, expansion charms, and various combat spells.
- On the comparison between Equestria and the Muggle World, aside from the latter beating out the former in weapons and aircraft (the latter handwaved as the side effect of having a third of Equestria's population being able to fly), the matter of medicine is brought up; Equestria has nearly totally eliminated cancer, whilst earth has a better understanding of viruses and in vitro medicines.
Film — Animation
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire has submarines and aircraft in its version of 1914 that were not developed until decades later in reality as part of its Steampunk/Dieselpunk setting.
- The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello has an alternate techline featuring, among other things, steam-powered dirigibles.
- 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.
- Steamboy 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 protagonist's father makes steam-powered weapons such as the monowheel and is considered this universe's version of Darth Vader.
Film — Live-Action
- The Attack on Titan (2015) trilogy sees the protagonists having greater access to firearms (including automatics and rocket launchers) and motor vehicles than the pseudo-Medieval Stasis of the manga and anime. This is because the trilogy was made long before certain revelations were made in the manga, and so this Alternate Continuity tale is taking place in a truly post-apocalyptic Earth with no Paradis, Marley, the Secret Police enforcing said stasis and many other details.
- Brazil (1985): If you count "Somewhere In the 20th Century" as implying an Alternate History. The tech is Zeerusty in a Played for Laughs way; for example, there are computers, but the monitors are so tiny that they must be enlarged with a magnifying glass, ducts are omnipresent, telephones which have to be switched manually, and the "answering machine" telling the characters the office is closed may or may not be some poor guy doing nightshifts reading off a script ("this has not been a recording!"). Of course, it barely works.
- 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.
- 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, contemporary to the book the film was adapting).
- Iron Sky has a non-alternate-reality example. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Wild Wild West has Steampunk technologies such as the steam-powered giant spider and non-steampunk technologies like the metal collars and saw gun.
Literature
- 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.
- In The Crucible of Time, an alien civilization develops a culture based almost entirely around Organic Technology, which leads to things like their bioengineering plants before they develop a printing press. This continues until they build an entire autonomous space station with almost no concept of electronics.
- Fire on the Mountain describes a history that diverged from reality in 1859. The alternate 1959 has much more developed materials science, transportation, and aerospace technology than the real 1959 and even than the real 1988 when the book was published or the current real-life present. However; communications and information technology are not changed that much from the real mid-20th-century: there is broadcast radio and television, but no widespread use of personal computers or any equivalent of the internet.
- 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.
- Agstarn in Eric Brown's Helix generally has technology (airships, portable cameras, drill rigs) roughly equivalent to the early 20th century, but thanks to perpetual cloud cover and a rigid theocracy, its physics are pre-Copernican. Also, thanks to there being no serious threat to the main civilization's power, its weapons tech is about a century behind the rest of its tech.
- Played for Laughs in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: an alien species with many arms is said to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
- This is played with in "Impossible Dreams" concerning 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.
- Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan takes place in an alternate history where Alan Turing lived past World War II, thus leading to personal computers being possible in the '60s and Artificial Intelligence advancing enough that self-driving cars and androids are possible by the '80s.
- The Missionaries trilogy by Lyubov and Yevgeny Lukin features an Alternate Universe where disillusioned guys from our world gave some locals Bamboo Technology to have a chance against European colonization. European caravels turned out to be there when no one expected them anymore. Their inept act of aggression was a rather comic relief for locals up to the ears in their own war, with aircraft carriers on ethanol turbines and ceramic rockets. Lots of rockets. Later author's notes says the original draft was more mundane, but their engineer friend ripped the idea to shreds, so they demanded he put it back together. This even made the setting darker — big open-cycle ethanol industry isn't pretty.
You want to say that their ships burn? — chemist was taken aback — That just one incendiary rocket — and a caravel... Not finishing the phrase, he shook his head and grew silent.
- In Never Let Me Go, medicine is ahead of our world. The film version begins with stating that these breakthroughs were made in the 1950s.
- The Night's Dawn Trilogy features an alien race living in stations very close to their sun. they are not as advanced technologically as the humans of the setting, and didn't spread in space, but because of their proximity with their star they developed an incredibly efficient heat exchanger technology (to evacuate the unneeded thermal energy). Humanity has split into two factions, with one relying on biotech while the other abstains from it. the latter are considered less advanced technologically and morally, but their non-living ships are more powerful and more resistant to radiation and the like, to compensate for their lack of artificial gravity, maneuverability, and ability to regenerate if not hurt too badly.
- Paratime: Different timelines have evolved different levels of technology based on whether or not they remember their ET roots and other causes like mass extinction or wars.
- In Ian McDonald's Planesrunner, there is the E3 timeline where the electrical motor was invented before the steam engine and there is no oil, so you have, as an example, airships with carbon nanofiber gasbags that are fueled by coal.
- The Practice Effect dumps the hero on a world with the eponymous Practice Effect. By working with a tool and knowing what you'd like it to be, it gets better with use. A crude stone ax eventually becomes a gorgeous, incredibly sharp tool with a head made from a single gem. A crude sled eventually develops skids that self-lubricate with a near-frictionless oil. Kites turn into hangliders. Oh, but the people are still at the bow and arrow stage and never invented the wheel. The hero, a PhD physicist with an interest in scouting and practical engineering, becomes hailed as a wizard for inventing matches, the sling, whiskey, the cart, balloons, and the airplane, and liberally taking advantage of the practice effect.
- The assorted species around the galaxy in the setting of the short story "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove have wildly different technological levels depending on when they discover (or are introduced to) gravity manipulation, which tends to bring other technological development to a screeching halt. The Roxolani were a major galactic power with weapons no more advanced than black powder matchlocks and an overall technology at the level of the Age of Sail. "Were" being the operative word as they attempt to invade Earth in the early 21st Century, after seeing humanity didn't have antigrav aircraft, spaceships, or FTL travel. At least not until the invasion force shows them how and realizes there's a whole galaxy out there with civilization who haven't even figured out electricity yet.
- The Rough Draft duology features a multiverse with a few worlds given fairly detailed descriptions. For example, Veroz (Earth 3) lacks petroleum and is thus an example of a Steampunk world. Then there's Tverd (Earth 8), whose technological development was deliberately stalled by the functionals in order to force this world on the path of biotechnology. Thus, Tverd is a world in Medieval Stasis but with many biotech developments that replace our (Demos or Earth 2) world's technological developments. Examples include jellyfish-like contact lenses that can be modified to see in any EM frequency, genetically engineered Yorkshire terriers that can rip out someone's throat in a second, gargoyles that act as air force. There's also Arkan (Earth 1), a world about 30 years behind ours in technology and history in general (their calendar is also behind) but ahead in a few areas such as military technology. All of this is the result of functional influence, who shape worlds as they see fit.
- Mentioned for some of the many alien species in Sector General. For example, the Chalder are aquatic and appear fish-like but with tentacles. They discovered controlled fire well after developing many other technologies.
- Seekers of the Sky 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).
- In Slave World, the England timeline has better computers and medicine, while the Britain timeline has deadlier weapons — including the nuclear bomb.
- 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!
- Harry Harrison's Tunnel Through the Deeps (AKA A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!) takes place in a world where The American Revolution failed with all the "rebels" executed. In the late 20th century, there is an alternate Cold War between the two superpowers: Great Britain and France. There are gigantic airplanes, powered by nuclear reactors, and the technology to build a maglev tunnel at the bottom of the Atlantic, but mechanical calculators are still the norm with "computers" being seen as something newfangled and unreliable.
- The Wolfish Nature duology describes a world where humans evolved from dogs instead of apes. Somehow, dog-humans chose focus on bio-engineering instead of "dead" technology. By modern times, they have most of the same amenities as us, but they're all "selectoids" that need to be regularly fed. Even houses are grown and not built (and yes, you have to feed them as well). If you go on an extended vacation, better find someone to come in every week to feed your TV, computer, fridge, couch, walls, etc. Interestingly, in some areas, selectoids are slowly being replaced with their "dead" counterparts, especially in computer technology, which begins to outpace selectoid-computers. Also, firearms can only be "dead", as no living thing can survive repeated explosions taking place inside them. Then again, firearms are rarely used, as the Bio-Correction has turned all dog-humans into pacifists.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who:
- "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel" feature an alternate universe Earth where Zeppelins are common, Britain's technology is more advanced 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 of 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.
- 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.
- 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 2020s, but the technology is at 1980s levels. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- A few Sliders episodes involve this:
- For example, "Fever" 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.
- "Heavy Metal" has the Sliders 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.
Podcasts
- In The '80s of Within the Wires, Sony Walkman cassette players exist alongside unobtrusive, standard-issue abdominal "black box" cybernetic implants that monitor and manage vitals and store memories. Should someone need more direct surveillance, however, this implant will be replaced with a boxy proto-Tracking Chip so large and unwieldy it distends the abdomen.
Tabletop Games
- The alternate world of Etherscope has a lot of technology based on the exploitation of an adjacent "ethereal plane" that can be tapped for energy, manipulated by machines, and even explored. There are flying cars, ether cannons, cybernetics, and more; the eponymous etherscope itself acts as an internet-equivalent, allowing people to store ethereal (instead of virtual) files and communicate globally. The main downside is that the ethereal plane is straight from D&D with all sorts of creatures living in it that are less than happy with humans suddenly nosing about.
- 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.
- Space 1889 takes place in an alternate universe where Victorian theories that have been discredited in this universe actually work, leading to a very different techline.
Video Games
- Civilization: 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.
- Civilization 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.
- 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.
- Fallout in spades: there's nuclear propulsion, Powered Armor, robots and lasers, but their computers are at the level of computers in the 1970s and early '80s, and many other consumer technologies like telephones and TVs are stuck in the '50s and '60s.
- Mass Effect: The geth are AIs 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.
Shepard: What difference does it make how you acquire a certain technology?
Legion: Technology is not a straight line. There are many paths to the same end. Accepting another's path blinds you to alternatives. Nazara-Sovereign-said this itself. "Your civilization is based upon on the technology of the Mass Relays. Our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire." - Mega Man:
- 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.
- 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 Walking Tanks, to say nothing of its numerous variants and any other bipedal tanks the series has to offer.
- Pokémon: There are hi-tech tools such as Pokéballs and artificial Mons (Magnemite, Voltorb, Porygon, Kling), but 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).
- 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 that 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.
- 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...
Webcomics
- 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.
Web Originals
- The Alternate Timeline simulator A Better World commonly has this as a side effect if you interfere with the invention of certain technologies:
- One of the available Points of Divergence is the flight of the first plane. If you sabotage the plane, it creates a world where underground drills replace planes, leading to the construction of "city-strata" and humanity discovering an underground civilization of intelligent dinosaurs in the late 1950s. Meanwhile, if you give the Wright Brothers the secrets of modern aviation, it leads to the creation of flying cities, colonization of Earth's orbit in the 1920s, the Moon in the 1950s and Mars in the 1970s, and ultimately the destruction of humanity by an Alien Invasion in 2001.
- Another is the discovery of DNA in 1953. If you introduce genetic modification technology, it leads to vast increases in life expectancy ultimately culminating in the creation of ageless, psychic "neohumans" capable of surviving in space. If you sabotage genetic research, it leads to the creation of Mutants, who eventually take over the world after a Sterility Plague decimates humanity.
- One of the available Points of Divergence is the flight of the first plane
Western Animation
- In the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "Fissure Quest," the Anaximander encounters an interdimensional ship called the Beagle crewed by humans and Vulcans and captained by Lily Sloane. Unlike the Prime universe, where she helped Zephram Cochrane invent the warp drive, in her reality, she and Cochrane developed the quantum fissure drive that allows a ship to travel across The Multiverse. Unlike most realities, where Starfleet explores the galaxy, Lily and her crew explore other universes. However, the Beagle is clearly less advanced than many of the realities, lacking in any FTL tech or shields.
