Earth
In addition to the existence of Minerva the book alludes to a variety of subtle differences between its history and ours. The fact that the fourth planet was blue rather than red as in our universe, and named for a different deity of the Classical pantheon, did not significantly change life on Earth. Galileo is mentioned as having seen Minerva in his telescope and made the first drawing of its surface; this did not, however, make his general career significantly different than in our timeline. The first difference noted is that in this history the first human to land on the Moon was Buzz Aldrin rather than Neil Armstrong.
However, fundamental differences seem to have started to develop since the mid-1970s. Following the discovery of intelligent life on Minerva, both superpowers engaged energetically on efforts to launch a manned spacecraft there. This evidently had an effect of exacerbating tensions on Earth, with American and Soviet planes engaging three times in direct aerial combat over Beirut - presumably drawn, after the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon in 1982, into a far deeper involvement than in our history.
An escalation into all-out nuclear war was avoided only with difficulty, and though things have calmed down a bit by 1989 when the plot takes place, the Cold War is still very much on, and the Soviet Union is still very much a dictatorship keeping its citizens (even cosmonauts millions of miles from home) on a short leash. Mikhail Gorbachev had led for only nine months, and barely got started on Glasnost, before dying from a stroke (though there are rumors of a secret assassination, which Soviet characters prudently avoid discussing too loudly).
Read more about this topic: A World Of Difference (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word earth:
“The best quality tea must have creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.”
—Lu Yu (d. 804)
“Alas! While your ambitious vanity is unceasingly laboring to cover the earth with statues, with monuments, and with inscriptions to eternalize, if possible, your names, and give yourselves an existence, when this body is no more, why must we be condemned to live and die unknown?”
—Thomas Paine 1737–1809, U.S. writer and magazine editor. Pennsylvania Magazine, pp. 362-4 (1775)
“It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with his black wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)