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 high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once; we shall hear it by and by.”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)
“To recover a buried treasure without having it disappear miraculously in the process, one must be entitled to it, and also be willing—really willing deep in his heart—to share it with the poor and helpless. Buried money, especially silver, gives off a bright glow which comes right up through the earth and can be seen as a dim light on nights when the weather is misty or there is a gentle rain.”
—Administration in the State of Ariz, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)