One of the elements of the Fallout setting that seems bizarre to me when I try to take it at all seriously, rather than an excuse for retro-futurism and black comedy about a decade that was both prosperous and optimistic yet fearful and repressed, is the way American society just... stopped, and stayed the way it was for over a century, while time and technology marched onward.

What happened? What changed? What event or force was strong enough to act as an anchor against the tide of history for that long?

In Fallout's timeline, was there no Pill, no sixual revolution? Did women remain confined to the kitchen?
Was there no Civil Rights movement, and did Jim Crow rule over the South for another hundred years? (Note that all of the faces in the ads are white. Every one.)
The "current" society in the games seems about as egalitarian as our own, but did things not change until after the Great War, when every hand was needed for survival and the ghouls provided a new Other to hate and discriminate against?

Was there a Korea, a Vietnam? Was the United States of Fallout always giddily and brazenly imperialistic, and did it manage to avoid the discouraging losses that came later and cast a shadow over our national will for over a decade?

What happened to the USSR, the other and perhaps even scarier bogeyman of the '50s? Did they fall apart on schedule in the late 20th century, sometime in the 21st, or not until the bombs started flying? Did China destroy them before turning their eyes to the US?

Maybe I'm taking this too seriously, asking questions that a game was never supposed to answer. I'm just trying to make sense of something that may not have any.

Good questions, I would assume the reason social trends continued would be that the triggers never happened :shrug: . As for the politics i need to look around maybe i will find something.

Thanks.

One point of divergence that I can readily identify is that, with the non-invention of the transistor and the resulting delay in the computer revolution, computer networking seems to have stayed with the server-and-terminal model (which is very 50s). No Internet, only something like the ARPAnet, connecting military command centers and a few labs and defense contractors. No Google; if you want to know something, and you're lucky enough to live in a city and have a house terminal, you submit a query to the giant library mainframe that lives under a hill somewhere. Microframes with a single dedicated terminal and limited capabilities, like we see in F3, probably only became common a decade or two before the War.

No Internet definitely makes a difference. (We wouldn't be having this discussion, for example.)

I have two words for you : Doctor Strangelove.

Wasnt the other major difference that fussion became a sustaiable power method?

I won't complain.

This does seem to create many conflicts, especially with the techology used, but we need to note that this timeline differs from ours from since WWII, so actually there is no way to tell what the future would look like, probably quite different.

But as I said, I won't complain, I like the retro-futuristic post-nuclear setting.

Byt the way, I believe China invaded the USSR (the newspaper in the Fo3 trailer, China invades the USSR?), and, at least in Fallout 3, (though before the war, and that's over a hundred years ago) communists we're considered a threat (or, at least, the government wanted the public to see them as a threat). The communists could and probably did mean the chinese, also China did have nuclear submarines, as we know from Fo2.

You should look at it not from the point of view of our history and thinking "what changed", but from the point of view of it being based on how people in the 1950s imagined the future.



The Soviet Union still existed in the 21st century in Fallout:

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Soviet_Union



Yes, that's probably how it looked.

For a very long time, the "science" in "science-fiction" was only technological sciences. Human sciences more fickle than, say, demography ("the Earth will be overpopulated, we'll have something like five billion people in 2050!") were completely ignored, which is why the society and society values of the future were the same as those of the era the fiction was written. When you remark "The "current" society in the games seems about as egalitarian as our own", keep in mind that the game isn't really made by and marketed for people of the 50s.

Writers like Norman Spinrad have started writing sci-fi novels that are more about the evolutionary trends of politics and culture than about crazy high tech stuff.

Yes, but when looking at the setting as anything but a dramatic construct, there has to be some justification for why the normal processes of social change, fashion, everything just stopped. The 20s were not the 30s were not the 40s... but in Fallout, the 50s just went on and on and on, for some (inexplicable?) reason. A society trapped in amber.

Thanks for the link about the USSR, even if it's a passing reference in one of the "less well regarded" games of the series.

Gez:
Good points. I don't think the game would fly today with (for example) separate bathrooms for "Whites" and "Coloreds (scratched in: and Ghouls)", no matter how authentic it was.

There is a difference in between what would be a unique representation of the past, and what todays society will allow developers to add.

Personally I believe it mainly has to do with the non-existance of the hippies and revolutionaries of the 1960's. Fallout is really a story of Captialism gone amuck.

Someone mention technology stopping at the transitor, maybe the speed of computers was 2.0 ghz in 2004 but they used a whole lot more vacuum tubes.

There is one thing I must say about the computers: they appear about the size as a modern computer but have a 1980's look to them. It appears there was a personal computer boom during 2077.

I always thought they had the whole 50 ish thing going on because of the cold war and the threat of nuclear war the took place during it

I think if you're looking for a reason that could be considered "accurate" in a real world sense, you won't find any. The setting exists as it is as a sort of bleak and dark reflection on the scientific, social and political realities and hopes of the 1950's. Certainly there was a lot of optimism for a nuclear powered future, which we see evidence of here, but coupled with the deep fear of change and communism, as well as the antagonistic imperialism of the era we end up with a future that isn't so bright.



I interpret it more as a story of nuclear brinkmanship and imperialism gone amuck, as the destruction seems tied more to political maneuvering than economics.



What a bizarre world we live in. Nuke an entire town? Fine. Enslave people? Have at it! Separate bathrooms? Hold on just a minute there...

yeah the computers remind me of Commodore PET alot.

but still they have like Robots and whatnot, but kinda 8-bit MS-DOS computers....its kinda wierd but its a game so i can live with it.

Odd eh. Just shows how we are overly sensitive to some things but completely climatized to things just as bad if not worse.

My take is the world entered into a odd-ball Orwellian 1984/Huxley Brave New World era. The Enclave in the US, and I assume other governments around the world sought to keep themselves in power by adopting policies from these two novels. It was never as bad as Big Brother in 1984, but the government de-facto controlled everything and it benefited them to stifle technology advancement to a minimum. But it was also required to keep the population happy as well.

In the mid-21st century this began to breakdown as resources started to dry up. The governments became more aggressive and soon the war with China started.

Just my take.

To elaborate a little more on the previous posts, more nasty aspects of the 50s - racial segregation, Jim Crow laws and the like, in my opinion would be abolished at some point by the government (the Enclave) since it was in complete control, it simply did this and the controls it had over the public via education and entertainment made this a lot easier than in our timeline.

Maybe in this timeline America decided to make the switch to Metric. Anyway it was probably a number of different events. The real question is will they ever give us a hint to why it didn't change.

While I generally try not to apply the world of Fallout to the real world (because it isn't), I will point out that in the Late 90s and Early 00s, we saw a resurgence in 1960s era fashion and decor.

It's possible that the latter half of the 21st century involved a revival of 1950s decor and values. Just looking around now, there seems to be a large push back to the values and motivations of the 50s (Mainly thanks to "Leave it to Beaver" and "Happy Days" enthusiasts who actually don't recall that time period, only that it was a 'simpler time'.)

It seems more Huxley than Orwell. While Orwell's vision has certainly been influential on just about every "dystopian" work of fiction since, I think Huxley's sort of "happy totalitarianism" is closer to what we would've seen in Fallout's 21st century (and really closer to what we see in our own society). Orwell saw a much bleaker, darker and more controlled future.



Really? Its seemed to me like we're still stuck around the 1960's more than the 50's.

It's something like that, I think, the future Fallout portrays seems quite improbable if you look at things as a possible vision of the future of our modern world, it should be seen as a fictional, alternate world with a future such as what people in the 1950s might have envisioned it, only with the destruction of nuclear war and other dark and bleak aspects contrasting to the optimistic vision of a future where nuclear power would be commonplace.



Still, that would only explain styles and values resembling those held at the time, it does not explain the different path that technology took, unless for some reason people decided to give up modern computer technology in favor of a desktop PC sized version of the old vacuum tube computers as well, which I can't see making any sense, unless such technology was lost for some reason, which I would expect to happen AFTER the war, and then there's the radiation making you look like a zombie instead of just killing you and turning insects into giant monsters out of an old B movie, that's pretty hard to plausibly explain with modern science.

I disagree with this. I think you have to accept that our world and the Fallout world diverged sometime soon after World War II. The precise point of divergence can't be pinpointed down exactly but I think you can say that our world of 1960 was significantly different already of the Fallout world of 1960. I really do like the idea that the Fallout world entered into a Huxley/Brave New World situation by 1960 that significantly curtailed technological development for the next century. The Fallout World did advance, but along different lines and at a slower pace than our world. Keep in mind that all the big businesses in the Fallout world - Vault-Tec, Nukla-Cola, Radiation King, etc. were heavily attached to the government itself. The US government of the Fallout world was much more invasive and controlling than ours.

When the Resource Wars began, things began to fall apart. The status quo in the world was no longer possible and countries began to significantly alter past policies to keep themselves in power. China invaded Alaska and so on. Some technological advancement took place at a rapid pace by then, vaults, GEK technology, power armor. The Enclave was determined to hold on to power even if it meant all out war.

Sorry for talking so long, its just that I believe that instead of a revival of the 1950s, in the Fallout world the 1950s never really left.

Europe and America both developed a sword of sorts. Compare the Mesoamerican macuahuitl and the Spanish Sword. They both had quite a bit of development time, but of the two, the sword had more variances than the macuahuitl. it is because metal is a much more workable medium than wood and stone. There are more inventions that could be spun off of the metal sword than off of the stone one.

What then would happen if there was a different path taken to nuclear energy? We have the underlying principles of Nuclear energy developed during World War 2. if Fallout diverged in World War 2, then technologies, no matter how similar in function at first, might be quite a bit different and use different techniques. We have established that Nuclear Radiation as we know it wouldn't cause the effects that are seen by Fallout rads. Could it be because it is a different kind of radiation entirely? Something that could have been developed that is seperate from and different to our understanding of nuclear energy? "F-Radiation", as I will call it, could be what lead them to their understanding of fusion energy. As for development, the digital age wouldn't exist without the transistor. The technology existed in the 1920s, but wasn't realized until after WW2. Now if you have unlimited cheap energy, you take away a key leg for the abandonment of vacuum tubes, their energy requirements. This might have provided no incentive for the development of transistor technology, since the increased energy would also allow for space to grow quicker than vacuum tubes could fill it up.

This allows for the computer processing power not to grow quite as exponentially as we witnessed with the growth of the digital age, since the base technology for those spin-offs wouldn't be there. (so Fallout has the macuahuitl, a cheap and efficient early design that leads to a dead end in invention spin-offs fairly quickly)

As for the rest of the changes in the world, the 1950s were the result of the generation that grew up during WW2 having kids and starting families. These people learned to give it their all for the government, and created an integrated society based on sacrifice for the war effort. It was the Civil rights effort overturning that pot and demanding equality that threw us out of the 50s mentality. You eliminate equality, you eliminate modern society. This could all have come about from a more repressive government coming out of *WW2*. If we played the cold war differently, there is no Korean War and there is no Vietnam War. In fact, with a few small changes in how the world was put back together after WW2 and all the modern major wars wouldn't have occured. it is not unreasonable to think that a small thing could have changed the entire war outcome and resulted in a different form of nuclear energy being developed. Such a Divergance could easliy be traced back to just before WW2.

I think it works as a critique on modern society as well though... you can't really say big business isn't heavily attached to the government or that there isn't (at least the apparatus) for large-scale social control in place. The 1950's/Brave New World style just makes it easier to be less heavy handed about what is going on. I agree with the rest of your post though, I think it makes sense that the 1950's never really ended, they just evolved a bit.

The stagnant 1950's in Fallout could be in part to the notable historical divergences taken in the series. Think about it being like that graphic novel, Watchmen. You have the same basic America, just things happen a bit differently.

I dont think you are doing yourself any favours by asking these questions. Its just fiction and was never ment to make to much sense. the best thing to do is just enjoy the amazing imaginations that brought this whole thing together because it really is one of the best and most entertaining game worlds ever created. Cant wait for the movie!