For All Time[]
For All Time is a classic work of online alternate history. Written by alternate historian Chester A. Arthur (real name Mike Davis) and published between 2001 and 2002 on the Usenet group soc.history.what-if, For All Time (or FaT, as it is commonly abbreviated) imagines a world that might have been had U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died on December 20, 1941, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Through the words of an invisible narrator, the reader consumes with increasing revulsion Chester A. Arthur's vision of a world that takes a terrifying turn for the worse after the untimely demise of one of its most revered leaders.
Often cited as the ultimate example of an alternate history "dystopia" (a truly unpleasant and hostile world rife with hatred, destitution, war, and suffering), For All Time's approach to alternate history is comparable to Murphy's Law, the age-old adage which posits that "anything that can go wrong will go wrong". Applied to the context of FaT, this means that anything that could have gone wrong in the mid- to mid-late twentieth century does go wrong in For All Time. As the world grows more and more unpleasant and inhospitable, plausibility is increasingly sacrificed so that by the year 1980, when coverage of world events drops off for twenty years, the world we know has deteriorated into one that is ludicrously noxious and miserable—almost to the point of absurdity, but still just a bit believable.
Primarily concerned with political history, For All Time is notably imbalanced in its description of events. Some countries, such as the United States of America, receive detailed coverage throughout the storyline; others, such as India and South Africa, receive sparse, periodic updates; while others still, such as Jamaica and Uruguay, are barely, if ever, mentioned. In addition to this lopsidedness, the story sometimes skips over several years of history with only a cursory examination of what occurs during those periods of time, leaving large gaps in the histories of different countries and periods. This means that much of what happens in For All Time is open to guesswork and interpretation.
The purpose of this wiki is to serve as an encyclopedia for the people, places, and events that are significant in FaT, and to piece together the disparate aspects of the narrative into a coherent, flowing timeline that describes the world's terrifying descent into horrific dystopia. Articles are written from an in-universe perspective, although some may contained italicized information from the point of view of someone In Our Timeline (IOTL).
Archive[]
The full story of For All Time, consisting of 128 parts and almost 120,000 words, is archived here on the For All Time Wiki for the enjoyment of all avid consumers and creators of alternate history, beginning with Pt. 1.
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