History Literature / ForAllTime

* EvilVersusEvil: A frequent occurrence in For All Time. Racial paramilitaries frequently battle each other in the streets of the USA, and both the 1976 and 1980 presidential elections are between [[spoiler: Jim Jones and Charles Manson.]] Nazi Germany falls into a three sided civil war where all factions are worse than the Allies they are also fighting, Communist East Africa wages a [[spoiler: nuclear]] war against apartheid South Africa, and so too do the USSR and the People's Republic of China.

** France loses Brittany, Corsica, the Saarland, and Saint Pierre and Miquelon. Then after [[spoiler: Emperor Bokassa]] dies the rest of France collapses into half a dozen states.

* TemptingFate: In the midst of the French Civil War, Maurice Challe places Jean-Bedel Bokassa in charge of maintaining order in Corsica and later Alsace. The French government writes him off as a potential threat. After all, what's the risk of placing a colonial subject, especially a mere black African, in charge? [[spoiler: Bokassa goes on to overthrow the government and declares himself Emperor of France.]]

* SpaceFighter: By the end of the 20th Century, the United States and several other countries have fleets of nuclear-powered space bombers.

* SchizoTech: Technological progress is all over the place in ''[=FaT=]''. The United States military introduces suborbital nuclear-powered bombers in 1959, but computer science stagnates massively. Already by 1966 the field is explicitly stated to be about five years behind our world. In ''Well Enough Alone'' a character marvels at a computer that fits inside a single room, and experts are mentioned as claiming the price of a personal computer to possibly decrease to less than one million pounds by 2020.

** Sheridan Flu emerges in the United States in the early 1970s, the result of a clandestine bio-warfare program led by Linus Pauling and a [[Series/{{MASH}} "Colonel]] [[Literature/TheStand Flagg"]], becoming a global pandemic, killing about 0.5% of the world's population. As a result, what remains of international trade pretty much collapses.
* PlayingWithSyringes: After Linus Pauling discovers the double helix structure of DNA, he is offered and accepts a job consulting a biological research facility in Puget Sound that comes with an immense salary and little responsibility. He doesn't know it's main purpose is biological warfare.

* YouHaveFailedMe: Reinhard Heydrich orders the launch of three V2 rockets containing sarin gas against the Red Army approaching Berlin. One misses entirely, and thanks to allied decryption the other two hit prepared troops and cause minimal casualties. After the follow up German offensive fails, the people responsible for the V2, including Wernher von Braun, are executed. Ironically, Stalin launches a purge of his own against the military intelligence for allowing the casualties of the poison gas.

* TyrantTakesTheHelm: Though tyrants are a dime a dozen in For All Time, this trope is mostly averted due to the lack of [[ReasonableAuthorityFigure reasonable authority figures]] for them to take over from. One notable exception is when Jim Jones replaces George [=McGovern=] as President of the USA.

* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: Raoul Salan earns himself the title of The Butcher of Bayeux, and for good reason.

* KillerRabbit: A metaphorical example. When Spain invades the newly-communist Portugal in 1970, it expects an easy victory--look at a map, for crying out loud, Spain is six times larger! [[spoiler:As it turns out, Portugal had nukes.]]

* RedChina: Like in our timeline, Mao Zedong emerges victorious in the Chinese Civil War. The Sino-Soviet split still happens, albeit under different circumstances, and the USSR's cutbacks to international spending results in most of the world's communist block being allied with China, most notably East Africa and [[spoiler: Argentina]]. The dispute with the USSR culminates in [[spoiler: Chairman Lin Biao starting a nuclear war which leaves hundreds of millions dead, China balkanized and vast swaths of the country uninhabitable]].

* IronicLastWords: See KilledMidSentence below.
* KilledMidSentence: Josef Goebbels, who becomes the center of the nuclear bombing of Nuremberg.

* MustMakeAmends: After President Robert La Follette meets with a crowd of black activists and [[spoiler: his bodyguards massacre 120 and injure 200 of them]], causing rioting to break out in Washington, he holds a press conference where he takes responsibility for everything and [[spoiler: shoots himself on live TV]].

* FailureHero: President Wallace. Just about all of his plans blow up in his face, most notably the desegregation of the armed forces.

* IllegalReligion: After [[spoiler: the collapse of the Jerusalem League]], the Grand Hebrew Republic founded in its wake effectively outlaws Islam.

WonTheWarLostThePeace: The rebellions that shake France from 1965 end with victory for most of the rebels, and [[spoiler: Jean Bedel-Bokassa riding the chaos to become emperor fighting against them.]] The country is devastated after losing three years of war, and a famine begins that he alleviates through [[spoiler: the mass murder and consumption of political prisoners.]] This becoming public knowledge leads to another round of rebellions which balkanize France.

A spiritual sequel/update titled "For All Time: Well Enough Alone" was written on AH.com by user "Lord Roem". It brings the story up to 2008 and gives it a final conclusion. It can be found [[http://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/for-all-time-well-enough-alone.111344/ here]]. An "[[MirrorUniverse antithesis]]" story titled ''For All Eternity'' was also written, inverting the point of divergence to attempting to create a timeline where things turned out much better than our world.

* BenevolentDictator: Gough Whitlam and later Charles Yu are this for Australia, later Australasia.