Write a descriptive, fictional, imaginative screenplay of RDR2 but set in this alternate world:

“A TOUR OF TURNOVIA

I’ve processed these orbital photos very little. Names and boundaries and meridians are not marked; only the text will guide you. I have made a few concessions: I’ve stripped away clouds so the landforms are clear, roughly indicated water depth by color, shown both polar icepacks near summer minimum (unlikely to happen simultaneously!), but shown mountain snowpacks more generously to highlight them, and marked live volcanoes in red.

EUROPE

Orbital photo of Turnovia, an upside-down Earth; the Mediterranean.
For 2000 kilometers, along the Scandinavian Icecap’s foot, stretch the Baltic Lakes, milky with glacial silt. North of them, from Russia to England, is a vast sweep of tundra and thin spruce. The Alps and even the Pyrenees have substantial glaciers above dark conifer forests at their feet. France resembles Quebec, while the Mediterranean is temperate but rainy and muggy in summer and snowy in winter, like Korea or New York. In this cooler, wetter climate, even Mt Etna is often snowcapped, melting it off during eruptions and icing up again. Even Palestine, the Sinai Peninsula, and the African coast are forested. The rains penetrate deep into Central Asia, enlarging the Aral and Caspian Seas, and flushing fresh water and sediment into the Aegean and Egyptian end of the Mediterranean (a biological desert in our world). Mediterranean fishing, as well as farming, is better in Turnovia. Europe’s cultural center will never cross the Alps. The future lies in a different direction–the green Sahara.
AFRICA AND ARABIA
Morocco’s Atlas Mountains sport glaciers, and the coast below is densely forested. Huge lakes cover parts of Senegal and Mauretania, whose humid coasts resemble Florida or Vietnam. The Sahara is one of the world’s great fertile zones, densely wooded near the coasts, open woods inland, with savanna in the southwest around the Sea of Chad. The central Saharan ranges of Jebel Marra, Tibesti, and Ahaggar are pine-clad, snowy in winter, and the source of dozens of rivers breaking up the modest deserts of Egypt, Libya, and southern Sudan.

Orbital photo of Turnovia, an upside-down Earth; Africa.
To the north, the great rain forest from Guinea to the Congo is largely unchanged. But the woods continue along the coast of Angola and Namibia, all the way to Capetown. Even the Kalahari is open forest, cradling the great lakes of Etosha, Okavango, and Makadikadi. But because this northern tongue of Africa is symmetrical, the desert still exists–it’s just shifted to the high veldt in the rain shadow of the Drakensbergs, and parts of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. Natal and northern Madagascar are Californian–pleasant along the coast, but dry inland, except where mountains catch the rain. South Madagascar is wetter, supporting forests full of lemurs.
The ranges around Lake Malawi also catch enough rain to hem in the desert. Tanzania, the Great Lakes region, and Ethiopia are wetter than our world; these complex uplands are a patchwork of woods and prairies, with only a few small rainshadows. The Ogaden Desert is gone too: Somalia and most of Kenya are rainforest (as they were in our world’s recent past). Only the lowlands of the Afar Triangle and the Red Sea are still dry, since high mountains cut them off from the sea. Still, the mountains of Yemen, Sudan, and even Arabia and Oman are quite green, and the lowlands are more Sahel than Sahara. Large lakes (instead of salt pans) make Oman’s flats a wildlife oasis. The Empty Quarter is Arizona-like, with occasional streams, and the rest of Arabia ranges from arid to prairie and savanna. The Tigris and Euphrates are not alone; half a dozen rivers wind across the lowlands, from Damascus, Petra, even Mecca, each an oasis for huge herds that graze the plains. It looks more like the Serengeti than Arabia.

NORTH ASIA
Orbital photo of Turnovia, an upside-down Earth; India and the North Asian coast.
The long mountainous strip of Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Afghanistan, etc., is distinctly rainier. Large lakes lie in grassy valleys that are desert flats in our world, and the mountains are heavily forested. Ararat, the Caucasus, the Elbrus and Zagros Mtns support glaciers. The Caspian Sea has nearly doubled in size, fed by Lake Balkhash and the enlarged Aral Sea, along with several new lakes. The whole complex drains into the Black Sea. The Steppes are prairie, not desert. To the south is a strip of Siberian forest, with marsh and tundra beyond.
The only true desert is north of the Tien Shan: the Taklamakan Desert persists in Turnovia, as it does in every single climatological variant I’ve been able to devise, for with peaks 5-7000 meters high around it, no rain can get in. Tibet, too, is little changed: a bit wetter, hence more glaciated.

India is still dominated by the monsoon, but east and west have swapped rainfall patterns. Pakistan is much rainier. Outside the Indus floodplain is savanna not desert, and the mountains above, largely bare in our world, are pine-forested. The hills above the Ganges and Brahmaputra are drier, if hardly desert, and the floodplains of Assam and Bengal are irrigation country. The rest of India is still recognizable, though microclimates have changed, especially on the coasts. Sri Lanka is linked to the mainland now, and much larger island chains now lead from India to Madagascar, which might well become Indo-African instead of Afro-Polynesian.

Northwest Asia – Burma, Thailand, etc. – is much drier. The upper Mekong and Irrawaddy rivers have cut spectacular desert canyons into the Himalaya’s western spurs. But equatorial Indochina and Malaya, and the islands of Indonesia, the Philippines and Papua, still form one of the earth’s great rain forests.

BOREALA

But the Turnovian forest doesn’t end on Papua. I didn’t think turning Australia on its head would make it unrecognizable, but… behold the legendary Northern Continent! Let’s call it Boreala, “northland,” as Australia meant “southland.” Australia was red; Boreala is green. From Darwin to Perth to Adelaide, the whole east is millions of square kilometers of forest and prairie. A chain of Great Lakes nearly cuts the continent in two–Lake Simpson, Lake Eyre, Lake Torrens, and half a dozen others. Only the Darling Basin, west of the low, pine-clad Flinders Range, is still red desert. Well, the central west coast is dry too, especially around the Great Barrier Reef–desert above water, paradise below, like Baja California. To continue the analogy, Victoria and New North Wales, further north, are a fertile ecological island much like California, though linked to the fertile east by a migration corridor from Adelaide to Melbourne along the wooded north coast. Oregonian Tasmania is just offshore, also nearly linked to the mainland, due to lower sea levels. The Tasmanians won’t lose contact with the mainland and dwindle culturally and technologically, as they did in our world.

Orbital photo of Turnovia, an upside-down Earth; Boreala, the greener equivalent of Australia.
Changes in other Pacific islands are modest. While the lower sea level has enlarged the rocky and volcanic islands, coral atolls aren’t much affected, since they stabilize around sea level. The main change is in the straits between Indonesia and Boreala–while they don’t disappear, enough reefs and islets rise above water to make it possible that Boreala was settled well before Australia. A wave of mass extinctions probably still resulted, but the invaders might be so early and primitive that (as in Africa and Eurasia, and unlike our Australia and Americas) many large animals could adapt, learn to fear humans, and survive (to be domesticated later on?). So Boreala is probably richer in megafauna as well as biomass–full of giant lizards, marsupials, and flightless birds.
CHINA AND SIBERIAOrbital photo of Turnovia, an upside-down Earth: the Chinese Desert and Siberia.
The Pacific coast of Asia has drastically changed. In the Tonkin Gulf, Hainan Island has linked to the mainland, creating a Korea-like peninsula with a dry monsoon climate. To the south, China is a desert, one of the greatest in the world. The Yangtze and the Yellow River, even Vietnam’s Red River, all wind through desert hills, forming great irrigable floodplains like our Nile. Will pyramids rise here (or in the Mississippi Delta) before Egypt? Coastal China is somewhat Mediterranean; think of Korea as Greece and Japan as Italy. Inland, Manchuria is mostly prairie, with year-round rivers flowing from the mountains; picture a wetter Fertile Crescent. Sakhalin Island has grown so much it may link to the mainland too; it’s cool and rainy like England. Kamchatka resembles Norway, or British Columbia, with huge forests and salmon-streams and mild winters for this latitude. All around the Seas of Japan and Okhotsk, and even inland over the mountains, the Pacific Siberian forests are thicker and the winters much milder; parts of the Antarctic coast are forested, especially the Lena Delta. The woods form a great triangle from Hokkaido to the Bering Strait and narrowing to the east, all the way to the Urals–reversing our world’s triangular Russian taiga, thicker in Europe, thinning in Siberia.

The relative warmth and fertility of Pacific Siberia has enormous consequences for Turnovian history. In our world, Siberia was nearly uninhabitable till the last ice age waned, preventing settlers from entering the New World until 15-20,000 years ago. But Turnovia’s milder Siberia means people could reach the New World tens of thousands of years earlier–maybe even before Boreala. And as with Boreala, the earlier introduction of more primitive hunters would give Ice Age megafauna more time to adapt and survive. The mass extinctions humans bring would still happen, and this doesn’t mean New World civilizations would necessarily domesticate cattle, horses, or camels, but it increases the odds they’d have some large animals to domesticate–and far more time to work with both animals and plants. The hemispheres are more likely to develop in technologically in tandem, fueled first by land-route trade with Kamchatka and Japan, and later by sea-trade between Canada and Sahara.

TORTOLIA

North America is now south of South America. To avoid confusion, let’s call it Tortolia, after the native name, Turtle Island.

Tortolia’s Pacific Coast is wet. Lacking any capes to deflect the warm California Current, and with high mountains blocking Antarctic storms, it’s fairly mild for an eastern continental coast. California, balmy and humid, has an inland delta worthy of Louisiana (or Cambodia), which narrows, gathers and pours through the freshwater San Francisco Lagoon, out the Golden Gate, and winds through the coastal jungle to the sea. The Sierra and Cascades have some of the densest snow packs in the world, and the tallest broadleaf trees. The fall colors in the foothills and along the Oregon coast will be famous…

Beyond the mountains, the Utah Sea never dried up, nor did Lake Lahontan in Nevada or a dozen others, dotting a patchwork of prairie, forest, mountain and canyon much like East Africa at the dawn of man. It’s unlikely apes would make it here and evolve into protohumans, but with a Bering landbridge appearing in mildly cool eras, it can’t be utterly ruled out. Winters here can be cold, but the land is much more fertile than our American West, and isn’t split into ecological islands like California and Central Mexico with deserts between, but forms one rugged but unified zone we’ll call Ecotopia, from Guatemala to the Yukon. Plants and animals can spread north and south here by climbing the slopes to find the right temperature and humidity. Once Ecotopia is settled, trade in crops and unified empires like the Inca will be possible, rather than the fragmentation of our world’s North American tribes.

Orbital photo of Turnovia, an upside-down alternate Earth; Tortolia, the geological equivalent of North America
In the north, jungle covers Baja and the Sonoran shore. The Mexican desert’s shrunk to a narrow strip along the Gulf coast. Indeed the Gulf from Mexico to Florida is rather Southern Californian. Inland lies the Great American Desert, from the Appalachians to the Rockies, broken only by the Mississippi and its many red, muddy tributaries in their low, winding canyons. I can already see the pyramids and scribes…
Beyond the Appalachian pine forests, the West Coast is Mediterranean from Georgia to Cape Cod. Redwoods cover New England and parts of the Great Lakes. The Maritimes, Quebec, and Hudson Bay are lush forests with fairly mild winters, due to the warm Spanish Current I mentioned, pouring up past Iceland and southern Greenland to bathe Labrador and Baffin Island. The fabled Southeast Passage is tree-lined on its northern shore, and stays ice-free even in the severest winters. A plume of relatively warm water even reaches the Beaufort Sea off Alaska, pushing back the ice and exiting via the shallow, shrunken Bering Strait. In our world, the Canadian treeline is startlingly diagonal, slanting from the Arctic sea at the mouth of the Mackenzie River down to Labrador in the east. In Turnovia, the slant is reversed: Greenland and Baffin’s subarctic coasts are densely wooded, while the McKenzie River and Alaska, at the same latitude, are mostly tundra–colder than the Siberian coast across the Bering Strait.

CARIBBEAN
The Caribbean has many new islands, and existing lands have grown; for example, Andros Island now dominates the Bahamas; it’s nearly the size of Florida. Both Andros and Florida are Mediterranean in climate and quite dry inland. The Everglades (just below Florida’s hundred-mile-long “Cape Keys”) are an oasis in a sea of dry scrub. The Gulf and the Caribbean have more islands and reefs than ever, due to the lower sea level; but the region’s recognizable.

ANDEAOrbital photo of Turnovia, an upside-down alternate Earth; Andea, the geological equivalent of South America
We certainly can’t call this continent South America: it’s now the northernmost land in the world, after frozen Arctica. Let’s name it Andea, after its most fertile, spectacular region. From Panama all the way up to Chile, Andea’s east coast is evenly lush, including our Atacama Desert. This Pacific slope forms a north-south migration corridor like the Ecotopian strip on Tortolia. While temperatures rise in the equatorial part, the huge altitude range of the Andean slope compensates, allowing temperate-zone plants and animals to spread more easily north and south than anywhere else in the world. This makes Andea less biologically stratified or isolated than our South America–though steamy Panama remains a barrier.

The Chilean and Bolivian Andes are a bit rainier; Lake Titicaca has grown, and has four huge sisters: Poopó, Coipasa, Uyuni (larger than Titicaca) and Atacama–together, some 50,000 square kilometers of water. These moderate the climate of the altiplano–it’s no warmer, but much grassier. The Incas will have a much higher population base…

The Amazon Basin is still rain forest, but not quite as wet, especially in the deep interior, near the foothills of the Andes (I’m making an analogy with our Congo). But to the north, the rains fade gradually like Africa’s Sahel–the forest breaks to savanna, grassland, and finally the Parana Desert, an ill-defined dead zone larger than Argentina. The Brazilian coastal mountains catch enough rain to be wooded, but the lowlands and canyons are also quite dry except for river banks. It feels Australian–a green coast with mountains and canyons fading to red desert inland. The cool Brazil Current is deflected offshore around 20 degrees north by a new cape and reefs exposed by lower sea levels; south of this, tropic storms make the Bahia coast jungly and lush.

Uruguay? Argentina? Think Oregon or France. Rains are reliable and climate mild, milder than in our world, and this effect (due to a shift in currents) gets more pronounced further into Patagonia, which is much warmer and greener. The full force of the warm Benguela Current shoots from Cape Town across to the rather Icelandic Falklands and Scandinavian west coast. Patagonia is pine forest, instead of our windy barrens. The land is wider, too, for the shore is very shallow and sea levels have dropped.

The Chilean fjords east of the Andes, caught in a cooler eddy, are colder and treeless; it’s the only part of the Pacific Coast harsher than the Atlantic.

ARCTICAOrbital photo of Turnovia, an upside-down Earth; Arctica, the northern polar continent.
Arctica is the logical name for the huge, ice-capped continent covering the North Pole. Sealed off by a ring of cold currents at 60 degrees north, it’s the least changed of all the regions. Still, Palmer Land, that long icy cape facing Patagonia, now gouges into the prevailing currents like a claw, instead of trailing like a bent reed. The long hook scoops relatively warm water along the peninsula’s west face, freeing a thousand miles of coastline from the ice. This Arctic oasis resembles our southern Greenland, and is crowded with strange species, the last survivors of Arctica’s ancient fauna and flora. Further north, the Ross ice shelf has retreated closer to the base of the jagged Vinson Massif. Across the pole, the jagged Transarctic Range leads to fuming Mt Erebus, the great volcano standing alone near the sea, upper right.

Despite the Peninsula’s partial thaw, the total volume of ice slightly exceeds Antarctica’s, for Arctica is slightly larger in area, due to the lower sea level.”