That (the plague) would mean that society as we know it today would turn out radically different, and that can’t be, for the sake of this story. It has to be set in the 1990s, as they actually happened. The island doesn’t need to be Newfoundland either, but it does have to be somewhere in the North. I’m not sure what its main source of capital would be. But it would definitely be a backwater place, no question. There was never any doubt about that. The only people in Karla who have a good life are the nobility; everyone else is basically a serf. The nobility patronize artists and scientists, but ultimately those people are also basically servants.
Well I suppose you could just say that Newfoundland or whatever other island has oil riches or some other mineral wealth that the élite siphon onto the international market?
If you want the Kingdom to remain isolated, then maybe an island like Newfoundland is not the place for it to be. It’s too exposed and accessible to ship traffic. Instead, put the colony on the shores of Hudson Bay, which was discovered in 1610. Way off the beaten track of shipping trade, and isolated from the other colonies of North America by vast tracts of coniferous forest. Access to Hudson’s Bay could be defended by forts and a naval squadron at the mouth of the bay. The Hudson’s Bay Companywas the de facto government across Rupert’s Land, a huge swath of territory, for more than a century.
If you could figure out a plot device that makes this population exceptionally impervious to cold, and perhaps uncomfortable in temperatures much above freezing, you could park them on, say, Baffin Island and keep them there fairly unmolested for centuries. They’d be disinclined to leave and nobody else would be particularly keen to live there.
OK, I’m just going to create a new landmass in the Northern Atlantic. Why not? This is fiction here, so I can do things like that. It’ll be something similar to Tarrantry, a fictitious nation south of Ireland and west of Wales. So forget about Newfoundland and any other existing landmass; Karla will be founded on a new island, let’s say northeast of Newfoundland.
And let’s say there’s a gold mine or some other valuable metal or mineral on the island. And let’s say that the Kingdom of Karla developed a powerful enough navy to defend the island.
As the concerns brought about Hitler invading this island during WWII, remember that Germany couldn’t manage to invade a country with 20 miles of sea protecting them, much less than the hundreds or thousands of miles this island would be from Germany’s nearest occupied territory. And even if they tried, they would have to get past the British (and later, American) Navy(s), which really wouldn’t want Germany to have a nice place to resupply their U-boats.
And I have another idea of where to put your island - Iceland. Just have your point of divergence be a nasty volcanic eruption in the late 1500s-early1600s that wipes out most of the native population, and Duke Charles Emmanuel I sends in colonist and soldiers to take over the place shortly there after, with nobody really want to fight him over it (being concerned about future eruptions). Or wins the island from the King of Denmark in a really high-stakes poker game. Of course with the volcano, you can say all the ash it dumped on Iceland led to fertile soils a hundred years later, allowing a higher population density.
Wouldn’t there be a little problem for the Nazis of how to get the troops there? What with the Atlantic being sort of in the way and there being these enemy ships on it, you know?
That’s not a bad idea; however I really like the idea of there being a completely anachronistic monarchy right in America’s backyard. So to speak. To me that’s the compelling element of the story, that this is not simply a European country that’s behind the times, but a little piece of 30 Years’ War-era Europe that was transplanted across the Atlantic ocean and was “frozen in time” for more than three centuries. I think the best way of going about this story is just to invent a fictional landmass.
Just have the founders be religious zealots, and tell it so as to remind readers of the Mormons, and you are home free.
While everyone is having fun tweaking the basic concept, it’s worth pointing out the real-world analog: pre-Meiji Japan effectively prohibited any contact by foreigners for a couple of centuries, until Commodore Peary’s visit in 1858.
Bermuda Triangle? Island lost in time?
No supernatural elements in this story.
IMO it’s utterly implausible. People are people and seek out new things, it’s part of human psychological DNA. Unless there was some sort of reign of terror to keep the populace in line people are going to decide they’ve had enough of ye oldeness at some point. Beyond this the US is not going to suffer a potential enemy ally just off it’s coast. It’s inconceivable they would not have been brought to heel by US miltary force at some point in the last 200 years.
True, but Japan was only able to stay isolated because China went into its own isolationist period.
This nation would be close to the US which was fairly expansionist for most of its history.
Isn’t it in the Appalachians? You might get away easier with South America. There are still vast areas as good as untouched. You could have an Amish-like culture hidden away in a few mountain valleys, even in North America, just one of those places that nobody has ever had any occasion to go to and so everything has always passed by. Anybody who didn’t in old prospecting days was never seen again.
It’s just possible that it is actually easier to hide something in the modern age than in the past. Traffic sticks to the main roads, it is usually going somewhere not just wandering around like a couple of prospectors on horseback. Reminds me a little of a novel and series called Harvest Home, a sort of American version of The Wicker Man. How do you know that somewhere lost in the mountains there isn’t a mini-country like Andorra with the population of a small city?
Satellite photos?
Without this, it seems to me the only plausible solution to the expansionist tendencies of your neighbors would be an Anomaly Of Some Sort™ which prohibits functioning technology beyond a certain point. Gun powder would work, as would breech loading, but semi- or fully automatic mechanisms would not, for example. This Anomaly could also be a natural stealth system: the island could be seen with optical equipment, but not electronic.
What if this island was far enough east of the US that it wouldn’t be enough of a target for American expansion? I’m thinking there are two islands here, a large one and then a smaller one which is a “trading port.” Traders from Europe and from the US can come to the trading port but they are totally forbidden from going to the main island. Don’t forget Karla is a European nation and so taking it over would not be part of “manifest destiny” the way that non-white territories were. Also it’s entirely plausible that Karla could have better technology than the rest of Europe or America. If Karla allowed scientists to study there and treated them like royalty, they might have better technology. Keep in mind that there is a fairly clear and logical line of evolution from the guns and artillery of the Thirty Years War to the guns and artillery of today.
The medium is the message, so I doubt that any advance in technology could occur without corresponding influence on culture, especially communications advances like telephone, tv, and internet.
Another problem is the diversity of your initial population - most cultures that manage this sort of thing to any extent are monocultures.
The closest example would probably be the Amish, but they eschew modern technology for the most part and are protected by the technological advances of the rest of the US.
I think your best bet is to have your society exist on it’s own merits for a few decades, and then have the tradition continue through tourism - the entire country could be a sort of Renaissance Fair or Disney World that people visit for the ambiance. There could still be a hidden infrastructure of advance technology but the ephemera like costume and architecture could remain intact.
I just don’t see this as being plausible. Someone- the British, the Americans, Icelandic Cod Fishermen- would have shown up and thorougly trounced the Karlanders with almost no effort at all, under some guise or another- especially during the Napoleonic Wars or World War I/World War II. Such an island would be strategically located as a refuelling stop for Steamships in the 19th Century and Flying Boats in the first half of the 20th Century.
There’s no way it would be allowed to remain in the hands of people who thought that Galileo chap had some fairly radical ideas and that Witchcraft was a very real and present danger to their communities, no matter how “European” they might be.
If the Karlanders allowed their military technology to evolve so they weren’t using pointy sticks and wheel-lock arquebuses against repeating rifles and Maxim guns, then the rest of their society would evolve as well, and one of the European powers (probably the UK, but maybe Germany or Belgium or France) would end up supplying guns to disaffected rebel groups. It wouldn’t be pretty. I can actually see the Belgians (who where terribly keen to get Colonies in the late 1800s, you see) simply annexing the place.
It’s an interesting premise, though.