Zeppelins from Another World



""A startling number of alternative histories wind up strengthening the marginal technology of airships and zeppelins, for example. This is a matter of flavor rather than logic, but this is a game book, after all.""

- GURPS Infinite Worlds

If your characters have entered a parallel universe that's just a few steps removed from our own, the fastest way to establish it is by sticking a whopping great Zeppelin airship in the sky.

In our world Zeppelins and other airships lost popularity in the late 1930s in part due to a series of catastrophic crashes (culminating in the the fiery Hindenburg disaster) but mostly because advances in other aircraft technologies had rendered them obsolete. More recently airships have made a bit of a comeback for limited applications such as advertising, pleasure cruising, logging, non-perishable bulk transport, law enforcement (as well as Command and Control applications in the military), photography, and scientific research where airships' strengths in vertical flight, long range, fuel economy, low vibration, loiter time and relative silence outweigh their obvious disadvantages.

The name of Zeppelin strictly refers only to airships with a rigid frame, a motor, and no anxiety that users will be put off by the name. Alternate universe plane-spotters, take note.

So by filling up Earth 2 with bulbous aircraft rather than hovercars or spaceships, you are suggesting a world that is of a similar time period to our own, but just happened to follow a different technological route. It also helps that they have lots of Steampunk cred and are sufficiently olde-worlde to be used in fantasy stories too. They are also cool.

Alternatively, the Zeppelins are just there to show the audience that the movie is set in another world, even if nobody from our world crosses over into it.

Alternatively, you could make the whole sky different. This works, too.

The transportation of choice for Sky Pirates everywhere. Also see Airborne Aircraft Carrier, Cool Airship, and Floating Continent. Somewhat related to Space Whale.

Anime & Manga

 * Done with a powerful kick in the 2003 anime version of Fullmetal Alchemist:
 * Also done in Last Exile (though it turns out that said zeppelins are actually heavier-than-air ships made to float with the use of Applied Phlebotinum conveniently supplied by a neighboring society that happens to possess somewhat more advanced technology).
 * Zeppelins and blimps (along with windmills, solar power, and other eco-friendly technologies) are a big part of the "just like ours only better" world of Pokémon.
 * Laputa: Castle in the Sky
 * Kiki's Delivery Service has a huge polar exploration zeppelin as befits its Retro Universe setting. It also crashes spectacularly, proving that Kiki's world, while different, is not all that different from ours.
 * Negima pulls this off in the Magic World with Great Flying Whales. You can even see a flying ammonite in the first spread.
 * The Ancient Decepticons from Transformers Cybertron can combine into these (shattering combination records for the franchise in the process).

Comic Books

 * One of the more obvious differences in the Watchmen universe (which departed from our own when a genuine superpowered being came into existence in the aftermath of WW2 and singlehandedly won the Vietnam war for America) is the huge zeppelins that hang in the air over New York.
 * The Invisibles by Grant Morrison has some of these early on when Dane and Old Tom trip their way to another London.
 * In Christian Gossett's The Red Star, the military power of the Soviet-esque Reds is based on their great fleet of "skyfurnaces," which are essentially kilometer-long flying battleships/carriers/troop transports that run on magic.
 * One of the few fantastic things to be found in any of the Marvel Noir stories is the O*N*E Dirigicarrier seen in X-Men Noir: Mark of Cain. And boy is it ever fantastic: it's a colossal battleship kept airborne by virtue of having several Hindenburg-like zeppelins strapped to its underside.
 * Zeppelins are present in the post-apocalyptic version of the Age of Apocalypse timeline that Uncanny X-Force visit in search of a MacGuffin.
 * Lady Mechanika is set in a Steampunk version of late Victorian Britain and zeppelins are a prominent feature of the skyline.
 * Thorgal has Mayincatec zeppelins. However, it's thanks to the fact that their Physical God is capable of creating the gas to float them.

Film

 * The (rather loose) film adaptation of The Borrowers has numerous indicators that is set in a mid-Atlantic Retro Universe, not least of all being the constant presence of one or more zeppelins in the sky. Note: this is not the good version with Ian Holm, which is zeppelin-free.
 * Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow (2004), set in a Diesel Punk version of 1939, opens with the Hindenburg III docking with the Empire State Building. While the building was in fact designed with a mooring mast the idea was dropped after tests with a U.S. Navy airship showed that wind turbulence caused by the surrounding skyscrapers made it too hazardous. Well, that and the fact that most passengers found the idea of crossing a gangplank 1000 feet above the street more than a little intimidating.
 * The film adaptation of The Golden Compass features airships in the establishing shots of the alternative Oxford.
 * In Stardust Robert DeNiro plays the captain of the airship Caspartine.
 * Despite being set in 2019, the Los Angeles of Blade Runner appears to be infested with zeppelins, most of which wind their way through the labyrinthine skyscrapers advertising travel to the Off-World Colonies and various Chinese/Japanese products.
 * One of the big differences between real 2009 and parallel universe 2009 in Southland Tales is the presence of massive perpetual-motion powered Zeppelins.
 * Roland Emmerich's production company features this in many of their films
 * The film version of Watchmen manages to show a few Zeppelins in the background of some of the shots of New York.
 * The sky over Libria in Equilibrium is full of zeppelins. Too bad they don't seem to serve any purpose other than to show us that no fascist dystopia is complete without them.
 * Iron Sky has zeppelins that can somehow travel through space from the Moon, and open up to release a swarm of Nazi Flying Saucers. But then again you're not supposed to take all this very seriously.

Literature

 * In Alastair Reynolds' Terminal World, Swarm is a entire mobile city of zepplins, zepplins being safest and most practical way to travel on the planet due to higher technology not functioning on most of it.
 * The Robert A. Heinlein book Job: A Comedy of Justice has the main character from a zeppelin-filled world, slipping into a world with no air traffic at all, and then into one with similar technology to our own. One especially well-done part is when he attempts to explain to the readers what an airplane looks like from the perspective of someone who's never seen one before. It's explained that in this alternate reality, heavier-than-air flight is proven to be mathematically impossible and The zeppellins travel at mach speeds!
 * Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series features a world with zeppelins but no jet planes -- although small propeller aircraft do exist. Of course, there's little demand for high speed airliners with the gravtubes: London to Osaka in 42 minutes! At one point Thursday has the option of being hidden in a parallel Earth where there are jetliners -- presumably, from the sound of things, our world. She says such a thing as a jetliner is impossible.
 * The opening story in Elizabeth Bear's New Amsterdam is a murder mystery set on a zeppelin. With vampires.
 * The parallel world that takes up the majority of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series features giant zeppelins as a mode of transport. Interestingly, they are handled much more realistically in the books than in the movie.
 * This is the premise of Kenneth Oppel's Airborn trilogy: an alternate world where, due to the existence of an ultra-light gas called hydrium, airships became the primary means of long-distance travel. Features lots of nautical metaphors.
 * Aaron Allston's novel Doc Sidhe is set on an alternate world where zeppelins and autogyros are still cutting edge aviation technology, and the climactic showdown takes place on board the major villain's airship.
 * Fritz Leiber's short story Catch That Zeppelin! is about an alternate universe where things turned out (mostly) much better than our own, It too includes zeppelins docking at the Empire State building, where a Real Life mooring mast was considered. Needless to say, they didn't use hydrogen to lift them.
 * Harry Turtledove's novel The Two Georges is about an alternate world where the United States never left the British Empire. The first chapter is set on an airship, where the protagonist sees a Air Force biplane fly past and echoes the general view that while such speed is useful for the military, there's just no need for it in civilian life.
 * This is in fact based on the Imperial Airship Scheme, also known as the Burney Scheme, which proposed that Britain's colonies would be serviced by a fleet of airships.
 * S.M. Stirling's books are lousy with zeppelins.
 * Mortal Engines has a lot of Zeppelins, though it's a post-apocalyptic future version of this world rather than a parallel one. Heavier-than-air flight is reinvented over the course of the series.
 * The War in the Air by H. G. Wells is about the German Empire using giant zeppelins to attack the rest of the world, particularly the United States. While at the time it was written, it was a reasonable extrapolation of the current technology, it suffers from being set Twenty Minutes Into the Future and so might now be considered an honorary alternate reality.
 * During World War I the Germans did bomb London several times with zeppelins. They did a better job of frightening the civilians than actually destroying strategic targets, but it worked out all the same until they started getting blown out of the sky.
 * Dean Ing's The Big Lifters has a messianic protagonist pushing high-tech "delta-dirigibles" as a way to get big trucks (like the one that killed his grandmother) off of America's freeways.
 * The War Against the Chtorr. Blimps are used for military and rescue operations, but nothing beats the Hieronymus Bosch, a giant luxury airship (30% longer than the Hindenberg) converted for the scientific expedition in "A Season for Slaughter".
 * In Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series, one of the two alternate universes featured in detail uses zeppelins for air travel. (The other one has a roughly medieval level of technology, so it doesn't have air travel at all.)
 * L. Neil Smith's alternate history novel The Probability Broach features large zeppelin passenger liners. Interestingly, Smith does not have them simply for style, rather their existence proceeds logically from the nature of his world. The character's claim that zeppelin travel is uncommon in our world because the military subsidizes airplanes so that it can requisition them in emergencies. It does not subsidize the less militarily useful zeppelins, which means the incentives are for companies to develop planes. In The Probability Broach the governments and militaries of the world are much weaker, so are unable to subsidize much of anything. In fact, in the back story a sort of airborne militia try to use zeppelins in combat and are pretty much all shot down, lampshading the military uselessness of these aircraft.
 * This turns up with the second word of The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray, a somewhat Lovecraftian novel set in an alternate late-Victorian London. For the record, the first word is "The". In our universe, when Queen Victoria died, Count von Zeppelin hadn't sold even one of his machines, but he had been banging on about them since 1874.
 * The Red Mars trilogy has a fleet of automated "air"ships used both for exploration and as part of the early Terraforming effort (ultimately a failure but it turns out somewhat useful anyway), so they're Zeppelins on another world as well. Later (post-terraforming) a transforming high-tech sailboat turns into a blimp to escape rough seas.
 * Neil Steaphenson's The Diamond Age features a very well justified abundance of airships. With ubiquitous nano-tech it's so simple to create objects that are lighter than air but stronger than steel that it's the law you have to add weight to things to make sure the atmosphere isn't filled with lighter-than-air-stronger-than-steel grocery bags clogging engines. As to the airships, when you can create these materials you don't have to fill the envelope with anything at all. Vacuum is lighter than everything and thanks to nanopumps cheap to create. Airships are so economical they replace shipping as the bulk transit of choice.
 * Iain M Banks' Transition invokes this -- a man who frequently travels between universes at one point looks up at the sky when arriving in a new one, searching for zeppelins. As he says, he 'likes it when there's zeppelins'.
 * In Michael Moorcock's Warlord of the Air, the alternate-timeline Earth is still using zeppelins in 1974, and has never developed heavier-than-air flight technology. The title character claims that the imperialism of the Great Powers has stifled innovation.
 * The Hubris in More Information Than You Require, a massive zeppelin that the author buys from Emo Philips. Counts as another world because according to this book, Thomas Jefferson was friends with the mole men, axolotls have magical powers, and Enrico Fermi was an alien.
 * In the 1632 series, Marlon Pridmore uses his experience as a baloonist to help the Danes build a dirigible to bring home nutmeg from their Indian colony of Tranquebar. Also, without any experience, but with a lot of brute force, Berni Zeppi helps the Russians build their own dirigible, which they use to beat a Polish-Lithuanian army.
 * The novel Affinity Bridge, as a function of its Steampunk setting.
 * Dexter Palmer's The Dream of Perpetual Motion
 * Hinted at in The Yiddish Policemens Union, an Alternate History by Michael Chabon; no actual Zeppelins appear, but early in the novel the protagonist finds "a windup zeppelin" amongst other junk in a basement.
 * Of course, as antiques, those exist in our world, as well.
 * The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. Dirigibles powered by kink-springs and other alternate energies are used for international trade, as there's no petroleum any more.
 * Rudyard Kipling's short story With The Night Mail imagines a world where airships are the primary means of transatlantic flight - though when he wrote it, this looked like a probable future rather than an imaginary world.
 * The "blimps" that ply the "skies" of the giant living space habitat Gaia in John Varley's Titan trilogy are literally Zeppelins from another world. They aren't machines though: they are living, sentient creatures kept aloft by naturally produced hydrogen. Sometimes they allow people to hitch rides.
 * The evil aristocracy in The Kingdoms of Evil employs gas-filled flying squid as a means of transportation.
 * In Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt, airplanes remain limited to military use, while civilian airflight is accomplished mostly by airship (and later, "space planes"!)

Live Action TV

 * In the Doctor Who episode "Rise of the Cybermen", The Doctor immediately notices that they've slipped into a parallel world when he sees zeppelins in the sky above London.
 * The season six finale "The Wedding of River Song" opens with a montage of anachronisms ("Do Not Feed The Pterodactyls" sign, Holy Roman Emperor Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens interviewed on television, etc.) starting, of course, with a sky full of hot-air balloons. Carrying cars.
 * It's a relatively minor instance, but in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Past and Present," SG-1 finds itself on a post-industrial world remarkably similar to our own in the late 19th century. A zoomed-out shot of the city shows a zeppelin floating lazily in the sky.
 * There is an airship in the opening sequence of Caprica, and in the Metaverse game New Cap City, a gigantic, heavily armed dirigible circles the virtual city, launching fighter planes and gunning down anyone it sees on the ground.
 * The National Geographic Channel's Aftermath: Life Without Oil special suggests that a civilization without access to abundant fossil fuel may use airships for air travel; most likely thanks to the fact that they need very little fuel compared to propeller or jet-powered planes.
 * Played dead straight to the point of an Invoked Trope on Fringe; the first image Walter shows his military bosses in 1985 to prove he's discovered an Alternate Universe is a zeppelin docking at the Empire State Building. They're not seen all the time in other episodes set in the alternate universe, but then again you don't always see airplanes in the real world's sky. Sometimes, the transition from scenes in one universe to another is shown via a quick burst of light and a zeppelin in the sky appearing or disappearing in the sky.
 * In a third-season episode, Fauxlivia meets her fiancé at the aforementioned Empire State Building upon his return from assisting in treating a North Texas cholera outbreak.

Music

 * Abney Park is a steampunk band whose fictional persona involves their plane crashing into a time-traveling dirigible, which they then commandeered. They have since become airship pirates.
 * The song Geni e o Zepelim ("Jenny and the Zeppelin" in English) features a villain that rides in in a giant Zeppelin and threatens to blow up the entire city.

Tabletop RPGs

 * In a January 2000 Suppressed Transmission column, Kenneth Hite dubbed this trope "Hite's Law", and took it to its logical conclusion: our own history was an Alternate Universe in the early 20th century.
 * One of Ken's contributions to GURPS Infinite Worlds is a table to randomly generate alternate technologies for one's randomly generated worldline; it has a note that certain results dictate adding zeppelins regardless of the rest of the universe's tech level. Apparently, alternate history just generates airships.
 * Airship technology turns up from time to time in Shadowrun: in remote drones for aerial surveillance, in huge "cargolifters" for inexpensive bulk transport, and in luxurious cruise ships for the ultra-rich. The finale of the first Shadowrun book takes place at an airfield where a yakuza boss has just flown in on a zeppelin.
 * GURPS All-Star Jam 2004, a 10-chapter compilation of various roleplaying concepts and settings, devotes one entire chapter (by Brian J Underhill) to airships.
 * A favorite (if blatantly anachronistic) mode of transportation for the Sons of Ether, who for the most part revel in just the type of aesthetic that would spur mad scientist/mages to build large and improbable airships. Due to practicality (and Paradox), most zeppelins are found in off-world Horizon Realms.
 * BattleTech has Zeppelins as support vehicles, in small, medium and even large. In addition, the Star League apparently once used a Zeppelin based design to create multi-platform flying cities.

Video Games
""So, is nobody going to shoot at it? Because, gee, I wonder what the weakness could be on the airship with the two balloon things."
 * Persona 2 makes special mention of a model blimp mounted to the roof of the aerospace museum. Since rumors can become reality in this game, the fact that enough people suspect it's a real, functioning blimp makes it flyable. The launching of the blimp is a signifier that the basic rules of reality no longer apply.
 * The beginning of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura sees the player barely surviving a terrible zeppelin crash. Interestingly, it seems heavier than air ships have a shorter than real-life span of use in Arcanum, as the before mentioned zeppelin was the first of its kind and on its maiden voyage, but was destroyed with stolen bi-planes (succeeding on one quest and providing proof the bi-planes flew insures their continued existence).
 * The Final Fantasy games love airships; each main-series game includes an airship in the mid- to late game as easy transport around the world. While many of the earlier games are simply sea-ships with propellers on, Final Fantasy VI and VII (both much more technology-oriented than their predecessors) feature actual zeppelins as their major airships, and Final Fantasy IX brings them back as general-use vehicles in a fantasy Steampunk setting. (More recent games have airships so advances as to be barely recognizable as dirigibles.)
 * Used in TimeShift. Most of the game takes place in an alternate 1940s, so the zeppelins aren't so far out . The helicopters and giant mechanical spiders, however, make you realize something is more than a little wrong.
 * They are badass zeppelins. They have two giant vertical props, have two heavy-duty AA autocannon turrets, several machinegun emplacements, dedicated lift systems between decks, and self repair capabilities, thus able to fend off a heavy-duty assault by two or three dozen unusually slow jet planes.
 * The Crimson Skies game is alternate history in the Diesel Punk genre that has Zeppelins as flying aircraft carriers/battleships.
 * Rowan software's 1995 alternate universe flight simulator Air Power: Battle in the Skies takes place on a marshy continent with little in the way of roads and railways. Warfare is conducted mainly with aircraft and zeppelins. The player commands a fleet of heavily armed war zeppelins, including the aircraft carrier which serves as the main base for the player's fighters and bombers.
 * Command and Conquer Red Alert 2 and 3 (Both set in separate alternate timelines) feature the Kirov Airships, massive, heavily armoured war Zepplins used by the Soviet Union to bombard ground targets. Cutscenes and promo pictures, as well as the menu screen for Red Alert 3 show them looming ominously over US Cities. This is explained as an alternative approach to aircraft due to the Allies forbidding the Soviets from building a strong conventional air force. While the Soviets do get additional aircraft in Yuri's Revenge, this takes place after the main storyline, giving the Soviets more time to build fast-strike MiGs.
 * Zeppelins seem rather abundantly used by villains in Dead or Alive series, mostly by the evil DOATEC. Their universe seems to be a mix and match of different eras. At DOATEC, it seems to be a big city with elements of Cyberpunk, then there's the ninja clan villages which seem to be stuck in feudal Japan. Oh, and dinosaurs still roam the jungles for some reason. To top it all off, now there's a time travelling Spartan.
 * In the World War II game The Saboteur, Nazi zeppelins act like helicopters from GTA. It is worth mentioning that these airships can be shot down in a fiery inferno.
 * Seen in World of Warcraft, usually on the Horde side but sometimes in neutral zones (like Northrend).
 * An airship features in Damnation, for perhaps longer than it should as the folks from Unskippable point out:


 * Shadow of the Beast
 * Wing Commander spinoff, Privateer 2: The Darkening, featured the planet Bex, complete with flying zeppelins and purple sky in its intro movie.
 * Dealt in Lead No zeppelins yet, but war balloons. During the American Civil War. No, they're not used for observation. They're used for wrecking entire cities.
 * Neo Steam has steam balloons, which are basically hot air balloons with propellers (and possibly full of steam...). Unlike other transportation methods the balloons are free to use once you have bought a map.
 * An interesting detail is that rather than play a stock cut scene, the game remains interactive during the journey, so you can zoom in and out and circle around your character as s/he stands in the gondola while the actual terrain you are traversing unrolls below. The balloons can not be seen from the ground though.
 * Ratchet and Clank Up Your Arsenal's Metropolis (a recurring level) had airships with Ratchet and Clank advertising which could be destroyed for a skill point. An early teaser for Tools of Destruction also featured them.
 * Sky Gunner displays how different their world is by setting the first stage of the game around one.
 * The Panza Dragoon series features a large number of various airships. Since you are on a dragon and could just run away from anything that couldn't keep up with you, it's natural enough that it needs a wide array of flying enemies, and since its a steam-punkish universe (with added magic) the vehicles of preference for the evil empire du jour are airships or airshipesque vehicles.
 * Bio Shock Infinite takes place on Columbia, a floating city built in 1900.
 * Guns of Icarus has you pilot a zeppelin called the Icarus across a post-apocalyptic landscape, fighting off Sky Pirates along the way.

Webcomics

 * Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio, also sold in albums, features really big zeppelins such as Castle Wulfenbach, the actual seat of government, apparently with apartments up in the gas bag and not confined to the gondola as usual.
 * And in print-and-online comic PS238, which counts as a parallel universe because it's full of superheroes, the distinctly familiar Von Fogg family's not-yet-seen zeppelin is an airborne independent supervillain nation.
 * Xkcd has zeppelin appearances signalled by wristwatch dial and elevator button.
 * The Thinking Ape Blues features an alternate universe in which zeppelins are frequently seen in the sky.
 * Order of the Stick - The Anachronism Stew comes with a side-order of airships. It was a Shout-Out to the Final Fantasy games. Specifically to Final Fantasy VI, as all the people are its PCs. Elan and Thog are disguising as Locke and Mog. Interestingly enough, the airship does not in any way look like Final Fantasy VI's Blackjack.
 * This Subnormality strip has zeppelins become commonplace when time travel apparently results in the Nazis conquering the world.

Web Original

 * In Decades of Darkness, they're used to great success in the North American War and the Brazilian Civil War.
 * The Flying Cloud is a serial web series about a British airship crew that gets stranded in the Pacific. It's set in an Alternate History where the World War One ended two years early.
 * "The Number One sign you are an a parallel world"
 * Lampshaded and parodied in AH Dot Com the Series due to its playing with Alternate History tropes. The very first episode features a timeline full of airships, and the entire crew seems to have an obsession with them bordering on a fetish. Also appears in later episodes, for example the Whole-Plot Reference Sealions On An Airship.
 * As per habit, Lampshaded in Irregular Webcomic; "h, you forget this is an alternate timeline. It therefore follows inevitably that airships are much more reliable and widespread.". The commentary also links to this very article.
 * The upcoming indie film, "Iron Skies", has Nazi Zeppelins from the moon.

Western Animation

 * Batman: The Animated Series was fond of these, as they evoked a 1930's atmosphere. Commentary for "On Leather Wings", which was the first episode of the series, acknowledges that Police blimps never really existed, even in the 1930's, but they decided to use them anyway because of the impression they gave of Batman's world.
 * Avatar: The Last Airbender has regular, reality-based hot air balloons, and massive metal airships that are truly from another world.
 * The Legend of Korra also has the large metal airships of its predecessor, albeit with 70 additional years of technological development.
 * Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire shows why people riding in hydrogen-filled dirigibles shouldn't back-stab Badass subordinates packing flareguns.
 * Archer has the "Skytanic", and seeing as how the Cold War never ended, it's definitely an AU. Massively subverted in that the Hindenberg disaster did happen, and so Archer spends the whole episode convinced the dirigible is a massive explosion waiting to happen, despite the fact that it's not remotely the same kind of airship.

Other

 * John Reilly has warned that airships, which are most prominent in alternate history scenarios, are a "Fortean technology" indicative that some thing's wrong with the timestream. So we should be very worried.
 * Dreamfinder's Cool Ship at Disney Theme Parks last version of Journey Into Imagination.
 * Used in this mock retro-space tourism poster from Zazzle Art. See Venus by Air!