While David's article focuses on the Twilight War, the points he raises in the first two paragraphs are equally valid when talking about changing the rest of the game's back-story ( the events between 2000 and 2300) or its starmap.  Note there will be one other source of 2300AD materials later this year, FFE's reprints. - KevinC - April 30th, 2003.

The surviving 2300AD player community is small, with the list providing probably the largest single concentration.  That gives us a certain centre of mass effect in what we think, but if our thinking becomes contrary to the norm as perceived by everyone else, then we become a divisive force and any "authority" in our views is lost.  Changing the published background is something I would class as pretty divisive.  Do it in you own games if you want to, but do not expect everyone to follow you, not even everyone on the list.  The only remaining route into the game for anyone is through second hand purchase of GDW modules, if they say one thing and we say another then any new player is going to be pretty disenchanted with us.

Assuming you only change history when you substitute a few events here and there is also fallacious.  The entire mindset of the 2300 global community is predicated on the Twilight War.  Mini-wars will not do it, comet impacts will not do it.  It has to be a war, it has to be a big one, and it has to take us all the way to the edge so we can gaze into the abyss and say "no way, no thanks".

Without that look at extinction, NARL would not exist as the force it is, Zapamoga would not exist, the Foundation for Practical Knowledge, and the Institut Dei Lincei would never be born.  America would not have spent 150 years traumatized by civil war and the loss of its Southern states, Mexico would not be the Central American giant.  It took the degree of destruction and loss of life from Twilight to make Germany accept partition at French hands, the UK second place to the old enemy.  Individual events can give you one or two of these outcomes, but how many individual events can you pile into the history before it collapses under its own weight?  Only the Twilight War gives you all of them at once.

If you accept the Twilight War as necessary, then you need a cause.  Quite frankly, the chances of a Twilight War have receded from the realms of possibility for probably the next twenty five years or more (25 years = my minimum estimate for China to become a threat of the same order as the former Soviet Union).  The problem with a China War is that you are extremely unlikely to get the same effect in Europe and the Mid-East as the war would tend to focus as Trans-Pacific rather than Trans-Atlantic.  Tank battles raging across the wastes of Siberia and Mongolia just do not have the same effect on the global psyche as turning the cities of Europe into new Stalingrads before nuking the smoking ruins.

Given the difficulties of any rewrite realistically generating the society we know in 2300, the existence of the already well developed backgrounds of Twilight:2000 and 2300AD, and the reasonable statement that this is an alternate history, with an agreed upon fission point, I really do not see anything to be gained from this.