I'm imagining up a world where, through incredible science, the soviets successfully develop genetic engineering, the west develop psychic powers, and such things. Lots of inspiration from the metal gear solid series. I want to include some cool interesting real life people, like Ted Kaczynski, and make them even more interesting, like him becoming president or something. Then I also need cool locations, like an east german state run gay disco club. Any suggestions?
I would strongly suggest you avoid glorifying the unabomber mainly as he commited a string of random murders but also because he wasn't a leftist at all and was in fact an incredibly racist libertarian his critique of industrial society is a bit like those people in the civil war who wanted to end slavery so they could get rid of all the black people the institutions he was against suck but holy shit was he against them for the wrong reasons. It's like talking up Jack the ripper it's just weird and frankly ghoulish
if you want to include him anyway altering his history so the CIA experiments ran on him at college were to develop psychic powers and they worked leading to him using those powers in a campaign of random attrocities.
Yeah I wouldn't be of a mind to glorify him even as president, but keeping him as a deranged terrorist is probably the safest bet.
a deranged terrorist is probably best yeah. Also it's worth keeping in mind that he was antisocial and reclusive so becoming president would be a bit inexplicable.
on an unrelated note a potentially interesting piece of alternate history would be a black nationalist breakaway state in the south coming to be in the 60's led by the black panthers which was at one point a real concern for the US establishment particularly as while there were never that many black people in America as an overall demographic they were highly concentrated in the south
Fiction needs evil as well.
I was thrown by the phrase cool real life people.
although the unabomber would make a difficult villain to include as he commited ultimately low stakes for society as a whole attacks remotely which doesn't add a lot to work with and his real life murders make him an uncomfortable figure to change too much as he has actual living victims he's not like dracula he hurt real people who's pain is deserving of respect and empathy and if you change very much it would probably be better to just create a fictional villain instead