Does anyone think that it will be that bad once the fuel is gone?
With the considerable latitude given to state governments, when Indiana and Kentucky had managed to suppress the pro-government counter-secession in Louisville they had taken fifty thousand African-Americans, ten thousand suspected homosexuals, and twenty-five thousand general 'communists and environmentalists', loaded them all onto barges in the Ohio river while chained together, and then sunk the barges.
Absurdly silly, and too extreme.
Any particular criticisms?
And Air Marshal Johnathan Falkirk was their ally. As Generalissimo of Cyprus, Malta, and the Peloponnesus, he thought mildly, amused at his fate as a crusader despite not being very religious. The RAF had still had its sovereign base areas on Cyprus, and it was toward Cyprus that the surviving elements of the Royal Navy had finally come, a taskgroup, one of the SSBNs proved useless in the face of the French ABM lasers, a few SSNs, some frigates and patrol boats showing the flag in distant reaches. The remnants of the Royal Navy operated out of Famagusta at first, and then returned daringly to Malta to threaten the French. But not to fight; they were outnumbered, and the position was hopeless.
Just to preserve what they had. And it had only grown; southern Greece, when the northern part was overrun by the Balkan peoples in internicine war triggered by starvation. The Greek islands, Ionian and Aegean. And finally, of course, what was necessary to give them an industrial economy, to give the Israelis food supplies too in turn. It was a devil's bargain, to work with those bastards, but the Royal Air Force was the only thing keeping the Turks and Greeks of Cyprus from killing each other, and the French from snatching up the remains.
"Air Marshal, Sir?" General Bagenev glanced over to his guest. Sometimes he though the old man was going senile.... But he was still the only ally that Israel had left in the world. The Russian Jew who commanded the northern sector of the IADF--responsible for the north of Israel and Lebanon, where their client state (as opposed to full ally) of the Falange kept things tightly locked down and defended the immense fortifications in the Bekaa Valley. "You see the effects of our last strikes?" He pointed out the still-burning smudges, the columns of smoke from two weeks ago where what were likely the last oil wells in the mid-east, a very tiny find by the Arabs in the southeast of Syria, had been destroyed. They had tried to establish them secretly, but little escaped the notice of Israel, nor the reach of her hydrogen-fueled jets.
But he knew in his heart that this alliance would be the only thing keeping the people he had taken up the defence of, for a long, long time. From chaos, pirate raids, fascist French domination, and countless other things. The Republic of the Islands, a true Mediterranean state, would be born out of the remnants of the British armed forces. And to support it, they needed Israel. It did not let him rest easy, and never would, but that was the job of those last remnants of Britain now. By ruling justly but sternly over the Cypriots and Maltese and Greek islanders, they would protect them from moral opprobrium.. And take it upon themselves.
Ah, I love me some aged sci-fi. You ever read Shooting War? It's got the same vibes.
Well damn now I feel old.Way ahead of ya
FH: Shooting War
Nominated for 2007's Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic. Takes place in 2011. President McCain is pretty much under siege. The War on Terror looks a lot like the present, except more so. A (failed) Arab peacekeeping mission is getting slaughtered there. A more invigorated version of...www.alternatehistory.com
It's a classic cliché source of post-apocalyptic baddies. If the author is left-wing, they'll have a new Confederacy, if right-wing, Aztlan. I have no knowledge of actual support for founding either of these, but imagine can timelines where their supporters fight each other over the same territory or team up to found some kind of apartheid hacienda system knockoff.Also, the formation of the New Confederacy.
Well, they used up a lot of their nuclear arsenal turning southern Mexico into a radioactive stain on the map when the Mexicans made a grab for the southwest just as the war started. More about that is coming later, but suffice to say the population of Mexico City was subjected to the Claw of Death, which scratched 10 million urban dwellers right off the map.
The Mexicans couldn't return nuclear fire. It was perfect. They didn't have to lose the services of more than a single division to keep the Mexican forces in check. They just put an eight-pointed star (actually, Adrian) in Mexico city, and hit a couple of other targets--oh, I think the total for final fatalities was 30 million, fifty million dead. There's also plenty of Mexicans still alive. It has been "so bad" continuously for eight years.
Dystopia is always one election cycle away, collapse a decade, and depletion never sleeps.If nothing else, it's a pretty evocative piece of mid- to late-2000s dystopian anxieties, at the tail end of the Bush administration, right before the Great Recession, back when we worried about energy shortages. Some things never change, eh?