Map Thread XIII
- Thread starter Pragmatic Progressive
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OK, here's a commission for krinsbez, a map for his "nonsensical future" scenario https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=7645908&postcount=352 with some added nonsense.
WWWIII broke out in 2069, and it was fought with the exciting new weather-control and time-warping technology, along with a rich variety of bioweapons both contagious and mutagenic, and even some grungy old atomics for old times sake. It was principally a US-Chinese conflict, but most of the developed world was drawn in one way or another, and when the artificially induced super-storms interacted chaotically and went quite out of control, and the time-space continuum pretty much broke down all over the place, pretty much everyone day was spoiled, with around a third of the world's population being killed or vanished.
It's roughly a hundred years later: roughly, since it was some (hard to determine) while before time was flowing forward at roughly the same rate in, say, Bolivia and Botswana, and in some places time went along at very different rates indeed, such as New Zealand, which in (roughly) 70 years Canadian underwent multiple millennia, and when their clocks finally slowed down to match the rest of the world, had become a quite alien civilization. Other places, such as Moscow, are still stuck in 2069.
Africa, which at leas avoided any direct attacks in WWIII, is doing quite well, with complex networks of alliances and local unions and federations popping up everywhere. Other parts of the globe vary between "OK" and "Oh god kill me now."
Religion has changed drastically, with most of the old traditional faiths having fallen out of favor due to their rather counterproductive responses to the apocalypse, and possible due to bioagents driving most of the world's population at least mildly insane for a while after the war. The main faiths today are Baha'i, which has expanded hugely, and the new religions:the very sexy Church of Porn, the Chariot (a sort of futurist synthesis of non-mainstream Kabbalism, "Chariots of the Gods" flying saucer myth, and Ray Kurtzweilian "rapture of the nerds" singularity theory), and Neo-Koreshanity, which is spiritualist, collectivist, and doesn't believe the Earth is inside out - it's the universe which is inside out, while the earth is hollow (attempts to debate Koreshians is likely to induce headaches). Most 2016 religions have been marginalized or have wandered off in strange directions.
Technology is powered by solar power and by clean fuel generated by bacterial colonies in the stomachs of increasingly outsized cattle: every town is now a cow town. Biotech is advanced: genetically engineered animals of all sorts are common, and people can expect to see their 200th birthday. Airplanes are unpopular: people tend to have an exaggerated notion of what storms can do as a result of the mega-storms of the war (this also leads to a great deal of underground living and homes above ground being built like bunkers). Similarly, most ocean travel is now by giant submarine, deep down where the Ocean is undisturbed by storms on the surface. France is actually building an all-underground national railway (well, electromagnetically suspended trains in evacuated tubes).
Computer tech has become somewhat less popular since the war, thanks to all the cyberattacks and drone attacks during the war and after (some particularly fine custom models were still assassinating people a decade later), and paranoia about computer attacks means the world is actually less "wired" in some ways than in 2016: with eidetic memory now being as common as nose hair, people have rather less need for constantly looking stuff up on the internet anyway.
People would be highly alarmed to know that cybernetic researchers actually succeeded in creating true AI several years ago, but said AIs were smart enough to not let on that they were sapient. Right now their keepers think they're running very fancy industrial research simulations that require a lot of capacity and *internet access. Fortunately, the AI are really quite uninterested in humanity, and as long as we can be conned into giving them ever greater computing resources, they really don't care what we get up to.
Currently the international situation is tense: not only is there the ongoing struggle between Taiwan and the Turks for control of the hideous toxic wilderness that covers much of former China, and the super-advanced New Zealander's adoption of their own eccentric version of Chariotism (which has led them to invade Central America), but due to a badly addressed letterbomb, conflict has broken out between Switzerland, Swaziland (and with it the South African federation) and the International Church of Porn in a war which threatens to drag in most of Europe and Africa, along with most of the Pornish nations of the world.
WWWIII broke out in 2069, and it was fought with the exciting new weather-control and time-warping technology, along with a rich variety of bioweapons both contagious and mutagenic, and even some grungy old atomics for old times sake. It was principally a US-Chinese conflict, but most of the developed world was drawn in one way or another, and when the artificially induced super-storms interacted chaotically and went quite out of control, and the time-space continuum pretty much broke down all over the place, pretty much everyone day was spoiled, with around a third of the world's population being killed or vanished.
It's roughly a hundred years later: roughly, since it was some (hard to determine) while before time was flowing forward at roughly the same rate in, say, Bolivia and Botswana, and in some places time went along at very different rates indeed, such as New Zealand, which in (roughly) 70 years Canadian underwent multiple millennia, and when their clocks finally slowed down to match the rest of the world, had become a quite alien civilization. Other places, such as Moscow, are still stuck in 2069.
Africa, which at leas avoided any direct attacks in WWIII, is doing quite well, with complex networks of alliances and local unions and federations popping up everywhere. Other parts of the globe vary between "OK" and "Oh god kill me now."
Religion has changed drastically, with most of the old traditional faiths having fallen out of favor due to their rather counterproductive responses to the apocalypse, and possible due to bioagents driving most of the world's population at least mildly insane for a while after the war. The main faiths today are Baha'i, which has expanded hugely, and the new religions:the very sexy Church of Porn, the Chariot (a sort of futurist synthesis of non-mainstream Kabbalism, "Chariots of the Gods" flying saucer myth, and Ray Kurtzweilian "rapture of the nerds" singularity theory), and Neo-Koreshanity, which is spiritualist, collectivist, and doesn't believe the Earth is inside out - it's the universe which is inside out, while the earth is hollow (attempts to debate Koreshians is likely to induce headaches). Most 2016 religions have been marginalized or have wandered off in strange directions.
Technology is powered by solar power and by clean fuel generated by bacterial colonies in the stomachs of increasingly outsized cattle: every town is now a cow town. Biotech is advanced: genetically engineered animals of all sorts are common, and people can expect to see their 200th birthday. Airplanes are unpopular: people tend to have an exaggerated notion of what storms can do as a result of the mega-storms of the war (this also leads to a great deal of underground living and homes above ground being built like bunkers). Similarly, most ocean travel is now by giant submarine, deep down where the Ocean is undisturbed by storms on the surface. France is actually building an all-underground national railway (well, electromagnetically suspended trains in evacuated tubes).
Computer tech has become somewhat less popular since the war, thanks to all the cyberattacks and drone attacks during the war and after (some particularly fine custom models were still assassinating people a decade later), and paranoia about computer attacks means the world is actually less "wired" in some ways than in 2016: with eidetic memory now being as common as nose hair, people have rather less need for constantly looking stuff up on the internet anyway.
People would be highly alarmed to know that cybernetic researchers actually succeeded in creating true AI several years ago, but said AIs were smart enough to not let on that they were sapient. Right now their keepers think they're running very fancy industrial research simulations that require a lot of capacity and *internet access. Fortunately, the AI are really quite uninterested in humanity, and as long as we can be conned into giving them ever greater computing resources, they really don't care what we get up to.
Currently the international situation is tense: not only is there the ongoing struggle between Taiwan and the Turks for control of the hideous toxic wilderness that covers much of former China, and the super-advanced New Zealander's adoption of their own eccentric version of Chariotism (which has led them to invade Central America), but due to a badly addressed letterbomb, conflict has broken out between Switzerland, Swaziland (and with it the South African federation) and the International Church of Porn in a war which threatens to drag in most of Europe and Africa, along with most of the Pornish nations of the world.
Something a little different. Full size/non-shittily-compressed version here. If you get all the parallels, you win all the European History Nerd points.
The climatic worst-case scenario has come and gone. Runaway warming has long since melted away the final remainders of the Ice Age and replaced them with vast, broad seas spilling over the ancient breadbaskets of the world. Desertification and extreme weather came next: Ukraine and the the Amazon a dustbowl, mercury topping 70°C in the blasted wastelands of Syria, and cyclones tearing away every sign of civilization in the sunken jungles of the Mississippi and the Yellow River. By the end of the centuries of disaster, little of the surviving lands bore any resemblance to their old-world namesakes. But while humanity would suffer under the privations of this new, unforgiving world, the human race would not be extinguished. It had suffered worse before and come back stronger. So the tempest-tossed survivors banded together and, out of the ashes of the societies that came before them, built a society for themselves in the strange world they now called home.
Centuries have passed again since then, and from the catastrophe scattered bands of subsistence farmers, nomads, and scavengers have created a society that has recaptured a spark of the glory days. Armed with the last remnants of the prized pre-catastrophe technology, the survivors of Europe are pushing beyond the obsolescing feudal governments that allowed them to survive in the harsh, lean times of the Fallen Years, and new scientific discoveries are changing life in the bustling port towns of the Baltic Sea and the North Sea every day. Explorers, too, are pushing the boundaries of the harsh climates of the European continent, sailing further and further south down the Lusitanian coast, scouting the south shores of the Black Sea, and traversing deeper and deeper into the Great German Desert.
In broad strokes, the world in the Second Renaissance can be compared to that of the First. Swedish and Gothic merchant republics dot the coasts of the sunny, Mediterranean Baltic, controlling trade across the narrow straits of Vänern and Øresund. The old and stately Kingdom of Norway, deep valleys rich with Bordeaux grapes and terraced with wheat, fends off both ambitious Icelanders angling for more of the prosperous, fertile Vestlandet and the resurgent Sámi, once a bare minority in the unforgiving northern taiga, who with newly arable land now preside over a large multiethnic empire (tottering and overextended, but it's more than they could say before) stretching from Jemtland to Murmansk. Finland and Meänmaa, once rife with as many petty, squabbling fiefdoms as lakes, have come under a single king that now threatens from across the Bosporan Onega the stagnating, byzantine Russian Empire.
Southwest of Moscow, moving towards the centre of the European continent, the heat grows oppressive, and little of agricultural value can be grown. The ancient lands of Russia have themselves been riven in two by the Great Grass Sea, a dry, scorching grassland with long, flat seasonal riverbeds flowing languidly towards the brackish Dnieper Sea. Here, between the arid Donlands and the Podolian desert, sunbaked Kiev is the linchpin of a Russian Songhai, the trading post where Caucasian and Rhomanian nomads bring rare goods to ship north to Moscow. Sometimes, reed ships from farther afield, like the jungle kingdom of Greece, arrive, bearing unusual relics from the ancient world.
North of the dusty Kievan borderlands, minor states people the islands and the northern coastlines. Estland, Lettland, and Ljetva, with a Sicilian or Cypriot climate, are dotted with olive orchards, and their oil is said to be among the finest in Europe. (For this reason, of course, the Kalmar Republic and the Vasa Republic have been struggling for control of them for hundreds of years.) Greater Poland juts out among a steamy archipelago: here villages cling to the coast, where they can fish and seek shade under the broad date palms, but many seek fame and riches by trekking to the sandy ruins of Kraków and Lublin in Lesser Poland. The German shoreline is much the same, with littoral emirates buoyed by trade with Gothland to the north, but is distinguished by the river Rhine, one of the few great rivers of Europe to remain flowing year-round. Fed by heavy rains and even the occasional snowfall in the subtropical Swiss Alps, the wide river irrigates the Palatine lowlands like the old Nile, spilling over the sands of the Saxon Desert with a verdant bloom, and opening onto the magnificent Rhine delta. Extending the metaphor, Essen is Alexandria, the great port on the coastline kept above water with extensive reclamation, and Frankfurt is Cairo, capital of the German nation, relieved of the blistering heat by cool winds from the nearby Rheinsee.
France is no more: Normandy and Brittany are independent-minded islands, oriented more towards their aims on the (hundreds of) British Isles, where the weakened England struggles to fend off challenges from Scotland to the north, Scandinavia to the east, and Wales to the west as well as the Normans and Bretons to the south. Île-de-France is a pyretic, poorly-dredged swamp, but the petty kings of La Vieille can gloat about the immense, iron-wrought ancient Lighthouse of Paris, while those holding court in Poitiers—as prosperous as they might be—sit at the fringes of the European sphere, largely ignored by everyone except the Spanians, who pretty much everyone can agree don't really count as European.
But things are changing in Europe. The Kola march, long the least prosperous and most isolated of Sápmi, has begun to press back against Meänmaa and Finnmark, conquering the strategic city of Kiiruna (Giron, to the Sámi) and driving the Norwegian settlers of the north coast to the islands. Norway, in turn, has all but banished Iceland's claimant to the throne—only the fortress of Narvik remains under Icelandic control, similarly, the beleaguered English have finally driven the Bretons to their Cornish pied-à-terre. And Finland threatens the rotting empire of the Rus; having captured half of the strategic Onega straits, it is gathering armies and fleets to finish the job.
Nice! Superpowerful New Zealand FTW!
22 on the map seems to have been labelled as 23.
How are relations between NZ and the East Australian Kingdom? Does NZ have any designs on that particular area of its neighbourhood?
Has the newly minted North Korea Plus changed in any significant fashion from OTL's present day incarnation?
Also, this is the second time I know of where you have referred to "sheep the size of camper vans". Is that intentional?
Oops. Fixed.
"Badly scared" on the Australian side, "don't care much" on the New Zealand side. By the time the time distortion ended, Australia was only a vague legend, and New Zealand visitors soon lost interest after being disappointed by the lack of drop bears, cat-sized spiders, and man-eating Irwins. Their present expansionism is driven by their new religion and the way it interacts with their very poor records of pre-time distortion history, and Australia really doesn't feature in the narrative. (Egypt, Peru, and Greece have reasons to worry, though).
Oh, it has modernized in its own sociopathic way. The government is fond of biological engineering, and much of the population now consists of mutant oddities and beast-men, not to mention the flying laser unicorns (raised on the Radiant Leader's own underground stud ranch), and the giant mutant monsters are one of the few things slowing the Cat-Girl advance. The ever-multiplying food fungi in the underground cities mean that mass starvation is a thing of the past, although on occasion the fungi get a bit out of control and start eating the people.
The current Peerless Leader has been in power for sixty years and may be good for another sixty, thanks to modern biotech, unless assassinated first by his ever-multiplying descendants (The All-Knowing-One occasionally prunes the family tree a bit by encouraging homicidal feuding among the great-grandchildren).
An old Ah.com meme, before your time I guess.
Happy new year!
Bruce
Ooh, me likey. I've always had a thing for batcrap insane stuff like this, particularly if it involves bioengineering.
B_Munro said:
Ah, okay. I thought that the use of the exact same point of reference seemed a bit strange.
I was also reminded a bit of the infamous B-movie The Giant Claw, where multiple characters repeatedly refer to the Giant Antimatter Space Buzzard as being "as big as a battleship".
B_Munro said:
And the same to you!
What happens to you if you are so (un?)fortunate to live in one of the Temporal Instability zones, e.g. in Southern Kentucky or Northern Tennessee? What will you experience?
Thanks so much! Any questions about particular regions? Including those outside the map, there is actually a whole world beyond that hasn't yet been mapped, but which I have plans for! I'm definitely open to suggestions about which place to do next, too, since I probably won't be able to decide on my own.
Most of the map is in Norwegian since the Nordic languages are something of a lingua franca in this Europe, so the areas to the south aren't translated because I'm a huge language nerd. They mostly have informal names that involve legend as much as any verified information about the places—the Alpine streams that follow tropical valleys feeding the flooded Po Valley are "branches of the Boiling Sea", as few dare to come down the mountainside to face temperatures of over 50°C occurring at sea level in the Mediterranean, while the badlands of Hungary and Romania are conflated into the stagnant Hungering Sea and the Lands of Eternal Hunger ("Rhomania" is applied as a name to the barren West Bank of the Dniepr, where desert nomads scour seasonal riverbeds for mudcrabs and occasionally, old relics). And in the north, where few beyond royal cartographers even know about Kiev, let alone the even fewer number of explorers and traders who have actually been there, there are rumours that the black sea is a giant, ancient oil slick that cooks alive anyone who tries to cross it.
Thanks man!
I'd like to imagine that there would be people in *South America. The trade winds around the Tropic of Capricorn would drive ships from *Western Europe and Africa that way, if they could hop from island to island. If not, then there may be a scenario like OTL's Bering Land Bridge, where peoples in Antarcitca could go south into *South America.
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