"Power Without Knowledge...": President Haig and the Era of Bad Feelings

[Born in the USSA]

Ask the average Warsaw Pact cinephile and you'd be told that the turn toward dense and unconventional Western films that began with the release of Dune was nothing but a pale imitation of the trends that had been coursing through Soviet cinema for decades by that point. Whether you lent any credence to this "imitation rather than parallelism" theory was ultimately rendered moot by the shaky finances that paralyzed the Eastern Bloc in the wake of the so-called Soviet Restoration. If the USS couldn't spare money to continue the First Space Race, after all, there was hardly any slack in the budget for large artistic projects.

The start of the 21st Century would prove kinder on the USS and the Warsaw Pact than the end of the 20th had been, with the Atlanticist Western Bloc spreading itself thin with the War on Terror and Chinese expansion into Tibet creating serious strain among the nations of the Asia-Pacific region, all of that even without the lingering pains of the 2008 recession. Having focused on internal development over foreign adventurism following the wild success of the Crises of '91, money once again began to flow into vanity projects, from the Second Space Race to the cultural sphere, the latter best symbolized by 2013's No Truce With the Furies.

A product of the Baltic Federation artistic collective ZAUM, No Truce With the Furies was perhaps one of the most technically challenging films ever made, taking the form of a massive gamebook where viewer choice helped navigate the amnesiac central character through a fully realized constructed world and a dizzying array of ideologies, personality quirks and complex scenarios and interactions. While the core case of a lynched mercenary and the cause of your police detective's self-destructive tendencies can be discovered on a "speedrun" of just over five hours, fully exploring the world of the film and the limits of your protagonist's pathologies can run as long as fourteen hours for the completionist viewer, though the end result can still vary wildly depending on which of the film's four ideologies the viewer decides to embrace.

Supporting a film that required some two dozen hours of finished footage was always a bold choice, since it would be practically impossible to show in conventional theaters, though the advent of streaming services in the early 2000s made the film a fortuitous gamble, with international audiences raving at the level of complexity and nuance worked into the finished product. The censors were somewhat less than pleased with the ambiguity of the protagonist's communist focus tree, but by all metrics the film had succeeded in its goal, producing a grand show of disposable affluence, technical sophistication, and mass popular appeal. No Truce With the Furies has resonated so well, in fact, that several ARC-funded media projects have adopted the film's style of ambiguous and responsive storytelling over a century later.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The Maximalist Fraction (colors: black and burgundy, symbol: octopus) is a relatively new force on the Cosmicist stage, styling itself the embodiment of Second Wave Cosmicism. Drawing a small but significant bastion of support from the Steward/Populist duopoly and absorbing the Globalist, CosCom and Novuteran fractions almost in their entirety, the Maximalists have built a brand around three major planks, the so-called Three Pillars of Maximalism:

1. The revision of the Doctrine of the Last Throw- While the previous version of the Doctrine advocated purely soft-power influence in matters outside direct defense and emergency humanitarian aid, the Maximalist form has expanded the self-defense corollary to include economic and ecological attacks within its trigger conditions.
2. The expansion of the Cosmintern Space Program- To speed the process of Cosmicist expansion into space and hasten the arrival of the Weltgeist the fraction advocates a massive investment in the already robust extraplanetary colonization and genetic engineering programs, seeking to create a firm base for sustained terraforming efforts throughout the solar system.
3. The further enshrinement of the Cosmicist Economic System- To prevent Nihilist subversion at home and abroad the Maximalists desire a program of increased economic interconnection among the Cosmintern nations to speed the planned transition of the alliance into a proper world government and prevent backsliding within the member nations.

The three pillars of Maximalism are designed to be self-reinforcing, with the refinement of the Cosmintern intended to speed the progress of space expansion, in turn creating an insurmountable high ground to be used to outmaneuver (and, if necessary, subdue) the Nihilist northern powers both economically and militarily. There are several increasingly esoteric minor planks and policies, but the Three Pillars are seen as the programs with the most clear-cut popular mandate. Assorted minor policies include:

• New research into human modification, from cybernetic to biological transhumanism.
• The incorporation of artificial intelligence into the state apparatus to better manage the economic and social systems.
• Increasing the rate of racial admixture in a rather literal attempt to achieve Sutter's proposed Coming Race.
• The adoption of the most recent derivative of Ithkuil as a native language for the highest levels of Cosmicist discourse.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The Centennial of the Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealths

Behold! The centennial celebratory flag for the Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealths in my Power Without Knowledge TL! A century into the first successful Cosmicist experiment has seen the rise of a new force within the Antarctic Cosmicist Party, the Maximalist Fraction, determined to complete the work of transitioning the Cosmicist International into a true world government, expanding the space colonies into self-sustaining territories, and finally shattering the exhausted remnants of the Arctic Council to the north. To the dismay of the Nihilist powers the flag itself is unsubtle about these ambitions, prominently featuring the octopus that serves as the symbol of both the Cosmintern and the Maximalists and blatantly displaying the Cosmicist model of the solar system, complete with an Earth all decked out in burgundy. The ARC motto lends the flag an extra edge of either hopeful promise or implied malice, depending on which alliance you happen to be subject to.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The policing regimen implemented in the wake of the Antarctic Revolution was a unique product of the reaction against the dark days of the Macondo regime, where security was handled by a private force that deliberately lived completely separated from its "patrons" and shuffled personnel between divisions with relative frequency. These policies in turn fostered a detached and suitably bloodthirsty security force adequate to terrorize the populace and maintain the quotas required to preserve the company's bottom line.

Following the necessary purges of unreconstructed elements within this system the ARC elected to retain a modified form of the paramilitary model, though steps were taken to preserve an ironclad promise of transparency and accountability to civilian control. Police in the modern ARC are required to have served at least one tour in the Antarctic Armed Forces and remain subject to the same code of military conduct, and as such are one of the few groups in the nation barred from unionizing and eligible for the death penalty in matters such as the violation of the standards of field executions. The Antarctic model of the police power has since been adopted by the other nations of the Cosmintern and is divided into two partitions:

1. The Regional Militia fulfills the police function within the Regional Commonwealths proper. A force centralized under the control of the civilian government of the RC, the Militia fulfills a role somewhat similar to a hybrid of a local police force, state police force, and National Guard integrated into a single operation. At the local level the members of the Militia are required to maintain permanent residency in their jurisdictions, while a separate central pool of officers investigates crimes whose scope or severity elevate them beyond the capacity of the local force. It is this central pool, in conjunction with relevant local units, which is marshalled in the event of disaster, insurrection or invasion.
   • Given the distance between the Antarctic Insular Territories, the police function in the Protonga Regional Commonwealth is instead handled by the Antarctic Coast Guard, a subdivision of the Antarctic Navy, though local peace officers are still required to be permanent residents of the area they are overseeing.
2. The Continental Constabulary serves as the federal police force, investigating crimes that cross the boundaries of separate Commonwealths or deal with matters of state security and foreign and domestic espionage, as defined by the Basic Law and certified by a Continental Security Jury. The members of the Constabulary have broad latitude to commandeer Militia units and resources in the field, though they are held to an even stricter standard than the Militia members to better curb abuses of this power. Aside from their traditional security functions, the Constabulary also oversees the training, auditing and investigation of the Regional Militias, ensuring both an equality of enforcement and the prevention of the formation of reactionary bastions within the security forces of the RCs.

 

[Born in the USSA]

To help hint at the broader changes of the timeline without relying too much (I'm not made of stone!) on infodumps and footnotes I've decided to preface every chapter of the Alienation half of my novel with an appropriate quote lifted from OTL but slightly modified to allude to changes!

• "The Swamp": "The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam."- JG Ballard, 1983*
• "Red Meat"- "I am in command here, at the White House..."- President Alexander Haig, 1984
• "Copperhead"- "Britain and France have got to get our continental interests into balance. There's no easy popularity in what we are proposing but it is fundamentally sound. Yet I believe people accept there's no real alternative."- Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 1992
• "Bread and Roses"- "The Age of Oil and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."- Seyyed Nasr, 2001
• "Reservations"- "[...] So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."- President Carol Moseley-Braun, 2008
• "Blue Wave"- "You don't need a Weatherman..."- Anonymous graffiti, 2014
• "Leviathan"- "No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain."- Thomas Friedman, 2020

*OTL quote and context

 

[Born in the USSA]

I've been giving some more thought to my Volksgeist/Leviathan framework 🤔 I like the Necropolitics/Acceleration dichotomy and it occurred to me as I was trying to fall asleep last night that rather than have it be two umbrella categories only manifesting in the schizophrenia of the Nihilist stage it would be better to have them manifest in different forms in every stage as competing tendencies rather than discrete movements. In the new framework, each stage would generate its own antithesis in the form of acceleration and coincide with the necropolitical traces of prior stages, with the acceleration in turn being transmuted into the dominant tendency of the next stage. The persistence of necropolities in every stage neatly sidesteps the critique that "You said X-state existed in Y-stage, therefore you're saying X was Y!", since that produces an incredibly unhelpful degree of reductionism.

In the rough guide below, the Origin represents fundamental cause of the deterritorialization of the prior model, with the generalized Manifestation listing the primary characteristics of the new stage. Meanwhile the Necropolity refers to the remnants of the prior model that have been warped by accommodating the transition and the new Acceleration to the seed crystal that creates the next stage through reterritorialization in a modified form. A consequence of the de/reterritorialization cycle is the generation of Hauntology, the atemporal imagined ideal future/past that has been snuffed out by the new model, created as a ripple effect as the necropolities are forced to adapt to the new stage.

1. Imperium
   • Origin- First Agricultural Revolution
   • Manifestation- Centralization of authority, hereditary class relations, union of spiritual and temporal authority
   • Necropolity- Nomadic pastoralists, hunter-gatherers
   • Acceleration- Capitalism
   • Hauntology- Mythic golden age
2. Liberalism
   • Origin- Little Ice Age
   • Manifestation- Republicanism, growth of private markets and ownership of the means of production
   • Necropolity- Enlightened absolutism, constitutional monarchy, Qin imperial model
   • Acceleration- Utopian socialism, anarchism
   • Hauntology- Ancien régime
3. Socialism
   • Origin- First Industrial Revolution, Second Agricultural Revolution
   • Manifestation- Labor militancy, social democracy, vanguard organization
   • Necropolity- Mass democracy (populism/progressivism)
   • Acceleration- Futurism
   • Hauntology- Enlightenment rationalism
4. Fascism
   • Origin- Second Industrial Revolution
   • Manifestation- Fuhrerprizip, national rebirth narrative, corporatist economic structure, return of frontier violence to the metropole
   • Necropolity- State capitalism
   • Acceleration- Neoliberalism
   • Hauntology- True communism
5. Nihilism
   • Origin- Third Agricultural Revolution, Third Industrial Revolution
   • Manifestation- Capitalist Realism (reflexive dismissal of all alternatives), hegemonic global market system, near-total shift of the political horizon from economic to social matters.
   • Necropolity- Oligarchical populism
   • Acceleration- Longtermism, NRx (neocameralism, auntology*), XF, Regression
   • Hauntology- National rebirth (geopolitical multipolarity)

Under this new analysis the breakdown of the Nihilist stage would be that the accelerationist tendencies are slowly being digested and incorporated (in acceptable form) by the dominant model instead of maturing into a new stage proper. The fundamental character of the Nihilist stage is that, since it cannot tolerate any possible counter to itself and actively commodifies and absorbs any that arise, the sheer number of hauntologies has multiplied exponentially as conditions have degraded and alternatives have been actively discarded. This sense of lost possibility combines with the material realities of economic and social exploitation and constant sense of looming ecological and societal collapse (even on a subconscious level) to explain the expansion and continual privation of the lumpen precarian social class.


*Auntology proper refers only to a movement in China, but given its focus on actively fostering balkanization and the artificial reconstruction of prior national/ethnic identities, in the context of Cosmicism it's used as a broad category for various permutations of racial acceleration.

Cosmicism therefore sees itself as a unique development rather than another link in the Leviathan, squaring the circle by absorbing and redeeming hauntologies to create a viable alternative to the Nihilist stage and by awakening class consciousness among the precariat to create a popular base to actualize itself. The overcoming and suppression of the kyriarchal class will allow the new Cosmicist consensus to absorb the ability to digest/incorporate arising alternatives, albeit in a more stable and sustainable form rather than a purely symbolic commodified one.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Internet is still spotty but I'll try to do an actual update sometime over the next week or so once I'm in the swing of things at the new job! In the meantime have another rough one-off idea! Based on my love of all the sheer weirdness and intricacy of political ideology as a concept I had another concept I'd like to have percolating in the background of Antarktos 😂 Basically it stems from the idea that Oubliette will be written in such a way that it can be interpreted in three ways:

1. The anonymous future "editor" is using Sutter's name for clout, explaining both the direct references to current ARC politics/society and Sutter's somewhat surreal adventures in the narrative past.
2. The Sutter segments were attributed correctly but the future portions were written later, likewise explaining the current information and casting Sutter's adventures as a strange narrative blend of actual events and dreams/hallucinations he recorded at the same time.
3. Sutter genuinely was having transmundane visions and accurately predicted the future. Just as straightforward as option one but naturally more unsettling to in-universe readers.

Anyway, I recalled an old idea I had for "Esoteric Cosmicism" that was mentioned in the Zoranist post and thought it would be interesting to flesh it out a bit more, with the idea that the reader would cast them in a different light based on which explanation they prefer, from LARPing culture jammers in option 1 and 2 to a shadowy genuinely occult current in option 3. The idea would be that they would cobble together an occult system by combining Zoranism with elements lifted from Sutter's writings and mainly content themselves with secret get togethers and counterculture art, writing and graffiti.

• Zoranism would give them their central symbol, the concept of increasingly material root races, and the concept of the Three Poisons.
• Sutter's novel Demimonde would give them their focus on vril and sigils (reinterpreted into a modern chaos magic context), as well as a fire-ice/life-death elemental system and a bit of Aztec five suns/Yiguandao three suns eschatology. Add in the Emerald Tablet and "Cassilda's Song", both quoted in the text, and blend well.
• The Cosmicist Manifesto naturally forms the foundation of their worldview, though they've taken an unhealthy interest in a one-off illustration in the prose final third that they purport represents a six-element system.

So how would a counterculture properly synthesize all these elements? We'll start with the elemental systems: fairly straightforward, all things considered, with ice/sea and life/earth having one to one parallels. Fire would be associated with sky, death with time, void would be a medium the rest exist within and vril (as the counterentropic force in the Demimonde schema) with dream. Then it's a matter of assigning these elemental associations (and the Aztec five suns) with the Zoranist root races and interpreting the Yiguandao White Sun/Maitreya* as the Cosmicist salvation at the end of the current Kali Yuga, giving us the basic framework of a cosmology. Actual praxis, meanwhile, is more straightforward, with the Emerald Tablet serving as the foundation for the Western esoteric tradition OTL and sigilization providing a mechanism for expressing will on the world through magical direct action. The fact that "Cassilda's Song" is fully incorporated as a vision of humanity surviving to watch a dying universe is ultimately hopeful, despite its incredibly dour tone.

-The new order would be Dream, Sky, Sea, Earth, and Time. The Thevetat of Zoranist belief would represent Void, a legacy the Esoteric Cosmicists seek to reclaim through the general Cosmicist drive toward space expansion (and shadowy rituals). ​

So, are they harmless dilettantes putting out weird art with strange symbols, black suns and Aztec motifs in the ARC's considerably more materially-secure environment of cultural expression? Or, if there really are supernatural actors behind the scenes, is there more to their work? Naturally it's all incredibly theoretical but if I can actually pull off Oubliette and get around to the sequel they'll eagerly absorb the book into their worldview, maybe even gaining some new practitioners in the process 🤔 And of course it's more fun if I never settle the truth of the matter one way or another 😉


*The use of the White Sun to represent the Cosmicist rejuvenation of the world has has synthesized with the inherent Cosmicist distaste for singular leaders to produce a belief that the Cosmicist movement as a whole is embodying the Maitreya as a sort of mass-generated egregore. The actual Sutterist symbol is a green Zoranist symbol in a gold circle, simultaneously representing the Emerald Tablet and Cassilda's Song.

 

[Born in the USSA]

I've started the writing process but because I'm always getting ahead of myself and I love backmatter in books and comics I've been mulling over my appendices and these are the ones I've come up with:

1. The Party Systems- Ideally an infographic timeline of how the American parties evolved into the Antarctic one. Nothing too extreme, just Founded: XXXX and maybe electoral symbols, with the Commonwealth Party also having a Suppressed: 2061 tacked on, with the content of the novel and the way the colored lines branch/fuse doing the heavy lifting. Much easier to put into an ebook, if I ever printed out a physical copy it would probably be a foldout insert 2-3 pages long or so and arranged into two halves. I'm still a little fuzzy on some of the specific dates but here's the gist:
   • 1979: Start of the timeline, featuring the Republican Party, Democratic Party and Citizens Party (with the last starting with a very thin line).
   • 1992: Founding of the Reform Party, positioned above the Republicans.
   • 199X: Founding of Manifest Destiny!, positioned below Citizens.
   • 2018: The Shatter. Republican split fuses with the Reform (keeping the color but renamed into the America First Party) and the new New Federalist lines and creates the Freedom Party. Democratic split swells the Citizens and Neofed lines and forms the Equal Rights Party.
   • 203X: Founding of the Commonwealth Party out of a fusion of the Citizens, Equalists, Manifest Destiny! and a faction of the Neofeds. Fusion of the America Firsters and Freedomites, retaining the former's name. This section goes until ~2060 before the Neofeds and the America Firsters branch out of frame and there's a sharp break.
   • 208X- Founding of the Antarctic Cosmicist Party and the branching off of its Fractions. The timeline would also shift from CE to HE dating.
   • 218X- Fusion of portions of the larger Fractions and most of the minor ones into the Maximalist Fraction. Probably need a new color for them though, since burgundy and black are taken 🤔
2. The Antarctic Basic Law- Pretty self-explanatory. Since unlike the US Constitution the amending process directly edits the text instead of just tacking on to the end my normal instinct to footnote it would be better served with a short introduction explaining the general changes between versions.
3. The Executive Quorum c. 12194: Similar to the breakdown of the executive departments chapter in Reds!, giving me some space to lay out how the government works during at the time of the Fourth Constitutional Convention.
4. Primer on Regression: Nothing too extreme, just a brief breakdown of major currents within the movement like the one I posted upthread, albeit with a bit more info on what's become of them over the 21st century*. Depending on whether I can insert this organically into the text I might scrap this one 🤔

Expect some maps, flags or images of symbols inserted directly into the text. Appendix 1 will be the most technically challenging, but I might just commission someone to make it, since I really loved the timeline for Jonathan Hickman's East of West and desperately want to include something similar. The way he drew his maps is also incredibly cool.

Isn't it stunning? Mine will have nowhere near this level of timeline detail but I'm in love with the look. Splitting it into two horizontal columns (1979-206X and 208X-218X) will keep it from being 10 pages long.
​

*Among other things, the Kaczynskians remain a recurring problem (not unlike syphilis), the Nasrists are the dominant political force in the Arab League, the Neomalthusians have been absorbed into the PEC and BaRD mainstream, XR has been absorbed into the global Cosmicist movement and the Tsalal have settled down from their decades of insurgency against the ARC government.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Released in September of 2016, The Last of Us was an epic post-apocalypse film directed by Sam Raimi. Based on the Atari-exclusive game of the same name, TLoU likewise centered on a tale on a survivalist road story set twenty years after an extremely virulent strain of cordyceps fungus became capable of infecting humans and caused the almost spontaneous collapse of human society under the weight of the zombie-like "Infected". Following a harrowing prologue set on "Outbreak Day" where his daughter is killed, Joel (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is tasked with escorting Ellie (Bella Ramsey) from Boston to northern Colorado in the hope that her immunity to the cordyceps infection can be used to synthesize a vaccine, dealing with Infected, raiders and the fascist remnants of the American government along the way.

An immediate hit with Atari fans and newcomers alike, The Last of Us garnered praise for its pragmatic but still faithful adaptation of the game, as well as for its masterful use of practical effects, best seen during the film's (comparatively) rarer but more impactful encounters with the Infected. While Morgan was incredibly effective in his role as Joel, the breakout casting of the film would be Ramsey, with critics gushing about her emotionally-moving and action-packed performance, all the more remarkable for being an essential unknown among American audiences. At its core a story about surviving and living on in the face of loss and trauma, the arc of Joel and Ellie gradually connecting, letting down their guard and coming to develop a genuine father-daughter bond was a prominent feature of many glowing reviews, netting Ramsey herself an Oscar that year.

Originally "merely" a critically and popularly acclaimed story of zombies and the families we choose, several aspects of the film have gained new attention in the wake of the election of Buchanan. The fascist American remnant "FEDRA" became a repeated point of comparison with the Department of Heartland Security and the rest of the domestic security apparatus under the new administration, while the revolutionary "Fireflies" drew parallels with groups as diverse as the Weather Underground, Extinction Rebellion, and the Double-V movement, with differing degrees of sincerity depending on who was making the remark. While much of this early analysis would focus on the various factions present in the film's world, perhaps the most shockingly prescient was the nature of the Infected.

With the outbreak of the Gray Lung pandemic, Candida auris, new attention was paid to the nature of the film's apocalypse. Beyond the simple commonality of a global fungal pandemic, and one where one of the earliest signs of infection is wheezing, no less, the complete collapse of an effective government response over the course of weeks went from being a fanciful invention to a scathing bit of foreshadowing to the seeming inability of the Buchanan administration to staunch the tide of new C.a-19 infections. Another uncomfortable parallel was Raimi's choice to adjust the timeline of the game for his adaptation, shifting Outbreak Day from 2013 to 2000. While he has said he intended it as a critique of the inherently reactionary nature of the DHS during the Powell years, this had the unfortunate effect of shifting the narrative present of the film to 2020, further intensifying its preexisting culture war cachet and ironically turning it into a must-watch for many on all sides of the fractured political landscape.

 

[Born in the USSA]

To add a bit of color I've decided to come up with monuments for each of the Regional Commonwealths! Aside from showing the ambition and material security of the post-Macondo generations they'll also allow we a nifty conversation piece for my characters to explore aspects of their society. Unless otherwise noted, all are in the stripped Szulalskian style popular on the continent.

1. Ultima Unbound, representation of the Antarctic peoples and entry point for all new immigrants, found on the rasping Tongue of New Nantucket.
2. The Modern Tauroctony, Mithras slaying the Bull of Wall Street, the triumph of will over wealth, found in the suppurating Legation Quarter of Caprona.
3. The Star Chamber, home to the most advanced terrestrial telescopes of the Corps of Discovery, nestled in the heights of the Starkweather Mountains of Dakkar.
4. The Crucible, pride of Cosmicist environmental control, fully enclosed, fully mutable*, ten square miles perfectly tailored for the Flower War in the wilds of Inner Xanadu.
5. The National Preserve, the greatest experiment in constructed ecology in human history, dominates the Pale of Symzonia.
6. The Nameless Temple, heart of Zoranism, seat of the Nameless Priests and the High Priest Not To Be Described, found atop the Plateau of Leng.
7. The Struggle, the Kanaloa raised from the depths, restored and suspended over a faceless statue of Sutter, found on the Midnight Coast of New Swabia.
8. The Moloch Machine, former heart of Company operations in Antarctica, maintains its disgusting Silicon Valley minimalism even after becoming a museum in the Riallero Historic District.
9. The Palace of the Precariat, seat of power in the ARC, straddles the South Pole and the Straits of Karnak.
10. Star City, crown jewel of the Corps of Discovery, gateway to the stars, found on the island of Protonga**.

*A testbed for colonization domes, the Crucible has a malleable climate to provide diverse training for the Antarctic Armed Forces. In Festival years hosted in Antarcica the extremity of the environment is ratcheted up for more entertaining gladiatorial combat.

**Formerly Easter Island, and not to be confused with the much broader Protonga RC.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Here are some examples of the Szukalskian style embraced by the ARC! Their architectural style isn't quite this ornate, being essentially a Greco Deco slightly stripped form, but that doesn't stop the Arctic Council nations from basically treating Antarctica like it has the architectural sensibility of the Necromongers 😂

 

[Born in the USSA]

*Trigger warning gang, this one's gonna get rough*

Modern American mythology has always had a disturbing connection to its media. After First Blood people believed that Vietnam veterans were spit on when they rotated home. The cowboy hat was a creation of Westerns and cigarette ads. The Klan and all its horrors sprung fully-formed from screens playing Birth of a Nation. Through this lens the acceleration of violence and protest that set the stage for the 2016 election can trace its contours to The Murder Ballads. Ballads did not create what it would unleash, but it is abundantly clear that the energies released in the latter years of the Mosely-Braun presidency drew the series fully into the vast lunatic fringe of American conspiracism.

A dark and ambiguously supernatural detective anthology series, The Murder Ballads began to critical acclaim in 2014 with the release of the first season, subtitled The Western Book of the Dead. Starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, playing against type as brooding detectives wading through the morass of American depravity, the season was set in Arizona and revolved around sexual violence, human trafficking, murder, and sinister cults, spanning the 1990s to the 2010s and given a disturbing supernatural air through the deft sprinkling of references to The Three Imposters, a previously obscure horror novel by Arthur Machen. Although there was some pushback from the Hispanic community for the season's approach toward Santa Muerte, reaction was broadly positive, with critics praising the emotional performances, constant air of tension, and humanizing portrayal of the victims of coyotes on the border.

The second season, starring Christian Bale and Jessica Chastain and set in Washington, D.C., would be released in 2015 and subtitled The Blood-Dimmed Tide. Tied directly to the prior season, Blood-Dimmed Tide revolved around occult architecture, political conspiracies, secret societies and perverse rituals, with the Machen references replaced with intimations drawn from H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Similarly beloved by fans and critics alike, a third season was ordered almost immediately. And that's where it would have rested, season after season of horrifying glimpses of the suppurating rot under the skin of the American dream, if it hadn't been for Darren Ratch and Victoria Vasquez.

Though Mosely-Braun was not the first Black president, her election and the progressive hope that she had embodied had led to a sort of cultural schizophrenia on both left and right. The former grew increasingly disillusioned in the face of police violence and economic exploitation even as the latter sunk into the wilds of baroque and wild-eyed conspiracies born out of the confluence of the remnants of the Satanic Panic, the Sovereign Citizen movement, and the perennially-popular New World Order conspiracies, all seemingly ignored by the bloated security state. In the long hot summer of 2016 the Zodiac videos began appearing on the Libertalia forum and the country exploded.

Since the latter months of 2015 San Diego had been plagued by a string of unsolved murders, almost all targeting undocumented immigrants and local labor leaders and environmentalists. The posts would begin the following year, a series of videos and long cryptic screeds from a masked man (?) making a series of extraordinary claims:

1. The poster claimed credit for the murders gripping the city and further claimed that they were the Zodiac killer, though explicitly not the original one.
2. Zodiac was not a person or a group, but rather a title claimed by "freedom fighters" using information from the future to prevent the rise of a New World Order.
3. Agents of the NWO operated at the heights of power, doing unspeakable blood rituals to a dark star called Nibiru to ensure their eternal rule.
4. The killings would not stop until the nation had been purged and the mantle would be taken up if they were caught or killed.

Panic gripped the city as the killings continued and Zodiac began cultivating an online following, either fellow travelers enthralled with the killer's bizarre blend of conspiracies or murder tourists intrigued by the theatricality of the Zodiac's encoded messages. Victoria Vasquez, mayor of San Diego, second generation immigrant and proud progressive, had made a vow that the killer would be caught and brought to trial. She had only succeeded in putting even more of a target on her back, and on July 4th, 2016, the Zodiac would strike, assaulting a city council meeting with a veritable arsenal. What followed was a horrifying scene of wanton violence as the killer streamed the "trial" and execution of the mayor and several city employees and members of the city council before being overwhelmed and gunned down by police. He had finally been unmasked, but at what cost?

Darren Ratch was a Border Patrol agent with over a dozen allegations of brutality to his name in a little over a year on the job. In his home police found the apparent backdrop used for the Zodiac videos, as well as a manifesto and rooms packed to the rafters with journals, photos of local citizens, community leaders and officials, conspiracy lore, and souvenirs taken from his victims. According to his tightly-written manifesto Ratch had become convinced that the federal government was an illegitimate military-industrial dictatorship, drowning the country in a flood of illegal immigration in a bid to destroy its culture and any possible resistance at the behest of a people-smuggling predatory elite, and he was certain that The Murder Ballads and other pieces of media were an attempt to launder an expose on the entire corrupt system. According to the best reconstructions of the timeline it was at this point he began to "receive" his instructions and list of targets, though it has since been determined that he had come across most of them through his work. Though no one could prove who leaked his manifesto and the wealth of crime scene photos online within hours of his death the deed was done and time would show that Zodiac would live on.

For the left Vasquez put a face to the scourge of state violence that had been increasingly in the news with the seemingly continual eyewitness recordings of the police engaging in disproportionate violence that looked suspiciously like executions and of the Department of Heartland Security denying things like due process and basic humanity to those caught up in the dragnet of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. What was quickly being called the Zodiac Massacre was a direct catalyst for the Double-V Movement, named in honor of Vasquez and hearkening back to the original fight against fascism abroad and racism at home during World War II. Calling for an end to the forever wars, massive demilitarization of police, and the complete dismantling of the DHS, the Double-V Movement brought together Americans of all races and creeds loudly agitating for radical steps to crush what many saw as a resurgence of white supremacy.

To the most toxic elements of the right it was another story. Speculation ran rampant that the Zodiac was on to something. The fight against the New World Order had a new face for a new century. As the social justice protests turned to riots in the face of police repression those already partial to the allure of the fever swamps would only grow more radical as they saw what was, to them, incontrovertible evidence of traitors and fifth columnists tearing down the country at the behest of their monstrous elite. The Zodiac manifesto would find a wider audience than any sane society could tolerate as violent clashes between the rapidly crystallizing lunatic fringe came into bloody conflict with the supposed catspaws of the cabal, from the Double-V movement to the Green Knights as they accused their opponents of being cultists, demons, and voracious abusers. Though filming had finished, the third season of The Murder Ballads was quietly shelved in the face of the national mood, as the Era of Bad Feelings lurched sickeningly closer to an American Years of Lead.

 

[Born in the USSA]

One of the most famous "might have beens" in the history of American comics comes down to a single element of pure random chance. In 2008 Warren Ellis was at the top of his game, with half a dozen series out simultaneously, all generating huge reader interest and positive industry response despite his infamous tendency toward schedule slip. Unfortunately a single hard drive crash destroyed all his notes for his unfinished series, and they were all sadly left dying on the vine. Not so in the world of Power Without Knowledge. In a world with a more diverse comics medium Ellis thrived, and it was only a matter of time before movie rights were optioned. The subject of this entry is the history and impact of one of those movies. It's time to talk Doktor Sleepless.

Ten years ago, John Reinhardt left the Pacific Northwest city of Heavenside, leaving his friends and a slew of public domain biohacking tools in his wake. Now he's returned changed, having crafted the moniker of Doktor Sleepless and set about unleashing the subculture that grew around his discarded inventions to bring the city down. As transhumanist gangs and a roving serial killer begin to tear the city apart and a strange and inexplicable disease begins to spread, his ex tries to get to the bottom of where exactly he lost his mind as a second John Reinhardt furiously writes a manifesto from his prison cell and strange alien gods seek to devour humanity.

That brief synopsis doesn't do the project justice, but a population accustomed to cosmic horror and strange philosophy on the big screen and seeing evidence of social decay in their daily lives flocked to it, making the film a breakout success of the 2011 movie season, even netting Bradley Cooper an Oscar nomination for his bizarre and compelling role as Reinhardt(s). The film proved popular enough to gain a sequel in 2015, The Darkening Sky, adapting the second half of the 35 issue series and retaining Cooper in his role(s). The duology and the series that inspired it has maintained mass cultural currency even despite Ellis's fall from grace in 2020. This lingering relevancy is best seen in the rise of the Grinder subculture, an elegant illustration of the series' theme of fixed ideas bootstrapping themselves into lived reality.

In Doktor Sleepless and its adaptation, the Grinders can best be described as a body modification punk subculture. When the tendency began to catch on in the real world the fact that the good Doktor regarded them as poseurs and useful idiots in-text was deliberately ignored, with the ideals of biohacking and resistance to authority, whether social, corporate or government, adopted with abandon. For natural reasons thought leaders among the Grinders gravitated toward the Subversive Party, using posts on libertatia.us and a slew of encrypted social media platforms to proselytize their manifestos and show off their chemical regimens, bathtub CRISPR and implanted sensors and microchips.

Mainstream reaction to the deceptively small but vocal subculture was mixed, from interest to indifference to disgust, and the occasional stories of botched back alley surgeries and grinds gone bad were always sure to make the news. Though too few in number to have an actual electoral impact, the tensions of the 2016 campaign would actually hand-deliver them the perfect vehicle for future expansion. While the Subversive Party had risen up in the wake of Powell's War on Terror and the further enshrinement of the Haig security state, the polarizing Moseley-Braun administration had seen a massive surge of right-wing keyboard warriors gravitate toward the movement, turning what was meant to be a Union of Egoists into yet another extrusion of right wing cultural grievance. This issue would be neatly resolved by the rise of Buchanan and Z-Thought siphoning off a majority of those "members", leaving Egoist-Extropianism the defacto largest tendency within the Subversive movement.

 

[Born in the USSA]

As you can presumably guess given the genre I'm writing it in, indie alternate histories (particularly the ones on this site) were a huge influence on my Oubliette concept, so I thought I'd like to talk a bit on that! My interest in uchronia goes way back, I have fond memories of checking out TL-191 books from my local library as a kid and I once gave nearly an hour long book report in high school on The Years of Rice and Salt. The assignment was only for 15 minutes but I got an A so... 😂

I'd originally joined the site in 2015 to read @DG Valdron's Green Antarctica, so I suppose you could say the intersection of Antarctica and alternate history goes way back with me and it's held fast ever since. As I became more invested and began to both seek out more timelines and begin starting my own threads my exploration of the broader uchronian genre became deeply entangled with a profound political shift I was going through at the time, sparking my longstanding interest in divergent ideologies and political systems. Some were certainly better grounded than others but I found them all interesting and it really demonstrated that given a combination of proper material conditions and social trends the movements of the body politic can writhe and spasm in the most interesting of directions.

@Napoleon53's What Madness is This (both versions) and EBR's Separated at Birth resonated with my preexisting tendency to free-associate historical and cultural details and ratchet up the resulting melange to create new and interesting texture for stories, and I hold both creators and their works in very high esteem as pinnacles of that more gonzo approach to the butterfly effect. The Could-Have Been Ideologies thread, particularly the @Crying posts on acceleration, were especially helpful, and @MasterSanders' excellent A Perfect Democracy even gave me an idea that I incorporated into my own vision of the Antarctic banking system! Of course Reds! was important as well, an example of a timeline that combined relatively simple PODs with a thorough grasp of political theory and its impacts on the march of history.

I've also found @Thande's Look to the West (and to a lesser degree several of his oneshots and novellas) incredibly interesting. It should come as no surprise that Societism was one of the heaviest influences on my Cosmicism, though my presentation of the latter as not only positive but an absolute necessity in the face of the Cthulhucene would likely strike him as me reading it wrong 😂 Though the *Zones are actually designed rationally and they preserve ethnoregionalism within the ideal world state, I've mentioned before that I appropriated modified versions of his Internal Completion idea and Doctrine of the Last Thrown into my ARC's economic and martial doctrines, respectively. Hell, the Struggle symbol is even an inverted and refracted Threefold-Eye!

I regard the genre as a broad exercise in hauntology, one that sees not only the ghosts of lost futures aborted by modernity but also the specters of lost pasts and presents discarded on the journey to that modernity. Some are well-grounded, some are tons of fun, some are even both together, but there are a rare few that demonstrate what could be possible with the proper shift in perspective. That possibility has always spoken to the spiritualist in me, I suppose, and I don't see any likelihood that that will change. We'll see how my long-gestating project comes along but as for me, I'm more than happy interacting with these ghosts as I labor on it.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Thought of a fun little change awhile ago and figured I'd lay it out 🤔 In 1984 there was actually a very hazy option on the table for Marvel to outright buy DC, but it obviously fell through. Having it go through here but the diversification of the medium still preventing the hegemony of the new behemoth (especially when it comes to movies) would be endlessly amusing to me, as if Marvel ends up with a bigger stable than ever but somehow inherits DC's future bad luck with movie universes 😂 At least partially that'll also come down to the slower pace of film studio consolidation TTL. Under the new schema the "Big Two" of American comics are Ultra Comics (the rebranded Marvel/DC fusion*) and Image (much larger and better entrenched here and also the publisher of the Milestone imprint).

*Though the deal gets started in '84, the actual consolidation of the two properties doesn't happen until the separate Secret Wars/Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover events in '85, which are followed by a canon Amalgam Comics thing and then the separation of the characters but the retention of a single shared universe. The jumble of the acquisition actually helps Moore retain ownership of Watchmen, sowing the seeds of Ultra's greatest competitor.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Aside from the recent backdating of the POD to the attempted assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978 I also went back and updated the presidential candidates post (and defeated parties are listed by "date founded" rather than "votes earned") though it goes without saying that the Libertarians and Citizens don't amount to much. I'll go into the start of their ascendance in the 2016 election update. I've also been mulling over a couple of changes I'll canonize, though they don't effect much so I'm not giving them full posts:

1. With Haig in the Oval and suffering from low-key brain damage in 1986 the Compact of Free Association never comes to be, with Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau reduced to insular territories instead. There are independence/statehood movements but nothing much has come of it yet.
2. With that change in place the Kanaloa Incident takes place in the (by that point) consolidated Territory of Micronesia, coinciding with a large-scale nationalist revolt over mistreatment by the mainland that's usually considered a front in the quasi-Civil War/legislative coup of the early 2060s.
3. In the late 90s James Cameron goes through with his original plan to become a US citizen and in the early 2000s the Equal Opportunity to Govern Amendment passes, creating a situation where he can be Citizens VP in 2016.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Too tired to make my original idea work, so have another one I cooked up! In my Power Without Knowledge verse, City on a Hill! holds pride of place as the first true work of Antarctic literature, published in 2080 by an anonymous American exile under the pseudonym Fabian Palmer. Functionally similar to Reds!, the novel is a mix of prose and epistolary uchronia, describing a slightly different history of the 21st century that lessens the Shatter of the big three American parties and in the process leads to a stronger Commonwealth Party able to turn the coup against their 2060 electoral victory into a successful Cosmicist Revolution, eventually culminating in the birth of the United Commonwealths of Columbia. Here's the state of the Seventh Party System just before the final American election:

• The Radical Reform Party was forged by Pat Buchanan during his second term, having fully purged the Nader and Perot wings from the Reform Party and absorbed large swathes of the Republican and Libertarian parties in the wake of an even less successful War on Terror. The party of right wing reaction and militant anticommunism, the party has occasionally held the Senate in the past forty years, but has never won the White House with the popular vote. The Radical color is gold and their symbol is an eagle. Major factions: neoconservative, Laroucheite, Objectivist. Paramilitary: Myrmidon Militia/Minutemen.
• The New Democratic Party is centrism made flesh, bolstered by "compassionate conservatives" cast off from the Republicans and Perotist Reformers. Demographic shifts and escalating climate change have delivered them a recurring slim if comfortable lock on the House and every time they've lost the White House but won the popular vote rest assured they're always magnanimous in defeat. The NDP retain Democratic blue but extended an olive branch to the reasonable Republicans and traded in the donkey for a tapir as a middle ground. Major factions: neoliberal, conservative, radical centrist. Paramilitary: PMCs (too lukewarm for motivated partisan street fighters).
• The Commonwealth Party* was organized around a core formed by the Citizens Party (itself having butterflied the Democratic Socialists of America and the Green Party), bolstered by an influx of progressive Democrats, Nader Reformers, and the Manifest Destiny! Party (after they managed to purge the white nationalists, black separatists, and ethnocacerists). The Commonwealthers are organized around the principles of neopopulism, bringing together an emphasis on syndicalism, intersectional social democracy, environmentalism and political devolution. Their color is purple and they use a bee as an electoral symbol. Major factions: neopopulist, Left Regressive, councilist, Cosmicist. Paramilitary: Bonus Army (Cosmicist-dominated).

*In PWN proper the Commonwealth Party used teal, but the lack of a Shatter leaves purple on the table and creates more thematic resonance with the burgundy of the Cosmicist faction that will eventually become the dominant face of the party and the new regime.

 

[Born in the USSA]

As with most of the worst innovations of global capital in the last two centuries much of the development of the hypercorp model that even today dominates the decaying economies of the Arctic Council states* can be traced to the pioneering work of Macondo Technologies in the middle twenty-first century. Having risen up from a small startup to a major economic engine in the span of a generation on the back of strategic acquisitions, simultaneous vertical and horizontal integration and a ruthless drive to increase efficiency perhaps this is unsurprising. The name of the game was modularity.

In its refined form as first demonstrated by Macondo, the hypercorp model best resembled a hypertrophied example of what we would recognize as the gig economy. Anything that could be automated would be, but that wasn't efficient enough in the face of diminishing returns, necessitating ever more extreme ways of cutting costs. In a "perfect" hypercorp, the only truly secure personnel would be the owners (naturally) and a cadre of absolutely essential upper management. Most middle managers could be safely replaced with AI of one stripe or another, and any employee deemed "nonessential", at any level, would be temporary contractors. Any piece of the company below the upper echelon, from the equipment to the staff, could be replaced at a moment's notice to remove troublesome elements or shift company priorities, often through a purely automated process of resource acquisition and employee discipline and termination. As the cthulhucene accelerated there were always people in a worse position and therefore more desperate for any scrap of material security, after all.

It should be stressed that even at the height of its power Macondo never reached such a pure state, even with an entire continent of people that were tantamount to its property. Given the rapidly shifting Antarctic ecology and restive labor pool a reliable class of compradors, enforcers and other chain dogs had to be kept around in a status much closer to what we'd recognize as "actual employees", for example. And thanks to those cowards in the rapidly splintering UN even penal laborers had to be paid something, no matter how much the stockholders howled about "subsidizing criminals" and even if the majority of compensation came in the form of scrip that just fed back into the moloch machine.

The fatal flaw with gig workers, however, is that when they become the majority of the labor force and all know they can be replaced at any time it becomes impossible to suppress the coalescence of precarian class consciousness spreading through sheer osmosis, just as Sutter had predicted. In fact it was this knowledge that essentially everyone** could be replaced at any time that saw so many of the middling ranks of the managers, researchers and security staff swing their sails when they saw the writing on the wall. Better a brief political reeducation with a sincere promise of job security at the end than being cast out to the masses and facing penal labor of their own or a bullet to the head.

While the Mark I hypercorp model survives north of the equator, the period of Cosmicist consolidation in the wake of the Antarctic Revolution would see the pioneering of a new concept, which for the sake of simplicity we'll refer to as the Mark II*** hypercorp. While the majority of civilian business ventures**** in the Cosmicist sphere are cooperatives with a permanent pool of fully employed owner-producers, the Mark II's fill a crucial economic niche, but one where modularity based on a lack of choice has been replaced with a kind based on an abundance of choice. For example, lets look at the Antarctic military industrial complex, where the interconnection of the hypercorps is clearest:

1. Because the ARC government oversees the production of interchangeable standard parts in its pursuit of Internal Completion and the broader semicircular economy, most manufacturing of the common building blocks of modern technology and infrastructure flows through Promethean Standard Systems, a state-owned hypercorp with a relatively large permanent staff directing human resources and production.
2. Those line roles that cannot be automated are filled by temporary contractors who, all basic needs met by the state and often with either membership in a cooperative or a personal creative endeavor bringing in steady money, pick up a few hours a week as their needs dictate, with the sheer size and average education of the Antarctic labor pool ensuring adequate staff to reach production goals dictated by market demand.
3. PSS parts are then purchased at a discounted rate by a private defense hypercorp contracted by the government, itself a cooperative owned and operated by a permanent staff of researchers, managers, and other crucial employees. Combining PSS parts with proprietary ones produced either by the permanent staff, another specialized hypercorp, or a fabricator, a vehicle, weapons system, or dragoon armor is then assembled by a combination of automated factory systems, with necessary human roles filled by carefully vetted contractors.
4. Now finished, the shipment is tested and examined by PSS inspectors of the proper security clearance before being delivered by entirely automated systems to the military base, warehouse or research campus it was requisitioned for.

The above example is fairly simplified, with a customary military acquisition involving components produced by several specialized hypercorps integrated seamlessly into the desired finished product, but it adequately demonstrates the materiel flow and level of interconnection in the system. Often the private extrusions of the military-industrial complex draw from the same pool of contractors, who, after signing a very strict NDA backed by the full force of the ARC government, can command a premium for their services. In the event of catastrophic need, for example a world war, the system would be further streamlined and integrated with the state, with that same contractor pool brought in for the duration of the emergency and supplemented as necessary with permanent PSS employees.


*Most nakedly in the NAU and PEU and much more insidiously in the USSR and BARD.

**Outside the managers and the upper echelons of the security apparatus, of course.

***Purely for convenience here. Both types are simply referred to as "hypercorps", with their national/political affiliation being the mark of whether you're being exploited to death or actually getting a pretty good deal.

****Most nationalized industries, especially medicine and education, are far more traditional in structure, owned by the state but with the overwhelming majority of their workforces being fully unionized permanent employees.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Having given some more thought to my original Heartland ideas I had the idle thought to combine it with my The King in Yellow scenario, so as of now Heartland in-universe would roughly consist of a combination of these three posts:

(Click the post to see them)

I'm also mulling over changes to the in-universe title of Sutter's novel 🤔

Since I'm all over the place have some more extraneous details for the setting 😅

Tangentially related to the broader King in Yellow project, I've been giving some idle thought to an altered list of presidents for Demimonde, the science fantasy story-within-a-story version of this TL for my Power Without Knowledge timeline/Oubliette novel. As a quick refresher, Aleister Crowley discovers industrialized goetia, there's fearsome critters and human subspecies running around, and the 2CoC is fought against an earlier Franco-British Empire. Without further ado:

• William McKinley (National Union, 1897-1905)
  • The point of divergence with the main timeline is in 1904, when Crowley moves to the US and parleys some family money into a business venture and sets the world onto a path of occult climate change.
• Charles Fairbanks (National Union, 1905-09)
• William Jennings Bryan (Populist, 1909-17)
  • The Populists are a bit more manic at this point in the TL, with the nature of the new industrial revolution really riling up their Christian fundamentalist wing.
• Beekman Winthrop (Independence, 1917-25)
  • William Randolph Hearst is his vice president and has turned into a fire breathing lion creature. It's surprisingly less of an issue than you might think, though he loses his own bid for the presidency.
• Warren G. Harding (National Union, 1925-33)
• Howard Philips Lovecraft (Independence, 1933-53)
  • The new "sciences" are able to treat his cancer, so he remains president and wins another term, with Clark Ashton Smith as his veep throughout. Among other things he founds the reborn Knights of the Golden Circle (standing in for the Church of Starry Wisdom here), leads America through the Second Clash of Civilizations as per usual and devotes his postwar presidency to establishing relations with the tzitzimime and addressing the issue of goetic contamination, and eventually dies in 1960.
• Earl Long (Populist, 1953-58)
• William Dudley Pelley (American Workingmen's Party, 1958-61)
  • Pelley is just the straight up leader of the token esoteric racist party here rather than an author and was chosen as part of a coalition against the Independence Party, only for a different version of Long's assassination to put him in the Oval. America's in for a rough couple of years.
• Robert E. Howard (Independence, 1961-6X)

As I'm currently conceiving of it my protagonist in the past portion of Oubliette will spend a chapter early on in a dream taking place in ~1947 in this scenario, serving as the inciting incident for his arc throughout the book. Meanwhile the "novel" would exist in a finished form in the future portion, a nice pulpy urban fantasy spy thing set during the apocalyptic 1960 election.

 

[Born in the USSA]

I know you're all likely sick of the fact that I actively adjust the canon of the TL as I work through it but I've had some further thoughts on Zoranism I thought I'd lay out here. Originally I was going to tack on a new version of my metaphysics map of meaning here as well as a sort of visual distillation of Esocosmicist foundational principles* but my Zoranism updates have unfolded in such a way that my map of meaning will get a post all its own when I finish.

First off, I'm tweaking William Dyer's history to better tie him in to the prequel short story I'm trying to get included in the SLP Antarctica anthology. Rather than a Regressive activist having his vision quest in the early 2000s he'll instead be a journalist having one while reporting on the Antarctic theater of the Anglo-Argentine War in 1983/84. Rather than Meditations Under the Southern Cross his book would instead be titled the far more provocative Christ on a Southern Cross, though it would still be a blend of science fiction and Theosophy rather than an overtly Christian denomination.

Dyer's work would remain relatively obscure throughout the first century or so after his revelation, only gaining large numbers of adherents in the religious melting pot of East Antarctica. The combination of early proto-Zoranism with the Nasrist strain of Regression concentrated in the future Leng RC/Symzonia Territory and a resurgent Yiguandao** in the future Xanadu would shape the faith into its current form, with the rise of the first High Priest Not To Be Described and the basic structure of the Nameless Priests in their monasteries and the Gyrovague wandering priests-errant.

From there the spread of Cosmicism provoked the first major schism in the new Zoranist Movement, with the majority embracing Sutter's vision as the best way to pursue their ecological and social goals while the minority cleaved to Regression, retreated into Symzonia and reformed into the Tsalal Hetmanates. By the current stage a rapprochement between the two seems to be in the cards since the Tsalal have toned down their insurgency, though an outright reunification of the faith seems unlikely. The Esocosmicists are the other major schism, but they're not actively resisting the government or the Lengite heart of Orthodox Zoranism so they get overlooked most of the time.

I've decided the core Zoranist cosmogony revolves around a concept I'm calling Solid-State Panentheism. , something best encapsulated by the common Zoranist salutation "Was, is, will be", though whether it's a greeting or a farewell, a blessing or a curse, depends on context. SSP can be broken down into two primary tenets:

1. God is the universe and the divine infinite, everything that was/is/will be and was not/is not/will not be. God in the Zoranist conception is conflated with Ultima Ayesha*** and is associated with both Shakti and Wusheng Laomu. Whether she's an actual deity, some sort of universal consciousness or a metaphor to be considered in daily life depends on the practitioner, though the understanding is that every person, object and process is simply a small part of a single vast multidimensional cosmic organism regardless of how self-aware it actually is.
2. God is fixed, always. Spacetime is a solid and cannot be changed, period. Our inability to truly perceive God gives the illusion of free will, but that's all it is at the end of the day. The implications of this are open to interpretation, with schools of thought concerning themselves with whether the illusion of time is "flowing" in both directions simultaneously (even though we're only conscious of one) or if alternate universes exist but are just as fixed as we are, and clearly not the universe we as we perceive ourselves are currently inhabiting.

Zoranism believes in reincarnation owing to the illusion of free will and the suppression of the Three Poisons, though whether every individual is distinct or the same conscious facet of the universe filling every role across time and space simultaneously is an open question. Here's where we get to the supernatural. Zoranists prefer the term "transmundane" to "supernatural", since in their thinking nothing could possibly be beyond nature, but events and actors of this type are considered "resonances" in the divine crystalline structure of the solid-state universe organism, radiating backwards/forward/sideways in time and lacking physical presence but not existence. This handily explains both the Zoranist root races without any need for archeological evidence and any visions or the like experienced by the faithful, since all things are part of the illusion of the flow of the universe and nothing has a concrete existence outside of the illusion anyway.

The core Zoranist symbol is still Zoran's Equation (representing the illusion of perfect knowledge of the divine infinite) and I'm retconning the Tsalal Vajra symbol to be a secondary symbol of the faith proper, representing Solid-State Panentheism as a doctrine as the intersection of insurmountable solidity, irresistable power, and the illusion of self symbolized by the vril symbol in the sigil. Currently Zoranism is the largest single religious tradition in Antarctica, smaller than the irreligious/nondenominational population but still far larger than (in order) Yiguandao, a strain of Antarctic Shaktism, Liberation Christianity, and a school of ecological Islam. Various ethnoreligions and new religious movements have a smattering of followers throughout the continent, but none are large enough to break out of the "Other" category on a pie chart of Antarctic religions.


*It'll be a triptych, incidentally, and hopefully simultaneously symbolically dense but easier to parse. When it's done the post will include an in-universe analysis of its components to help it all tie together better.

**The transition of the Second Republic of China into the Neoconfucian Third Republic saw a continued resurgence in Chinese new religious movements, with the new form of Yiguandao serving as an overtly feminist counterbalance to the patriarchal Neoconfucianism. It's part of the reason so many of them ended up in Antarctica in the first place, though it did end up introducing the Three Suns among other things to the Zoranist philosophy.

***As the personification of the Antarctic people and the global precariat more generally it feeds into the "Maitreya as collective egregore" concept embraced most fully by the Esocosmicists.