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Description
OK, here's a commission I did, a map of the world for Turtledove's "Mortes D'Arthur" short story: turtledove.wikia.com/wiki/Les_… - an SF future of the 1980s which has become alternate history with the passage of time and the fall of the USSR.

Background:

The move toward Green-Pink neutrality in Western Europe and the rise of a Japan which could not only say no but also “screw you, Yankee” on the one hand and the US move towards the hard right and rising Israel Uber Alles religious fanaticism on the other led by the early 21st century to the breakup of NATO and the increased isolation of the United States internationally, and an emboldened USSR pushed the US hard in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. This in turn increased US paranoia, and eventually Some Damn Fool Thing in South America combined with an excessive confidence on both sides as to the deterrent effect of new anti-missile systems led to bombs flying.

The US and Soviet Union were both pounded badly, with lesser damage inflicted upon such allies and near-allies as China, Korea (both), Cuba, Canada, the Warsaw Pact countries, Iraq, Israel, and the People’s Republic of Venezuela. Both superpowers essentially disintegrated, and an interregnum of sorts followed. Centralized authority was revived in Russia faster than the US, but the Russians were divided in two separate states which well over a century of efforts would fail to reunify. The Union of Moscow was established by hardline Communists, while the Siberian Republic, and later the Siberian Empire, was based on a conscious rejection of Communism and a deliberate effort to return to the values of a pre-1917 “true Russia.”

(The Union of Moscow, although it stubbornly insisted on calling itself the USSR for three quarters of a century, was based in Moscow from early on: nearly half of the anti-missile system budget being dedicated to protecting one city meant that only two US nukes got through, and given superior US targeting and therefore lower megatonnage weapons, nearly a third of Moscow remained livable for certain values of livable, if you used a proper Soviet Geiger counter rather one of those lying, over-sensitive Western ones).

The US fragmented badly, and the largest regions of ordered government to emerge were in no mood to fight another series of wars to reunify. (Although there was eventually some violence in dealing with particularly wacky enclaves). US reunification has been a slow and mostly voluntary process, with some bits taking their sweet time to rejoin, and a number retaining various degrees of autonomy above and beyond what states used to have before the war. State borders have changed substantially as various “governments of emergency” were often not willing to hand over “their” citizens to the possible misgovernance of states essentially rebuilt from scratch, or in some cases didn’t want to rejoin a state if it meant living with “them.” In some particularly hard-hit areas states were indeed essentially constructed from scratch and repopulated from elsewhere. Currently the US is inward-turned and rather poor by global standards, although its overly sugared fizzy drinks remain a popular export.

Eastern Europe was not happy that a neutralized Western Europe had “abandoned them”, or about being nuked when all the westerners got was a wee bit of fallout, or about what they felt was distinctly insufficient aid from the West after the war. Nor did they like the West’s Pinko leanings and cheerful atheism. Western Europe, on the other hand, had over the last few decades becoming something closer to a United States of Europe, and was leery about admitting to their union impoverished, radioactive, rather democracy-impaired eastern states which would take a long time to “bring up to spec.” A few bits were absorbed, notably Croatia, East Germany, and Hungary (which hated all its neighbors from way back), but a positive effort to bring the East into United Europe’s embrace was generally “too little, too late” and a hostile coalition of anti-Brussels, religiously reactionary and generally pissed Eastern nations formed.

Israel, although not entirely annihilated, was badly damaged and had lost its principal sponsor: it would never regain the regional hegemony it had held for a while. A more successful *Arab Spring brought about a new era of Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabist dreams…

By the last third of the 22nd century, a new international order exists. The unified world dreamed of by 20th century utopian futurists has not come into existence (although the total number of nations has rather decreased) but neither has the radioactive wreck of the pessimists. Communism is a discarded philosophy, save in the Union of Moscow, where it is in any case more of an element of national identity and as formalized and ritualized as 17th century Spanish court ceremony. Technocracies, oligarchies, democracies, monarchies all exist. It is generally a pragmatic world, and although nationalist rivalries remain, there is little in the way of international ideological conflict. A number of Great Powers watch eachother carefully and maneuver for influence in the more backward and fragmented parts of the globe.

The world’s leading nations nowadays are the United Arab Ummah and the Republic of India, although the Arab Ummah or “world” as some foreigners call it is considerably more “impactive.” India, like the US in the 1920s, is economically booming but isolationist, rich and rather arrogant, the world’s largest economy but rarely intervening in other people’s affairs outside the immediate “sphere” of nations closely integrated into its economic and military space, and participating only to a limited extent in international fun and games like, say, the Olympic games. (The very cerebral and artistic society of modern India thinks running around a track in shorts is an undignified activity unworthy of anyone fortunate enough to be born a Hindu). The Arabs, on the other hand, are not quite as heavy a hitter economically, but are very rich on a per capita basis, and are heavily involved in international politics, peacekeeping activities, space exploration, etc., with complex political ties with other major nations from Brazil to China. Like Germany before WWI, they are a relatively new “great power” and tend to feel they need to keep proving that they have “arrived.” They also have unfortunate minority problems, having annexed the Turks outright after defeating the Turkish totalitarian state in the Kurdish Crisis, along with Armenia: and the remaining Jewish population of the annexed Holy Land remains a headache, although the government in Cairo is doing its best to fully integrate the Jews, one of the athletes on the current Winter Olympics team being a Jew.

The Empire of China’s inevitable (as they think) rise to Top Nation status has been admittedly somewhat delayed, being nuked by the USSR, the Not Enough Babies crisis, the Global Warming Crisis and the second (or third, depending on if you go back to the 19th century) civil war all being something in the way of speed bumps. Like the Siberians to the north, there has been a turn towards traditionalism, especially since the Hereditary Dictator declared the replacement of Communism-Maoism by Modern Confucianism as the state religion in 2137.

Japan returned to Good Old Fashioned values as well in the wake of the collapse of the US and a lot of radioactive ash wafting across from the mainland, although admittedly the Neo-Bushido of today has as little to do with that of the early Showa period as that did to the Japan of Tokugawa (mostly made up out of whole cloth, in other words). Big families and militarism are back, although loli-porn has proven impossible to eradicate. In spite of government efforts to promote Prodigious Breeding and even opening immigration to people who look sufficiently Japanese to a complex computer pattern recognition system, Japan does not have enough people to really support first-rank power status,[1] which they make for with bravado and substituting machines for people wherever possible. Japan is, of course, the most cyberneticized and roboticized nation on earth [2].

Eastern and Western Europe still tend to negatively stereotype each other out of sheer habit and inertia, and the continued grumbling of Serbia re being “cheated” in the partition of Bosnia has led certain German groups to troll with old claims to Kalningrad: however, the revival of Moscow as a middling power has led to détente, the Prague government feeling it best to deploy its defenses eastward. United Europe, which includes a scattering of territories world-wide plus a Canada looking for a protector that wouldn’t get them nuked, is pretty closely unified today, but not without continued strong regionalism, the Scandinavians forming a particularly influential sub-group, while the British are the often-threatening-to-secede equivalent of Texas.

The Swiss, like the cheese, stand alone.

South America is divided into an Argentine and a Brazilian block, the Brazilians also maintaining close ties to Lusophone Africa. Brazil is a leader in biotech research, and is undergoing a rather scary national experiment in substituting biological mechanisms for machinery wherever possible in a spirit of creating a “greener world.” Visitors are recommended to stock up on anti-allergens and fungicides.

Africa remains somewhat fragmented south of the Arab sphere of influence, but economic convergence means that the sub-Saharan lands are finally catching up to the rest of the world. Nigeria has emerged as a major power, with a chip on its shoulder about the Arab competition for influence in the Sahel. Even the Congo isn’t doing too badly nowadays, the mere fact of their continued existence being a bit of a surprise to interdimensional travelers. Somalia has broken up, reunified, and broken up again, and the Azanians and the Cape Republic are nowadays commercial partners rather than blood enemies. Angola never did quite manage to get its shit together, though.

Siberia, which eventually crowned a charismatic 17th cousin of the original Romanov line, is in fact the richest sizeable nation per capita on earth, much richer than Moscow, and if not populous enough to be a true heavyweight, have a fair share of international influence. Their hatred for and desire for the overthrow of the Moscow regime is legendary, with both sides arguing that they are the “true Russians”, with Siberians pointing to their revival of all the best of Russian culture and the “enslavement” of Moscow by an absurd German-Jewish [3] philosophy, while Muscovites note that Siberia was a mere annex of Russia while they are the true heartland, and Siberians are anyway a “mongrel” non-Russian people (concerns with low population plus economic growth have made Siberia an immigration magnet: half its population are non-Russian by descent).

The world is technologically advanced, although a Singularity does not seem to be in sight: genuinely self-evolving self-aware AI turns out to be rather harder to create than was generally imagined. Economical (finally) fusion power and dirt-cheap solar panels have allowed a successful transition to the post-carbon fuels era, and while global warming remains a serious issue, the geo-engineers have been on the job and can guarantee that things won’t get any hotter. Of course, the seas will continue rising, albeit slowly, for a while yet: these things have a lot of inertia. The only way to stop or reverse this is to cool things, perhaps even below late 20th century levels and back to Little Ice Age levels: although some are enthusiastic about the notion of holding winter fairs on the frozen Thames, Siberians, Canadians, and Scandinavians, not to mention the British fine wine industry, are all rather opposed to the notion of cooling things down much, if at all. On the other hand, the Arabs certainly could stand getting less of their water through solar-powered desalinization, and the Australia-New Zealand union, which has been doing all sorts of cutting-edge stuff in efforts to make their country more habitable, would certainly like it if things were a bit cooler…the debate continues.

Revolutionary new propulsion systems have opened up interplanetary space since the start of the 2100s, and there are now human colonies all over the solar system. Independent off-Earth governments include a couple of the larger space Habs in orbit around the Earth, the Lunar Republic, whose origins lie in the heroic efforts and cooperation of the Soviet and American space colonies to survive after being cut off from Earth by the atomic war, two regional governments on Mars (to which five different powers have claims) and a dozen dinky and often-in-need-of-a-bailout-but-always-boasting-of-their-independent-nature colonial efforts scattered through the asteroid belt. The rest of colonies are still too dependent on supplies and support from Earth for independence, and vary from a corporate-backed effort to exploit Mercury’s mineral wealth combined with illimitable solar energy, to a chilly outpost on Pluto’s moon investigating what appear to be liquid-helium based forms of life. Currently there is a big to-do on Mimas, the moon of Saturn, where the first deep-space Olympics, the 66th winter Olympics, will be held…

[1] If you want to piss off a Son of the Gods, remind him that the Philippines now have an overall larger economy.

[2] 1980s SF, after all.

[3] Not without their flaws, the Siberians. Antisemitism, after all, is another old Russian tradition.

I apologize if the notes are a bit hard to read: computer issues.

Description
OK, here's a commission I did, a map of the world for Turtledove's "Mortes D'Arthur" short story: turtledove.wikia.com/wiki/Les_… - an SF future of the 1980s which has become alternate history with the passage of time and the fall of the USSR.

Background:

The move toward Green-Pink neutrality in Western Europe and the rise of a Japan which could not only say no but also “screw you, Yankee” on the one hand and the US move towards the hard right and rising Israel Uber Alles religious fanaticism on the other led by the early 21st century to the breakup of NATO and the increased isolation of the United States internationally, and an emboldened USSR pushed the US hard in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. This in turn increased US paranoia, and eventually Some Damn Fool Thing in South America combined with an excessive confidence on both sides as to the deterrent effect of new anti-missile systems led to bombs flying.

The US and Soviet Union were both pounded badly, with lesser damage inflicted upon such allies and near-allies as China, Korea (both), Cuba, Canada, the Warsaw Pact countries, Iraq, Israel, and the People’s Republic of Venezuela. Both superpowers essentially disintegrated, and an interregnum of sorts followed. Centralized authority was revived in Russia faster than the US, but the Russians were divided in two separate states which well over a century of efforts would fail to reunify. The Union of Moscow was established by hardline Communists, while the Siberian Republic, and later the Siberian Empire, was based on a conscious rejection of Communism and a deliberate effort to return to the values of a pre-1917 “true Russia.”

(The Union of Moscow, although it stubbornly insisted on calling itself the USSR for three quarters of a century, was based in Moscow from early on: nearly half of the anti-missile system budget being dedicated to protecting one city meant that only two US nukes got through, and given superior US targeting and therefore lower megatonnage weapons, nearly a third of Moscow remained livable for certain values of livable, if you used a proper Soviet Geiger counter rather one of those lying, over-sensitive Western ones).

The US fragmented badly, and the largest regions of ordered government to emerge were in no mood to fight another series of wars to reunify. (Although there was eventually some violence in dealing with particularly wacky enclaves). US reunification has been a slow and mostly voluntary process, with some bits taking their sweet time to rejoin, and a number retaining various degrees of autonomy above and beyond what states used to have before the war. State borders have changed substantially as various “governments of emergency” were often not willing to hand over “their” citizens to the possible misgovernance of states essentially rebuilt from scratch, or in some cases didn’t want to rejoin a state if it meant living with “them.” In some particularly hard-hit areas states were indeed essentially constructed from scratch and repopulated from elsewhere. Currently the US is inward-turned and rather poor by global standards, although its overly sugared fizzy drinks remain a popular export.

Eastern Europe was not happy that a neutralized Western Europe had “abandoned them”, or about being nuked when all the westerners got was a wee bit of fallout, or about what they felt was distinctly insufficient aid from the West after the war. Nor did they like the West’s Pinko leanings and cheerful atheism. Western Europe, on the other hand, had over the last few decades becoming something closer to a United States of Europe, and was leery about admitting to their union impoverished, radioactive, rather democracy-impaired eastern states which would take a long time to “bring up to spec.” A few bits were absorbed, notably Croatia, East Germany, and Hungary (which hated all its neighbors from way back), but a positive effort to bring the East into United Europe’s embrace was generally “too little, too late” and a hostile coalition of anti-Brussels, religiously reactionary and generally pissed Eastern nations formed.

Israel, although not entirely annihilated, was badly damaged and had lost its principal sponsor: it would never regain the regional hegemony it had held for a while. A more successful *Arab Spring brought about a new era of Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabist dreams…

By the last third of the 22nd century, a new international order exists. The unified world dreamed of by 20th century utopian futurists has not come into existence (although the total number of nations has rather decreased) but neither has the radioactive wreck of the pessimists. Communism is a discarded philosophy, save in the Union of Moscow, where it is in any case more of an element of national identity and as formalized and ritualized as 17th century Spanish court ceremony. Technocracies, oligarchies, democracies, monarchies all exist. It is generally a pragmatic world, and although nationalist rivalries remain, there is little in the way of international ideological conflict. A number of Great Powers watch eachother carefully and maneuver for influence in the more backward and fragmented parts of the globe.

The world’s leading nations nowadays are the United Arab Ummah and the Republic of India, although the Arab Ummah or “world” as some foreigners call it is considerably more “impactive.” India, like the US in the 1920s, is economically booming but isolationist, rich and rather arrogant, the world’s largest economy but rarely intervening in other people’s affairs outside the immediate “sphere” of nations closely integrated into its economic and military space, and participating only to a limited extent in international fun and games like, say, the Olympic games. (The very cerebral and artistic society of modern India thinks running around a track in shorts is an undignified activity unworthy of anyone fortunate enough to be born a Hindu). The Arabs, on the other hand, are not quite as heavy a hitter economically, but are very rich on a per capita basis, and are heavily involved in international politics, peacekeeping activities, space exploration, etc., with complex political ties with other major nations from Brazil to China. Like Germany before WWI, they are a relatively new “great power” and tend to feel they need to keep proving that they have “arrived.” They also have unfortunate minority problems, having annexed the Turks outright after defeating the Turkish totalitarian state in the Kurdish Crisis, along with Armenia: and the remaining Jewish population of the annexed Holy Land remains a headache, although the government in Cairo is doing its best to fully integrate the Jews, one of the athletes on the current Winter Olympics team being a Jew.

The Empire of China’s inevitable (as they think) rise to Top Nation status has been admittedly somewhat delayed, being nuked by the USSR, the Not Enough Babies crisis, the Global Warming Crisis and the second (or third, depending on if you go back to the 19th century) civil war all being something in the way of speed bumps. Like the Siberians to the north, there has been a turn towards traditionalism, especially since the Hereditary Dictator declared the replacement of Communism-Maoism by Modern Confucianism as the state religion in 2137.

Japan returned to Good Old Fashioned values as well in the wake of the collapse of the US and a lot of radioactive ash wafting across from the mainland, although admittedly the Neo-Bushido of today has as little to do with that of the early Showa period as that did to the Japan of Tokugawa (mostly made up out of whole cloth, in other words). Big families and militarism are back, although loli-porn has proven impossible to eradicate. In spite of government efforts to promote Prodigious Breeding and even opening immigration to people who look sufficiently Japanese to a complex computer pattern recognition system, Japan does not have enough people to really support first-rank power status,[1] which they make for with bravado and substituting machines for people wherever possible. Japan is, of course, the most cyberneticized and roboticized nation on earth [2].

Eastern and Western Europe still tend to negatively stereotype each other out of sheer habit and inertia, and the continued grumbling of Serbia re being “cheated” in the partition of Bosnia has led certain German groups to troll with old claims to Kalningrad: however, the revival of Moscow as a middling power has led to détente, the Prague government feeling it best to deploy its defenses eastward. United Europe, which includes a scattering of territories world-wide plus a Canada looking for a protector that wouldn’t get them nuked, is pretty closely unified today, but not without continued strong regionalism, the Scandinavians forming a particularly influential sub-group, while the British are the often-threatening-to-secede equivalent of Texas.

The Swiss, like the cheese, stand alone.

South America is divided into an Argentine and a Brazilian block, the Brazilians also maintaining close ties to Lusophone Africa. Brazil is a leader in biotech research, and is undergoing a rather scary national experiment in substituting biological mechanisms for machinery wherever possible in a spirit of creating a “greener world.” Visitors are recommended to stock up on anti-allergens and fungicides.

Africa remains somewhat fragmented south of the Arab sphere of influence, but economic convergence means that the sub-Saharan lands are finally catching up to the rest of the world. Nigeria has emerged as a major power, with a chip on its shoulder about the Arab competition for influence in the Sahel. Even the Congo isn’t doing too badly nowadays, the mere fact of their continued existence being a bit of a surprise to interdimensional travelers. Somalia has broken up, reunified, and broken up again, and the Azanians and the Cape Republic are nowadays commercial partners rather than blood enemies. Angola never did quite manage to get its shit together, though.

Siberia, which eventually crowned a charismatic 17th cousin of the original Romanov line, is in fact the richest sizeable nation per capita on earth, much richer than Moscow, and if not populous enough to be a true heavyweight, have a fair share of international influence. Their hatred for and desire for the overthrow of the Moscow regime is legendary, with both sides arguing that they are the “true Russians”, with Siberians pointing to their revival of all the best of Russian culture and the “enslavement” of Moscow by an absurd German-Jewish [3] philosophy, while Muscovites note that Siberia was a mere annex of Russia while they are the true heartland, and Siberians are anyway a “mongrel” non-Russian people (concerns with low population plus economic growth have made Siberia an immigration magnet: half its population are non-Russian by descent).

The world is technologically advanced, although a Singularity does not seem to be in sight: genuinely self-evolving self-aware AI turns out to be rather harder to create than was generally imagined. Economical (finally) fusion power and dirt-cheap solar panels have allowed a successful transition to the post-carbon fuels era, and while global warming remains a serious issue, the geo-engineers have been on the job and can guarantee that things won’t get any hotter. Of course, the seas will continue rising, albeit slowly, for a while yet: these things have a lot of inertia. The only way to stop or reverse this is to cool things, perhaps even below late 20th century levels and back to Little Ice Age levels: although some are enthusiastic about the notion of holding winter fairs on the frozen Thames, Siberians, Canadians, and Scandinavians, not to mention the British fine wine industry, are all rather opposed to the notion of cooling things down much, if at all. On the other hand, the Arabs certainly could stand getting less of their water through solar-powered desalinization, and the Australia-New Zealand union, which has been doing all sorts of cutting-edge stuff in efforts to make their country more habitable, would certainly like it if things were a bit cooler…the debate continues.

Revolutionary new propulsion systems have opened up interplanetary space since the start of the 2100s, and there are now human colonies all over the solar system. Independent off-Earth governments include a couple of the larger space Habs in orbit around the Earth, the Lunar Republic, whose origins lie in the heroic efforts and cooperation of the Soviet and American space colonies to survive after being cut off from Earth by the atomic war, two regional governments on Mars (to which five different powers have claims) and a dozen dinky and often-in-need-of-a-bailout-but-always-boasting-of-their-independent-nature colonial efforts scattered through the asteroid belt. The rest of colonies are still too dependent on supplies and support from Earth for independence, and vary from a corporate-backed effort to exploit Mercury’s mineral wealth combined with illimitable solar energy, to a chilly outpost on Pluto’s moon investigating what appear to be liquid-helium based forms of life. Currently there is a big to-do on Mimas, the moon of Saturn, where the first deep-space Olympics, the 66th winter Olympics, will be held…

[1] If you want to piss off a Son of the Gods, remind him that the Philippines now have an overall larger economy.

[2] 1980s SF, after all.

[3] Not without their flaws, the Siberians. Antisemitism, after all, is another old Russian tradition.

I apologize if the notes are a bit hard to read: computer issues.