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Description
A commission for Venusian Si over at ah.com

The world of Risk 2210! This world initially diverges from ours in WWII, with the US holding into Greenland and Communism in China being confined to the Manchuria era, and continued to go off in other directions as the Soviet Union failed to collapse as OTL.

WWIII was a bit of a damp squib (a mere 40 million dead and largely a return to the status quo ante), but WWIV in the 2070s, starting with the whole US First Strike attempt, was distinctly more impactive. [1,2] Combined with the rising sea levels and increasingly unreliable rainfall resulting from global climate change, the next century was a bit anarchic, and few state entities survived the era without some major political or geographic changes. Corporate states and new forms of socialism backed by computers actually capable of planning an economy arose, and a rash of revolutionary ecology broke out in the Americas. New religious movements sprouted as old faiths proved inadequate or downright absent.

In the year 2210, a new stability of sorts exists. It’s a hot, summer world, and quite a lot of ice has melted, although plenty more remains: sea levels are still far from stabilized. Some areas combining high humidity and high temperatures alike have become rather inhumanly muggy in summer: In coastal India and south Arabia and the lands of the old Deep South alike there are many days a year when people stay in their ubiquitously air-conditioned houses and only venture out wearing clothes with built-in cooling systems.

What used to be Canada, Alaska, Siberia, Greenland, Iceland and the Antarctic (not to mention a Argentine Patagonia) have become far more populous as people have migrated from the stifling heat and droughts of the middle parts of the globe, although in recent decades some of the more blasted and desolate parts of the globe have been repopulated as advances technologies of moisture condensation, industrial desalinization of sea water, synthetic and indoor skyscraper farm food production and cheap refrigerated clothing have made possible for humans to deal with parts of their planet as if colonizing a hostile alien planet. Fusion power is finally a thing, if still not “too cheap to meter”, and solar exists on a monumental scale, and recycling is universal thanks to dumb nanotech (smart nanotech is forbidden on Earth for very good reasons).

The US got off fairly lightly from WWIV, but its reputation and the loyalty of its peoples were badly impacted, and as climate change went from bad to worse stresses built up until final disintegration. The rather technocratic and fiercely rationalist American Republic has turned its back on many US traditions, but not as much as the Continental Union of Biospheres, where the “screw the spotted owl” tradition of the western interior was ended by decades of drought and ecological catastrophe and its place taken by Earth stewardship as a religion. A similar north-south split in Brazil was eventually healed, but the division of the old US has only grown wider. (Alaska has gone quite its own way). Mexico has finally found its own Place in the Sun, while the Andes remains relatively fragmented politically and may yet be divided between Argentine, Brazilian and “Timoto” [3] blocks. Brazil never quite made it as a superpower, but is still a relatively major player: Argentina, on the other hand, is a technologically cutting edge state which has big hopes for the 21st century, but a long history of failed futures has left them insecure and given to almost Wilhelmite bluster.

Even today there are only a few million Icelanders, but the nation is essentially one big biotech research company in which everyone is shareholders, biotech taking the place banking and fishing had in earlier economies: the nation is in love with the idea of transhumanism, and everyone has at least a few (some rather ill-advised) genetic tweaks. They make other people nervous, and the fact that Iceland is surrounded by so many miles of germ-quarantining sea is one reason why they are tolerated at all.

France has once again been a leader in political styles, and is the leading Leftist (in the 22nd century fashion) nation, and of course is convinced the west Australians, the Red Khans, the East Africans, the west Siberian weirdoes and the rest are all doing it wrong. Relatively liberal and capitalist (in the 22nd century fashion) Warsaw dominates north central Europe after finally getting in an oh-so-satisfying win over the Germans, while Italy and the Balkans and the Scandinavian peninsula have gone in very odd directions. From the ruins of neo-liberalism, and neo-fascism, and neo-socialism, the British have actually succeeded in creating a Green and Pleasant, if weirdly nouveau feudal land: they’ve even managed to draw back in the Irish from the grim squalor of their Deep Green phase (it’s hard to maintain a decent lifestyle and be deep Green if you try to be self-sufficient on the scale of the Irish republic).

Africa took quite a while to get its shit together, the promising early 21st century running hard into environmental change and the disaster of WWIV. East Africa, luckier in rainfall patterns than elsewhere, remained semi-stable and eventual the old Anglospheric East African Union expanded into a leftist union of much of eastern Africa. Things were fairly disastrous in the Sahel, and variable in the coastal forest states: not until the second half of the 22nd century did a serious regional power block begin to emerge, and the area is still only a fairly loose alliance, if economically unified. South Africa’s Traditionalists have recreated African traditional monarchy for the 22nd century, which does not include any Boers, the last of which moved southwards a lifetime ago.

Zaire, which dodged the Mobotu bullet, actually reached for greatness in this world and unified much of central Africa in the late 21st century, only to overextend and collapse disastrously in the mid-22nd, leading to a cycle of wars that only ended some 30 years ago when the peacekeeper drone collective known as Y-1000 decided that its employers did not have the best interests of the locals at heart. In spite of efforts to upgrade, Y-1000 is falling behind technologically, and the locals fear the return of predatory foreign interests or local warfare if the various foreign info-warriors seeking to take it down succeed.

The Middle East is generally considered as a regional grouping, although the hegemonic power, the Kurdish Caliphate, doesn’t control even indirectly large parts of the area. Egypt (which dodged the atomic bullet in WWIV) is considered an African power, and is anyway a mostly secular, technocratic state nowadays. Iran remains fragmented, while central Asia has coalesced into a loose federation under the somewhat nominal leadership of the progressive Khans of Samarkand. (The Uzebek Hegemony of the immediate post-WWIV era failed to survive continued climate disruptions). Afghanistan no longer exists, although the Pathans remain disruptive.

Israel is also gone and likewise the Jews remain, although nowadays it’s mostly deeply Orthodox who marry among themselves and indoctrinate their children with every modern technique they can legal get away with. But Judaism was long closed off from the European world before: perhaps it will once again have a period of blooming.

Although it had a tough time when the Monsoons went all wibbly-wobbly, India survived and by 2210 is considered one of the three biggest powers on Earth, along with the American Republic and the south Chinese. Bangladesh is down to a few little chunks of land, but India is polite enough to pretend it still has an independent existence.

Fragmented Russia is fragmented. The largest chunk in the west is dominated by the Ukrainians, while the eastern bits are divided into four loosely allied small (if on the grow) states unable to agree on terms for reunification, and a super-Orwellian society whose population is known to exist mainly through satellite photos. There are occasional brief bursts of strange radio noise: it seems the language has been heavily modified from old-style Russian, perhaps as a means of making communication with the outside even harder.

The Red Khanate to the north of the Chinese state is less weird: although the worship of the Supreme One compares to that of the KIms OTL, the Khanate of the Scarlet Banner interacts with the outside world, and is a functional society in its own, weird, 1000-meter rusty metal arcology sort of way. The Khan’s justice is efficient, just, brutal, and fully automated.

South China is sometimes referred to as Hong Kong China or the Empire of Hong Kong, the hundred million inhabitants of the Great Hong Kong Metrozone dominating south China as Paris dominates OTL France. It is ruled by great corporate dynasties, which currently argue among themselves as to how best to widen the economic gap between China and the rest of the world: some three centuries after the establishment of the Republic (which has gone some odd political mutations over the years), China _still_ doesn’t dominate the world the way they think it should.

SE Asia united in a federation during an earlier period of Chinese aggressive expansionism, and has slowly congealed into something of a real union over the course of a century: the Burmese still are rather trying at times, admittedly, and everyone else thinks the Vietnamese are full of themselves.

The Malay world is very corporate and only very slightly Muslim nowadays (except for those loonies in Aceh), while Japan, after the May Riots of 2123 made the government decide that importing more foreign laborers and treating them like shit wasn’t going to be the solution to the population problem, has gone off in biotech and cybertech directions the rest of the world is a little appalled by.

Many small island nations are now submerged, and those that survive are usually dependent on one or another of the major Powers.

Australia’s weird society, with its coastal megacities and Mad Maxish interior, is distasteful to most outsiders, but that doesn’t prevent them from putting on their three-d goggles and watching the Blood Games when they are broadcast.

Aside from International Antarctica, now the independent Science Republic of Shackleton, thawing Antarctica is a place of exiles and weirdoes, the Boers leaving a South Africa which insists on their cultural assimilation, Kansans (many of them actually from other parts of the old US Midwest and south) a nation where white fundamentalist Christian non-eco-friendly farmers are distinctly not in charge, and the Anarchists a world which has never seemed to be ready for them. Border disputes with the other three states are common, the Anarchists of course not recognizing borders.

The planets having been sort of a bust as places to live, sea floor colonization, on the more accessible continental shelves and shallows became a major international project in the 21st century, with the old US leading the way, and later followed by Europeans, Asians, Brazilians, and Africans. Most of these were centered on one major undersea settlement from which the colony got its name, but by this point some are fairly polycentric. The independent New Atlanteans have big plans for expansion, and some of them are planning to go entirely aquatic: they’ve been working with the Icelanders to develop gills for human beings.

The Moon is also colonized, divided up in the second half of the 22nd century between the American Republic, "Hong Kong" China, and India, to the considerable resentment of lesser space powers. (There had been some earlier settlement in the 21st century, but the colonies had proven incapable of supporting themselves when financing from earth had been rather curtailed as a result of WWIV). There is currently an effort to make the new frontier of Mars a more inclusive affair, but some of the big nations hunger for big ‘ol tracts of land, and don’t really care what, say, the Saharan Empire wants.

This is causing international tensions, and frankly, more tensions are not needed. The Argentines want to bring the Andes into their sphere of influence, the Union of Biospheres is bitterly hostile to “toxic nations” such as Alaska and the Khanate, India and China are competing for influence and wagging the national privates at eachother all over the place, The Imperium of Italy-Balkania and the Kurdish Caliphate both think they have a Mission, several powers are waiting eagerly for Y-1000 to become obsolescent, anarchist groups are popping up everywhere, and who knows what those weirdoes in west Siberia or those crazy Thor-worshipping Scandinavians are up to? And then there is the Great Debate on planetary climate engineering: it’s now technologically feasible to really cool things off, but that would hurt many high-latitude nations, and in any event who will control technology that might easily be manipulated to screw over competitors? The Chinese and the American Republic, which stand to lose quite a bit more land if sea levels rise further, have been talking of Going It Alone no matter who complains. Some feel a touch of frost in the sweltering global summer and fear WWV may be coming…

[1] Sorry, I have “Fallout” currently on my mind
[2] Some are calling for a renumbering
[3] Named after a rather romanticized extinct Native American civilization

Description
A commission for Venusian Si over at ah.com

The world of Risk 2210! This world initially diverges from ours in WWII, with the US holding into Greenland and Communism in China being confined to the Manchuria era, and continued to go off in other directions as the Soviet Union failed to collapse as OTL.

WWIII was a bit of a damp squib (a mere 40 million dead and largely a return to the status quo ante), but WWIV in the 2070s, starting with the whole US First Strike attempt, was distinctly more impactive. [1,2] Combined with the rising sea levels and increasingly unreliable rainfall resulting from global climate change, the next century was a bit anarchic, and few state entities survived the era without some major political or geographic changes. Corporate states and new forms of socialism backed by computers actually capable of planning an economy arose, and a rash of revolutionary ecology broke out in the Americas. New religious movements sprouted as old faiths proved inadequate or downright absent.

In the year 2210, a new stability of sorts exists. It’s a hot, summer world, and quite a lot of ice has melted, although plenty more remains: sea levels are still far from stabilized. Some areas combining high humidity and high temperatures alike have become rather inhumanly muggy in summer: In coastal India and south Arabia and the lands of the old Deep South alike there are many days a year when people stay in their ubiquitously air-conditioned houses and only venture out wearing clothes with built-in cooling systems.

What used to be Canada, Alaska, Siberia, Greenland, Iceland and the Antarctic (not to mention a Argentine Patagonia) have become far more populous as people have migrated from the stifling heat and droughts of the middle parts of the globe, although in recent decades some of the more blasted and desolate parts of the globe have been repopulated as advances technologies of moisture condensation, industrial desalinization of sea water, synthetic and indoor skyscraper farm food production and cheap refrigerated clothing have made possible for humans to deal with parts of their planet as if colonizing a hostile alien planet. Fusion power is finally a thing, if still not “too cheap to meter”, and solar exists on a monumental scale, and recycling is universal thanks to dumb nanotech (smart nanotech is forbidden on Earth for very good reasons).

The US got off fairly lightly from WWIV, but its reputation and the loyalty of its peoples were badly impacted, and as climate change went from bad to worse stresses built up until final disintegration. The rather technocratic and fiercely rationalist American Republic has turned its back on many US traditions, but not as much as the Continental Union of Biospheres, where the “screw the spotted owl” tradition of the western interior was ended by decades of drought and ecological catastrophe and its place taken by Earth stewardship as a religion. A similar north-south split in Brazil was eventually healed, but the division of the old US has only grown wider. (Alaska has gone quite its own way). Mexico has finally found its own Place in the Sun, while the Andes remains relatively fragmented politically and may yet be divided between Argentine, Brazilian and “Timoto” [3] blocks. Brazil never quite made it as a superpower, but is still a relatively major player: Argentina, on the other hand, is a technologically cutting edge state which has big hopes for the 21st century, but a long history of failed futures has left them insecure and given to almost Wilhelmite bluster.

Even today there are only a few million Icelanders, but the nation is essentially one big biotech research company in which everyone is shareholders, biotech taking the place banking and fishing had in earlier economies: the nation is in love with the idea of transhumanism, and everyone has at least a few (some rather ill-advised) genetic tweaks. They make other people nervous, and the fact that Iceland is surrounded by so many miles of germ-quarantining sea is one reason why they are tolerated at all.

France has once again been a leader in political styles, and is the leading Leftist (in the 22nd century fashion) nation, and of course is convinced the west Australians, the Red Khans, the East Africans, the west Siberian weirdoes and the rest are all doing it wrong. Relatively liberal and capitalist (in the 22nd century fashion) Warsaw dominates north central Europe after finally getting in an oh-so-satisfying win over the Germans, while Italy and the Balkans and the Scandinavian peninsula have gone in very odd directions. From the ruins of neo-liberalism, and neo-fascism, and neo-socialism, the British have actually succeeded in creating a Green and Pleasant, if weirdly nouveau feudal land: they’ve even managed to draw back in the Irish from the grim squalor of their Deep Green phase (it’s hard to maintain a decent lifestyle and be deep Green if you try to be self-sufficient on the scale of the Irish republic).

Africa took quite a while to get its shit together, the promising early 21st century running hard into environmental change and the disaster of WWIV. East Africa, luckier in rainfall patterns than elsewhere, remained semi-stable and eventual the old Anglospheric East African Union expanded into a leftist union of much of eastern Africa. Things were fairly disastrous in the Sahel, and variable in the coastal forest states: not until the second half of the 22nd century did a serious regional power block begin to emerge, and the area is still only a fairly loose alliance, if economically unified. South Africa’s Traditionalists have recreated African traditional monarchy for the 22nd century, which does not include any Boers, the last of which moved southwards a lifetime ago.

Zaire, which dodged the Mobotu bullet, actually reached for greatness in this world and unified much of central Africa in the late 21st century, only to overextend and collapse disastrously in the mid-22nd, leading to a cycle of wars that only ended some 30 years ago when the peacekeeper drone collective known as Y-1000 decided that its employers did not have the best interests of the locals at heart. In spite of efforts to upgrade, Y-1000 is falling behind technologically, and the locals fear the return of predatory foreign interests or local warfare if the various foreign info-warriors seeking to take it down succeed.

The Middle East is generally considered as a regional grouping, although the hegemonic power, the Kurdish Caliphate, doesn’t control even indirectly large parts of the area. Egypt (which dodged the atomic bullet in WWIV) is considered an African power, and is anyway a mostly secular, technocratic state nowadays. Iran remains fragmented, while central Asia has coalesced into a loose federation under the somewhat nominal leadership of the progressive Khans of Samarkand. (The Uzebek Hegemony of the immediate post-WWIV era failed to survive continued climate disruptions). Afghanistan no longer exists, although the Pathans remain disruptive.

Israel is also gone and likewise the Jews remain, although nowadays it’s mostly deeply Orthodox who marry among themselves and indoctrinate their children with every modern technique they can legal get away with. But Judaism was long closed off from the European world before: perhaps it will once again have a period of blooming.

Although it had a tough time when the Monsoons went all wibbly-wobbly, India survived and by 2210 is considered one of the three biggest powers on Earth, along with the American Republic and the south Chinese. Bangladesh is down to a few little chunks of land, but India is polite enough to pretend it still has an independent existence.

Fragmented Russia is fragmented. The largest chunk in the west is dominated by the Ukrainians, while the eastern bits are divided into four loosely allied small (if on the grow) states unable to agree on terms for reunification, and a super-Orwellian society whose population is known to exist mainly through satellite photos. There are occasional brief bursts of strange radio noise: it seems the language has been heavily modified from old-style Russian, perhaps as a means of making communication with the outside even harder.

The Red Khanate to the north of the Chinese state is less weird: although the worship of the Supreme One compares to that of the KIms OTL, the Khanate of the Scarlet Banner interacts with the outside world, and is a functional society in its own, weird, 1000-meter rusty metal arcology sort of way. The Khan’s justice is efficient, just, brutal, and fully automated.

South China is sometimes referred to as Hong Kong China or the Empire of Hong Kong, the hundred million inhabitants of the Great Hong Kong Metrozone dominating south China as Paris dominates OTL France. It is ruled by great corporate dynasties, which currently argue among themselves as to how best to widen the economic gap between China and the rest of the world: some three centuries after the establishment of the Republic (which has gone some odd political mutations over the years), China _still_ doesn’t dominate the world the way they think it should.

SE Asia united in a federation during an earlier period of Chinese aggressive expansionism, and has slowly congealed into something of a real union over the course of a century: the Burmese still are rather trying at times, admittedly, and everyone else thinks the Vietnamese are full of themselves.

The Malay world is very corporate and only very slightly Muslim nowadays (except for those loonies in Aceh), while Japan, after the May Riots of 2123 made the government decide that importing more foreign laborers and treating them like shit wasn’t going to be the solution to the population problem, has gone off in biotech and cybertech directions the rest of the world is a little appalled by.

Many small island nations are now submerged, and those that survive are usually dependent on one or another of the major Powers.

Australia’s weird society, with its coastal megacities and Mad Maxish interior, is distasteful to most outsiders, but that doesn’t prevent them from putting on their three-d goggles and watching the Blood Games when they are broadcast.

Aside from International Antarctica, now the independent Science Republic of Shackleton, thawing Antarctica is a place of exiles and weirdoes, the Boers leaving a South Africa which insists on their cultural assimilation, Kansans (many of them actually from other parts of the old US Midwest and south) a nation where white fundamentalist Christian non-eco-friendly farmers are distinctly not in charge, and the Anarchists a world which has never seemed to be ready for them. Border disputes with the other three states are common, the Anarchists of course not recognizing borders.

The planets having been sort of a bust as places to live, sea floor colonization, on the more accessible continental shelves and shallows became a major international project in the 21st century, with the old US leading the way, and later followed by Europeans, Asians, Brazilians, and Africans. Most of these were centered on one major undersea settlement from which the colony got its name, but by this point some are fairly polycentric. The independent New Atlanteans have big plans for expansion, and some of them are planning to go entirely aquatic: they’ve been working with the Icelanders to develop gills for human beings.

The Moon is also colonized, divided up in the second half of the 22nd century between the American Republic, "Hong Kong" China, and India, to the considerable resentment of lesser space powers. (There had been some earlier settlement in the 21st century, but the colonies had proven incapable of supporting themselves when financing from earth had been rather curtailed as a result of WWIV). There is currently an effort to make the new frontier of Mars a more inclusive affair, but some of the big nations hunger for big ‘ol tracts of land, and don’t really care what, say, the Saharan Empire wants.

This is causing international tensions, and frankly, more tensions are not needed. The Argentines want to bring the Andes into their sphere of influence, the Union of Biospheres is bitterly hostile to “toxic nations” such as Alaska and the Khanate, India and China are competing for influence and wagging the national privates at eachother all over the place, The Imperium of Italy-Balkania and the Kurdish Caliphate both think they have a Mission, several powers are waiting eagerly for Y-1000 to become obsolescent, anarchist groups are popping up everywhere, and who knows what those weirdoes in west Siberia or those crazy Thor-worshipping Scandinavians are up to? And then there is the Great Debate on planetary climate engineering: it’s now technologically feasible to really cool things off, but that would hurt many high-latitude nations, and in any event who will control technology that might easily be manipulated to screw over competitors? The Chinese and the American Republic, which stand to lose quite a bit more land if sea levels rise further, have been talking of Going It Alone no matter who complains. Some feel a touch of frost in the sweltering global summer and fear WWV may be coming…

[1] Sorry, I have “Fallout” currently on my mind
[2] Some are calling for a renumbering
[3] Named after a rather romanticized extinct Native American civilization