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Description
A map inspired by Fritz Leiber’s “A Specter is Haunting Texas.”
It’s been a century since WWIII, and some stability has returned to battered old Terra. The world is now divided into six or seven major power groupings, and even in the interior of Africa foreign money and guns have converted petty warlords and areas knocked back to pre-industrial conditions to functioning states. After a very bad century, there seems some room for cautious optimism.

The post-war US was reunited from Texas, which expanded both north into the wreckage of the US proper, assimilating or conquering outright other re-emergent centers of government, and also southwards into chaotic post-war Mexico. It is nowadays one of the major powers, up there with the Caracas Alliance or the restored USSR or China, but internationally a bit isolated due to its unfortunate tendency to keep more than half of its population in a state of bondage, its only solid ally being the Republic of SW Africa, reformed in the Cape area after the English and Boer (and, to be fair, much of the Asian) populations were forced to make a hasty exit from the northeast. Texas used to be more involved in Africa (indeed, the Chad-equivalent essentially owes its existence to Texan oil companies), but mostly moved out after the easily accessible oil and minerals ran out, and only Katanga remains as a reminder of an era when Texas was a major presence in the chaotic post-war continent. Texas does have a sort of nudge-nudge wink-wink sort of alliance with China vs. the USSR, but it is kept mostly confidential due to matters of public opinion (both governments issue ritual abjurements of each other on a regular basis).

Due to a process of racial sorting (Blacks and Hispanics hurriedly leaving Texan territory, Whites moving to Texas or Cascadia or New England), two Black republics have emerged on the west and east coasts. (Black, but with large Hispanic minorities, and also some “honorary Blacks/Hispanics” of Anglo descent). The Pacific Black Republic (that’s Acificpay Ackblay Epublicray to you Ofays) and Greater Florida agree to disagree on matters of religion (the Pacific state follows an oddball version of Zen Buddhism, while the Floridians are mostly more conservative Baptists) but agree on loathing Texas and working to help out Africans wherever, and more generally oppressed minorities world-wide.

Cascadians, being of a somewhat liberal disposition, had no desire to join Texas, but due to lack of military wherewithal were forced to conclude an alliance with Soviet (then) Siberia, which had moved into Alaska, to survive. Alliance over the last century has gone through Finlandization to puppet status, but as Texas society has grown increasingly weird, baroque, and slavery-based, a lot of Cascadians don’t regret the outcome too much. To the NE, the relatively target-poor backwoods of New England managed to birth a local government, which by the time Texas came calling (delayed by the hellish wreckage of the Bowash area) had consolidated enough in alliance with a Quebec-based state to discourage Texas, which in any event had enough on its plate with Latin Americans and Soviets. Quebec suffers from an occasionally troublesome English separatist movement in the islands.

In spite of a lack of nukings (save a denial-of-resources attack on Venezuelan oil fields) South America suffered badly in the aftermath, what with a collapse of international trade wrecking the economy, lack of raw materials and trade prompting a temporary collapse back to turn-of-the-century tech, civil war, Red Revolution, etc. However, after a few decades, there was enough recovery and consolidation and modernization of military forces for the Latins to turn their eyes north to an expanding Texas, and after some nasty fighting the Texan March to the South was stopped a bit south of the current site of the Nicaraguan canal. As a result of the final suppression of local radical leftists, the former states of Bolivia and Peru have been replaced by some new political entities. Today the Caracas Pact Alliance is one of the world’s major powers, if still plagued by internal squabbles.

Argentina, which did better than many of the other South American states post-war, has managed to transit from military dictatorship to authoritarian democracy, and thanks to heavy immigration has grown greatly. Uninterested in military confrontation with Texas for the save of a bunch of Indians and Mestizos, Argentina instead looks across the ocean to Africa, where it has a close strategic alliance with another aggressive, striving state, the Zulu-dominated regime of Greater Azania, perhaps the strongest state on the African continent.

The most extensive political organization on the planet is the Tripartite Alliance, an alliance between three major political groupings which actually don’t like each other too much in the interest of preventing further Soviet expansion westward.

The European Federation, successor to the old EC, is led by the Swiss, which although losing ½ of their population to fallout and famine post-war managed to survive as a functioning state and with a largely undamaged infrastructure, were in a good position to start bringing some order to devastated Europe. The neutral Irish also didn’t do too badly, expanding into a depopulated Great Britain, although the thinly-populated English rump state which reemerged in northern England is a bit resentful about this (the Bretons have similar issues with the federation of French post-apocalypse states and their occupation of devastated northern France). Castile, after a long period of junta rule, has reunited and is another anchor-man of the new Europe. The Sicilian regime in south Italy and Sardinia (Corsica is independent) is run by the Capo di tutti Capi, and the north Italian statelets joined the Swiss Confederation rather than be absorbed – perhaps unreasonably, since pretty much everything short of shooting people in the face is legal in Sicily, as long as you don’t disrespect the Organization (it is not, admittedly, a nice place for people of a Feminist disposition). The Danes did better than other Scandinavians in the post-war famines (tasty, tasty cows) and have unified the somewhat depopulated Scandinavian peninsula under their control (Swedish and Norse are now minority languages).

To the east is the Orthodox Alliance, rather more authoritarian and conservative than the generally democratic Federation, but allied out of hostility to the Soviets. (Ukrainian-dominated Nova Russia used to extend almost to devastated Moscow before the Soviets moved west). The Greeks have occupied Constantinople: the quarreling Turkish successor regimes grouse about this, but it wasn’t like they had any use for the charred, radioactive ruins.

Not a member of the Federation or the Alliance is the Republic of MittelEuropa, which in spite of its name is a hereditary military dictatorship, founded by a Soviet general in Berlin (as a divided city, untargeted by either side, if still kinda smashed up in conventional fighting). The locals still have a residual fondness for their ruling house, which did manage to create a working state in one of the most ruined and depopulated regions of the post-war world, and merged the scattered German and Polish population into a new Russian-speaking (actually, a Russian-Polish-German goulash, although good Russian is still the language of the military) people. (The tiny Polish rump state to the SE does not like it at all). MittelEuropa is neutral, and a great place for smugglers, spies, people doing dirty deals, etc. Nobody likes them much, but it’s too useful a place to get rid of.

The third member of the Alliance is the Baghdad Pact, the leading Islamic power block: Iran, in spite of heavy fallout, managed to hold together, and the Kurds descended from their mountains to carve out a state of their own in the post-war chaos. Iran is a democracy nowadays, if a rather conservative one: Kurdistan, not so much, although at least they pretend to have elections. Iran is protector of the Hejazi state and the Holy Cities: the oil long since run out, the small squabbling emirates of Eastern Arabia are of little concern to anyone.

Africa is complicated, with all of the various powers competing for influence, and containing several states (the Niger confederation, the Zulus, the Agrarian Republic) which have become non-inconsiderable powers in their own right over the last few decades. Africa also contains a number of dirt-poor warlord states which exist on the sufferance of larger powers, and often serve as puppets of the same. The Agrarian Republic is actually fairly industrialized nowadays, and is the USSR’s main African ally: the Tanzanian government had before the war managed to create enough of a national identity that the country did not disintegrate into warlordism, although it regressed to an 18th century Malthusian agricultural economy for a while. The Ashanti Kingdom became a rallying point for unity after the collapse of Ghana, while an Ethiopian state survived in its old ethnic and religious core, to later expand south and west into the chaotic interior. (Abyssinia is more or less a theocracy, but a fairly tolerant one).

African federation is an idea that often comes up, and is discussed frequently in conferences, but doesn’t seem to get anywhere, due to rather serious disagreements between pro-Alliance, pro-Soviet, pro-Chinese, Islamicist and Black-America backed states on the format of such an agreement. The old revolutionary Polisario Front has managed to carve out a state well beyond the borders of the old Western Sahara. The Gabon is largely run by Argentine corporations, with mostly Zulu management providing a correctly skin-colored cover to what otherwise might be condemned as a return to colonialism. Egypt is divided between the north (Godless puppets of the Shi’a, says the south) and the south (half-Black Sudanese fanatics, says the north) and seems unlikely to reunify soon: Egypt has had a bad time of it since the Last Arab-Israeli war, when a majority of its population north of the Aswan dam ended floating out to sea.

The Israelis are reportedly still rather regretful about all that, but it’s hard to tell nowadays. The Hermit State of Israel, behind the lethal high-tech Security Curtain, does not allow anyone into the country who has not testified to Jewishness under heavy truth-drug interrogation, and does not allow many people to leave. It does trade extensively with the outside world, although all trade goes through the sealed-off offshore port of New Haifa. Rumors of Prodigious Breeding, immense underground cities and genetically enhanced Jewish supermen are attributed to the usual anti-Semitic nonsense.

India would be one of the leading powers, if not the leading power, if it were not for the fact that it broke up amidst famine and revolt after the war (the Pakistanis didn’t have too many bombs, and most Chinese bombs were for more important targets, but it was all quite bad enough) and reunion has so far been hampered by the non-democratic nature of the mutually hostile northern regimes.

SE Asia has been divided between the Soviet’s Vietnamese ally and the Chinese, who expanded southward to compensate for the loss of their depopulated and radioactive northern territories to the Soviets. The Chinese, who managed to reestablish a working regime in the Deep South and expand from there, were very annoyed when they met the Siberian Soviet expanding south, and only the fact both sides had few working atomic weapons at the time prevented another mass population loss. China remains economically an underperformer; international trade being very restricted in the post-war decades and international finance only coming back into existence in the last couple decades, China was forced to return to an autarchic path, and has had a much harder time of moving away from it than it did in our timeline after only 30 years of Soviet economics. Advanced technologies developed over the last century (genetically engineered foodstuffs, synthetics, etc.) have helped keep things from getting too unpleasant. Vietnam, which has a restive 35% of its population made up of Cambodians, Laotians, and Chinese refugees, gets along very poorly indeed with China.

The south Indians and the Australian-NZ-Hawaii-Papua-Pacific island Pacific Union form another power Block, which competes for influence in the fragmented remnants of Indonesia with China and the Soviets. Australia and NZ, only lightly nuked (a few US radar stations and such) survived OK, and have grown greatly through immigration, although things were a bit Mad Maxish for a while in Australia away from the SE: it was during this period that refugees from disintegrating Indonesia settled in North Australia and eventually managed to establish their own state. (Much grumbling was had at the time, although nowadays Union members consider them decent enough neighbors).

The Siberia-centered Soviet Union is nowadays more technocratic than socialist, although the propaganda drumbeat is kept up against the Texans, the Chinese, the Ukrainians, those Trotskyites in lunar orbit, etc. They have done some very odd things to adapt themselves to the cold conditions prevailing in much of their territory, although one might consider it no odder than some things that the Texans have done in their turn.

Japan, badly depopulated by fallout and famine, was unable to avoid being partitioned by the Soviets and the Chinese. The Japanese in Soviet Japan are only slightly outnumbered by immigrants, unlike those in Chinese Japan, but the suppression of their culture and national identity have been rather more thorough (the Chinese like having Japanese culture survive, as colorful folk traditions and costumes they can show to tourists and look down on), and then there’s the whole hair thing…

Description
A map inspired by Fritz Leiber’s “A Specter is Haunting Texas.”
It’s been a century since WWIII, and some stability has returned to battered old Terra. The world is now divided into six or seven major power groupings, and even in the interior of Africa foreign money and guns have converted petty warlords and areas knocked back to pre-industrial conditions to functioning states. After a very bad century, there seems some room for cautious optimism.

The post-war US was reunited from Texas, which expanded both north into the wreckage of the US proper, assimilating or conquering outright other re-emergent centers of government, and also southwards into chaotic post-war Mexico. It is nowadays one of the major powers, up there with the Caracas Alliance or the restored USSR or China, but internationally a bit isolated due to its unfortunate tendency to keep more than half of its population in a state of bondage, its only solid ally being the Republic of SW Africa, reformed in the Cape area after the English and Boer (and, to be fair, much of the Asian) populations were forced to make a hasty exit from the northeast. Texas used to be more involved in Africa (indeed, the Chad-equivalent essentially owes its existence to Texan oil companies), but mostly moved out after the easily accessible oil and minerals ran out, and only Katanga remains as a reminder of an era when Texas was a major presence in the chaotic post-war continent. Texas does have a sort of nudge-nudge wink-wink sort of alliance with China vs. the USSR, but it is kept mostly confidential due to matters of public opinion (both governments issue ritual abjurements of each other on a regular basis).

Due to a process of racial sorting (Blacks and Hispanics hurriedly leaving Texan territory, Whites moving to Texas or Cascadia or New England), two Black republics have emerged on the west and east coasts. (Black, but with large Hispanic minorities, and also some “honorary Blacks/Hispanics” of Anglo descent). The Pacific Black Republic (that’s Acificpay Ackblay Epublicray to you Ofays) and Greater Florida agree to disagree on matters of religion (the Pacific state follows an oddball version of Zen Buddhism, while the Floridians are mostly more conservative Baptists) but agree on loathing Texas and working to help out Africans wherever, and more generally oppressed minorities world-wide.

Cascadians, being of a somewhat liberal disposition, had no desire to join Texas, but due to lack of military wherewithal were forced to conclude an alliance with Soviet (then) Siberia, which had moved into Alaska, to survive. Alliance over the last century has gone through Finlandization to puppet status, but as Texas society has grown increasingly weird, baroque, and slavery-based, a lot of Cascadians don’t regret the outcome too much. To the NE, the relatively target-poor backwoods of New England managed to birth a local government, which by the time Texas came calling (delayed by the hellish wreckage of the Bowash area) had consolidated enough in alliance with a Quebec-based state to discourage Texas, which in any event had enough on its plate with Latin Americans and Soviets. Quebec suffers from an occasionally troublesome English separatist movement in the islands.

In spite of a lack of nukings (save a denial-of-resources attack on Venezuelan oil fields) South America suffered badly in the aftermath, what with a collapse of international trade wrecking the economy, lack of raw materials and trade prompting a temporary collapse back to turn-of-the-century tech, civil war, Red Revolution, etc. However, after a few decades, there was enough recovery and consolidation and modernization of military forces for the Latins to turn their eyes north to an expanding Texas, and after some nasty fighting the Texan March to the South was stopped a bit south of the current site of the Nicaraguan canal. As a result of the final suppression of local radical leftists, the former states of Bolivia and Peru have been replaced by some new political entities. Today the Caracas Pact Alliance is one of the world’s major powers, if still plagued by internal squabbles.

Argentina, which did better than many of the other South American states post-war, has managed to transit from military dictatorship to authoritarian democracy, and thanks to heavy immigration has grown greatly. Uninterested in military confrontation with Texas for the save of a bunch of Indians and Mestizos, Argentina instead looks across the ocean to Africa, where it has a close strategic alliance with another aggressive, striving state, the Zulu-dominated regime of Greater Azania, perhaps the strongest state on the African continent.

The most extensive political organization on the planet is the Tripartite Alliance, an alliance between three major political groupings which actually don’t like each other too much in the interest of preventing further Soviet expansion westward.

The European Federation, successor to the old EC, is led by the Swiss, which although losing ½ of their population to fallout and famine post-war managed to survive as a functioning state and with a largely undamaged infrastructure, were in a good position to start bringing some order to devastated Europe. The neutral Irish also didn’t do too badly, expanding into a depopulated Great Britain, although the thinly-populated English rump state which reemerged in northern England is a bit resentful about this (the Bretons have similar issues with the federation of French post-apocalypse states and their occupation of devastated northern France). Castile, after a long period of junta rule, has reunited and is another anchor-man of the new Europe. The Sicilian regime in south Italy and Sardinia (Corsica is independent) is run by the Capo di tutti Capi, and the north Italian statelets joined the Swiss Confederation rather than be absorbed – perhaps unreasonably, since pretty much everything short of shooting people in the face is legal in Sicily, as long as you don’t disrespect the Organization (it is not, admittedly, a nice place for people of a Feminist disposition). The Danes did better than other Scandinavians in the post-war famines (tasty, tasty cows) and have unified the somewhat depopulated Scandinavian peninsula under their control (Swedish and Norse are now minority languages).

To the east is the Orthodox Alliance, rather more authoritarian and conservative than the generally democratic Federation, but allied out of hostility to the Soviets. (Ukrainian-dominated Nova Russia used to extend almost to devastated Moscow before the Soviets moved west). The Greeks have occupied Constantinople: the quarreling Turkish successor regimes grouse about this, but it wasn’t like they had any use for the charred, radioactive ruins.

Not a member of the Federation or the Alliance is the Republic of MittelEuropa, which in spite of its name is a hereditary military dictatorship, founded by a Soviet general in Berlin (as a divided city, untargeted by either side, if still kinda smashed up in conventional fighting). The locals still have a residual fondness for their ruling house, which did manage to create a working state in one of the most ruined and depopulated regions of the post-war world, and merged the scattered German and Polish population into a new Russian-speaking (actually, a Russian-Polish-German goulash, although good Russian is still the language of the military) people. (The tiny Polish rump state to the SE does not like it at all). MittelEuropa is neutral, and a great place for smugglers, spies, people doing dirty deals, etc. Nobody likes them much, but it’s too useful a place to get rid of.

The third member of the Alliance is the Baghdad Pact, the leading Islamic power block: Iran, in spite of heavy fallout, managed to hold together, and the Kurds descended from their mountains to carve out a state of their own in the post-war chaos. Iran is a democracy nowadays, if a rather conservative one: Kurdistan, not so much, although at least they pretend to have elections. Iran is protector of the Hejazi state and the Holy Cities: the oil long since run out, the small squabbling emirates of Eastern Arabia are of little concern to anyone.

Africa is complicated, with all of the various powers competing for influence, and containing several states (the Niger confederation, the Zulus, the Agrarian Republic) which have become non-inconsiderable powers in their own right over the last few decades. Africa also contains a number of dirt-poor warlord states which exist on the sufferance of larger powers, and often serve as puppets of the same. The Agrarian Republic is actually fairly industrialized nowadays, and is the USSR’s main African ally: the Tanzanian government had before the war managed to create enough of a national identity that the country did not disintegrate into warlordism, although it regressed to an 18th century Malthusian agricultural economy for a while. The Ashanti Kingdom became a rallying point for unity after the collapse of Ghana, while an Ethiopian state survived in its old ethnic and religious core, to later expand south and west into the chaotic interior. (Abyssinia is more or less a theocracy, but a fairly tolerant one).

African federation is an idea that often comes up, and is discussed frequently in conferences, but doesn’t seem to get anywhere, due to rather serious disagreements between pro-Alliance, pro-Soviet, pro-Chinese, Islamicist and Black-America backed states on the format of such an agreement. The old revolutionary Polisario Front has managed to carve out a state well beyond the borders of the old Western Sahara. The Gabon is largely run by Argentine corporations, with mostly Zulu management providing a correctly skin-colored cover to what otherwise might be condemned as a return to colonialism. Egypt is divided between the north (Godless puppets of the Shi’a, says the south) and the south (half-Black Sudanese fanatics, says the north) and seems unlikely to reunify soon: Egypt has had a bad time of it since the Last Arab-Israeli war, when a majority of its population north of the Aswan dam ended floating out to sea.

The Israelis are reportedly still rather regretful about all that, but it’s hard to tell nowadays. The Hermit State of Israel, behind the lethal high-tech Security Curtain, does not allow anyone into the country who has not testified to Jewishness under heavy truth-drug interrogation, and does not allow many people to leave. It does trade extensively with the outside world, although all trade goes through the sealed-off offshore port of New Haifa. Rumors of Prodigious Breeding, immense underground cities and genetically enhanced Jewish supermen are attributed to the usual anti-Semitic nonsense.

India would be one of the leading powers, if not the leading power, if it were not for the fact that it broke up amidst famine and revolt after the war (the Pakistanis didn’t have too many bombs, and most Chinese bombs were for more important targets, but it was all quite bad enough) and reunion has so far been hampered by the non-democratic nature of the mutually hostile northern regimes.

SE Asia has been divided between the Soviet’s Vietnamese ally and the Chinese, who expanded southward to compensate for the loss of their depopulated and radioactive northern territories to the Soviets. The Chinese, who managed to reestablish a working regime in the Deep South and expand from there, were very annoyed when they met the Siberian Soviet expanding south, and only the fact both sides had few working atomic weapons at the time prevented another mass population loss. China remains economically an underperformer; international trade being very restricted in the post-war decades and international finance only coming back into existence in the last couple decades, China was forced to return to an autarchic path, and has had a much harder time of moving away from it than it did in our timeline after only 30 years of Soviet economics. Advanced technologies developed over the last century (genetically engineered foodstuffs, synthetics, etc.) have helped keep things from getting too unpleasant. Vietnam, which has a restive 35% of its population made up of Cambodians, Laotians, and Chinese refugees, gets along very poorly indeed with China.

The south Indians and the Australian-NZ-Hawaii-Papua-Pacific island Pacific Union form another power Block, which competes for influence in the fragmented remnants of Indonesia with China and the Soviets. Australia and NZ, only lightly nuked (a few US radar stations and such) survived OK, and have grown greatly through immigration, although things were a bit Mad Maxish for a while in Australia away from the SE: it was during this period that refugees from disintegrating Indonesia settled in North Australia and eventually managed to establish their own state. (Much grumbling was had at the time, although nowadays Union members consider them decent enough neighbors).

The Siberia-centered Soviet Union is nowadays more technocratic than socialist, although the propaganda drumbeat is kept up against the Texans, the Chinese, the Ukrainians, those Trotskyites in lunar orbit, etc. They have done some very odd things to adapt themselves to the cold conditions prevailing in much of their territory, although one might consider it no odder than some things that the Texans have done in their turn.

Japan, badly depopulated by fallout and famine, was unable to avoid being partitioned by the Soviets and the Chinese. The Japanese in Soviet Japan are only slightly outnumbered by immigrants, unlike those in Chinese Japan, but the suppression of their culture and national identity have been rather more thorough (the Chinese like having Japanese culture survive, as colorful folk traditions and costumes they can show to tourists and look down on), and then there’s the whole hair thing…