Month: January 2020

Here’s another map I’ve drawn for book two, Children of Man (coming in April and available for pre-order here!) This is a map of the Kingdom of Sahara and surrounding regions. While the story of Children of Man takes place entirely on Enceladus (see previous post), there are numerous references to events in Africa.

In the future world of the Age of Androids books, power is dictated by geography. Technology has advanced to the point where space elevators are practical, and they have automatically become the only economical way of reaching orbit. Since they can only be built on the equator, countries near the equator have an enormous economic and geopolitical advantage. On the map you can see that Sahara has an elevator at Libreville on the Gulf of Guinea, while Congo has one further inland at Boyoma. The Nile Federation, on the other hand, has no access to the equator. It’s the astronautical equivalent of landlocked.

The second geographical factor in global power is electricity generation. The world ran out of both fossil fuels and uranium centuries ago, so the main sources of electricity are solar and wind. Wind farms are most effective in high lattitudes, and while this is great for the Church Lands and the Kingdom of the Atlantic Isles, high-latitude countries have no cheap access to space and thus can never become great powers. Neither can most locations on the equator become great powers. Congo, for example, while sitting smack on top of the equator and having its own elevator, is a land of gentle breezes and continual rainstorms, not good for wind or solar generation. Instead, the great powers have arisen in the deserts on either side of the equator. The vast solar farms of the Sahara, Kalahari, Great Sandy, and Nazca deserts provided the base for powerful kingdoms to expand into the equatorial regions. A few small equatorial states like Somalia, Madagascar, and Sri Lanka did manage to build off-world empires, but their power has waned in the face of relentless expansion by the kingdoms of Australia, Sahara, and South America.

Here’s a map I’ve prepared for Children of Man (now available for pre-order!). It shows the Saharan settlements on Saturn’s moon Enceladus in the year 3174, twenty-six years after the events in Servants of Man. As you can see, the capital is New Gambia, named after the royal gardens along the Gambia river south of Dakar. Aside from its administrative functions, it serves mainly as a transshipment port for the moon’s space elevator.

Enceladus’ true wealth lies in the lowlands around the south pole. There, geysers gushing from faults in the long, parallel rift valleys bring up salts and hydrocarbons from the subterranean ocean. Some of the spray escapes into orbit, but much of it falls back to the ground as a mineral-rich snow. Snow mining along the Damascus and Baghdad Rifts has turned Enceladus into one of the Kingdom of Sahara’s most important off-world colonies.

Readers will recognize some locations mentioned in Servants of Man. These include Ebony Ridge Observatory, located on the equator to keep an eye on the shipping orbits, and Fort Saladin, located on the Damascus Rift with easy access to fuel for its missiles.

I’m excited to present the next instalment in the saga! Children of Man is now available for pre-order on Amazon! I don’t want to give too much away, but I can’t wait to tell you about the trials Tiffany and Marisol must endure when they awake! There’s hope, there’s danger, and there’s a new world to be baptized in blood (or at least, in battery acid). Will their love be enough to hold them together?