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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?

Revolutions promise many things: life, liberty, justice, equality, prosperity, even happiness. Yet one of the most depressing aspects of history is how often revolutionaries have ended up being even more murderously tyrannical than the oppressive regimes they overthrew. Rivers of ink have been spilled arguing over how this can be. Why have the people who seemed to be the hopeful idealists of the world so often become its ogres?

This morning I read an article in The Conversation with the provocative, if rather long, title “Would you stand up to an oppressive regime or would you conform? Here’s the science.” I’d encourage you to read the article yourself, but I’ll try to summarize it here.

Basically, the author (Nick Chater) says that oppressive regimes stay in power by relying on our natural inclination to obey social norms, even when those norms are arbitrary or inconvenient. Since obedience to authority is a social norm, most people will obey the authority. Those who rebel must reject important social norms to do so, and those who lead rebellions must be able to convince others to follow them. In conclusion, “a tendency to adopt non-standard norms [is] linked to verbal ability and perhaps general intelligence in individuals who actually rebel.”

It occurred to me that we have a term for people like that: high-functioning sociopath.

And suddenly I understood why so many “freedom fighters” have turned out to be monsters. After thinking about it a little more, I realized why some revolutions have been disastrous bloodbaths and others haven’t.

George Washington was almost unique among his contemporaries for not declaring himself emperor, or at the very least president-for-life. (cf. Napoleon in France, Dessalines in Haiti, Bolivar in Gran Colombia, Iturbide in Mexico, and Dom Pedro in Brazil.) Another revolutionary who stands out for his basic lack of dickishness is Nelson Mandela who, despite spending most of his career as a literal Communist, when he won power was content to be bound by democratic norms. The same cannot be said of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, or Pol Pot, or even of many non-communist revolutionaries like Gaddafi, Mugabe, and Arafat.

The monarchies of France, Spain, Russia, China, etc., were thoroughly authoritarian regimes which did not permit dissent of any kind. Neurotypical people conformed. Only the sociopaths rebelled, and they spread death and destruction wherever they marched.

The Thirteen Colonies and Apartheid South Africa, on the other hand, were quasi-democratic regimes with at least a strong tradition of free thought. In these societies, dissent was socially acceptable, so neurotypical people were much more likely to adopt dissenting views and lead rebellions without falling prey to sociopaths.

On the bright side, this shows that we needn’t instinctively fear politicians like Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders who speak of revolution. We live in a society that fetishizes dissent to a degree unparalleled in all human history. One only has to look at the many “punk” genres to see the irony that rebellion itself has become a social norm which everyone strives to conform to. The leaders of a modern revolution in America or any Western nation would most likely be true idealists, and not sociopaths who’d murder anyone standing in their way.

So while I’m busily working away on the expanded edition, I thought I’d give you guys a sneak peak. Here’s a chart I drew of the Saturnian System, showing the colonial holdings of Australia and Sahara as well as each moon’s capital city or main settlement.

After reading the reviews I’ve received, I’ve concluded that Servants of Man in it’s current form is not the best work I’m capable of writing. It was originally intended as part of a longer work, and it was a mistake to try to make it stand on it’s own. Therefore, instead of publishing a sequel called War in Heaven, as I previously announced, I will publish an expanded edition of Servants of Man which will include the events of War in Heaven. I’ve prepared a draft of this expanded edition, and I find it has a much more natural story arc with a more satisfying ending, as well as giving the reader more time to get to know Tiffany, Marisol, and their world.

I thank you all for your support, and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to put my best foot forward on my first try. I will be unpublishing the original novella soon, and hope to have the expanded edition available in August.

Some of you might wonder why Australia and the Sahara play such a large role in Servants of Man.

Edit: I forgot one other important factor when I made the video: The story has space elevators. Once space elevators are invented, they will be vastly cheaper than any other launch system. And they can only be built on the equator. Countries that don’t have access to the equator will be shut out of the space economy, so all the future colonial powers will be in the tropics. Places like Europe, Japan, and North America that have good wind resources to power an automated economy will still be at a disadvantage because they will be planet-bound, the equivalent of being landlocked back in the age of sail.

Here’s my first vlog post. It’s about my experiences dealing with the effects of my own male privillege in my writing.

I intended to put a link to my website in the video, but it turns out Facebook doesn’t allow that anymore, so now it just looks like I’m pointing at my crotch for no reason 😛

But you’re already on my website, so it doesn’t matter.

The Happy Antipodean wrote a review of Servants of Man! This is a big deal for me, since this is my first review. I’m also happy to see that it’s quite positive.