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.
