Rinns Star

A "future past" inspired by a late-80's SF novel entitled "Rinn's Star."

It's the mid-22nd century (FTL starships as in the novel optional). The USSR is still around, although the economy is run by supercomputers rather than commissars now. Slow population growth in the late 20th and much of the 21st centuries have led to a relative decline in power, and it is still a major power principally through it's alliance with the rather radical South Africans, the only other important Communist (more or less: even the south Africans have a fair amount of "market socialism") power of importance.

(Yes, those internal borders are _meant_ to be largely arbitrary: new politial subdivisions were meant to break up existing nationalisms and loyalties).

New political movements have arisen: technocracy, which failed to take off in the 20th century, has had a revival after aplied science and technology, backed by powerful governments, got the world through the nastier bits of climate change. (The sea level has gone up, although it's not too noticeable on a map of this scale.)

Also, after the breakup of the Catholic church in the second half of the 21st century, a powerful "green-black" environmentalist-Christian movement arose in Brazil, which after devastating it's extraodinary ecological bounty in the first half of the 21st was groaning and moaning like a man with a bad hangover remembering all too well the night before. This spread to a number of countries, and although only in Brazil did it become a major political force, it served well as an excuse for Brazil and some friendly states to disengage themselves from the US-Mexican effort to create a more closely united economic union of the Americas.

(The United States of the Americas, as it eventually became, was forced to legnthen its name when the New Zealand-Australian alliance came on board in the 22nd century: it's mostly called the "United States" for short)

The EC is still the European Community, after a failure to agree on a new name after Turkey joined: it's generally accepted nowadays that being European is a state of mind, and the joining of the community by several Arab states between 2080 and 2120 has generally led to some talk about a restoration of the natural unity of the Mediterranean but not too much in the way of an identity crisis: the fact that more than a third of the EC's population is nowadays Muslim raises few eyebrows, given the slow secularization of the Mahgreb over the course of the 21st century.

Iran, which expanded westward [1] after the wacky Islamicist regime in Arabia (overthrew the House of Saud after the economic collapse of '47) tried to "liberate" Iraq. Along with India, they are the major examples of "techno-theocracy", states with official religions which have at the same times embraced science and technology as a means of spreading and indoctrinating the faith (quietly squashing the annoying voices of young-Earth creationists and other yahoos who don't realize that if the universe _demonstrably_ works one way, then that just must be the way Allah swings.)

One arguably positive point was that with the Iranians on the border, Israelis and Palestinians finally found a common enemy: the present joint Jewish-Islamic fundamentalist government is very odd indeed, but somehow functional.

Modern East Africa has its roots in the rather unwise decision by Ethiopia and Kenya to "restore order" to Somalia by partitioning the place. The whole thing worked rather badly over the medium run, although the EAF is doing alright nowadays.

Although China had some periods of democracy over the 21st century, what with the disruptions of two periods of major decline in international trade, global warming and rising sea levels, etc., the crumbling of the old Communist regime failed to bring stable democratic government, and in the end the Technocratic Party came to power, and has for several decades refused to share power with other political movements which can be demonstrated to have "irrational" bases.

China has reestablished its traditional dominance over its immediate neighbors, and managed to scare the Japanese into a mutual-protection alliance with the Phillipinos and Indonesians: thanks to failing to reproduce themselves through much of the 21st century, the Japanese are second fiddles in this alliance, which annoys nationalists (although not as much as the fact that non-idiot Japanese politicians finally managed to force through legislation allowing desperately needed immigrant labor in, after the arrival of the "second long slump" and Japan began to get alarmingly full of old people and not very competent robot nannies. Japan's big cities are now as polyglot as European ones, which the young find normal and the huge population of over-70 Japanese - Japanese average lifespan is now over 100 - an endless source of things to grumble over.)

India is currently a bit politically isolated, but they don't really care: India is currently even more populous than China, and has currently an economic growth rate only surpassed by the West Africans, who anyway still have some catching up to do, although things are vastly better than a century ago. "India as number 1" is selling quite well abroad...

[1] Since the world had moved into the "post-oil era" by then, nobody really cared to get involved: the "time of troubles" was in full swing, what with global climate change, new diseases, the Near War between China and the USSR, and increased Millenarian terrorism in the US.