My most recent world: Near future, confined within the solar system, and for most of its arc, with all people still on Earth. As concieved, it was to be a political thing, the objective being to bring up as many possible political conflicts, and to contrast the possible ways to respond to that conflict. I wanted to try to portray politicians that I could view as heroes, a concept I think sorely lacking today. The story I wanted to begin with was of a highly regionalized North America, with the parliament of BC facing the prospect of a war on Mars destroying their economy.


Its history would go something like:

With most government sponsered space flight and development dead in the water, businesses make their first manned forays into space, but it turns out that prolonged absence from the Earth's magnetic field results in the losties - a complete loss of direction and purpose in one's mental outlook, resistable, but very real, akin to chemical depression, followed by the loss of coordination, body synchornicity, ultimately leading to death. It is curable by a long recovery period within Earth's magnetic field, but is otherwise untreatable.

Those businesses try to adjust, ferrying workers back and forth from mining and research stations, but ultimately, this proves disastrous, as one's sensitivity to the losties is culmalitive. Even before the wave of deaths among space workers, though, most private enterprises in the fledgling were bankrupted trying to make space mining work.

Governments around the world, lambasted by citizens for whom the space industry has already captured imaginations, but unwilling to provoke the millions in grieving, begin research into semi-independent unmanned robots, nicknamed by a gimmicky newspaper as 'Seers'.

The SIURs, when launched, deployed, and set to work on the facilities that thousands gave their lives to build, spark a golden age in human wealth, fueled by both the sudden influx of resources from the moon and Mars, and the sudden need for genius to actually make this new economy work. Governments around the world continue to support the space industry, but now subsidize corporations and occasionally smaller companies to do the same. Soon, nations, provinces, and states of every stripe, drawn by high rewards and cheap access, has a holding in space, which is treated as the absolute jurisdiction of the owner, save for an unwritten code to not interfere with the claims of other holders.

With the profits pouring into the coffers of governments worldwide, the world is suddenly somewhat LESS interdependent. America still relies on imports from everywhere, but suddenly it, like every other country in space, has a wealth of industrial materials to work with. Individual states in the US suddenly don't rely on each other or the union as much any more, and accompanying that is a rise of regional sentiment around the world. Look after one's own, the meme says, and things will grow.

It is in this climate that my first story occurs, as the BC government finds its holdings on Mars invaded by (insert US state). The events of that, sadly, I haven't really been able to acertain. :/

Following that, my ideas get much less defined. I'd like to have humans eventually be able to escape the Earth's magnetic field in a meaningful way, but not for awhile. I'm thinking a magnetic field generator on a massive scale, simulating the Earth's magnetic field as closely as possible. Perhaps a generator that makes a field as big as Earth's in empty space, becoming the base of a planet sized cluster of stations.

The last thing I've thought of for this world, is the arrival of myriad alien races, divided into two warring empires. The gimmick for these aliens right now is that every one of them is to some degree psychic, where we are not psychic in any meaningful way. Instead, we have robots and automation, something psychics eschew in favour of dominated slave labour.

The question this raises, of course, is which is the better tool to have. I like to think it's robots, on the general principle that slavery is bad. Psychicness is damn cool, though, and anything done there should play that aspect up. These are beings with tremendous powers naked, and they put a lot of effort into augmenting themselves. They should be scary things, and while we might hold the advantage when they have no enemy minds to twist, they can mess humans up good if they get close enough. This last part, in my mind, would be the high adventure, where the beginning is the political intrigue.

I've got the first half or so of that beginning story written up, and I'll post it at some point. In the meantime, maybe people will read this.