MotF 113: Tickled Punk!

Krall

Banned
Tickled Punk!


The Challenge
Make a map showing a "punkified" world, where the technology and culture of a specific era has survived and become exaggerated.

The Restrictions
There are no restrictions on when your PoD or map may be set. Fantasy, sci-fi, and future maps are allowed, but blatantly implausible (ASB) maps are not.

The rules on ASB are very relaxed for this round, as all entries should be implausible to some extent, but extremely nonsensical entries may still be disqualified.

You must "punkify" an era of real human history - taking the technology, cliches, fears, hopes, and prognostications of that time and exaggerating them - but your map does not have to be of the real world (so, for example, maps of clockpunk fantasy worlds are permitted).

If you're not sure whether your idea meets the criteria of this challenge, please feel free to PM me.

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The entry period for this round shall end when the voting thread is posted on Sunday the 29th of March.

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THIS THREAD IS FOR ENTRIES ONLY.

Any discussion must take place in the main thread. If you post anything other than a map entry (or a description accompanying a map entry) in this thread then you will be asked to delete the post. If you refuse to delete the post, post something that is clearly disruptive or malicious, or post spam then you may be disqualified from entering in this round of MotF and you may be reported to the board's moderators.

Remember to vote on the previous round of MotF!
 
Blitzpunk!

In this world, the Luftwaffe continued a more competent strategy of bombing Britain's airfields, and only after crippling Britain's air defences did she attack her cities, ports and industrial centres. This brought Britain to the brink of surrender, but not over the edge. With Britain effectively out for the count, Hitler was able to turn his full attention to vanquishing the Soviet Union. In 1948, a cabal of Soviet generals overthrew Stalin and surrendered to Germany, ceding everything west of the Urals, and becoming an Axis state with a Hohenzollern on the throne of a new Tsardom.

If Britain hoped America would enter the war, that was forlorn. America didn't block petroleum exports to Japan, and under President Charles Lindbergh peacefully agreed on their respective sphere of influence in the Pacific in the early 40s. Lindbergh called on Britain to surrender, and there were murmurs of doing so.

That was quelled by the invention of the Wilkins Apparatus. Based on RADAR technology, it was a radio wave death ray. With his war aims essentially complete, Hitler turned to lance the 'ulcer of Europe' as he had taken to calling Britain, all fondness the country gone. A massive bomber fleet was sent to turn London into ash. The use of the Wilkins Apparatus crippled the Luftwaffe and gave Britain the breathing space to turn itself into a fortress. London was turned into rubble however, and the city has been virtually abandoned, the capital now in the concrete megalopolis of Coventry.

For the fifty years, Britain has stayed behind her natural defences of the sea, but continues to fight the war against Nazism. Her SOE agents, flown into Europe in RADAR-invisible stealth aircraft, supply and train resistance movements across the Continent. She has a vast network of spies, feeding misinformation into the Germanic war machine, and giving her a lifeline to Germany's rivals America and Japan, who will pay through the nose for good intel. The Germans don't take this lying down of course. Since '48, she has attacked Britain's south with rockets, turning it into the Militarised Zone, that deters any German invasion. Not for want of trying, what with various landings, infiltrations or outright attacks since the 50s. Northern Ireland and Shetland have been annexed by German allies, and the Channel Islands have become part of the German Reich. Life remains austere, and while Britain is completely capable of feeding herself, the food is quite bland and stodgy, and fashions seem to have been frozen in the 40s. Society is militaristic and politics is authoritarian and hardly that divergent from fascism, except for the liberal values that Britain holds dear. Much is made of the fact that while German women are expected to stay in the home, have babies and be god-fearing, British women work in the fields and the factories and march in lockstep beside their men-folk.

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20 years into the future…

THEN CONQUER WE MUST, IF OUR CAUSE IT IS JUST

Exhausted. Helpless. Hopeless. The optimism at the turn of the new millennium faded as it became clear that the 21st century would be our last. The Doomsday Clock is at 23:59 as the world undergoes a slow motion apocalypse.

Where do we begin?

Most would say it all started when the USA took the idea of a “New American Century” a bit too seriously. The USA currently has 51% of the world’s wealth and spends more on its military than every other country put together. Doubled. Afghanistan and Iraq were followed by many more campaigns to bring freedom and democracy around the world. The war with Iran was instigated in 2006, a nightmarish slog against a massive, mountainous, industrial economy. Not long after came Cuba, Syria and North Korea. Of course, this all came at a tremendous cost – 5 million lives and 8 trillion dollars.

But who’s complaining? The war effort necessitated unprecedented political centralisation and propaganda campaigns. I’m talking rigged elections, state governors being assassinated, no presidential term limits, and protestors, bloggers and draft dodgers being jailed indefinitely for treason. The CIA and FBI directly dick around in media organisations and any dissenting staff or whistleblowers quietly disappear. If that doesn’t frighten them, threatening their families usually does. The latest Pew survey shows that over 70% of Americans still believe the Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. As for other countries, France considered leaving NATO until the Eiffel Tower was pulverised.

Others would say the process was already in motion with the institutional inertia of fossil fuels. Runaway climate change exploded in 2012 (literally) when methane deposits erupted. Much of the world has been desertified or flooded, 90% of species are now extinct and people are nostalgic for the times when they didn’t have to wear face masks outside. These stresses have caused the area from the Sahel to Central Asia to succumb to the “Cradle Crisis”, an orgy of radical Islamist terrorism, nuclear proliferation, slavery and ethnic violence. For example, Wikipedia has just changed its article on “Palestinian people” to use the past tense.

If you think that corrupt, militaristic states are to blame, you may be glad to know that in the Cradle Crisis, the borders and governments only exist on maps and in the deluded minds of the United Nations. The real situation is about as mappable or describable as the Syrian Civil War crossed with the Holy Roman Empire. The main problem of the surrounding area is to contain the Cradle Crisis and its refugees. Reactionism to the influx of Middle Eastern migrants to Europe has led to far right Bushist-Cheneyist-Blairist ideologues entering the mainstream, abandonment of neutrality and expansion of NATO.

Not that the oil companies care. Once a supplier falls to shit and oil reaches $200 a barrel that’s only a wake up call to invade another country and leech it dry before moving on to the next. Well, that used to work until it suddenly became clear that there was no oil left to safely extract. Now on the other side of peak oil, and with no investment in alternatives, the world is in the midst of a second Great Depression. Unemployment ranges from 30-95% and Western Europe is on the level of OTL southern Italy (including crime rates). After the fall of India and Turkey, fears of the Cradle Zone expanding to Europe were realised when Spain collapsed into civil war and the European Union dissolved.

Has anything good happened? The exponential rise and spread of digital technology is truly a marvel. Nearly every person on the planet has a cellphone and can record videos of government abuses, organise protests through MySpace, run online petitions and spread their views on their Angelfire site. Even more impressive, it’s all monitored in real time by a single AI and suspicious activity is relayed to local agents. Entertainment technology is also remarkable as millions use their iPods to beam the latest episode of The OC (courtesy of LimeWire) directly into their brain. Either that or replaying the best memories from their lives, though many are wary after reports of users being unwilling to stop and subsequently dying of thirst. At least the children are safe from this moral panic as they have no good memories worth replaying.

“Multipolar future? Not on my watch!” MAD has been replaced by SAD, Singularly Assured Destruction. The space system Ragnarok (nicknamed “Chuck Norris”) was developed based on the 10/10/10 specification – “Within 10 minutes of the command, there should be 10 megaton blasts, in any 10 simultaneous locations (we’ve long since improved on this baseline of course). The enemy should not be able to mitigate the attack. The enemy should not be able to launch their own space weaponry. Here’s some Apollo/Manhattan level resources – Go!”

Ragnarok’s railguns and lasers are also used to instantly eliminate any other countries’ missile or space launches, forming a perfect blanket of security. At one point the rationale was about protecting the planet from North Korean missiles and asteroids, now it’s just “what are you going to do about it?” especially when Jakarta and Beijing complain about tests in the oceans near their cities. Turns out when you can hold entire countries hostage, SAD is too effective. The world economy and order really should have collapsed a long time ago if not for the fact that it is being held together by sheer force (think of the pseudo-stability of OTL North Korea).

Forget about identifying the “sick man of Europe” or “sick man of Asia”, the entire world is sick and dying, and we’re all just waiting for someone put it out its misery. Luckily we will get that as a Christmas present in the form of a nuclear terrorist attack on London, auto-triggering Ragnarok :)


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One continent, under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
The cold war has been getting hotter. . . That is, warmer due to the climate change occurring over the past two hundred years. Other than that, not much has changed. Just a few revolutions in South America, some coups in Africa and some questionable disappearances of large ethnic groups in Eurasia.

America, which has grown to encompass Canada, Greenland and Iceland, continues to stare down the Soviet Union across the Arctic Ocean and Florida Strait. Slightly frustrated at still being 2 million square kilometres smaller than the Soviet Union

The governments of many of the Hispanic Countries underwent some updates by the Soviet Union and attempted to align themselves with the communist bloc. While it may have gone okay in South America, poor Mexico got hammered by the United States and thrown into several pieces.

Some places in the United States have begun to test flying cars, however they’re more of a novelty for the rich due to being very loud and wasteful in fuel. To care for their aging population, Japan has begun to roll out some suspicious robots.

Just above the struggle for control of Earth’s land lies an even bigger struggle. Space has largely escaped being weaponized, as the majority of weapons in space are the AK-47’s carried by the Cosmonauts. Although Humanity was slightly disappointed in not finding sexy Martian women or wombats on Titan, nevertheless they trudged on and continued to explore the Solar System with the rockets they dreamed of.

As far as settlements go, the United States has constructed a rotating torus in orbit of the Earth with the collaboration of the United Kingdom and Japan. The Soviet union also has constructed a rather large space station, however this one does not have gravity. Nearby on the moon, the United States maintains a base approximately 840 kilometres from the Soviet Union’s base.

Larger version: http://i.cubeupload.com/0Whcot.png

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Grungepunkd 2021.

Yeah. This is a world that has been Grungepunkd, set 30 years to the day after the release of Pearl Jam's "Ten" album. It supposedly has the "technology, cliches, fears, hopes, and prognostications" of the 90s. Whatever.

Anyway, this is Grungepunk. So there's no fancy GIS and Inkscape used here and there's a lot of pixelization. Also, it doesn't use the one-pixel border rule that "people" say people should use. The lines are thick because I like them that way. Third, it doesn't use any "politically correct" color scheme. The colors are dark and full of angst. Like my soul.

Last, it doesn't even use proper latitude and longitude. I moved Australia about 15 degrees east of where it should be just to fit my title in. Subvert the dominant mapmaking paradigm, dude.

So deal with it. Or not. I don't care. In the end, it doesn't matter anyway. I'll be over here drinking coffee and listening to Stone Temple Pilots.

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Last minute entry. I normally don't do worldas for MotF, but with the amount of time I have, I'm surprised I even got this much done. This is a 1960s-punk future, inspired a little by B_Munro's Sixties Future. Since I'm already quite sleepy, I'll keep the description spartan:

Jetpunk

  • The PoD is Oswald being a worse shot, and missing Kennedy. Kennedy then commits far more to Vietnam, which extends the war throughout the rest of his presidency. He is remembered as the man who started the next Hundred Years' War.
  • The counterculture gets nasty. The civil rights movement becomes a full-on race war in the South when leaders on both sides are assassinated (MLK and George Wallace are assassinated within a week of one another). By the 1980s, tensions are so bad that all-out civil war breaks out. In an attempt to jettison the most chaotic bits of the country, the federal government allows California and "New Afrika" to go their own way.
  • The protests of 1968 become violent, and governments are overthrown in both the East and the West. While the Western governments retreat to Britain and Spain, the Soviets just send in the tanks and Moscow gets a few more SSRs. They get even more when the Chinese decide to attack in the 1980s, which ends in the People's Republic of China being transformed into the Worker's Republic of China, losing a few provinces and a hundred million people in the process. Europe's anarchist communes begin their decades-long war against one another.
  • Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism manage to succeed, and serve as a primary counter to the Western powers in Africa and the Middle East. The Indians get hit with a communist revolution. The Soviets capitalize on this, and support these movements.
  • The early 21st century is the era of greater federalization. As the African and Arab federations mature, other blocs start jumping on that bandwagon. The United States annexes Canada, and then its closest East Asian allies, to form closer ties with these states and to stand as a bulwark against communism. The Amerasians encourage the federalization of what remains of NATO. The Union of European Communes stabilizes under a strange pseudo-pagan socialist cult.
  • By the mid-21st century, just about everyone is a nasty dictatorship of one stripe or another. Amerasia is dominated by conservative forces which vow never to allow the Union to be jeopardized from within or without, and ruthlessly use the FBI to root out political dissidents while the Department of Culture ensures that everyone in the Union is a good, patriotic Amerasian. The Soviet Union has become a pseudo-fascist Slavic nationalist state, which is busy suppressing the peoples of Europe and Asia by playing musical chairs with national homelands and taking children from their homes to be Russified. That being said, inequality is bad and society has been in a state of disrepair for decades, with many city sectors closed off because they are just too full of crime. Radical political movements and cults love to recruit from the destitute, and are powerful and pervasive enough to constantly cause trouble without getting stamped out by "The Man."
  • Tech is amazing. There are already cities on the Moon, with self-sustaining bases on Mars. Space travel is widely available, with middle-class families easily affording annual trips to the Moon. Fusion power was unlocked in the 1980s, and so clean energy has been available for everyone and stopped a lot of atmospheric pollution in its tracks. Nukes have gone out of style, with defensive and offensive satellites replacing ICBMs. Energy shielding, phasers and photon torpedoes are standard for all military units, and just about everything that had wheels or tracks hovers now; drunk driving is a major problem with flying cars. Robots are widespread, from military bases to houses, although women in both East and West are still expected to stay in the kitchen; to be fair, nobody's figured out artificial intelligence, so robots need constant supervision. Most urban areas are starting to build "starscrapers," habitats propped up on antigravity-maintained spires, for the ultra-wealthy. Nobody wants to even see the chaos on the streets.

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A rather simple map made as a last-second entry, because, why not.

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netpointer:bellwest1.253.555.0103 password: ********
access:WORLD NEWS (TEXT)
access granted

IN THE NEWS, March 29, 2015 (Pacific Time Zone)

21:53 SAN FRANCISCO. An illegal supercomputer has been seized by police
forces. According to the SFPD, the computer was used by local gangs to
optimize drug distribution. So far, more than 200 megabytes of RAM have
been removed from the warehouse on the north waterfront.

21:59 DAKAR. Following reports of violence in Guinea, French and American
special forces- including a number of Augments- were inserted via
helicopter into Conakry, where they secured a route to the airport to
evacuate several embassies.

Long days at the office got you down? Try commuting on the
INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY- with Virtual Reality!


22:14 WASHINGTON. It was revealed today in an announcement by Vice
President Bolton that NATO command has assumed responsibility for the
former UN missions in Somalia, Iraq, and the South China Sea. This brings
the total number of former UN missions under NATO control up to eleven.

22:15 LONDON. Prime Minister Mandelson announced the military of the
United Kingdom would be deployed to Saudi Arabia and Turkey to support
the no-fly zones over Iran. This announcement comes mere hours after it
was confirmed Iranian F-14s downed two Soviet fighters near Tehran.

Get news updates, relay chat, and access to your American networks at
twice the speed! Upgrade to Bell West HyperNet today!


22:19 LONDON. The European Community projects unemployment to
increase as much as 3% over the next five years in Italy and Spain unless
immediate measures are taken to incentivize job creation.

22:31 TOKYO. A man was found deceased in his apartment, connected to
several virtual reality devices, making the fifth case in Tokyo this week.
Authorities blame the deaths on the slow speeds along the Tokyo-Osaka
connections during construction of the new high-volume data links.

Want the security of a retirement fund without the risk of the standard
772(a)? Contact the American Association of Credit Unions and ask about
our retirement accounts.


22:35 LONDON. A series of bomb blasts today in Belfast that killed nine and
wounded more than forty has been traced to a faction of the IRA.
Residents of Belfast are reminded to obey curfews and present papers
immediately upon questioning by military or police officials.
 
POD:Alternate Reconstruction leads to both increase in wealth for African Americans then a severe backlash.

There are riches in the uncivilized world, in the remote corners of the planet, dark places where man ekes out a living from hostile environment. Those willing to exploit-err, procure these riches will be rich beyond the imagination of the wealthiest man. Cities of gold, exotic beasts and peoples, dangerous terrain beckon for the disenfranchised: American Negros, Russian bourgeoisie, Irishmen, Chinese peasants pining for a place to seek their dreams.

From the Depths of Colorado gorges to the heights of Congolese mountains, these men (and women) risk life and limb. The Natives certainly aren't letting this go down without a fight. Sefu Tip, Howard Baskerville, Thasunke Witko, and the Yanomamo are just some of the non-state actors working against the creeping imperialism. Japanese and American Societies fund anti-colonial movements across the world, hoping to aide those societies falling to European intervention (for a price of course).

In this dark world, there is only profit; War to the tune of laughing tycoons...

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