- Joined
- Feb 1, 2015
The old 1950s sci-fi writer H. Beam Piper wrote a series of novels and short stories set in a far future where a 20th century WW3 between NATO and Warsaw Pact obliterates the Northern Hemisphere, so the human civilization that ends up establishing interstellar colonies and conquering the stars is descended from Portuguese and Spanish South America, Afrikaner South-Africa, and Australia, with a sprinkling of Northern Hemisphere refugees who relocated to the Southern Hemisphere shortly before and after WW3, bringing with them the best of their technology and knowledge.
However, since the novels were the products of a 1950s American writer, the characters still talk like 1950s Americans, complete with idioms and slang, even though in the stories they are supposed to be speaking a lingua franca based on a melding of Portuguese, Spanish, Afrikaans, and English. The characters smoke and drink like 1950s American, even building 1950s American customs like cocktail hour into their schedules, but the clever in-universe explanation is that 1950s America is considered by the far-future descendants of WW3 survivors as the heyday of a long dead Western civilization, the last era of peace and prosperity before the new dark age, to be emulated like the Founding Fathers emulated Classical Rome and Greece.
But Piper does make a good effort to give the setting a strong Southern Hemisphere feel. All the big industrial companies are Argentine or South African. The best universities on Earth are in South America. Pretty much all of the characters explicitly have a Southern Hemisphere background either Southern native or Northern refugees who have been in the South for generations and have a familiarity with Southern Hemisphere history and culture. The Northern Hemisphere is slowly being restored and resettled but lags behind the South.
In the steampunk novel "The Difference Engine", the Perfidious Angloids have kept America disunited by propping up the CSA in the still ongoing Civil War, and also running guns to other breakaway American states like an independent Texas. One of the breakaway states is a Manhattan Commune, which basically sounds like a longer-lasting version of the Paris Commune. Whereas the Paris Commune was formed in reaction to the Imperial French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the Manhattan Commune is formed in reaction to the US federal government's inability to defeat the CSA.
