The Ruin of Earth (Part 3: Asia) [RETCONNED]

Much of Asia is dominated by the verdant grasslands of Green Siberia, which stretch from the shores of the chilly Sibir Sea up to the Urals and into Outer Mongolia, the dry steppe now displaced by the greenery brought about by the Soviet-built atomic canals, which now feed new river systems. But the cold, wet lands around Sibir is dominated by the Soviet Union's answer to the West Coast Remnant. The Special Administrative Zone of Sibir is technically the last remnant of the old RFSR, but lacks the same rigour of governance as the MFSR and other SSRs on Mars, or the same level of representation in the Politburo. Instead it is treated as part of the MFSR and like the West Coast Remnant remains largely self-governing with outside influence mostly existing as supplies and aid.

The rest of the vast steppe regions of Eurasia are dominated by the various clan based nomadic societies of humans and the tribal settlements of Brittlemen. Brittlemen lack the intelligence or creativity of human beings and tend to remain in small pastoral communities which lack sanitation or even an adequate food supply, only moving on if truly desperate. By contrast, scarcity of resources have turned most human societies into nomadic ones. The most successful of the post-Soviet states is the Khanate of Baikal, formed around a warlord who has united the Chinese, Mongolian, Russian and Turkic immigrant groups who came here in the years before the Third and Fourth World Wars.

To the east are the more unstable nomad bands who are squashed between the Baikalans and the areas annexed to the Free State of Alaska, which while nominally part of the West Coast Remnant and the United States, act very independently. The lands under Alaskan controls are lands of wooden forts, connected by trails, and is a land held together by the sort of hard-bitten mountain-men who built the American West. Around these islands of American civilisations are the tribal and nomadic societies with whom they trade, having the advantage of receiving supplies from Venus. There are a few Alaskan homesteads but they are few and far between.

In the west of Asia, there are the great Moskovien Wastes, lands ravaged by the Nazis during their ethnic purges, and now by nuclear war which has destroyed Hitlerstadt and Kiev. Nature has reclaimed the land here, and the Soviets don't linger far past the Urals because of what is said to lurk there. Beyond a band of steppe nomad kingdoms, is a remnant of the Nazis, the Kaukasus Reichscommissariat. It has extended control over Krimea, which is now purely German after extensive racial purges. Kaukasus is estranged from true Reich control due to its proximity to the Soviets, though there are purely nominal links ie the Reichscommissar in Tiflis recognised his vassalage to the Fuhrer in the Asteroid Belt.

South of Kaukasus are the resurrected empires of the Middle East. Dominated by the Axis and the British Commonwealth, from the ashes of the World Wars have emerged a Greater Syria locked in conflict with a renewed Persian Empire. Greater Syria is the successor to Italian Syria, which after the World Wars claimed independence and bit chunks of her neighbours or moved into the land which was falling into chaos. Turkey was in the Italian sphere and so lost land to Greater Syria, but the local tinpot dictator has managed to secure the reduced borders of his state and is moving toward making himself King of Turkey. Key amongst his successes has been the conquest of the State of Cyprus. He is a close ally of Kaukasus. Persia by contrast became a joint Soviet-British ally after the Second World War. When India founded the Non-Aligned League, the Shah attempted to join it and the British sponsored a coup which established a socialist republic. Persia became a wealthy state and came to be the main socialist power in the Middle East. With the Third World War, Persia was scarred, and since the Fourth World War, Persia has recovered and re-established much of the symbolism of the Empire. It is a less explicitly socialist state now, and more of a one party dictatorship. It has a larger sphere of influence, but has less allies than Greater Syria. As the Syrians rise, and normalise relations with Turkey, Persia feels isolated. Arabia is once more divided, with the Holy Cities independent in a Kingdom of Hedjaz, the remainder is divided between Persian and Syrian catspaws. A huge Empty Quarter dominates the Peninsula, with the Many Kingdoms of Yemen perpetually warring in the South, the one island of peace being the once British, now Persian, City of Aden.

Persia's other big rival is the Afghan Soviet. Established in the 50s as the British overturned the local King, and set up a Soviet aligned dictatorship, the Afghans have taken advantage of the recent collapses to establish control over majority Muslim regions of India. Syncretising hardline Soviet communism with Islam, the Afghans are radical and ambitious and see Persia as corrupted and insufficiently Socialist or Muslim. The two have not yet come to blows but both have interests in the Great Steppes, and this could lead to trouble down the line. It doesn't help that the Afghans continue to see themselves as the successors to the Mughals and the idea of reclaiming Samarkand is an important part of their propaganda.

Then there is the Great Chaos of India. Depopulated in the Third and Fourth World Wars and the ensuing exoduses from Earth, the remains are a patchwork of shifting warlord states and a few more stable states. The Afghans have established some wobbly clients in the Northeast and have a notion of extending their influence along the Ganges. The Nepalese have moved down from the mountains and rule with iron discipline, blocking the Afghan's way to the sea. In the south, the Sri Lankans have built a stable-ish Kingdom founded on dual Sinhalese-Tamil domination. Few expect it to last.

In China, a stable-ish government has reunited the remnants. The United States of China has succeeded the dome cities America built here after victory in the Third World War. Reasonably safe during the Fourth World War, the American puppets came together and have managed to rebuild. Its a union of hi-tech city-states and medieval rural hinterlands, and the divergence in wealth between the populace of the cities and the populace of the countryside is astronomical, unlike anywhere else in the Solar System. Order is maintained by the mighty robots who patrol the countryside, and the Bannermen, the brutal mercenaries who keep the serfs in line. The USC is verging on anarcho-capitalism, but is deeply isolationist and avoids foreign entanglements if at all possible. The one big rival is Tibet, a Buddhist theocracy which has nabbed bits of the interior. Much of the country remains radioactive and uninhabitable, but in political terms, the USC and Tibet have military control over these regions. Korea and Japan were sent back to the Stone Age and haven't recovered.

Southeast Asia is divided between three very different states. There is the Kingdoms of Siam, which has come to rule over much of Indochina and nibbled a bit off Malaysia. There is the Social Republic of Myanmar, a former Soviet client state which has plans to muscle in on India. And then there is Science Dictatorship of Indochina. The Americans built dome cities here, but unlike China where they became fortresses of capitalism, these cities became wonders of science, unbound by morality or religion. The cities dominate the countryside which has become bare as the various experiments have forced the population into the cities. The country is small, but the cities are colossal, spilling out of their old domed confines. It is basically Vietnam with some bits on but the technocratic overlords renamed the country Indochina to do away with nationalism. They are utopians and idealists, and they live in hell.

The East Indies are a different situation. The Netherlands were annexed by Germany, and their colonies were occupied by Britain. In the years following WWII and especially after the 60s, the British spun off most of the 'Mandates' as independent, socialist republics. Indonesia was no exception. It formed the nexus of Socialist power in Southeast Asia, connected the Peoples Republic of China with the Commonwealth of Australia. When the Martian Conquest came, Indonesia was prestigious enough to take some not insignificant territories of their own, and with the Third World War, much of the population was evacuated to Mars. In the aftermath, the East Indies has been left sparsely populated, and dominated by exterior powers. The Kingdom of Sarawak is a legacy of the colonial era, a former British protectorate which has conquered almost all of Borneo, except for those areas ruled by the Commonwealth of the Phillipines. The Phillipines is, like Alaska and Hawaii, theoretically part of the United States. In reality they are an independent republic, ruling those areas too far from Hawaiian rule. What was Malaysia is now a cluster of city-states and small Kingdoms which exist in relative peace, united against the threat from Siam. Northern Sumatra is ruled by a restored Kingdom of Aceh, which has taken advantage of the empty countryside to build a large and sturdy Kingdom. The remainder of Sumatra and Java are ruled by a weak Indonesia continuity government. The islands between Borneo and New Guinea are ruled by chieftains and kings as in the days before colonial rule. Indonesian New Guinea has come under British rule, controlled via the government in Canberra. Most of the British protectorates and colonies of the Pacific have been united as per the Commonwealth Continuity Act. The Pacific has been divided between the Kingdom of Hawaii and the legal institution that is the United Commonwealth of Australia and New Zealand.