The World in 2077

Every map is an argument about who counts.

This one is the world The Change happens to, fifty years from now, after the old alliances have finished coming apart. Four blocs hold what is left of it.

The Sovereign Nations Pact was born in the United States and grew outward into the Middle East and Africa. It outlawed science a generation ago, stages its executions as festivals and has raised a Church of Men to burn the very people its own citizens are turning into. The World Union is what the hardened democracies of Europe built when they saw which way the wind had turned. The Russian and Chinese blocs keep their own counsel and their own borders. And in the gaps sit the independent and non-aligned nations: poorer, quieter and, as it turns out, freer. Most of what matters in this book happens in those gaps.

The small marker on the upper Ucayali, in eastern Peru, is the Todt plant. That is where it starts.

Nobody in any of those blocs will understand that for years. One of them has made the finding of causes a crime, and has therefore guaranteed, with its own hands, that it will never understand the single largest thing now happening to it.

This map appears as Appendix A in The Change*, a novel. You can read more about the book here: josephvaleri.com/books/the-change*