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Description
A new age dawns, bringing in its wake unbridled expressions of peace and love, emancipatory social change and liberating personal development, and new frontiers beyond uncharted areas of science and space. Men are moved equally by their darker impulses in these strange times, however. Dozens of nations have the bomb, creating chaos or perhaps restoring balance where once was two-sided brinkmanship. A truly United Nations is still somewhere in the future, as the capacity for destruction makes the next collective move the most weighty of all. Humanity is at a precipice. Yet as flowers now grow in the harshest of climates, on other planets, and even from the soil of the human follicle, hope persists at what could be the eve of destruction.

The United States has renewed its optimism in progress, technology, and volunteerism, epitomized by the third President Kennedy, with a period of sweeping reform following the end of the Nixonian stagnation in the 1980s. The electoral alliance between the liberal establishment and the radical parties is nevertheless uneasy as the occupation of Southeast Asia goes on; while détente with the Soviets once offered hope for peace, a new Cold War rages with the Chinese. The squares themselves have radicalized, and the new right-wing parties promise to end the war once and for all with nuclear weapons and eliminate the threat of communism from within and without. Black people are noticeably underrepresented in the colorblind future, with riots and assassinations having erupted into a race war that led to the migration of hundreds of thousands to a black-majority autonomy in the South and the exodus of tens of thousands more to Africa. With the autonomies under increasing pressure to integrate, the Nation of Islam has become the single largest source of black identity. New televangelizing mystery religions with tantalizing visions of transcendental power are replacing older, more exclusionary ones alongside Asian imports. Buddhists and Hindus have converted enough Americans to be courted for votes by politicians, while Confucianism has rejuvenated conservatism. Most universities have separate departments for Eastern philosophy that rival the Western ones.

In Europe, student protests and labor strikes continued into the 1970s, becoming revolutionary uprisings against NATO and Warsaw Pact invaders- attempts to pacify the population with experimental non-lethal psycho-chemical aerosols didn't help. A tactical disengagement by the superpowers left a free, neutral, and demilitarized Europe between the entrenched Mediterranean dictatorships and the Soviets, having turned inward to suppress internal dissent. What started as a trade organization between a reunified Germany and its immediate neighbors has flowered into the European Union, a major influence and a booster for green politics worldwide. Britain is a bit of a basketcase, an overbearing welfare state kept from going the way of Europe only by a glamorous intelligence agency with unchecked power. The student population is wildly experimental- then there's the muckers, youth who've made a hobby of public spectacles of carnage and terror. With an infusion of bohemians, bons vivants, and businessmen fleeing the European uprisings and revolutionary violence throughout the Commonwealth, London is a swinging, colorful epicenter of music, fashion, and film.

Red China is a power run largely by local revolutionary committees, with an economy of factories latticed by wind turbines and solar arrays and collective farms augmented by biotechnology to allow for massive crop yields anywhere. The leader of anti-imperialist revolution in the third world, Beijing has replaced Moscow as the heart of world communism and Washington's greatest enemy. The Soviet Union is more or less a colorless, conservative social imperialist oligarchy nowadays, enamored with super science and space exploration. Peaceful coexistence with the United States remains state policy, even fostering cooperation against China, but Soviet super soldiers, spycraft, weaponized gamma monsters, and non-nuclear doomsday devices are a continuing source of tension. Caught between the Chinese and a West and East Pakistan held together by the CIA, socialist India remains non-aligned in the new Cold War and close with the Soviets.

The Pan-Arab and Pan-African movements have succeeded in creating federations and countering Western influence, and now pursue continental unification. The United Arab Republic has secured much of the nuclear age Middle East through somewhat reluctant cooperation with the Shi'a Islamic mystics in Iran, but remains militant and belligerent. There was a bit of a scare during the War of Retribution with the Israelis: the world barely averted the nuking of Damascus, Amman, and the Aswan High Dam with international arbitration that restored Israel to its original borders on the guarantee of safety under several layers of energy shielding. A stridently anti-colonial African Union has become a powerful voice for the African diaspora, a destination for black Americans and Europeans with technological know-how to contribute, and an economic heavyweight via its control of rare earths. While the Africans follow the principles of Ujamaa and Arab Socialist parties dominate the UAR, both lean toward China.

Overpopulation is a major concern as continuing economic expansion permits high birthrates, and although new technologies have expanded agricultural production enough to avoid Malthusian collapse, the world is troubled by draconian eugenics laws, outbreaks of violence, and weariness of the supplementary food pill. Pollution is a problem that the rich have escaped in high-rises raised above the ground on adjustable columns. Others are dispersing back to the land, aided by hydroponic farming, revolutionary computer technologies, and general decentralization.

Nuclear fusion is the largest source of commercial power generation, and hydrogen is cheap and plentiful enough to fuel flying cars. Machines have ushered in a push-button economy of unbridled productive capacity, which has also increased unemployment. Governments have eased this transformation through large-scale public works, low-cost housing blocks, high-speed rail, income redistribution, and restraint on technology deployment, while some countries are experimenting with basic income. Socialism with interlinked computerized systems of resource allocation has made a mockery of Marxist-Leninist centralized planning, and some national economies have already gone moneyless. Supercomputers control the world's nuclear arsenals, no less worrying than the prevalence of pocket nukes, and robot servants are everywhere. Some androids are virtually indistinguishable from humans. Genetic engineering is widely used in consumer and industrial products, even to make red, purple, or green dogs.

Conventional sexual mores have completely broken down and society is saturated with Murdochian mass media. Privacy no longer exists between abundant hidden microphones, concealed cameras, and truth serums. Birth control is commonplace and encouraged by the government to keep the population down, while AIDS was successfully contained and cured before it became a pandemic. For those who do not want to bother with social interaction, there is a device that supplies pleasure on demand by direct stimulation of the brain. Psychedelic drugs are mass marketed for higher consciousness and long-term, positive transformation of the self. Neuroparticipant therapy, using computer-mediated dream telepathy, is one of many psychotherapeutic innovations in a directionless world where humanity suffocates psychologically beneath its own mass despite abiding in relative physical comfort.

With low cost propulsive systems, many countries are engaged in their own independent scientific exploration and economic development of the solar system. Earth orbit is connected to the surface by space elevators and crowded with space stations, satellites, electromagnetic catapults, orbital nuclear weapons platforms, and photon weapons. Spaceships are typically assembled and launched in orbit, sporting unaerodynamic design and simulated gravity through a bulky centrifuge. Some missions have reached the Jovian moons, and many more are planned to go further with suspended animation systems on-board. The Moon and Mars are being colonized mostly by families deemed fit and genetically pure enough to conquer the new frontier. Some want to escape the amoral violence, mind rot, and hedonic excess they see the Earth as having succumbed to. Others see in the space age a brighter future, where man has learned from the lessons of history and once and for all eradicated the specter of hate.

Description
A new age dawns, bringing in its wake unbridled expressions of peace and love, emancipatory social change and liberating personal development, and new frontiers beyond uncharted areas of science and space. Men are moved equally by their darker impulses in these strange times, however. Dozens of nations have the bomb, creating chaos or perhaps restoring balance where once was two-sided brinkmanship. A truly United Nations is still somewhere in the future, as the capacity for destruction makes the next collective move the most weighty of all. Humanity is at a precipice. Yet as flowers now grow in the harshest of climates, on other planets, and even from the soil of the human follicle, hope persists at what could be the eve of destruction.

The United States has renewed its optimism in progress, technology, and volunteerism, epitomized by the third President Kennedy, with a period of sweeping reform following the end of the Nixonian stagnation in the 1980s. The electoral alliance between the liberal establishment and the radical parties is nevertheless uneasy as the occupation of Southeast Asia goes on; while détente with the Soviets once offered hope for peace, a new Cold War rages with the Chinese. The squares themselves have radicalized, and the new right-wing parties promise to end the war once and for all with nuclear weapons and eliminate the threat of communism from within and without. Black people are noticeably underrepresented in the colorblind future, with riots and assassinations having erupted into a race war that led to the migration of hundreds of thousands to a black-majority autonomy in the South and the exodus of tens of thousands more to Africa. With the autonomies under increasing pressure to integrate, the Nation of Islam has become the single largest source of black identity. New televangelizing mystery religions with tantalizing visions of transcendental power are replacing older, more exclusionary ones alongside Asian imports. Buddhists and Hindus have converted enough Americans to be courted for votes by politicians, while Confucianism has rejuvenated conservatism. Most universities have separate departments for Eastern philosophy that rival the Western ones.

In Europe, student protests and labor strikes continued into the 1970s, becoming revolutionary uprisings against NATO and Warsaw Pact invaders- attempts to pacify the population with experimental non-lethal psycho-chemical aerosols didn't help. A tactical disengagement by the superpowers left a free, neutral, and demilitarized Europe between the entrenched Mediterranean dictatorships and the Soviets, having turned inward to suppress internal dissent. What started as a trade organization between a reunified Germany and its immediate neighbors has flowered into the European Union, a major influence and a booster for green politics worldwide. Britain is a bit of a basketcase, an overbearing welfare state kept from going the way of Europe only by a glamorous intelligence agency with unchecked power. The student population is wildly experimental- then there's the muckers, youth who've made a hobby of public spectacles of carnage and terror. With an infusion of bohemians, bons vivants, and businessmen fleeing the European uprisings and revolutionary violence throughout the Commonwealth, London is a swinging, colorful epicenter of music, fashion, and film.

Red China is a power run largely by local revolutionary committees, with an economy of factories latticed by wind turbines and solar arrays and collective farms augmented by biotechnology to allow for massive crop yields anywhere. The leader of anti-imperialist revolution in the third world, Beijing has replaced Moscow as the heart of world communism and Washington's greatest enemy. The Soviet Union is more or less a colorless, conservative social imperialist oligarchy nowadays, enamored with super science and space exploration. Peaceful coexistence with the United States remains state policy, even fostering cooperation against China, but Soviet super soldiers, spycraft, weaponized gamma monsters, and non-nuclear doomsday devices are a continuing source of tension. Caught between the Chinese and a West and East Pakistan held together by the CIA, socialist India remains non-aligned in the new Cold War and close with the Soviets.

The Pan-Arab and Pan-African movements have succeeded in creating federations and countering Western influence, and now pursue continental unification. The United Arab Republic has secured much of the nuclear age Middle East through somewhat reluctant cooperation with the Shi'a Islamic mystics in Iran, but remains militant and belligerent. There was a bit of a scare during the War of Retribution with the Israelis: the world barely averted the nuking of Damascus, Amman, and the Aswan High Dam with international arbitration that restored Israel to its original borders on the guarantee of safety under several layers of energy shielding. A stridently anti-colonial African Union has become a powerful voice for the African diaspora, a destination for black Americans and Europeans with technological know-how to contribute, and an economic heavyweight via its control of rare earths. While the Africans follow the principles of Ujamaa and Arab Socialist parties dominate the UAR, both lean toward China.

Overpopulation is a major concern as continuing economic expansion permits high birthrates, and although new technologies have expanded agricultural production enough to avoid Malthusian collapse, the world is troubled by draconian eugenics laws, outbreaks of violence, and weariness of the supplementary food pill. Pollution is a problem that the rich have escaped in high-rises raised above the ground on adjustable columns. Others are dispersing back to the land, aided by hydroponic farming, revolutionary computer technologies, and general decentralization.

Nuclear fusion is the largest source of commercial power generation, and hydrogen is cheap and plentiful enough to fuel flying cars. Machines have ushered in a push-button economy of unbridled productive capacity, which has also increased unemployment. Governments have eased this transformation through large-scale public works, low-cost housing blocks, high-speed rail, income redistribution, and restraint on technology deployment, while some countries are experimenting with basic income. Socialism with interlinked computerized systems of resource allocation has made a mockery of Marxist-Leninist centralized planning, and some national economies have already gone moneyless. Supercomputers control the world's nuclear arsenals, no less worrying than the prevalence of pocket nukes, and robot servants are everywhere. Some androids are virtually indistinguishable from humans. Genetic engineering is widely used in consumer and industrial products, even to make red, purple, or green dogs.

Conventional sexual mores have completely broken down and society is saturated with Murdochian mass media. Privacy no longer exists between abundant hidden microphones, concealed cameras, and truth serums. Birth control is commonplace and encouraged by the government to keep the population down, while AIDS was successfully contained and cured before it became a pandemic. For those who do not want to bother with social interaction, there is a device that supplies pleasure on demand by direct stimulation of the brain. Psychedelic drugs are mass marketed for higher consciousness and long-term, positive transformation of the self. Neuroparticipant therapy, using computer-mediated dream telepathy, is one of many psychotherapeutic innovations in a directionless world where humanity suffocates psychologically beneath its own mass despite abiding in relative physical comfort.

With low cost propulsive systems, many countries are engaged in their own independent scientific exploration and economic development of the solar system. Earth orbit is connected to the surface by space elevators and crowded with space stations, satellites, electromagnetic catapults, orbital nuclear weapons platforms, and photon weapons. Spaceships are typically assembled and launched in orbit, sporting unaerodynamic design and simulated gravity through a bulky centrifuge. Some missions have reached the Jovian moons, and many more are planned to go further with suspended animation systems on-board. The Moon and Mars are being colonized mostly by families deemed fit and genetically pure enough to conquer the new frontier. Some want to escape the amoral violence, mind rot, and hedonic excess they see the Earth as having succumbed to. Others see in the space age a brighter future, where man has learned from the lessons of history and once and for all eradicated the specter of hate.