The Fallen Continent: Introduction
A post-apocalyptic setting with an epic scope, exploring all fifty states of the Union and beyond.
Hello, and welcome to the world of Fallen Continent, an ambitious speculative fiction project that I’ve been working on in parallel with a novel I’ve been writing. The novel itself takes place mostly in Oklahoma, but developments from the furthest reaches of the country affect even the remotest states, and I’ve detailed them all. For those of you who read my previous Substack article, welcome back; I’d like to introduce you to the other kind of writing I’ll be sharing on this page. The setting comes with a well-detailed map to guide you through its contents:
Imgur link, for those experiencing difficulty viewing this very large image. Warning, it shows up as a JPEG here. If you know a better website to host this image on, please let me know.
It’s a massive file, complete with legend and many small details that I encourage you to explore and read, if you are into maps like me. Every single faction on this map has their own story and unique characteristics, and I’ll be elaborating on each and every one of them in detail over a series of posts. This will include one post for every state (including Alaska and Hawaii, which have maps of their own that aren’t pictured here), as well as posts for the outlying U.S. territories and even some foreign countries whose situations directly impact that of the mainland United States. There may be other entries for certain bigger concepts or encyclopedic entries on aspects of the postwar American wasteland. If there’s anything you want to know more about, just ask and I’ll have it covered!
The first thing people might think of upon seeing this post is Fallout. There are ideas loosely inspired by Fallout, although this is a story that tries to maintain a moderate level of realism and plausibility, and any science fiction elements are very light. There are elements drawn from many other settings and stories as well, including novels, movies, video games, and more. You might find some of them included on the map as easter eggs. Yet this remains an original story that tries to avert some of the tropes associated with nuclear apocalypse media, or at least put an original spin on them.
Before we jump in, I’d like to make a quick disclaimer. This setting, naturally, includes some extreme political and religious topics, as extremism of all kinds is going to occur in such a crisis as the United States has undergone in this setting. My aim is to present them as neutrally as I can, and I have developed them to try not to take any sides. As a man like any other, I naturally have my own biases which have seeped into my writing, but I’d like for myself and all my readers to keep an open mind.
The Great War
Fallen Continent, set thirty years after a hypothetical nuclear war in the 2020s, is not so much of an alternate history story as it is an “imagined future” story. Nonetheless, there is some limited alternate history preceding the outbreak of the Great War in 2029.
Our Point of Divergence is unclear, having occurred sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s. Whatever may have transpired to provoke such a reaction, the United States’ response to the threat of Islamic terrorism—real or perceived—was far, far more drastic than it was in real life. Foreign intervention was waged on an extreme scale, with American troops fighting across the globe from Libya to Iran to Malaysia over a series of decades. The result was profound economic crisis, domestic discontent, and international tension.
Such turmoil was not limited to the United States alone. Russia underwent a similar crisis, which resulted in the assassination of Vladimir Putin and a brief conflict that culimated in the shocking restoration of the Russian Empire by a far-right clique of military officers. As the United States escalated its overseas expansion, the Russians began posturing throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia, aligning themselves with an axis of anti-American powers. Both power blocs pursued a course of hyper-militarization and nuclear re-armament. By the 2020s, both sides possessed nuclear arsenals with warheads numbering in the tens of thousands.
The reckless military spending further necessitated higher taxes and contributed to a worsening economic downturn. Political polarization deepened as people sought increasingly radical solutions to the worsening problem, which earned its name in history as the Great 21st Century Crisis. Radical militias popped up throughout the country, which reached the brink of open rebellion in certain trouble spots by the end of the 2020s.
The tipping point came over the geopolitical position of Turkey, resulting in a brief conventional war spanning six months. The Third World War raged with furious intensity throughout the summer of 2029, with disastrous consequences for both sides. Just as the United States and its allies had pushed through the Caucasus Mountains, the Russians achieved a surprise breakthrough in Western Europe. The radical French Sixth Republic, led by a government of fanatic anti-clericalists, feared the advance of the fundamentalist, reactionary Russians. On July 31st, 2029, they unleashed their nuclear arsenal on the advancing foe.
What followed was a worldwide nuclear exchange between all nuclear-armed countries, spanning 48 hours. In what was later known as the Great War, most of the northern hemisphere and much of the south was annihilated.
Approximately one billion people died during the nuclear exchange; billions more perished in the period of anarchy and starvation which followed. Some called it the Fimbulwinter, the Smuta, the Hungerrjahre, the Black Thirties, the Seven Years’ Famine, or the Hard Lent. In America, its most widespread name was the Starving Time.
The firestorms caused by the Great War sent 50,000,000 tons of ash and soot into the earth’s atmosphere. Of this, 1,000,000 tons reached the stratosphere, blocking and diverting enough of the sun’s radiation that the earth cooled by 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit on average, resulting in local drops of as much as thirty degrees across the northern hemisphere. Agriculture was rendered impossible throughout the world’s temperate regions during the first year of Nuclear Winter, and barely remained viable in the tropics. The next year saw the return of agriculture, but with “Year Without a Summer” weather, yields remained perilously low. Many devoured seed grain in desperation, leaving nothing left for planting season. With the loss of so many farmers, the drop in agricultural expertise ensured a feeble harvest even when the weather stabilized in 2032. Mass starvation ensued; some practiced cannibalism, often euphemized in the US as DPO, the “Donner Party Option.” Antiquated diseases, which were believed to had been banished centuries ago, returned to reap a grisly harvest.
Between the bombs, radiation poisoning, disease, starvation, and warfare that ravaged America, the population fell by 95%. Only twenty years later, did the birthrate outpace the rate of death, resulting in America’s first population growth since before the war. Since then, the former United States of America’s population has risen to approximately 25,500,000, roughly on par with the number of the 1850 census.
The U.S. Government
Most of the United States’ plans for continuity of government were dashed by the war. Its crisis centers and “bomb-proof” bunkers were obliterated by spectacular nuclear barrages—not even NORAD was spared. Yet the government did, initially, endure.
Three days after the end of the Great War—the primary phase of the wider Third World War—the last remnants of the Clinton administration landed in Twin Falls, Idaho. The US Secretary of Commerce was sworn in as the Acting President and made plans for a recovery. The situation was rapidly worsening, but they at least had the resources to ride out the storm and rebuild the country when the Nuclear Winter came to an end. Its most lasting contribution was the designation of irradiated territory as “Nuclear Exclusion Zones,” black spots on widely-publicized maps in which no man was to enter, lest he dwindle and die.
Three months later, Twin Falls was destroyed by a nuclear warhead sent by a Russian nuclear submarine in the North Pacific. The era of the secondary strikes had begun. The submarine fleets of all involved nations had orders to carry on independent operations for as long as necessary, launching their missiles on enemy rendezvous points and centers of reconstruction, in order to prevent a follow-up to the nuclear attacks and—more enticingly—exact revenge on the hated foe for destroying their homelands. For nearly two more years, roving submarines kept watch for signs of enemy recovery and put a stop to their plans. Secondary capitals, military rallying points, first-wave targets that were missed or whose interception systems succeeded—dozens were taken out over a period of seventeen months.
The second U.S. rump government was based in Amarillo, Texas. This government accomplished more than its predecessor in Idaho, and even tried to coordinate with its remaining military forces to wage a half-hearted war on its Old World foes. It, too, was destroyed in a secondary strike ten months later. By that point, the government’s hold on its own population was rapidly slipping. Large swathes of territory were lost to warlord bands, survivalist bandits, and ideological militias. Remote government officials and military officers were no longer answering to the directives of the federal or even state governments. When the third rump government was established in Dodge City, Kansas, most of the country was no longer in their grasp.
The Starving Time was now in full force, and all of America felt the pangs of hunger. As a high-profile reconstruction center with large stockpiles of beef and seed grain, Dodge City was overwhelmed by millions of starving refugees from throughout the central United States. Electing to not take on the impossible errand of feeding them all, the government fled south to a more tenable position in Midland, Texas, leaving behind a few token administrators to take the fall back in Kansas. The Dodge City remnants weaponized these refugees, forming a massive army of desperate, starving peons with nothing to lose, and sent them south into Texas. Though government authority was already drastically weakened by the beginning of the Starving Time, the Midland-Dodge City War shattered the last remaining hopes for American unity. An ill-fated attempt to establish a new, more neutral national government in Walla Walla, Washington was later destroyed by the final nuclear strike of the Third World War.
America Today
There is no one “United States of America” today. Rather, there are more than a dozen of them, each with their own claims of legitimacy (that have varyingly sound foundations). Other factions eschew the dream of national unification, either maintaining their own state independently until a suitable claimant appears to unite with them, or going their own way altogether. Most of the country, its population and its territory, lives under the control of warlords, who rule principally through force of arms. Even outside of the warlord realms, little is left of antebellum democratic government. Most surviving government authorities are emergency administrations, discarding the tenets of democracy until such a time as they can be safely reinstated (which some hope will never come).
Much of the country is controlled by radical movements, religious and political, which offer extreme answers to the hardships brought on by the Great War and its aftermath. Far right militias and warlords can be found all across the wasteland in nearly every state, resisting the remnants of de jure government authority. Leftist movements are more rare, but still persist in college towns, among old labor unions, or in communities with a more left wing rural tradition. Most of the country, however, is ruled by apolitical warlords or emergency governments, who focus on the immediate issues of survival without paying any thought to theories or ideologies. Economic theory is seldom heard of; most markets are either state-controlled or entirely unregulated, depending on who’s in charge.
American culture has changed dramatically since the Great War as well, and its demographics look very different. As most minorities and left-leaning individuals dwelt in major cities prior to the War, they were mostly killed in the initial nuclear exchange or died in the hectic aftermath of the Starving Time. America is still a diverse nation, as many regions were either seized by bands of refugees or amicably received them, but its demographic situation more closely resembles the United States of the mid 20th Century. The population is around 80% non-Hispanic white, though this differs wildly at the local and regional levels. Among the minority population, a much larger percentage of it is Hispanic and Native American, and much less of it is African-American, due to the antebellum distribution of their populations. Regions governed by Native American tribes generally fared relatively well (save for heavily fallout-stricken North Dakota), and the Native population has begun to rebound in the decades following the Great War. Some decaying languages and cultures have had a chance to revive themselves in the absence of a globalized, English-language monoculture. Texas Germans, French Acadians, Pennsylvania Dutch, and—with disastrous results—the Louisiana Cajuns.
The culture of the wasteland is eclectic; most 21st Century culture at the time of the Great War existed online, but a combination of EMPs, destruction of electronic infrastructure, and a lack of materials and industry has led to the end of digital media in North America and the loss of most of its prewar culture. American wastelanders instead turned to whatever old physical media they could find; some CDs and cassettes, but mostly old vinyl records. From there, they have used whatever materials are at hand to produce new art and music of their own. The result is a fusion of mid 20th Century American culture with older Americans’ recollections of the digital world they left behind.
Stirrings
After thirty years of chaos and fragmentation, the winds are beginning to change. The population is increasing, new cities are being built, and reforms are coming to warlord states and rump governments alike. Long-dormant factions wake from their slumber and finally embark on campaigns of expansion and reconquest. The rest of the world is beginning to recover as well, and foreign powers from the south are looking towards a recovering America, trading with various states and backing those they think will prevail in the coming struggles.
The old warlords, the free riders of the open wasteland, are fast fading away. The last ones remaining now find that they must adapt to the changing times and reinvent themselves, or face annihilation by more purposeful, tighter-knit powers. America is slowly drawing itself together again, but its ultimate fate remains to be seen. Will it end up as one country, or several? Fifty states, or many more? Under whose banner and whose leadership will unity come—if it can come at all? Upon the plains, along the coasts, up and down the river vales, and in the mountain valleys, giants are waking and remembering that they are strong. The fallen continent rises from its ashes.
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O'er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
Index
Here is a collection of links to other Fallen Continent entries.
Special Articles:
Nuclear Exclusion Zones
The Starving Time
Famine Foods
Religious Movements
States:
Hawaii
Alaska
Washington
Oregon
California
Nevada
Idaho
Utah
Arizona
New Mexico
Colorado
Wyoming
Montana
North Dakota
South Dakota
Nebraska
Kansas
Oklahoma
Texas (Part 1)
Texas (Part 2)
Louisiana
This is awesome
Teh PETRIXXX Show lore is interesting too. It diverges from our timeline in 1488 when Pope Constantine II united italy under a catholic federation, leading to the colonization of Florida by the Italians. This country later falls in the 1700s and a battle in Florida causes a rock to fly into space which hits a ufo containing retardium, causing Florida to become a retarded realm and causes it's inhabitants to act like classic smg4/kitty0706 characters. In the 1920s, Mario comes from the future in a tripod and turns the country into a giant mutated cartoon kingdom where the once normal & realistic humans are now split between the Toads (third human, third gnome, third blocklandian) and the Floridians (half human, half blocklandian). A century later, a young teenager known as Bobert Mann is enjoying lunch at school with his friends when Sunny Omori comes out of a portal and attempts to prevent him from establishing the Confederate American Empire by shooting him, but this backfires and Sunny ends up getting beaten up and his world-traveling device is taken by Bman, who uses it to contact Hyperborea and the Empire of Mennkind (like the rick and morty world but for gman from half life) and he convinces the empires to help him start a war against the Omori regime in America, which took control after he escaped earth and is Hellbent on destroying all elements of Christianity and the white race (for example, you can't clap your hands anymore because you make the praying hand gesture for 0.5 seconds). The alliance's hyper-advanced technology wins leading to the rise of Emperor Bobert I (though he is usually called Bman) and the Confederate American Empire. The world's response to the second civil war led to WW3, consisting of every right wing country being at war with every left wing country while other countries fall into a left vs right civil war, with their factions being at war with other countries. It ends in 2036 with the right faction being victorious but very splintered (such as western europe being balkanized and being split between fascists and monarchists). Bman would get married to a Hyperborean tradwife (I haven't decided her name yet so just call her Bwoman for now) and rules a greater America. Mario, Luigi, Toad & Bowser were extremely helpful to the royalists defeating SMG4's marxist dictatorship and restoring Regent Princess Peach. The show is set 20 years in the future during a period of peace and prosperity, focusing on the spine-ticking, knee-slapping, jimmy-rustling adventures of Mario and Emperor Bman, and can be seen on my Youtube!