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:

If you want to view this map in high resolution without image compression, here is the Google drive link you can use to save the image to your phone or computer. For those of you reading on the desktop browser, the best option is simply to click on the map, open the image in a separate tab, and then save the image to your hard drive and view it with a photo viewer. I know that these are both very cumbersome options—this is a 14 MB file and I cannot easily host it without compression. If any of you know a better way of sharing this image, 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, 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 will also 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.

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Map Guide

One last digression before we move on to the premise of Fallen Continent: a guide to the map! Not everyone can open and read the full image in detail, so I have amended this article to provide a basic explanation of the map’s legend. Everything here is color-coded and labelled to provide clarity. Without further ado:

Borders

Solid lines indicate the approximate boundary of a faction on the map. This can range from actual codified borders to a vague sphere of influence.

Dotted lines indicate the internal boundaries of a faction. This could denote the borders of constituent states within a federal union (the United States of America-Dodge City and its State of Kansas, State of Oklahoma, etc.), or the partnership of two sovereign states in a confederation (Mississippi and Alabama working together in the Congress of Southern States), or a faction that borders some kind of satellite regime that is closely associated with it (New Hampshire, its occupation regime in Maine, and the New Hampshire-supported Green Mountain Boys in northern Vermont).

Light-grey dashed lines indicate the antebellum international and sub-national boundaries of the United States. This includes the US borders with Mexico and Canada, as well as borders between prewar American states.

Physical Features

Large stars represent factional capitals with populations above 100,000 people. This generally does not include sub-factional capitals, such as US states under a federal government or Ozark vassal realms.

Small stars represent factional capitals with populations under 100,000 people.

Large circles indicate non-capital cities with populations over 100,000 people. This can include sub-factional capitals, such as Midland, Texas—the capital of the Midland Special Administrative Zone, but not the United States of Aztlan as a whole.

Medium-sized circles indicate non-capital cities with populations between 100,000 and 50,000 people.

Small circles indicate cities with populations below 50,000 people. There is not an explicit cut-off point for how small these cities can be, but they are generally above 1,000 inhabitants.

Pale blue obviously indicates bodies of water: seas, lakes, and major rivers.

Dark-shaded regions represent Nuclear Exclusion Zones, heavily-irradiated regions that cannot safely harbor human habitation. Most NEZs belong to the wasteland and are not controlled by any faction, but some NEZs are located entirely within a faction’s borders.

Faction Key

Dark Blue: Federal Legacy Governments
These are remnants of the antebellum United States federal government. This category includes factions founded by presidential cabinet members, US congressmen, and even federal agencies, such as the National Park Service or Border Patrol.

Light Blue: State Legacy Governments
These are remnants of the US state governments. This category includes governments founded by executive, legislative, and judicial officials, as well as state-level agencies such as state highway patrols and correctional facilities. This does not include state legacy factions whose leaders have devolved into warlordism.

Light Purple: Local Governments
These are surviving city, county, and county-equivalent factions, as well as larger associations that began at the county level, such as multi-county alliances or re-founded state governments.

Green: Military Factions
These are factions led by surviving elements from any branch of the US Armed Forces, including the National Guard and State Defense Forces. These range from military emergency governments, to territories administered by military units, to rogue military units that have descended to de facto warlordism. There are also some reformist military governments who blend military and civilian rule.

Brown: Right-Wing Ideological Factions
These are factions with a far-right ideological bent. They include militias, right-wing warlords, organized right wing movements, and surviving governments which adopted a far-right platform.

Pink: Left-Wing Ideological Factions
These are factions with a far-left ideological bent. They include revolutionary states, student movements, militant labor unions, and surviving governments which adopted a far-left platform.

Yellow: Religious Factions
These are factions organized around a religious movement. They include theocratic governments, religious militias, Messianic states, religious orders, and cults. These religious movements may represent traditional antebellum religions, postwar developments of traditional religions, or altogether new religious movements.

Orange: Legitimist Warlords
These are warlord factions that are centered around some kind of legitimizing institution, in which power is maintained through something greater than sheer brute force. This category includes surviving local governments gone rogue, warlords who force themselves into existing governments, and warlords who have weak claims to legitimacy or rule through some kind of formalized institution.

Red: Warlords
These are the petty warlords, criminal gangs, vigilante gangs, gang alliances, and other factions that have no effective claims to legitimacy, however remote. These factions tend to lack organized institutions, and authority is maintained almost solely through armed force and coercion.

Tan: Native American Factions
These are any and all factions ruled by Native Americans or Native American institutions. These include American Indian reservations, Alaska Native Corporations, states founded and ruled by Native Americans, and Native American warlords and gangs.

Dark Purple: Special Cases
These are any and all factions that do not quite belong to previous categories. This qualifier is mostly reserved for “post-warlord” states: warlord factions that have grown sufficiently advanced and sophisticated that they can no longer simply be described as legitimist warlords. This first category includes the United States of Aztlan, Kingdom of the Ozarks, and the Heartland Social Republic.

Other special cases include former military governments that completely liberalized into democratic states, namely the Republic of Hawaii and the Republic of the Mariana Islands.

The last category of special case factions is for foreign regimes. These include the Russian naval regime occupying the San Juan Islands, the pro-Russian collaborator army of American POWs and defectors that landed in the Virgin Islands, and the Independent State of Samoa, which exists in union with American Samoa.

With the legend taken care of, it’s finally time to explore the history behind the Third World War and its aftermath.

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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 culminated 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Index

Here is a collection of links to other Fallen Continent entries. For newcomers, I advise you begin with the Hawaii article and work your way through the series in chronological order.

Special Articles

Nuclear Exclusion Zones
The Starving Time
Famine Foods
Religious Movements
Trade and Currency
Weapons and Vehicles
Factional Allegiances

States and Territories

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
Arkansas
Missouri
Iowa
Minnesota
Wisconsin
Illinois
Indiana
Michigan
Ohio
West Virginia
Kentucky
Tennessee
Mississippi
Alabama
Florida
Georgia
South Carolina
North Carolina

Other Countries and Territories

Cuba