The world of Thera

Created Wednesday 14 January 2026

This is intended to be a grounded sci-fi world set nominally around the year 2200 on an alternate Earth--Thera. It's meant to be harsh-yet-hopeful in a world of 3 degree C global warming, horrid waste management, and a political refusal to adapt away from hierarchy, profit, and extraction. The intention is to highlight the ingenuity and courage of people who manage to make such a world a little more livable. It'll have pretty consistent anti-colonial/fascist/imperialist themes.

Thera is a world much like our own with different geography. Somehow it has basically the same kind of life as we have and humans. They follow a simillar development path as our timeline did and are perhaps 125-250 years beyond us. The nations and peoples will be quite different yet some aspects will be very familliar.

I will be borrowing a lot of symbols, objects, and animals from our world because I'll already be doing a shit load of mental work to screw around with speculative geography and society building. When I'm designing an entire island with 60 million people... it's just easier to have them pick up ak-47s and skss because that's a very good short hand for "these guys are using slightly old tech and are semi-guerrilla". Also skss and aks are cool... Actually, see the technology section for how implausible this is. What I could do is uses SKSs and bolt actions then reveal they are are air rifles later.

You'll probably clock this as an ideologically motivated project and you'd be mostly correct. I am fanatically in favor of anarchism and socialism. Please understand that that came about from me being a patriotic lil boyscout that was super excited that HIllary Duff er I mean Clinton was going to be our president specifically because she's openly a cold machiavellian bitch. I worked for the military industrial complex during covid. The experience was eye opening and traumatic. They really just don't care about us.

I'm writing this with the intent to explore what happens if certain behaviors are done en masse under various conditions. So, it is partially ideological, but not really. I'm interested in social behavior patterns and their affects on people and the world more than I am picking the perfect polcompball microfaction.

Finally I'd like to say that this is better way to channel that weird depression energy than silently having an existential crisis by myself in a dark room, or asking chatgpt a million questions, or sexting random thirsty fembois on questionable bdsm subreddit.

AI disclaimer: AI has written none of this, and it never will be used to do so. That, said, I do bounce ideas off of LLMs sometimes. It's also been helpful for researching certain things like hypothetical climates.

Places and movements to explore

  • Clovus
  • Junkpunk afghanistan
  • Insurrection world
  • stateless and nomadic pacifism
  • Some post-colonial emergent systems
  • market-leninist dystopia using it's still semi-functional industry to push colonial extraction in exchange for vaccines and such--i mean uh... hail socialism!
  • the totallly 100% fictional 'Murikan Empire

Some fun sci-fi tropes to explore

  • cybernetics (a la Norbert Wiener, not robot arms)
  • cryptids
  • aliens and space travel
  • magic crystals
  • alternate humans that are easy to costume (elf ears, cat tails)
  • androids, cyborgs, human augmentation
  • artificial life – living robots
  • biotech and genetic modification
  • conway's game of life

Geography, geology, and climate

Clovus

A lot of the story happens here or nearby, so it's description needs to be more through.

The quick rundown is that it's a rather large island (~400 km2) comparable to Montanta in size. It has a human population of 60mil and is comparabale to Italy. It's at a pretty high latitude but kept at moderate tempreatures by a warm ocean current. It has frequent but mild disasters from storms, flooding, earthquakes and (rarely) volcanic eruptions. Wildfires and droughts exist but there's a lot of rain so they're never bad. The disasters cause damage all the time, but there's no record of mega storm or quake wiping out the entire island in written history. The whole place is covered in gently rolling hills that disguise rather large altitude changes. Peaks 3000-4000m above sea level are pretty normal with a select few reaching into the 6000-8000m range. A huge portion of the island is covered in old growth forests. The island is called Clovus because it is is shaped like a 4 leaf clover with pretty significant ingress of the ocean inland to all four corners. Small rivers are ubiquitous. Microclimates & seasonal change can be pretty prounounced.

The inhabitants have a peculiar culture as the majority of Clovians are descendant from people who arrived via shipwreck, being marooned, or ships that got lost. The first humans on Clovus had to learn the hard way to work with strangers to stay well and healthy even if you don't particularly like them. While Clovus is now a major stop on a pretty important naval trade route, it is essentially alone in the middle of an ocean comparable in size to the indian ocean with no immediate neighbors other than dispersed small islands. Some would describe it as a "cultural melting pot"... this is technically accurate in that struggling people from multiple very disparate cultures had the choice of struggle alone in harsh isolated world or be a good neighbor to some weirdos. The best example I can think of in this world might be hawaiian pidgin for the language.

Technology Available

Gunz

So. Clovus won't have much chemical propellants or explosives by necessity. The requisite biofuels and industrial chemistry have to be rationed for nationally critical uses such as medical logistics, irreplaceable producton, and critical infrastructure. Their military has limited heavy strategic weapons: coastal artillery, naval weapons, rockets, drones, and so on. Infantry and small naval weapons will will use almost exclusively mechanical energy to propel projectiles. That means mechanical means of launching projectiles dominate infantry and small vehicle/naval weapons. I'll say that means air rifles and pneumatics dominate infantry arms and small artillery... but crossbows and old siege weapons with low energy sci-fi engineering are also plausible. Grenades/mines/mortars/rpgs as we know them are probably replaced by pneumatics and botanical derived incendiaries or mild explosives. Clovus, being the biggest and most intact solarpunk nation will be an early innovator on air rifle designs.

The Murikan Empire maintains firearms to dominate in raids and as propganda but it's not even remotely capable of sustaining a long or peer war with them. Production is prolific for in-world production levels but vastly under our world's production levels. They also do a lot of stupid shit chasing prestige and profit rather than synchronizing national production. They have a tiered access system that should look familiar.

  1. Gucci "Pre-War" weapons that are well maintained, in bespoke calibres, and have lots of accessories. This stuff is very rare. P90s with or SCAR-Hs with suppressors, holographic sights, flashlights with lithium ion batteries, underbarrel grenade launchers, and so on. These are hoarded by overlords. They are tightly controlled and rented out to prestigious soldiers (tier 1 specops or high ranking and wealthy officer status symbols).
  2. What we'd consider standard infantry weapons. These have "boring" i.e. standardized-ish ammo. Saved mostly for serious units... and seriously neglected systematically. Most visibly seen as junior officer status symbols. Range from WW2 bolt actions to ak's with red dots. This is tier 2. These weapons are typically in the hands of the elite units of the more serious colonial militias, middling officers/lords, and the non-disposable imperial marines.
  3. Rusty assault rifles with duct tape and misaligned sights, barely functioning ww2 weapons, higher quality pipe guns, higher quality 3D printed guns, and mostly functional hunting weapons. This is what the vast majority of Murikan Marines and a few of the better supplied domestic militias use. These soldiers are expected to provide their own weapons and ammo, so it's whatever the hell they can scrape up. Literally no standardization. Their job is to bully and raid people without guns to keep tribute flowing upwards. They are gig workers that have "made it".
  4. Shitty pipe guns, 3D printed firearms, or mechanical launchers of some kind. These are totally unregulated and prolific throughout the empire among civilians, organized crime, sheriff posses, unorganized crime, and the poorer militia soldiers. Overlords think this is a boon as it keeps the bottom destabilized and "makes men tougher".

Energy

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Mechanical

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Electrical

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Civil

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Transport

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Construction and housing

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