Descending Road - Before The Story by Dana W. Paxson

Before The Story

2330 CE

The Twenty-First Century featured two great plagues that halved the human race, a global economic collapse that halved it again, and a bootstrapped revitalization that wove the slowly-recovering world of humanity into one. This wholeness did not last.

The Twenty-Second Century brought recovery of the delicate technological web of knowledge and development that had fallen apart in the late Twenty-First, followed by a great division of nations into Sinese and non-Sinese, brought about by the appearance of two powerful leaders, one in each camp. The Sinese lands — the former China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Vietnam and Cambodia, together with part of Eastern Russia — became the empire of Ia Ma Tou, the son of a Chinese social reformer who had died in prison and a Mongol woman who had been exiled from her homeland to Taiwan. The rest of the world looked for leadership to Indira Bhatti, descendant of Mahatma Gandhi. Ia and Bhatti had dredged their respective realms up from near-total anarchy into great strength, and their rock-hard wills raised between them a political barrier many called the New Great Wall, dividing the whole world in two.

Fueled by their rivalry, both East and West raced outward. While the West laid claim to cislunar space and the inner planets Venus and Mercury, the Sinese made a stunning leap out to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond, colonizing the great moons of the Jovian planets with thriving industrial communities. At Mars, the two titanic factions collided, falling into a costly struggle to claim the Red Planet.

The struggle resolved on economic terms. The Sinese took Phobos and Deimos as base points for travel between Earth and the Jovian planets, and the West claimed the surface of Mars along with some commercial rights in the asteroid belt. During that stage, the Sinese developed the mass-thrust technology they called the Hot Stick (Làde Jing, or hot stalk), which combined laser-driven fusion with nanoengineered chain reactions to build giant rocket engines. It worked.

Story List	SURPRISE ME	Author Page
USER SURVEY	PUZZLE ME	MAKE ELM MARK

HOVER Lucida Bright BARE	HOVER Lucida Bright FULL	HOVER Palatino Linotype BARE
HOVER Palatino Linotype FULL	HOVER Times New Roman BARE	HOVER Times New Roman FULL
PAD Arial BARE	PAD Arial FULL	PAD Lucida Bright BARE
PAD Lucida Bright FULL	PAD Times New Roman BARE	PAD Times New Roman FULL


	Before The Story 2330 CE The Twenty-First Century featured two great plagues that halved the human race, a global economic collapse that halved it again, and a bootstrapped revitalization that wove the slowly-recovering world of humanity into one. This wholeness did not last. The Twenty-Second Century brought recovery of the delicate technological web of knowledge and development that had fallen apart in the late Twenty-First, followed by a great division of nations into Sinese and non-Sinese, brought about by the appearance of two powerful leaders, one in each camp. The Sinese lands — the former China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Vietnam and Cambodia, together with part of Eastern Russia — became the empire of Ia Ma Tou, the son of a Chinese social reformer who had died in prison and a Mongol woman who had been exiled from her homeland to Taiwan. The rest of the world looked for leadership to Indira Bhatti, descendant of Mahatma Gandhi. Ia and Bhatti had dredged their respective realms up from near-total anarchy into great strength, and their rock-hard wills raised between them a political barrier many called the New Great Wall, dividing the whole world in two. Fueled by their rivalry, both East and West raced outward. While the West laid claim to cislunar space and the inner planets Venus and Mercury, the Sinese made a stunning leap out to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond, colonizing the great moons of the Jovian planets with thriving industrial communities. At Mars, the two titanic factions collided, falling into a costly struggle to claim the Red Planet. The struggle resolved on economic terms. The Sinese took Phobos and Deimos as base points for travel between Earth and the Jovian planets, and the West claimed the surface of Mars along with some commercial rights in the asteroid belt. During that stage, the Sinese developed the mass-thrust technology they called the Hot Stick (Làde Jing, or hot stalk), which combined laser-driven fusion with nanoengineered chain reactions to build giant rocket engines. It worked.