The Millennials in the History of the Mandate

(the following refers to the worldlines of the American Mandate)

The Millennials                          born 1983-2005                                Civic-Adaptive

Like the generation that fought the First American Civil War, their crisis came too soon and was resolved ambiguously, whipsawing between the First Terrorist War under George W. Bush, the feckless delusions of the Barack Hussein Obama Administration, and the return to battle in the Second Terrorist War. In their youth, they fought hard but were frequently betrayed, as their Boomer and Slacker leaders repeatedly shifted direction, and initially failed to take the Terrorist threat with sufficient seriousness.

In their prime (2005-2047) they built greatly and enduringly.  This is the generation that returned to Luna and colonized Mars, restored the economy after the Second Great Depression, and led the conquest of the Carribean Basin in the Third Terrorist War. But here too they suffered repeated betrayal: their hero President John Garcia failed to prevent the San Antonio Massacre, in which the Narcoterrorist government of Mexico executed a partially-successful nuclear strike against Texas.

Their next hero, President AnthonyPowers, staged a coup from above and made himself the first President to rule the United States of America as a dictatorship, bringing about the fall of the First American Republic in 2040.  He completed the conquest of Mexico, winning the Fourth Terrorist War and completely securing American control of the Carribean.   By the time that President Biggs restored the Republic in 2045, they had become more than a little cynical of their political leadership.

They were also quite divided, which became obvious once they started moving into leadership positions (2025-2069).  They ran the cuntry under Powers and Biggs and the Crazy Fifties.  When they advanced into high leadership positions their generalship was largely ineffective in the Second Pacific War.  They were saved from the consequences of their indecision by General Randall O'Hare, himself a late Millennial (born 2001).  They then led on both sides in the Second (2067-69) and Third (2076-77) American Civil Wars, which ended with the victory of President George Custis Lee.

As elders, many saw their lives blighted by these wars, and they were only too happy to surrender their freedom to George C. Lee when he assumedthe title of Commander Lee the First in 2080.  Only the oldest Millennials (such as Jeanne Delarue) remembered a time when the American government did not rule unconstitutionally, save for the brief golden age under Garcia. They had decided to put their trust in princes rather than principles; by and large Commander Lee I did not betray them.  Most Millennials died before the suppression of the Omeganists or the Belt Rebellion.

The Sea-Selks

 

“The Sea-Selks”

© 2013

by

Jordan S. Bassior

Sea-selks (aka “selkies”) were first gennied in 2080 by the University of Hawaii, under a grant from the United States Department of Defense.  The original intent was to create the perfect underwater rangers, but the basic design from the beginning also had obvious civilian and engineering applications.

Sea-selks are humanoid with hairless gray skin, large eyes and webbed hands and feet.  They can walk and run at normal speed on land, and swim equally fast in the water.  They are air-breathing, but their lungs are linked to a special “third lung” organ which acts as an extra oxygen store, enabling them to operate without problems at any depth to which a human can skin-dive, to operate with some difficulty in deeper waters, and hold their breaths for about 12 to over 60 minutes depending on exertion levels, before they risk drowning.  They can endure wide variations in water temperature, and have superior underwater senses (equal to that of most marine mammals, but inferior to cetaceans), being essentially the primate equivalent of seals.

The main physical disadvantage of being a sea-selk is the skin.  While highly resistant to both heat and cold, and streamlined for rapid swimming, their dermal biology requires constant moisture.  They are uncomfortable when their skins are dried, and actually suffer injury (about an hour to critical condition) in very dry air such as an Earthly desert.  Both physically and emotionally, selkies need to spend long stretches of the day immersed in water, and selkie vehicles need to have some sort of pools in their chambers, or at least very humid interiors.  This is a problem for selkies who must travel in vehicles designed for normal humans, or spend much time in ordinary human structures.

The standard solution is a “moist-suit” – a garment rather like a normal diver’s “drysuit” but with the opposite purpose – it keeps the wearer’s skin continually in contact with water.  Moist-suits have some minor disadvantages:  they slosh noisily with each motion of the wearer, must be kept warm in freezing environments, and may leak some water from time to time; but they are adequate to enable selkies to operate comfortably in the drier environments preferred by most Mandatial races, including baseline humans.  Moist-suits became commercially available in the 2080’s and 2090’s, and became steadily cheaper and more reliable in the 22^nd and 23^rd centuries.

The long cessation of most Earthly warfare from the mid-2080’s to the 2180’s meant that there was little need for sea-selks in naval combat, but they found ample employment in commercial operations:  particularly the colonization of the continental shelves and oceanic archipelago reefs.  They were formally-granted full civil rights from the date of their creation, and were never considered chattel property.  However, there was originally much prejudice against them from many baseline humans:  some maritime workers felt threatened by their superior aquatic adaptations, or annoyed by the minor inconveniences posed by their entry into human-frequented areas.  Baseline-humans who rarely saw them found them uncomfortably strange, or even despised them on “moral principles.”

Sea-selks of a given sub-race can freely breed with selks of the same sub-race but not with any other beings; it requires genning to make such crosses fertile, though it is easier with sea-selks of other sub-races than with wholly-different human variants.  At their racial conception in 2080, there were only a few dozen sea-selks, but the University of Hawaii added dozens and eventually hundreds to thousands more every year until the 2150’s.  At that point Commander Lee IV deemed the race self-sustaining, and gradually reduced funding for their project.  During the American Peace from the 22^nd through 24^th centuries, Sea-selks expanded through Earth’s oceans, spawning variant races who dwelt in the oceanic depths, and others who inhabited the seas of other worlds, such as the subsurface water oceans of Europa, Ganymede and Titan.

The first sea-selks were mosty trained as underwater combatants, engineers, technicians, scouts, scientists and aquacultural workers.  By 2130, they had branched out into various other professions, but those original professions became traditional in many selk families.  For centuries, the sea-selks retained an adventurous and enterprising culture, even as the attitudes of Earth baseline-humans softened, and by the end of the American Pace, Earth’s sea-selks were disproportionately common in the Space Forces (despite the disadvantages imposed upon them by their special life-support equipment) and other high-risk, high-demand fields.

Over time, the basic sea-selk gen was improved, and baseline-human attitudes improved toward them.  In the 2120’s, due to public awareness of the extreme selk loyalty to the American Mandate, popular prejudices softened, and by 2180, when anti-variant attitudes became widely identified with Islamism, they vanished entirely.  Gennied improvements mostly involved improved built-in life support, sensory and communications abilities. 

The sea-selks became an important part of American Mandatial society, until the fall of the Mandate itself in the 28^th century – by which time advances in borging and equipment enabled all other humans to at will enjoy the same amphibious advantages.  The lineages of the sea-selks never died out completely, and survived the fall of the West, lasting into and even flourishing in the Solar cycle of civilization which was to emerge in the 4^th Millennium AD. 

The Shattie Skyslips

"The Shattie Skyslip"

(c) 2013

by 

Jordan S. Bassior

(the following was taken from a popular guidesim to Outie weapons systems published by Northam Berlds in 2290)

The Shattie Skyslip is perhaps the ultimate aerospace fighter.  It is optimized for Saturnian atmospheric conditions.  Massing around just 500 metric tones, and shaped something like a triangular seed pod, its hull is composed entirely of woven carbon nanofiber under a silicon nanofiber sleeve, offering only the most minimum radar signature, even with its advanced electromagnetic cloaking device turned off.  The lack of significant metal in its construction greatly augments its stealth.

A Skyslip is powered by an onboard lithium-boosted dual-fuel (deuterium-tritium and deuterium-helium) nuclear fusion vortex reactor.  Airscoops can suck in and an onboard purifier separate out fusion fuel in flight through the Saturnian atmosphere, rendering the Skyslip independent of fixed refueling stations.  Energy can be stored in a nanobloc chemical matrix; some Skyslips have recently been fitted with positron coil batteries at the expense of some of their stealth.

Skyslips are equipped with plasma rocket engines, capable of indefinite cruising at up to 2G thrust and boost up to 5G with fusion afterburners.  They are thus physically capable of attaining Saturnian orbit or even escape velocity, but are not well-suited for warfare outside the Saturnian atmosphere and hence would rarely do so in actual military operations.  Their engines boast a turbofan stealth mode, workable only in atmosphere, which greatly reduces speed but results in them leaving almost no detectable drive wake.  A deformable surface control system (Defscos) coupled with strategically-placed vents allowing all-aspect vectoring in forward flight (viffing) makes the Skyslip incredibly maneuverable.

Maintenance is extremely easy, because a Skyslip is semi-alive.  A mechanical lymphatic and circulatory system enables nanoscale damage-control bots to reach every part of its hull and machinery, repeairing any damage or wear from usage, given time and the proper feedstock materials.  It carries a certain quantity of these materials aboard in its own stores, and can take on more at need.  Bases, termed “stables,” hold ample “feed” and the “grooming vats” enabling repair of major damage; also “breeding vats” enable new Skyslips to be produced, or even reproduced in the organic sense, as they can be cloned and combined from existing designs.

Skyslips are controlled by advanced neurolinkage, for which the Shattie brain is opitimized (a non-Shattie could control a Skyslip, but rarely with such speed and efficiency).  Since the Skyslip itself has a full aint brain, pilot and slip are alike linked by a strong bond, emotional on both sides.  A Shattie’s Skyslip is his best friend and closest ally:  a relationship generally even more intimate than even one of the Shatties’ hermaphroditic love affairs.  Shattie without Slip or Slip without Shattie is bereft, and every attempt is made to re-mate the surviving widow of such a pair.

The main armament is typically a single capacitor-fed 30-GW pulse cosmer (cosmic-ray laser), often termed a “stinger,” and ultimately supplied to the Shatties by the American Mandate, as their native arms technology is not up to producing such an advanced and powerful weapons system, built to stealth specifications so that it contains little metal and is hard to detect until it fires.  Secondary armament includes up to three 250-MW beam x-rasers, in defensive mountings atop the tail and on each wingtip.  Cosmer or even disruptor torpedoes may be carried externally (at some expense to performance and much to stealth) and 250-KT to 5-MT tactical AAM’s (air-to-air missiles) are commonly shipped in the internal bays, where they cannot compromise stealth.

Shattie aerial tactics are more about maneuver and precision than raw firepower.  Ideally, the Shattie uses stealth to put hes Slip close behind the foe and take him down with one or two shots from his stinger.  Torpeodes and even missiles are mostly reserved for larger and slower targets than fighters.  A 25-GW cosmer can do fearsome damage to other small craft;  well-placed shots can threaten even warships – and the Shatties are crack shots.

Skyslips carry almost no armor protection, save for the minimum to enable them to survive maneuvers at speed through the Saturnian atmosphere.  Shielding is rarely switched on save for in actual pitched battle, because it would too greatly compromise stealth, and generally consists of some sort of electrodynamic flash or pulse system for the outer and electrostatic steady system for the inner course.  Shields are however de-emphasized in the design and are thus weak even by small-craft standards.

The survival of Skyslips in air fighting thus depends tremendously on active defense against missiles, rapid precision shooting to take down enemy beam platforms, and extremely-violent maneuver to deny enemy beams precise shots along clear lines of fire.  In the Saturnian atmosphere and with Shattie pilots, squadrons of Skyslips are lethal threats:  in open space, or with less-talented pilots, Skyslips would be death-traps, a fact of which the Shatties are most painfully aware.

Skyslips are not well-suited to the American way of war, or even life.  We are justly proud of the Mandatial Forces, officered by the best our elite breed and crewed by humans gennied to be perfectly loyal, perfectly-obedient and perfectly-efficient soldiers.  But they have enabled the Shatties to win and keep their independence against the decadent Corporate Republic of Titan, and manned by our allies, they help defend American interests out beyond the Jovian system, where the wild Outies dwell.

We salute them.

END.

Slugthrowers as Space Artillery in the American Mandate

"Slug" is a general term for any unguided (or semi-guided) projectile.  Slugthrowers are as old as our family:  apes evolved with rocks in their hands.  Mechanically-launched slugs appear in the Late Pleistocene to Holocene in the form of spearthrowers, slings and bows; complex mechanically-launched slugs were first developed by the Ancient Greeks and Chinese (ballistae and crossbows), and chemically-propelled slugs by the Medieval Chinese and Europeans (fire arrows and cannons).

Slugs dominated warfare from the 14^th through 20^th centuries.  Cannon ruled sieges and large battlefields; muskets and rifles short-ranged combat.  The subtype of slug called a shell – essentially a slug with an explosive and detonation mechanism – delivered by artillery tube or dropped from an airplane, ruled the battlefields of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  Even the first use of nuclear weapons, in World War II, was in the form of air-dropped bombs:  nuclear missiles did not become a reality until the 1950’s and were not deployed in numbers until the 1960’s.

With the development of missiles, slugs and shells became increasingly less important in strategic warfare.  Aside from personal combat, the main role of slugs and shells in 21^st-century warfare was as defensive weapons designed to shoot down attacking missiles.  These autocannon had an important combat role well into the 22^nd century, though principally to backstop anti-missile and anti-torpedo defenses based primarily around lasers, blasters and missiles.

In the late 22^nd century the development of the gausson (“gauss cannon,” basically an electromagnetic slugthrower) to full practicality gave the slugthrower a new lease on life.  Gauss-cannon could throw their slugs much faster than chemical propulsion, and the impact of the projectiles at several, eventually dozens of miles per second delivered concentrated energy which was superior to anything producible by small energy weapons.  The main limitation on the gauss-gun was range:  even if it fired a self-guiding projectile (essentially a very small missile) it was still essentially a close defense system.

In the 24^th century the leaper (“laser-propelled round”) further extended the range and speed of slugthrowers.  A leaper was propelled primarily by a laser mounted on the launching platform, though it might be given a starting boost by a gausson or other mechanism.  This allowed the leaper to accelerate all during its run, reaching terminal velocities of hundreds of miles per second, and it could use the received energy for delta vee, making it a sort of missile with a very limited engagement cone.  Leapers were important because they pushed the offensive-defensive projectile equation strongly to the defense, which meant that torpedoes were greatly weakened and such weapons as meson cannon and neutron blasters greatly strengthened in space combat.

Finally, the late 26^th century saw the development of the arkvee (“R-K-V” or “relativistic kill vehicle”) to practicality.  This was essentially a very fast leaper, using antimatter-pumped lasers on the gun mount to allow acceleration to many thousands of miles per seconds.  An arkvee, as the name implied, could if powerful enough reach a good fraction of “C” (the speed of light) and its kinetic energy would be immense:  at such velocities fairly small slugs impacted with the force of contact nuclear explosives.

Arkvees very strongly threw the balance of force to the offensive, and put a premium on powerplant, agility and active shields as the principal defense against such weapons..  When coupled with the gravitic-harness inertial damper, which enabled crewed ships to maneuver at hundreds of gravities, arkvees very much weakened all fixed defenses, such as the space fortresses which the Late Mandate had so very much relied upon to defend itself against the Outies.  The use of large numbers of small antimatter-powered, photon-driven grav-harnessed warships, armed with arkvees and disruptor cannon, by the Hordes which swept in from the Outer System during the 27^th and 28^th centuries, were the immediate cause of the fall of the American Mandate in Space, and its reduction to a remnant in Eurasia for the next millennium.

Birth of the Mardween (2012) by Jordan S. Bassior

"Birth of the Mardween"

(c) 2012

by Jordan S. Bassior

IntroductionShort for "Martian Bedouin," the Mardween are an Arab-derived culture of Sunni Muslim religious fanatics who emigrated to Mars in the late 21st and early 22nd centuries to practice their Wahabbist cult with strictures increasingly-illegal on Earth, including extreme patriarchy, honor-killings and the enslavement of non-Mardween.  The Mardween were implacable enemies of Western Civilization in general and of the American Mandate in particular:  in truth they deeply hated all life and civilization other than their own.  In the end they became merely a force for chaos and destruction, a taint on Mars and Mankind.

The First Martian Hegira
The culture was founded by Ahmed Jabril ("The Founder") Farouk who on January 15th, 2089 led the first Hegira to landfall on Mars, with the intent of eventually dominating Mars by demographic expansion.  Farouk's followers first setled around northern oases, and were tolerated by the other Martian settlements as long as they refrained from raiding them.  There, they built conventional domed outposts and shallow subterranean settlements, architecturally-similar to (if a bit better-fortified than) those constructed by the other Martian cultures.  In these early days, these Muslim colonists were still sufficiently weak -- and sane -- to avoid provoking a war of ethnocide from the other settlements:  indeed they participated in the 2097 declaration of the Martian Confederation, and fought for the Confederation against both the abortive 2150-51 attack by Lee III and the successful invasion in 2154-55 under Lee IV.

The Second Martian Hegira

When the American Mandate finally conquered Mars, in 2155, Farouk's eldest son and successor, Abdullah ("The Grim") led the most fanatical of his followers south of the equator into the deep deserts, in what was called the Second Hegira.  There, they at first attempted to build normal colonies, though well-concealed from the American authorities, in the hopes that risings would sweep the American presence from Mars, allowing them to return to the Founder's plan.  Part of Abdullah's strategy was to refrain from raiding as much as possibe, and to conduct such raids only by indirect and deniable means, so that the blame might be put upon "bandits."

In 2169, however, an astute investigator for the American Forces Military Police successfully proved to the satisfaction of General Sutton that Farouk's Wahabbists were actually behind the raids.  US forces descended upon Abdullah Farouk's capital of Sira by near-total surprise and captured the colony, finding ample evidence of Wahabbist misdeeds, including slaves taken from other Martian settlements, and stores missing from military convoys and depots.  Abdullah the Grim was slain in the fighting, but intelligence captured from his computers and some of his other followers allowed Sutton to roll up and occupy the Wahabbist settlements.

Here, the Mandate missed a major opportunity, because Sutton did not have the authority to disperse the Wahabbist civilians and hence end their culture.  Some of the most fanatical Wahabbists were able to escape into the unsettled deserts, where they set up heavily-stealthed subterranean encampments and made only the most minimal contacts with civilization, even Muslim civilization.  The populace in the Muslim settlements, both northern and southern, strongly sympathized with these fanatics -- for the first time called "Martian Bedouin" -- and young hotheads frequently ran off to join them. 

When Sutton tried a partial dispersal in 2171, through mass arrests in the most egregiously-rebellious settlements, to cut off supplies to the Bedouin, he aroused political opposition amongst liberals back home, who argued that he was unfairly persecuting a rich and unique culture that merely wanted to be left alone to their traditional way of life.  The new Commander Nicole Lee, fifth of her dynasty and one who imagined herself to be highly enlightened in the European mode, repudiated Sutton's actions, released his prisoners, and sent Sutton back to Earth, to take control of the continental defense of Antarctica.

In 2176, the shocking pornographic broadcasts made by Nicole Lee, as part of America's Quadricententennial Celebration, outraged many people throughout the Solar System, and in particular its Muslim population.  The terrorist atom-bombing of Washington DC was seen by many religious fanatics of all stripes as a sign that Armageddon was upon the Universe.  On Earth, there was widespread Muslim rioting. On Mars, these events both offended the Muslims, and heartened them when they saw Nicole Lee's incompetent and cowardly reaction to the attack on Washington DC, which included a pointless persecution of the Changists (a group hated by orthodox Muslims and blamed by Lee V for the attack) -- in an effort to avoid having to confront mainstream Islam.

In 2177, Lee V made matters worse by dispatching her favorite LaRousse, whom she had made a Marshal in the American Forces, to Mars to serve as Governor.  Marshal LaRousse was despised by much of the American military because of his inept response to the Muslim attacks of 2176, and the appointment was a deliberate attempt to remove him temporarily from the Terrestrial scene so that he might be returned at a future date, his sins overlaid by more recent blunders by other high officials.

LaRousse was a very poor choice for a Governor.  To begin with, he viewed his appointment primarily as a golden opportunity to line his own pocket through bribery, graft and outright extortion.  The wise policies of the late Commander Lee IV had led to a Martian economic boom, with the combination of superior Martian technical skill and access to the huge Terrestrial and Lunarian markets proving immensely profitable for Martian commerce.  To LaRousse, these thriving enterprises were so many geese to be plucked -- or even slaughtered -- for his own benefit.

So highly-skilled Martians, in control of a sizable and modern industrial infrastructure, who had been reconciled by Lee IV to American administration on the proviso that their economic growth was encouraged, were now being plundered by the disgraced favorite of Lee V, and plundered so ruthlessly that they were thrown into recession.  The Martians had been free a scant 22 years earlier -- just one generation past -- and they were far from tamed to the point that they would submit meekly to such treatment.

Formal delegations were rebuffed with scorn.  Public demonstrations were dispersed with lethal force.  Angered, and mourning the death of some of their own youth, the Martian political leadership readily accepted arms smuggled in from the League of Europa -- and supplemented them with many more munitions forged in Martian factories.  Survivors of the original wars of 2150 and 2154-55 provided leadership; the new generation was already old enough to provide ample recruits.

The rebellion against LaRousse erupted in 2178, just two yearsafter the appointment of that venal Governor.  Among the Martians joining in the rising included the Muslims, which was ironic because LaRousse's malfeasances included an almost complete suspension of patrol and law enforcement activity against the Muslim settlements (he preferred to use his forces to intimidate the wealthier non-Muslim towns, the better to fleece them).  LaRousse was so plainly a despicable, licentious coward that all this attempt at appeasement produced was utter scorn on the part of even the more moderate Muslims, let alone the fierce Bedouin of the South.

In the encounter, LaRousse's forces -- led by political favorites and supplies stripped by embezzlement -- proved woefully below the normal Mandatial standard, and far less able than were the Martian rebels.  In a mere month the rebels seized control of the whole planet and its orbital facilities; only the forts on Deimos remained in American hands, and these were so besieged that the commanding officer at Deimos, Brigadier Leonard Oswald Ferrell (a more competent nephew of that Terrence Ferrell famously ambushed at Blackrock in 2121) was barely able to keep enough lasers and casters working to prevent a precision bombardment of his works.

With this victory the Bedouin -- led by Hakim ("The Cruel") Farouk, younger brother of the slain Abdullah, ran wild.  They were just sufficiently sane to avoid attacking their fellow rebels, but they did make prisoner various American and other foreign personnel, both military and civilian, and upon them visited the most horrible abuses.  Many were mutilated and enslaved; others simply slain, with or without slow torture.  Some of the worst atrocities were actually comcast to Earth, by way of defiance.

These actions horrified not merely the Mandate but also all sane men throughout the Solar System -- including most of the Martian rebels.  When Morton Blythe Stanek formed the Second Martian Confederation, it was with great reluctance that the Muslims were represented, and it was generally understood by the other Martians that the Muslims were to be kept away from any real decision-making powers -- which politically-weakened the revolutionary regime.

Marshal LaRousse survived the defeat of the Mandatial forces by fleeing Mars -- not for Deimos, which he judged doomed -- but for Luna.  Faced with political embarassment and strategic disaster, Lee V brought General Sutton back from his Antarctic obscurity, made him a Marshal, and put him in command of the American Martian Expeditionary Force, tasked with recovering Mars for the Mandate, and suppressing the rebellion.

Sutton swept swiftly to Mars, taking the calculated risk of leading with a strong force of assault carriers, strike cruisers, destroyers and fast tenders, while the main body of battlefleet lagged behind.  Consequently, he was able to arrive in early 2179, before the Martians had sufficiently fortified Phobos, and though his light forces took losses from the enemy defenses, his torpedoes battered and then his marines captured the inner Martian moon,  allowing Ferrell to reopen the port on Deimos and opening the port on Phobos to the American transports.

Now with strong superiority in Martian orbital space, Sutton brought up his battleships and bombarded the Martian surface defenses into uselessness, gaining complete orbital supremacy.  Massing his forces rapidly but with precision, he bombarded local defenses around Bradbury and effected a landing at that port, seizing and strongly garrisoning a wide worldhead.  He was able to hold it against desperate Martian counterattacks, within which could be landed further reinforcements.  The Martian ability to concentrate against his landing was limited by orbital interdiction fire, and Sutton's own ability to make raids and even secondary landings as required elsewhere on the planet.

As for the Second Martian Confederation, following the fall of Bradbury its political disintegration was rapid.  Sutton was almost as canny a diplomat as he was a general officer, and he knew Mars well enough to grasp where lay the political faultlines.  He covertly treated with all the major Martian factions, even the Muslims, and offered all pardons and good treatment should they submit to the American Mandate.  As one after another settlement and faction surrendered even before his troops rolled up to their gates, he was as good as his word toward most of the factions -- but not the Southern Wahabbists.  The Martian Bedouin, of course, kept on fighting -- though after Hakim the Cruel died in an American raid on October 26th 2179, they fought as independent bands, clans and families rather than as a united force.

Sutton had seen firsthand the barbarity of their culture in his 2169-71 campaign, and was well aware of the Bedouin atrocities of 2178.  After he had firmly garrisoned all Martian settlements -- especially those of the Muslims -- he conducted a thorough investigation into all actions committed by the Martian Muslims from 2171 on which would be considered criminal even in most Outie polities, such as rape, slavery, torture and the murder of prisoners.  All the while he recomcast the original atrocities, with tantalizing leaks from his investigations to outrage not only the population of the Mandate but also the reconquered Martians.  The final straw -- for the Martians -- was when he produced evidence showing that such abuses had also been committed against other Martians who had somehow fallen afoul of Muslim ire.

With this revelation, he sprung the trap.  The Martian Muslims were assigned almost all blame for both the revolt and its atrocities.  The other Martians gladly agreed with this notion.  Virtually every Muslim who had been an officer, official or even combatant in 2178-79 was convicted of war crimes.  Sentences ranged from death to mental enslavement to long prison terms.  Every child belonging to their families was judged to be in an unfit environment and put in fosterage.  The Muslim colonies themselves were confiscated in reparations for the atrocities and their lands and other assets put up for sale; their populations forcibly evicted and dispersed among other settlements, both on Mars and elsewhere.

The Third Martian Hegira

As one would expect, the most fanatical of the surviving Muslim Martians refused to accept this grim edict.  With the death of Farouk the Cruel, they had no overall leader, but the surviving Sheiks were able to organize escapes of families with considerable amounts of war-surplus equipment into the deep Southern deserts, far from even the old Wahabbist settlements.  There, the Mars-Bedouin were determined to make a stand for their religion, for their culture, and for their way of life -- including raids against and the enslavement of the unbelievers.

At first, of course, they were hiding far more than raiding.  American Forces pursued them, but desultorily -- as long as they stayed away from convoys and settlements, and did not make their presence obvious, the Americans were too busy rebuilding Mars to be able to devote the tremendous effort needed to find and neutralie every single Mars-Bedouin holdout.

Marshal Sutton would have liked to get them all, of course, but in 2180, less than one year after he had completed his conquest of Mars, the Second Great Muslim revolt erupted on Earth.  With significant portions of Earth itself under rebel Muslim control, Sutton could not keep most of his forces:  they were shipped back to the Terrrestrial System to support Marshal Hispano's Arabian campaigns.  While Sutton did not wholly abandon the field to the Mars-Bedouin, even in the deepest deserts of the south, all he could do was to guard scattered outposts, escort convoys, and carry out the occasional search-and-destroy operation -- usually in reaction to a Bedouin raid.

It was during this period that Sutton's troops -- often overstretched, tired, and increasingly-cynical about the prospects for long-term victory against such an elusive foe, began to call the Martian Bedouin simply the "Mardween" -- and the culture received the name under which it would be finally known to history.

Generational Social Variance in Future Histories: Sexual Mores of the American Mandate

Introduction

Too much science fiction creates only one set of social customs for "the future" -- it basically assumes that things change a bit from today until they have adapted to "future technology," and then remain frozen in that form from now until the heat-death of the Universe.  Well, maybe not that long, but it sometimes seems that way.

In this article I'll show a simple way that this can be avoided in the construction of a future history, by charting in a very basic fashion the variations in sexual mores of an imagined future society, my "American Mandate."

The American Mandate

The "American Mandate" future history is based on Spenglerian and Toynbeeian cyclic history.  It assumes that, over the 21st century, the present-day global order coalesces around the United States of America  as the Universal State of the West.  In the West's last great burst of creativity and expansion, other worlds of the Solar System are colonized, but then the West sinks into its cultural "winter."  America, now a semi-fascist republic under "Chief Commanders," sometimes referred to as the "American Mandate," rules the Inner System; while new cultures, collectively called the "Outies," are born and grow great out beyond the Asteroid Belt.  Eventually, America declines and is conquered by the more vital and energetic "Outie" civilizations.

The Sexual More Rating System

Since I'm being simple here, I will analyze the population in "generational" cohorts of 25 years (an oversimplification as real "generations" are more on the order of 20-22 years).  This allows me four cohorts born per century, as follows "01-25," "26-50," "50-75" and "76-00."  The precise length chosen for one's cohorts is arbitrary, though note that real human customs rarely change drastically over any period of time shorter than a decade, and when they do change that rapidly it is usually under some extreme stress such as a devastating plague, disastrous war or major philosophical upheaval.

Again keeping it basic, we will analyze sexual mores on a unidimensional "strictness of morality" (which is a major oversimplification) with five levels:  from least to most strict we shall call them "Licentious," "Free," "Normal," "Restrained" and "Puritanical."  We shall set "Normal" to be the equivalent of American morality in the mid-20th century, with "Free" being the equivalent of American morality today, "Licentious" the "free-love" subculture of c. 1965-75, "Restrained" being Edwardian middle-class and "Puritanical" Victorian middle-class values.

Here we go:

Period         Level                       Comments
2001-2025:  Free                          Present-day.
2026-2050:  Normal                     Continuation of current conservative trend.
2051-2075:  Free                          Period of foreign and civil wars:  fall of the Republic.
2076-2100:  Normal-Restrained   Formation of American Mandate, new idealism.
2101-2125:  Restrained                Heavy propaganda preventing renewed sexual liberation.
2126-2150:  Restrained-Normal   Moral decline under the mad Commander, Lee III.
2151-2175:  Normal-Free             Continued moral decline under the two later Lees.
2176-2200:  Free-Normal             Lees fall, Mandate reformed, public morality recovering.
2201-2225:  Normal                     Moral recovery, but not to restraint of earlier Mandate.
2226-2250:  Restrained                Despite First Solar War, the Inner System long stable.
2251-2275:  Normal                     Social exuberance in first decades of Long Peace.
2276-2300:  Free                          Society relaxes in the enjoyment of Long Peace.
2301-2325:  Normal                     Moral reform under Murasaki the Great.
2326-2350:  Restrained                America at apogee:  great morality and public pride.
2351-2375:  Restrained-Free       Near social collapse under the shock of the Metaplague.
2376-2400:  Free-Normal            The Mandate recovers from demographic devastation.
2401-2425:  Normal-Licentious  Second near collapse due to defeat in Second Solar War.
2426-2450:  Licentious-Free       The Mandate begins a partial recovery.
2451-2475:  Free                         Society remains troubled:  plots and finally a civil war.
2476-2500:  Licentious               The Time of Troubles:  all values are adrift.

(Note:  split-values means that the early part of that generation learns the first-named value set, while the later part of that generation learns the last-named value set.  Change is usually only by one level per generation, but under exceptional circumstances can happen more rapidly).

There you have it:  five hundred years of social history (in the single aspect of sexual morality) condensed into twenty lines -- very much oversimplified, but providing a quick way to imagine part of the background of any character from this universe -- and containing a hidden complexity.

The complexity lies in the fact that a person's basic values are formed in their first decades of life.  A person born in, say, 2088 ("Restrained") will by age 60 in 2148 in a "Normal" era, but this does not mean that his own values will have changed as rapidly as those of the younger generation.  He may well look at the immorality of the younger set with disapproval and disdain.  Likewise, the person born in 2288, in the "Free" times following the conquest of the Jovian System, will at 60 in 2348 be living in the "Restrained" period of Murasaki the Great, and may find the younger folk to be boringly strait-laced by his standards.

Conclusion:

What this does to science fiction is offer the prospect of social change:  and not just the unidirectional social change of "In the Past we lived [like we do in 2011], but now we live [like the author's ideological hobbyhorse].  Real history doesn't work like this:  customs change back and forth, often in a rather cyclic fashion.  Technology enjoys a "ratchet effect," as I've described, but society does not:  it drifts about under the influence of various forces.   Even if it moves in one direction for a long time, eventually some new factor will push or pull it in another.

I demonstrated how to do this for sexual customs, but social change can be charted for any social factor.  Liberty, economic growth, the popularity of novelty fake-noses-and-moustaches -- anything.  This is a tool of considerable power and versatility, which can help a future history come alive, and I urge its more general use.