SUBLIGHT Mars

Here, courtesy of our friends at NASA, is a topographical map of Mars. What you will notice is that the north of Mars is flat lowland plains and the south is crater-pitted highlands. This is important to know if we're going to terraform it.

It's pretty easy to terraform Mars. (This is obviously false but let's play along). All you have to do is pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This will warm the planet, causing the carbon dioxide locked in Mars' dry-ice poles to sublimate back into the atmosphere, thus magnifying the greenhouse effect. It will also raise Martian air pressure above the Armstrong limit, the point at which air pressure is high enough that water no longer boils at human body temperature. Then import some water and oxygen, both of which substances Earth has an overabundance of, and Bob's your uncle. The only concern is that Mars has no magnetosphere, meaning the atmosphere will be constantly eroded away by solar wind, but you can get around that by bringing shipments of extra gas in from Earth or Venus on a regular basis.

(I am not a scientist! I am not even the guy from XKCD. I just read some Wikipedia articles. Although I'm pretty sure that's all the guy from XKCD does.)

What's important here is water and air pressure. All the water is going to drain into the lowlands. That's what happened back in the days when the Martian surface had rivers and oceans. And the highlands might not even have breathable air, especially the red bulge on the right, which is the volcanic plateau of Tharsis. The best Earth comparison to the surface of an only mostly terraformed Mars is likely to be the summit of Everest.

So.

as we know, mars is indistinguishable from utah

Mundos de los Cataclismos

They get called Sleepers, mostly. Sometimes postapocs or just apocs. Formally they're supposed to be referred to as failed colonies, but even the government calls them Cataclysm Worlds when they're feeling sensationalist.

There are lots of them. The empire is big and space is full of surprises. Plenty of worlds have a colony ship, or ten, launched at them before the probes turn up any real data. Usually it's the air. Too much nitrogen, not enough CO2, unexpected clouds of acid, something like that. Other times it's the topsoil, or oceans full of some horrible poison cooked up by a brief flare of single-cell xenos a million years ago.

But then there are more interesting ones. Sometimes it's not even the world that's the problem. There's an issue with cryosleep, a problem in the reactors, a captain that just sort of snaps. The worst, of course, is when the world is too hospitable to life. The ship settles down, folds out into a city and fucked-up alien biology starts pouring in through the windows, through the walls.

All of them are worth huge amounts of money. They're the collected remnants of entire asteroid belts, pre-manufactured into everything that's needed to support life on hostile worlds. Power cells, atmo machines, medical supplies, seed stores, gene banks. One salvaged AI core or gravity compensator can set an explorer up for life, especially if the rest of the expedition is too dead to split the profits. The governments offer rewards, though they're not quite enough, and you can always find buyers on the black market. Though what a crime syndicate wants with a tailored strain of nitrogen-fixing bacteria is perhaps best left unexplored.

What's Wrong With This Cityship?

1. FOG
2. PLANTS
3. EVERYONE IS HATE
4. BUGS
5. ROBOTS
6. DINOSAURS
7. CRYSTALS THAT ARE BAD SOMEHOW
8. SHIP IS ALIVE
9. GHOSTS
10. PORTAL TO HELL
11. HIPPIE LOVE PLAGUE
12. COMPUTER WORSHIP
13. TIME IS BROKEN
14. PIRATES
15. BRAIN FUNGUS
16. SQUIDS
17. FISH MANS
18. ACCELERATED EVOLUTION
19. MUTANTS
20. FLOOD
21. PSYCHICS
22. ICE
23. MORLOCKS
24. PUNKS
25. ALL MEDIEVAL FOR SOME REASON
26. SHADOWS THAT ARE ALIVE AND KILL YOU
27. BIRDS I GUESS
28. FACE CRABS
29. APES
30. VIRUSES
31. MEMES
32. SHAMANS
33. ENERGY VAMPIRES
34. OOZE
35. THE SUN
36. JELLYFISH
37. CANNIBALS
38. SAND
39. CYBORGS
40. SHAPESHIFTERS
41. RADIATION
42. RATS
43. MAD SCIENTISTS
44. MOST DANGEROUS GAME
45. LEOPARDS
46. METAL HATES FLESH
47. MUTAGENIC PLAGUE
48. LUDDITES
49. GLADIATORIAL COMBAT
50. AMNESIA

If you have some way of choosing a famous historical personality at random this list also doubles as a Doctor Who episode generator.

we make thank for picture famous artist Kilian Eng

Music as Currency. Music is Currency.

It's a dystopia. It's always a dystopia. They let you do the weirdest things with every day stuff (please start a debate about that in the comments) and that makes them accessible and interesting.

So in this dystopia, as in all dystopias, people are deeply fucking bored. Always. They still remember the internet, or stories of it. Endless information piped from across the globe. The freshest content renewed with every f5. But now it's just smoke and craters for forever, and subsistence farming doesn't make you feel enriched when all your food tastes like shit. But even though dvd players and working tvs are hard to find and electricity hard to produce, mp3 players are everywhere. Every phone, every ipod, every stereo, every car radio with a cable jack or a usb port, it all gets used to endlessly loop the culture of dead civilisations.

But you get bored of hearing the same song over and over and over, especially when that song sucks, so obviously you trade them. With limited access to computers you can rarely copy an mp3, but you can trade one ipod for a stack of cds. All it takes is figuring out about what each song is worth. It turns out that is very hard.

Pop songs are clearly worth the least; they're common and lack depth. But, then, everyone likes them. They're guaranteed currency wherever you go, so that makes them worth more again. Rarer stuff is worth more to a collector, but who has time to collect in dystopia? You might be able to trade Vivaldi and Sigur Ros and the Sesame St theme with one of the Aquifer Queens, but if you're living rough in the badlands, Taylor Swift is better than gold.

And then there are the people that remember the stock market, and banks and mints and all the ways economies should work. So you get the one set of turntables in a thousand mile radius and go into business. Or you start printing banknotes, backed by the basement collection you found: every song, album and ep produced by The Beatles, or anyone that was in The Beatles, on cd, vinyl and live dvd. Or you just start speculating, telling people how many Adam Levine's they can get for a Drop It Like It's Hot remix. I'm not even sure that radio stations have a real-world allegory at this point. They definitely start wars.

Presumably, at some point, someone does just decide that bottlecaps have intrinsic worth. But think of life before that. How much is entertainment worth in a dead world?

Death Sydney

• Ibis Men rule over the city as garbage pharaohs, dispensing radioactive wisdom from their temple complex in the ruins of the Opera House
• The Star has come to life and devours people with its hypnotic rotating teeth, chewing up their souls and shitting them out as expressionless suit-wearing servitors who plant pokie seeds in the underbellies of otherwise-innocent pubs
• All the good drugs come in via deep-sea current, smuggled in the bellies of tuna by the 'Ndranghulhu (otherwise known as the Pelagic Mafia)
• Joe Hockey, torn and blistered, lies undying on a football field in his North Shore electorate, thousands of maggots endlessly sucking the last last ounce of juice from him
• Chinatown slid sideways into Darling Harbour and is now a floating market of sampans, secretly governed by an animated and evil wax statue of Nicole Kidman
• All the water abandoned Bondi in disgust, it is now a mile-wide expanse of dead dry sand
• That guy who drives up and down King Street on a scooter blasting classic rock turned out to be the actual King of King Street and now provides the anarchist denizens of Newtown with the only authority they can understand
• Rupert Murdoch was mummified in old front pages of the Telegraph and his hate-preserved ancients war with Lebanese vampire hunters in muscle cars on the streets of the Outer West
• Oxford Street closed in on itself to form an infinity symbol, it cannot be accessed from outside but over the rooftops you can hear the distant roar of a Mardi Gras parade that never ends
• Manly snapped off from the mainland and is now an island fortress, the people who live there have enough money to pretend that nothing's wrong
• Circular Quay is full of broken glass and avocado-coloured scumwater and smashed-up ferries and bad, pretentious art torn out of the galleries by tourists enraged at being expected to pay $6 for a cup of coffee. Toothed seabirds circle overhead, doing the bidding of the Ibis Men
• An enormous ruined cruiseship lies at anchor off Watson's Bay, it is full of insanely old people with parasite oysters clapped to their brainstems, pumping them full of immortality hormones and controlling their every move
• All the rich people killed each other and now Mosman is a single giant haunted mansion full of entitled ghosts
• There are spiders everywhere, they're harmless and if you help one out it's good luck. If you disturb one it's not bad luck you're just a dick
• The weird Brutalist concrete shoreline of Clovelly looks exactly the fucking same, is breeding-place of crab people with cement shells
• Taronga Zoo was bought up by a billionaire gun enthusiast who has offered a small fortune to anyone who can survive a night within its walls, he has let all the animals out and will snipe at you from the gondola
• Each Friday night the gunpowder phoenixes dance in the sky over the ocean and wake you the fuck up
• Long pork rolls are sold on every street corner and considered a prime hangover food
• There are warehouses in Marrickville packed with flesh, you open the door to see an oozing red wall and the pulse of an arm-thick artery. If not pruned regularly they will grow and multiply
• Buses pass at midnight, faces pressed against the glass. They only stop to let people on, not to let them off
• If you are not yelled at by a homeless person at least once during the course of the day it means that they have already decided to come to your house and kill you in your sleep
• A single enormous black swan nests in the calm blue dark of an abandoned movie studio, it has devoured its mate and now knows the future
• Cook's baked and disembowelled revenant patrols Botany Bay with a spyglass, scanning the horizon for the war canoe of the Hawaiian king who pursues and, he believes, intends to eat him
• In winter the skies freeze over and it's five minutes to get inside or death by apocalyptic hail, this pisses off the gunpowder phoenixes
• The phantom of the monorail prowls Pyrmont at night, dragging victims back to its lair in the Powerhouse museum where they labor in chains to construct it a new, brutal, piston-powered body
• Falun Gong peace pirates have learnt to survive indefinitely without the organs stolen from them by agents of the Chinese government. Their urine is filtered by the concentrated meditation energy of thousands of tranquility slaves who can only attack by vomiting up black qi
• The aquarium has inverted itself and lumbers through the harbour's slimy depths with small, scared townships trapped in what were once fish tanks, breathing from pockets of stagnant air that are refreshed every full moon when it surfaces. The inhabitants have learned to not throw stones
• The Domain is now the domain of giant carnivorous fungi that spill over each night from the botanical gardens, they worship mushroom Madonnas in St. Mary's Cathedral and smear the portraits in art gallery with poisonous mold, cursing their subjects
• The botanical gardens are a stinking trashpile which breeds carnivorous fungi. This is the design of the Ibis Men, who look upon them as beautiful and sacred
• The actors, crimelords, media personalities and mining magnates of Finger Wharf live a life of astonishing luxury so long as they never leave. It's like the Masque of the Red Death in there. Each one is missing their little finger, the price of their admittance
• Tiger Edwards, a literal tiger, runs a portable pie cart that shows up where you least expect it. He is waging an eternal struggle with the guys who sell the long pork rolls
• Swimming-capped seahags lurk in wave-dashed pools at the bottom of cliffs, guarding the fountains of regenerative brine which prevent them from shriveling into nothingness. They eat only scones and flesh
• The bridge left. Legends say that one day it will return

Sat On Bus, Wrote Dystopia

Working Title: Bustopia

Lawsuits made all the laws. Suing the government enough times has ensured that there is very little government left. In the interest of increased electoral transparency it became legal for senators to be the paid spokesperson for a corporation. The government is now a little like the UN of old. Representatives from different companies bicker loudly and ineffectually, while Robonixon tries its best to better seal away the launch codes.

Too many cases of police brutality have ensured that serving and protecting is now firmly in the hands of the people. Everyone is a registered informant but they don't have anyone to inform to, just a lot of paperwork. Districts are owned by companies that trade streets like stocks, faster than real people can keep up with. No one in this world is there to help you, but nobody really cares about you either, so you're probably safe. Recreational drug use is still illegal. The DEA will never die. Cocaine is now marketed as performance enhancing, but the truth is it's falling behind coffee+, Crimson Taurus, and the slew of other supplements that have been addicting a fanbase for years.

Everything is sold as liquid, vapour, or powder. Efficiency is key, as is reusability. A 'packet' of cigarettes might be passed down generations, LEDs dimming and holographic health warnings flickering, but still dispensing sweet smoke whenever its reservoir is topped up. The exception to this rule is the universe's most packageable food; precooked noodles. Noodles are pretty much the only food anyone has ever eaten, but have a lot more flavours than there were a thousand years ago. Or a week ago.

Everyone's forgotten where culture comes from. What nations are. Noodles aren't Chinese or Japanese or Italian, they're GigaFeed, bioTaste or Snak Powr. People still make art though. You can't stop art. Landlord issued jumpsuits are recut, dyed, adorned, even crocheted. Punk has a lot more meanings these days.

Everyone still has to work, of course, but with so much production automated it's hard to tell where the money goes. Presumably the government is still printing electro-dollars somewhere, and it trickles down through corporate tax breaks until it gets to the landlords, the most senior corporate position anyone's ever heard of. So people work odd jobs. They fix goods that are no longer under three day warranties most places offer. They run bodymod shops, putting in piercings and extra limbs. They trade for what small things pass at luxury goods, saving money for the vending machines that are the only source of food. Some lucky few get a letter in the mail and a permanent job with a corporation. Food vendors and bar staff and salespeople at the few stores that still hire, relics written in the code of a forgotten time. Techs are more common. Creative solutions are vital in a system with only 98% recyclability and not enough spare parts.

The most exciting career path, as in every era, is Freelancer.

A thousand years ago they may have been described as private investigators. A thousand years before that they'd be considered adventurers. In the present they are a motley assortment of ne'er-do-wells. Lancers, Psychics, Biomechanoids, Enginewrights. The ever reviled Hackers. Packs of Freelancers roam the streets under halogen skies, spreading equal parts heroism and bloodshed. After all, something has to keep the population under control.

Scenes from a Bustopia

1. 19th-century coastal fortress turned squatter city turned hyperdense cubicle labyrinth now in processed of being transformed again, into museum of squalor for billionaires to coo over. Actual population being evicted to make way for exhibits on how they'd live if they lived here, which now they don't.
2. Lost art of physical cartography making comeback in graffiti form. All maps now electronic, controlled by ostensibly benevolent megacorp which distorts geography at will to suit political sponsors. Coven of midnight mapmakers stencilling walls with accurately-scaled surface of Earth. Mexico bigger than you thought it was
3. Public transport no longer exists. All trains taken to central repository in heart of continent, bombs dropped on them from half-mile up. Homeless stage mass migration/crusade for lost shipping containers to settle in
4. DEA flooding streets w/ cheap weed. Weed contains tracking enzymes, lipids, chemically activated phosphorus tar. At prearranged signal all hippies in regional area will spontaneously combust. "Let that be a lesson to you," says simulated consciousness of Harry J. Anslinger
5. Ultrastealth drones, invisible to human eye and controlled by outscooped brains wired up in basement of Pentagon5, turn against masters and conduct supersonic peace rally in skies above major metropolitan area. Thousands deafened
6. Free trial day for first mass market virtual reality sex simulator. Everyone stays at home. Small percentage of customers experience disconcerting facial glitches, broken collision detection, difficulty in unplugging. Corporate experiments on psychological conditioning, aimed at lowering birth rate, considered howling success
7. Freegan pirates commandeer trashbarge shuttling food waste from gated community to mid-Atlantic dumping spot. All will die from sodium cyanide dusted over garbage to prevent unsightly reef formation
8. Subversive children's cartoon about Vikings snuck onto airwaves by renegade animators, supplanting scheduled therapist-approved pastel pabulum, contains blood, death. Each episode contains hidden clues to time, location of next broadcast. Mass dejection upon revelation that it was all elaborate marketing scheme for Snak Powr
9. Hedge fund engaging in quantum arbitrage (array of ion traps allows for stock to be indefinitely suspended between two price states, one microscopically higher than the other) causes rampant inflation, complete devaluation of all money. Everyone goes back to barter system for week until Fed pulls economy reset lever. To be clear, reset lever is also a literal lever
10. Schoolbus turned upside-down, defloored, hung like gondola from decommissioned Goodyear blimp. Vandals stage trans-American odyssey only to discover that White House stands empty
11. Brain-eating paramecium accidentally introduced into cartons of powdered orange drank. Targets Broca's area, forges new clade of grammarless gabbletalkers who seem to grasp one another's meaning perfectly
12. Landlord of diverse inner-urban neighbourhood evicts all inhabitants to make way for bioengineered clone tenants w/ "pay rent" implanted somewhere above "love and belonging" on their hierarchy of needs

(why are these American? is the America only place where Thing Happen? i don't even live in America and it's still the only place a dystopia can be set. backhanded compliment? not sure.)