Some thoughts, currently spilling out. You can watch my thought machine at work

about worldbuilding in my nearly completed cyberpunk work in progress. Which, as this standalone novel is set in the same larger universe as my Voidstrider books, means worldbuilding for that as well.

The current story takes place on Earth about 50 years before the stories told in the larger series. Earth, in general, needs to believably match up between the two. There’s a half century gap to give a little wiggle room, but still.

It’s a couple centuries in our future, at least. I’ve never given an explicit date in text.

Climate crisis passed the tipping point. The last world war soon follows. Corporate interests enter the conflict increasingly as independent operators. War officially ends with the formation of a unified world government. War actually ends after a pretty extensive period of “mopping up,” i.e. that world government solidifying itself in fact as well as word.

Initiatives to clean up the planet get rolling. Government is largely controlled by corporations, though. Why are these future fatcats spending money on environmental clean up? Are they really?

Story starts out in Cap City, the proverbial mega-city. Cap City sprawls over an area that once, long ago, contained Washington DC, Annapolis, Baltimore, and large chunks of the surrounding area. It’s established that much of the coastal land in this area is submerged. The city itself fronts the Atlantic with a massively tall seawall, guarding against tidal surge presumably. Lots of storms over the Atlantic (and yes there’s a scene in one).

One character, unreliable at best but most probably not lying or incorrect, says the government and the corporations that basically own it aren’t doing anything to fix the environment.

Cap City’s cyberpunk noir flavor is slightly at odds with the Earth of 50 years later. Pretty much nothing in the Voidstrider books actually takes place on Earth, though, so everything you know there is hearsay. There are several POV characters from Earth, though. The one scene that does take place there is set in a future Geneva that’s described as being fairly lovely; the climate fix up has definitely worked there, and it is explicit that the topography of Europe has been altered by climate change.

So what? Cap City’s on the other side of the planet. Maybe world leaders really are doing the good work. Maybe they’ll get there sometime in the next 50 years.

Probably what’s happening is the efforts are prioritized. Centered around the location of power. We’re building a new first world here, right? We’ll get to the rest. Possibly.

OK, so that explains why what we see of Africa and Europe in the stories is cleaner, which in turn helps explain why much of the planet is a deeply flawed but nevertheless somewhat utopian future but Cap City is seedy and soiled, labor powerless, everything controlled by greedhead scumbuckets. Maybe not enough, but we’ll come back to that.

The point is, what’s the corporations motivation for the clean up? Labor’s powerlessness is explicit, though barely given more than cursory thought, in the Voidstrider books. On Earth, the right to vote extends only to employed adults. That’s it, one sentence, you can see perfectly well the problem, let’s move on. In the story of Serotonin Overload, solidly Earthbound, we have to give it a bit more attention.

The franchise entangled with employment. Think about employer sponsored health insurance in the real world now. Think about consequences, be they feature or bug. Your boss controls your right to vote, so your boss controls your vote.

I’ve always sort of assumed without digging into it when worldbuilding for Voidstrider that these corporations have, for the most part, figured out a cost-effective, bottom line friendly of minimizing their risk of, you know, armed revolution. The weapons of the future are indeed terrifyingly powerful, but there’s 13 billion people spread between Earth and the moon.

There are more than a handful of oblique references in the current WIP to companies’ efforts to replace the work force with robots, of course. As well as some not at all oblique sections pertaining to AI, but now we approach spoilers!

Anyway. Why does a society where the CEOs have almost complete control over government globally spend money on environmental clean-up – not to mention other expenditures like a universal basic income (even one shown to amount to basic food, basic shelter, and extremely low-tier medical care but absolutely nothing further)? After all, most of the 1% live in orbit these days.

Illusion maintenance? It’s suggested. Doesn’t seem sufficient, though.

And, since all this is tangential to the plot of either project, it’s ultimately a question to let simmer in the bottom of the thought machine. Worth examining somewhere in the future, but for now it’s background.