3 ms·
Although I am loathed to be seen as recommending it, Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota trilogy does have a bit of interesting material as it imagines an earth 5 centuri
by PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Although I am loathed to be seen as recommending it, Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota trilogy does have a bit of interesting material as it imagines an earth 5 centuries from now in which vertical communities are vastly more important than nation states. Of course, this is aided by an insanely fast transit system that means you can work in Paris and have lunch in Rio without thinking about it.
Palmer's vertical communities (called "hives") are fairly high level compared to the considerations in TFA, but IIRC they consist of something like:
1. Cousins - strive to take care of all humans
2. Utopians - dedicated to utopian projects, specifically planetary colonization
3. Mitsubishi - very control-via-land-ownership focused, merged with Greenpeace which had owned most of the wild areas
4. Humanists - as the name suggests, combined with a strong belief in the power of individuals
5. Masonic Empire - essentially a continuation of a sort-of Roman empire
6. Gordian - dedicated to understanding and controlling and predicting the human mind
7. Europe - still valuing national identities
8. "Blacklaw" - everyone outside the Hive system
I found the final book almost impossible to finish, and ultimately not very rewarding. Still, as an imagined future essentially without computers of any kind we would recognize, humans organized primarily into vertical (distributed) communities and more, it at least started out quite intriguingly.