Austral Scape
“But the blue people were not from his map. They were the corpses under the ice in the old stories. The Austral people. They had a weird name he couldn’t quite say right, pronounced differently by every adult he asked.”
“The Horizon between the Larch Scape and the Austral Scape was retreating down to Antarctica, turning the barren wastes of ice into the glowing southern cities of her warmer homeland, where the Unity had been founded … the Austral Indian Ocean was practically cooking as a consequence of global warming, such that the coastlines changed when the Horizon swept over.”
“Lar had gone into the interracial world late, and this was now her greatest regret. She had first emerged into the rest of the Austral Scape, so secular and apathetic to her racial passions, so dismissive of the Auravelus sect … brown and blue could marry and adopt. Each year more exiles came from the Noir Scape, deported for reaching over the Horizon from their squalor. The problem was time – her augmented physiology had given her the time to go from hardened bigot to tolerant, relaxed progressive. Alder Malone probably wasn’t going to have the time.”
-Terra Incognita
The homeland of the Vulkaz-wrami, the Austral Scape has experienced extensive global warming as a consequence of historical fossil fuel use in the time before the Blue Plague. Following the Plague, and the extermination of the Sunni religion, the Vulkaz-wrami developed in relative peace and advanced to become the dominant technological power in the Known World for almost five thousand years. At present the locals make extensive use of photovoltaics and nuclear fusion power, and have developed aquacultural technology to exploit the flooded coasts. The oceans and polar regions have been colonized, with the continent of Antarctica bearing the dominant superpower and the seat of the Unity that controls the entire Scape and colonies on many other Scapes.