Back in… oh, it was probably 1984, I first tried my hand at a series of short stories set in a post-catastrophic future, in which micronations (but they were not called micronations back then) were the last surviving bastion of order in a world in which environmental and economic disaster had created billions of refugees.
I had just read a book about the coming ice age (it looked legit), so I threw that idea in.
I had been reading The Prisoner of Zenda for the first time, too, and I sort of wanted to mix the small operetta nation/state of the book with a sort of futuristic and cyberpunkoid stories.
Hussars and Hackers, if you will.
So I imagined this small Alpine nation, called Drachenstahl (which means something like “stolen from the dragon”), served by airships and with a solar/geothermal energy economy, in which a small unit of “technology cops” operated – people charged with keeping an eye on the diffusion of new technologies and the abuse of those technologies. Continue reading →