Southowilson: Overview and History

Southowilson is the industrial capital of the NorCal Free State (officially called the Bear Republic), located in northern California, on Suisun Bay, north of the ruins of San Francisco. In many ways, it is similar to prewar Chicago, in that Southowilson is crowded, polluted, industrial, and vigorous. It has a strong corporate presence; several megacorporations are headquartered here, and many have manufacturing facilities in the Industriplex. Southowilson is a city of approximately 6.2 million people. Southowilson is a dirty, overcrowded metropolis; but unlike many cities around the world, Southowilson is not part of a larger sprawl. It is separated from neighboring metropolises by miles of empty agricultural land. Its population, partly composed of refugees from the continental interiors, huddle together in the crowded inner city. Southowilson remains one of the greatest industrial cities in the postwar world, and its economy manages to support the population. Large parts of the city are ethnic enclaves, brought over piecemeal by Megacorps in the past. Southowilson is a product of its times, and can best be understood through its history.

War and Chaos – (2020-2055)

The city of San Francisco and the huge megalopolis around it were primary targets of the nuclear attacks of late summer of 2020. The immediate postwar years, marked by the global inability to communicate via radio transmission over long distances, nearly spelled the end of world civilization. Central California held together longer than most regions thanks to the heavy federal presence in the San Joaquin Valley, but eventually even that failed. The United States essentially withdrew to strongholds east of the Rockies, leaving California to go its own way completely by 2028. For nearly a decade, the entire state was wracked by disorder, warfare, and starvation. Factional fighting ebbed and flowed in the north, while the Mexican Army dug in and stayed in southern California. All in all, conditions were not too different from post-Roman Europe, with the weak ruled by the strong. In some parts of the San Joaquin valley, an actual feudal order took root, with powerful landowners and the bands of fighters loyal to them ruling over tenant farmers, exchanging food for security. Over time, such loose arrangements evolved into the proto-states that would survive today.

In 2032, General Anthony Salazar, a prominent SoCali warlord and former general in the United States Army, managed over the course of a year to unify all of Southern California under his rule, adding Baja California to his territory. In 2034, General Salazar named himself as president of the Constitutional Republic of Southern California, and reinstated a written constitution based on the now defunct US Constitution. President Salazar made diplomatic and military overtures to surrounding regions. SoCal's government was heavily centralized and based around the military, almost Latin American in nature, but it was stable and successful enough to bring peace to the region and drive back marauders. In response to this perceived threat to their autonomy, several political entities in the San Joaquin Valley and around the bay area decided to attempt unification. Negotiations took nearly two years, but in 2037 the Republic of Northern California, sometimes called the Bear Republic or just NorCal, issued a proclamation of its own existence. In 2038, the government of NorCal built a military base on Suisun Bay, intended to control the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento River regions. Named Fort Wilson after a famous war hero of WWIII, it soon became a nucleus of local commerce and industry. Located in a convenient place for trade, fishing, and settlement, the small town that grew up in the shadow of the fortress came to be known simply as Southowilson. Despite efforts to give it a different name, Southowilson stuck and was adopted officially in 2042. Over the next decades, the two states consolidated their own power internally, bringing a modicum of stability to California, and even managed to bring back prosperity. A series of wars were fought in the 2050's resulted in the current borders agreed to by treaty (a line running roughly northeast from Morrow Bay through Fresno on out to Mono Lake), and both states fought against the American Federal Republic in 2061 as it attempted for the last time to reassert control of California.

Golden Years (2055-2060)

By the 2050's the wars in California were over for the most part, and the region slowly rejoined the budding global economy. Southowilson became a popular stop for ships making the trading circuit around the Pacific, and it's rough harbor slowly expanded. NorCal developed its industrial capacity, while its southern neighbor expanded agricultural production as it grappled with a variety of Mexican successor states. Southowilson grew almost overnight into a very important industrial center, achieving the place once held by San Francisco. Over the next several decades, large numbers of people emigrated from all over the hemisphere, joining in the rapid expansion of the city. Southowilson was transformed from a military town to a large government complex administering a city of millions. The harbor grew to accommodate the enormous bulk submarine transports in use by the 2060's. Southowilson's prosperity continued for many decades to come, almost single-handedly propelling NorCal into the ranks of the global industrial powers. By 2060, NorCal's economic heart was the Southowilson Metroplex, though the national capital remains in Redding.

The Era of Ikebara (2060-2095)

In 2063, the Ikebara Foundation, an international consortium devoted to the idea of creating urban arcologies as a unique solution to the increasing population and urbanization of the 2060's, set forth on it's plan to build one of three prototype arcologies in the Southowilson area. This ambition plan aimed to create a thousand story tower, one of the largest engineering feats ever attempted. Previously impossible, new materials developed in the 2050's made such a structure plausible. The government of NorCal, which had been seeking some means of attaining international prestige, gave the Ikebara Foundation the go-ahead. Construction began in 2065 after years of ground clearing and preparatory construction. Almost overnight the city of Southowilson increased in sized by a quarter. Entire new districts of town were created to house the tens of thousands of workers and millions of tons of machinery and materials needed to construct the leviathan Ikebara Tower. The tower was completed in nine years, with the crowning ceremony performed on New Years Day, 2074. Tenants began moving in overnight; early arrivals faced the inevitable teething pains of a new and complex construction, but by and large Ikebara Tower was a success. Construction started on similar towers in Singapore, Rio De Janeiro, and Pretoria.

Disaster struck in 2076, when the long awaited "Big One" struck California. First predicted in the 1940's, this earthquake devastated much of the Pacific coast of North America. The San Angeles (LA/San Diego Sprawl) was decimated, and SoCal was thrust into martial law, undoing generations of relatively stable and enlightened politics in the chaos. NorCal's sporadic efforts to rebuild the San Francisco Bay area were smashed and finally were given up for good in 2077. Southowilson suffered moderate damage; South Harbor residential districts subsided suddenly, and the Southern Industriplex suffered a huge chemical leak, killing thousands and spurring the creation of the Northern Industriplex. The biggest fear was that Ikebara Tower would collapse, which in itself would have been the death knell for the city of Southowilson. Defying even its designer’s expectations, the mile high tower withstood the shock of the quake. It suffered enough structural damage that the NorCal government officially condemned it, but it did not fall. This left Southowilson with a damaged megastructure that would require a nuclear weapon to demolish. Unfortunately, the loss of the Ikebara Tower weakened the Ikebara Foundation financially, and the outbreak of war doomed the organization. A large part of Southowilson’s economy dried up overnight.

The Fourth World War (2085-2095)

During the 2080's and 2090's, the three great southern superstates (SACPA, Oceania, and the SAR) clashed repeatedly over resources in a series of conflicts later collectively named the "Fourth World War". Despite the dramatic name, the clashes were limited mainly to incessant, intense, but relatively limited special operations raids and air/naval operations around the Pacific Rim, Southern Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. The most sustained combat occurred in and around Antarctica, in clashes between Australia and South American land forces and submarines. The need for accurate intelligence spurred the redeployment of the first surveillance satellites, which in turn spurred the remilitarization of space. By 2089, the first armed satellites were used to attack the numerous spysats.  Almost completely uninvolved in the conflicts which wrack the Southern Hemisphere, Skandia placed more effort in the global recovery process, making a number of scientific breakthroughs that would bear fruit later. Perhaps most significantly for global recovery, a Skandian-owned energy corporation developed the first practical fusion reactor in 2093. Though crude, bulky, and limited by modern standards, it made almost unlimited clean energy available with surprisingly little effort. Skandia sought to bring an end to the conflicts, and made the reactor technology available to all three combatants simultaneously in exchange for recognition of patent and licensing rights. Almost overnight, the dependence on increasingly scarce petroleum as a fuel source declined, and the Fourth World War wound to a halt within two years.

During the Fourth World War, NorCal was a noncombatant that traded freely with all of the rival factions at one point or another. No open fighting occurred, though numerous instances of small covert actions did happen. In 2094, the Fourth World War ended with a series of epochal summits in Stockholm, Skandia. NorCal participated to the extent that a minor regional power could, and parleyed it's highly literate population into an industrial boom. NorCal rode the postwar global wave of prosperity, revitalizing the high tech industry destroyed in the earthquakes, and building the Montezuma Fusion Plant with corporate assistance.