The developing world has no shortage of reasons to be pissed at the other two. By mid-century, I'm postulating a sort of Africa-wide schadenfreude in response to the collapse of N'Am's societal infrastructure. The icing on that bitter cake is the further prediction that the majority of the African population will consist of women; I base this on the fact that in Ethiopia at least, malnourished women are more likely to give birth to daughters than sons38 (presumably for the same energetics-related reasons this happens in other species). I'm basically suggesting that generations of disease, starvation, and exploitation/indifference will result in one righteously-pissed, gender-skewed hotbed of discontent in which the myth of a victimized woman's apocalyptic vendetta would catch on real fast. Think of Liberation Theology, that violent incarnation of Catholicism that arose from the political turnoil of Latin America in the last century; now move it to Africa, and emphasise the warrior Madonna at its heart.

The various bits of weaponry portrayed in this novel—from Miri's arsenal to Desjardins' booby-traps to South Africa's ICBMs— are taken from a variety of sources including the USAF39; The Economist40; Cornell University Peace Studies Program41; and even the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts42. Evidently weapons-grade infrasound isn't all it's cracked up to be. (On the other hand, it seems surprisingly simple to generate your own electromagnetic pulse43).

Electronic Wildlife & Digital Evolution

Maelstrom hung on the premise that the same Darwinian processes that shape life in this world are equally applicable to the digital realm—that self-replicating software will be literally alive when the conditions of natural selection are met. That position has gained recent ground; terms like "digital organism" crop up in the most respectable scientific journals44,45,46, and you can now download freeware apps that let you experiment with digital evolution on your own desktop47. E-life is proceeding on track; maybe the Maelstrom Ecosystems won't be far behind.

Maelstrom extended the conceit of Internet-as-Ecosystem to a "consensus superorganism" that exploited the myth of the Meltdown Madonna as a reproductive strategy. Five years further down the timeline, parts of that superorganism have transmuted—with a little help from their friends—into the "Shredders" and "Lenies" of ßehemoth. Ecologically, we've moved from a climax ecosystem to a weedy and impoverished landscape of virtual rats, gulls, and kudzu—and in keeping with that spirit, the virtual-ecology aspects of this novel echo the pest-species dynamics common in real-world ecosystems.