The Modern Age : The Martan Empire and Gallanol

The Modern Age : Martan Empire / Gallanol c.2007 David Kirtley

An age when there had been awe-inspiring technological advance. The Martan Empire grew in strength, economic size, and technological and cultural ability. Many of its achievements came from Gallanol's culture, borrowed. The two cultures had long since merged and become shared.
The once again divided nations of Gallanol, and all the others, had relied on the Empire to defeat the Dark Empire, whose chaos had threatened the whole world. In the aftermath of that near apocalypse the nations had rebuilt, trade and economic wealth restored, the other continents explored and dominated, the Goblins and Dwarves marginalised and forgotten, their power broken.
Technological advance was what distinguished the new Marta and Gallanol from their prior days of glory, the use of fossil fuels to power barges, ships, trackcars, personal boxcars, flying cars, jets, and finally rockets and space stations. Society was convulsed by the need to keep pace with advances, unless the individual, the region, or the nation fell behind. The world was dominated by a handful of nations of which Marta was the most powerful. But economic and national rivalries drove them into competition to conquer space.
Pilots and astronauts were lost in space. They searched the stars, in search of colonies and raw materials. They never found habitable planets but were driven by economic insanity. Ordinary members of society were bound by bureaucracy, greed, and the competitive economic and technological system. Kids spent more than half their lives studying scientific or commercial detail.
The human race could not rest. In this cauldron of interest groups and repressed yearning there were occasional wars between rivals, revolutions by the oppressed, or mutinies by space crews. Hell, of a sort, had been created.

(The above is the background or introduction to further writings to follow.)