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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1787374" data-attributes="member: 6533">I was thinking the oil boom would be difficult without the internal combustion engine being around to help transport, but I suppose you'd just run railroads around.  Really difficult, but possible.  Could they do pipelines in 1870?Magical oil production?A lot more expensive to get out of the ground anyway you look at it.I was thinking, for a city, oddly enough, of Galveston.  'Cause no 1900 means no Galveston hurricane.I don't know how familiar everyone is with that city, but the reason you aren't and the reason we have Houston is that in 1900, in America's greatest natural disaster, 6000 people and much of the city's property was destroyed.As a result, the city that had been predicted to become the other great Southern port had its role usurped by Houston.  A city that otherwise makes very little sense.1870 means no Houston, and Galveston is mostly located on an island so it probably gets shielded from much of the dead zone.  I figure it makes the logical base for most of the relief efforts, increasing its importance to the region, and while portions of it might sometimes get integrated into the zone that more or less makes it perfect for research that uses the zone's effects. Plus Galveston already and has always had a pretty crazy cultural scene picking up a fair amount of Dixie, Mexico, and Carribean stuff.  Very very cool city.  Very cool city to deal with an influx of magic.  Sean Stewart has a book called Galveston on that very theme.So here's how I picture it:  There's Galveston proper with the Island and Shore elements.   Those areas have adapted to a mix of zone and non-zone tech and cultures.  Off shore you have oil rigs, but you also have tech platforms.   The necessity of developing oil drilling outside of the zone and the particular sensibilities of its inhabitants has resulted in very sophisticated and underregulated artificial islands on which the most highly sophisticated, uncontrolled, and secret tech work is done.  Everything from data havens to cloning labs.   All of it fairly confident in the knowledge that they can do limited harm as the zone will take apart any of their work, including non-1870 pollutants, that finds its way to shore.Galveston itself contains one of the few populations of 1920ers left after the incident.  People who had the unsettling experience of meeting their ancestors.  That combined with the flood of relief workers means that the city is simultaneously among the most influential in zone politics and the most federalized.  Tourism starts from there, military aid goes into it, and among the offshore facilities is the last reliable American naval base before Mexican waters.Divided between jurisidictions both political and magical Galveston often serves as the American free city.  Shipping, crime, and intrigue from the Carribean stops and starts here.  Every world power has an embassy.  Including several Indian nations, primarily as a result of the academic researchers and foriegn researchers who entered the area anxious to reclaim previously lost cultures.Think of it as a Dixie version of Miami Vice.</blockquote>

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