"How JUDGE DREDD predicted the future" Topic

"At the start of March 1977 the newly-launched British SF comic 2000AD introduced its most famous, enduring and iconic character: Judge Joseph Dredd. Dredd is a law-enforcement officer with on-the-spot powers of judge, jury and, if necessary, executioner. Over the course of decades, Dredd has appeared in thousands of comics, numerous novels and audio dramas and two feature films. The world of Dredd, a hugely overpopulated American city of the early 22nd Century, is harsh and brutal, but also darkly humorous and bitingly satirical. It was also grossly fantastical and completely implausible from the perspective of 1977.

Almost half a century later and a third of the way from the comic's launch to the date of its setting, Judge Dredd is starting to look a lot less satirical and a lot more accurate. In fact, a reasonable (and disturbing) claim could be made that Judge Dredd may yet emerge as the most prescient work of British science fiction of the late 20th Century…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Well, no one is using a "belly wheel" just yet, but it can't be too far in the future…

LOL. The slant of this article is ridiculously obvious.

Dan

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

I haven't read much of Judge Dredd, and haven't made myself watch all the way through either movie when they come around on tv. So I'll take the author's word about the story as accurate on this point:

"The rest of the Earth isn't doing too much better. In 2070 a series of nuclear exchanges reduced several large areas into radioactive wastelands. In the United States only Mega-City One on the east coast, Mega-City Two in California and Texas City in the south survived. The rest of the country was reduced to a burned-out ruin known as the Cursed Earth, inhabited by criminals, exiles and mutants. Other mega-cities exist in Asia, Australia and Europe, but most of Africa is uninhabitable. Sea levels have risen modestly, flooding low-lying areas, but the seas are also polluted (the Atlantic, for example, is now known as the Black Atlantic for the garbage and pollution that infests it, with most forms of marine life made extinct)."

It seems odd to me that areas of low population density without much industry or military resources were the targets of nuclear weapons. The central United States does have a lot of ICBMs, so I guess it would get hit -- but wouldn't the Boston-Washington-Chicago triangle also be a major target? One possible answer is that it had better anti-missile defenses than the central part of the country.

Did Africa end up uninhabitable because of nuclear bombing? If so, why? What's worth destroying? What threat did Africa pose to anyone?

That's pretty much accurate as far as it goes.

Africa isn't totally uninhabitable, but most of the population has moved to the northern end, as South Africa bore the brunt of nuclear fury during the war, and ecological collapse took the rest of south and central Africa. The largest ares of human habitation in Africa are Umar and Luxor, New Jerusalem and Casablanca Conurb – See this map for details link .

And yes, anti-missile defenses protected much of the USA in that case – it was in fact the development of these systems prompted President Robert Linus "Bad Bob" Booth to start the Final War against the Soviets and allies, justifying his power grab as part of freeing America from foreign economic "parasites" . For more, check this out – link

I agree with Oberlindes.
The tenet that the east coast and west coast survives a nuclear attack but fly over country doesn't shows that Judge Dredd is meant to please the publishers and most readers of novels. Maybe it supposes the destruction of industrial and agriculture region will bring the surviving population to its knees. But, with trade the money centers can buy from other suppliers.

The coastal regions don't need to be hit with missiles. Ships or subs or drones with nukes can easily get through.