History Literature / InGoldenWaters

* UsefulNotes/FurryFandom: The goons borrowed ideas from [[http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3427893 another thread]][[note]]Like the original thread, this one also requires SA membership and the archive upgrade to read.[[/note]] mocking a similar project called Malatora, which had a particular focus on {{transhuman}}ism as a means of becoming dragons. As such, furries with modified bodies, and sometimes full-body transplants and exoskeletons, showed up on more than one occasion.

From there, one goon started posting dystopian fiction set in a world where a seastead was actually built, and soon descended into a hell of class warfare, stratification, and utterly amoral business. Other goons followed in his wake and wrote their own stories. Eventually, the stories were edited into a single collection with a loose continuity. The full story can be read [[http://www.mediafire.com/view/?tvlxdb9f274stpt here]].

* PrettyFlyForAWhiteGuy: Kevin [=MacDonald=], a "debt collector" (read: armed goon) who calls himself Kashiro and idealizes {{samurai}} culture, using a katana as his WeaponOfChoice.

* TooDumbToLive: Many cases, but particularly notable is the seastead in the story "The Ground Gained", which was powered by a nuclear reactor designed by a hack "scientist" who had little more than a bachelor's degree and a CrackpotTheory, and which was fueled by substandard fuel rods rejected from use in American power plants due to safety concerns. Not only did it end predictably, but [[FromBadToWorse as a bonus]], the place was built around a fully-operational oil rig (its main source of hard currency was petroleum exports), meaning that the meltdown produced a radioactive oil spill.

* ActionGirl: Tina.

* {{Irony}}: At least two stories, "Reinventing the Wheel" and "A Mirror, Markedly", chronicle seasteads that actually did succeed... by slowly evolving into social democracies with unions, worker protections, public services, infrastructure investment, taxes, and all of the "statism" that their founders had tried to escape. The latter story even has one of the Captains of Industry meeting a representative from a "mainland" government and realizing, to his horror, that the two of them are NotSoDifferent.
* KlingonPromotion
* LawEnforcementInc: Of course.
* LibertariansInSpace: At sea, rather, and a DeconstructiveParody of the concept.

* TheSociopath: Many, ''many'' "captains of industry" fall under this category.

* UsefulNotes/FurryFandom: The goons borrowed ideas from [[http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3427893 another thread]][[note]]Like the original thread, this one also requires SA membership and the archive upgrade to read.[[/note]] mocking a similar project called Malatora, which had a particular focus on {{transhuman}}ism that occasionally ventured into this. As such, furries with modified bodies, and sometimes full-body transplants and exoskeletons, showed up on more than one occasion.

* FurryFandom: The goons borrowed ideas from [[http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3427893 another thread]][[note]]Like the original thread, this one also requires SA membership and the archive upgrade to read.[[/note]] mocking a similar project called Malatora, which had a particular focus on {{transhuman}}ism that occasionally ventured into this. As such, furries with modified bodies, and sometimes full-body transplants and exoskeletons, showed up on more than one occasion.

'''''In Golden Waters: Stories from the Seastead''''' is a crowdsourced collection of short stories written by the goons at Website/SomethingAwful. It was born from [[http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3438569 this thread]][[note]]Membership to the Something Awful forums and the archive upgrade are required to read it.[[/note]], which started out as a discussion of the [[http://www.seasteading.org/ Seasteading Institute]], which plans to build artificial floating communities in international waters where potential leaders and visionaries could build new societies and experiment with new ideas of governance and social contract. From the start, discussion was dominated by the libertarian ideals that the project was founded upon, with people picking apart the Institute's plans from every direction and concluding that a real "seastead" would quickly follow the same road as [[VideoGame/BioShock1 Rapture]].

* MadScientist: Many mainland pharmaceutical and biotech companies are happy to use the seasteads for R&D, what with their lack of laws and their large, desperate underclasses.

* TooDumbToLive: Many cases, but particularly notable is the seastead in the story "The Ground Gained", which was powered by a nuclear reactor designed by a hack "scientist" who had little more than a bachelor's degree and a CrackpotTheory, and powered by substandard fuel rods rejected from use in American power plants due to safety concerns.