The landscape is usually covered with a thick tangle of the dark, almost black food plants where it’s not radioactive rubble, frozen wastes or baking-hot desert, the vegetation extending in floating mats far out onto the ocean. Huge harvesting machines grind along in the distance. Here and there, the straight line of a train-road bisects the landscape, and something like a row of ocean liners shoots along it at a few hundred miles an hour. On the horizon, visible a hundred miles away or more, one may see the mountainous form of a hive city. There is wilderness here and there, strange tangles of mutated vegetation, some terrestrial, some alien in origin, usually located in disputed border areas or in the radioactive fringe lands of a dead zone. In a few places, wilderness has been deliberately set apart by kings and dictators to provide a little touch of real nature for elites to enjoy. Aside from the hive cities, the landscape includes huge mining complexes extending down tens of miles into the planetary interior (the upper crustal layers were mined out long ago), smaller-than-city-hives-but-still vast defensive fortresses bristling with artillery, and agricultural tending stations (usually including a posting of troops. Far worse pests than aphids may be lurking in the vegetation).
The Dead Zones were exposed to particularly lethal forms of atomic energy which has rendered them nearly permanently radioactive, remaining uninhabitable even after millennia. Areas with merely normal fallout are hardly even worth putting on maps. Only a few rare and exotic forms of life survive in these areas.
