The word Shaturanga comes from India, and is the name given to a board game that is similar to chess but predates chess by about five-hundred years. It is a game of politics, religion, and war.
In the book titled, Shaturanga, it is much the same. Only now the board is Earth, and it has been permanently changed forever by a great cataclysm that has left the oceans barren and all the continents buried beneath a mantle of ice half a mile thick. New and strange civilizations have arisen from the ashes of the old world and they battle for supremacy over the vast new territories left exposed on what was once Earth's ocean floor.
The city of Shaturanga is one of these civilizations---a sprawling dome city of about 50,000 inhabitants. It is 1 mile in diameter and surrounded by a two-hundred-foot wide moat. It is the home of the most puritanical ruler that the post-apocalyptic world has ever seen. Its kingdom spans from one continental shelf to another, and its theocratic rule is enforced by the royal infantry and scurrilous patrol forces in medieval-looking jet cars and siege machines.
The second civilization is known as the Bogotron---a clone race that dwells in subterranean cities which are connected through a network of tunnels that converge at the center of a massive dormant volcano called Mt. Rembtu. Here lies the great central city of Rembtu jutting skyward through the caldera, a towering machine-city harnessing the tremendous geothermal energy tapped below the surface of the hardened magma. The Bogotron have survived by cloning themselves using technology mined from the ruins of buried cities of the ancient world---our world. Their ways are considered taboo by the standards of the bishop of Shaturanga, and they stand to rival his kingdom with their expanding secretive technology mines guarded by hidden underground fortresses.
Last, but definitely not least, are the Dregs. The Dregs are the wandering nomadic tribes left to fend for themselves out on the wasteland. Some have managed an existence by erecting simple villages and cultivating farms in the highlands away from the prying eyes of the kingdom. The more daring of these gypsy-like vagabonds survive by trading scrap metal and found artifacts to the more advanced cultures, but some are said to have ended up as slave labor or swept away in the crossfire between warring civilizations. It is here where our story begins. In a village called Tholus a prophecy is about to unfold, and mankind will be forever changed.
