New America

New America, the principal U.S. settlement on Mars, was established as the centerpiece of the United Nations' colonization program following World War Terminus. The program was driven by a dual incentive: the carrot of a free android servant and the stick of Earth's lethal radioactive fallout. The slogan "Emigrate or degenerate! The choice is yours!" blared from posters, TV ads, and government junk mail, framing emigration as the only rational choice for those who could reproduce within legal tolerances. The colony was founded on the fifth or sixth anniversary of its establishment, a date celebrated as Interspace Horizons Day, during which the government-sponsored television channel broadcast testimonials from recent immigrants.

Life in the Colony

New America was marketed as a world "rich with every imaginable possibility," but the reality, as described by those who lived there, was starkly different. Immigrants like Mrs. Maggie Klugman spoke of the "dignity" that came with having a dependable servant, but others, like the android Pris Stratton, described Mars as an "awful place" where loneliness was pervasive. Pris recounted that "all Mars is lonely. Much worse than this," referring to the desolate, abandoned buildings on Earth. The colony was not conceived for habitation; its ancient, barren landscape and the psychological toll of isolation drove some to drug use and a desperate longing for the pre-colonial fiction that romanticized space travel.

The Role of Androids

Under U.N. law, each emigrant automatically received an android subtype of their choice, a policy that made the android servant the ultimate incentive for emigration. The Rosen Association, the system's largest manufacturer of humanoid robots, produced progressively more human-like androids to meet colonial demand, following the "time-honored principle underlying every commercial venture." The Nexus-6 brain unit, which gave androids intelligence surpassing many humans, was developed for this market. However, the androids themselves were not content with servitude; some, like Roy Baty, organized escapes back to Earth, killing their human masters in the process. Roy Baty, a pharmacist on Mars, and his wife Irmgard ran a drugstore near New New York, where Pris obtained drugs to cope with the desolation. The colony thus became a site of both opportunity and exploitation, where the boundary between master and servant blurred.

The Emigration Imperative

The U.N. made it easy to emigrate but difficult to stay on Earth. Those who remained risked being classified as "biologically unacceptable" — a "special" — which meant sterilization and exclusion from humanity. The radioactive dust, a legacy of World War Terminus, created new "specials" daily, and monthly medical checkups could reveal that a "regular" had degenerated. For those like bounty hunter Rick Deckard, emigration was impossible because of his job; for chickenheads like John Isidore, it was legally barred. The colony thus functioned as a pressure valve, siphoning off the healthy and productive while leaving the damaged and the stubborn to eke out an existence on a dying Earth. The promise of New America was, for many, a mirage — a world that was "fundamentally uninhabitable" and that drove its inhabitants to seek escape in drugs, fiction, or a desperate return to the contaminated homeworld.