Martial arts weave through the histories of conflict and recreation, adapting and being adapted as the world turns. This has been as true in the hundred years leading up to 2100 as in any earlier period.
In the first decades of the third millennium, martial arts developed in three distinct directions.
The largest, and commercially most successful, of these three branches was the amalgamation of various martial-art techniques and styles with moves from aerobic and dance classes. This resulted in the creation of what would later become known as “fitness arts.” Practitioners of these styles were (and are) primarily interested in the workout effects of their training, wasting little to no thought on self-defense – though there were some tragic cases of delusional belief in the actual combat value of someone’s chosen style. A related set of “arts” were in fact primarily meditative disciplines, teaching mental focus and self-control; these could be genuinely useful at best, emotionally satisfying at the minimum.
This all led to the appearance of a plethora of what appeared to be new arts and styles, although most of these were simply trademarked names for perfectly serviceable but not particularly coherent or integrated fitness training curricula. Fashions in such things came and went, and on occasion, some more dedicated students progressed to more serious combat arts, or at least seriously competitive sports. Mostly, however, the fitness arts separated completely from anything recognizable as martial arts.
The second major branch of martial-arts evolution was somewhat classical: self-defense. Especially in areas with a strong tradition of strict gun control, many citizens felt the need to learn some ways to protect themselves against physical violence. As in the latter half of the 20th century, most dojos drew paying customers by offering a variety of quick and dirty (or often just quick) self-defense courses. These in turn were derived from certain techniques of the dojo’s “main” martial arts (often some form of Karate, Jujutsu, Tae Kwon Do, Hapkido, Escrima, Muay Thai, or Wing Chun, with a Self-Defense focus).
Serious practitioners of traditional martial arts still existed, and often made their living by teaching those self-defense courses, but new styles of any significance were not developed in this environment.
Invention and creativity of a sort, however, could be found in the third important area of martial-arts development in the early 21st century: full-contact blood sports. Born out of the Muay Thai and mixed martial arts bouts of the 1990s, such “meatfights” became popular all over the globe up to 2020 and in the early years of the subsequent decade – even if they were still illegal in many areas. Since many fighters in those days came from a criminal and/or streetfighting background, the “creativity” shown in their fights was of a rather primal and brutal sort, thus keeping the lessons from those tournaments out of any “real” dojo for decades to come.
Some of those techniques came full circle during the 2020s, 2030s, and 2040s, when civil unrest and wars in various parts of the world – but especially in Central Africa – saw the reintroduction of those brutal fighting maneuvers to the urban battlefields of the 21st century. Close combat skills were still largely irrelevant in real warfare, but in unstable insurgency situations, undisciplined street fights, and the personal entourages of thuggish warlords, a willingness and ability to batter opponents to a pulp with bare hands could be a real advantage. Meanwhile, even when global politics grew a little more stable and law enforcement grew more experienced at suppressing illegal contests, the meatfights survived, right up to 2100, with skill still serving some purpose alongside raw toughness and appropriate biomods.
Less brutal noncontact and minimal-contact combat sports were still around at this time, and some were quite popular. However, they mostly hadn’t changed or developed much since the 20th century. They would later fade away almost entirely.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, more sophisticated military organizations were beginning to make their own contributions to the development of martial arts in a broader sense. In wealthy, advanced countries, armies increasingly sought to substitute high technology and advanced training for numbers and raw firepower. In extreme cases, these systems of training went beyond simple skill instruction to a structured formality comparable to almost any martial art. Behind this lay an even more fundamental development, again emerging from new technologies; refinements in AI and virtual reality now permitted whole new ways of developing, teaching, and adapting systems of skill.
Then, between 2040 and 2080, dozens of new styles seemed to appear all across the solar system, though only a handful of them were really successful. The obvious triggers for this were radical, often technologically driven developments in society, especially manned space travel, the colonization of deadly environments with nonstandard gravitation, and life in small, pressurized habitats. Indeed, many of these new styles were born out of social and political unrest, mainly on Mars and beyond. The Ares conspiracy, the appearance of the Duncanites, and the bloody history of the Martian Triads are the most widely known of these points of conflict.
Perfectly logically, the first people to apply new technologies to the arts of violence were the military, who had both the need and the budget. Intensive analysis by staff officers with access to hours of recordings of combat situations and computer modeling of tactical problems produced specific and complex – often too specific and complex – proposals for systems of training. With virtual reality now the norm in military training, these proposals could be implemented and refined within weeks or even days – and modified just as quickly if they proved imperfect. The stress for some troops could sometimes be considerable, but the best-trained “virtual veterans” became experts in a startling range of problem-solving methods.
The civilian world wasn’t too far behind the military – and the most committed teachers and combat scholars brought a great deal of ingenuity to the topic. Not only could virtual reality model all manner of combat situations and facilitate training, modern somatic modeling software could actually analyze skill use down at the level of individual muscles and joints.
In short, martial arts moved into the realm of computer-aided design. Specialist software allowed whole martial-arts styles to be designed and redesigned in virtual space before being tested in action, and AI aides could talk the tester-stylists through the process of learning and deploying the new ideas. Traditionalist martial-arts masters might disdain this “hasty and fantastical” approach – many of the systems developed this way proved to be ineffective, inefficient, or just unremarkable – but over time, some genuinely new and interesting ideas came out of the VR dojos.
Hence, although many of the styles developed to deal with new extraterrestrial environments were created by people who were on the spot, working through old-fashioned, painful trial and error, others came from either keen army training specialists or interested martial-arts masters working with VR programmers and biomechanics experts. Furthermore, the analysis software made cross-fertilization between new styles and ideas significantly simpler to manage. For a while, the solar system seemed to be experiencing a golden age of martial-arts development.
The culmination of the VR analysis trend, around the 2080s, was a serious and systematic attempt to formulate the “perfect style.” Actually, there were several separate attempts, but they all had a lot in common. The pattern was to apply the best computers and software available to the largest possible set of recordings of real combat – thousands of hours at minimum. This equipment analyzed what worked and what didn’t, mapped that onto actual tactics via physiology and weapon-expert systems, and fine-tuned the resulting style using simulated VR combat. It ultimately exploited teaching technology (including mnemotropic drugs, VR, and the young science of memetics) to generate a maximally effective teaching regime.
This approach was by no means a total failure; it produced some useful synthetic styles and some formidable martial artists. However, it didn’t actually render all previous martial-arts study redundant, despite the hopes of its proponents. For a start, the styles it generated were often difficult, occasionally verging on being impossible to learn properly. To become as effective as the experts, a student had to master a significant set of techniques (though not too many – inefficient moves were deliberately eliminated, after all). He had to internalize them, instinctively triggering the optimum response to any given move by an opponent. The high-tech training regimes were supposed to resolve this problem; instead, they made learning the styles expensive and stressful.
Furthermore, soon after most of these “ultimate” styles were developed, rival trainers began developing counters to them, designed to exploit the gaps left by their single-minded devotion to efficiency and to trigger responses that left the fighter open to specific follow-up attacks. This was nicknamed the “rock-paper-scissors” problem: A given approach could often be defeated by a specific counter-pattern that in turn could be defeated by other styles that weren’t better, just different. An arms race developed, only to be abandoned by most protagonists who recognized that it would never end.
That brought up the simple question of what these styles were for. They were too hard and expensive for casual students seeking simple self-defense skills and cheap fitness training, and too brutal for many sporting contests; students found it difficult to break the habits hammered into them by training when contest rules treated them as fouls. Military forces might see some use for them, but armies were mostly in the business of using high-tech weapons, and the best martial-arts styles still offered little protection against a bullet fired from a cheap handgun by a semi-trained shooter.
Nonetheless, elements of the various “ultimate” styles developed during this period survive to 2100, and there remains a tantalizing and not entirely crazy possibility – at least in the eyes of martial-arts fans – that a true ultimate style exists somewhere, presumably known only to a few reclusive experts. However, many of the styles developed in the 2080s included some weapons training – computer analysis confirmed that, yes, weapons are deadlier than bare hands – so this hypothetical style might include some weapons skills, too.
At a lower level of intensity, some dojos have incorporated ideas from this period into their own training regimes, particularly for military and unlimited combat-sports use. Styles that may have added some new ideas in this period (which could mean dropping combat art or sports skills) include Jeet Kune Do and Tae Kwon Do. One new style that owes something to the process is Cocerdelmi, which was optimized for use against opponents in body armor.
That golden age didn’t last very long. The scope for new inventions proved finite, although the tools remained available and effective. Still, at the dawn of the 22nd century, the martial arts are evolving almost as rapidly and confusingly as most other fields of human endeavor. Some old forms and applications have gone out of date, to be preserved only by a handful of traditionalists and historians – but VR and slink recording technologies allow such skills to be preserved much more reliably and meticulously than once was the case. Meanwhile, new forms, meeting the needs of new technologies and new environments (or just new fashions), do continue to appear, sometimes developing through fast prototyping, spreading through a subculture, and fading into obscurity or mutating beyond recognition, all in the space of a couple of years. Styles that take advantage of new biomods, or the unique abilities of some bioroids, and even cybershells, are also developing. One or two styles have even been designed for uplifted animals. The fact that some styles persist largely unchanged is a tribute to their memetic strength – or to their timeless usefulness.
In addition, many styles created in the 20th century have evolved in new and surprising ways in the 21st. For example, a handful of instructors staying true to Bruce Lee’s concept of Jeet Kune Do are turning it into a rather different style to accommodate biomods and variable gravity.
In 2100, the fitness arts have almost completely vanished. Thanks to modern biomods, citizens of firstworld nations no longer have any great desire for them, and those living in poorer areas of the world usually have more urgent needs. Anyone old-school or poor enough to maintain their fitness the antiquated way can usually find a well-designed training regime, perhaps with extensive AI support, without having to piggyback on the forms and traditions of the combat arts.
Martial arts as arts, like many forms of T’ai Chi and kata demonstrations in karate, however, are alive and kicking. Likewise, dojos that teach martial arts for self-defense still exist, although they are more common on Mars and in lastworld nations than in the secure and wealthy firstworld areas of Earth. Martial arts are still something that the average civilian has seen demonstrated and maybe considered studying.
Classical martial-arts tournaments in styles like boxing or kickboxing went the same way as almost all other spectator sports when confronted with upgraded, uplifted, or biomodified contenders. It was just too hard to maintain the illusion of fairness or a balanced set of rules and restrictions, let alone an ethos of sporting amateurism. Meanwhile, contests of combat that allow for and incorporate such modifications are widely prevalent. They often combine the conventions of a sporting tournament with the atmosphere of a trade show, as the creators and vendors of different biomods and bioroid designs compete with each other to demonstrate the superiority of their current models. At the least reputable – and least legal – end of the scale are the deadly bloodsport fights that can be found almost anywhere in the solar system – if you know who to ask and don’t look like a cop. Even these have some of the trade-show aspect, though, as black clinics want to make sales, too. These various contests provide the entertainment demanded by most armchair fight fans, who can convince themselves that modern medicine (or the use of bioroids) make the injuries involved impermanent and thus morally acceptable.
Quite how immoral some such contests really are is in fact a divisive issue in 2155, reflecting larger ethical questions. In societies where bioroids are regarded as property – or as abominations – the idea of matching them in no-holds-barred combat may hardly look problematic, especially if they have been designed and trained for the purpose, perhaps seeming eager for the fight. In places where they are seen as fully sapient beings with all the rights that implies, the idea of “brainwashing” them for combat is seen as appalling, and bioroid meatfights are despised as the morally corrupting pathology of debased societies. In other places, beings with full citizenship voluntarily engage in almost-lethal combat, trusting modern medicine and advanced biomods to keep them alive and intact in the end. Sometimes, this is legal; sometimes, it is banned as an affront to human dignity and a misuse of medical ingenuity. In banned locations, it is widely considered as mere barbaric pit-fighting with a layer of feeble excuses, its participants clearly in need of psychological therapy. Of course, where such things are banned, some people watch illicit broadcasts and recordings, or take holidays to places where the laws are more relaxed.
It’s possible to hold combat contests entirely in virtual reality, of course, and some such contests have their fans – but they aren’t as widespread as might be expected. To start with, there’s the simple feeling that VR just isn’t the same as reality, and that VR combat is somehow “cheating” or lacks an “edge.” Certainly, the feedback through a VR suit doesn’t convey some of the detail of real combat, and even interface implants and the best software have trouble with the complexities of balance, action and reaction, and physical pain. Suits capable of transmitting damaging levels of impact force, or implants capable of inducing serious pain, are generally unpopular and carry unavoidable risks. They are actively illegal in some places, but without them, virtual combat isn’t truly realistic. Even when underground virtual arenas use such technologies (which are also sometimes relied on for quick-and-dirty military training), audiences are often cynical about the whole subject. People who want to see bloodsports tend to insist on real blood – and sometimes on simsense records to prove that the loser was really hurt. This adds to the sleazy image of the whole business.
Some combat sports employ cybershell combatants – sometimes humanoid shells, but more often specially designed shells that tend to look like bad cartoons of military RATS designs with garish embellishments. It’s hard to ban these – sapient beings are never harmed in these contests, after all – but some free SAIs regard them as being in extreme bad taste. They do attract a lot of enthusiasm from the organic chauvinist end of the market, which likes to see AI-controlled shells being smashed up.
To further add to the difficulties, some recordings or simsense experiences are actually carefully constructed dramas – “no organic beings were harmed during the making of this InVid.” Violence in the media remains a live issue in 2155, with access controls in more restrictive societies and parental censorware locked in unending struggle with the ingenuity of those who want their fix of violent entertainment or are willing to supply it. In general, “genuinely fake” material is hard to ban, at least when it refrains from tipping into what society in general regards as outright violence-porn (mostly depictions of uncontrolled violence against defenseless victims with a high subjectivity level). Even so, responsible parents, guardians, and personal AIs try to monitor for unhealthy levels of enthusiasm for such stuff – definitions of “unhealthy” also being debated, of course. Meanwhile, ingeniously sleazy vendors employ memeticists to spread the belief that some recordings aren’t actually fake, whatever the tags may say, giving them the added thrill of the secretly illicit.
The software aides available to martial-arts students in 2155 open up many possibilities, not all of them very sensible. Some such programs can analyze recordings of fighters in action, usually to deduce what styles and forms they may have studied. Sufficiently detailed analysis of a large enough body of recordings can reverse engineer an entire style and help work out how to recreate it from scratch. Applied to historical recordings, this has enabled teachers to recreate “lost” styles from the 20th century, and to explain the secrets of deceased combat experts. Applied to other recordings, the results are plain bizarre.
Specifically, some fans of various popular media properties that happen to include a lot of combat have fed their favorite recordings to martial-arts analysis programs, forcing them to “recreate” the styles used by fictional characters. As the actors were usually following the guidance of professional fight arrangers, whose objective was to make the scenes look good rather than to show genuinely effective combat skills (which would, after all, often have been dangerous to other actors), these “derived styles” are invariably pretty useless, being much heavier on Art versions of skills than on really useful training. Nonetheless, dedicated fans will go to the trouble of learning them, and are sometimes tragically deluded enough to try using them in real life-and-death situations.
In a few cases, dedicated but not totally delusional students have recognized the limitations of such styles, and sought to convert them into something more useful, switching the Art skills to functional combat versions. This can work in principle, but tends to produce something that annoys serious fans of the source material by being less faithful and more brutal – and still not that useful in a real fight.
Virtually all professional law-enforcement personnel – be they on Earth or beyond – can be expected to have some form of hand-to-hand combat training, if only a simple art with the Police lens. In firstworld areas, the efficiency of VR-based training has shifted such skills from being an option to being the norm, for serious professionals – while cops in troubled lastworld regions are more likely to need to be effective streetfighters, even if their schooling is less formal. Training often integrates close combat with the use of assorted “sublethal” ranged weapons, to the point that the Police lens might very well add assorted Beam Weapons or Guns skills or Liquid Projector (Sprayer), and possibly the associated Fast-Draw skills and Retain Weapon techniques. Shield skill is also appropriate for some cops with riot control training, and Shortsword works with both old-fashioned batons and stun wands. The use of arm-mounted weapon pods and the need to deal with cybershells with integral weapons has reduced the attention paid to disarming techniques, especially as recognition pads in weapon handgrips make it impossible to use an opponent’s gun after taking it off him. In turn, this has led to slightly less emphasis on weapon retention.
Traditional martial arts are less commonplace in military organizations – except for those that also perform some kind of police function. Although most forces teach advanced melee techniques to a few units, many firstworld armies have largely abandoned the idea of human special-operations or infiltration/recon units in favor of cybershell and microbot solutions to those requirements. In addition, during downtime, most units engage in extensive VR-based training in multiple skills, which may include basic or even quite advanced unarmed combat.
Likewise, armies with human or bioroid troops in serious combat roles still need to teach aggression and cheap, low-tech methods to maintain fitness. Thus, basic martial-arts classes are still found, with or without the use of VR. The Military lens may be appropriate, but knife-fighting is seen as rather archaic at best, and the near-total disappearance of the bayonet makes Spear skill superfluous. The amount of body armor available on all sides, and less fastidiousness about killing than among police, means that serious military combat training is largely about high-tech weapons. Most or all of the shooting styles known survive somewhere on Earth in 2155, although the number of armies who still choose to deploy mostly human front-line forces and can afford to employ sophisticated training regimes is steadily shrinking.
In fact, some weapon-training regimes have become refined and formalized to the point where they resemble old-school martial arts in flavor – although once again, in the most advanced armies, even light weapons handling is becoming primarily the province of cybershells. (Controlling those shells can be something of an art in itself, though.) The extent to which high-end military AIs with full decision-making capability have to be trained rather than programmed to use their weapons complicates things; some military systems are actually experts in something not unlike martial-arts styles.
The human colonies on Mars are widely and quite accurately perceived as being important to martial-arts study and development in 2155. Tight weapons control in domed communities, the strong Chinese tradition of martial-arts study (including very practical forms among the Triads who have expanded so enthusiastically to Rust China), and the options opened up by lower gravity have combined to produce something of a renaissance in combat arts on Mars. The media in the rest of the system have latched onto this, taking the traditional Chinese idea of the martial-arts hero and suggesting that most such people are found on the Red Planet these days. For once, the media isn’t too far off the truth here; it’s been estimated that between 10% and 25% of the adult population of Mars has some kind of formal martial-arts training – although not many of them are obsessive adepts or enigmatic experts.
Furthermore, Mars has helped keep traditional unarmed and low-tech combat arts dynamic and innovative. It has given the media a hook on which to hang periodic martial-arts fashions. It has also provided a new environment in which martial arts teachers have been obliged to adapt and refine their skills rather than just parroting tradition. Statistically, with its much larger population, Earth still has many more skilled martial artists than Mars – but Mars arguably has the most interesting martial-arts scene.
Martin Ballantine: The creator of ARC-P retired from the US Army decades ago. Following a moderately successful civilian career in various branches of VR development and some rejuvenation treatments, he is living in a community in California, taking occasional consultancy work in VR design over the Web. Periodically, dedicated students of the style he formulated track him down and approach him in search of advanced training, despite his own repeated comments that he was a VR designer, not a warrior. He was originally amused by this, but is now merely irritated. Two of these people are the subjects of restraining orders from the local court.
Anthony Proudhomme: The official inheritor of the mantle of leadership in the Bantujutsu community is still active and still giving lessons – for high fees. Even aside from his unpopularity with some of his uncle’s more obsessive followers, he isn’t universally highly rated in the martial-arts community; his competition record is skimpy at best, after all. Nevertheless, it’s not always wise to discuss this in public; some of his followers are touchy and capable, and Bantujutsu isn’t a gentle style.
Paul Sayama: The creator of Hishôjutsu retired some years ago to a moderately substantial estate near Lake Candor, on Mars, where he lives on royalties from his past writings and occasionally contributes to new instructional InVids to keep his hand in. He is not a recluse, but he guards his privacy. His staff AIs insist firmly that he no longer takes pupils, but rumors abound in the martial-arts world about youngsters who’ve impressed him enough… These are probably just fan fictions.
Sylvia Vigil: The founder of Margaret Station’s Dancing Crane Studios doesn’t claim to be a martial-arts mistress (she’d certainly wince at “master”). She likewise has played no part in recent developments in the martial arts on the station, such as the creation of Margaretian Karate. Despite her current health problems, she retains much from her decades of experience; she could be expected to perform respectably in a sporting contest, and could look after herself in a street fight. Still, anyone approaching her in search of “combat secrets” will be briskly directed to the Studios’ numerous full-time teachers.
Master Xiao-Yue Zhang: While there are inevitably many arguments about who is the best martial artist in any region, most knowledgeable insiders give the title on Mars to Master (never “Mistress”) Zhang. Deported from Earth in the 2080s as a subversive element, Zhang is a fierce feminist in a still rather traditionalist, sexist milieu; most of her students are female, although her prejudices aren’t absolute. She’s hard to locate and harder to impress. Despite being over 50 (which shows in her gray hair), she is still in formidable condition. Even experts in the field are uncertain of her full capabilities. She must know (and probably helped invent) Zhua. She presumably knows at least enough about Hishôjutsu to be able to counter it. She also is believed to have studied more than one traditional kung fu style before she came to Mars. It’s possible that she is one of the true masters of Jeet Kune Do, adapting it to new conditions.