The Illuminated Path of Captain Woodhouse is a gargantuan, orderly nation, ruled by Professor Fate with an iron fist, and renowned for its keen interest in outer space, complete lack of prisons, and sprawling nuclear power plants. The hard-nosed, hard-working, cynical, humorless population of 30.81 billion Captain Woodhouseans are rabid consumers, partly through choice and partly because the government tells them to and dissenters tend to vanish from their homes at night.

The tiny, corrupt, pro-business government juggles the competing demands of Industry, Defense, and Education. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of The Valley of Ashes. Income tax is unheard of.

The frighteningly efficient Captain Woodhousean economy, worth an astonishing 13,646 trillion $$s a year, is broadly diversified and led by the Arms Manufacturing industry, with major contributions from Information Technology, Retail, and Book Publishing. Average income is an amazing 442,937 $$s, but there is a vast disparity between incomes, with the richest 10% of citizens earning 4,125,189 per year while the poor average 4,284, a ratio of 962 to 1.

The government regularly hires contractors to construct high rise apartments, mystics are claiming that a simultaneous rise in scepticism and education budgets is correlation rather than causation, scaffolding is built around scaffolding to give safe access, and strange lights seen in the sky are officially regarded as weather balloons or hoaxes and nothing else. Crime, especially youth-related, is so common that it is unusual to encounter someone following the law, perhaps because of the country's complete lack of prisons. Captain Woodhouse's national animal is the Death's-head hawkmoth, which is also the nation's favorite main course, and its national religion is Aubrey-Maturinism.

Captain Woodhouse is ranked 575^th in the world and 1^st in Islam for Largest Gambling Industry, scoring 23,649.14 on the Kelly Criterion Productivity Index.