If there’s one aspect of the future about which we can be completely certain, it is that the United States will either grow larger, stay the same size, or shrink. SF authors looking for reason for the last possibility (shrinking) tend to imagine some institution-shattering large-scale calamity such as a meteor impact, a nuclear war, or pandemic—some disaster large enough to overwhelm civilian and military organizations.
A quick glance at actual history suggests that such scenarios, while undeniably dramatic, are unnecessary. The West Indies Federation disintegrated almost immediately1, the Soviet Union eventually vanished in a puff of logic, and the British Empire was gradually reduced from a globe-spanning regime to a commemorative barstool in a pub in Berwick-upon-Tweed without nuclear war, meteor impact, or pandemic. All that’s necessary is for a nation’s (or empire’s) centrifugal forces to be slightly larger than the bonds holding it together. While (comparatively) quiet dissolution is rarer in science fiction, it is not unknown, as these five vintage SF works show.
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach (1975)
Ecologically-minded West Coasters formed an independent nation in 1980, earning independence with a combination of righteousness, persuasive rhetoric, and nuclear blackmail. Since 1980, the border between Ecotopia and the US has been closed.
American journalist William Weston ventures into Ecotopia. Ostensibly, he is there to report on the young nation. In reality, the US President hopes Weston will be a wedge in the door, a first step to diplomatic normalization or even readmission of Ecotopia into the US. The flaw in this plan is that the author is very much on Ecotopia’s side. Weston is almost instantly seduced by the Ecotopian way of life.
This is one of the 20th century’s great comic novels, in that the contrast between Weston’s uncritical acceptance of Ecotopian propaganda with the Ecotopian way of life—racial segregation, declining standard of living, the fact that peace with the US is dependent on the continued operation of nuclear munitions the Ecotopians cannot maintain—is hilarious. Oddly, the author does not seem to have intended Ecotopia as humour.
Missing Man by Katherine MacLean (1975)
This expansion of MacLean’s Nebula-winning novella of the same title is an edge case, as the focus of exuberant regional autonomy2 isn’t national, but urban. New York has embraced wonderous diversity through mutual loathing. Each neighborhood celebrates its own culture while doing their best to pretend that the other enclaves don’t exist.
This might sound like a bad idea. It is! Not only is it easy for mutual distaste to slide into violence, New York City is only barely able to maintain and operate the vital systems that span and support the entire city. A divided city is an easy target for a sufficiently visionary terrorist.
Missing Man is an odd little novel. The original stories that became part of the fix-up were originally sold to John W. Campbell and the tropes on view are ones one would expect to see in Campbell’s Analog… except that proposals that would be lauded in other Analog stories—eugenics, for example—are presented negatively in MacLean’s novel. It is almost as though MacLean set out to write stories Campbell would be sure to buy, while simultaneously critiquing the very elements that would appeal to Campbell…
Friday by Robert A. Heinlein (1982)
Artificial Person Friday is one of “Kettle Belly” Baldwin’s top field agents. Kettle Belly’s sudden death leaves former international person of mystery Friday unemployed in a world that despises Artificial Persons. Too bad for Friday that Baldwin didn’t see fit to provide Friday with the means or training to thrive in civilian life, at least not on Earth.
Friday’s misfortune is the readers’ fortune, as Friday is forced to travel to and fro across a divided North America. The result is a tour of the nations that replaced the US and Canada: British Canada, the California Confederacy, the Lone Star Republic, and the Chicago Imperium, to name just a few.
Baldwin presents himself as a father figure to Friday, but not only does he seem to have limited her education to matters of utility to him, the ease with which she is captured at the beginning of the novel suggests that Baldwin did a crap job in educating Friday in fields about which Baldwin did care. Thinking about Friday’s relationship to Baldwin is infuriating… but at least it might distract you from looking too closely at the Michael Whelan cover.
In the Drift by Michael Swanwick (1985)
In this alternate history, fallout from the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown spread far downwind. A vast region was quarantined. Millions fled, the US disintegrated, and a century-long global depression ensued.
This fix-up novel is set nuclear half-lives later, by which time the affected region is less radioactive, the peculiar political arrangements that arose in the aftermath have become widely accepted as the norm, and even reunification isn’t entirely unthinkable. For Philadelphians like Keith Piotrowicz, the pressing question is: what’s in it for them?
To be honest, when I first read this novel, I found the premise unbelievable. Even leaving aside whether light-water reactors can go into meltdown in the manner the book requires, the idea that the political shockwaves from a single powerplant meltdown, no matter how spectacular, could crack a superpower apart seemed dubious. It would be like the Soviet Union collapsing because, I don’t know, a reactor somewhere in Ukraine blew up. Aren’t nation-states supposed to be robust?
When Gravity Fails by David Ackerman, William Moss, Chris Williams, and Chris Hockabout (1992)
Inspired by the George Alec Effinger novel of the same name, this R. Talsorian Cyberpunk supplement puts on full display a common issue with tabletop roleplaying game adaptations. A novelist can hint at the background, leaving readers free to fill in the details as they see fit. RPGs don’t have that luxury because players… (inarticulate frustrated game-master grunt).
Therefore, while Effinger’s novel is tightly focused on the Budayeen in an unnamed Middle Eastern (or possibly North African) city, this R. Talsorian supplement gives gamers a global overview, which includes North America. The map is, alas, hard to read, but I can say with some certainty that a century of economic decline and political division has produced such spin-off Americas as the Northwestern Protectorate and Federated New England. A timeline of the next few centuries is provided, featuring among other details the disintegration of the Soviet Union… in 2135.
While “centre cannot hold” future North Americas are rarer than stories of apocalyptic collapse, these works are by no means the only examples. In fact, just as I was typing this, I remembered a Ron Goulart novel I could have mentioned. No doubt there are many other works that I overlooked. Feel free to mention them in comments below.
- As I recall, the West Indies Federation failed because the low population islands worried about being dominated by high population islands, and the wealthy islands worried about having to subsidize less wealthy islands, plus the major politicians all disliked each other. The situation is instantly relatable to any Canadian; for very similar reasons, provinces began muttering about leaving while the ink was still drying on the British North America Act of 1867.
- I am trying very hard to avoid the term “Balkanized.”
Alfred Bester’s The Computer Connection features a North America that appears to be an agglomeration of city-states, corporate states, and more ambiguous regions (a fair amount of plot is set in Mexifornia).
The obvious one I forgot was Ron Goulart’s After Things Fall Apart, which is set after things fall apart.
Many of Goulart’s books were post-breakdown/breakup of one kind or another. I loved them all, back when I was 14. I have a vivid memory of looking for them everywhere, and feeling overjoyed when I realized the local college had a bookstore with some books I hadn’t seen before. I also admire Charlaine Harris’s recent Gunny Rose series, where the US disintegrates after FDR dies early.
[T]he British Empire was gradually reduced from a globe-spanning regime to a commemorative barstool in a pub in Berwick-upon-Tweed without nuclear war
Point of order: only one nuclear war. (And a lot of quite vicious fighting in parts of the world the British Empire didn’t really think of as “parts of the world.”)
Is there any point in mentioning Snow Crash or The Diamond Age here? No?
“Seven American Nights” by Gene Wolfe
Vinge’s The Peace War?
That began with the Peace Authority functionally nuking a lot of cities. Or at least, removing them as effectively as a nuke would.
I can’t recall if the US was still unitary by the end of O’Donnell’s War of Omission. The pure-hearted rebels who surely meant well armed themselves with devices that shifted their targets out of this universe, which they used with a tremendous lack of self-control. That would have been bad enough but an unexpected side-effect was that organic brains forgot that the targets had ever existed.
It was fracturing towards the end of War of Omission. Plus there was the effect of some folks finding the weapons used and restoring some missing pieces. I really need to pull that out and reread it.
By the start of the some-time-later part of War of Omission, the U.S. is sufficiently fragmented that the commander of the U.S. forces in Europe thinks he has sufficient forces to “restore order”, one piece at a time. That he chooses to start with New Haven CT is his second error.
lmfao
Re: The Peace War: There was also the case of all those warplagues that got unleashed that reduced the population down to something like 20-25 million planetwide(?).
Post US scenarios in novels: Micheal P. Kube-McDowell’s Emprise started with well-meaning activists using a nuclear nullifying field to render fissionable materials inert, ending the threat of nuclear war but precipitating an energy crisis that saw the global order collapse. The US broke apart into at least three segments mentioned in the novel – possibly much more.
A similar thing happened in Frederick Pohl’s Starburst (which has the dubious honour of being the front-runner in the “What-the-heck-did-I-just-read?” award). Eight astronauts sent on a one-way journey to find new ways of thinking succeeded… and then attempted to send a psychic blast to wreck humanity as revenge. The result was, again, rendering nuclear materials inert, leading again to global order collapse and the US breaking apart into several mutually-hostile pieces.
But perhaps both of the above examples qualify as “great calamities”.
Spider Robinson’s Night of Power ends with what might be considered a partial breakup of the United States, where New York and Pennsylvania are hived off to create a majority Black/PoC nation. It is rather dramatic, however.
Breakup of the United States seems to be one of the more popular themes in the subgenre of alternate history, where the point of divergence is usually the Civil War. But that wouldn’t be a whimper, no?
Judith Moffett’s Hefn series, starting with The Ragged World, has a smallish nuclear accident, and some fairly friendly aliens taking over.
Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife has the US fragmenting under climate change; Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning proposes a flood (I don’t remember the cause) rather than a drought.
It looks like you’re discussing only the cases of separate polities; have I forgotten a separate column on the U.S. simply being diminished (e.g., Ballroom of the Skies, the recent one (forgotten title) in which global warming has erased most of Florida and related lowlands)? Have you done (or do you have in mind) a column on the US never gelling (e.g., Cahokia Jazz, Of Tangible Ghosts), or is that too wide a territory?
Trail of Lightning is more ending with a bang, I’d say.
The America of Bruce Sterling’s Distraction is well on the way to functional dissolution under the twin pressures of climate change and total political dysfunction.
Fritz Leiber’s prescient 1969 documentary “A Specter is Haunting Texas” ;
“He lands in what he believes to be Canada to reclaim family mining interests only to discover that Canada is now North Texas and what is left of civilization in North America is ruled by primitive, backslapping, bigger than life anti-intellectual “good ole boys” convinced of their own moral superiority.”
Friday is far from the only Heinlein piece that involves a USA that ended not with a bang but a wimper. they all have interesting twists. but I particularly like Friday because of the interesting regional devolution (or evolution – depends on your perspective I suppose). I enjoyed the idea of how and why that devolution might happen so much that it came surprisingly close to becoming an international affairs dissertation topic during a long discussion with a certain professor.
William Harrison’s “Roller Ball Murders”, the basis for the 1975 & 2002 movies “Rollerball” contemplates a whimper rather than a bang as corporate interests and mercantile conglomerates take the place of nations. it is in the wake of a war, but seems to be gradual, so that sounds whimper-ish.
I kind of expected Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge to be mentioned, since you show a cover illustration that has been used for this novel.
You must have read a different Ecotopia than I did: Weston was hardly uncritical of Ecotopian life, so conditioned by his American lifestyle to waste, pollute, spend and barely tolerate his neighbors as he was. It took weeks of showing him a simpler, truer, more sustainable lifestyle and community to finally turn him toward Ecotopian life and to abandon his old lifestyle. Was the book heavy-handed? Like crazy, yeah. But the state of America at the time was hardly comic.
Kornbluth’s The Syndic has different parts of a former US run by what began as organized crime bodies (Syndic and Mob). The US disintegrated due to a sudden wave of sanity overtaking the populace, the government becoming superfluous to its needs, which were met by the underground economy. Everyone got along, so there was no need for coercive order-keeping.
Someday someone will collect MacLean’s stories and readers will get to read her trio of Rescue Squad stories without the what-were-they-thinking nonsense that the publisher imposed on her fixup novel.
Right now it’s possible to hunt down the individual stories via ISFDB (look for “Rescue Squad” on her home page), but you’d have to be lucky with your library.
Neal Stephenson’s Fall, or: Dodge in Hell shows us a fragmented USA where a substantial chunk has become ‘Ameristan’ – it feels frighteningly possible.
I would recommend Fitzpatrick’s War by Theodore Judson, in which the multinational Yukon Confederacy has taken over from the old United States. Very enjoyable even though military SF is not usually my thing.