By Don
Curren
About 15
years or so ago, just as I was going through one of my periodic attempts to
write science fiction, a Canadian sci fi
magazine announced a story competition around the theme of living in the shadow
of an empire.
They suggested
it was a theme Canadians should be quite familiar with.
So, I had what I thought was a clever idea: I’d create a scenario where Canada
was the empire, and the US was living in our shadow.
In my story,
civil war had broken out in a divided, chaotic US. But the unreliability of military
communications systems, due to their being overwhelmed by viruses that create
misleading AI-style “hallucinations,” resulted in a stalemate and state of
chaos where the only authorities are regional warlords.
After a
disastrous failed attempt to intervene by the EU, Canada reluctantly
intervenes, initially in a “peacekeeper” mode, but then negotiating the
integration of large parts of the US into a “Greater Dominion of Canada.”
The story was told from the perspective of a lone militiaman, cut off from his
comrades after a skirmish in the hills of Tennessee, who’s being pursued by
some better-equipped soldiers.
He doesn’t
know who they are, but when they capture him and then offer him free healthcare
at one of their military hospitals, he realizes they’re Canadian.
I thought
the premise of the US collapsing into chaos and having to be saved by Canada
was so outlandish it was entertaining, in a Bizarro World kind of way.
I wrote a
rough draft of the first few paragraphs of the story, which I tentatively
titled “Shadow of An Empire.”
But I
quickly ran out of creative steam. My interest in trying to write science
fiction waned again (it’s strangely cyclical), and I set it aside.
Then three
or four years ago, sometime during the Biden presidency, I believe, I told my
brother about it during a phone call, and he suggested I should get to work and
finish it.
So, I spent a
couple of hours on it, fleshing out more detail about the fictional unravelling
of the US that had led to the scenario of an armed Canadian intervention.
I imagined a
few other details I would include in the story.
I speculated
on what healthcare would look like in the US. Hospitals would be in armed
compounds, surrounded by security details charged with keeping out anyone who
didn’t have health insurance, which would have been taken over by the warlords as
part of their personal fiefdoms.
I also
explicitly linked the collapse of the US to Donald Trump. He wasn’t even on the
political scene when I first played around with the idea in the late 2000s,
just laying the foundations for his foray into politics with a trashy RealityTV show.
But as a novice
fiction writer, I was finding it hard to structure the story.
Should the
unveiling of the identity of the mysterious soldiers pursuing my lone militiaman
be left, O. Henry fashion, until the end?
Or should it
be a more gradual realization that came to him as he lay shivering in the
woods, ruminating about what he’d heard about the cold, distant and mysterious land
of Canada, and the rumours swirling around in the environment of disinformation
that prevailed during America’s collapse.
I once again
shelved the project.
It crept
back into my thoughts last fall when, to my horror, Trump was elected again.
But being
busy with other things – mostly fretting about exactly how disastrous another
Trump presidency would be – I didn’t make any more progress on Shadow of an
Empire.
I was
reminded of it even more forcibly when Trump began his project of
systematically bullying Canada.
But I was
also compelled to conclude reality had rendered my feeble imaginings obsolete.
I do think,
if Trump and Musk are allowed to continue in their present path, there might be
some kind of fragmentation of the United States.
I find it
hard to imagine the people of California or Massachusetts or Washington or New
York tolerating for too long the kind of authoritarianism and the flagrant
disregard of their values promulgated by Musk and Trump and their sycophantic minions.
The appeal
of stories like “Shadow of An Empire” – or the kind of story I tried and failed
to make it – is that they imagine a scenario that’s startlingly different from
reality, but sufficiently connected to it that the reader can consider it kind
of plausible.
If they stay
too close to reality, they lose some, or most, of their charm.
My story hasn’t
“come true” in any real sense, but reality has moved close enough to the
scenario depicted that it no longer seems like a huge, and entertaining,
speculative leap.
So, I hereby
declare my “Shadow of An Empire” project finished. At least until my cyclical
interest in writing science fiction has another upswing.
What are the
morals of this story about a story?
I think
there are two.
The first is
never to sit on your creative impulses. Reality can get weirder than your imagination
very rapidly.
The second
is never under-estimate Donald Trump’s capacity for cruelty and stupidity.
I offer the crude,
partial first draft below for your amusement, if you’re still interested …
Shadow of an
Empire
By Don
Curren
About a
second after the armored personnel carrier rumbled into view on the roadway across the valley, Lt. Mark Fisher squeezed
the trigger on the rocket-propelled grenade launcher perched on his right
shoulder.
Less than a
second later, there was a muffled explosion and the vehicle, a late model MPV
with the initials “GDC,” bumped along the surface for a moment before coming to
stop.
Fisher
tossed the depleted bazooka off his right shoulder and swung his automatic
rifle up and into its place. As he expected, a soldier had come out of the
vehicle’s back door and was a levelling his weapon in Fisher’s direction.
He aimed at
the soldier, and just as he was squeezing the trigger, Fisher felt a searing
pain in his left forearm. Another foreign trooper had come around the front of
the vehicle and was able to take a good clear shot at Fisher before he saw him
appear.
Fisher dived
for cover and felt the wound left by a bullet that had grazed his arm. He was
already losing blood but getting out of there was a more immediate priority –
another round of automatic rifle fire passed over his head and thundered into
the embankment just behind him.
He took off
in a crouching kind of run down the path along the north side of the small
valley.
Alone and
outgunned, Fisher had one decisive advantage against the invaders – he knew the
terrain intimately. He had been born and raised in the hill country of west
Tennessee, and now he was doing his best to defend it from another wave of
invaders.
There was no
way across the valley from the old highway roadbed the MPV was now stuck on,
and down the path, about a quarter of a mile or so, Fisher knew of a hiding
place he could use while he tried to bandage up his arm and checked his kit to
see if he had anything he could use to kill the pain.
Fisher had
been fighting in these hills, a soldier in the Western Tennessee Militia Unit
of the Army of the Federated States of America, for about seven years now –
since his 17th birthday, in fact.
It wasn’t
just the enemies that had changed. So had the nature of war itself.
The Second
Civil War began almost immediately after Donald Trump “won” the presidential
election of 2024.
Civil unrest
broke out almost immediately in New York, Chicago, Boston, and on the West
Coast. The Trump administration ordered the National Guard and then the Army to
suppress the violent protest that had erupted in cities and states under
Democratic control.
The military
splintered in response. In the Northeast and the West Coast, the military chain
of command refused to bear arms against the protestors, rejecting Trump’s
orders as illegal and unconstitutional.
In the south
and the Midwest, they complied. In most of those areas, it was irrelevant, as
there was little armed violence.
But in some
major cities – Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta and Houston, in particular – there
was rioting. Army and National Guard units there mobilized, and within days
pitched battles raged in inner-city areas, with soldiers and tanks spilling
onto city streets in scenes reminiscent of the riots of the late Sixties - but
much deadlier.
For a day or
two, it looked like the Administration might be able to maintain control over
the nation as a whole.
But military
commanders in the “mutiny” states continued to refuse orders from Washington,
turning instead to their state governments for direction.
Chaos
threatened to engulf those states, mostly on the coasts, as “militia” groups in
heavily Republican areas attempted to taken control and violence there began to
spiral out of control.
With
remarkable speed, however, New York, Pennsylvania, California and the other key
Democratic states formed an ad-hoc alliance under the leadership of the
Governor of New York called the “Alliance of Democratic States.”
Laws were
passed in state legislatures banning the militias, and the army and law
enforcement agencies cracked down on them and re-established some degree of law
and order.
The violence
elsewhere, most notably Texas, Ohio and Illinois, continued to smoulder.
And the Trump administration, supported by the
fragmented remains of Congress, declared the actions of the Alliance of
Democratic States unconstitutional.
Trump demanded
that the military and police forces loyal to it lay down their arms and
surrender to units from the “loyalist” areas, which “temporarily” renamed
itself the “Federated States of America.”
The FSA
threatened to invade Pennsylvania and California to reinforce its claims of
sovereignty. For its part, the Democratic Alliance threatened a
counter-invasion.
Hostilities
commenced shortly afterwards. Or, more accurately, they commenced, and shortly
afterwards collapsed into chaos.
No one had
anticipated the way that cyber warfare had rendered the real thing almost
impossible to wage.
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