A People’s Future of the United States is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by John Joseph Adams and Victor LaValle
Introduction copyright © 2019 by Victor LaValle
The copyright for each story herein is owned by its author. See this page for individual credits.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
ONE WORLD and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
ISBN 9780525508809
Ebook ISBN 9780525508816
oneworldlit.com
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Anna Kochman
Art direction: Greg Mollica
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
The Bookstore at the End of America, by Charlie Jane Anders
Our Aim Is Not to Die, by A. Merc Rustad
The Wall, by Lizz Huerta
Read After Burning, by Maria Dahvana Headley
Chapter 5: Disruption and Continuity [excerpted], by Malka Older
It Was Saturday Night, I Guess That Makes It All Right, by Sam J. Miller
Attachment Disorder, by Tananarive Due
By His Bootstraps, by Ashok K. Banker
Riverbed, by Omar El Akkad
What Maya Found There, by Daniel José Older
The Referendum, by Lesley Nneka Arimah
Calendar Girls, by Justina Ireland
The Synapse Will Free Us from Ourselves, by Violet Allen
O.1, by Gabby Rivera
The Blindfold, by Tobias S. Buckell
No Algorithms in the World, by Hugh Howey
Esperanto, by Jamie Ford
ROME, by G. Willow Wilson
Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death, by N. K. Jemisin
Good News Bad News, by Charles Yu
What You Sow, by Kai Cheng Thom
A History of Barbed Wire, by Daniel H. Wilson
The Sun in Exile, by Catherynne M. Valente
Harmony, by Seanan McGuire
Now Wait for This Week, by Alice Sola Kim
Dedication
Story Copyright Credits
About the Editors
INTRODUCTION
VICTOR LAVALLE
My father and I saw each other only three times before he died. The first was when I was about ten; the second was in my early twenties; and the last doesn’t matter right now. I want to tell you about the second time, when I went up to Syracuse to visit and he tried to make me join the GOP.
Let me back up a little and explain that my mother is a black woman from Uganda and my dad was a white man from Syracuse, New York. He and my mother met in New York City in the late sixties, married, had me, and promptly divorced. My mother and I stayed in Queens while my dad returned to Syracuse. He remarried quickly and had another son with my stepmother. Paul.
When I finished college I enrolled in graduate school, for writing. I’d paid for undergrad with loans and grants, and debt already loomed over me. I showed up at my dad’s place hoping he’d cosign for my grad school loans. I felt he owed me since he hadn’t been in my life at all. Also, I felt like I’d been on an epic quest just to reach this point. I got into Cornell University, but boy did I hate being there. Long winters, far from New York City, and the kind of dog-eat-dog atmosphere that would make a Wall Street trader sweat. But I’d graduated. And now I wanted to go back to school. More than that, I wanted to become a writer. Couldn’t my dad see me as a marvel? Couldn’t he support me just this once?
Nope.
At the time I felt incensed. In hindsight, I see he was a married man with a wife and a teenager to support; he worked as a parole officer, made a decent salary, but the man had never been well-off even once in his life. He wasn’t cruel about it, but he would not help.
With the question of the loan out of the way, my father and brother invited me out to dinner. I still felt angry but I went along. Maybe if I sulked in front of him he’d change his mind. Maybe, even with the disappointment, I still wanted to be around this stranger, my father. We went to a Chinese buffet they liked. Endless dumplings and beef fried rice and chicken wings were offered up as a consolation prize.
On the ride back to their place, my father turned on the radio. This was 1995, and the voice playing through the speakers was Mr. Rush Limbaugh. These days I think Limbaugh, while still popular, has retreated a ways into the far-right antimatter universe. Back then, he was trailblazing the same hustle Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham would refine: scaring old white people for money. My dad was an old white person, and he loved Rush Limbaugh.
I can’t remember what kind of bullshit Rush was spewing. What I do remember is sitting in the front seat of my father’s car while he and my brother shouted at me. “Listen! Listen! Rush is telling the truth!” For the whole twenty-minute ride these three men—my dad, my brother, and Rush—bellowed at me. I felt queasy from all the General Tso’s chicken I’d eaten at the buffet. But I felt even queasier with concern for my brother.
My father’s second wife was a Filipina. This meant my brother, Paul, was half Filipino. So the rhetoric of Limbaugh and my dad—anti-immigrant and virulently xenophobic—was literally about my brother and his mother. And yet Paul parroted the phrases with no sense of irony.
Paul shouted from the back of the car about “environmental wackos” whose policies were going to cause a “second violent American revolution.” Where else could a fifteen-year-old raised in Syracuse have learned these ideas and phrases but from this blowhard? Not even my father got as pumped as his second son. Paul had such a sweet face most of the time. A big, guileless smile, and the hints of a puberty mustache that only made him seem more fragile, highlighted all the growing up he had yet to do. But what was he being raised to become? He couldn’t be just like my father; his skin and his features would mark him. But these beliefs sure wouldn’t make him welcome among those who looked more like him. He might become a kind of orphan, a man without a clan.
As the car pulled into my father’s garage, I realized Paul had basically spent his entire life being told a story by my father, by Rush Limbaugh, and, in the broadest sense, by the United States as a whole: the story of America, as related by a wildly unreliable narrator.
* * *
—
On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump won the election to become the president of the United States. On that night I recalled the car ride with my father and brother twenty-one years earlier. The familiar sensation of having men shouting lies in my ear: Listen! Listen! He’s telling the truth!
My wife and I turned off the TV soon after the election results were called. We got in bed and for a while we lay there quietly. My wife is a writer and an academic, too. Over the years she’s given me countless insights about the hurdles women face as they struggle for unbiased student eval
uations, for promotions, for tenure. Her stories of the countless humiliations and second-guessing and the problem of “unlikability” returned to me on election night. I felt like a child who must be told something a thousand times before he truly understands it. I turned to my wife and said, “Damn, this country hates women.”
She said, “You’re only now just figuring that out?”
She patted me gently, kissed me once. She eyed me with the same look of concern, even pity, I must’ve shown Paul all those years ago. My brother hadn’t been the only one being fed falsehoods all his life.
* * *
—
In January 2000, on C-SPAN, Brian Lamb interviewed Howard Zinn—historian and author of A People’s History of the United States. The jacket copy describes the book as “the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of—and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers.” The cover of an edition published back in 2005 also states: “More than two million copies sold.”
At one point in the interview Zinn explains that the first edition of his now legendary text came out in 1980 and had a print run of five thousand hardcovers. He laughed at the number, as one can only do with the benefit of hindsight. “They didn’t know what would happen to it,” he said. “Neither did I.”
Zinn’s history of the United States begins not with Columbus discovering America, but with the Arawak of the Bahama Islands discovering Columbus. His large ship appears and the Arawak swim out to greet him and his crew. Zinn quotes Columbus’s journals: “They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features….They do not bear arms, and do not know them….They would make fine servants….With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” This is on the first damn page of the book. Try to contemplate what an educational tremor this must have caused in 1980.
Hell, even today whole swaths of the U.S. population regularly go into a rage at the idea of genuine historical accuracy. In 2010 the Texas Board of Education, for instance, made use of a history textbook that included this gem: “Most white Southerners swallowed whatever resentment they felt over African-American suffrage and participation in government.” I’m looking forward to the follow-up textbook about all the white Southerners who protested against Jim Crow laws!
Only two pages farther into his book Zinn relates, in a short paragraph, the experience of a sailor in Columbus’s crew. On October 12, 1492, a man named Rodrigo spots the sands of an island in the Bahamas in the moonlight. A promise has been made to all on board: The first man to spot land will be rewarded with a pension of ten thousand maravedis (medieval Spanish coins; it would amount to about $540 USD today). That was ten thousand maravedis a year for life. Rodrigo gave word of what he’d seen, but he never received the prize. Why? Columbus said he’d seen it the evening before. Columbus collected the loot. Oh, Christopher. You shady motherfucker.
This anthology in your hands—A People’s Future of the United States—is, in a sense, inspired not by those Arawak men and women who swam out to greet Columbus’s ship nor by Rodrigo, who was cheated of his reward. Instead this book is inspired by the countless generations of offspring who lost the right to forge futures of their own making.
Zinn had already written about our past, so my co-editor, John Joseph Adams, and I decided to ask a gang of incredible writers to imagine the years, decades, even the centuries, to come. And to have tales told by those, and/or about those, who history often sees fit to forget. “There is no such thing as impartial history,” Zinn once said. He added, “The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data.”
Think of this collection of stories, then, as important speculative data. A portrait of this country as it might become the future of the United States.
* * *
—
“We are seeking stories that explore new forms of freedom, love, and justice: narratives that release us from the chokehold of the history and mythology of the past…and writing that gives us new futures to believe in.”
That’s the gist of how our invitations read. John and I gave our writers a lot of leeway when it came to the stories themselves. One of the benefits of soliciting an astoundingly talented crew is that you can trust them to interpret the theme in ways that will be much more startling and ambitious than you could ever guess.
So many of these tales are vivid with struggle and hardship, but its characters don’t flee, they fight—whether it’s N. K. Jemisin’s dragon riders, A. Merc Rustad’s covert commandos, or Alice Sola Kim’s time-traveling best friend. While some of these stories depict battles with external foes there are those that wrestle, as well, with the enemies within. Violet Allen’s characters are caught in mind games with troubling consequences and Kai Cheng Thom’s must decide if they will change themselves or change the world. G. Willow Wilson turns a classroom exam into a test of communal bravery and Charles Yu relates the tale of a fight with an android that would’ve totally voted for Trump.
All that and I’ve hardly touched on the depth and breadth of brilliance in this anthology. As this collection came together, I found myself wishing I’d had this book with me in Syracuse all those years ago. I might’ve turned toward my brother, Paul, and put this book in his hands. I could’ve told him that this was the United States, a much broader portrait of his country than anything he would ever hear on right-wing talk radio. I might’ve asked him to imagine a future where he didn’t have to parrot the speech of bullies and tormentors. Instead, he might speak his own language, which is to say his own truth. He might come to believe he mattered most in a story. Not secondary, but primary. Not the foreign villain, but the homegrown hero. I could’ve used it to convince him the future belonged to him as much as anyone.
If I’m honest, I could’ve used this book myself long ago. Hell, I still need this book. Maybe you do, too. You might know others just as desperate for stories like these. If so, pass them on. Because the future is ours.
Let’s get it.
Victor LaValle
New York, New York
February 2019
THE BOOKSTORE AT THE END OF AMERICA
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
A bookshop on a hill. Two front doors, two walkways lined with blank slates and grass, two identical signs welcoming customers to the First and Last Page, and a great blue building in the middle, shaped like an old-fashioned barn with a slanted tiled roof and generous rain gutters. Nobody knew how many books were inside that building, not even Molly, the owner. But if you couldn’t find it there, they probably hadn’t written it down yet.
The two walkways led to two identical front doors, with straw welcome mats, blue plank floors, and the scent of lilacs and old bindings—but then you’d see a completely different store, depending which side you entered. With two cash registers, for two separate kinds of money.
If you entered from the California side, you’d see a wall-hanging: women of all ages, shapes, and origins, holding hands and dancing. You’d notice the display of the latest books from a variety of small presses that clung to life in Colorado Springs and Santa Fe, from literature and poetry to cultural studies. The shelves closest to the door on the California side included a decent amount of women’s and queer studies but also a strong selection of classic literature, going back to Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston. Plus some brand-new paperbacks.
If you came in through the American front door, the basic layout would be pretty similar, except for the big painting of the nearby Rocky Mountains. But you might notice more books on religion and some history books with a somewhat more conservative approach. The literary books skewed a bit more toward Faulkner, Thoreau, and Hemingway, not to mention Ayn Rand, and you might find more books of essays about self-reliance and strong families, along with another selection
of low-cost paperbacks: thrillers and war novels, including brand-new releases from the big printing plant in Gatlinburg. Romance novels, too.
Go through either front door and keep walking, and you’d find yourself in a maze of shelves, with a plethora of nooks and a bevy of side rooms. Here a cavern of science fiction and fantasy, there a deep alcove of theater books—and a huge annex of history and sociology, including a whole wall devoted to explaining the origins of the Great Sundering. Of course, some people did make it all the way from one front door to the other, past the overfed-snake shape of the hallways and the giant central reading room, with a plain red carpet and two beat-down couches in it. But the design of the store encouraged you to stay inside your own reality.
The exact border between America and California, which elsewhere featured watchtowers and roadblocks, YOU ARE NOW LEAVING/YOU ARE NOW ENTERING signs, and terrible overpriced souvenir stands, was denoted in the First and Last Page by a tall bookcase of self-help titles about coping with divorce.
People came from hundreds of miles in either direction, via hydroelectric cars, solarcycles, mecha-horses, and tour buses, to get some book they couldn’t live without. You could get electronic books via the Share, of course, but they might be plagued with crowdsourced editing, user-targeted content, random annotations, and sometimes just plain garbage. You might be reading The Federalist Papers on your Gidget and come across a paragraph about rights vs. duties that wasn’t there before—or, for that matter, a few pages relating to hair cream, because you’d been searching on hair cream yesterday. Not to mention, the same book might read completely differently in California than in America. You could only rely on ink and paper (or, for newer books, Peip0r) for consistency, not to mention the whole sensory experience of smelling and touching volumes, turning their pages, bowing their spines.
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