"Timely, dark, and ultimately hopeful: it might not 'make America
great again, ' but then again, it just might."--Cory Doctorow, New York
Times bestselling and award winning author of Homeland
Acclaimed short story writer and editor of the World Fantasy
Award-nominee Three Messages and a Warning eerily envisions an
American society unraveling and our borders closed off--from the other
side--in this haunting and provocative novel that combines Max Barry's
Jennifer Government, Philip K. Dick's classic Man in the High
Castle, and China Mieville's The City & the City
The United States of America is no more. Broken into warring
territories, its center has become a wasteland DMZ known as "the Tropic
of Kansas." Though this gaping geographic hole has no clear boundaries,
everyone knows it's out there--that once-bountiful part of the
heartland, broken by greed and exploitation, where neglect now breeds
unrest. Two travelers appear in this arid American wilderness: Sig, the
fugitive orphan of political dissidents, and his foster sister Tania, a
government investigator whose search for Sig leads her into her own
past--and towards an unexpected future.
Sig promised those he loves that he would make it to the revolutionary
redoubt of occupied New Orleans. But first he must survive the wild
edgelands of a barren mid-America policed by citizen militias and
autonomous drones, where one wrong move can mean capture . . . or death.
One step behind, undercover in the underground, is Tania. Her
infiltration of clandestine networks made of old technology and new
politics soon transforms her into the hunted one, and gives her a shot
at being the agent of real change--if she is willing to give up the
explosive government secrets she has sworn to protect.
As brother and sister traverse these vast and dangerous badlands, their
paths will eventually intersect on the front lines of a revolution whose
fuse they are about to light.
"Futurist as provocateur! The world is sheer batshit genius . . . a
truly hallucinatorily envisioned environment."--William Gibson, New
York Times bestselling and award-winning author
