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.
