I spent a month traveling all over the country interviewing people about America’s 250th anniversary. My plan was to write something about what is, in my view, one of the most fully realized novels about a prospective second American Civil War, Christopher Brown’s Tropic of Kansas, which was published in 2017. I had begun to write this essay before the trip, but my odyssey changed how I thought about it. My travels over the course of the months of May and June took me through many cities and places that Brown describes in his book. Notably, I spent time in the Twin Cities, East Texas, and New Orleans, all places that Brown’s characters visit on their respective road trips. One of the things I was struck by on my tour of the United States was the multiracial character and size of the country. Brown’s protagonists Sig and Tania both represent that multiracial character. Sig is a half-Indigenous, half-white insurgent who has been identified by a government algorithm as troublesome for the future stability of the polity, while Tania is an African American government worker who strikes a deal to track down her brother Sig in order to get her mom out of prison. As I traveled the country, I understood how the novel truly did work through many of the anxieties in the zeitgeist about a second Civil War.
Civil war is the heart of what interests me about Brown’s novel. And it is something that remains on almost everyone’s minds. The increasing political violence, instability, elite divisions, and overall fraught political climate have many people thinking about a civil war. My own fascination with civil war began probably a year or so after 2020. Around that time, I encountered Brown’s Tropic of Kansas and his Dystopian Lawyer duology. I also read another novel called American War by Omar El Akkad, which I liked a lot less. Then there’s the movie Civil War that A24 produced a few years ago. I read the books How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter and The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche. Walter’s book follows a concept of anocracy. In her first chapter, she describes how “one of the best predictors of whether a country will experience civil war is whether it is moving toward or away from democracy.” The middle zone between autocracy and democracy is described as “anocracy.” She describes how, in an anocracy, “citizens get some elements of democratic rule — perhaps elections — but they also get presidents with lots of authoritarian powers.”
These partial democracies are most likely to experience civil wars. Walter describes that anocracies are quite similar to what we have in the United States, calling them “partial democracies, faux democracies or hybrid regimes.” These are not countries that have become fully authoritarian or fascist. The United States is definitely in this zone. Some states hold free and fair elections while others suppress the vote via voter suppression laws and gerrymandering. In reading this, I recognized another period of anocracy in America’s history: Reconstruction in the South. Different from our current era, where things appear to be transitioning away from democracy, Reconstruction was a period where things were transitioning toward full democracy, at least for the slaves. Walter also talks about how a “primary reason for revolt is that democratic transitions create new winners and losers: [i]n the shift away from autocracy, formerly disenfranchised citizens come into new power, while those who once held privileges find themselves losing influence.” I think that people often try to talk about the first American Civil War from ’61 to ’65 as the analogue to a second American Civil War, but that the Reconstruction period after offers a better understanding of what we might be facing in the present day.
For this reason, I decided that revisiting Du Bois’ later chapters in Black Reconstruction might be helpful to understand civil war from a historical perspective. Black Reconstruction has become more popular among the left in recent years, though much academic writing seems to avoid the centrality of political violence in the later chapters, opting instead to engage in more discourse about abolition, which is doubtless an important part of the book but feels less relevant to our current circumstances. In Du Bois’ penultimate chapter “Back Toward Slavery,” he summarizes: “How the civil war in the South began again — indeed it had never ceased; and how Black Prometheus bound to the rock of ages by hate, hurt and humiliation, has his vitals eaten out as they grow, yet lives and fights.” Here Du Bois flexes his own rhetorical muscles before diving into the depths of historiography about how Black people were driven back into slavery. It’s critical to understand that the popular understanding of the Civil War in the United States has the war ending in 1865 and Lincoln’s assassination, but I think a more expansive vision is needed. As Du Bois describes it, “the civil war began again.”
Du Bois describes in the final chapter how “the white laborer joined with the white landholder and capitalist and beat the Black laborer into subjection through secret organization and the rise of a new doctrine of race hatred.” I want to focus on the term “secret organization.” Secret fascist organizations are incredibly common and far-reaching in the United States, even now. For instance, books like Matt Kennard’s Irregular Army have detailed how neo-Nazis and other extremists joined the United States military during the War on Terror. Many of these forces are home now. When I was coming of age politically in the mid- to late 2010s, it was very common for people to take part in demonstrations and direct actions against fascist groups, which often featured large numbers of veterans. These fascist groups were sometimes more forward-facing; other times they were less so. Clashes in Berkeley, Charlottesville, and Portland were commonplace political events. None of us can forget January 6th, which featured a large number of veterans. Most recently, the Patriot Front marched through the streets of D.C. on the anniversary of the nation’s birth. These examples make the similarities between the Reconstruction period and today too easy to see. Du Bois goes on to describe various different white factions, often composed of Confederate Army veterans, who kept the newly free Negroes in line, eventually putting them back in their place. Often, this meant physically preventing Black people from leaving the plantations that had oppressed them as slaves.
Du Bois lands on a Marxist explanation for the secret warfare against the Negro that took place in the midst of Reconstruction: “The race element was emphasized in order that property holders could get the support of the majority of white laborers and make it more possible to exploit Negro labor.” On both sides, there were clandestine networks that organized to fight one another over the question of labor. Du Bois goes on to describe how “[a]rmed guerrilla warfare killed thousands of Negroes; political riots were staged; their causes or occasions were always obscure, their results were always certain: ten to one hundred times as many Negroes were killed as whites.” The goal of this type of politics was to win the contested democracy, which relates back to our earlier theme of anocracy. Du Bois describes a report investigating the Klan of South Carolina in 1871 and their reasons for violence:
The reasons for the Ku Klux outrages were significantly varied: the victims should suffer in revenge for killing, and for some cases of arson, they were Republicans, they were radical; they had attempted to hold elections; they were carrying arms; they were ‘niggers’; they were ‘damn niggers’; they boasted that they would own land; they should be made to recant Republican principles and they should give desired information.
The commonality of reprisals during Reconstruction against political opponents of the disempowered planter class makes it clear that the handwringing about political violence from many politicians and pundits today seems to overlook that American history is mired in violence. I’m not endorsing political violence, but I am not surprised by it; the history of the United States has always been soaked in blood. This came up in my interview with Christopher Brown when he talked about how, even in the Jeffersonian tradition, there’s some understanding in the American polity that armed resistance is a right of the populace. While the idea that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots” can lead to a variety of places politically (notwithstanding Jefferson’s own origin as a slaveholder), it’s important to grasp how violence has always been part of America’s founding myth. Knowing this, it’s clear that the anocracy and resulting violence of the Reconstruction period in the United States is not a fluke.
Walter narrates how often wars result when losers and winners are in close proximity. Du Bois describes that the problem with ending a civil war is that, at the end of the day, the losers “rest face to face after peace.” Unfortunately, as Du Bois recounts, white southerners had to rest face to face with Black folks, the cause for the war and their misery. In some ways, the problems of America at its 250th anniversary are similar, with neighbors often distrusting other neighbors. That your neighbors may hate you can feel less palpable in large cities, but it is especially intense in places like my hometown of Rockford, Illinois. Often people you know have different and conflicting views. In some ways, this familiarity when it comes to “resting face to face” reminded me of my time in Northern Ireland, where violence between Republican and Unionist paramilitaries often engulfed small cities like Derry or Belfast. This dynamic is described well in the novel when Tania watches a livestream of some revolutionaries and describes seeing the “[e]yes of people she had grown up with peering out through the balaclavas.” Tania grew up with militants and now sees them making threats online via anonymous videos. Conflict is not estranged from her life. The emphasis on race, conflict, and class returns often in Tropic of Kansas. Brown’s novel grapples with emancipatory themes that deal with social conflict, violence, and freedom in a fictional future period of anocracy, just like Du Bois’ seminal work of Marxist historiography.
Anocracy is palpable in the novel. In one of the later scenes, Sig and members of a resistance group witness hacked voting machines being wheeled in from planes along with captured opposition members being forcibly returned from exile. This all happens at a Texas airfield somewhere. These acts indicate that the novel exists in a space between democracy and autocracy, where the current regime still needs private military companies to bring in voting machines to win the midterms. In fact, in the fictional history of Brown’s world, the current authoritarian President Mack is a successor to the ousted left-wing administration. The vice president of that administration, Maxine Price, is a novelist and revolutionary who helped lead an insurrection in New Orleans. Tania is a fan of her books.
My interview with Christopher Brown lasted about 45 minutes. We talked about an empty plot he owns in the edge lands of Austin, Texas, and Sig’s origin as a Conan-esque hero. His succinct description of the novel was: “What if the Occupy guys got themselves some AK-47s. . . . What if the Third World was this place . . . the Third World country the United States is trying to put down is this place?” Brown traces some of his inspiration to the Occupy movement in Houston that began the year he started writing the book. His positive view of Occupy is refreshing to hear, as much of the current retrospective writing labels Occupy a disordered mess rather than an inspirational moment. He also cites his drives from Texas back to his home state of Iowa. Over the course of these drives, he described to me how he watched the degeneration of rural America over the years. The book’s title comes from a territory somewhere in the middle of the United States. In the novel, it is described as “the parts of the Midwest that had turned third world.” It’s largely unclear how the Tropic became that way, though it has something to do with ecological catastrophe. That theme compares with the other novels I’ve read about a Second American Civil War. In Omar El Akkad’s novel American War, the South secedes as a reaction to the North’s federal laws prohibiting the use of fossil fuels. A large portion of the novel takes place in a refugee camp. The father of Sarat, the main protagonist, is killed in a terrorist attack. Eventually, Sarat ends up fighting in a militant group for the South. There are shades of anocracy here as well.
The ecological themes are perhaps one of the most overlooked causes underpinning a potential second Civil War. As AI data centers consume more and more water, shortages could make more radicalized populations willing to kill. American War suffersfrom the same problems as other books, such as Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, as both novels over rely on the “North” versus “South” division rather than on more complicated current political realities. Fascinatingly, these books also parallel one another in reading the second Civil War through the eyes of an observer in the future, the fictional biographer C.M. in Biography of X and the future historian Benjamin Chestnut in American War. The focus on the first American Civil War is a literary and historical fixture, it seems, even if quite distant from current realities. While Lacey’s novel is less concerned with outright conflict than El Akkad’s, it still grapples with an alternative history rooted in the Southern Territory’s secession from the Union in 1945. In this universe, Emma Goldman was a part of FDR’s staff. Goldman abandons her anarchism to become a bureaucrat! Who says alternative history cannot be fascinating? The main character, X, is an enigmatic artist later revealed to be an agent for the Northern government, which is engaged in a cold war with the Southern theocracy that is quite literally walled off from the rest of the United States in the “Great Disunion.” X is an escaped refugee from the South. I think this imagining of a second Civil War as a cold war is strange and betrays some misunderstandings about American history in those books that imagine a second Civil War as an analogue to the first one. There are not the clear battle lines that existed in the 19th-century wars between the Confederacy and the Union. Also, both Lacey’s and El Akkad’s novels largely elide the racial history of the United States, despite the centrality of “North versus South” in the books, which should signal a racial past. In Laura Miller’s critique of American War in the Guardian, she argues that:
A mere 75 years in the future, as he imagines it, there will still be a Democratic and a Republican party, but no one will care much or talk about race any more. Sarat has “fuzzy” hair, but her father’s skin was a “caramel” shade. . . . The Chestnutts don’t claim any ethnicity at all. Perhaps El Akkad envisions an America where the old races have so intermingled they can’t be distinguished, but in his version of the future, no one even seems to remember that race was once a cornerstone of American identity, a division and a heritage that tore the nation apart again and again.
A similar critique exists for Catherine Lacey’s book. In a Vulture review, Emma Alpern writes about how the Black citizens of both the Southern theocracy and the Northern socialist republic in Lacey’s novel “aren’t given much narrative priority here.” Alpern also mentions how, as a part of the fictional bibliography, Lacey just references a Black art book called Black Futures, edited by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham. Relegating race to a reference reveals, to me, a kind of cowardice, a racial guilt that plagues many liberal white writers. It’s unfortunate that the book continues to exist in this uncomfortable place. Both stories imagine armed conflict would not involve a racial dimension, at least to some degree. Despite this, they both illuminate how a second Civil War, or some kind of national divorce, has been on the minds of fiction writers for a while.
El Akkad’s novel experiments with bringing American wars of conquest in the Middle East to a homeland setting, similar to Alex Garland’s movie Civil War, a sleeper hit released in 2024. The film is among the better depictions of a second American Civil War, focusing less on the causes of conflict and more on how people live day to day amid political violence perpetrated by both state and nonstate actors. Garland chooses not to follow insurgents, but rather journalists who themselves are following the insurgents and various factions. There are a number of scenes that I enjoy, but the standouts are those where we get to see how mundane life experiences continue even as conflict rages on, such as at the gas station where gas is super expensive, paid for with Canadian money, and corpses are hung up as warnings, or the moments of quiet reflection near a refugee camp filmed at the Alonzo Herndon Stadium in Atlanta.
Garland was criticized by some for not taking a strong political stance in Civil War. I think that criticism utterly misses the point of the film, which was to explore the cascading violence that results from a conflict such as a second American Civil War. A standout scene is the moment Jesse Plemons as Wyatt, a racist paramilitary, is caught by the journalists doing racial purges of an area somewhere in the United States. He specifically targets journalists who are visibly not white. This moment recalls both the secret organizations described by Du Bois in Black Reconstruction and groups such as Patriot Front, which march proudly in the streets of D.C. today. Civil war as it’s understood by Garland is an opportunity for the worst elements in our society to take advantage and do violence for reasons real or imagined. This tracks with reality, as many zoomer-aged neo-Nazi accelerationists on closed Discord channels yearn for a race war. Anocracy remains a constant, as Garland’s story also features a president with a contested seat of power.
If Garland’s film captures the bizarre and horrific realities of a second American Civil War, Christopher Brown’s novel captures a more optimistic and surreal tone. The title Tropic of Kansas comes from Brown’s description of a desolated heartland of the United States that is filled with movements to fight back against the degradation. The Tropic is an unclear territory in the book, as Brown does not exactly define it, even acknowledging that “Kansas wasn’t even really a part of it.”
Tropic of Kansas follows something that resembles a second American Civil War. It is important to understand that civil wars as they currently exist in the 21st century involve large numbers of nonstate actors. There are no clear battle lines as in the 19th century. Everyone and everything becomes a target. The novel is largely unconcerned with notions of North versus South that seem to preoccupy the other novels mentioned. Brown does not inherit the old or feel indebted to replaying the first American Civil War, well, save for the fact that he takes seriously some of the histories that took place during Reconstruction. Rather than rooting his book in a North versus South conflict, Brown explores the fictional Tropic of Kansas:
They were still arguing about what caused it. Entire political movements had grown around different theories, but the truth was no one really knew. . . . What they did know was big swaths of the corn belt had turned sick, from bad splices, failed economics, burnt climate, broken politics or divine retribution.
Brown’s novel is more optimistic than Lacey’s or El Akkad’s, as it foregrounds protagonists who are children of the movements that had grown around fighting back against devastation in the Tropic. Tania and Sig are something like foster siblings, as Sig’s mom, a member of the movement, would often leave Sig with Tania’s mom in a cooperatively run public housing development in Minneapolis. It becomes increasingly clear as history turns that to talk about any kind of second American Civil War or sustained social conflict in the States, the Twin Cities must be mentioned. The Twin Cities were the site of both the initial sparks leading to the nationwide George Floyd uprising and some of the most pronounced conflict with ICE in early 2026.
Fascinatingly, Minneapolis and the surrounding area remain a central site in the historiography of Brown’s future civil war. It’s the home of the protagonists, political movements, and a riot in the Mall of America. When I asked the author why Minneapolis featured so prominently, he told me that Sig’s origin as a man from Arrowhead country in northern Minnesota was inspired by his own childhood going to summer camp up in those woods, so it just made sense geographically. He didn’t write with the intention of predicting Minneapolis as the center of American political conflict in the 21st century. Brown, in contrast to Lacey and El Akkad, is working from an understanding of American myth. The character Sig is rooted in distinctive American folklore. He’s a 21st-century version of a frontiersman or wild man such as Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill, or Paul Bunyan. Many American folktales are tied up with some of the worst parts of American history, such as slavery or Indigenous genocide. Despite this, Brown talked explicitly about retooling these American archetypes for emancipatory ends. Tropic of Kansas is thoroughly a work of genre fiction, despite its literary merits. I remember reading a critique of Tropic of Kansas on Goodreads criticizing Sig’s constant escapes as unrealistic. What these critics fail to understand is that Sig is more analogous to a “sword and sorcery barbarian,” as Brown put it during our interview, than a typical literary fiction protagonist filled with alienation and insecurities. While Tania as a character more closely fulfills the literary role of an anxiety-ridden and introspective protagonist, Sig is a combination of a freewheeling Kerouac-esque loafer, Dungeons & Dragons rogue archetype, and 21st-century frontiersman facing the scourge of capital and climate collapse. Sig’s story is a mosaic of adventures full of violence, drugs, and getting robbed with his buddy by beautiful women in St. Louis.
Sig’s foil is Tania, a government worker and adoptive sister who tracks Sig throughout the novel before eventually abandoning her good government job to join the movement. She reminded me of a character like Dan Freeman from The Spook Who Sat by the Door, another African American trained by the U.S. government who eventually joins a revolutionary faction. She also, for those who do not enjoy genre fiction, reads closer to a typical middle-class protagonist common within contemporary literary fiction. The difference is that the “weird little white kid” whom Tania loves reluctantly is a terrorist, rather than a peer at her middle-class job.
As ecological devastation spreads, the civil and various other conflicts become more difficult to map, just like the Tropic of Kansas. While the story takes Tania and Sig from Cedar Rapids to Minneapolis to Houston to New Orleans, the whole thing feels distinctly rooted in the fact that civil war can and will break out anywhere in the United States. But rather than the North and the South fighting, there will be a thousand different factions. In many ways, this more accurately resembles the struggle during Reconstruction. Anocracy as a concept returns as well. In the prequel novel from his Texas lawyer duology, the narrative partially follows how the current, deeply unpopular authoritarian president ascends into power. It does seem a bit familiar.
Captivity is a common theme in Brown’s novel. In the beginning, Sig is captured at the border and held in a detention center in an abandoned mall. Brown, in the course of our conversation, talked about how the book was supposed to be a dystopian mirror held up to our own reality, but feels increasingly accurate to life; he mentioned temporary detention centers springing up in abandoned Walmarts in the Rio Grande. Over the course of the book, Sig frees himself from captivity numerous times. These escapes follow in the tradition of the adventure novels that Brown took inspiration from for the character. The United States, since the advent of mass incarceration in the 1970s, has been a nation dominated by the prison in many ways; even those of us outside prison walls are often trapped as surveillance itself expands. Jackie Wang narrates in Carceral Capitalism how increasing automation and deindustrialization have led to surplus populations that are ever more controlled, surveilled, and imprisoned by the state. So the constant evasion of the police state powered by the tech algorithms that Sig engages in feels quite resonant to our reality. As data centers, Flock cameras, and detention facilities continue to be built all over, any sort of narrative about a civil war must include the impact of tech and prisons and how they structure all of our lives. Tech can have emancipatory potential, while resistance inside of prisons only becomes more commonplace, such as the hunger strikes inside of Delaney Hall in New Jersey, which in turn spurred rebellion outside of the walls.
Speaking of the emancipatory prospects of tech for liberating captives, somewhere in Iowa, in one of the best scenes, Sig and an older militant named Fritz free Sig’s friend Moco from a militia compound using a drone. Sig is assisted by the drone in his attack on the compound. Fritz is an older member of some eco-anarchist collective that remains reluctant to take the fight to the militias. This militia base is described in the book as “a gated compound on the East end of Town, the home of one of the local owner class families who relied on the militia to protect their property and keep the other locals under control.” It feels quite reminiscent of Du Bois’ description of the secret societies that enforced property relations in the South. For an account of what these groups actually look like today, one need not imagine. In Phil Neel’s seminal work of Marxist geography, Hinterland, he spends the first chapter, “Oaths of Blood,” following groups such as the Wolves of Vinland, the Oath Keepers, and the broader Patriot Movement in their desires to carve out some strange kind of right-wing autonomous zones in the hinterlands of capital. Neel writes:
The crux of Patriot Movement land politics is the desire to see federally controlled lands returned to local management in order to revive long-dead local timber, mining, and ranching industries. At the same time, they argue that the devolution of federal power to states and counties will allow local communities to manage their own affairs.
This all comes true in the Tropic. In the novel, the militias that Sig and Tania encounter are largely left alone by the federal government, which has ceded control of the area to these local warlords. The fight against the militia with drones is prophetic in how it anticipates the usage of drones by civilian populations for insurgencies. While we’ve mostly seen drones used in conflicts between different states such as the Iran War or the war in Ukraine, it’s quite clear that nonstate actors will begin using these devices more as time continues. In the United States, guns are plentiful. Drones soon will be. The combination of both guns and drones makes it quite easy for nonstate actors to do violence. At a laundromat in Texas over the summer, I had an intriguing conversation with several lovely gentlemen about the politics facing the United States. Despite the many disagreements that those folks had, there was a shared insistence on the necessity of arms, whether for the patriotic tradition, revolutionary upsurge, simple self-defense, or other purposes.
Another book in conversation with Brown’s novels is After the Revolution by Robert Evans. Evans, a war reporter and host of a second American Civil War prepper podcast, “It Could Happen Here,” is familiar with the territory. Evans writes characters who seem much closer to the action-hero archetype of a character like Sig. For instance, one of the main characters in After the Revolution is Manny, a media fixer who is just trying to survive while having crazy adventures. Or Roland, a cyborg super soldier. In the book, set in Texas, one of the main factions, the Heavenly Kingdom, a Christian nationalist group, provides another example of how a second American Civil War would be consumed by a thousand groups and ideologies. The choice to have Sasha, a converted believer, as one of the main characters is important, as it illustrates how Christian nationalism will be a force to be reckoned with if a second American Civil War ever goes hot. The exploration of Sasha, her radicalization, and ultimate disillusionment is fantastic. After the Revolution illustrates how writers with an explicit sci-fi influence, like Evans and Brown, may grasp the political realities of a second American Civil War better than their literary counterparts. Genre fiction is often considered not serious politically amongst literary fiction readers. But Evans’ work resonates for the same reason that Brown’s does: it sort of feels like what’s happening right now, even with its cyborgs, nomadic transhumanist anarchist communities, and Christian nationalist-powered drone warfare in the middle of Austin, Texas.
For many writing fiction these days, there is a desire to ignore both American history and the American present when it comes to addressing violence. I don’t mean to celebrate political violence, but rather to assert that it has been a part of American politics during many of our most critical historical periods. Brown’s novel Tropic of Kansas, a hopeful dystopia, presents a deeply American conflict. Fiction offers a way to work through events such as the political shootings of figures like Charlie Kirk, Brian Thompson, and others. But we must acknowledge both the history and present reality we are faced with. Fiction is one of our best tools to grasp, understand, and hopefully change our present conditions, just as the radical ecologists in Brown’s novel seek to rewild the world in order to set things right with nature.
I want to end with the environmental commitments in the novel. As I traversed the United States, I found myself in New Orleans. In Failed State, the actual sequel to Rule of Capture and chronological successor to Tropic of Kansas, we follow a lawyer who in some ways is a closer stand-in for the author. Donny Kimoe, Sig’s lawyer in Tropic, travels to the liberated territory of New Orleans for a case. The city was liberated after a prison uprising started in part by Sig in the Superdome in Tropic. Donny Kimoe spends time in a New Orleans reshaped both by climate change and by the residents who are living in some kind of decentralized eco-socialist urban environment with solar-powered streetcars and communized McDonald’s that serves “fair trade chicory and fried dough liberally seasoned with the sauces of the free peoples.” I wouldn’t call it utopian, as the society Brown describes has many problems, but it is imaginative. Canal Street in New Orleans has become a giant grassland. There are brief sections that detail how the new society is organized. It’s closer to a return to the nomadic lives of humans of the past. In fact, one of the characters explains to Donny that “the idea was to mimic the structure of the earliest human bands.” Hunting and foraging have returned with a solarpunk style in one of the oldest American cities. The choice of New Orleans as the revolutionary hub illustrates how Brown’s writing evades the North versus South dichotomy in other novels. In our conversation, I asked why the books managed to feel so hopeful. Brown talked a lot about his reading of books like James C. Scott’s Against the Grain and the problems of surplus. He talked about how the novel tries to grapple with how “you can’t deal with wealth inequality . . . if you don’t deal with that. . . . The earliest city-states had to enslave the freewheeling nomads. . . . The Great Wall of China was designed to keep people in.” The novel began as a book that was going to focus more on some of the themes of the Occupy movement and the post-9/11 moment, but in his writing, it became something else. His optimism is tied up with how he talked about nature:
If you leave a little pocket of earth alone for just a couple of decades, it’s remarkable how quickly nature will fix everything, heal itself, will bounce back, animals move in, plants move in. . . . The self-correcting powers and resiliency of the natural world are amazing. . . . It’s easy to be optimistic if you’re focused on the long-term health of the planet versus the near-term health of human civilization.
There’s a lot more I could say about the novels of Christopher Brown, but I encourage you to read them, maybe even with a friend or a group. While I think the prospect of a second Civil War can engender a kind of understandable pessimism in regard to art, especially when it comes to the horrors of political violence and particularly as enacted by institutions such as ICE or the U.S. military, to cite recent examples, we’d do well to remember that art can help us describe our realities now, even if that’s through the lens of genre fiction set within what Brown calls a “dystopian mirror.” In an era where we are bombarded constantly by visions of what is horrible, perhaps a vision of a better, although not perfect, world may be possible through exploring characters who find themselves taking part in the time-honored American literary tradition of getting on the road and having adventures. Maybe we even can be those characters ourselves.
Luke McGowan-Arnold is a writer from Rockford, Illinois, based in Philadelphia. He writes about American subject formation, subcultures (on and off the internet), Black people, and popular social movements.