Brad Torgersen

Life, art, sureal (“Divided We Fall”)

Sureal to see the Tweets by Andy Ngo after just finishing “Divided We Fall, ” which is available for free to those subscribed to Kindle Unlimited.

The Baen Books Publishing anthology features short stories by Sarah A. Hoyt, Brad Torgersen, and Jon Del Arroz, among others. We’re told by the authors that Science Fiction writers aren’t popular with the new Powers That Be. Although there’s been a lot of “woke” SF in the last few years, there’s also a long tradition of military and libertarianism. Then, there’s the [T]Ruth and [S]cience problem, not to mention that the scion of Sci-Fi, John W. Campbell, called the genre, “future history.” Campbell wasn’t sufficiently prescient and has himself been cancelled by the “woke.”

Prescient? Although mistaken about an early concession by President Trump, “Divided We Fall,”  makes quite a few accurate predictions, at least up to the point I’m living in: the 2020 election and, to a lesser extent, through the inauguration and first week of the Biden (or what the White House news releases call the “Biden-Harris” administration). The early stories could have been reports from the last two months.

Not bad for a book that was published the week before the election, on October 31, 2020.

I hope and pray it’s not as accurate about the year(s) after.

The excellent story tellers – many with a military background – outline a dystopia that reads like the news from tomorrow if the French and Russian revolutions are to be repeated in the post-2020 election period. With a heavy dose of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

Rather than the Great Leap Forward, rural life is suspicious, too independent of the Federal government. Politically conservative or libertarian, gun owning, religious citizens are suddenly and mysteriously “disappeared” or publicly killed. Any dissent results in being fired, at least. Imagine convicted felons, terrorists, and antifa activists released from prison, with the latter put in charge of emptying libraries of “problematic” books (including most science fiction), or the military forced to assist with gun confiscation, beginning with Marines, but rapidly shifting to the other branches.

(A couple of stories point out that the Navy and Marines, aren’t covered by the Posse Comitatus Act.)

The characters all live in the same universe, with the same basic timeline and major events.

If the “Resistance” from the Right not only becomes necessary, imagine the the different ways people from all sorts of backgrounds find themselves managing to stand strong against chaos like what we’re seeing in Seattle. Portland, and, now, Tacoma.

Am I going to be disappeared for having read and liked this book?