Most dystopias make the regime cruel, so by page ten the reader knows whose side to take. Secret police, camps, beatings. It’s comfortable to read and it wears thin fast.
The series idea I’m sitting on runs on the opposite rule: nobody gets beaten by the state and nobody goes to a camp. North America in 2030 is governed by a polite, clinical bureaucracy that changes your life by updating your banking app, and what makes it frightening is that its policies work.
It’s an idea for later, nowhere near a manuscript. Working title: The Great Re-Alignment. It’s a near-future geopolitical thriller set in 2030 and 2031, mostly around Fort McMurray, in a slice of former Alberta the US has annexed and renamed the Athabasca Military District. The concept came out of one long session with Gemini 4 Argon, eleven prompts from me and about 15,000 words back, which became a series bible I’ve parked until I’m ready to write it. Paid subscribers get the whole bible below.
Between 2025 and 2029 the crises stack up. AI layoffs gut white-collar work in HR, PR, marketing and compliance, which hits women hardest. A Treasury bond auction fails. US fertility falls to 1.38, military recruitment drops to 42% of quota, and male grid techs and truckers stage wildcat strikes. Then France falls. Sectarian coalitions seize the National Assembly and proclaim an Islamic Republic while Americans watch women beaten on the Champs-Élysées on a livestream.
Washington panics but doesn’t stage a coup. A secular coalition of demographers, defense-tech billionaires, manosphere ideologues and burned-out “Soft-Life” traditionalist women rewires the country in 180 days, using a programmable digital currency plus a stack of tax and insurance rules. Women lose the individual vote and independent credit. Most lose their corporate jobs as well, and their legal standing gets tied to a male sponsor.
And it works. In the book, street crime drops 75% and working-class male wages double, fentanyl deaths fall off a cliff and the birth rate climbs back above replacement.
I set it up that way because a regime that fails lets the reader off the hook. If my patriarchal state collapsed under its own cruelty, readers on either side could close the book feeling vindicated. The bible’s governing rule is that evil is individual, not systemic: a kind grid technician gets robbed blind by the wife who married him for a debt bailout, while a Red-Pill officer slowly hands back the legal power the state gave him over his wife.
Claire, the heroine I have in mind, is a forensic auditor caught moving women’s money out of the country. She signs a five-year frontier marriage contract with an officer in Athabasca, and nobody holds a gun to her head. The alternative is a $450,000 forfeiture that would bankrupt her parents and end her father’s dialysis coverage.
Central Europe is the third player on the map. A Warsaw-Prague-Bucharest axis held its borders and its social cohesion without touching women’s rights, so in 2030 women in Warsaw vote, run companies and walk home alone at 2 a.m. Sooner or later every American character looks east and has to ask whether Washington did what survival required, or whether a group of men used a crisis to grab power they’d wanted all along.
The book leaves that question with the reader.