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WORK TITLE: Tropic of Kansas
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Brown, Chris N.; Nakashima-Brown, Chris
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://christopherbrown.com/
CITY: Austin
STATE: TX
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Children.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, and lawyer. Also reported from war zones in Central America and cohosted a punk rock radio show.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories to anthologies and periodicals.
SIDELIGHTS
Writer and lawyer Christopher Brown has taken companies public, worked on Supreme Court confirmations, negotiated hundreds of technology deals, investigated fraud, and protected whistleblowers in his role as a lawyer. His short stories, some written under the name Chris Nakashima-Brown, have appeared in anthologies and periodicals. He is also the coeditor of Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, which was nominated for a World Fantasy Award.
In his first novel, Tropic of Kansas, Brown presents a dystopian future in which the United States no longer exists as a democratic nation and a foster brother and and sister find themselves on different sides of the law. “I set out to write an adventure story that began in the post-9/11 Middle East, and ended up starting an uprising in a dystopian America,” Brown told Paul Semel in an interview for the Paulsemel.com website, adding: “I knew where I wanted to go, and I realized that to get there I needed to turn the world upside down, into a mirror America where 9/11 didn’t happen, and all the dark energy of that event and its aftermath was focused on the domestic population.”
In the novel, the United States has been broken up into warring territories. In the middle of these territories is an area known as the “Tropic of Kansas,” a vast wasteland that serves as a demilitarized zone. In his interview with Semel for Paulsemel.com, Brown noted that he chose to call the area the Tropic of Kansas because “the book is a dystopia of the American heartland, examining a very particular place to finder wider truths, an effort to pull off what my friend Bruce Sterling calls ‘a regional novel of Planet Earth.'”
In the setup for the dystopian world of The Tropic of Kansas, Brown informs readers that the end began when President Ronald Reagan died from the real-life assassination attempt in 1981 by John Hinckley. As a result, Alexander Haig went on to establish a militaristic presidency that went to war with Iran and the Soviet Union. Haig also oversaw efforts to take control of Central America’s natural resources. By the twenty-first century, democracy in America has ended, and a dictator is in the White House. Thomas Mack is a narcissistic kleptocrat whose evil doings led a former vice president to try to assassinate him. Mack is so vain that he hires an actor to portray him at times. Writing for NPR: National Public Radio website, Jason Sheehan remarked on the novel’s setup, noting: “Not simple dystopia, but complicated by present reality and recognizable politics. Not nameless or alien, but very much named and very close to home.”
The novel features eighteen-year-old Sig, who is an orphan of political dissidents. As the novel opens, Sig is being deported from Canada and sent back across the border wall to the United States. His foster sister, Tania, is a government investigator who has been ordered to hunt Sig following his escape from a midwestern Gitmo. It turns out that Sig is on his way to occupied New Orleans and a revolutionary stronghold that is operating there. Although he is a master of living off the grid, Sig still must navigate the dangerous terrain of the Tropic of Kansas, a barren land overseen by civilian militias and watched over with autonomous drones. One wrong move, and Sig will be captured or killed.
Tania does not want to hunt her foster brother, but she has agreed to do so for the promise by the government to free her mother. Working undercover in the underground to track down her brother, Tania is connected with Sig because her family briefly fostered him many years earlier, until Sig killed a police officer at the age of eleven during a riot. Tania ended up working as a lawyer in Washington, DC. However, after heckling President Mack on the White House lawn, she is detained and then offered the subsequent deal to find Sig, who authorities believe may be the key to breaking the resistance. The novel follows Sig and Tania in alternating chapters as they are on their respective “missions.” Eventually, the two come together, along with a Texas billionaire who oversees pirate broadcasts and who is trying to find the deposed former vice president. It turns out that the vice president, with a National Guard colonel, helped to liberate Louisiana, but only temporarily.
Literary critic Jill Lepore’s “insistence that dystopian literature ‘used to be a fiction of resistance’ and has now ‘become a fiction of submission’ doesn’t quite fit for Christopher Brown’s timely and gritty debut novel,” wrote Los Angeles Review of Books website contributor Christopher Urban. He went on to note later in the same review: “Brown’s economical prose style ultimately fits this narrative, and the story essentially unfolds as a road novel.” A Publishers Weekly contributor remarked that Brown does not allow his characters to “easily triumph … because he respects them too much to cheapen the costs that they must bear to succeed.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, May 22, 2017, review of Tropic of Kansas. p. 76.
ONLINE
Boing Boing, https://boingboing.net (July 11, 2017), Cory Doctorow, “Tropic of Kansas: Making America Great Again Considered Harmful.”
Christopher Brown Website, http://christopherbrown.com (January 9, 2018).
Civilian Reader, https://civilianreader.com/ (July 11, 2017), review of Tropic of Kansas.
Los Angeles Review of Books Online, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (September 2, 2017), Christopher Urban, “Dystopian Resistance: Christopher Brown’s Tropic of Kansas.”
NPR: National Public Radio Website, https://www.npr.org/ (July 9, 2017), Jason Sheehan, “Tropic of Kansas Rips Dystopia from the Headlines.”
Paulsemel.com, http://paulsemel.com/ (July 25, 2017), Paul Semel, “Exclusive Interview: Tropic of Kansas Author Christopher Brown.”
RT Book Reviews, https://www.rtbookreviews.com (January 27, 2018), Leah Hansen, review of Tropic of Kansas.
SFF 180, http://sff180.com/ (January 27, 2018), review of Tropic of Kansas.
About
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I am a writer and lawyer living in Austin, Texas. My debut novel, Tropic of Kansas, is forthcoming in 2017 from Harper Voyager. My shorter work—stories, nonfiction, and criticism—has appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. I was a 2013 World Fantasy Award nominee for the anthology I co-edited, Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic.
I’ve also taken two companies public, restored a small prairie, worked on two Supreme Court confirmations, rehabilitated a brownfield, reported from Central American war zones, washed airplanes, co-hosted a punk rock radio show, built an eco-bunker, worked day labor, negotiated hundreds of technology deals, protected government whistleblowers, investigated fraud, raised venture capital, explored a lot of secret woodlands, raised an amazing kid, and trained a few good dogs.
I used to write as “Chris Nakashima-Brown,” until that was no longer an accurate representation.
I live in Austin with my family, in the edgeland woods between the river and the factories, where I work in a 1978 Airstream trailer.
Thank you for checking out my work.
CONTACT:
Email me
REPRESENTATION:
Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media Group
ULY 25, 2017
Exclusive Interview: Tropic Of Kansas Author Christopher Brown
In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, sales of such dystopian novels as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s 1984 spiked. Though if you’ve already read them, but still need something dark to sooth your soul, I present Tropic Of Kansas (paperback, digital, audiobook), a new dystopia sci-fi novel by writer Christopher Brown.
Christopher Brown Tropic Of Kansas
Let’s start with the basics. What is Tropic of Kansas about?
Tropic Of Kansas is a dark road trip through an Americana-infused dystopia, in search of the better futures that might lie on the other side. It follows two characters through a barren heartland: Sig, the fugitive orphan of political dissidents who gets deported from Canada back to a U.S.A. that has been walled off from the other side, and Tania, his foster sister, a government investigator coerced into hunting Sig after he escapes from a Midwestern Gitmo.
It’s an effort at a realist dystopia, while at the same time I hope it’s a compelling adventure story. It bites into the copper wire by imagining an America torn apart by revolutionary unrest — Book Riot called it “the brilliant feel bad book of the summer,” and many have called it prescient — looking at the place we live through a fun-house mirror, with the hope of imagining the place we want it to be.
Where did the idea for the book originate, and how different is that original idea from the final version of Tropic of Kansas?
I set out to write an adventure story that began in the post-9/11 Middle East, and ended up starting an uprising in a dystopian America. I knew where I wanted to go, and I realized that to get there I needed to turn the world upside down, into a mirror America where 9/11 didn’t happen, and all the dark energy of that event and its aftermath was focused on the domestic population. That meant dystopia, but one where everything described in the book is something I have seen in the real world, just shifted a bit to help see it with fresh eyes. People tend to read it as the future, but I think of it more as a mirror present. To paraphrase Gibson, the dystopia is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. And we need to see it to be able to remedy it.
In the book, the wasteland DMZ is called “The Tropic Of Kansas.” Why did you decide to name it that as opposed to “The Tropic Of California” or “The Tropic Of New Jersey”?
The title came to me while I was down in the mines of deep revision, one of those weird lyrical gnomes that somehow encodes the whole book, and defies rational decryption. It works through layers of allusion, riffs on climate and ecology and dystopian inversion, and declarations of regional affinity. The book is a dystopia of the American heartland, examining a very particular place to finder wider truths, an effort to pull off what my friend Bruce Sterling calls “a regional novel of Planet Earth.”
Similarly, the character of Sig is trying to get to New Orleans. But you live in Austin. Why did you decide to have him head for New Orleans instead of Austin? Because if they went to Austin, you could include a chapter about how they ate at The Salt Lick, and maybe get yourself a free sandwich.
The short answer is I’d rather get myself a free po-boy at Domilise’s.
Ha!
Every place the book goes is a place I have lived or spent a lot of time. It starts in the north woods, travels through a barren Midwest, makes stops in Texas and even Austin, and follows the ancient rivers all the way down. I originally picked New Orleans because I wanted to explore what would happen if, after Katrina or a similar weather event, the people left behind took over the city. New Orleans is a liminal city that already accommodates all sorts of alternate realities. It’s a profoundly atemporal place that lets you charge your imagined futures with deep currents of the past. And it’s a great keystone for the ecological themes of the book: the beating riverine heart of the land, ready for a triple bypass and a new diet.
Of course, by calling your novel Tropic of Kansas, some people are going to think of Henry Miller’s novels Tropic Of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. Do you think there’s anything Miller-esque about your book?
The first time someone asked me that, I explained that Tropic Of Cancer is a book about sex in Paris, while the only sex in Tropic Of Kansas is sex in Minnesota, where it’s colder. And better.
I suppose my book shares some concerns with The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Miller’s recount of the cross-country road trip he took when returned to the U.S. after a decade as an expat, a book I only learned of after I finished Tropic Of Kansas, when a friend blurbed that my novel is a cross between Miller’s Nightmare and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. One of Miller’s conclusions after three years driving across America was that “nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete.” The characters in Tropic Of Kansas come to similar conclusions at the end of their own wanders, realizing that the problems of their society are ultimately rooted in its damaged relationship with the land, and that it’s up to them to fix it.
Speaking of other authors, are there any writers, or books, that you feel were a big influence on how you wrote Tropic of Kansas, or what you wrote about?
McCarthy was one. Not so much The Road as The Crossing, a book about a teenage boy’s journey through strange country that a colleague pointed to as something an early passage of Tropic Of Kansas made him think of. What McCarthy does with the material of the Western is very useful precedent for writers of speculative fiction looking to find more literary truth in their material.
Another huge influence, perhaps counter-intuitively, was Joan Didion, especially her novel Play It As It Lays, which is almost the opposite of McCarthy in its structural and stylistic lightness, but shares a fearless and incisive ability to cut through the bullshit Disneyfied filter we tend to apply when depicting the American character.
Joanna Russ’s New Wave science fiction book The Female Man was another big influence, at the edges.
I also read all sorts of post-9/11 material, from the Senate Torture Report to Poems From Guantánamo, volumes of Americana that ranged from obscure studies of old trails to memoirs of the frontier like Andrew Garcia’s Tough Trip Through Paradise 1878-1879 and folklore studies like Constance Rourke’s American Humor.
What about such non-literary influences as movies, TV shows, or video games? Are there any of those you think had an impact on Tropic of Kansas?
This is a science fiction that listens to Gordon Lightfoot and Buffy Sainte-Marie albums, and then remixes them with the heaviest free jazz. Music is a more immediate influence than moving images for me as a writer because I think language is all about rhythm and improvisational discovery. But the ghost of Billy Jack is in there for sure, and I was heavily influenced by Mexican narco movies, especially El Infierno, a 2010 film by Luis Estrada about a guy who is deported from the U.S. back to a hometown turned upside down, somehow finding heart and humor in the horror. And every technothriller I have ever watched is in there, from 24 to White House Down, but turned on its head, with the Jack Bauers as the bad guys.
As you’re undoubtedly aware, a lot of science fiction novels these days are not stand-alone books, but are instead of part of a series. Is that the case with Tropic of Kansas as well?
I wrote this as a stand-alone book. My process isn’t really amenable to planning out a trilogy or something like that. I usually have an end point in mind, it’s the first thing I write, and a starting point, but most everything in between is discovered by the characters finding their own way. And writing the dark world of Tropic Of Kansas was a pretty intense experience.
That said, I have lots of thoughts about more story that could be told with that material, including a project I have been sketching out about a minor character from the book, a criminal defense lawyer — think Better Call Saul in Orwell’s 1984 — and I’d love to explore the potential of some of the more hopeful places where the book tries to go, and maybe write a utopia to bookend my dystopia.
So has there been any interest in adapting Tropic of Kansas into a movie, TV show, or video game?
There are some promising discussions underway, but nothing firm yet. I think the material would be well-suited for adaptation to the big or small screen, and the picaresque structure of the narrative would work really well for an episodic format, and would maybe let me dust off some of the material I had to cut about other places the characters visit on the road.
A video game could also be a ton of fun — allowing players to choose whether to make decisions as dumb as the ones my characters do, and affording the opportunity to really flesh out the world building — all of which was deeply thought through, but mostly withheld from overt exposition.
If it was going to be made into a movie, show, or game, what actors would you like to see cast in the main roles?
I really like unknown actors, and when I think of people who could play the characters of Tropic Of Kansas, I think of people that aren’t actors at all. There’s a young dude who works in my neighborhood who could pass for Sig, and a woman I used to work with that would make a great Tania. That said, the actors who narrate the points of view of Tania and Sig for the audiobook, Bahni Turpin and Josh Bloomberg, are both pretty amazing.
If you pressed me, I’d say Zoe Kravitz (Mad Max: Fury Road), Taraji P. Henson (Hidden Figures), or even Angela Bassett (What’s Love Got To Do With It) would make a good Tania. Woody Harrelson (the Hunger Games movies) or Johnny Depp (the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies) could be great in the role of Walker, the trickster businessman branching out into revolution. Sig is tougher. The dudes from the Wolf Pack of those insane Twilight movies are pretty close — Solomon Trimble, Booboo Stewart, Kiowa Gordon — as are some of the guys from East Los High like Gabriel Chavarría. But not close enough. I know he’s out there, because I’ve seen him.
Christopher Brown Tropic Of Kansas
Lastly, if someone enjoys Tropic Of Kansas, and they’ve already read Tropic Of Cancer and Tropic Of Capricorn, what would you suggest they read next and why that?
Other than my next book, I’d say they might try some of the amazing literary dystopias that are out there: Jack Womack’s Random Acts Of Senseless Violence, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and Greg Hrbek’s Not On Fire, But Burning all explore similar territory in very different ways. I have also had the book compared to China Miéville’s The City & The City and Darin Bradley’s Noise, which are both amazing books. For those who want to try a more optimistic future, focused on solving problems, I highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140.
Tropic of Kansas
Publishers Weekly.
264.21 (May 22, 2017): p76+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Tropic of Kansas
Christopher Brown. Voyager, $15.99 trade paper (480p) ISBN 978-0-06-256381-1
In an alternate America in which Reagan did not survive the 1981 assassination attempt, the revolution will
indeed be televised, in analog. This militarized America (called "robotland" by Canadians), with walls on
both borders, has its heartland rebelling against the corporate government. Sig, a runaway adolescent
recently returned to the American "Motherland," escapes detainment and heads for the sanctuary city of
New Orleans. His adoptive sister, Tania, who incautiously insulted the president, is forced by the
government to infiltrate the underground that is helping Sig. Dodging drones, deputized citizen militias, and
suspicious dissidents, they come together with an outlaw Texan billionaire who operates pirate broadcasts,
hoping to find a deposed former vice president and a National Guard colonel who together temporarily
liberated Louisiana. Debut novelist Brown (editor of Three Messages and a Warning) brings a mordant
sensibility to his depiction of a "flyover country" that is no longer willing to have its patriotism exploited
and its land degraded for other people's profits. His characters do not easily triumph, because he respects
them too much to cheapen the costs that they must bear to succeed. Agent: Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media
Group. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Tropic of Kansas." Publishers Weekly, 22 May 2017, p. 76+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494099061/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=149f8e4b.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494099061
Dystopian Resistance: Christopher Brown’s “Tropic of Kansas”
By Christopher Urban
106 0 1
SEPTEMBER 2, 2017
IN THE AGE of a Twitter-troll presidency, Brexit, impending ecological collapse, and austerity politics, is it any wonder that literary critics (such as Jill Lepore and others) are currently fixated on dystopian fiction and beating the drum for a new utopian literature? It’s safe to say that constructing a convincing utopian world has proven more difficult for authors than the subgenre’s counterpart — and not just presently. George Orwell wrote about this disproportionate divide and the difficulties of portraying “other-worldly happiness” in his 1948 essay “Can Socialists Be Happy?” There he observed that “heaven is as great a flop as Utopia though Hell occupies a respectable place in literature, and has often been described most minutely and convincingly.” From Hades to Dante and Milton, up through Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series and beyond, it’s clear that hell has no shortage of representation in literature. The same holds true for the breadth of dystopian novels and their many cousins (such as post-apocalyptic, apocalyptic, and satirical narratives). And while the coming of Trump raises the stakes of the dystopia/utopia debate, it’s worth keeping in mind that novels take years to write and sometimes longer to publish, and of the dozen or so dystopian fictions to appear this year alone, all of them would have landed in a bookstore near you regardless of the 2016 election’s outcome.
Lepore’s insistence that dystopian literature “used to be a fiction of resistance” and has now “become a fiction of submission” doesn’t quite fit for Christopher Brown’s timely and gritty debut novel Tropic of Kansas. Not that the near-future United States depicted by Brown is one any American would want to live in. Armies of drones monitor the homeland skies, desperate citizens attempt to cross the northern borders only to be sent away by Canadian patrol guards, abandoned strip malls and empty hotels serve as military barracks, and a football stadium is even converted into a makeshift panopticon-like prison: a playful if terrifying nod to Foucault’s theory of a society under unceasing surveillance.
Beyond the successful assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981, it’s perhaps telling that Brown doesn’t go into detail as to how his fictional United States has fallen into such a derelict state, or how its citizens could possibly allow for a fascist president to take office (not once or twice, but three times) and fill the domestic skies with killer drones. In a way, we already know the answers (further proof that Brown’s novel is meant to be read against our present times): too many wars abroad, a widening income gap, a broken political system, unfettered neoliberal capitalism, deluges and droughts, and the other catastrophic ills characteristic of our Anthropocene period. In other words, Brown mixes ingredients already present in our contemporary world to concoct his own dystopian recipe.
These grim elements aside, a story of resistance, centered upon a teenager of mixed Latino heritage named Sig, lies at the heart of this adventurous dystopian thriller. Orphaned, strong-willed, and soon to be a leading revolutionary figure in the underground movement, Sig does everything he can just to stay alive, relying on his extraordinary survival instincts. He travels to the center of the rebellion in New Orleans — now a DMZ territory — keeping a promise to his dead dissident parents. As he dodges drone strikes and deadly crews of militiamen (mostly dumb, white, and scary), we glean information about the growing underground movement along the way. Brown is at his best describing the inner workings of the resistance: the way revolutionaries carve out an independent media network, making use of charmingly outdated technology to communicate and organize offline (fax machines, payphones, discarded antennas), and build an army of clumsy yet powerful DIY drones from scratch. They even have their own digital cryptocurrency, a kind of remedial Bitcoin, called Snowflakes.
Sig’s foster sister, Tania, a young government investigator living in DC, begins to lose faith in her capacity to create a better world from inside the system when she’s asked to track down her “terrorist” brother. In exchange for pursuing him, the authorities agree to keep her mother from undergoing “reprogramming,” an interrogative tactic that sounds like something out of A Clockwork Orange. The process leaves those who undergo the treatment in a near lobotomized state. As Tania makes her way back home, a place where “Minnesota dissolved into Iowa,” she is reminded of why she left the Midwest in the first place: a decaying Corn Belt has turned the entire region into something akin to a third world country.
Structurally, the short chapters of Tropic of Kansas alternate between the brother’s and sister’s points of view and culminate when the two finally meet. Sig and Tania never stay in the same place for very long; the dangers are too great, especially for Tania, whose skin color draws attention as she passes through the country’s rural white areas. The accelerating pace of the story can give the impression that the author, too, seems afraid to stay with any scene for very long. However, Brown capitalizes on this rapid pace for thrilling results, such as when Sig escapes from a military school in the opening, and escapes again later from a mansion-turned-detention center belonging to a millionaire. At other times, however, some of the cliffhanger chapter breaks can seem a tad arbitrary. Nevertheless, the book’s breakneck speed allows for the fictionalization of notoriously difficult concepts to appear alongside the swashbuckling elements of the story without bogging down what matters most: portrayals of political economy, collective action, parallel societies, urban spaces reclaimed by nature, and the nuts and bolts of the resistance movement.
Brown’s economical prose style ultimately fits this narrative, and the story essentially unfolds as a road novel. Usually, American road novels, which are often concerned with personal freedom and liberation, have a free-flowing style to match (think Kerouac, Twain, or Wolfe), but in Tropic of Kansas nothing is poetic about the constant threat of commercial and volunteer “people hunters” and relentless drone strikes. If Brown’s sentences seem restrained, even ugly at times, perhaps this is because there’s not much beauty to describe in this world. One paragraph starts off promisingly, describing the rich wildlife of the southern Louisiana marshes, but ends describing “petrochemical extraction machines” that invade the peaceful biome “like giant robot mosquitoes.” Brown knows what he’s doing with all this ugliness, as he himself argued in a recent Lithub piece on dystopian literature. The goal of this kind of speculative fiction, he states, should be to report “ugly truths about the human society we live in” in order to “discover its real alternatives.”
The novel, with its pulpy plot and alternate history (or future history, rather) will readily call to mind Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (even if it’s not nearly as tightly constructed). However, Tropic of Kansas’s guiding principles of resistance and opposition, of fighting for survival and creating new societies — in other words, its hope for the future — reminded me more of the late Richard Adams’s Watership Down. Often wrongly classified as dystopian, Adams’s fictitious world of brave rabbits fighting to achieve not a perfect world but at least a fair and just one (much like Brown’s rambunctious characters hope to do) would be a better comparison. Incidentally, Watership would also make for a much better read during the Trump moment than similar speculative works like Dick’s novel or Orwell’s resurgent 1984, whose sales spiked 10,000 percent by inauguration day.
To Brown’s credit, he manages to avoid the Jamesonian dilemma that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism.” The attempt to break free of capitalism in the novel doesn’t mark the apocalypse, but it is worth asking: what’s left? After all, it takes a second American civil war near the end of the book for the revolutionaries to gain autonomy, which ultimately results in the dissolution of the United States. The rebel territories, including parts of the South and the Midwest — from which the book’s title takes its name — form a sovereign nation inside the country. Plenty of blood is shed, but as one character puts it, not as much as one would have thought. The “crowdsource” flag that flies victoriously at the end of the book has a million tiny stars on it, ushering in a new era of participatory democracy. Of course, it will take more than a flag to put these utopian ingredients to the test: the kind of brave new world that emerges after the drones finally fall from the sky is only hinted at. Readers leave this newly built provisional government admittedly in “beta testing.” Nevertheless, Tropic of Kansas is an entertaining and engrossing read — and, contrary to what Lepore argues — it shows that contemporary dystopian literature need not forgo aspects of “resistance” but can, in fact, be all about it.
¤
Christopher Urban has written for the Paris Review Daily, The Millions, The Times Literary Supplement, Hong Kong Review of Books, and other publications.
'Tropic Of Kansas' Rips Dystopia From The Headlines
July 9, 20177:00 AM ET
JASON SHEEHAN
Tropic of Kansas
Tropic of Kansas
by Christopher Brown
Paperback, 480 pages purchase
In the vast galaxy of science fiction, it is always three minutes 'til doomsday.
There is always some monster, some alien warlord, some catastrophe so imminent that no one has time to pee. Lives are always on the brink. More than ray guns, more than starships, this is the defining characteristic of sci-fi literature. Disaster, within and without.
And as has been said a thousand times by critics far smarter than me, there is nothing that happens in science fiction that is not a reflection of our own grubby reality. We have been afraid of nuclear war, of environmental calamity, of technology, plague and politics and the enmity of our fellow man, and these dreads have always made their way into our entertainment. The worse the days, the more baroque the diversions. And these days are very bad indeed.
So this mess of a present has birthed a new breed of dystopian novels, of which Christopher Brown's Tropic Of Kansas is the latest. Not simple dystopia, but complicated by present reality and recognizable politics. Not nameless or alien, but very much named and very close to home. And while these books have utopian leanings, they are not happy stories. No one walks away smiling. They are revolution porn.
Tropic Of Kansas is like a modern dystopian buffet. It plays out in a world where all of our terrors have become manifest — climate change, wealth disparity, terrorism, an authoritarian government in power suppressing its own citizens, corporate control of everything from food to media. It is, in this particular moment in history, frighteningly prescient. It is the nightly news with the volume turned up to 11.
'Tropic Of Kansas' is like a modern dystopian buffet ... It is, in this particular moment in history, frighteningly prescient. It is the nightly news with the volume turned up to 11.
And none of this is better typified than in the opening scene, which deals with illegal border crossers being deported back to their country of origin across a walled and heavily fortified border. Except that, in this case, the people being deported are American citizens and the border is with Canada.
Brown tells his story of righteous revolution through two lenses. The first, Sig, is a wild thing — child of a revolutionary mother, raised around armed insurrection, and half-a-swamp-rat himself. He is a creature of woods and rivers, more comfortable sleeping rough, tracking deer, living on garbage and stolen clothing. He's got a weird double-strand of DNA running through him, part John Rambo, part reality TV.
The second is Tania, a government employee with rebellion in her heart; who exemplifies the living pulse of dystopia because she is simply existing within it. She has a job, an apartment. She hates the state of the country and the president (a cartoon villain, who comes from a military-industrial background and is so patently, obviously evil that his own Vice President tried to assassinate him) but does nothing about it until one day she shouts at him, is detained and strong-armed into working for the Tropic Of Kansas equivalent of the FBI and Homeland security. Her job? Tracking down Sig, who — once upon a time — was her brother.
There's nothing pretty in Brown's future. Nothing purely good. But at the close, there is a spark of hope that things can get better.
Things get complicated, like things do. The narrative bounces back and forth between Sig (who quickly rises to folk hero status as some of his violent anti-government exploits get captured by security cameras and broadcast to the revolution fomenting all across the nation) and Tania on a one-to-one basis — short, choppy chapters that track them from Washington to the upper Midwest, through the Tropic of Kansas (a wasteland made by robot farms, agribusiness, poverty and national terrorism) and down into New Orleans. From about the hundredth page forward, you know how it is all going to go down.
But Brown, to his credit, uses the pages given to him to paint a frighteningly believable portrait of an American future that is closer than you want it to be. He sketches small-town fury and ultra-super-uber-right-wing nationalism in detail, showing a Midwest overrun by uniformed bullies in armored pick-ups, watching the movie star who plays the president in a series of action movies that are thinly disguised propaganda films and flying surveillance drones over million-acre farms sucked dry by corporate greed. He details the movements of his protagonists, but spends nearly as much time detailing the movements of the rebellion, describing communications networks and revolutionary cells, underground meetings and daring raids against government forces. That's the porn part. The wish fulfillment. The dreaming of (nearly) impossible things.
But by the end of things, he snaps back to reality. The finale is bloody, violent, quick and messy, like revolution always is. There's nothing pretty in Brown's future. Nothing purely good. But at the close, there is a spark of hope that things can get better.
At least for those who survive the violent delights that come before.
Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, video games, books and Starblazers. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia magazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book
CORY DOCTOROW / 4 AM TUE, JUL 11 2017
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Tropic of Kansas: Making America Great Again considered harmful
Chris Brown -- long known as a writer of perfect, jewel-like demented cyberpunk stories -- makes his long-overdue novel debut today with Tropic of Kansas; a hilarious, dark, and ultimately hopeful story of a terrible authoritarian president whose project to Make America Great Again has plunged the country into an authoritarian collapse that's all too plausible.
Brown's alternate America diverges from our own with the assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981, which leads to the ascension of President Haig and the beginning of the end. The Internet is never realized -- instead, it's supplanted with a surveillance-friendly, centralized system run by AT&T that quickly becomes an organ of state surveillance.
The post-assassination America's authoritarian paranoia drives hordes of refugees to Canada, to be hunted and deported back to the USA -- where, inevitably, they are viewed with suspicion as potential foreign agents.
Enter Sig, a feral child whose radical mother was imprisoned and ultimately murdered for her politics, who has been living off the land in Canada for years, until he was caught and committed to the tender mercies of US Motherland Security, who mark him for the forced labor camps of Detroit.
After a daring escape -- the first of many -- Sig is free, living off the land again, drifting in and out of the radical underground, pursued by his stepsister, who has foregone her own radical ybouth to become a government agent. As the two of them whirl across America, Brown paints a picture of a pirate net, complete with its own cryptocurrency, living off of mutated phone phreak technology and secret messages in the vertical blanking intervals of pirate TV broadcasts.
The uprising -- and counterrevolution -- that is sweeping across America has both of them in its tailwind, providing for enough much adventure, hair's-breadth escapology, jungle melee and down-and-dirty fighting for three hairy-chested men's magazines, but with an ironic, reflexive distance that makes it all the more delicious.
Brown's novel is just what you'd hope for from a long-awaited debut like this: a book that excites, provokes and terrifies.
Tropic of Kansas [Christopher Brown/Harper Voyager]
Review: TROPIC OF KANSAS by Christopher Brown (Voyager)
July 11, 2017 Civilian Reader ReviewChristopher Brown, Dystopia, Harper Collins, Most Anticipated 2017, Must Read 2017, Thriller, Tropic of Kansas, Voyager
brownc-tropicofkansasusA terrifyingly realistic dystopian novel
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.
As the news is filled with stories of creeping fascism, an increase in the militarization of police forces, and a “fortress America” mentality settling in for those on the right (although, mostly, it’s anyone who voted for Donald Trump), this novel feels frighteningly realistic. It is also very good.
There have been a few dystopian novels published since the election of Donald Trump that seem prescient — giving us a glimpse of what America could be only a few years in the future. (Another that springs to mind is American War by Omar el Akkad.) Tropic of Kansas presents a worst-case, slippery-slope possible future America: it is one characterized by fear, nationalism, authoritarianism, macho-militarism and internal strife. Given typical publishing lead times, it’s especially scary. (There is the risk, when reviewing a novel like this, to reference Trump quite frequently — there seems to be a Tweet for every eventuality that a pessimist could dream up. I will try my best not to do this.)
The characters are pretty interesting. Sig is a bit of a cypher: a highly competent mixed-race survivalist, he is withdrawn and distrusting of almost everyone around him. He’s also taciturn, which means we don’t really get to know him too well over the course of the novel. Those chapters that were focused on him were interesting, but there was definitely a distance, on occasion. There were also a couple of jumps forward in time, which felt like we missed out on some of his development into the man he becomes. (I’m trying not to spoil anything…)
Tania is a better-rounded character, and we get to know her pretty well. She’s a low-level government official who finds herself set on Sig’s trail. Over the course of the novel, we see her impression of her country change — where before she was content to exist within the fascistic new Washington, D.C., exposure to life outside the bubble is a shock. She’s a great guide to this nightmare America, “her country gone cannibal”. The supporting cast is also interesting and engaging, not to mention wonderfully varied: whether a freedom-fighter, thuggish militiaman, government bureaucrat, or “regular” civilian just trying to get by, they are all well-rounded and realistic.
Peppered throughout with social commentary, allusion to the present, and many of the social and economic issues facing America (and the world) today, Tropic of Kansas is a great novel. Brown’s writing is tightly composed, and flows nicely. There were a couple of lulls in the momentum, but they were fleeting and barely detracted from my overall enjoyment of the novel.
Definitely recommended.
*
Christopher Brown‘s Tropic of Kansas is published by Voyager in North America and the UK.
If the measure of a dystopian novel’s success ties directly into how easily readers can map the premise and events of the novel to our lives right now, with minimum effort required to suspend disbelief that this can happen here, then Tropic of Kansas may well be the most successful single work of dystopian fiction ever published. Christopher Brown — who has a back catalog of acclaimed post-cyberpunk short fiction written under the name Chris Nakashima-Brown — has constructed his debut novel in such a way that its sense of timeliness in depicting a shattered America revolting against authoritarian government is existentially terrifying like nothing else you’ll read, hopefully, for many years. It’s as if Brown was reading the tea leaves long ago regarding America’s slide towards the kind of wrapped-in-the-flag fascism epitomized by the Trump era. Tropic of Kansas just feels way too close for comfort.
Some backstory. As most of us know, and some of us remember, in 1981, a pathetic loser named John Hinckley took a shot at Ronald Reagan. While Reagan recovered from a collapsed lung, Alexander Haig, the hawkish secretary of state, made what many considered a little power grab, which, surprisingly enough, put no one at ease.
In Brown’s alternate America, Reagan did not survive the shooting and Haig went on to a militaristic presidency, smashing Iran and the Soviet Union in a series of wars and chartering “military merchant companies” to seize natural resources in Central America. The internet as we know it didn’t emerge. Rather, a government-controlled network was put in place, mainly used for domestic surveillance. Fast forward to the 21st century, and democracy is effectively over. America now has a dictator in the White House, a blustery ex-POW kleptocrat named Thomas Mack, so narcissistic he travels with the actor who plays him in propaganda movies and so extra-evil that the former vice president tried to blow him up in the West Wing, Operation Valkyrie-style.
We follow two protagonists. Sig is the 18 year old son of resistance fighters who has been mostly alone and on the run for half his short life. As the story opens, he is being deported back to America from Canada, where he will, for the rest of the book’s length, remain on the run. We see him escape from incarceration, then take up briefly with various groups of dissidents scattered throughout the heartland. It’s an area now known as the Tropic of Kansas, where the land has been chemically farmed to such excess, it’s no longer arable except to grow inedible corn for biofuels. Deputized citizen militias, consisting of exactly the kinds of people you’d expect, enforce what laws Washington pays them to.
In the other corner we have Tania, whose family briefly fostered Sig many years ago, a time culminating in the riot that led to Sig’s killing his first police officer at the age of eleven. Tania has since swallowed her pride and done her best to settle in, with a Beltway legal career. But she can’t keep the rebellious spirit instilled by her mother bottled up completely, and after she publicly heckles Mack on the White House lawn, she’s detained and offered a deal: her imprisoned mother in exchange for locating Sig, whom the Feds believe will lead them to the most active resistance cells throughout the Tropic. Their stories will ultimately converge in the battleground city of New Orleans.
Brown writes with a staccato urgency that stylistically recalls William Gibson. His language is sparse, his chapters short. Yet at the same time, detail is rich, and the pervasive sense of how profoundly a once great country has declined as it went to war against its own citizens is palpable. Don’t get too attached to characters, as Brown often dispatches them with a cold suddenness that makes George R.R. Martin seem positively humanitarian. Brown’s complete lack of sentimentalism is absolutely right for the story. There is no call for anything in the way of rah-rah heroics here, and the story makes it abundantly clear that even if everything goes entirely in favor of the rebels, any kind of victory will only mean the hard work of restoring the nation has just begun. And it will never go back completely to its former self.
But it must be said that the book’s greatest strengths are also its greatest liabilities. I expect a good dystopia to be grim and depressing. But at over 460 pages, Tropic of Kansas is well overlong, and the way in which Sig just goes from one brutal, violent confrontation to the next, rinse and repeat, ultimately creates more a sense of numbing monotony than nail-biting suspense.
And frankly, Sig himself is a problem. While it’s entirely in keeping with his character that he would be emotionally aloof — after all, a boy who never really knew his parents and has been a homeless fugitive since early adolescence isn’t exactly going to be the most socialized guy — it should have been possible to convey this without also making him such a personality vacuum for the reader. Sig gets more rough trade thrown his way than any one person should, but he doesn’t really elicit sympathy, and it can be hard to get a handle on his arc. While it’s laudable that Brown avoids turning him into the kind of Katniss Everdeen superhero that so many fight-the-power dystopias want to offer us, by the later chapters, when Sig is jumping onto drone tanks and disabling them by ripping out their wiring with his bare hands, let’s say the novel begins veering away from hard-edged realism at precisely the moment it should do the opposite.
Tania is quite a bit more well-rounded and human, and some of her scenes with her mother deliver the book’s most successful emotional engagement. And a number of the minor characters register pretty well, despite being seen only briefly. In what may be the novel’s single most incisive moment of truth, Tania’s mother describes how easily it is the bad guys win. Because the good guys spend too much time “compromising.”
…“By letting them divide us. They know how to get all the people who should be on the same side to fight each other over differences that aren’t even real. Race, religion, region, reason. And people got so poor and worn out they just gave up, at least on the idea of real change….”
In final analysis, Christopher Brown is a brilliant writer who has delivered a suitcase bomb of a novel that is undeniably important. But it’s imperfect, like its own displaced heroes, and some readers will be impressed by it without especially liking it, while others will likely find it all just too much to take. But then, maybe the gut-punch that Tropic of Kansas delivers is exactly the sort of alarm call we need. It’s easy — and foolhardy — to take freedom for granted when there are people in power very very skilled at getting you not to notice until after it’s been taken away.
TROPIC OF KANSAS
Image of Tropic of Kansas: A Novel
Author(s): Christopher Brown
Set in a dystopian future in which the U.S. is governed by a totalitarian regime that crushes all opposition, down to minor insults of the president, Tropic of Kansas feels eerily prescient. The atmosphere starts out a little unclear, but the author does a stellar job subtly weaving the world’s rules into the plot, leaving the reader feeling appropriately embroiled yet disoriented by the politics. Unfortunately, while the two protagonists are intriguing, most of the side characters come and go quickly, so the book feels a little shallow. Visual descriptions of places and surroundings are also somewhat lacking.
Sig only spent a short time as the childhood foster brother of government agent Tania, but she still feels a connection to him all these years later. Adult Sig has mastered the art of self-preservation and off-the-grid living. After he escapes government custody for the umpteenth time, Tania is enlisted to bring him in — in exchange for their mother’s freedom. But the closer Tania gets to Sig and the deeper she goes into the rabbit-hole of illicit communications and rebellion, the more she questions her government. Now she must decide whether to use her position to bring in Sig — or take down the powers that be. (HARPER VOYAGER, Jul., 336 pp., $15.99)
Reviewed by:
Leah Hansen