I was told once, at a convention, that every story of the future is destined to become alternate history. I wish I could remember who told me that. At the time, I had already started working on a near future novel, and I was worried that it would show it’s age too fast, and I found the universality of that idea very comforting.

Besides which, the world of Second Sentinels diverges in 2001, at the start of my own adulthood. 2001 was not only the year I turned 18, but the year I left my parent’s houses. It was a hell of a September to start out comparatively independent life, and provided a sudden, sharp focusing on current events.

Even with that divergence, I’ve mostly kept major historical events unfolding in my books as they do in our world. I understand that that’s optional. I didn’t have to do it that way. But doing otherwise felt both insincere and likely to render my books irrelevant.

I’ve always liked science fiction best when it’s directly addressing what’s going on in the era that made it, more than the imaginary era in which it occurs. You can thank my early exposure to Star Trek for that.

Clearly/unfortunately, there’s no shortage of opportunities for commentary these days. Even with a five book series, I can’t possibly say everything I could have to say about it all. Which is fine, since my opinions on a lot of it probably aren’t worth much more than the opinions of any other random person who doesn’t get all their news from FOX.

But I can say some things. There are things I know about. Thing’s I’ve experienced.

I live in St Paul. I’m not in Chicago. But according to the timeline of my books, several of my characters are growing up there right now, alongside the attacks Chicago is undergoing right now from ICE.

My closest personal experience to what I see on my screen, is one I’ve never spoken about on here, despite it occurring since I started the newsletter. It’s not something I tend to talk about at all except with people who I know were also directly impacted by the 2020 BLM protests in Minneapolis and St Paul.

To be clear- I was never providing anything in these protests that at least a hundred other people weren’t doing better, more often, and at greater personal risk. But I tried to play my little support role as well as I could.

And nobody in my neighborhood was un-impacted. Police dropped so much tear gas on the nearest main street that my asthma was set off from 5 blocks away. We were all under curfew. My pharmacy burnt down after “proud boy” counterprotesters were spotted in the area. There were helicopters circling low over my neighborhood in a loop, night after night after night, for hours at a time, waking us up.

I still get twitchy if I hear a helicopter loop past more than once—the sound can wake me from a dead sleep, even years later. Which feels like an absurd problem for a midwestern US civilian to have, but there you go. I am sure there will be more US civilians with similar problems after this year, in Chicago and blue-leaning cities all over.

I particularly remember a night when I was doing a combination of medic work and food pantry donation sorting and a woman came in crying and gasping, after having an entire can of mace emptied onto her by a cop angry she was out after curfew. She’d been bringing food to her friend who was isolated all alone with COVID. The food and all her clothes were ruined. Just being close to her made my eyes sting and my esophagus burn.

It all felt so dystopian. It all was so dystopian.

The day after the Minneapolis police precinct base of George Floyd’s killer burned down, I stood on the lawn of a republican neighbor of mine, both of us in our pajamas. I’ll never forget this person on the opposite end of the political spectrum of me said “Well, I don’t know what the police expected to happen, with how they’ve been acting.”

It felt like maybe people who had ignored state violence up till now would see what was really happening, and maybe things would change.

But my neighbor was in the city. She was getting secondhand tear gassed and curfewed in with the rest of us.

When elections came around, there were too many people who never went into the city successfully convinced that it was the protesters making everything unsafe, and not the people gassing whole neighborhoods and choking innocent people. And they voted against reform. And not much changed.

Solidarity failed us.

I’ve been asked, since then, why I didn’t just move to suburbia, or out to the country, after a thing like that. Redlining isn’t going to impact my family, after all, even if it is alive and well. The simplest answer is that I didn’t want to live in community that thought myself and my neighbors were the problem here, and not the ones with helicopters, gas and tanks.

Maybe I’m just an optimist. Well, ok I know I’m an optimist. But the size of the No Kings rallies and the apparent developing cross group sympathies coalescing under that umbrella make me feel like maybe solidarity may have another chance.

I wish that unity could have formed earlier, when the violence was in my neighborhood, but God knows our immigrant neighbors and the non-immigrant caught up in racist anti-immigrant sentiment are overdue massive support.

And I am seeing so so much support coming together in Chicago. So much fighting back in Chicago and Portland and LA and everyplace the current admin tries to turn violence on it’s own people. I am delighted by the massive crowds and the frogs and the intricacies in how each community has it’s own way of fighting back. (I love the way the frogs seem perfect for daring the media to try to cast them as a terrifying mob, the way news outlets portrayed the decent, everyday people in the protests I joined.)

In my books, I have a super“hero” named Talon who was genetically modified during a Trump term (I wrote him before there was going to be a second term, so I never specified which Trump term) specifically for ICE, to hunt immigrants and protesters. It seems likely that he would be at play in all these cities, in that alternate 2025 of my books.

And that brings me to why I’m collaborating with history. Why I don’t just make up everything after some set year, and have it go however is convenient to me and my story. If I delete the current unrest from Chicago, it implies that Chicago never fought back, because of Talon.

And I don’t think the presence of Talon- or even a bunch of guys like Talon, would persuade Chicago from fighting back. I don’t want to disrespect the community I’ve set this story in by scrubbing their resistance out of it. To do otherwise would be a failure of solidarity on my own part.

So, history keeps throwing things at me, and I do my best to weave it in, as a tiny way of honoring the real life heroes out there right now.

I’m not going to do a call to action this month. There is certainly more than enough to do, but what you can do to have the most impact varies to wildly based on your address. So, for this month, I’m just going to have faith that you’re already going to do what you can, based on where you are and what options are available to you.

Thank you, as always, for reading. I’ll see you next month!

Lee Brontide

Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories and Names in Their Blood are available as ebooks here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop. And don’t forget, as a subscriber to Shed Letters, you have exclusive access to my free novelette, Doll’s Eye View, the Martin focused story that takes place between Secondhand Origin Stories and Names in Their Blood.