I’ve been intending to write a story about asteroid mining for some years now. Last week I put the finishing touches on my best attempt at the topic: what started last year as a first draft of about 3,000 words plumped up over the course of a year into a 10,000 word dreadnought of a story (actually a novelette, for those of you interested in the preposterous nomenclature of fiction) about terrorism, white supremacists, and a floating mountain of pure platinum.

There aren’t many science fiction magazines that will take a story of that length, so if it isn’t picked up it may not see print until I publish a collection of my own stories. But I do hope that it is printed before then, partly because so much of what the story became bubbled up out of my struggling with the political climate of the last year.

While the terrorist enemy of the day is ISIS, science fiction looks beyond today’s social structures, refracting the view of today’s enemies and power relations into a new image that arrests our attention with its logic. What I’ve attempted to do is not exactly a bravura leap of imagination: it’s pretty easy today to see parallels between the medievalist Islamic terrorists of ISIS and their reactionary Christian, white supremacist counterparts. The greatest parallel between them is that for all the hostility they seem to have for one another, their common enemy is liberalism: both groups hate the world of globalized commerce and its perceived moral relativism; both are willing to kill innocent people in order to restore what they believe to be the proper–and long-insulted–social order.

Photo Credit: Robert Thivierge

In the last few weeks it’s been comforting to watch the total shambolic ineptitude of the Trump administration. I have some faith that Trump’s vision of a hyper-nationalist, authoritarian America will fall apart over the next two to three years, if only because Trump and his cronies seem so intent on committing impeachable offenses (and crimes) in plain view. However, Trump’s incompetence will not dismiss the anger and hatred of some of his hardest-core supporters, the white supremacists and neo-fascists who have been so emboldened by Trump’s behavior. In fact, I’ve wondered whether Trump’s inability to govern, his failure to encourage the passage of legislation even with a pliant Republican congress eager to pass tax cuts and repeal Obamacare, may lead to even greater violence and frustration among Trump’s hardest core.

When I sat down to start this latest story, called “Potosí,” over a year ago, the thought of a white supremacist terror group seemed far-fetched, a hearkening back to the worst days of the KKK. Today I wonder whether the story is a little too prescient.