Writing Fiction In a Time Like This

A Frenchman sheds tears of patriotic grief as flags of his country's lost regiments are exiled to Africa, 1940. Source: archives.gov

I have heard advice that my author persona should steer clear of politics, that I should limit my author blog to talking about writing, and maybe to sharing a few things about my life to humanize me. Don’t take sides on political issues. Don’t say things that might alienate readers or (even worse) potential agents.

I cannot do that. Not today. Not this week, when I’m watching my country be dismantled before my eyes. Not while a president sets himself up as a dictator and the world’s richest man (unelected and holding no government position) seizes control of the U.S. Treasury.

I weep, as did the Frenchman in the famous photograph as he watched the Nazis parading victorious through his country in 1940.

What am I doing, writing fiction in a time like this? Maybe I should read some fiction written in 1930’s Germany to see what they were writing. I’m quite serious about that. Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz or Kathrine Kressmann Taylor would be places to start.

The novel I’m working on now is an urban fantasy about a woman—an activist protesting weapons of mass destruction—who suddenly and unexpectedly inherits enough money to make her the 300th richest person in the world, along with a demon bound to her service. It was originally going to be set in the present day, but I’ve had to move the setting back, maybe as much as half a century. My character is wrestling with what to do with that kind of power, but I don’t want her to be watching Trump and Musk looting and smashing her country while she ponders her choices. Nooooo. Because I think I know what she’d do, and I’m not even sure I'd support it. Regardless, I'm not going there. That would subsume the whole novel. I’ll set it in the 1960’s or 70’s instead, when life was simpler, computers were only for crunching numbers, and dictators were all far away.

Besides, a novel written in 2025 and set in 2025 would be hopelessly dated by the time it ever saw print and hit the shelves. Politics and technology are both spinning out of control too fast and too unpredictably.

What won’t change are basic values: peace and justice, friendship and community, as well as humanitarian concern for the poor and downtrodden. People will still hold values even if our leaders spit on them. I hope that my own values show through in whatever I write, whenever it is set.