Empire City

"This is a great book, set in a world where America won the Vietnam War , a world where the chastening lessons America learned from its failure in Vietnam were never learned. It’s a world where America is unabashed about empire and where a military caste plays a huge role in politics; all the main characters have served in wars and are involved in domestic politics. The contentious and troublesome election of 2020 could’ve been conjured into existence by Matt Gallagher, if it hadn’t been conjured by Donald Trump . The novel traces all the ways in which American fascination with our military might and violence play out across different political movements and institutions. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s also really fun. The central characters are veterans who have comic book-style superpowers. It’s a totally wild yet incredibly well thought-out and insanely believable picture of a cracked America. And it’s way too close for comfort. This is a good question. I think that alternative histories, by presenting a somewhat cracked vision of reality, allow us to see ourselves more closely. So it’s a fun house mirror that helps us realize how distorted our reality has become. It allows readers to get a distance from current difficulties, which makes it feel safe to see what’s wrong, and then realize how uncomfortably close this alternative reality is to the one that we’re living in. It might seem deferential to say to a veteran, ‘I can’t imagine what you’ve been through.’ We assume, I think wrongly, that there is an unbridgeable gulf between those who have served in the military and those who haven’t. These books can help bridge that gap. I want my writing to bridge that gap. We all have a responsibility to try. It’s important for people to try to imagine what veterans go through because we all bear responsibility for war. Veterans don’t deploy themselves. Veterans are sent to war by governments that answer, to varying degrees, to their citizenry. How citizens understand the violence that is done in their name affects a nation’s willingness to wage war and veterans’ reintegration into the society they serve."