This book is in large part a continuation of the stories related in Rule of Capture and Tropic of Kansas. And while this text should stand on its own, it would not have been possible without the advice and support of the people I acknowledged in those books. These include my family, innumerable friends and colleagues (especially those who brought me to Dallas over the years to get a feel for the city I put a fun-house mirror up to here), my literary agent Mark Gottlieb, and David Pomerico, cover designer Owen Corrigan, and the rest of the amazing team at Harper Voyager. I owe particular thanks to “human webcrawler”* Bruce Sterling for his helpful and timely research on early utopias, Craig Campbell for invaluable anthropological wayfinding, L. Timmel Duchamp for her annual prompts to think about my reading through a different prism, and the librarians at the University of Texas Law School who helped me research the legal systems imagined in this book. Notable texts that were indispensable include James C. Scott’s Against the Grain, Christopher Stone’s Should Trees Have Standing?, Simon Roberts’s Order and Dispute, Njal’s Saga, and Laxdaela Saga.

While I was working on this book, I acquired two new daughters, one by birth, and one by marriage. This book was inspired by the idea of trying to imagine a future I would want them to be able to live in, and trying to imagine the more hopeful world the protagonists of Rule of Capture and Tropic of Kansas fought to realize. I don’t know if I entirely succeeded in finding it, but I like to think the characters in this book have started to map some of the unexplored territory where that lies. And I don’t know if the future in this book is as female as the one I expect the real world to bring us. But I hope it will provide some inspiration to Octavia and Ajin and their peers to help us get there, and it is to them that this book is dedicated.

Tropic of Kansas

For more of the story of the dark years between the events of Rule of Capture and Failed State, check out Tropic of Kansas, which tells the story from the perspective of people much further from the sources of power.

Excerpt from Tropic of Kansas

Eagle One flew in fast from the west, then yawed back over the East Lawn, engines whining overthrottle, blasting air onto the ground.

Eagle One was the flagship of a new line of Anglo-American tactical aircraft the President had promoted as superior to the helicopter. It could fly faster and higher, with even better vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. All jet, no wings—just stabilizers at the tail. Manufactured by a company he still had stock in.

Tania tried to see through the cockpit window, to see if he really was the pilot, but the glass was as opaque as the midnight blue fuselage.