Five stories that build on the dramatic potential of nuclear blackmail

At Tor.com James Davis Nicoll tagged five stories built around the threat of nuclear blackmail, including:

Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach (1975)

Twenty years after the West Coast exited the United States of America to form a utopian ecotopian state, ace reporter Will Weston travels to Ecotopia. Officially, his purpose is report on conditions in the breakaway nation. Unofficially, the US President wants the reporter to feel out the possibility of Ecotopia being reabsorbed into the Union. Not only are true Ecotopians utterly disinterested in rejoining capitalist, ecologically deranged America, they waste little time assimilating the reporter into the Ecotopian way of life.

Ecotopia’s independence is based in part on the simple fact that a few highly motivated militias can easily handle the much larger, better funded, but inefficient American military-industrial complex. Elan trumps mere logistics, after all. Another, perhaps more important element in the Ecotopian defense strategy is that they may or may not have mined American cities with nuclear devices. Thus far, the US has not cared to test this.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue