My Book Pitch

This started out as a snarky comment on Poliblogger Steven Taylor's scathing review of Orson Scott Card's latest novel, but then the more I thought about it...

OK, here's the pitch. It's for a three-volume set, each volume at least 700 pages in paperback.

My books will be set in the not so distant future and will be a fictional account of how, after setting the scene with a rash of gung-ho books, Islamophobia and rhetoric about liberals being terror-appeasing traitors, the extreme right under a fanatical sociopathic Vice President declares the President mentally incompetent then imposes martial law to supposedly prevent a liberal/Islamo-terrorist coup.

Of course, the "liberal coup" turns out to be a lie (complete with faked terror attacks causing thousands of deaths), just a subterfuge to create a narrative for martial law and a rightwing government in perpetuity. But the ends justify the means as one of the main antagonists, a rightwing pundit for a conservative magazine who helped push the coup, explains in a chapter-long polemic. There's some token resistance and some far-sighted individuals who have expected the coup manage to go underground, but by and large the populace goes along with the new regime - sometimes through fear, sometimes apathy, some because they heartily agree and want to join the new paramilitary enforcement squads. Civil liberties become a thing of the past.

In the second book, liberals, Moslems and other undesirables who are counted as "enemy combatants" by a computer program using a massive secret government database which has been built up through domestic surveillance are carted of to internment camps built by the military-industrial complex, who are backing the rightwing coup. Other known liberals, Moslems, gays, libertarians and environmentalists are made to wear color-coded digital ID badges on their clothing and are forced to attend classes in 'American Thinking and Integration" by evangelist preachers. The National Guard is federalized, immigrants are rounded up and made to do forced labor and the new regime begins three or four brushfire wars with Third World nations, thus paying back the military/industrial complex for its help by spending big on weaponry while simultaneously giving the populace a nationalistic foreign crusade as a distraction from what's happening at home. (Cue lots of techno-thriller style battle scenes.)

In the third book, the regime falls apart as awakening outrage over loss of civil liberties at home combines with national bankruptcy and the regime's incompetence at pursuing its foreign adventures. Large sections of the (by now not being paid) military, including several generals, refuse to serve. They don't take up arms against the regime but simply sit down on strike, defending themselves only. The populace, which has been galvanised by the tireless and danger-fraught work of a few radicals who escaped the original dragnet (including the husband/wife team who are the main protagonists of the three books), rise up and throw of the shackles of oppression. The evil Veep dies of a heart attack brought on by the stress of seeing his plans fail. The book (and the series) ends with a Continental Congress which reafirms the Bill of Rights and Constitution and declares a new Second American Republic. It immediately sets about defusing the foreign wars of the rightwing extreme with a new ethical foreign policy. Everyone lives happily ever after.

I can guarantee that the series would be just as badly written as Card’s book seems to be, with acres of political polemic, unbelievable plotting, bad dialogue and cardboard characters - but the plot is marginally more plausible, all the major elements are already there in the real world. I'd say it would be a guaranteed bestseller.

So, anyone want to offer me a huge advance to write it?