The ebooks are up at Apple Books and Amazon.com, and print editions will be available May 9 at Amazon.com and (through Ingram/Spark) from your favorite bookstore or library. Check the UnCommon Sense page for up-to-date ordering links and detailed information on the June 6 book launch and reading in Seattle.
Patti 209: Fifteen Tales of the Very Near Future (UnCommon Sense, 2025) is a collection of the short stories I’ve published over the past eight years about people who experience, and resist, the worsening political situation in the United States. They range from humorous essays (“Yoga for Protestors”) to satirical fantasies (“The Best Man for the Job”) to science fiction stories about individual protests (“Patti 209”) and civic disruption (“The Bodies We Carry”).
When I wrote these stories for various anthologies and magazines during the first Trump administration, COVID, and the run-up to the 2024 election, I fully expected them to become dated relics soon after publication. Surely the nation would return to normal, and outrages like violent deportations, suppression of free speech, unobtainable healthcare, and Project 2025’s proposed destruction of federal agencies would be of interest only to a few historians!
But, no. Here we are again. Several of the dystopian elements my characters face in these stories, considered pure science fiction when I submitted them to editors, are now elements of everyday life. Other plot points, intended to be far-fetched, now seem horrifically plausible (see “Wishbone”).
The dystopia is here.
But…so is the resistance!