Two Lights, Drifting Apart
This post is part of my Medium blog.
You might ask why someone who lives in the United States is selling novels set in Canada. I have a long answer for that. This week I have a short one, because the news did it for me. Two stories dropped a day apart, they're both about Elon Musk, and together they're a better argument for the books than anything I could have made up.
The first one is genuinely strange. Last week the Starlink service Ukraine's military runs on — the military-grade version, called Starshield — was slowed down. Badly. This is the system they use for battlefield communications, for launching drones, for shooting them down, and it went quiet on them with no warning. Here's the part I can't get over: a week later, nobody can say who did it. Trump said he didn't order it and that he was asking around about who had. Musk said any limits were decided by the military or the president. Two senior US officials told reporters it didn't come from Trump. The State Department said the same thing out loud, on camera, and then had nothing further to add. Nobody in either capital could produce a name, an order, or a signature — just a slowdown, mid-war, that took a week to even argue about. The Wall Street Journal reported it was Musk himself, exercising his own rights under the terms of service. I want you to sit with that phrase for a second. A sovereign country's army lost its communications mid-war, and the working explanation is that a private citizen read his own contract and made a battlefield decision for another nation. In Essential, Canada responds to a catastrophe by writing a law that requires a human name on every critical AI decision. I thought the hard part of that book would be getting people to believe the catastrophe. It turns out the hard part is that the private-citizen-with-a-switchboard part isn't even fiction anymore.
The second story arrived two days later, timing so neat you'd cut it from a draft. The European Union and Canada announced they're partnering to build an alternative to Starlink. Not a study. A partnership. Europe already has IRIS² on paper — roughly 290 satellites, first launches planned before the decade is out — and Canada has Telesat's Lightspeed constellation, first launch scheduled for December. The Europeans have also been openly discussing bringing Ukraine into their secure GovSatcom program in early 2027. I'll be honest about the difficulty: Starlink has thousands of satellites already up, and 290 is not thousands. This is a decade-long project to replace something a single company built in five years. But look past the satellite count at what it means. Two governments looked at the first story — a military losing its network because one man's contract said he could — and concluded they cannot depend on that. So they're building.
Why does this land in my books? Because this exact drift is the premise. Contingent opens with Canada refusing to let its critical systems run on infrastructure it doesn't govern — and with the Americans finding that decision inconvenient, expensive, and a little insulting. In the real timeline now: Canada's own regulators are drafting rules the Americans won't write, the border people crossed for decades without thinking about is suddenly the math everyone does twice, and the Canadian government is talking openly about the risk of relying on American suppliers for anything that matters. The easiest border crossing on earth getting harder. Two satellite fleets instead of one. Two sets of terms of service instead of one. The gap, widening.
I wrote the trilogy in the near future because the near future felt safely hypothetical. Lately the hypothesis keeps cashing out ahead of schedule. The country next door is starting to behave in the books' premise: governing itself like a country that expects to need its own lights on. Which brings me back to the short answer for why someone who lives in the United States is selling novels set in Canada. I'm not writing about Canada. I'm writing about the country that watches this all happen and then needs a word for it.
The books are there, if you want them.