Me and Mine — J.M. Holmes

Speculative fiction, set in the not-so-distant future, about family, scarcity, and what it means to sell out as the world ends.The world hasn’t quite ended, but it’s getting there. Me and Mine brings readers to a not-so-distant future in pre-apocalyptic Chicago. The West has dried up, the watershed has been contaminated, and water scarcity has driven most of the population inward from the coasts. Here, real estate interests run rampant and the possibility of snagging a house close enough to the Great Lakes to get fresh water has realigned global financial interests. And, as always, the working class is still being pushed aside to make way for white, wealthy newcomers.Amidst the chaos, three brothers try to navigate the swiftly changing landscape of this new Chicago. As one seeks influence in politics, the younger two are drawn into the dangerous, shadowy world of private security and militias. In the precarious new world that these three brothers navigate, J. M. Holmes offers a grim yet familiar future in which scarcity breeds resentment, resentment breeds extremism, and extremism ignites around the racial faultlines of our present.