Speculating about how the US will crack apart is a cottage industry for sci-fi authors and political commentators. Ernest Callenbach did it in 1975 with Ecotopia, a novel about the Pacific Northwest seceding from the rest of the country. In 1981, journalist Joel Garreau argued that the US was several different nations stitched together in his book, The Nine Nations of North America. Colin Woodard made a very similar argument in his 2012 book, American.