Not so long ago, the notion of civil war erupting in America might have seemed a fairly niche political nightmare. In 2017, Omar El Akkad’s book American War imagined a civil conflict over fossil fuels, but it was a speculative fiction, set in 2074. Yet by 2022, another novelist, Stephen Marche, was publishing The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future – and this was speculative non-fiction, about today.