Pride: A Novella

Cultivated behind the walls of an insane asylum, Pride is a sci-fi fable and prescient look at New York City, one and a half presidential terms into a turbulent future, imagining a dystopian nightmare. Issa Ibrahim began writing Pride in 1997 while an inpatient in Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. While he foresaw many crucial events, with many key elements ripped from today's headlines with an unflinching eye on tomorrow, Pride provides history, immediacy, and prophecy. Race and class subjugation renders the new capital, New York City, and its citizens, a microcosm of the new world; segregated, medicated, and narcotized. The Fathers and Mothers of the New Confederacy are in power of the newly named AmeriKKKa, using fear, pharmacology, and the media to control the populace. The protagonist and storyteller is Anson Freeman, a poor, Black, paranoid, scrap-dealing snitch, a cynical anti-hero. His mixed-race wife Beth Pride, a dissident in league with a disorganized group of militant revolutionaries, is captured by the authorities, charged with sedition, and scheduled to hang from a noose on live TV. Told in real-time over the course of one day, Pride is named for the woman Freeman loves and, with an unlikely band of misguided mercenaries, is reluctantly enlisted to save, as well as what he hopes to restore in himself while the world he knows goes haywire.