The York Problem

In a future Galactic Federation, the walled city of York has sealed itself off from the rest of humanity. Its citizens, marked by a genetic pigmentation that singles them out as different, have chosen isolation over integration with a society that has never stopped seeing them as the other. When diplomacy collapses and the Federation's council grows desperate, extreme measures are proposed, each more alarming than the last. The question becomes not whether York will submit, but what humanity is willing to become in the process of forcing it. This is tense, morally complex speculative fiction that uses a far-future setting to interrogate the deepest fractures of the present: segregation, autonomy, and the violence hidden inside the word 'peace.'