My son and I were lucky enough to meet Meg Elison at the Worldcon in Chicago a couple years back. She was a panel guest, and we were both impressed by her fierce intelligence and humor. I happily got her to sign her then-new novel, Number One Fan, and I was thrilled to discover she was just as good a writer as she was a speaker. Number One Fan is a creepy, propulsive page-turner that I recommend to anyone who will listen.

Founding Fathers is very different, but no less compulsively readable. It’s a satirical, bitingly hilarious novel, but the laughs are hiding something profound and disturbing. This is humor with wickedly sharp teeth.

In Founding Fathers, a group of cloned teenage Founding Fathers—Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Ben Franklin, and John Adams—has been raised in isolation to recreate an idealized vision of the nation’s past. The Antediluvian Society, a cabal of extreme right-wing billionaires, are hoping that when their charges come of age, they can set the country on what they believe will be the right, very right, track. But the teenagers discover the truth about the twenty-first century when Ben finds a cell phone (it doesn’t take him long to also discover the wonders of online porn), and their handlers’ carefully engineered social experiment begins to unravel in spectacular fashion. Founding Fathers blends science fiction, political commentary, and coming-of-age chaos as Elison explores whether history can ever be recreated, or whether every generation inevitably writes its own future.

As much as I loved this novel, I have to admit it gave me pause. I can’t help wondering if certain members of the current administration would treat Founding Fathers as more of a how-to manual than a work of fiction.

Founding Fathers will be published June 23, 2026, and is available for pre-order now. Don’t miss this one.