Latest news about the 'coup' in Zimbabwe has echoes from my unpublished but previously printed science fiction novel's predictions... I even got the year right! (And of course thankfully got some events and dates wrong!)
Ten years ago, I took advantage of an offer to get one of my unsold manuscripts (Time With a Gift of Tears) printed in paperback form – for the princely sum of £60 for ten copies. I’d tried the science fiction time travel novel MS with a number of publishers and agents, without success. I’d just had my first book published, a western, but that publisher didn’t publish SF or fantasy. As the story was time-linked and it featured a unique time-travel gimmick, I wanted to get it ‘out there’ to establish some kind of provenance.
Ten years ago, I took advantage of an offer to get one of my unsold manuscripts (Time With a Gift of Tears) printed in paperback form – for the princely sum of £60 for ten copies. I’d tried the science fiction time travel novel MS with a number of publishers and agents, without success. I’d just had my first book published, a western, but that publisher didn’t publish SF or fantasy. As the story was time-linked and it featured a unique time-travel gimmick, I wanted to get it ‘out there’ to establish some kind of provenance.
The story took place in the UK
in 2020, at the beginning of a race revolt; the time traveller goes there from
2033.
All these years later, it needs
rewriting, not least because 2020 is too close now; also, since I hadn’t predicted the massive surge in smart phone usage, the
ubiquitous and pernicious social media, and the switch from laptop to tablets,
and of course Brexit. Some predictions
in the book for pre-2007 were: an Iraqi exodus, a Sellafield Accident, Zimbabwe escapees,
legalising of cannabis in UK, Britain expelled from the Commonwealth (never saw
Brexit coming!), and a terrorist attack on Sellafield… Here’s the timeline for
subsequent years:
2014
African exodus; Racial uprisings in UK; all
British police armed
2015
Solent Islamic Fundamentalist nuclear blast;
legalising heroin; Lawless August
2016
Limited War
2017 Politically Correct legislation; Typhoid epidemic; 13th Terror Scare;
PC Legislation revoked; Zimbabwe settlement
2019 Puritan ethics begin to sweep through UK; Asian Flu computer virus; Sexual Rebound
to Puritan ethics
2020
Race Revolt
2022 Race Revolt ended
2023 Common Sense return to norm after Sexual Rebound
2025 Compromise Peace; Race Revolt ended
It's been a long time coming, but it looks like Mugabe is going to be ousted; too late to save the country he has destroyed.
Needless to say, it’s fiction and not likely to happen – any
of it. Still, a nice little coincidence!
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