A few days ago a friend of mine sent me an image of a notice in a bookshop which had (presumably) been altered to read, Please note: the post apocalyptical [sic] fiction section has been moved to Current Affairs. I replied to her as follows: Unfortunately, my literary output has been somewhat prescient, sorry…
This brought home to me how much our lives and our country has been transformed in the month since my last post. I don’t recall the exact death toll as of April 6th, but consulting a linear graph of total deaths online reveals it to have been roughly 5,000. This is bad enough, but I’m sure that nobody (least of all the UK Government) anticipated that it would be more than 30,000 at the start of May, and that we would have the highest total in Europe, and second only to the United States worldwide. An article I read in today’s Guardian described the death of so many elderly care home residents as ‘a harvest’, and argued it was the result of Government’s short-lived policy of seeking herd immunity, which was undertaken (and then abandoned) without the necessary safeguarding measures being implemented to protect this vulnerable group. All of which suggests, if not actual callousness, a cavalier disregard for public safety, and will ensure that the Public Enquiry which is bound to follow will be keenly anticipated, if not by ministers in the present government.
It is not a comfortable experience to find that events and consequences that you had fondly imagined were confined to the pages of your latest novel have now turned up on the front pages of the newspapers and are suffusing daily life. All of which makes me more wary about actively seeking publication for this series, given that there are probably enough lunatics out there for whom the boundary between fiction and real life is sufficiently blurred for them to want to seek revenge against those who they somehow deem guilty of bringing the apocalypse about by anticipating it. If people can attack mobile phone masts, then what price a poor old novelist.
And while I did not reference infectious disease as one of the drivers of my literary apocalypse, preferring the rather more visual combination of fire, flood and civil disorder, neither did Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
In my defence, I will say that my breakdown of civilization does eventually lead to a kinder and more rational world, not that this would be of any consolation to the paper billions I consign to a brutal and premature death.
Anyway, it is what it is…
My speculations were based on future threats to our biosphere and our civilization set out by a whole host of scientists and cultural commentators, and set within a long literary tradition. It’s rather unfortunate that at least one of them has chosen to arrive rather sooner than anyone anticipated.
Lights in the sky continues to take shape, blissfully unaware that life has now decided to imitate art. I’ve decided to just write until I finish the story, which may mean a final novel approaching eight hundred pages, which I would then divide into two volumes.
Which all leads to the inevitable question; which comes first? The end of the series or the end of the world?
On that cheery note…
The Author May 2020