At the start of every January, I open up my predictions file and sift through all the news stories I’ve found during the past year that relate in some way to my novels—plot lines that have come to pass, bad actors who are eerily close to characters I’ve created, and inventions I’ve envisioned that made their way to market.
Code Red
For the second year in a row, Code Red is headlining my recap post. As everyone knows, the Assad regime fell last month, and the president and his family have fled Syria. The insurgency was at its strongest in Idlib—a city that played a central role in my story.
Rapp chose the location as his base of operations for the same reason as the rebels—neither the Syrian government nor the Russians had been able to gain control of it. In Code Red, Rapp sparks a rebellion there that’s in danger of spreading throughout the country. For better or worse, that’s now what’s happened. For the sake of the Syrian people, let’s hope it turns out to be an opportunity and not a trap.
Captagon, the Islamic State’s chemical courage, was largely unknown outside of the Middle East when I wrote the book. Some readers thought I’d made it up but, in fact, sale of this drug supports various terrorist organizations and was a critical source of funds for Bashar al-Assad. Production methods and the players involved have now been revealed and turned out to be very much as I imagined.
The Ares Decision
Many years ago, I wrote three books for Robert Ludlum’s Covert One series. The protagonist was an army microbiologist, so many of the threats I covered have roots in the natural world. Geeking out on science is one of my favorite things to do and I’ve always been an aficionado of zombie movies. I figured why not combine the two and disguise a zombie book as a bioweapon thriller? The gist of the novel is that a parasite infecting a group of rural Africans makes them supernaturally strong, fast, and violent. A few readers recognized it as a tip of the hat to one of my favorite genres, but most people didn’t connect the dots.
I chose parasites over the more common virus because of their shocking ability to influence the behavior of their hosts. This article, with the most captivating title I’ve seen in a long while, talks about a fungus that infects cicadas, turning them into insatiable bisexual mating machines—but only after causing their genitals to fall off. Good for spreading the fungus, but not so great for any insect duped into a fungus-fueled tryst.
More than anything else in nature, parasites are the stuff of nightmares. I still struggle to shake off the descriptions I read during my research for the book. You’ve been warned.
The Utopia Experiment
Last year brought a second reference to another book I wrote for Ludlum’s Covert One series. My story from 2013 featured a computer interface, called the Merge, implanted directly into the brain.
Early in 2024, an article surfaced about a man who’d volunteered to be the first person to receive a similar device made by a company owned by Elon Musk.
The patient received an interface in the part of his brain that controls movement after suffering a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed. The device, called the Link, has given him the ability to use his thoughts to communicate with a computer.
Today he’s able to move chess pieces on a virtual board with his mind, but who knows what the future will bring? Perhaps not just therapies for the disabled but enhancements for the rest of us. The Link’s origin feels straight out of my fiction, but the life-changing applications are no longer fantasy.
I’ll be back next month with the second half of this post. In the meantime, if you’d like to discover more news stories that track my plot lines, check out Stranger Than Fiction 2024: Predictions Part 1 and Part 2.