From Terrible Minds:
I thought Terrible Minds would be the place to talk about the strange, horrible feeling of accidentally predicting the future, since Chuck did it too with Wanderers.
It happens to pretty much any science fiction writer who writes in the near future. Worldbuilding is basically extrapolating cause and effect in different ways. You see a news article somewhere like Futurism and you give a little chuckle—it’s something happening that you predicted in a book, and it’s a strange sense of déjà vu. I used to even share some of the articles with the hashtag #FalseHeartsIRL when I released some cyberpunks a few years ago. I can’t do that with Goldilocks, really, because the stuff I predicted isn’t some interesting bit of tech or a cool way to combat climate change through architecture or urban planning.
Because this time it’s people wearing masks outside. It’s abortion bans. It’s months of isolation. It’s a pandemic.
In real life, it’ll rarely play out exactly as you plan in a book. Some things twist or distort or are more unrealistic than you’d be allowed to put into fiction (e.g. murder wasps or anything that the orange man in the white house utters). In Goldilocks, I have people wearing masks due to climate change being a health risk, which was inspired by how disconcerted I felt seeing a photo of my mother wearing a mask due to the wildfires in California while I live in Scotland.
. . . .
Five women steal a spaceship to journey to Cavendish, a planet 10 light years away and humanity’s hope for survival and for a better future. A planet they hopefully won’t spoil like the old one. It’ll take the Atalanta 5 a few months to journey to Mars to use the test warp ring to jump to Epsilon Eridani (the real star for my fake planet), and then a few more months’ travel on the other side. It’s a long time to be with the same people. I did not expect those elements of how the women cope with isolation to be a how-to for 2020. I read a lot of astronaut memoirs, and that has probably helped me cope with lockdown a bit better than I might have (my top rec is Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth).
Though it’s a mild spoiler, in light of current events I have been warning people that there is a pandemic in the book. It’s not a huge focus of the plot and it never gets graphic, but I forwarded an article about coronavirus to my editor on January 22nd with basically a slightly more professional version of ‘shit.’ The illness within the book is not quite as clear of an echo as White Mask, it’s still strange. The last thing I expected when I wrote a book with a pandemic was to have its launch interrupted by an actual pandemic.
You don’t feel clever, or proud, when you predict these sorts of things. You feel guilty when you see the nightmares about the future come true instead of the dreams.
Link to the rest at Terrible Minds