Maybe we should think ourselves lucky that terrorists do not spend all their time scanning the fiction shelves for ideas.Peter Millar in The Sunday Times reflects on the often uncomfortable relationship between the real world and fiction, especially when the plots of thriller novels suddenly seem to predict real life atrocities.
Among his examples Stephen Leather's Soft Target which
detailed a plot by four British-born Muslims to explode bombs on the Undergroundfive months before the 7/7 suicide attacks on the London Tube, and the blockbuster climax of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series* which saw
... a crazed anti-American Japanese airline pilot crashing his 747 into the Capitol, killing the US President and half of Congresswell ahead of 9/11.
Not exactly a thriller but ... remember the uncanny timing of the launch of Chris Cleave's Incendiary?
Some other strange coincidences of this kind may have struck you too ...
1 comment:
Huh.. crashing planes into things started as far back as WWII. Guy Fawkes' gunpowder plot was hatched in the 18th century.
Post a Comment