Headlines and Deadlines
[image error]Today marks one year since I published The Repulse Chronicles, Book One: Onslaught, and it feels like it’s only been a couple of months. A year ago, I certainly expected and planned to have Book Two written and ready to go by now, but it isn’t (stop cheering at the back!). Although the reasons are many and varied, there is a note of irony in why Book Two will not be released until the beginning of next year, at the earliest.
When I put out Repulse two years ago, I had intended it to be my last novel. And it would’ve been had it performed as poorly as my preceding books. But it didn’t; quite a few of you read it, and that encouraged me to write the Chronicles companion series. However, in August 2016 I didn’t know Repulse was going to find so many readers, so a good acquaintance of mine put me in touch with The Polish History Institute, who, bless them, have kept me quite busy this year; so busy, in fact, that Invasion remains only partially written. So the deadline has to be moved back to the first few months of next year. Hopefully.
Another thing I find curious is how the news agenda has changed since I wrote and published Repulse. Obviously, much of my inspiration for that book came from what the headlines were in 2015. Since then, the news agenda has changed completely. Today we lurch through the bright new uplands of the Age of Stupid, where ignorance is celebrated and verifiable facts treated with the contempt that used to be reserved for falsehood. Today satire can barely begin to mock the reality in western governments’ race to the bottom of feeble-minded simplicity.
At some level, of course, this isn’t even news. Anyone who knows Russian history and Putin’s biography knows exactly why the Age of Stupid has come to pass. It is quite easy to imagine the embittered, young, East German KGB agent’s shock and humiliation at the abrupt collapse of his beloved Soviet Empire. It’s even easier to imagine his anger at the way companies from the West moved in like third-rate carpetbaggers to steal what they could from the Russian people. If anyone was going to thieve Russia’s vast wealth, it was always going to be other Russians. And so they have.
Putin will never attack the West militarily, because he knows where it would end. But make no mistake, from Moscow’s perspective Russia is at war with the West; a war of mis- and disinformation; a war of classic Russian duplicity, misdirection and obfuscation. The UK and US have fallen for it hook, line and sinker, with the Great Brexit Con and Putin’s asset installed in the White House.
Europeans, however, tend to have a better grasp of history, and apart from Putin’s useful idiots in Poland and Hungary, we have so far proved relatively immune to the social-media salvos of this new war.
In another little irony for me, an early draft of Repulse did have Russia as the antagonist, with the 2062–2064 war taking place over the natural resources in the Arctic Circle. I recall at the time ditching that scenario because, one, in the next fifty years the importance of natural resources will lessen, and two, Russia was so enfeebled militarily the story did not seem believable.
But who needs a strong military when you can undermine and destabilise your enemies’ societies without firing a shot?
