Squashed by Stephen King

In 2004, after I wrote my first novel Future Past, I revisited my extensive treatment of Brandon, Jody and Muriel. I renamed the two separated lovers (B, J & M's parents) Lee and Beth and linked them back to that book. Further, I decided to turn Brandon into Rei Bierak’s father to link Rome’s Revolution together with the other two.

I made a little more progress but I put the book aside again. As mentioned yesterday, The Simpsons Movie came out and I thought to myself, well, there goes that book. Imagine my surprise when Stephen King published Under The Dome two years after The Simpsons Movie.



I couldn't help but think to myself, isn’t he just copying that movie? Well, I was not alone. Many people approached Mr. King and pointed this out to him. His claim that he never saw the movie and didn’t know what it was about didn’t seem strong enough.

Eventually, Mr. King posted his original draft of the novel called The Cannibals, on its own web page, complete with photographs of the typescript to prove that his novel, in its original form (written in 1978), predated The Simpsons Movie by almost 20 years. Here is what he said when he published this excerpt:

There’s another reason for publishing this on the website. Several Internet writers have speculated on a perceived similarity between Under the Dome and The Simpsons Movie, where, according to Wikipedia, Homer’s town of Springfield is isolated inside a large glass dome (probably because of that pesky nuclear power plant). I can’t speak personally to this, because I have never seen the movie, and the similarity came as a complete surprise to me…although I know, from personal experience, that the similarity will turn out to be casual. Unless there’s deliberate copying (sometimes known as “plagiarism”), stories can no more be alike than snowflakes. The reason is simple: no two human imaginations are exactly alike. For the doubters, this excerpt should demonstrate that I was thinking dome and isolation long before Homer, Marge, and their amusing brood came on the scene.

Still, to have to defend an original idea from something that resembles it never ends. You will recall that I had asked John Dixon about this feeling because his book, Phoenix Island, spawned the TV show Intelligence which sounded to me to be a lot like the TV show Chuck.

So there’s The Simpsons Movie and Stephen King’s Under The Dome. I think that kind of reduces the likelihood that Brandon, Jody and Muriel will ever be born. Well, no. The chances are zero. The reason is even more bizarre. I'll explain tomorrow.