Don’t Shoot the Messenger

So, there was this little nugget in CNN.com:

“Vice President Mike Pence is setting himself up to replace his boss if Trump leaves office early or does not seek re-election. Pence would never admit this. He plays the part of unctuous toady so fully that the conservative writer George Will called him ‘America’s most repulsive public figure’. But don’t be fooled. He has seeded the federal government with his loyalists and is building his own nationwide political organization. He is acting, in fact, as if he is on a mission from God. Some may laugh, but many conservative Christians believe that God is merely using Trump to prepare the way for a so-called true man of faith.”

Now, if you aren’t familiar with Thaddeus E. Tubwell, the President of the United States in the excellent alternate history adventure spy novel On the Rock (You’re not familiar? Go to www.siblaska.net. Now.) You could easily substitute “Tubwell” for “Pence” to the quote above and it would fit right into our book. Since we are talking about the actual Vice President I will say that Tubwell, a former televangelist, is meant to be a vile, duplicitous pretender, while I am more than willing to believe that VP Pence is a good man with good intentions.

As discussed in past blog posts, we originally created Tubwell in the late 1980s when our novel was structured as a vison of the future some 30 years hence, based on the chilling rise of the Christian Collation within the Republican Party. We hadn’t realized that when we re-imagined the story last year as an alternate history that we would have to make so many little changes because it looked like we were deliberately attempting to mock the current administration. While patting ourselves on the back for such a spot-on prediction of how America would evolve (de-evolve?), it was never our intention to be actual modern day Nostrodomuses.

The situation does, however, spark a story idea about an author whose fictional futuristic novel comes true almost verbatim 20 years later, causing him (or her, you’re welcome ladies) to be both lauded and terrorized by an endless stream of people demanding “How did you know?” as well as “What’s next?”. Soon the author, now on the lam from rabidly adoring followers as well as a government determined to find out through a dissection if necessary, begins to second guess his (or her) writing process from so long ago. Did I just make it up? Was it the careful research? Time travel? Prophetic vison or just a…Lucky Guess©; an exciting new novel that I have just unwittingly committed us to write. Sorry, Doug.

Shutting up now.