Author: Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy / Source: WIRED
In the spring of 2011, when protests organized on social media broke out across the Middle East, most people were caught flat-footed.
One person who wasn’t was science fiction writer Walter Jon Williams, whose novel Deep State had imagined exactly that scenario.“It turns out to be that I predicted a lot of things that actually did happen,” Williams says in Episode 326 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
Ironically, Williams heard repeated complaints that the book “wasn’t science fiction,” because its predictions had already come true. “The book came out the week that the Arab Spring kicked off,” he says. “So basically the book became obsolete the day it appeared.”
Unfortunately for Williams, his foresight didn’t result in instant stardom. “My agent called every media outlet in New York, but none of them were interested,” he says. “Possibly the fact that I was a science fiction writer would have put them off.”
However, the accuracy of his predictions did get attention within the government.
“I did get some calls from agencies that will remain nameless, in our nation’s capital, asking me how I knew,” he says. “So there was some interest from that quarter.”
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Listen to the complete interview with Walter Jon Williams in Episode 326 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Walter Jon Williams on tyranny:
“Aristoi, my book from 1992, is about a glamorous and functional aristocracy. I was responding to Francis Fukuyama‘s ‘The End of History,’ where he suggested that from now on it’s just going to be liberal…
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