Monday, March 3, 2014

I Saw This Coming

I'm not sure if you've followed the situation between Russia and the Ukraine much recently, but yesterday while you were watching the Oscar red carpet on E! Russia was invading its neighbor, taking advantage of the unstable political situation there to gobble up territory.  In one of those cosmic ironies I realized I'd written about a scenario very similar to this back in 2010.

In Change of Heart (Tales of the Scarlet Knight #4), Dr. Emma Earl is lured to Russia with a lucrative job offer.  She goes out to survey some possible oil/natural gas fields near the border of a made-up republic called Grakistan.  Later the camp comes under attack by some Grakistani rebels and Emma learns of a conspiracy to destabilize the country.  Basically a businessman named Sergei Bykov wants to create enough unrest in Grakistan so the Russians will invade to "restore order" and he can negotiate some favorable terms for snapping up the country's natural resources.  In a roundabout way Emma does stop him, though it comes at a great personal cost a couple years later.

Anyway, it's not the exact same situation but it's close enough.  Putin is taking advantage of the unstable government there so he can take some territory (if not all of it) that he's been hankering for.  Unfortunately there's no Scarlet Knight to stop him.

It's one of those situations where life imitates art.  Maybe you've had this happen to you with your writing.

5 comments:

  1. you're a prophet and didn't know it!

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  2. Whoa, you and Sarah Palin got it right!

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  3. My art is too busy imitating life, I think, to have something like that happen.

    By the way, I'll post the results, such as they are, to my review experiment in our forums on goodreads.

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  4. This shows how realistic your novel is. As for me..it would have to be FAR into the future for anything I published to come true. I won't be around to know..lol.

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  5. Now I'm going to go read the rest of the series to find out what next year's news is going to be!

    That's pretty cool, though. So did you actually do any research to come up with a likely territory and/or war, or was it just "I assume things will go to crap in Russia someday"?

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