We’ve written before how novelists sometimes tune into future events in an eerily accurate way in their fictive stories. Among them are Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote about a shipwreck and how survivors became cannibals eating a cabin boy named Richard Parker in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Forty-seven years later, the incident actually happened – a shipwreck, survivors and eat a cabin boy astonishingly named Richard Parker!
Then there was The Wreck of the Titan, a novel by Morgan Robertson that described a luxury ship on its first cruise striking an iceberg and sinking. The story was published in 1898, fourteen years before the RMS Titanic maritime disaster.
In 1972, Regency Press published a novel, Black Abductor, by Harrison James, a pseudonym for James Rusk Jr. It’s about a terrorist group led by a black man who kidnapped a college student named Patricia. Her wealthy father was well known and had right wing sympathies. Two years later, a similar true story unfolded when Patricia Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army led by a black man. She was a college student, the daughter of right-wing media baron Randolph Hearst.
Now it has happened again with a novel called, The Tenth Justice, by Brad Meltzer. We’ve heard over and over that no secret Supreme Court document has ever been leaked, except for the recent illegal release of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft of court decision to overturn Roe v Wade. But that’s not exactly true. It has happened in fiction.
Meltzer’s novel is about a Supreme Court clerk Ben Addison, who is fresh out of Yale Law and on an ultra-fast track to success—until he inadvertently shares a classified court secret. Sound familiar?
At this point, we don’t know who released Alito’s draft but in all likelihood it was a court clerk. Their average age is twenty-seven.
Here’s a partial description of the novel.
Guilty of a criminal act, his golden future suddenly in jeopardy, Ben turns for help to his roommates—three close friends from childhood, each strategically placed near the seats of Washington power—and to his beautiful, whip-smart fellow clerk, Lisa Schulman. But trust is a dangerous commodity in the nation’s capital. And when lives, careers, and power are at stake, loyalties can shatter like glass . . . and betrayals can be lethal.
As the real-life story unfolds, we’ll see how close it parallel’s Metzer’s novel. Will a clerk be found at fault and how did the document get leaked out?
Metzer recently appeared on MSNBC to talk about two of his children books – one about Rosa Parks, the other about Martin Luther King – that have been removed from some school libraries. During the interview, Katie Phang, briefly mentioned the odd synchronicity about The Tenth Justice, and Metzer jokingly quipped, “Yeah, now there’s proof that I’m a time traveler.”
