When Rob and I wrote 7 Secrets of Synchronicity in 2010, the 4th secret was called The Creative. The premise is that creativity lies at the heart of creativity. In our book about precognition, Sensing the Future, we have a chapter called Painting the Future, which is about how when artists, writers and other creative types are in their zones, what Stephen King calls “dreaming awake,” they often tune into the future.
Numerous examples exist. One of the best known involves Edgar Allan Poe and his unfinished novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. In the novel, three men and a 16-year-old boy are adrift at sea in a lifeboat after being shipwrecked. The men on this lifeboat are desperate, hungry, on the brink of starvation. They decide to draw lots to determine which of them will be sacrificed to a greater good – killed and eaten so the others can survive. The cabin boy, Richard Parker, picks the short straw and is promptly stabbed and consumed.
In July 25 1884, some 47 years after Poe stopped working on the book, a 17-year-old cabin boy named Richard Parker, was killed and eaten in a similar incident. In real life, Parker was on his first voyage on he high seas. He’d boarded the Mignoette in South Hampton, England, & headed toward Australia. In the South Atlantic, the ship was struck by a hurricane and sank.
The survivors scrambled into a lifeboat with few provisions and 19 days out were in danger of starving to death. They discussed drawing lots to select who would be killed and eaten and settled on Parker who was delirious form drinking seawater. The group survived 35 days on Parker’s carcass. The specifics in this one are stunning.
On August 14, 1992, I mailed off my novel, Storm Surge, to my editor at Hyperion. In those days, yeah, snail mail. The story revolved around a category 5 hurricane – Alphonso – that slams into South Florida and devastates the coast. On the same day I mailed the novel, a tropical waved moved off the coast of Africa and 10 days later, it became the most powerful hurricane on record, at least up to 1992.
By August 24, about the time my editor was reading the novel, that tropical wave became Hurricane Andrew. At one point its winds were estimated to be greater than 200 mph. It slammed into Homestead, Fl as a cat 5 hurricane with a central pressure just below 922 millibars.
The precognition is striking in several ways. In fiction and real life, both hurricanes were the first named storms of the season and began with an A. Both were cat 5 storms with tightly compacted eyes rather than sprawling messes that covered the entire estate. In the novel, the hurricane struck Miami and Miami Beach were obliterated. In actuality, Andrew destroyed Homestead, just south of Miami. The synchronicity really disturbed me so I decided not write about hurricanes again. I did, but that’s another story and another synchronicity.
This evening, I ran across an article in The Guardian about a novel Hothouse Earth
by Bill McGuire, a professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. The article points out that McGuire believes we have passed the moment of no returnwhen it comes to climate change. “The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We…can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,.”
The article disturbed me for many reasons. Even though McGuire is more extreme in his views than his colleagues., he’s clear about his beliefs. “I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.”
So this brings me to White Crows, a group of people in 2141 who live in a huge dome because the world outside is so toxic. Crows have extraordinary abilities but are outnumbered by Normals, who keep them drugged and enslaved. A group of Crows escape to Tango Key in the 21st century to seize it for themselves. The parallels between their world in the 22nd century bears uncanny parallels to McGuire’s views. It feels like another precognition that came through the writing of fiction.Eerie.
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