I’m Afraid I Saw This Coming.

In 2019 I wrote a series about a global viral pandemic, MAGA insurrectionists and Christian extremists targeting allies for racial justice.

No One Wants to Be Right About Catastrophe

The Greeks knew that to see the future and be ignored is not a superpower; it is a curse. That was the crux Cassandra’s suffering. She was the oracle in Homer’s Iliad who tried to warn her fellow Trojans that their ruin was upon them in the gift of a giant wooden horse.

The Trojans welcomed it into the heart of their city anyway.

My 2019 novel, Reaper Moon, and the seven volumes that comprise it, was meant as fiction. Like so many writers before me, Octavia Butler being the most relevant, I looked at the trends roiling the US over the past ten years: the unchecked state violence against black and brown bodies; the unabashed white supremacy and white nationalism fed by grievance culture and toxic masculinity; the whitewashing of hate speech and hate crimes by Christian piety; political leaders leveraging all of it for their own personal gain — out of unchecked narcissism, cynical calculation, or both.

Add to that combustible mix my 20 years of experience in global health, which taught me that a…