Weird but serious question: did Darwood & Smitty predict the Qanon movement (and much more) when published in 2010? Read this foreword to learn more!
Darwood & Smitty - Foreword
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10th Anniversary Edition -- Highlighting the book's predictions that started coming true between 2016 and 2020!
When I first published Darwood & Smitty in 2010, the year 2020 was still the future. According to the novel, it was also the year in which government finally went global and life from throughout the solar system became an undisputed fact to everyone. Since then, I’ve had fun with the idea that 2020 was the big one … that suddenly we’d know about aliens for sure, and the book would happily sit alongside other prestigious science fiction works that have so accurately predicted our future. But in 2016, our timeline diverged from that seen in the novel. Suddenly, the unbreakable momentum of globalism was getting broken; nationalism started to rise around the world; and sure enough, a global government wasn’t officially established. But now, as I publish this 10-year Edition, it’s 2020. A year that will live in infamy. And – without giving away the story – maybe the book wasn’t so far off. First, since 2016, UFOs have become mainstream. It’s now public knowledge that the Pentagon studies unidentified aerial vehicles. The US Navy has released footage of some examples. And according to The New York Times in a 2020 article, “The Pentagon program’s previous director … is among a small group of former government officials and scientists with security clearances who, without presenting physical proof, say they are convinced that objects of undetermined origin have crashed on earth with materials retrieved for study.” So … no aliens in the skies yet. No aliens overtly trading with us. But it’s fascinating to see what an open topic this has become in 10 short years. Of course the big story in 2020 was a certain virus that shall not be named. As you’ll learn in this book, Smitty would have a field day with this. So many possible conspiracies wrapped into one. If nothing else, we saw a massive coordinated global response that, in many respects, made no logical sense. Health experts contradicted themselves and one another, yet leaders around the world looked to them to make oddly unified policy decisions, citing “the science,” even though “the science” was all over the place. To drive all this, tests were used that were helpful in boosting supposed case numbers, but not in giving accurate results. Fruits and animals tested positive. People who never got tested … tested positive. Entire labs came out with 100% positive results. And somehow, in all the urgency to follow the science, it was ignored that this test was never designed to diagnose disease. And that different labs used different standards to run the test – standards that can absolutely determine positive or negative results. It’s a script that a serious author could never get away with. Yet it became a unified global script in 2020. Deaths to the virus surged early on, only to be shown later (in the USA) as 94% caused by other things (on average 2.6 other serious medical conditions). But this was enough to drive fear and thus demand for more of the same tests that claimed fruit could get the virus. With more testing comes more cases, even though most are asymptomatic – exactly why the CDC has recommended not testing asymptomatic people with these tests. But never mind that. “The science.” So cases rose once more, even as deaths largely disappeared, and a unified global lockdown continued in spite of its crushing personal and economic impact. If one or some nations chose such actions, even in the face of so many contradictions, we might chalk it up to the views of individuals. But most nations responding in similar ways to such contradictions? Maybe Darwood & Smitty was right. Maybe government did go global in 2020, just in a more shadowy sense. It gets worse than that, I’m afraid. While the story is set in 2045, it may be that the 2016 timeline pulled everything forward. In the book, we have a president fighting against the special interests that have corrupted the government. In the book, he is taken to task for this and he literally calls the process a “witch hunt.” Events occurring in the novel end up capturing the attention of the entire world, and we’re told that “only the brashest entrepreneurs, who knew that people still needed to eat, kept things open with TVs running so they could draw in crowds that would pay exorbitant prices for common food items and necessaries on the scale of toilet paper.” Yes, toilet paper. And I simply cannot go into details on this here, as I don’t want to reveal the storyline, but there is even an elusive character named Q. There’s more. Division between mainstreamers and “conspiracy nuts”; patriotism and anthems; even a passing mention of Ukraine. It is, in short, a book of the times. Importantly, though, it’s a humorous and inspiring tale about people and our potential. It’s a tale not only of the woes we face, but of how we can overcome. Of what we must do to throw off the shackles together. And it asks the ultimate question: will we do what it takes to get there? This update was a long time in coming. There were always a few details in the first edition that I wanted to correct. Among them, the removal of a city description from an early draft when the story was set further into the future. Also a few fixed typos and clarified details. Other than that, this is the original story in all its unsung glory, and I welcome you to join me in the adventure as I reintroduce it to the world! The Author. |
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