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Has anyone had an element of their fiction make an unexpected connection with real events?
In 'Midnight Angels' Jess paints a white rose on the tail of her aeroplane... officially it would have been red but she is from Yorkshire and a red rose would never do. When it's copied to the other aircraft it makes the squadron very easy to recognise and earns them a nickname.
I emailed a friend last night to translate something into German for me. Just had the reply and along with the translation ("Die Nachtjá¤gerinnen der WeiáŸen Rose.") he asks if it's a reference to the White Rose resistance movement in wartime Munich.
Of course it isn't but it's seems a strange coincidence.
Comments
I remember studying the White Rose resistance
When I was in high school taking German classes, one year our German teacher was from Ulm. She gave us alot of history about the White Rose because of the fact that several members that were part of it were from Ulm as I remember correctly.
But as for fiction mirroring reality, yeah. I've had some of my sports related stories that have turned out to 'foretell' what happens in real life. But it is sometimes freaky when it happens.
Shannon Michelle
Samirah M. Johnstone
Can Be Scary
About three months before the events of 9/11 I wrote in a story:
"This was the blodiest battle in North America since the Civil War." It was one of three "disaster/mass murder stories I wrote or started before 9/11. Because of other previous incidents I think I subcounciously knew what would happen, but my concious brain rejected what I "saw."
Events
Several years before 911, I remember talking to a friend about the posibility that a Nuke could be set off in an american city. I felt and still feel that stealing a Nuke would not be that hard for a determined and educated person. Fortunately, the two traits have not meshed in an individual. I see that as a great stroke of luck.
I know that sitting around eating lunch at a construction site, when I advanced the idea that someone was going to attack us, everyone thought I was nuts. That was before 911. They were strangely silent afterwards.
Gwen
Fingers crossed it never happens
I had a schoolfriend whose father was one of those types who thanks to some quirks of the education system ended up working for the GPO when he should have been designing supercomputers or hovercraft. One of his passions was the design of atom bombs... he often had blueprints spread out on the living room floor, marked with his own improvements.
My friend's younger brother did go on to become a research scientist at a defence establishment and swears that some of his father's ideas mirrored secret projects that were actually worked on during the sixties and seventies!
Creativity, Roses
I’ve not had one single creative idea that someone else hadn’t already thought of first. Everything from inline “roller blade” skates* to bottlecap valves to convert 2-liter soda bottles into seltzer dispensers, someone else has already put it into production. When I think of something now, I turn to Google to see who has already done it. :D
Time and again in human history, an idea whose time has come has been realized by more than one person. Anthropologists distinguish between ideas that spread by “cultural diffusion” and those that are independently discovered in different locations at about the same time. It is almost as if ideas have a certain tangible existence where people with the right sort of vision can see them.
Roses (and their varieties), however, have a special significance to a large segment of the world’s population. No surprise, then, that many different groups of people claim the rose as hallmark for their endeavors.
*[As an example of how this works, I used to ice skate; it is not a huge leap to imagine roller skates designed like an ice skate blade. Later I read that an ice hockey coach had the same brainwave while searching for a way his team could practice in the off-season. Since he had the means to develop the idea, voilà—rollerblades. I had thought of it just before his rollerblades hit the general retail market.]