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Prescient Fiction and The Tick Tock Man

I am a voracious reader of books and texts – ebooks are great – but I still hang out in the second hnad shops and buy a huge number of books when I get the chance. I can remember when I was ten or so going with my Mum and my little sister out to Kirkcaldy for shopping. While Rachel would get her £1 to buy on sweets, I’d take that pound to a second-hand book store where millions (in my mind) books were packed in crates with just their spine showing. At the top of the crate was the glorious sign “5 for £1.” I looked forward so much to visiting that shop,because I came back with so many classics. Of course only now do I see them as classics, then they were just more books for my appetite.

The point of all this? One of the books bought on one of those days was The Tick Tock Man, by Terence Strong, a book I’ve had the urge to read again since the London Bombings last Thursday. The novel is set against a bombing campaign on the UK Mainland (ie the City of London) by the Provisional IRA. And these are some pretty evil bombs. ‘Little’ car bombs used to create panic in teh crowds of Soho, followed by other ‘little’ bombs that eventually shepherd the people to where the monster bomb is. Or the tanker full of explosives that is deliberatly rolled in the middle of the Blackwall Tunnel. Before the bombers make their getaway, they prime the tanker, along with booby traps, motion detectors and heat sensors.

I’ve always felt the need to read ‘prescient’ fiction based around real events after something similar. After 9/11 in the USA I turned to Dale Brown’s Storming Heaven, where a terrorist has suicide bobbers fly fully loaded passenger jets into Amercian landmarks (Capitol Hill, The White House, etc) and the central FedEx distribution Depot (after selling FedEx short on the Stock Market…). Henri Cauzeux (the terrorist) does this all because he was buggered by some American G.I.’s in his youth.

I hope I never have the same urge to read Sam-7 by Richard Cox. In that, a surface to air missle drops a DC-10 onto London’s Victoria and Waterloo train stations.

July 12, 2005; Personal Posts;

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