AtD blurb - "worldwide disaster looming"

[Chris Broderick]

jbor sez:

In fact, it's either a pretty dire prediction of a
"worldwide disaster 
looming just a few years ahead" of us, or an analogy
between the 
current world Situation and WWI.

so I say:

I'd imagine both.

I don't think that the current world situation is
going to be directly evoked in the novel, any more or
less than the early 70s were evoked in GR, or the 90s
were in M&D.

I'm probably throwing a grenade in the tank by telling
this story, but here it is...

Not too long after the start of the Iraq War, I had an
opportunity to see Don DeLillo do a reading (from
Cosmopolis, which was catchy, but a letdown) & do some
audience Q&A.  This was in SF, so you can imagine the
political sensibilities (for the record, I'm a lefty. 
Be gentle.)  The questioners seemed to treat Mr.
DeLillo like a great prognosticator, and the questions
revolved not around his writings, but rather the
pressing questions of the day to Bay Area natives:
What the hell is going on and what do we do?  Someone
asked him why we would have invaded Iraq, and his
answer was guarded and elusive (in a nutshell, we did
it because we've created new military technology since
the last fight & wanted to screw around with it, which
is a fine answer for a novelist).  Even DeLillo, who
is so relentlessly focused on the contemporary (can
you imagine him writing something like M&D?), isn't
some kind of soothsayer, politician or ideologue. 
He's a storyteller.  

So the long and the short of my argument is, yup.

-Chris

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