Adam Roberts’ Yellow Blue Tibia, and Why Fiction is Still Stranger Than Truth (Because it Comes First)

A couple of weeks back, my wife started telling me about a novel she was reading. I listened in surprise as she described the story. It was about Stalin consigning a group of sci-fi writers to create a fictional narrative about an ET invasion as a way to maintain Soviet supremacy by fabricating an enemy, and how the fiction starts coming true, much to the surviving authors’ bewilderment…

She hadn’t known what the novel was about when she picked it up. She’d just heard on Twitter that its author was “the guy to read” and picked it up at our local library. She had no idea that the subject matter overlapped so closely with  “The Prisoner of Infinity,” my latest piece of writing about Whitley Strieber and how (maybe) he authored his own experiences of alien contact into being, as part (unwittingly or not) of a grand, socio-religious engineering program (maybe) to create a fictional narrative of alien invasion as a way to keep the Capitalist system alive by fueling the drive towards space colonization.

I noticed the name on the book cover. “Hey, that’s the guy who wrote the only serious essay on Matrix Warrior. He’s quoted at my website!”

Small Universe.

While not having read the book (which is called Yellow Blue Tibia), I noticed some immediate correspondences from my wife’s description: Strieber’s childhood memory of being trained at a psychic school involved being told that Stalin was a hero. His Communion experiences began at the end of 1985, the novel begins in 1986. And one of the prophetic visions Strieber describes that came to him soon after (in 1986) was of the Chernobyl incident. In Roberts’ novel, this incident is one of two (the other being the exploding Challenger) that precisely enact the fiction written several decades before.

I contacted Adam and told him about the new article at RS. He linked it to his blog, here