What happens when a once-rejected dystopian novel turns into reality? Ask Scottish author Peter May.
The screenwriter-turned-novelist wrote a book titled Lockdown in 2005 about a global pandemic. Fifteen years later, that’s our reality due to coronavirus, which has so far infected about two million people globally.
The book, which was rejected by publishers at the time for being too unrealistic, was finally published on April 2.
The thriller is set in London, the epicentre of a global pandemic that forces officials to institute a lockdown. The story isn’t entirely based on May’s imagination. He used British and US pandemic preparedness documents from 2002 to make it as realistic as possible.
“At the time I wrote the book, scientists were predicting that bird flu was going to be the next major pandemic,” May told CNN.
“It was a very, very scary thing and it was a real possibility, so I put a lot of research into it and came up with the idea, what if this pandemic began in London? What could happen if a city like that was locked down?”
Bird flu and coronavirus are very different, but the lockdown scenario hits close to home for millions of people currently self-isolating to prevent the virus from spreading.
His current publisher hopes that familiarity will appeal to a wide audience. Years ago, publishers dismissed the novel as “extremely unrealistic and unreasonable,” May said.
So he put the book on the back burner and eventually forgot he even wrote it. That was until a fan on Twitter asked him to write a book set against the backdrop of the coronavirus.
“I thought about it for a minute before I realised that I’ve kind of already done it,” May said.
“I told my publisher about it and my editor just about fell out of his chair. He read the entire book overnight and the next morning he said, ‘This is brilliant. We need to publish this now.”
“Lockdown,” available only on Amazon , is being sold in Kindle format and will be available as a paperback and audiobook on April 30.
May, 68, said he is in the age group most vulnerable to the coronavirus and stands in support of a lockdown.
Credit: Source link