Was it a cheap gimmick or a prophesy that saw the link between Russia and the rebel insurgents feature in the first instalment of Dark Satanic Mills? Truthfully, it was a bit of both. Way back when I began to work on Dark Satanic Mills, the insurgents had military backing from Russia and Argentina, an unholy alliance that provided a source of income, food, medicine and weapons. But there wasn’t much in the way of geopolitics. Of course, that has all changed, ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, and is now facing a proxy war with the West, including the US, the EU and, more significantly, the UK.

England’s Pleasant Pastures, the first volume in the series, mentioned only very briefly the war in Ukraine as a precursor to the hostilities towards the UK, and those were extra, well, bits, I suppose you’d call them, to link my future war with today’s history. It wasn’t overly difficult to insert a couple of brief conversations and expositional paragraphs detailing Ukraine. And, of course, we don’t know what the outcome of the war in Ukraine will ultimately be, whether Russia fails, Ukraine is victorious, or whether Ukraine was fall to Russia. So it’s important that I don’t put too much guesswork into the war’s conclusion.

Dark Satanic Mills is set perhaps ten years in the future, plenty of time for the war in Ukraine to end. And whether Russia is victorious or whether Putin’s regime is brought down, the Russian people – including the oligarchs in charge of the government – will undoubtedly feel plenty of resentment towards the West. So in the next two volumes of the series (the 1st draft of volume 2 is almost complete), I will have to tread the line between Russia’s resentment and predicting the outcome of the war, making reference to a nameless president who may, or may not (in all likelihood), be Putin, and avoiding a huge elephant in the room.

In my timeline for Dark Satanic Mills, DID RUSSIA WIN THE WAR?

The truth is, it doesn’t matter, because my story of socialist insurgents, the uprising, the seizing of land by rebel forces, will take place whether Russia wins or loses. Russia will not be destroyed, so there will be either remnants of the current regime, or members of a new regime, who despise the UK for the help it it is providing for Ukraine. So I can happily finish off the series, step away, and hopefully even in five or ten years’ time, if someone picks up the books and reads them, there won’t be any glaring plot holes between my fiction and the reality of a world after war.

Like, hopefully nuclear weapons won’t have wiped the UK from the face of the earth, as one Russian hawk threatened a few months ago. I suppose if that does happen, I won’t be around to be embarrassed by my failure to predict the future, though my work – and Dark Satanic Mills – will remain forever in the ether.

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