No author of speculative fiction wants to be proven right. To be proven right in the spec-fic game is to see the worst come to pass. No, speculative fiction is written as a warning, and the crow of ‘I told you so’ when an author nails it, far from being triumphant in tone, instead comes across as a bitter acknowledgement that one’s warnings weren’t properly heeded.

Last year, when the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency still seemed, to many, a long shot bordering on an impossibility, my wife found herself in possession of a secondhand copy of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. It wasn’t long before she was e-mailing me passages that, as she noted at the time, seemed all too familiar.