I was off the mark.
But not by much.
It turned out to be Seaside Park, New Jersey.
Not Asbury Park, New Jersey.
But the attack was multi-pronged.
I got that part right.
Unfortunately.
And it did serve to help the erosion of the media halo of American invincibility – as explicitly laid out in the ambitions scribed in "The Management Savagery." That piece was sadly congruent.
This past Saturday afternoon, Sept. 17, 2016, I sat in my local cigar lounge enjoying fraternity with friends.
This was the day after my futuristic fictional piece "Horrors of the new American caliphate" was published here on WND.
Amidst bellowing clouds of first and secondhand premium cigar smoke, I received a text from a friend about the tragic bombings in NYC and New Jersey that had occurred that day. I had not been paying attention to the news prior to his text.
He pointed out the eerie similarities to my imaginative portrayal of a future coordinated terror attack on American beaches, as part of the Phase 6 effort of the Islamists' 20 year plan to take over America, and the tragedy unfolding on the Eastern Seaboard, and also in Minnesota.
Then I saw the comment by Devasahayam underneath my column: "An ominous portent of Thorp's article prior to 2021 (as in happened today)."
The joy of my pre-autumn afternoon ceased to continue.
My attempt to employ the art of faction writing had partly succeeded in its morbid near-term forecasting.
Which wasn't the goal.
The goal was to be part of what I would hope would be a growing chorus of watchmen that would intensify the sounding of the alarm – the alarm that would shake us all into realizing the true intentions of our enemy. Their clearly documented intentions of provoking us into total confrontation, as was written in "Al-Zarqawi: The Second Generation of Al Qaeda" by Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein.
But time didn't allow for any warning to take root. As the late great thriller writer Vince Flynn once noted, "You can't make this stuff up fast enough."
Vince was one of the most astute perfecters of the faction genre. Like when he weaved a storyline into his novel "The Last Man" about a general caught up in an illicit affair before the Petraeus scandal broke.
Joel C. Rosenberg, who freely admits he's no Nostradamus or Miss Cleo, is also a master of faction writing. In his novel "The Last Jihad," he places the reader smack dab in the cockpit of a hijacked jet on a kamikaze mission into an American city on the very first page. But he wrote it nine months before 9/11.
Faction, as Brad Thor describes the term he invented, presents a story "where you don't know where the facts end and the fiction begins."
The last thing I wanted was my for my fiction to begin last Friday night with a fantastical description of beach terror and end Saturday morning with a real pipe bomb on the boardwalk of Seaside Park, New Jersey.
But it illustrates the times we live in and the potential value of immersing our projective imaginations in the grips of a fictional story that just may come to pass.
If embraced and internalized, good faction can help us all reverse our failures of imagination, help us confront our stubborn normalcy bias and cement cautionary concepts in our minds. It does this through the marriage of plausible, projected near-term political and geopolitical forecasting and the magic of story crafting, multi-dimensional character development and entertaining flair.
Stories can change our outlooks. Alter our awareness level. Prompt new action. And steer our decisions.
Let's hope we can digest the right stories quick enough next time before the emerging reality of their predicted facts overtake the fiction of their earnest warnings.