My latest Science Fiction book, Making Waves (sequel toInside Out), came out last months and, like Inside Out, it’s an adventure story, focussed on a handful of characters, with a bit of humour and some hopefully thrilling action. But underneath all that, it’s a story of claims to territory by a superpower armed with overwhelming military might and potential for mass destruction, against the people determined to claim independence in their own home.

Although it’s set more than 2 centuries in the future, I was not attempting to be prescient. What happens in my book and what is happening now in Ukraine is what has happened times beyond count in the past. I wasn’t even being prophetic in putting my superpower in the hands of a messianic narcissist, incapable of swerving from his own fixed ideas, whether founded on reality or not. We have been here before…