A war dreamed up by bad novelists ... Royal Marines in Afghanistan, April 2008. Photograph: Sean Clee/Royal Navy/PA
As soon as you write a book, people start asking you what you're going to write next. Sometimes you can tell from the question what the book with the most impact from the previous crop has been. The question comes at me now in the form: "So, what are you going to write next, a work of post-apocalyptic fiction? Everybody's doing it."
Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a masterpiece, and McCarthy is one of the greatest English language writers of our time; and I wouldn't rule out writing anything in the future, although I've already started writing the next one, and it isn't post-apocalyptic. But to hear people speculating about writers rushing to try quickie Road knockoffs does make me think again about the curious nature of the human imagination - not just the imagination of writers, but the imagination of readers, journalists, politicians, terrorists, lovers - that was the theme of We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. I'm not suggesting the apocalypse has happened already, and we don't know it.
But for as long as I've been alive, I've been struck by how much more eagerly we, the public, terrify ourselves by imagining possible future catastrophes and historical horrors than by imagining real, current disasters; and how much comfort we derive from this.
This might seem a strange thing to say. Of course we need to use our imagination to conceive of a medieval Europe in time of plague, or to "see" Earth after it has been struck by a comet. Why would we need to apply our imagination to something which is happening now, something which is reported in the news media? Surely we don't need to imagine it if it is actually happening? Well, it's the phrase "need to" that is inappropriate, not "imagine". The fact is that we always apply our imagination to current events - but because we do it lazily, casually, remotely, we do it badly.
Imagination is the combination of present knowledge and past experience - particularly of human nature - to interpret social change and conflict, to feel what others are feeling, to guess what's going to happen next. It's considered a speciality of novelists, and it is. But everybody else exercises it as well, and just as there are novelists who imagine well and novelists who imagine badly, so there are voters and politicians who imagine well and imagine badly.
We live now in a world constructed by people who, without knowing it, were bad novelists. Osama bin Laden, who writes in the blood of martyrs and civilians, imagined a hero, a desert warrior (himself) chosen by God, who would defeat the Soviet Union, defeat the United States and create a global Koranic paradise on earth. Tony Blair and George Bush, who write in the blood of professional soldiers and foreign civilians, imagined a far-off land ruled by an evil dictator whose people would, released from the tyrant's yoke, rise up as one in gratitude to their liberators and set about building a just, tolerant democracy around Euro-American oil concessions and Euro-American chain stores. A class of overpaid private bureaucrats, who write in spreadsheets and MBA-speak, imagined a utopia where the amount of money you could borrow was limited only by the extent to which you could hide the size of the collateral it was borrowed against. None of these novels should have been bought by members of the public - but they all sold well in their respective markets. They're still popular.
It is seemly and good to reimagine the second world war in fiction. It is seemly and good to imagine the future consequences of global warming, nuclear war or overpopulation. But I do not want to live, as a reader or a writer, in some fuzzy limbo of now, bookended by holocaust and armageddon. I want to imagine the present, in all its gnarly, shaming complexity, without which its wonders and glories are bogus.
