There is a looming black hole. It's not just our anxiety.

You've heard art imitates life. Well, when you're writing a book about a black hole swallowing Earth, you don't actually want your art to imitate life at all, but back in 2020, as I was feverishly working on A Place Between, the novel that, by the next year, would become Without A World, strange coincidences were frequent occurrences. 

In the decidedly science fiction novel, Without A World, a black hole looms in Earth’s backyard, brought there because it feeds off the hate and ill will radiating from a dystopian planet that has given up on equality and the common good.

On a break from editing, I was innocently surfing space news, when this awkward art-imitates-life headline appeared: A Black Hole is ‘Almost on Our Doorstep’

Freeze frame- what? Now in the galactic sense "almost on our doorstep" still means 1,000 light years away, but to those who know, they say that is still very close. 

Was this black hole manifested by the wrongdoing of people of Earth? Unlikely. Is it poised to swallow the planet hole? Doesn’t seem so. Is it a strange coincidence to see this Atlantic headline at the same time I was pouring my heart into a book about a black hole on Earth’s doorstep? Yes, yes, it is.