Five years ago, the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow published a short story whose plot might seem eerily similar to followers of the past few weeks’ news.

In Radicalized, one of four novellas comprising a science fiction novel of the same name, Doctorow charts the journey of a man who joins an online forum for fathers whose partners or children have been denied healthcare coverage by their insurers after his wife is diagnosed with breast cancer and denied coverage for an experimental treatment. Slowly, over the course of the story, the men of the forum become radicalized by their grief and begin plotting – and executing – murders of health insurance executives and politicians who vote against universal healthcare.

In the wake of the 4 December shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which unleashed a wave of outrage at the US health system, Doctorow’s novella has been called prescient. When the American Prospect magazine republished the story last week, it wrote: “It is being republished with permission for reasons that will become clear if you read it.” But Doctorow doesn’t think he was on to something that no one else in the US understood.

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When Doctorow started writing the short story in 2018, he was processing his own traumatic experience with the US healthcare system. The British Canadian author, who’s written more than two dozen fiction and nonfiction books, had only recently moved to the US when his parents flew down for a visit from his home town of Toronto. It was a fun trip until late one night his mother woke him up to say that his father was ill. The family raced to the nearest emergency room, where Doctorow’s father was treated for an infected kidney stone. After the stones were removed, Doctorow’s father crashed and spent the following days in a coma.