Cory Doctorow’s Prescient Novella About Health Insurance And Murder: ‘they’re Going To Be Afraid’

The parallels between the science fiction writer’s five-year-old story and present-day events are startling

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.